Meet Mary Grothe | CEO House of Revenue™

We had the good fortune of connecting with Mary Grothe and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Mary, what is the most important factor behind your success?
Buyers have changed. Revenue generation tactics have changed. Too many CEOs are still trying to solve their revenue problems with a silo-attack with just focusing on sales or marketing. It doesn’t work. With the current economic, political, and other shifts caused by COVID, companies MUST be agile in adapting their marketing, sales, and customer success efforts to what the market needs. One of our clients in 2020 lost $2M over a 2 month period because clients were pausing services with them. Our team was able to act quickly and help them pivot. We immediately analyzed the industries of their clients, found the ones who could flourish with the market shifts, and moved all marketing and sales efforts to focus on the industries they could serve well, resulting in growth from $14M to $17.2M, including recovering that $2M loss. 2020 was all about learning to adapt and learning how to thrive in a shifting market. As we venture into 2021, our clients look to us to bring forth cutting edge tactics that will allow them to successfully scale even in times of uncertainty. We often get classified as a sales consulting or marketing services firm. We are so much more than that and the current shifts in the market are screaming for innovative ways to scale revenue, even in so much uncertainty. We used to be laser-focused on rebuilding sales departments for our clients; their sales processes, sales infrastructure, hiring a sales team, sales training, and managing them. We built excellent sales departments, yet often didn’t see the type of exponential revenue growth that we (and our clients) wanted. Our focus was too narrow. We didn’t have a say in our client’s marketing strategy or technology stack, we expected salespeople to do it all. Our client sales teams had to: Build their own prospect lead lists, contact info, and enter data into a spreadsheet or CRM, manually. Create and send their prospect emails without automation. Prep for and run sales meetings. Create presentation content and proposals, manually, for each client. That didn’t leave room for actually selling. Our clients wanted Sales Unicorns to do it all. Build lists and prospect manually, and be a great salesperson, close deals. Unfortunately, these sales unicorns spent nearly 70% of their time manually prospecting when it could be automated. Companies don’t grow revenue exponentially by focusing on sales in a silo. To grow our clients’ bottom lines, we broadened our focus. We shifted. We now focus on all elements of revenue generation. This means supporting our clients’ sales departments, marketing, customer success teams, and implementing the right technology. Now, we lead our clients’ team from a Chief Revenue Officer perspective to ensure ROI is achieved. Our 6-month engagements feature audits, gap analyses, and numerous deliverables, including brand strategy, a revenue playbook, comp modeling, tech stack implementation, content & SEO/SEM strategy, and much more. House of Revenue currently leads the marketing, sales, and customer success departments for 10 companies nationwide. In the past year, we have helped several second-stage growth companies between $2M – $20M, on average, double their MRR within 10 months. This has resulted in an average ROI of 1,454% with average annual revenue growth eclipsing $3.2 million. We employ hungry, humble, and brilliant people. Our main strength is our VP team. They are so talented! I have never seen so much innovation and creative problem solving from a group of people before. We also pride ourselves on launching an outsourced RevOps division before the general public knew what it was. We built a RevOps offering that helped catapult our clients to significantly scale. We also genuinely care about each other and the CEOs we serve. In 2021, we rebuilt our core values. We also believe this is a strength of ours. Our core values are 1. serve first, 2. scale second, 3. succeed always. Serve first means to serve ourselves first. Be right with ourselves so we can be right for others. Then, we serve our team members. We always take care of each other. THEN we serve our clients. The work we do is so hands on… so deep, so powerful! We have to love our CEOs at their core – as humans, before we can focus on scaling their companies. Once we get our servant mentality right, THEN we can scale! Our focus on scaling revenue, profitably, has led multiple companies to 2x and 3x growth! In a year or less. The third value is to succeed, always. Our success metrics are custom-built with each client. We don’t let the world define our success. We get to build those metrics with our clients and we ensure that no matter what, each engagement is successful.

What should our readers know about you?
At 22, I started with a Fortune 1000 Payroll/HR company at just $13/hour in an admin role, but quickly acquired the skills and training required to advance into B2B mid-market SaaS sales. I rapidly found success by listening to my clients and always solving their needs; putting their agenda before mine. Even when my sales approach was the direct inverse of corporate, I knew what was right and produced record-breaking sales numbers. With multiple #1 finishes and millions in revenue sold, I left in 2011 to become a business strategist for entrepreneurs and founded Butterfly Creative, LLC. My vision expanded into youth entrepreneurship education and eventually went back to the Payroll/HR company serving larger, more complex prospects/clients in 2014. I left in 2017 after two Top 25 and one Top 10 finish and millions more sold. I restarted my firm, Butterfly Creative LLC, rebranded as Sales BQ®. My mission was to rebuild every sales department my team could get their hands on. After 18 months, we realized that our clients’ sales teams were hitting ceilings because the clients were not equally investing in marketing, RevOps, and customer success. So, we doubled in size and organically grew service offerings to help every client rebuild their entire house of revenue, from marketing, sales, and customer success, all supported by RevOps. In December 2020, Sales BQ® split into two companies. Sales BQ® is the home of the Quota Crusher™ Podcast, Blog, and Sales Training Room. House of Revenue™ is the home of the revenue-scaling program for CEOs between $2M – $20M who are ready to scale. Every client engagement is custom built with the focus on driving revenue growth through 3 phases, rebuilding infrastructure, recruiting top talent, and leading the team from a Chief Revenue Officer perspective for 6-18 months to ensure the ROI is achieved. House of Revenue currently leads the marketing, sales, and customer success departments for 10 companies nationwide. In the past year, we have helped several second-stage growth companies between $2M – $20M, on average, double their MRR within 10 months. This has resulted in an average ROI of 1,454% with average annual revenue growth eclipsing $3.2 million. Personally, I am in my 6th year of marriage to my husband David, who together love raising our 4-year-old son, Beckham. I am an openly faith-based CEO who deeply cares about serving my family, my team, and my clients. After the shakeup from the March 2020 pandemic shut-down, I realized that my time was not allocated appropriately and I had neglected my family. After losing 60% of revenue and several team members, I made a commitment to rebuild my relationship with my family first and then rebuild my company in the most powerful way which led to a new work schedule of 9 am – 4 pm, allowing ample time for family and scaling my company to new heights, closing at $2.182M in 2020 at 26% EBITDA and 13 high-performing team members. In 2021, the company rebuilt its core values. The core values are 1. serve first, 2. scale second, 3. succeed always. Serve first means to serve ourselves first. Be right with ourselves so we can be right for others. Then, we serve our team members. We always take care of each other. THEN we serve our clients. The work we do is so hands-on… so deep, so powerful! We have to love our CEOs at their core, as humans, before we can focus on scaling their companies. Once we get our servant mentality right, THEN we can scale! Our focus on scaling revenue, profitably, has led multiple companies to 2x and 3x growth! In a year or less. The third value is to succeed, always. Our success metrics are custom-built with each client. We don’t let the world define our success. We get to build those metrics with our clients and we ensure that no matter what, each engagement is successful. Sales Career Highlights: B2B MidMarket SaaS Sales Rep #1 Rep 2008, 2009 Top 25 Rep 2015, 2016 #7 Rep 2017 Held Records for: Lowest Discounting Percentage Highest Average Revenue Per Sale Highest Close Rate Top 10 Largest Deal Sold Executive Career Highlights: First 3 Years in Business: $0 – $2.2M in Annual Revenue Self-funded, No Investors 0-13 Employees Voted Top 50 Keynote Speaker Finalist Top Sales Podcast Nominated for: Denver Business Journal 40 under 40 Colorado Companies to Watch

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
We work in the Dairy Block on 18th and Wazee, so my first recommendation is to stay at the Maven Hotel in the Dair Block where you have immediate access to amenities, food, music, and shopping. From there, since I am not an outdoorsy person, I’d recommend a trip of shopping, spas, and eating! My favorite restaurants in downtown Denver are Foraged, Kachina, and the Urban Farmer. For spas, I’d head south to the spa at the Inverness Hotel in the Denver Tech Center. For shopping? Well, what’s your budget? I love the boutiques and unique shops in downtown Breckenridge, Castle Rock, and Wash Park in Denver. If you want to stay downtown for shopping, check out Larimer Square.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
My shoutout is dedicated to our incredible team at House of Revenue™.

Website: houseofrevenue.com and marygrothe.com

Instagram: @marygrothe and @houseofrevenue

Linkedin: /marygrothe

Twitter: @MaryLGrothe

Image Credits
Charlie Warden and Rylie Manross.