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[00:01:23] Andrew Michael: . . Welcome to the show. 

[00:01:26] Baxter Lanius: Hey Andrew. Great to be here. Thanks for 

[00:01:27] Andrew Michael: having. It's great to have you for the listeners. Baxter is the CEO and founder of alternative, a flexible B2B payment solutions.

Uh, prior to founding alternative Baxter was a FinTech investor and served as a board member on several companies. He later joined Apollo global investing in technology businesses. So my first question for you back says, what has been your biggest learning from switching over from an investor to founder?

[00:01:54] Baxter Lanius: The biggest learning. I think from, from switching over, from being an investor to a founder, is, is the [00:02:00] level of detail that you need to understand and evaluate constantly across a number of different work streams, both at victory park capital, which is one of the first institutional investors in FinTech, where I worked, uh, Initially on the investing side, as well as Apollo global, you know, it was very much investment focused.

So we got opportunities in and we evaluated those opportunities based on cash flow, based on revenue growth, based on existing capital structure, a multitude of different things. And when you become a founder, You know, your, your job is everything, everything, and anything from hiring to building to product.

And, and especially in the early stage, you don't have the team to support you across all these different multitudes of, of, of business. And so, you know, I think that was the biggest learning is, is how, you know, many places you need to have your hands in and really work as a team or work with one of your team members to build out, um, [00:03:00] which was a challenge at the beginning.

Now since we launched and, and, and as we've grown, the team, you know, has really, we've got, we've gotten into a really, really strong place where I feel like we've hired an incredible team and people are really able to control different verticals of the business. And, and my time can kind of be let loose from some of those different, um, focus areas.

[00:03:21] Andrew Michael: Yeah, I can see that as well. I think maybe like you can get a newfound appreciation is all full of the things that founders need to juggle on top of fundraising as well. Uh, so it definitely is, I think in the early days when 

[00:03:33] Baxter Lanius: things to get your, and I had a little, yeah, I had a little bit of experience. I, I was the interim CEO of a Mediterranean restaurant actually, uh, at victory park capital.

Um, but still within a private equity type structure, you know, you ultimately usually have access to a lot of capital. You have a larger team. And so there's just much more to delegate, you know, in the early stages, when you know, you're a team of three. You really need to figure out, you know, to your best ability, [00:04:00] how do you push the ball forward?

If you don't have a product manager, or if you don't have a data person or you don't have an engineer in the seat and, and compiling all those resources and trying to make the best business decision, um, was, um, was an incredible learning. And, and I think, you know, we figured it out and do a great job today, but it's not, um, it's definitely not easy.

[00:04:19] Andrew Michael: Yeah, for sure. And I think in the early days as well, like there. You have nothing. So you need to do everything, but it's about figuring out, like, what is the most important thing that you can be doing and where should you be allocating your time? Because you don't really need to do everything as well.

That's the other thing, I think the trap you fall into, like in the early stages, like, oh, But we don't have this, or we don't have X or we don't have, Y we don't have Z, but like, really your thing is like, get default alive, like start building a business. So what are the absolute critical things that you need to do that will get you there?

And then everything else, what can come later? And I think, uh, at least for me, that's like now fourth time round, just figuring out like, things that you to stress me around, like the first or second time, like seeing them, like now it's not even a thought, [00:05:00] like it doesn't matter now. Like there's only one thing that matters for us.

And just having that ability to, I think, understand. Uh, really helps speed things up, uh, for you in the end. 

[00:05:10] Baxter Lanius: Yeah. It's all about prioritization, as you mentioned, right? Whether it's engineering, whether it's business, whether it's go to market, there's so many different channels across all of these different work streams.

And, and how do you prioritize the most important one? And, and I think that that's, you know, you nailed it on the head, Andrew, um, you know, that's so critical and always be learning, right? I mean, that's just not just day one learning. That's also. 360 7, 20, you know, year three, learning of, of how do you continuously work to create the most efficient business structure and efficient team possible?

Cause you know, I need to take these learnings and then I need to also help educate my team members to, to make sure that they're prioritizing initiatives and efforts, uh, as much as possible. 

[00:05:53] Andrew Michael: Yeah. It never stops that that's actually one of the, like the biggest things I think the podcast has given me really is, uh, [00:06:00] although like we produce this content and everybody listens to it and then hopefully like gain learnings from it.

Like for myself, selfishly like a lot of the questions and the line in the direction that goes to is like now building my company. I'm. Getting the learnings that I need in the moment from founders and from like, uh, people on the ground, in the operations of the business, like of challenges that we currently have.

So a lot of times like editors will say to me, like, oh, this sounds quite familiar to challenge you're facing now at the moment. And like, yes, it's good of you to notice. Like I think the learning aspects really are critical. I think if anyone's thinking about a podcast. It's probably one of the best ways to actually learn is I can, selfishly you can actually ask the questions you wanna ask, uh, about your business at any given time.

So, um, 

[00:06:42] Baxter Lanius: yeah, and, and learning from others, right. Which is, you know, for us at, at alternative, within the B2B, uh, payment space and B2B financing space. You know, B2B finance is not a new concept. , it's been around for, you know, 20, 30, 50, a hundred years. Um, [00:07:00] and you know, each iteration of it, we need to figure out how to improve the solution, how to bring down the cost of capital, how to, you know, increase the, um, our ability to underwrite at a accelerated pace.

And, you know, since I started investing in FinTech in 2014, You know, eight years ago, the space has moved at an accelerated pace forward and each iteration is improving and, and that's one, you know, real goal for alternative is, is how do we provide financing solutions to businesses that bring down the cost of capital?

That accelerate the pace of underwriting and increase the quantum of capital that we're able to provide from a business standpoint. So, you know, having these conversations and working with, you know, either learning from preexisting FinTech businesses, or even looking at social media businesses, you know, it's all super important to figure out, you know, how do you refine the model and, and how do you, you know, really execute on that thesis or on that product [00:08:00] that you, that you wanna.

[00:08:02] Andrew Michael: Yeah. So I'm interested then just to hear a little bit about what you actually offer. Cause I gave a, a very brief intro in the beginning, like you offer and you provide flexible B2B payment solutions. Um, what does that actually mean? So like, what does alternative do, who are your main customers that you serve?

[00:08:18] Baxter Lanius: Yep. So the, the, the core product solution that we have is basically a B2B by now paid later solution. So we empower our vendor partners to offer flexible pricing solutions to their end customers, to ultimately provide their end customers, additional buying power. To close deals, uh, faster, uh, and increase the kind of book of business.

Um, there are a number of other use cases that this solution offers including reducing churn. So we have a number of customers who leverage alternative as a standalone solution, you know, as a customer is potentially gonna churn. They can use alternative as a payment [00:09:00] plan to get them to not churn, um, and, and ultimately increase retention.

So this solution is really a sales enablement tool, as well as a financing tool, um, to increase the end customer's ability to purchase goods from you or, or services. We actually, we work across a number of different end markets. We work with. Software companies very closely. We work with services based business models.

We work with agencies. We work with ad tech companies because ultimately in the B2B space, you know, there's a lot of challenges within payment solutions. Um, and that's kind of our core product number one, um, that we're really looking to, to innovate on, um, and continue to, to build forward. 

[00:09:46] Andrew Michael: OK. And that's very interesting.

So just to. Put a practical example together. We say, let's imagine Salesforce as your customer now, um, one of their customers wants to purchase maybe a yearly plan. They [00:10:00] don't have the upfront capital. They would come to you or they would go via Salesforce and they would have sales would offer them this sort of buy now pay letter feature.

And then next question would be like, who does the underwriting then? Like, who's the one, um, measuring the risk of this client. The their clients wanna sell to, like, how does our process work? Maybe give us a practical example. Yeah. 

[00:10:21] Baxter Lanius: So Andrew, I think you've, you've listened to a few of our other podcasts cause Salesforce, my go to my go to example.

I haven't own . Yeah. But, um, but Salesforce is, is a fantastic example and, and, and the reason why it is, is cuz. Salesforce is, you know, has very, very stringent pricing requirements and they don't discount and they don't offer any payment plans. And they're looking to expand into the SMB market and the SMB market is obviously more price conscious.

So let's take a, a Salesforce contract example, contract of $60,000. We would work with Salesforce to create a payment plan for their end customer. The SMB, the [00:11:00] SMB is looking to buy Salesforce, but does not wanna pay $60,000 up front. So we would create a payment plan that enables and empowers the end customer to pay.

Six installments of $10,000. Um, now that would be basically a very simple example. Our fees are either burdened by or absorbed by Salesforce or passed along to the end customer. So we give Salesforce that optionality in a Salesforce example, they typically would, um, would pass along those fees to the end customer.

So in this example of six installments, we typically charge 5%. So for that example, the contract size would go to, uh, 61,500 and the SMB customer would then pay in six installments totalling 61,500 over those six installments. So it would come to a little bit more than, than $10,000. Um, now in terms of the risk.

To your, to your second [00:12:00] question, in terms of the risk, um, portion of it, we hold all the risk. So we would pay Salesforce on day two, and then we would collect from the end customer over the subsequent five installments. And, you know, if the end customer does not pay, you know, we are on the hook to, to, to collect from that end customer.

And so we are also not only holding the risk on our balance sheet, we're doing the underwriting and we're also collect.

[00:12:28] Andrew Michael: It sounds incredibly risky. Uh, and I'm just thinking just the nature of like churn attention as well in the sense that like, if somebody just stops paying, typically you just stop the service. But in this case, the user or the company has already paid upfront for the service. And how are you evaluating then and doing that writing from the end clients.

Cause I assume as well, like. Needs to be a relatively fast process for it to work, uh, and to be able to evaluate the clients like, um, how are you doing that [00:13:00] on your end? Is it, have you automated this to some degree or is it literally like somebody making application with you and then you need to go and do your own research and investigation.

[00:13:10] Baxter Lanius: Yeah, so the underwriting's fully automated, but just quickly on, on, on your first point regarding how risky it is. So within we signed two contracts, we signed a contract with Salesforce, which is a partner agreement. And then we sign a payments agreement with the end customer. Both of those agreements are embedded into our, into our technology platform.

And so it's a pretty seamless process within the partner agreement to Salesforce. In the event that the end customer stops paying us, we then have the ability to shut off the service that Salesforce is providing. So if after three or four months, you know, the end customer stops paying us, we would go to Salesforce and we would say, Customer a is, is, is not meeting their agreement.

Please shut off their CRM solution. So as it relates to business critical software solutions and technology solutions or [00:14:00] services solutions, um, it's actually a lot less risky because ultimately the end customer is not getting that specific service. If it's more call it social media or something, that's not business critical.

You know, to your point, Andrew, then, then the risk increases because the end customer can really just stop, stop paying you. Now on the underwriting side, our, our underwriting process is, is very simple and, and streamlined on both the partner side, as well as the end customer, because we ultimately need to.

Ensure that the partner is carrying out their duties as a partner. And we onboard customers within about two minutes. So we ask your you to confirm your business information, um, which is kind of a one step process. We then ask you to connect through a plat API, which gives us access to your bank account information, which allows us to automate payments on our back.

So our entire backend on the payment side is, is fully automated. And similarly, based on that [00:15:00] data, we then run a underwriting model based on, you know, how much cash is in the bank account. What last month's burn was, you know, we look at burn over the course of a, a number of different periods. And then we also come up with a projected model as to what is your future cashflow look like for that business?

And based on that, we rate the business, um, and, and approve the business. Um, currently our approval ratings are about 93%. Uh, and so we've had a lot of, a lot of success with this, this solution to date, but, you know, as you know, with any of these underwriting models, um, you know, for either the consumer market or for the B2B market, you know, it's a really, really point of competitive differentiation.

And, and so our team comes from the hedge fund and finance world, and, and we're looking every day to improve that modeling, improve the accuracy, and then also improve the turnaround time, which we've, you know, we've been able to do so effectively to date. 

[00:15:56] Andrew Michael: Very interesting. It sounds as well, a little bit about [00:16:00] like, if we draw an analogy B2B, in the sense, like you're doing a, like a lead scoring model to some degree from the marketing side of things.

So, uh, you're capturing that lead. You're taking a look at the number of different variables, like where they came from, what their website traffic is like, what their Alexa rank and so forth we do on the marketing side. And then on that, you can sort of have this ability to predict what their LTV is going to be.

But in your case, the likelihood to pay you back and. Then, if they're gonna become a good customer over time and retain or not as well. So the processes sound fairly similar as well. I think in the way that we go about measuring and trying to understand like user acquisition and then ultimately churn and retention at the end of it.

[00:16:40] Baxter Lanius: Totally very similar processes. And I think one of the things that's, that's most interesting to me and one of the main reasons why. I even jumped into this space was because the API economy continues to boom. And so your ability to capture a lead and supplement that lead data with, you know, [00:17:00] Alexa information or with clear bid information or whatever, the third party data provider is.

To really evaluate whether that's a qualified lead is, is super important because we actually, we do the same thing before we even receive their PLA plaid bank account information, um, to evaluate, you know, how strong the lead is and, and how, you know, what's the probability that they will be approved. Um, and, and that data will only get much more transparent, you know, year to year.

And, you know, you look at all of the companies that are trying to. You know, create better data, tagging, create an API solution. I mean, it's really, it's really incredible stuff. And, you know, I think that this inherent technology will not only affect, you know, businesses on the marketing side for quality of leads.

It'll also affect, you know, loan decision making, even at the biggest of banks. And, and so that's really. Where we [00:18:00] think we're most innovative and, and where we're really trying to, to compete and differentiate in the long run. 

[00:18:07] Andrew Michael: Yeah. So your direct competitors then today are the currently the bank. So companies will typically need to go to bank to, uh, get a loan for whatever the amount is to purchase or to pay for advertising for marketing services.

Do you have any other competitors? 

[00:18:23] Baxter Lanius: Yeah. So there, there are a handful of, um, competitors in Europe. There are a handful of competitors in the us. Everybody, I think takes a little bit of a different approach. Um, you know, there's some B2B by now pay later solutions in both the us and Europe that are very focused on B2B marketplaces.

So a similar approach to a firm Inna on the B2C by now pay later where they're the kind of embedded widget within the platform. Um, no one's approaching the B2B, uh, you know, overall, um, Business models the way we are in terms of. Leveraging sales enablement tools as a complimentary offering within your existing [00:19:00] workflow.

So no one has the ability to get up and running with a platform as quickly as you do with alternative, you know, we can onboard and you in minutes and we can set you up with a white label embedded financing solution that allows you to immediately onboard an end customer. But, you know, the alternative credit and the alternative financing space is, is quite large and, and only expanding in, you know, for eCommerce businesses.

For instance, there are a whole assortment of different players, the services based businesses and the kind of less tech. Oriented companies. Um, you know, there's still not really a solution for, um, which is one of our kind of key go to market strategies. And, and in that market, you know, it's really just the banks that are providing, you know, SBA type loans, which, you know, can take up to eight weeks and move really, really slowly.

Uh, and then, you know, again, as I mentioned before on the B2B by now pay later, so. That are really complimentary to your existing workflows and work [00:20:00] streams. There's really nobody in the us. Who's who's doing what we're. 

[00:20:05] Andrew Michael: Yeah, there's quite a lot of C we're actually gonna have, um, Phil Mont from zilch. If you're familiar with zilch as well on the show, uh, coming up, I actually went to school with him in South Africa as well.

It's incredible to see how fast that business has grown. And like, I think all these Binar later businesses, especially in these times are, are it so are exploding? I definitely think what you're doing is unique, uh, in the sense. To providing this as a service to end. And I think that was gonna be my next question then.

And I don't imagine your channel retention is particularly high, but you mentioned that your business model is basically you charge a standard fee for the loans and it's either covered by, uh, the business or by the end user themselves. So there's no real subscription model, but if you wanna call it a subscription model, it's the monthly installment that's being paid, uh, back to you.

Do you see many companies like adopting a solution, like alternative and [00:21:00] then taking it out? Like, have you had any churn in that sense from your direct customer? I'd say, cause you you're serving two customers 

[00:21:08] Baxter Lanius: ultimately. Yeah. So, so we we've had zero turn to date and, and part of that is that we're not integrated in and in company's existing workflows and we also don't charge a monthly.

You know, subscription fee. So, you know, we offer a free service connect through connect through plaid, um, and, and ultimately you can leverage and, and utilize our services. So that's not, that's not an issue for us. The, the key piece to our business model is really utilization. As you kind of mentioned, Andrew, which is.

If you have a hundred end customers. So if you're Salesforce and let's say Salesforce has a hundred end customers, which obviously is, is vastly underestimating their, their customer base. Um, but how many of those customers are using alternative as a, as a payment vehicle and payment solution? [00:22:00] And our goal is to really be in a hundred percent of those transactions to ensure that we're offering all of sales forces and customers.

A much more simple payment mechanism within B2B transactions than what Salesforce is currently offering. And in the B2B space, you know, many of us just use a PDF invoice or an email invoice. And there's gonna be a tremendous amount of innovation within that invoice structure. And that's really where we're building and where we're going, which is, you know, how do you leverage that technology and create a much more seamless payment solution so that Salesforce can, can offer and collect much more quickly reduce their accounts receivable days and receivable days.

Um, and then ultimately provide the end customer. Various different payment mechanisms that get them to check out sooner and also align interest. And by strengthening those relationships, you really, really create a, [00:23:00] a really strong, tight knit business model that then also, you know, to your point on churn, you know, reduces churn at the end of the day.

Um, so it's, um, utilization is more so how we think of our business, uh, on a month to month basis. Which, which also can be identified with churn, right. If you're utilized at 50 customers for month, one and 40 in month two, you know, or you've had some sort of churn on that specific Salesforce partner account.

[00:23:29] Andrew Michael: Yeah. The, the thing on that as well then, so just to understand a little bit further is. You don't would you ever serve customers who have monthly plans would typically only be like companies you only do yearly and the customers wanna have a lower breakdown? Would that be the case? Because I, yeah, I don't see a reason otherwise, like for them to one do something like this, unless it's to further payments.

[00:23:52] Baxter Lanius: Yeah, no, that that's exactly right. We work with customers who have a large upfront or average contract value. We do work with [00:24:00] a handful of customers who offer both monthly and annual plans. Um, but instead of offering an annual plan at a call it 20% discount to the monthly plan. What we can offer is we can offer the annual plan at a, at a 10% discount, but then the end customer still gets to pay over time.

So it's kind of a mix between two solutions. So walking through that more specifically, you know, if you're collecting $10 a month, you know, which is $120 contract, and you're trying to convince people to pay you a hundred dollars on an annual basis. We can step in. You can increase that contract size to $110 on an annual basis.

You can capture that capital up front, but then still provide your end customer, you know, a six month installment plan. So it's kind of a, a hybrid approach. Um, as we see it in the market, a lot of B2B businesses are moving to upfront contract [00:25:00] contracts because of they've had challenges, you know, with their customers over time.

And that trend also just really, you know, drives value in what we're offering. Because ultimately you don't wanna lose a deal just because of pricing or just because of your payment plan. We can step in the middle, hold some of that risk for you and get you paid upfront. Um, but to your point on, you know, we really focus on companies with high average contract values, upfront payments, um, and, and try to drive revenue growth for our, uh, partners.

[00:25:33] Andrew Michael: Yeah, cause it doesn't feel like it makes sense for companies with like, uh, low contract value, monthly payments, like, uh, but it is interesting. The notion of being able to sort of give the ability for someone to purchase a yearly plan, but at the discount, it's still at the discounted rate, but maybe not that full discounted rate, uh, as well.

I, I could see that as well, being an interesting concept that people might want to adopt if it costs [00:26:00] the end user. Nothing really. And they have the intentions of using it for the year. They just don't have that upfront capital to do so as well, but still take me advantage of it. 

[00:26:09] Baxter Lanius: And, and pricing is always a, it's a challenging topic, right?

People, people juggle pricing all the time and try to figure out, you know, how do you balance pricing with churn and retention and. How do you balance that annual plan versus monthly plan? And, you know, alternative is a solution that is complimentary and, and should be really a sales enablement tool to drive revenue.

So, you know, within our existing customer base, we've been able to drive just under 50% revenue growth on an annualized basis for those customers by utilizing another tool in the toolkit, um, to increase your win rate, close deals, and then upsell and cross sell customers on new different solutions. While providing them that flexible payment.

Yeah, 

[00:26:53] Andrew Michael: definitely. I think pricing and packaging. Yeah. That is like, it's an ongoing continuous effort to really try and [00:27:00] understand, uh, totally the optimal point, the optimal price points. If that even is like, it's probably just a.

[00:27:09] Baxter Lanius: It, it may, it may, may very well be, but it's, uh, it's initiative that a lot of people spend a lot of time on and 

[00:27:16] Andrew Michael: a lot of money as well. Cool. Um, so I see we're running up on time. Uh, I just wanna ask like a couple of questions to ask every guest that joins the show. Let's imagine a hypothetical scenario you join and your company churn retention is not doing great at this company.

And, uh, the CEO company says like back, so you're in charge. We need to reduce churn. We have 90 days to do it. You're in charge. What do you do, but you're not gonna tell me I'm gonna go and speak to customers and figure out the biggest pain points to start there. Or you're not gonna go look at the data and try and send.

You're just gonna pick a tactic that you've seen work at a previous company and run with it. Blindly hoping it works with the new company. What would that be? 

[00:27:58] Baxter Lanius: Use alternative. That's an easy one. [00:28:00] Andrew, that's an easy one. 

[00:28:01] Andrew Michael: Have you seen it be effective? 

[00:28:03] Baxter Lanius: we've seen it be really, really effective on the, on the, on the turn side.

So, you know, Now that we have so much, uh, transparency in terms of usage data for specific customers, you can almost tell when customers are gonna churn, especially at the end of a specific contract term and proactively reaching out to them, renegotiating that transaction and offering them a payment plan can be really, really beneficial and helpful, especially with an enterprise SaaS where, you know, the average contract values are continuing to creep up from 10,000 to thousand to.

You know, whether, you know, you can use that usage data proactively reach out to them and offer them a payment solution. You know, it can have a real meaningful benefit on, on reducing churn and increasing retention. 

[00:28:50] Andrew Michael: Yeah, definitely. Cool. Last question then what is one thing that, you know today about churn retention that you wish you knew when you started your career?[00:29:00] 

[00:29:03] Baxter Lanius: In my opinion, it's really all about. Product market fit and ensuring that you have designed a product with the right features that customers really value and really, really want. And so instead of approaching churn and retention, uh, retroactively based on your product, you know, it's really more important to address it proactively and make sure that you're, you know, properly and adequately receiving customer feedback.

To build the feature set that people want to then reduce churn at the end of the day. And, and that's where we spend a lot of time on at alternative, which is, you know, ensuring that we're not just trying to launch a beta product as quickly as possible, but we're ensuring that we're hitting all the dots that customers really want and, and wish they had and spending more time on the build upfront before deploying a [00:30:00] product.

To, to, to decrease churn and, and limit that type of, um, poor customer feedback. And, and then ultimately obviously increase and strengthen those customer relationships. 

[00:30:12] Andrew Michael: Yeah, absolutely. I think starting with product is one of the most critical components. And typically that is aligned as well with activation.

I think a lot of people mention that as well, is that, um, basically all coming back to like people come to you to solve a problem that they have. They're looking for. That's a specific solution. If you're not meeting that. And if your product is not hitting. Uh, and delivering the value, then ultimately people are gonna churn.

So focusing on getting, like, what is your product? And what's making it sticky and getting that right. Uh, at the beginning, going back to the roof. Cause for sure. Cool. B uh, we've up on time. Is there any final thoughts you wanna leave the listeners with? Like how can they keep up to speed with your. 

[00:30:54] Baxter Lanius: Yeah, no, this has been great, Andrew.

I mean, so, you know, feel free to visit our website, [00:31:00] alternative.co. You can also find me on, on LinkedIn Baxter, Landus, uh, CEO and founder of alternatives. Uh, we, you know, have a mailing list and we offer a blog so you can check out, you know, a number of different resources, you know, either articles that we're talking about, reducing churn and, and increasing retention, um, as well as, you know, U utilizing.

Buy now pay later solutions in the B2B space. There's, there's a lot of resources and content that we're creating, but you know, if anybody has any questions, you know, would love to hear from you, um, just to chat and my email's Baxter alternative doco. So it's been awesome, Andrew. 

Awesome. 

[00:31:35] Andrew Michael: Thanks so much. Uh, wish you best of luck going forward and thanks for joining.