When a $12M pipeline evaporated and forced a shift to recurring revenue — with Annie Eaton (EP 011) | Growth Under Pressure

Annie Eaton is the CEO of Futurus, an extended reality (XR/VR) company that started from an Atlanta meetup in 2014 and grew into enterprise training work with customers like Delta, Walmart, and Mars. She shares the cash-flow volatility of project-based services (including layoffs and stalled deals) and how she's building a licensing model to create more predictable recurring revenue. — 🌟 Highlights How education-first selling and partner referrals led to enterprise customers like Delta, Walmart, and Mars Why Annie won't celebrate a deal until the contract is signed, especially with long enterprise sales cycles Narrowing the business to hard-skills safety and process training and why manufacturing makes ROI easier to measure A customer reported employees trained in VR operating 18% more efficiently than traditional training after six months The Delta deicing training that scaled proficiency checks from 3 to 150 people per day per site in VR Building recurring revenue with ZR Industrial, a licensable library of OSHA-based safety training simulations Letting go of control earlier, plus how maternity leave became the forcing function to build backups and trust the team — ⏱️ Timestamps / Chapters 00:00 — Landing big customers through referrals and partnerships 00:38 — Annie's background and the meetup that sparked Futurus 01:23 — Early consulting engagements and turning VR interest into a business (2014) 04:00 — The CEO job: constant education and setting expectations on what VR can and can't do 05:55 — Degrees, self-teaching, and hiring for skill over credentials 09:16 — Inbound and partner-led growth, plus a newer outbound motion that stays educational 13:24 — Focusing on manufacturing safety and process training and proving ROI with metrics 16:00 — Delta's deicing proficiency program and scaling training in VR 18:59 — The push for recurring revenue and the launch of ZR Industrial licensing 21:48 — Cash-flow scares, layoffs, and deals getting delayed or canceled 27:58 — Tools, hardware, and where AI fits (and doesn't) in XR production 39:27 — Founder lessons: delegating earlier, offsites, and the weekly metric Annie watches — 🙌 Want more from AdaptCFO? Free CFO consultation → adaptcfo.com Financial fitness scorecard → adaptcfofinancialfitness.scoreapp.com Other episodes → adaptcfo.com/blog AdaptCFO case studies → adaptcfo.com/results