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No. 16
Revenue growth FY 2021 to 2023: 102%
2023 revenue: $10.2 million
Caleb Townsend is ambitious. The company he co-founded, Factur, has made the Fast 25 for the second consecutive year. His goal is 40% year-over-year growth. Factur now provides marketing, lead generation, and other sales and business development services to business-to-business manufacturers and industrial distributors, but “our long-term vision is to solve all sales and marketing problems that companies in B2B manufacturing have.”
The right people doing the right service: “We have a market that is hungry for our service,” Townsend says. The manufacturing industry is full of technical people, not sales and marketing people. When manufacturers recognize the value Factur can provide, Townsend says, they are eager to get on board. “The second thing I’d say is, we [have] just got a freakin’ awesome team.”
No sacred cows: This isn’t to say, of course, that the company hasn’t made missteps. One lesson learned: “I would embrace Dave Ramsey’s philosophy of no sacred cows quicker.” Entrepreneurs can be stubborn people. That same determination that can drive success also can blind you to when it’s no longer smart to try to grind it out, Townsend says. Factur used to recruit salespeople for clients. It no longer does. “We just didn’t time the market properly on the need for that service,” he says. “We should have quit quicker. We should have gotten out of that service quicker because it was an expensive lesson
to learn.”
Having faith: One of the key differentiators of his company, he says, is its faith-based work culture. It signals that company leaders run the business with humility, that they don’t have all the answers. The company, for instance, has a daily prayer. No one is obligated to participate, he notes, and not everyone does. But it’s one way the company shows that it truly embraces its core values. “I think then candidates and our existing team members go, ‘Oh, this isn’t just something that’s on the wall. It’s, like, truly how they live things out.’”•
Check out more of IBJ’s ranking of Indy’s fastest-growing companies.
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