A reflective story with lessons and ideas that Founders like you, can implement in your own businesses
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The morning I sold my business, I was sat in my home office with a cup of coffee and a document that had taken months to get to.
I remember thinking… I nearly didn’t make it to this moment. Not because the deal nearly fell apart, but because one year earlier, this company almost didn’t survive a global pandemic, and nearly three years before that, it didn’t even exist!
What happened between the accidental beginning and that morning is what this newsletter is about and what it means for you.
For most of my career I’ve been in B2B enterprise sales, Martech, AI, agency. 7-figure deals, complex cycles, the kind of work that looks impressive on paper, but causes your beard to turn grey and your hair to go AWOL.
In 2018, working as employee number 3 at a US startup called cClearly, I discovered a method of lead generation that at the time almost nobody was using. It mean’t we went from $0 to over $2 million in revenue inside two years, signing Farfetch on a contract worth over $1 million in its first year.
I’m setting the scene, because what happened next is the part that truly matters.
My neighbour in WeWork Moorgate, the CRO of Hypergrid, saw the results and asked if I’d take them on as a client, in the evenings, on the side. I said yes, but had no idea what I was starting.
That first client allowed me to start Rich Contacts. The results were significant they signed several very large accounts that landed north of $600k in ARR in short period of time. Word spread across the building, a few more businesses wanted in, and before long I was hiring virtual assistants to help manage the load. One of those VAs was so effective that I hired her full time, paying the agency release fee to free her from her contract (Lisa and I are still close and she’s enjoying life in Australia now.) ❝
Inside 6-months, Rich Contacts went from a freelance side project to something that resembled an actual business.
A year in and I brought in a CTO, who then hired a small tech team to start building proprietary sales technology that supported the clients’ needs. We hired a sales team that eventually took on 70% of the revenue number, and I had Lisa as my Head of Client Success. We evolved the offering to a full service Sales Agency establishing Rich Contacts’ credibility, as a professional outfit, designed to serve sophisticated clients.
Importantly, for the first time I was running a business that was not solely reliant on me to drive every decision and be in every deal.
But more over, we were building defensible IP and the valuation reflected it.
Then March 2020 arrived.
Covid punched the business in the gut. Some of our largest clients paused contracts and pulled budget overnight. I still had staff overheads to cover and, although the foundations were solid, I stood watching the business shake, really not sure what to do and how we would survive.
That period taught me more about what it actually means to run a business than any of the years that came before it.
We survived it though. In fact we more than survived it, we signed our largest client in the company’s history during that lockdown period. It saved the salaries, kept the lights on, and added more to the company’s valuation in a few months than the previous 2-years of steady growth had.
After that, I started thinking seriously about what the business was actually worth. And what I wanted to do with it. I had received a couple of offers to buy the business when, one morning, I opened LinkedIn and found an inbound inquiry from a larger agency looking to acquire and roll up smaller businesses into their group. A phone call later and I knew this was the one to explore.
With NDAs signed, I began to navigate the acquisition process and only brought in accountants and lawyers once we reached contract stage, but the negotiation, the due diligence, the conversations all those conversations, I handled those alone. On reflection, that was a naive move and I would not recommend it to any other founder, but I was in self-sufficient founder mode, I made some errors on reflection, but it all came good.
We agreed on a commercial model and fee that represented strong value for the acquirer and genuinely life-changing money for me. Money that allowed me to invest in different things and, for the first time in years, take a breath.
Shortly after the earn-out period ended, I was hired by another agency founder to help grow and ultimately sell their business. Which we did! But that’s a story for another issue… ❝
Here’s what I want to leave you with from this story.
Rich Contacts was sellable because of decisions I made years before I ever thought about selling it. The proprietary technology was key, but having a team that didn’t need to come to me for every decision, and a sales team carrying 70% of revenue, meant that I was not a bottleneck. The processes ran without me having to be in every room and every deal. The IP gave a buyer something to point to, but me not being required massively increased the valuation.
The interesting thing is that I didn’t build those things because I had an exit strategy. I mean, in reality, I was “building the plane as I was flying it”. I built them because they made the business better. The saleability was a by-product of building something that worked without me at the centre of it. ❝
I’d like to leave you with three questions to ponder.
1.
If you stepped away from your business for 90 days, not a holiday, a full disappearance act, would it grow, hold, or collapse? 2.
If a serious buyer looked at your revenue, how much of it runs through you, and your personal relationships? 3.
When was the last time you looked at your business through the eyes of someone who might want to buy it?
You don’t have to be thinking about selling to find these questions useful. The founders who ask them earliest, long before an exit is on the agenda, are consistently the ones who end up with the most options when the time comes.
Options are what life-changing money is actually made of.
Revenue & Beyond exists because of everything above. I work with B2B founders running businesses of 2 to 50 people, mostly in tech, AI, software and agencies, who are brilliant at what they do but are starting to wonder whether what they’ve built is actually as valuable as it should be.
I’ve been the founder who nearly lost it through Covid, but also the founder who was fortunate enough to pull through and eventually sell it. I’m now the advisor helping others do the same.
If anything in this issue made you pause and reflect, reply and let me know why.
I read every response myself and enjoy the conversations that flow thereafter.
Thanks for reading.
Onward!
Simon
Revenue & Beyond
Revenue & Beyond — Strategic Revenue Partner for Founders
We help founder-led tech and digital businesses build revenue systems that work without the founder in every room. Three exits. Fifteen years. No fractional nonsense.