Meir Singer Founder and CEO, BlueCloud USA.

Member Spotlight: Meir Singer

Founder and CEO, BlueCloud USA

Company Website: BlueCloudUSA.com

BlueCloud is a San Diego-based telecommunications company providing fully customizable voice over IP phone systems and services to small and medium sized businesses. Their goal is to be the last telecommunications provider a business ever needs and they provide service and support to make it a reality. CEO Meir Singer participated in the Founders First Bootcamp program four years ago. Founders First founder Kim Folsom caught up with him recently to find out how the business has been going.

How has customer acquisition been going since we last talked? Are you still focused largely on using partners to drive your growth?  

Most still comes from our partnerships, but we did hire a sales person whose responsibility is to prospect door to door and also on the phone, as well as helping me with some of the inbound stuff that comes from our partners

Your revenues have increased. What are the next big milestones that you’re aiming for?

So, we always have revenue milestones that we’re always aiming for. We had our goals, we kind of hit them, so we’re in a transition now. We’re migrating our platform to a more robust platform. It’ll have a lot more features and functionality. It’ll allow us to focus on different markets, like call centers and bigger customers, so that’s something that we’re focused on a lot. We’re focusing on where we want to take the business in terms of technology. 

And are you still using some of the practices that you learned from the accelerator program to help you with goal setting and any of that?

We obviously have taken so much from Founders First, you know, and it’s helped us get to where we are today. Specifically, we’re still utilizing revenue goals. We have real goals on the table. And with Founders we got a big new recurring revenue model. Going into Founders, we really didn’t focus on recurring revenue and now everything we do is recurring revenue.

We just added four additional revenue streams. They came for texting, call center–mobile applications like that and other software increased our recurring revenues.

I find myself working more on the business now than in the business. Before Founders, I was the one with sole responsibility for sales, but now that’s not so. With the hiring we’ve done, now I can focus on the bigger picture and expand.

We’re in a space that’s very highly competitive. In the telecom space, there’s a lot of bigger players out there and we’re just trying to do everything we can to stay competitive with them and relevant. Our values and our mission statement are a lot different than theirs.

We’re trying to provide a great customer experience and that’s the model, and our mission.

Have you ever thought about partnering with AT&T or any of those companies?

Not so much like AT&T, but you know, Google Fiber and all those companies who primarily focus on data, we do partner with them because we’re able to provide the full solution to customers. We like to stay in our lane, and again we don’t want to step on any of our partners’ toes. We let them know what they’re good at, and bring us opportunities and we bring opportunities to them.

Any parting advice? I think you were in our Bootcamp in 2017- 2018. Gosh, it’s been four years already. Any parting advice that you would give to anyone looking at doing the Bootcamp program or as far as the potential impact to their business?

One of the big pushes of Founders First is to take business owners outside the business. If I’m working in the business more than on the business, it’s a challenge. It’s hard to really pull away from that. I know it’s tough. You’ve got to focus on revenue, you’ve got to focus on deals, you’ve got to focus on all that stuff that keeps your customers happy. But it’s hard to tell someone they can’t grow doing that. 

Founders showed us the bigger picture, you know, how to focus on the massive goals and just go crazy. Look at that massive goal, and if you’re going to want to hit that goal, then you can’t be working day to day all day, every day, just inside the business. You really have to start from the top, take your big number, and work up a strategy on how you’re going to get to that number. So, let’s say that your number is $5 million, you know. Okay, that’s not crazy. It may be crazy to you, but that is doable. It may be $50 million or $200 million. Whatever it is, you have to start working backwards and getting everything in place to do that. But again that’s not possible with this day in, day out, working in your business.

Talking it out with someone who has real expertise growing businesses was a huge help to us at Founders as well. 

It is a different mindset for people to stop feeling like they have to be in the middle of everything to step back and bring in the right people. I am so excited for you and congratulations with your success!

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