John Serrantino

John Serrantino

Janitor, Kesey

I have been working inside CRM since 1997, when I was thirteen years old, doing data entry.

Everything since has been the same problem at a different scale. I have sold it, built it, run it, founded a company on it, and now I operate it for a limited client roster.

Scroll. The page travels with the years.
1997 to 2002
C:\ACCESS> LOGIN JSERRANTINO
AccessCRMAges 13 to 18
Summers through high school and college.
  • Data entry, database management, process structuring.
  • Thirteen years old, and it is where the whole thing starts.
What it taught meDiscipline.
F1 HELPF3 EXITF7 PREVF8 NEXTF10 SAVE
2002 to 2006
York College of PennsylvaniaBA Philosophy
Four years of being made to say exactly what I meant and then defend it.
  • It is closer to this work than it sounds. Most of a broken CRM is people using the same word for four different things.

1The one line out of four years that stuck is at the bottom of this page.

2006 to 2010
#2Fastest growing
Philadelphia
2008
ReminderMediaEmployee 4
First customer service rep, then Customer Service Manager, then Director of Customer Service.
  • Ran a team of 15. Hiring, firing, performance reviews.
  • Built the training and onboarding processes.
  • Helped architect the company's homegrown CRM platform.
  • The company was named 2nd fastest growing privately held business in Philadelphia in 2008, and 7th in 2009, by the Philadelphia Business Journal.
What it taught meThe power of sound process. We were a long way ahead of our time on technology and on what a CRM could be made to do.
2010 to 2012
FrontCenterMediaEmployee 1
A private-equity-backed venture, stood up to compete with ReminderMedia.
  • Every aspect of the business, from employee one.
  • Hired and built the team to 8.
  • Funding was pulled at eighteen months and the venture closed.
What it taught meFailure is how you grow, and this was my first real one. I made eight hires and I was the one who sat down with all eight and told them they no longer had jobs. The fund pulled the money. I had made the promises. Nobody gets good at this without one of these, and it is far better to have it early.
Month 18. Signal ends.
2012 to 2018
PipelineCRMEmployee 5
Account Executive 2012 to 2013, Senior AE 2014 to 2016, Sales Director 2016 to 2018.
  • Ran a team of 8.
  • Created the onboarding services program, then sold it and delivered on it.
  • Closed the largest deal in company history: $1.5M, 750 users. Won it off wireframes I built for their use case, with no deal team behind me.
What it taught meInnovation is listening to the customer, and then bootstrapping the answer.
$1.5M750 users · largest in company history
2018 to 2024
HubSpotHubSpot
Channel Account Manager for three years, then Enterprise Account Executive for three.
  • Carried a quota of roughly $25K MRR per quarter as an AE.
  • President's Club 2019 and 2020, at 125% plus attainment.
What it taught meHow it works at scale. This is the only corporate job I have had, and the only place I have seen what a genuinely finished product looks like and how it actually operates.
Quota attainment
125%↑ President's Club 2019, 2020
0Quota
ChannelEnterpriseAgencies$25K MRR / quarter
Concurrent, 2020 to 2023
EzHire CannabisFounded, exited

Recruitment as a service, built with a business partner and run alongside the HubSpot years. A tech-enabled service rather than an agency. Employed five plus people, did over $300K in revenue in 2020 and again in 2021, and exited in 2023.

2024 to now
KeseyJanitor
A limited client roster, and the person you meet is the person doing the work.
  • Visibility first, always. Build the measurement layer before anything else, so a client can see what is happening across their revenue channels rather than guess at it.
  • Then build, measure and test against what it shows.
  • Working assets in the first phase. Not a specification with the building deferred to a phase after.

Every seat at the table

One problem, six vantage points. This is the part a timeline cannot show, and it is the part you are actually hiring.

The user
1997 · AccessCRM, at thirteen

What it is to be the person who actually has to type it in. Every system I have built since answers to that, and most software is designed by people who have never once been that person.

The builder
2006 · ReminderMedia

Why a thing does what it does. I helped architect a CRM out of nothing, and a field exists because somebody decided it should, usually for a reason nobody wrote down. That is still true of every system I inherit.

The seller
2012 · PipelineCRM

What a buyer will and will not sit through. I closed the largest deal in the company's history, $1.5M and 750 users, on wireframes I drew myself with no deal team, which is what you can do when you know the product well enough to invent the half that is missing.

The vendor
2018 · HubSpot

What finished looks like. Six years inside a product at that scale is the only way I know to calibrate what good actually is, and it is the one thing you cannot get from working on small systems for a long time.

The founder
2020 · EzHire Cannabis

What it costs. Making payroll for five people out of revenue you personally brought in changes how you price, how you scope, and how fast you tell a client something is not worth doing.

The janitor
2024 · Kesey

That most of it is cleaning up. The strategy is rarely the problem. The problem is years of decisions nobody wrote down: pricing nobody can explain, a pipeline that is a guess, follow up that depends on one person remembering, numbers nobody believes, a proposal built from scratch every time. Somebody has to go in and sort that out before anything clever is worth doing. That is the job. It is not a glamorous title and it is the honest one.

What it adds up to

29 years
Inside CRM and revenue systems, without a break, since 1997
$1.5M
Largest deal in PipelineCRM's history, 750 users, won on wireframes I built myself
2x
President's Club at HubSpot, 2019 and 2020, above 125% attainment
$300K+
Annual revenue at a company I co-founded and exited
2nd
Fastest growing private business in Philadelphia, 2008, where I was employee four
15
Largest team run directly, as Director of Customer Service

What I take on, and what I do not

Worth saying plainly rather than finding out on month two.

What I take on

  • Revenue systems end to end: CRM architecture, pipeline discipline, lifecycle, and the measurement layer underneath all of it.
  • A limited client roster. Small on purpose, so whoever scopes the engagement is the person on it.
  • Building. The first phase produces working assets, because a business at this stage is buying something that operates rather than a document about operating.
  • Coaching the person who has to run it after I am gone. Portability is a design constraint, not a promise.

What I do not

  • Paid media at enterprise budget. Direct spend management tops out around $5K a month per client.
  • Deep platform work outside HubSpot. HubSpot is six years of depth; anything else is an honest ramp and I will say which it is.
  • Hands-on development as a trade. I build with AI tooling, to a production standard, and I would rather tell you that than have you discover it.
  • Anything at a scale that needs a team. If it needs an agency, it needs an agency.

vita brevis.

Art is long, life is short.

Hippocrates meant it as a warning rather than a boast. The craft is bigger than the time anyone gets, so you start early, you stay put, and you accept that you will not finish it. Twenty nine years in and I am nowhere near done.

That is the whole story. Tell me yours.

Book a call
John Serrantino · Janitor, KESEY

Somebody made a trailer about the janitor