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Today's blog is brought to you by our sponsors Paddy Pow... Only kidding. No big name sponsor for the FounderON blog yet. But we are going to be talking about making money by betting. To be quite frank, lots of people have an aspiration to sell their business one day. Lots of people get good early traction when they launch. Maybe pinch a client or two from their former employer, and then grow a bit more with a referral. But to build a business that you can sell for big money

There aren't many things that cost me as much money, and made me as much money in my agency as the monthly client report. Confused? Well, if you run a service business then you'll be used to the fact that you need to send your clients regular updates about all the brilliant, super-valuable work that you're doing for them. Usually this happens every month, but on occasions it might be weekly or quarterly. But it's your opportunity as a supplier to big yourself up. To justify

I'll start this blog with a disclaimer. I'm not a sales expert. I have no professional qualifications. The suggestions that you read below are my own opinions and won't be right for everyone. Etc etc. For some reason, of all the posts and blogs that I write, sales/lead gen/new business provokes the most opinions. So, take any of what you're about the read with a pinch of salt. They are purely my observations having spoken to over 200 business founders, built my own 80 person

I'd bet that anyone running a business would enjoy it a bit more if they didn't need to have clients. Yeah sure, the bottom line wouldn't look as healthy, but just think about how much time you'd save in delivering client work, having weekly calls and the dreaded monthly reports. But, until the time that someone invents a business model that brings in money without customers, we're stuck with them. And, no matter how much they disrupt our lives, the last thing on earth that w

As a business owner, I always wanted to try and find a way to do things in-house. Which is weird, considering that I spent my days telling other business owners that they should use my agency instead of doing things in-house. But, at various stages of our business growth, we needed help. Experienced help. And that experienced help wasn't cheap, which made me a bit more open to not doing it in-house! When I look back, there was some external help that we couldn't have lived wi

I ran my agency for 4 years before it was acquired. That's quite a short time frame. But actually, the majority of the growth came within the last 2 years. The first 18-24 months were us finding market fit, checking we knew what we were doing, and happily growing organically. But we knew we had an opportunity to be one of the winners in our niche. But to fully capitalise, we had to get much, much bigger. Quickly. At the time we were doing around £30k per month of revenue. We

As I mentioned in a previous blog ( here ), Linkedin was instrumental to the success of my previous business. I would go so far as to say that it was the single biggest contributor to its success. But back in the old days of 2017 there weren't the masses of personal branding experts and copywriters telling you what strategies, templates and blueprints you must use to generate financial gain from Linkedin. Nor were there the tedious AI driven comments and messages. No, back in

I reckon if you surveyed business owners, at least half of them would be looking to work with bigger clients. When you first start up your new enterprise, the priority is survival. And that means you probably sign some clients that you know will be a nightmare. We've all had them! But as your business starts to grow, and the nightmares build up, you find yourself striving for the golden egg that is the 'big client'. In my own business, I did just that. I kissed a few frogs in

Surely that blog title is going to win me some decent SEO results. But it's not just about the organic traffic potential. That title sums up the last 8 years of my career, starting as an employee in 2017, becoming a freelancer and transitioning to an agency owner. Then, selling my business in 2021 and effectively becoming an employee again within the company that I had run for 4 years. And finally, back to the world of self-employment again with FounderON. I would like to thi

If you follow me on Linkedin (if not, click here ) you'll know that I'm constantly saying that the key to building a successful agency is to sell solutions, not services. People are far more likely to invest money with you if you're solving a problem that they have, or you can talk about the outcome of the investment, not just list the things you'll do. Well, you'll be pleased to know that I practiced what I preach at my own agency. And this blog will list a handful of the pr

During the 4 years that I ran my business, I 'took money' 3 times. None of the times did I need to take the money, but each time I did for a specific reason. Reducing your equity in your own business should never be taken lightly. But often it's possible to make your remaining equity worth significantly more than the full equity you started with. Rather than give my advice on what you should do, I'm going to tell you about each of the 3 times I took the money, and why. I hope

I'd guess that this isn't the first article you've seen giving advice on how to 'do' Linkedin. In fact, I'd bet it's probably not even the first one today. Everyone has an opinion on how it should be done. And what it should be done for. Some say it's all about the hooks, the profile optimisation or the commenting. One thing's for certain. There's no right way to use Linkedin. It all comes down to what you're looking to achieve. The right strategy for generating leads is goin

I'm not sure if I can think of anything that can be more positive or negative to your business than a hire. Get it right and it makes your life as a founder far easier and more fulfilling. Get it wrong, and the impact can set you back weeks, months or even years. Chances are that if you have plans to scale up your business, you won't be able to do it alone. You're going to need to successfully run the hiring gauntlet. I think it's so crucial that it should be added to the sch

At the beginning of 2024 I started offering a free business advice call to any agency owners that had a challenge or opportunity they wanted help with. (Book yours here ). Since then, I've spoken to over 100 agency owners, ranging from 1 person agencies up to 100+ people. Speaking to so many, over a short period of time, you can really get a feel for the type of people that succeed as entrepreneurs. Ambitious, confident, curious and not afraid to ask for help, to get them to

I've made a bold claim with the title of this blog. And it's not just a hook for attention. If you don't believe me then check out all my previous blog titles here and see how bad and un-SEO-friendly they all are. I genuinely believe that if you're running a service based business, there is nothing more important to your growth, profitability and sanity than upselling. If you can get it right, then it means that for every new client you win, you're really winning two. Becaus

Right, we've got a bag full of fresh leads after reading last weeks blog ( here ). And the good news is, the most difficult bit is done. You got their attention. You quickly identified value that you can add. And now you just need to turn it into revenue. In this blog I'll share some learnings from my own agency, of how to increase the all important conversion rate of your pitches. Broadly speaking, there are two types of pitch. The RFP (request for proposal). A speculative p

If you're a business owner that has no need for new business then you can stop reading now. Oh, and also you're a liar. You could argue that you currently have a full stack of happy clients and you don't even have capacity to take on more. That's a fair point. But really that's the most dangerous phase of a business, when things are going well and you take your eye off the ball. Anyway, I'm not going to argue with you. If you want to grow your business you need to do two thin

As a solo-founder I found it incredibly lonely at times running a business. But along my journey I found a handful of mentors that either helped me avoid mistakes, or take opportunities that I'd have never seen. Not only at the start when I was naive and new to entrepreneurship. But also when we were accelerating at our fastest, to make sure we didn't leave anything on the table. At the time it felt a bit like it was a weakness to ask for help. But of course in hindsight, it

Coming in second place, just behind HR (see here ), tech was my weakest area of running an agency. Even now, over two years on from exiting my business, it still feels a bit like the one that got away. We spent huge amounts of money on developing tech. I'd guess around £1m over just four years of running the business before the acquisition. The reason? The holy grail of the tech-enabled-agency increased valuation multiple. The reality? I don't think it even moved the needle.

Bit of a mouthful. This weeks blog is a tribute to one of the things that caused me the most problems and stress while growing my agency. HR stuff. Usually I can accept when something isn't my strength and make peace with the fact that I should leave it to the experts. Basically any form of DIY for example. But for some reason, I felt confident that I could 'have a crack' at HR. The worst thing is, the pitfalls that I'm going to describe to you were self-inflicted, expensive