Surefire Local

Chris Marientis started Surefire Local with a mission rooted in personal experience. His father was an HVAC contractor, and Chris witnessed firsthand how small business owners were getting ripped off by opaque marketing agencies and forced to cobble together disparate point solutions. Chris had previously worked as a CEO brought in to "supervise" two other companies, which taught him a crucial lesson: never give up control of your destiny. That experience, combined with his skepticism of venture capital's "go fast or fail fast" mentality, made him commit to building a real, bootstrapped business.

Chris started with a managed services approach, implementing a marketing system he had documented. As clients asked for help executing that system, he realized he could systematize and automate the work. Around 2014, APIs had matured enough to build what he called an "Adobe marketing cloud" for SMBs. He invested a couple million dollars with a small team and began testing with his managed services customers (called "coaches" at the time). The early results were promising: gross margins increased as automation replaced manual work, and reporting became simpler. By 2017, the software had matured enough to launch to customers, and "adoption month over month just continue to go up." In 2019, he launched a next-generation platform that was "clearly the best product in the industry."

The first customers came from his existing managed services base, a natural testing ground. However, Chris faced a critical problem: his leadership team—in sales, customer support, and marketing—couldn't make the transition from services to SaaS. The inbound model he adopted (inspired by reading "Predictive Revenue") with SDRs and Facebook Ads wasn't working. CAC was too high even for their relatively high ASP. That changed in 2020 when he brought in Mike Pierce, a leader with four scale opportunities in the SMB space, who shifted the company to outbound-first sales with a transactional model.

The leadership shift was transformational. Chris invested heavily in KPI infrastructure: dials, demo sets, demo-to-close rates, and MRR tracked by team and vertical. This granular visibility created predictability. Outbound now drives 70% of revenue, with inbound at 30%.

He also learned that culture couldn't be whiteboarded; it had to reflect what employees already valued. Through surveys, the team identified five pillars: driven by purpose, keeping it real (radical transparency), connected delivery, empathy, and never settle. Pairing this with a strong head of people operations (a role Chris now calls "probably the most underrated part of our organization") transformed employee engagement: Inc. Best Workplaces award, Glassdoor 4.4, and employee NPS of +74.

On the capital front, Chris made strategic bets. He raised $1M in venture debt in 2016 just as he launched the SaaS platform, then $4.5M in 2019 with the second platform launch to fund new leadership and aggressive growth. Today he carries $11.5M in debt but owns most of the company. By 5x-ing the company's valuation in three years, the 16-17% all-in cost of venture debt proved "super efficient."

Surefire Local is now a "big data company." They've built a sophisticated infrastructure stack: a service desk managing all customer cases (escalated between Manila and US teams), omnichannel communication (voice, chat, text, email, bot), and integrations with involve.ai (for predictive churn modeling) and Churn Zero (for customer success workflows). This data sophistication enabled them to improve retention dramatically. New customer cohorts acquired from 2020 onward show 2.5% gross churn and are on pace for 1% net churn by Q1 next year—remarkable for SMB SaaS.

Chris projects the company will end the year at approximately $30M ARR. He's positioned for a private equity or strategic exit in the $125-150M range while retaining majority ownership—a very different outcome from the venture-backed CEOs he observed early in his career. His playbook: commit to a process with real investment, build a strong culture and leadership, and raise debt capital at the right time—"when you feel comfortable that you could add water and it'll grow."