Background checks SaaS · Full GTM and business transformation
“We were close to shutting the company down. Together we went back to first principles. Revenue grew 285% in year one and 245% in year two.”
PesCheck runs background checks. Serhat Elban and his team had real customers and a real product, but the business model was eating them alive. When Serhat and I first sat down, they were close to shutting the company down. That was the starting point. Not a growth problem. A survival problem.
From the inside, PesCheck was a services-heavy company taking on custom work just to stay afloat, stretched across too many customer profiles, selling with messaging that didn’t match what buyers actually wanted. The team was doing their best without the playbooks to back them up.
Everyone was working hard. Nothing was compounding. The runway kept shrinking.
Serhat didn’t need a GTM refresh. He needed the whole foundation rebuilt before there was nothing left to rebuild on.
We went back to first principles together before we touched a single landing page or outbound play. We defined what the company was actually for, refined the mission and vision, and built a five-year plan with OKRs that turned strategy into monthly actions the team could execute against.
Once that foundation was clear, we identified and prioritised the real Ideal Customer Profiles, rebuilt the messaging around them, and gave the team playbooks that made success repeatable.
From there we transformed the business itself. Services shifted to software. A full rebrand. Restructure. Execution coordinated across marketing, sales, onboarding, UX, pricing, and RevOps.
Purpose, mission, and vision written so they actually mean something. A five-year plan with OKRs that broke down into monthly actions, so the whole company knew what moved the needle this month and not just this year.
I identified and prioritised the real customer profiles and cut the ones that were draining the team. I rebuilt the messaging around those profiles and handed the team playbooks so the good work could be repeated by anyone, not just the founder.
The company shifted from services to software, rebranded, and restructured the team around the new motion. Execution got coordinated across marketing, sales, onboarding, UX, pricing, and RevOps so every function pulled in the same direction.
Revenue grew 285% in year one. Another 245% in year two. Win rate climbed to 28 percent. Churn settled under 2 percent. Sales cycles shortened, time to first value improved, and PesCheck started winning upmarket customers they wouldn’t have been ready for a year earlier.
Today they serve 1800+ customers. But the number that matters most isn’t any single metric. It’s that the business itself stands up on its own now.
“The result was not only a go-to-market transformation with measurable outcomes, but a business transformation.”
PesCheck came back from the edge, but the bigger shift is what changed underneath. The product is a real SaaS. The story is sharp. The team has playbooks they actually use. And the commercial motion runs whether Serhat is in the room or not.
The work was never about better marketing. It was about building a business that could grow without breaking.
Real engagements with founder-led B2B SaaS teams. Real results.
“Revenue grew 285% in year one and 245% in year two. Win rate reached 28%. He tightened our ICP, sharpened the story, and the numbers followed.”
“What truly transformed our marketing is that Douwe bases every decision on facts, experience, and proven successes — combined with the latest AI-driven tools.”
