Fullbay

ARR Growth Led by Product, Value, and Infrastructure Expansion

Founded: 2014
Invested: 2019
Status: Current
Location: Phoenix, AZ
Overview

Founded in 2014, Fullbay automates the operations of heavy-duty repair shops and internal fleet maintenance departments and strives to create more efficient, focused, and faster repair organizations. Fullbay’s cloud-based ERP software replaces paper-based tasks, including optimizing the workflows of technicians, managing inventory, automating invoicing, and streamlining financial reporting.

Outcome

In July 2024, Fullbay announced a strategic growth investment from JMI Equity and a significant reinvestment from Mainsail.

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At-A-Glance
  • Placed 6 key executives and board directors while founders remained fully engaged in new roles and aimed to uplevel 13 members of management team through training.
  • Created outbound sales organization and diversified marketing channel mix.
  • Sourced and completed an acquisition to extend services to clients and improve customer experience.
  • Launched cross-sell initiative to drive ancillary product growth through payments, including a dedicated team, switching providers and implementing free trial promotions.
The Story

While working for a vertical SaaS company, Jacob Findlay realized that commercial vehicle repair—mainly heavy-duty trucks and equipment—could also use modern software. “These are complex operations, but there wasn’t a purpose-built SaaS solution serving the market,” said Findlay. He and future co-founder and CTO, David Hoover, got to work, which included Jacob quitting his job to spend a year in a truck repair shop. He experienced firsthand the common operational inefficiencies faced by an industry filled with good people who were buried in paperwork and frustrated by the organizational complexities that kept them from doing what they love—turning wrenches and being able to leave the work behind at the end of each day.

They took Fullbay to market in 2015 to address those pain points with a suite of business management software solutions and found early growth while remaining profitable. After four years as a bootstrapped business, Findlay and Hoover sought to partner with an investor that was experienced in building software companies and could offer both capital as well as operational resources to help them further invest in product development, customer support, and sales as they continued to grow the business.

From 2019 through 2024, Fullbay and Mainsail partnered on a wide range of initiatives to help scale Fullbay’s operations and accelerate growth of the business.

MAINSAIL'S VALUE-ADD
Talent Acquisition & Development:

Supported by Mainsail’s Talent Team, Fullbay hired a CEO, CMO, CTPO and 3 Board Directors while both Jacob and David remained fully engaged in the business and on the board of directors. Thirteen Fullbay representatives also completed Mainsail’s management training program to help uplevel its team.

Sales:

To reach a wider audience of repair shops, Fullbay partnered with Mainsail’s go-to-market team to create an outbound sales organization and ramp it from 0 to 17 reps, as well as diversify its marketing channel mix. Together, we also launched an industry benchmark report and first annual customer event.

M&A:

In April 2022, Fullbay acquired Dieselmatic, a digital marketing company, to offer extended websites and marketing services to its clients and improve the customer experience.

Payments:

Recognizing that customers today expect a fully integrated payments experience from their vendors, and that it presents a strategic ancillary revenue stream for SaaS companies, Mainsail and Fullbay worked together to launch a cross-sell initiative to drive ancillary product growth, which included launching an integrated payments solution, creating a standalone payments sales team, and implementing free trial promotions for ancillary products to drive adoption. As a result, in the first 5 years since partnering with Mainsail and launching the integrated payments solutions, Fullbay’s annualized volume of payments processed grew to more than $300M.

Outcome

During the five and half years of Fullbay’s partnership with Mainsail, the company grew its employee count from 25 to 180 employees. Additionally, the company built out key elements of its infrastructure to support scale and expanded its product offering and value delivered to customers, setting the foundation to continue to pursue future growth opportunities.

In July 2024, Fullbay announced a strategic growth investment from JMI Equity and a significant reinvestment from Mainsail. This combined partnership aims to accelerate the continued expansion of Fullbay’s software solutions to help more shops run and operate more efficiently within the independent commercial repair and internal fleet maintenance industry.