AI helps software businesses be more efficient and ship product faster.
But the power of AI is wasted if you don’t deeply understand your customers, what they want, and how they are changing.
Marc Sanderson is the CEO of INNERGY, but he didn’t start as a software founder.
After earning his MBA and searching for a company to buy, he and his partner, Walter Wilkie, acquired a small architectural woodworking business in Minnesota in 1997.
Running that business revealed a deep operational problem: there was no software built for how custom woodworking shops actually operated.
So Marc and the team there built their own app to run everything in their business, except the accounting.
That internal tool eventually became INNERGY, a vertical SaaS ERP platform for architectural woodworking and high-end residential millwork businesses.
Today, INNERGY handles everything from CRM and estimating to project management, engineering, fabrication, and field installation.
In 2025, the company reached roughly $25M in revenue, is growing more than 50% annually, and expects to approach $40M in 2026.
After bootstrapping growth for years using profits from the original woodworking business, Marc sold 51% of Innergy to growth equity firm MainSail Partners in 2025 for more than $40M, while remaining CEO.
In this episode, he shares practical lessons about vertical SaaS, customer intimacy, onboarding complex ERP systems, finding the right growth equity partner, and why strategy still matters more than AI.
“AI is just a tool. I see organizations creating a chief AI officer. I don’t have a chief Outlook officer. I don’t have a chief Internet officer. I don’t have a chief Web officer. It’s just a tool at the end of the day.
“Just because you can cook rice infinitely at no cost doesn’t make you a Michelin-starred restaurant. It’s all the other aspects of these integrated activities that make you who you are, not the AI tool. And at the end of the day, as long as we create value for our customers, they will continue to write us a check.
“A lot of the AI efforts that are going on across the industry are focused on cost reduction, expense reduction, internal to the software firm. Great. That helps us reach break-even or beyond. It helps with the rule of 40. However, it does not create more intimacy with the customer. “
INNERGY advantage isn’t only software. Customer education and operational thinking drive adoption and retention.
Their education, onboarding, benchmarking, and peer-learning approach helped achieve ~95% retention.
Check out this practical interview with Marc Sanderson on the Practical Founders Podcast.
