Fire Awards: Winner - Software/innovation
Transactly, a St. Charles-based real estate technology startup, has been on a rapid growth clip, tripling its annual revenue and expanding the scope of its businesses. Within roughly the past year, the company says it has expanded its workforce by 58%, growing to 89 full-time employees, and has acquired five companies. Transactly provides real estate agents and brokerages with tech-enabled transaction coordinators and services to assist in processing and closing real estate transactions. It used its acquisitions to create a new business segment called Connect, which focuses on providing homebuyers with a streamlined way to set up home utilities and services.
Founder and CEO Bryan Bowles shared more on how the startup has pursued its rapid growth and why it believes it brings the right approach to innovating in the real estate industry:
How is Transactly disrupting the real estate industry? There are many graveyards of companies that have tried “disrupting” the real estate industry. Disruption is unlikely in an industry this large and complex. Transactly is focused on “evolving” the real estate industry, automating and integrating the many moving parts of a transaction. Most of which are currently performed manually by people. We’re keeping people at the helm of the real estate transaction (who have yet to be disrupted), but drastically improving their efficiency and consistency of execution — delivering a much improved home buying experience for all.
In the past year, Transactly expanded its business by launching its new Connect business segment. What made now the right time to expand the scope of the company? Connecting homebuyers and sellers to the utilities and home service providers was something we’ve done, to a degree, since inception. We’ve utilized partners for many of the services we didn’t yet perform. We simply found one of those partners to be a great strategic fit, and the timing just so happened to be right for them considering the stage they had reached in their business.
Transactly has expanded with several acquisitions. What has made the growth-by-acquisition strategy attractive? The acquisitions we’ve done to date have been "acquihires." They’ve allowed us to learn best practices for a streamlined integration process, while building a knowledgeable and experienced team. Many of the businesses we’re acquiring lack technical resources and talent, which we can apply to scale what they’ve started. We’ve created a unique opportunity for these small businesses, which becomes a win-win for all involved.
How is being headquartered in St. Louis a competitive advantage for Transactly? As a life-long St. Louisan, I can’t make a fair comparison of running a business anywhere else. There are however a couple things that come to mind: 1.) This may be obvious, but logistically, being centrally located, creates a lot of efficiencies for a business that operates nationwide. From time zone coordination (meetings, etc.) to bringing staff in town, who are located all over the US. 2.) There is also a big support network here that sincerely wants to see the local companies grow and thrive. It takes a little bit of networking and relationship building to get the support you need – but, it is most definitely here, and probably stronger and more genuine than larger cities with more transient populations.
In recent years, the real estate market has been perhaps as competitive and as busy as ever. How has Transactly’s technology helped agents and home buyers navigate the market? While there are several features of our platform in which our technology helps agents, bottom line, Transactly helps by shaving off roughly 16 hours of time that it takes to close a real estate transaction. It’s then up to those agents how they leverage that extra time. Many of them choose to leverage the time savings provided to grow their business by spending more time with homebuyers and sellers.
What is your company’s top goal for the next year? We expect another year of 2x revenue growth, and profitability.
There’s currently concern about an economic downturn and what that means for startups. What steps is your company taking to ensure it can continue to grow, even in a downturn? We made the decision in May to shorten our path to profitability, and we are moving swiftly toward that near term goal. The economic downturn is happening and seemed to really begin contributing to weakening venture capital and growth equity markets as early as March, when pricing reflected in the public markets began to decline. We’ve taken – as many startups across the U.S. have taken — the necessary steps to ensure we’re not reliant upon outside capital for growth.
For links to profiles of winners and finalists in the 2022 Fire Awards and Startup Exit Awards, go here:
