How this Atlanta startup grew to $100 million in revenue

Aaron Marks was in a bind.

The Decatur lawyer had to juggle important but competing priorities at once — being fully present for depositions or other meetings meant not being on his phone, which in turn meant he could be missing important calls.

“I needed to know if it was a judge’s office, if it was opposing counsel, if it was a potential client, and I needed to know it as soon as it happened,” Marks told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He runs his own personal injury firm, Marks Law Group.

Then about 10 years ago, he found a fix — CallRail, an Atlanta-based company that helps small businesses keep track of phone calls and measure the effectiveness of their marketing efforts.

With CallRail, Marks was able to have his calls automatically recorded, transcribed and sent to him. So if he was in a deposition, Marks could be on his laptop and see a judge’s office called and what they said, all without having to answer the phone.

“That helps me make better decisions in a faster time line,” he said.

Marks is one of 220,000 small businesses that now use CallRail, helping the company in May hit $100 million in annualized recurring revenue for the first time.

CallRail was founded in 2011 by Georgia Tech grads Andy Powell and Kevin Mann. Before cofounding the company, Powell ran a website for BMW enthusiasts. He struggled to show auto repair shops that advertised with him that his site was responsible for referring customers. So, he looked for a solution.

Along with call recording, CallRail helps small businesses measure marketing efforts by helping track a potential customer’s digital journey to their company or ad.

Credit: WSBTV Videos

CallRail’s technology shows a unique phone number to potential customers who have navigated to a business’s website from search engines like Google. When a person calls that number, it creates a digital fingerprint and CallRail can then link the search keywords that led to the interaction so small businesses can know how people are finding them online. This tracking is done through cookies, the bits of data web servers create and store on our computers to personalize our experiences on a website. The company’s software integrates with Google Ads, Facebook, Microsoft Ads and more.

CallRail began integrating artificial intelligence into its products in 2017, before the current AI boom, and can now tell businesses the tone of the conversation it transcribed — if a customer was happy or angry. That, in turn, can help convert leads into sales.

For Street Digital Media, an Atlanta-based digital marketing agency for apartment complexes, CallRail’s tracking helps the company optimize its rental ads, retain customers and attract new clients.

“When we’re either getting on client calls or providing reports for what we’re responsible for, CallRail allows us to do that … effectively and efficiently, and we need that in order to stand by what services we’re providing,” said Donald Kleckner, founder and president of Street Digital Media.

In 2020, Connecticut-based Sageview Capital acquired a majority stake in CallRail after investing more than $130 million in the company over three years. The next year, Powell stepped down as CEO and former American Express marketing executive Marc Ginsberg took the reins.

Ginsberg said CallRail’s customers come mainly from five industries that typically require a conversation to make a sale — real estate, home services, automotive, health care and legal services.

So, in a time when tech companies are laying off workers, CallRail’s variety of customers has given it stability because when one industry isn’t doing as well, another might be growing, Ginsberg explained.

“It’s been a rolling recession of industries,” he said. Real estate agents are in a recession because of high interest rates, but home services are rebounding because people are reinvesting in homes they bought with low rates, Ginsberg said.

“If interest rates were to come down, that would help real estate agents get more calls, get more text messages, get more forms, get more customers,” he said. But either way, some set of CallRail’s customers are getting calls.

Ginsberg said the company has been profitable since day one, and when he joined in August 2021 the company was already pulling in a little more than $60 million ARR. About half its revenue comes from subscriptions, and the other half is based on how many marketing numbers and call minutes a customer wants to track.

CallRail now has more than 260 employees, with an office spanning four floors in downtown Atlanta, and $100 million ARR in less than 14 years, a feat few startups achieve.

Ginsberg said that $100 million was never the goal, but it serves more as a validation of the team, values and product CallRail has created.

And Ginsberg said scaling a company comes down to one thing: collaboration.

“The biggest challenge for companies of getting from startup phase to $100 million … you lose collaboration. You lose intimacy in the employee base,” he said. “When Andy and Kevin started the company, they were all sitting in a room like this talking. You didn’t need a mission and a vision and a product road map, and now all of a sudden, we’re on four floors with 15% of people not even in our state.”

Ginsberg said he is focused on keeping people interacting and making sure everyone is on the same page. Three weeks out of the year, all employees across the country work in person in Atlanta. Team engagement is measured every quarter because if CallRail is going to continue to grow it’ll need continued collaboration, Ginsberg said.

He said in the next year or two, the company may partner with a larger private equity firm to help finance its growth.

“We’d love to continue to accelerate the base of what we’re doing, continue to invest in our products, continue to invest in our people,” he said.

Ginsberg is also eyeing ways to expand CallRail’s use of AI and how to leverage the 10 million hours of conversations the company has recorded, as well as expanding internationally. Right now, about 95% of revenue comes from U.S. small businesses, but he sees an opportunity to scale the platform to potential customers around the world.

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