When you start a software company, it’s about building a useful product, figuring out how to sell it, and inspiring your scrappy team.
As you grow towards $10 million ARR, you add systems to everything, improve your products, and stop selling to the wrong customers.
Above $10 million, most software CEOs will tell you, it’s all about your team.
Your team is your leadership team, with a clear culture for them to hire the right people for the right roles.
Josh Turley is the CEO of RTA: The Fleet Success Company, a fleet management software company founded by his grandfather in the 1980s and operated as a small family business for decades.
Then Josh’s father ran the business until 2015, never growing this slow, old-school business past $2 million in revenues.
Josh had worked in the business before, but in 2016, Josh bought the business, took over as CEO and slowly began to make improvements—and mistakes—as they started to grow.
Josh had an ambition to grow the company and learn how to be a real CEO.
They started retooling their code to build modern cloud software, investing heavily for many years.
They narrowed their focus to state and local government fleets to grow faster.
They transformed their leadership, staff, business model, pricing, marketing, tech stack, and culture as they grew faster.
The bootstrapped company grew steadily, with 75 employees and a $15 million annual recurring revenue (ARR) run rate in 2024, supported by some debt.
In 2025, Josh closed a $30 million investment round from Susquehanna Growth Equity, a practical growth equity investor that invests in steady SaaS businesses.
Josh is a long-time member of my Practical Founders CEO Peer Groups. He is an avid learner, attending conferences, reading books, hiring consultants, and continually seeking new knowledge.
Here is his hardest-earned lesson for scaling up past $5 million in revenue:
“Every problem is a leadership problem. The biggest challenge in building a SaaS business is always the people—making sure you get the right people in the right seats.
“We’re at 90 people now, and there’s no way I can manage 90 people myself. As the CEO, it all starts with you, then your leaders.
“Most problems I see are because we got the wrong person in the wrong seat. You can’t outrun that, regardless of how good the product is or how strong your financial model is.
“When you get a leadership team to be 100% aligned with one another, it doesn’t matter what the market’s doing. You just can’t be stopped at that point.”
In this episode, Josh also talks about:
- How difficult it was to transform an old business into a new one
- Why their Purpose, Values, and Mission drive successful hiring
- Why he chose to take on growth equity investors and de-risk with secondary investment
Check out this genuine interview with Josh Turley on the Practical Founders Podcast.
