A Conversation with Grier Allen, CEO & President of BoomTown

May 23, 2014

By Alan Cooper
September 23, 2013

LowcountryBizSC:
Where were you born and raised? What is your education?

Grier Allen:
I grew up right here in Summerville, SC and went to Summerville High School. From a very early age, I was always drawn to computers. Spurred by the growth in the Internet, I started to really get the technology bug when I was in high school.

I attended Clemson University where I majored in computer science. I learned a lot at the university, but I also had a good time when I was there. When I graduated in 2002, I did not know what I wanted to do, so I moved back down to Mount Pleasant and tried to keep on learning as a much as I could in those first few years out of college.

I did a couple of consulting jobs for local residential real estate companies that centered on helping them market homes that they had listed. At that point in time, that meant helping brokers get their homes listed in the newspaper.

That is when I discovered that I had this entrepreneurial itch. I started a digital advertising company called SLANT media. That company still exists here in Charleston, and they also now have a location up in Greenville. After that, I started BoomTown.

LowcountryBizSC:
What was the entrepreneurial spark for BoomTown?

Grier Allen:
The idea for BoomTown was not really the result of a spark, but rather a process of thoughtful research over time. Three passions of mine came together to help form the basis for BoomTown: the real estate industry, digital marketing, and technology. I knew intuitively that the real estate industry was ripe for disruption, but I had no idea what form that would take. My brother and father were both in real estate, so that was a big help. I also delved into learning not just how to develop a great website, but how to drive traffic to that website.

The last piece of the puzzle was working with our co-founder, Cooper Bane. He had a passion for the same things that I did. Starting in 2006, we spent nine months researching the real estate industry. We looked at how tangential industries were being affected by technology and tried to figure out how this might apply to the real estate business. We searched for a scalable business model that could create real value in the industry.

Remarkably, the business model for residential real estate has not changed that much over the past 50 years. Right now, with technology, the Internet, and the transparency of data (listings are now readily available on the Internet), the industry is changing rapidly, and therefore, the value that a real estate agent offers is changing. It’s becoming much more of a customer-focused industry and it’s a very fun space for a technology company to be in.

LowcountryBizSC:
What is the best takeaway from your education?

Grier Allen:
Strange, but the best takeaway from my education is…that you can never stop learning. Especially in this era where technology is making information so readily available to everybody, you have to continue learning. At each stage of BoomTown’s growth over the past seven years, I have had to learn new skills in order to move the company forward. It’s an exciting, but also a very humbling experience.

LowcountryBizSC:
What is BoomTown’s core business?

Grier Allen:
We help real estate agents and brokers embrace the Internet as a source for new business. The heart of our platform is the customer relationship management software (CRM) that allows brokers and agents to manage their relationships with prospective home buyers and home sellers, as well as their current clients. BoomTown offers a complete online system that leads more Internet home buyers directly to the broker’s door.

What drives us is developing a product that makes a difference in people’s lives, and ultimately happy customers.

LowcountryBizSC:
Who are your customers? How do you acquire new customers?

Grier Allen:
We sell to individual real estate brokers and real estate agent teams across the United States and Canada. We attend trade shows and we have people on the phone making calls, but mostly the growth in our sales has been organic. We are fortunate to have raving fans who share their success with BoomTown with other brokers in their franchise network, or their coaching network. That has been the main driver of our business since day one.

LowcountryBizSC:
What is the business model?

Grier Allen:
We have a software-as-a-service business model. Brokers sign a one-year contract with us, and we charge them a monthly fee for use of the technology involved with the platform, as well as success management and support. We take a very proactive approach to help our customers be successful with the software. Our philosophy is: If our clients are successful, then we are successful.

LowcountryBizSC:
Assess the industry that you are competing in. Is there a lot of competition?

Grier Allen:
We have competitors that are much larger companies than we are; some of our competitors are publically traded. Move Inc., the company that runs realtor.com, just purchased one of our competitors called TigerLead. Another competitor is Market Leader who was recently acquired by Trulia.

How we compete against those companies is to focus on our most important core value – create amazing experiences with our products. Our main philosophy is –don’t make the user think. Whether it’s the consumer looking for homes, or the broker who is using the CRM system, we try to make the experience as simple, and as amazing as possible.

We also differentiate ourselves on the service side. We want to make sure that when a broker launches their BoomTown platform, they are hitting the ground running with best practices. We staff up heavily on the success management side of our business in order to remain focused on the broker’s success.

LowcountryBizSC:
Do you develop the software in house or do you outsource it?

Grier Allen:
We develop everything in house. About 45% of our staff is directly involved in the development of the product. We have four main groups: software engineers, designers, quality assurance (Q&A) specialists, and product managers who are interfacing regularly with our clients in the industry to bring product knowledge back to our development teams.

LowcountryBizSC:
What are some of the major challenges that you have faced?

Grier Allen:
In 2006, we were coming up with the idea for BoomTown. In 2007, we were putting the final touches on the final version of the product. In 2008, just as we launched, the bubble burst in the residential real estate market. It was not a great time to start a company.

So, one huge initial challenge that we faced was attracting investors. Venture capitalists and angel investors were not willing to invest in a company in the technology space, let alone one that focused on the real estate industry. We created an awesome investor pitch, but we never actually ended up using it.

LowcountryBizSC:
How did you finance the company?

Grier Allen:
Cooper and I bootstrapped the business. Fortunately, we were able to get a second mortgage on our homes and that is how we funded the business in the early stages. Those were trying times. It was taking longer than expected to develop the product, and any bit of equity that we had in our homes was used up. It was either sink or swim.

LowcountryBizSC:
What is the ownership of the company?

Grier Allen:
To this day, we have not had to look for outside sources of financing. Cooper and I still own the company. Our annual growth in sales has been triple digit or double digit every single year. We have been fortunate enough to be included on the Inc. 500 list of America’s Fastest Growing Companies for three years in a row now. We are very proud of that! We have grown from three employees in 2009 to over 100.

There are a lot of differences in managing a company that is in start up phase versus growth phase, but it’s been exciting and we have embraced those challenges each step of the way.

LowcountryBizSC:
What is your company culture?

Grier Allen:
We strongly believe that company culture can be a great competitive advantage, so we focused on our culture from very early on. When we reached 25 employees, we created eight core values to guide our culture. We describe our company culture as work hard, play hard, and rest hard. We believe in having a great work/life balance.

In order to create and maintain a company culture, you have to make the right hiring decisions; you have to make personnel decisions based on what your values are. We hire people who enjoy working hard. It’s great working around people like that, because it keeps you energized.

This year, we were fortunate to be recognized as the number 32 company in the country on Outside magazine’s Best Places to Work list. It’s pretty awesome to achieve that given that the results are generated by anonymous employee surveys. People want to stay here because they love working here. Employee happiness is another big competitive differentiator.

LowcountryBizSC:
What is your focus strategically for the next couple of years?

Grier Allen:
As we move into growth mode, the big challenge and opportunity for us is how to scale BoomTown. With residential real estate prices starting to climb, there is plenty of opportunity at the moment. We feel that we are ahead of the curve in our industry so we are very excited about the future. It’s all about loving what we are doing and being in an industry that we are passionate about.

LowcountryBizSC:
What is your favorite business book?

Grier Allen:
I really like Great By Choice, by Jim Collins. It takes a look at what he calls 10x companies – those that outperformed their competitors by ten times over a certain period of time – to see what they did differently.

LowcountryBizSC:
What are some of your hobbies?

Grier Allen:
I love spending time with my family. I have a three-year-old son, and my wife and I found out the other day that we have another boy on the way.

I love Charleston and I love being near the water. My two favorite sports, fishing and golf, both involve a pretty serious time commitment, so, for the moment, those are taking a bit of a backseat to the business and family.