Joseph Walsh on business growth
From How Joe Walsh is Pivoting a $4B Legacy Business into a SaaS Model · · SaaS That App by Delta Systems
“I took that little company in Long Island, New York called Yellow Book from about $20 million in revenue at the time with 38 sales people, less than 200 employees, to more than $4 billion globally over the next 24 years. In the US we grew it to $2 billion in revenue, more than $600 million of EBITDA. We were about 8,000 employees.”
On , Joseph Walsh, Chairman & Chief Executive Officer at THRYV HOLDINGS INC, spoke about business growth during How Joe Walsh is Pivoting a $4B Legacy Business into a SaaS Model on SaaS That App by Delta Systems.
About Joseph Walsh
Joseph Walsh, Chairman and CEO of Thryv, appeared on the podcast "SaaS That App" in late March 2026 to discuss his experience transforming legacy businesses into SaaS companies. He described growing Yellow Book from about $20 million in revenue to more than $4 billion globally over 24 years. Walsh stated that the company still publishes Yellow Pages directories and that this business produced $3.2 billion in cash over the 11.5 years since he took over. He also said that during that period he would swap out private equity partners every two and a half to three years to keep the process fresh. Walsh discussed his approach to running Thryv, which he said has 2,850 employees, and described the company as "wicked nimble." He recalled advising a board in 2014 that small businesses would follow large ones into cloud computing, predicting that market would be larger than enterprise. Walsh also noted that the yellow pages represented about 4% of regional Bell operating companies' total revenues but roughly 25-26% of their operating profits.