How this CPA-Turned-SaaS Entrepreneur Found Success in an Economic Downturn
By: Miriam Kahn
Tags: Startup, Isvs, Entrepreneurship, SaaS, Salesforce

Sometimes taking a leap of faith is a leap in the right direction. Jerry Huskins, CEO and founder of Fonteva - an integrated event and membership software platform - had the entrepreneurial bug while working as a CPA. After an opportunity presented itself, he built up the courage to chase his dreams. Fast forward to present day, Fonteva has reached over $30 million in revenue with customers in nearly every continent around the world. How did Jerry’s transformative pivot take him from CPA to SaaS entrepreneur? This is his story.

Tell us about your entrepreneurial journey.

I started out as a CPA with Ernst & Young in their consulting business during the early ’80s and through the ’90s. And honestly, it wasn’t for me. But I was too afraid to leave. Deep down I knew that I wanted to become an entrepreneur, but it was really hard.

Luckily, something called “the internet” happened. Through the internet bubble, I started a business being an interim CFO for technology companies — which was great until the internet depression hit in 2001. At that point, I didn’t know where my next paycheck would come from and I was too proud to go back to work as a CPA.

How did you get introduced to Salesforce?

At the time I was thinking about leaving my job at E&Y, my partner said, “I just implemented Salesforce automation for this little bitty company in Atlanta and I wonder if you could just implement software that people rented on the internet.” That’s when we decided to talk to the Salesforce Alliances team and took the plunge.

We started our own consulting business on Salesforce, and before you know it, we opened offices in London and Singapore, with 200+ consultants spread across 18 time zones.

How did you transition to founding Fonteva?

Once we sold our consulting business, I asked myself, “Whoa, what am I going to do now?” I considered whether I should start another consulting business or build software on top of Salesforce. I figured that since I had never built or sold any software, I would go do exactly that. That’s when we started Fonteva, a membership and event software that is 100% native on Salesforce.

What did you learn from the dot-com crash that has helped Fonteva weather this pandemic?

There is an old adage that I saw first-hand during the dot-com bust. It said, “This too shall pass.” That quote has helped us stay strong during this turbulent time. It’s been instrumental in our approach during the pandemic: 1. Hunker down and don’t give up 2. Be there for your customers. Those are the two key learnings we’ve applied to make sure we stand the test of time so that we can serve our customers well into the future.

What makes Fonteva different from other solutions?

We are competing against folks that have to manage an entire stack of software. It’s incredibly difficult, if not impossible for our competitors to keep up with the pace of innovation of our combined solution. Because we are a Salesforce partner, we are able to outsource the majority of the infrastructure and application building tools to Salesforce. This enables our developers to focus on the features that matter most to our customers, like accounting, memberships, subscriptions, events, and communities.

Why do you think Fonteva has been so successful?

Fonteva has grown really well because we’ve been able to leverage the things that Salesforce does really well for hundreds of thousands of businesses around the world. Early on, we noticed that nonprofits could benefit from the Salesforce Platform. I saw deals where membership management was a requirement, but the entire category of membership management software had grown up in client-server for 30+ years. Fonteva made it relevant for a very specific group of users in the world by moving it to the public cloud.

What’s your approach to growing your revenue?

It’s not only important to think about how fast you’re growing revenue, but also what you have to invest to get that revenue. With the Salesforce infrastructure, we’ve invested significantly less in this business than we would have if we built it on .net or built a standalone Java application on AWS. So I would say that capital efficiency is very important. We’ve been good stewards of our money, our investors’ money, and have made it go further on the Salesforce Platform.

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What is your advice for aspiring entrepreneurs?

Don’t do it unless you really feel like you love it and have a passion for it. Having an exit plan probably isn’t the best thing for you. You’ve got to love what you do and can’t be thinking about getting out every day.

What’s been your winning formula for success?

Many problems will succumb to massive amounts of effort and unlimited amounts of problem-solving, but we’ve grown because we’ve been willing to invest in our customers. I’ve found, working with Salesforce now for 19 years, that if there is a problem and you work hard together to solve it, to make customers happy and successful, there is no limit to what you can do in your life.