Member News

January 16, 2015

Christopher Burnley, CEO and founder, CoreFact

What it does: A marketing company focusing on agency-based sales organization such as real estate, mortgage and insurance

HQ: Hayward

2013 revenue:$5.1 million

Employees: 38

Founded: 2005

Source of startup capital: Self-funded

Background: Previously a software engineer manager

Age: 41

Residence: Belmont

Web site: corefact.com

How's business: Fantastic. This year we've almost doubled and are projecting $9.4 million in revenue for 2014.

Biggest challenge for your business at the moment: Moving from a small business to a medium-size business. You have to put in different types of people to help the business continue to grow.

What's going to change at your company in the next year: We continue to expand our product base and expand our sales force and marketing team, but what we're trying to do is organize the company for success. Whether it's the way we do product management or how we measure our sales and management, they will allow us to be more agile in terms of how we do our internal processing.

Are you hiring: We're always hiring and currently we're looking for a sales person in the Oregon or Washington area. Customer service reps are open and someone for our marketing team.

Important skill needed to be a successful entrepreneur: Probably building a quality team. At some point, you need to build a team.

Reason for starting business: I've always had a passion for software so, in this case, it was about putting together a technology platform for real estate.

Most difficult part of decision: The challenge with starting a company when you're bootstrapped is that you have to put in a lot of time and effort without pay. It's balancing your dreams with the practicality of trying to live and survive in the Bay Area.

Biggest business strength: Understanding and connecting with our customers. It boils down to not just selling products, but creating solutions that make customers' lives easier. We want to make our clients more successful.

Biggest business weakness: Our size. Most of our true competitors are much larger than us and have 10 times our budget, so we're this small team that has to work really hard for every deal.

Biggest worry: I don't really worry about anything. That's one of the traits of an entrepreneur. They're optimistic. That may be my biggest fault.

What do you wish you had known from Day 1: The biggest challenge we've had was when the real estate market crashed in 2007, so we probably reacted to that too slowly. We nearly killed the business.

Toughest part about being an entrepreneur: Probably time management. It's all about work-life balance, and when you're running a small company, you're needed on a 24/7 basis.

Favorite task: Product strategy. I consider myself a product guy, so I really love to think about how people do things and how we can build tools and solutions that make their lives easier.

Least favorite task: Accounting. Managing cash flow is not as interesting.

Key business goal yet to achieve: We're not able to completely deliver on our software stack yet. We have lots of dreams and ideas of all the things we want to build out, but it takes a lot of time to deliver on those things. We need to slow down and realize it's a process.

Five-year plan: It boils down to completing the software stack and moving from a transactional-based business to more of a subscription-based business. And launching two verticals - we just added mortgage and insurance, so over the next couple of years, we want to add to that.

Favorite book: 1984.

Favorite film:"Groundhog Day."

Favorite restaurant: Bodega Bistro in San Francisco.

Favorite Bay Area destination: Ocean Beach.

Favorite Bay Area business: Apple.

Favorite music: 80s rock 'n' roll.

Car: A C-MAX hybrid plug-in.