Tag: Oklahoma Venture Forum Page 4 of 8

Kris Murray talks about Growing Through Acquisition in this profile article I wrote for the Oklahoma Venture Forum.

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Kris Murray’s entrepreneurial journey began in college when a friend suggested they should start a web development company. While in high school and college, Murray was interested in web development, video production, graphic design, and how to code, but throughout most of his college career, he was a biology major. Before making a significant life pivot, Murray had some terms.

“I was like, ‘Sure, we’ll start a company if you secure the first client,’” said Kris Murray. “And essentially, I threw some numbers at him, like, ‘If you can kind of guarantee that both of us will make X amount of money for the first year, I’ll jump in this crazy idea with you,’ and like two weeks later; he had all the stuff secured. He had sold to different people and secured a lump sum of money and a retainer covering our living expenses.”

As time progressed, Murray’s original business partner wanted to exit, so Murray bought him out and then merged with a friend’s video production company, where they were outsourcing all of their video work. They joined forces and created a new brand called Spark.

“At the time, people’s choices were to hire an ad agency, where typical ad agencies had not kind of caught up with the changes of digital media, so they were billing high hourly rates and didn’t really know how to engage new media, or hire a person internally and have to pay their salary, pay for their equipment, pay for their health insurance, and stuff like that,” said Murray. “We were the no-brainer choice because we were cheaper than both options available to them, and it was like, hey, if we hate these guys, we can fire them because they’re essentially a contractor, and we can move in a different direction. So again, we saw pretty quick success with that. I think our goal was to get like 20 clients, and we met that goal within two weeks.”

With Spark, Murray loved they were helping solve unique problems for people. He found companies would be great at providing their goods and services to people, but they didn’t know how to connect with potential customers, and that’s where Spark excelled.

“We had a client early on say essentially we were the best investment they had ever made in marketing, and that was like a big moment for me,” said Murray. “When I started realizing that people see us as an investment, this is a partnership, this isn’t a typical contract engagement, and this isn’t a service. They feel like we are jointly moving towards their shared success.”

Murray knew Spark’s next phase of growth would be through acquisitions. Their first acquisition was Scissortail Media. Murray admired the company’s high-end impactful work. Through circumstances, the owner of Scissortail Media had started a virtual reality software platform and was looking to pursue that avenue. The creative and storytelling aspect of video production was an area Spark needed to grow, so they acquired them to get the talent, equipment, and proprietary story craft process.

“We did an acqui-hire, where we hired all the staff,” said Murray. “Whatever Scissortail Media’s best year was, we doubled that in the first year of our acquisition. We gave all the staff a raise, we kept everybody on through the transition, and we carried that through with our future acquisitions, is we always tried to retain the entire team.”

For the following acquisitions, they used the Traction system, an entrepreneurial operating system, to help explore core values, systems, processes, and what is needed to get to the next phase. Murray identified Casey Cornett with Cornett Marketing and later Studio Flight.

“With all of our acquisitions, we always did cash deals, where we never got into debt because of acquisitions,” said Murray. “I wanted to have an agency that was working citywide, statewide, nationally, globally, and by the time we consolidated the brands and everything, we had great local clients, we had great statewide clients, we had great national clients, and we had great global clients. In all service areas that we were a part of, we were, in some ways top of that, working with top-tier clients. We were getting top-tier clients to work with us, so it was the completion of the original vision.”

Kris Murray will speak to Oklahoma Venture Forum Power Lunch members on Wednesday, October 12, 2022. The event will be open to members and guests both in-person and virtually via ZOOM.

“My advice would be a lot of people think that they need seed capital to get started, and for some things, you do need seed capital, but I would encourage people to market test their idea and do as much as they can to bootstrap whatever product or service they’re doing, and then once they have marketed tested their service or product, and they have a good idea of what the demand will be, then if they need capital, do growth capital,” said Murray. “We never did any kind of investment, so we bootstrapped everything. Honestly, I’ve got friends that have done capital rounds, saying, ‘I wish we had bootstrapped things,’ because one thing that capital does is it accelerates all of your problems. Money accelerates everything, so if things are going good, it accelerates things, but if things are not figured out or going well, it can run you off a cliff pretty fast.”

Ryan Coe talks about Creating a Flow for Innovation in this article I wrote for the Oklahoma Venture Forum.

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Ryan Coe has been in the oil and gas industry his entire life, the fifth generation in his family line. Where Coe is now in energy was not the path he expected for himself. Straight out of college, he went to work at Chesapeake.  

“I got comfortable with mashing together data sets and applying them towards my specific discipline, which was land, and that not only gave a ton of support to our land team to be able to be more efficient, but it also really sparked a massive passion that I had no idea that I possessed until this opportunity came along,” said Ryan Coe. “It gave me the ability to provide creative problem-solving into my day-to-day routine, and it’s what’s been driving me since that moment. I’ve been incorporating technology into most of the things I do regularly here at Flogistix, and it’s been a wild ride, frustrating, but I love it.”  

Coe is now the Corporate Product Manager at Flogistix. Primarily, Flogistix is a compression service company that’s incorporated innovative technology to optimize its fleet and the runtime and efficiency of its operators. His role includes reviewing Flogistix’s products and seeing, from an industry expert perspective, where’s the application, what should be changed, what shouldn’t be changed, and helping facilitate the best development and product fit they can achieve.  

For companies looking to advance and innovate with technology, Coe said the best thing they can do is create an environment where their employees feel comfortable and are not afraid to ask questions. 

“They’re not afraid to come up with those weird ideas that they may be concerned, “What is the person next to me going to think about it if I say, ‘Oh, this is a way to solve a problem,’ and it’s just off the wall crazy?” I have always encouraged people when they have an idea, talk about it, bring it up,” said Coe. “If you’re doing something monotonous or repetitive and you think there’s a better way to do something, there probably is a better way to do something.”  

Coe also added that people should be confident in the value they add to your company because not letting people think and express their thoughts and creativity hampers the organization. See what you can solve using technology versus, “Let’s just continue to do it the same way because we’re afraid to learn something new.”  

With the EPA’s concern about fugitive emissions, the next facet for Flogistix is trying to answer and solve some of those problems because it’s massive. Thousands of wells are outdated, so they’re some of the biggest emitters.  

“It’s a much bigger problem than people realize, but we are incredibly confident that we know how to address it,” said Coe. “We’re always developing new solutions to make things more efficient on our end and the customer side. I have no idea where the next step is, but I know that it will be in the energy space, and I know that it will involve technology and creativity.”  

Ryan Coe will speak to Oklahoma Venture Forum Power Lunch members on Wednesday, September 22, 2022. Coe was introduced to OVF last year, and while he initially didn’t know what to think of the forum, he’s come to see OVF as a great way to build a network of companies looking out for each other. The event will be open to members and guests both in-person and virtually via ZOOM.  

“It’s incredibly cool to bring some of these smaller organizations together that are all kind of fighting a common battle, trying to get established, trying to figure out what to do to give themselves an advantage and to be able to come together sort of as a consortium and collaborate amongst each other,” said Coe.

Kevin Moore, Aaron Webster, and Justin Wilson talk about their history in Pivoting to Venture Capital in this article I wrote for the Oklahoma Venture Forum to promote a panel discussion with them.

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Before having a career in venture capital, Kevin Moore, Aaron Webster, and Justin Wilson were pursuing other paths. Moore got a degree in engineering, Webster was a developer, and Wilson studied to be a doctor. While their career path changed, they incorporated their past knowledge into their current venture firms.  

Spur Capital Partners specializes in early-stage technology and life science venture capital fund investments. Cameron Ventures is an early-stage venture fund with affiliate operating companies that serve customers across the United States, primarily in insurance, banking, and asset management. Wilson at Plains Ventures says they are sector agnostic, investing from seed to Series A in Oklahoma businesses.   

Moore, a partner at Spur Capital, finds their significant diversification a positive for the company.  

“The way that our model is set up, we invest in so many different companies with the right firms that we see these effects within the portfolio, where because we’re still investing at the early stages of a company’s life, we’ll see that maybe 20% of all the companies within our portfolio, they will drive about 75% of our performance,” said Kevin Moore. “That’s the power law effect you want to see in venture capital.”  

Moore explained that the drawback to Spur’s business model is that some people lose all control. They decide which managers to choose, how much money to invest with each manager, and when to exit those different opportunities. The other potential issue that some people might have is that they only focus on early-stage venture capital.  

Webster, Managing Director at Cameron Ventures, sees a benefit to their limited partner base.  

“We get to focus on meeting entrepreneurs to focus on looking at the deal mechanics, looking at what the technologies actually do, and then backing the teams that we think are going to make some big changes in the industry,” said Aaron Webster.  

Historically, Wilson, Managing Director at Plains Venture Partners, has focused on healthcare and biotech companies because Oklahoma produces outstanding companies in those fields.  

“We can invest in really any industry as long as it’s a high growth opportunity with an outstanding founder, and there’s a clear path to value creation and an exit,” said Justin Wilson. “We’re open-minded and willing to dive in and understand something.”  

For founders looking for investors, Moore thinks most founders discount the strength of their team.   

“I think the team is critical,” said Moore. “However, I think that there’s also this notion that if the product is good enough or the market is large enough… And those things certainly have to be there, but in some of the most successful venture capital firms, what they experience and what I’ve experienced in the past is that the team is what makes the biggest difference. And you look at it as you can have a really good team with an average product that will have a higher probability of success than a great product with an average team.”  

Webster advised that entrepreneurs should understand what type of fund they’re pitching to, whether generalist or vertical-specific funds.  

“In general funds, you have to find the right partner to pitch to that is interested in your company and interested in your theme,” said Webster. “If you’re pitching to a vertical-specific fund, you actually have to pick the correct vertical. I get so many inbounds from founders, just cold decks to where we are not even focused in on that theme at all.”  

Wilson said founders should view investors as a class of your customers.  

“Think of investors as a customer and anticipate their needs and know that if you’re pitching a family office or a high net worth individual, what their needs are is likely very different than what a pure financial VC is looking for,” said Wilson. “But in the end, VC’s about value creation. And so if you can communicate that, ‘Listen, I have this really cool idea that creates real value, that solves a real problem for my customers,’ investors are going to find a way to understand it.”  

Kevin Moore, Aaron Webster, and Justin Wilson will be part of a special panel discussion at the Oklahoma Venture Forum Power Lunch on Wednesday, April 13, 2022. The event will be open to members and guests both in-person and virtually via ZOOM.  

“I think the fact that this organization exists is a huge positive for Oklahoma and for Oklahoma entrepreneurs,” said Moore. “It provides a good platform for people to present their ideas. And I would say that maybe most of the people in this group probably have some awareness of risk capital and what it means and how it should work. But I certainly encourage members of this group and just Oklahomans, in general, to think about venture capital and early-stage funding as an asset class and to make room for that in your investment appropriation.”