How to Sell a Bootstrapped SaaS for 8-Figures – with James Ashford [461]

Omer Khan [00:00:00]:
All right, James, welcome to the show.

James Ashford [00:00:01]:
Hey, Omer, thanks for having me.

Omer Khan [00:00:03]:
My pleasure. Do you have a favorite quote, something that inspires or motivates you that you can share with us?

James Ashford [00:00:09]:
Yeah. So I love the Jim Rohn quote, which is, don't wish it were easier. Wish you were better. I just love the responsibility that puts on you. Whatever the situation you're in, you want it to be as hard as it is. You've just got to be better to get through it.

Omer Khan [00:00:23]:
Love it. So tell us about Go Proposal. What does the product do? Who's it for, and what's the main problem that it's trying to solve?

James Ashford [00:00:33]:
Yeah, sure. So Go Proposal was pricing and proposal software for the accounting industry. And if you imagine the way that most accountancy firms work is the equivalent of going into a restaurant and saying to the waiter or waitress, have you got a menu? And they say, no, like, what did you have in the last restaurant you had? And then you kind of tell them what you want, and then they go and pester the busiest person in the restaurant, who's the head chef, and they kind of guess a price to give you. That's how accountancy firms operate. Right. So what we effectively did was have a digital menu of services and that enable any member of staff to be able to price and sell to that to their clients and to be able to close the deal during the meeting. So if I'm a client and I've given you an hour of my time now, like, there's no point in you sending the proposal to me once I've left the meeting. Like, the amount, how busy I am getting kids to after school clubs.

James Ashford [00:01:28]:
Like, I've got after this, after this webinar, I'm taking my son to football. I've got a dinner to cook for my daughter. Like, if you think you're going to follow up with me and get the proposal closed, it's just not happening. So I wanted to close in the meeting. And one of the. One of the key things that I learned, Omer, is that where the most value is brought is not in identifying the problem, and it's not in identifying the solution. It's identifying the characteristics of the solution. Okay, so one of the characteristics of the solution was that the most junior member of the team should be able to price and sell to the most complicated client, and they should be able to close the deal within 15 minutes.

James Ashford [00:02:11]:
Like they were the characteristics of the solution, which, although we had competitors in the space, no one had spotted those characteristics. And that's what set us Apart, just.

Omer Khan [00:02:19]:
Talk a little bit more about that. Like, that's very specific. How, how did you figure out that that was so important?

James Ashford [00:02:29]:
It's a few things really. So I guess I'm the most impatient person in the world. So if I want, if I'm going to buy something or I want, I want it now. And if we're all honest, we're all that impatient. Like, like there was once upon a time we'd go to Blockbusters and get a video and it wouldn't be available or whatever. Now we sat on Netflix and if the film isn't on net and I've got a log out and go on to Amazon prime and take 30 seconds to do it, I'm absolutely fuming. Like, we're just all the most impatient people ever, right? And so I actually went, I went to the accountancy firm. And it didn't start with an accountancy firm.

James Ashford [00:03:05]:
This concept had actually meandered through several businesses and several industries with me as a business consultant. And every time I encountered these businesses, I kind of said, right, look, let's just start with your sales process. Because if a business can just sell faster, convert a higher rate, charge more, sell more services, and you can empower everyone in the business to do it, so not just have a sales team, but create a sales culture so everybody can now do this, then you can actually solve most of the other problems downstream of that in a business. Right? That's one of the key sticking points. And so I was solving this for various businesses. So by the time I met the accounting industry, I knew what the challenges were. And when I turned up as a client going through that process myself, I remember saying to Paul, just who was the accountancy firm where I first kind of developed this, I said, your process is terrible. And he said, we're better than all the other accountants out there.

James Ashford [00:04:04]:
I said, I appreciate that, but I'm not comparing you to them. I'm comparing you to the Uber that I booked to get to your office. I'm comparing to Amazon. Where? Cause I ordered the book that I saw in your reception and I had it the next day and I was reading it and I still not receive your proposal. So you don't get to tell me who I compare you to. I'll compare to whoever I want. And so it's really just looking at a business and realizing that a business should operate on systems, not on people. By with people, it's then the people that run the systems.

James Ashford [00:04:37]:
And like I say, if you can just free up that, that part of the business, remove the friction and enable anyone in that business to sell to any customer that walks through the door. You solve mostly the problems.

Omer Khan [00:04:49]:
Now, you founded the business in 2016. Five years later, you sold it. You had a very successful exit. You sold it to Sage for eight figures. And what I love about your story is that, number one, you don't come from a traditional tech background, Silicon Valley or anything. You sold this business to or you sold this product to accounting firms, and you don't have an accounting background. You bootstrapped this business and didn't raise any external funding. And I don't even know if you're technical.

Omer Khan [00:05:33]:
That wasn't something we even sort of. Well, maybe now you are, after you've gone through this process.

James Ashford [00:05:38]:
I know. I know enough about it to be dangerous. That's. That's my view. So I don't. I don't understand. I couldn't. I couldn't build something.

James Ashford [00:05:45]:
I wouldn't be able to. I couldn't code. But my developers could come to me with a problem that they couldn't solve. And I know enough about it to be able to challenge them and say, yeah, but couldn't we do. What about if that. And I could get them to think through problems and to solve it. And sometimes having that naivety and not knowing can be really helpful because I'm just focused on the outcome. Like, I don't care how we get there.

James Ashford [00:06:10]:
I'm just trying to get us to this point. So I don't actually have any technical skills.

Omer Khan [00:06:14]:
Yeah. And within five years, you. You sold the business for eight figures at a crazy multiple. I know you don't talk about specifically how much you sold it for, but you did tell me how much. And so I know it's a crazy, crazy multiple that you sold that business for. And it's like there's just so much there that doesn't make sense in what you did. And so I just want to unpack that. I want to just figure this out, like, how you did this.

Omer Khan [00:06:51]:
And so let's start by where did the idea come from?

James Ashford [00:06:57]:
Yeah, so I had a marketing agency many years before and just had, you know, just hated that process of sitting with a client and not being able to kind of agree the fees, because we're all afraid of selling. At the end of the day, we're afraid of selling because we're afraid of rejection. And we've all experienced bad salespeople. So we don't want to be. I'm not trying to sell to you. Like, we don't want to be associated with selling. Right? But no value can be exchanged if you can't sell. And so I hit upon this idea of consultative selling, that it's actually your ethical obligation to sell it.

James Ashford [00:07:32]:
I'm not being fair to you if I know I can help you. I'm not being fair to you if I don't sell the thing to you. If it can genuinely help you. If it can't help you, then I wouldn't sell it to you in the first place. And so I just hated this interaction around selling and just developed this menu of services that was just logical. So I could say at the end of the meeting, oh, my. Right, okay, well, based on what you've told me that you want, if I was you in your position, this is everything that I would want. And I don't believe in offering people gold, silver, bronze.

James Ashford [00:08:02]:
Right? I think that abdicates responsibility. Like, if I'm being fair to you, I should offer you the very best thing that I can do for you that genuinely I would want if I was in your situation. Okay? So I present that, and then if you say to me, well, that's too much. Cool. What do you want to take out? Like, going back to the restaurant analogy, like, no one's falling out with a waiter or waitress because the bill's too high. It's like, well, if you don't want to spend that much on a bottle of champagne, have a bottle of Prosecco. Like, I don't care what you have. Like, but it's really clear.

James Ashford [00:08:31]:
So I solved this problem and kept moving into different industries like I said to do it. And what I found was that, like, I remember working a big company that was like, doing maybe 15 million in revenue. It was a waste management business. So very different to what I ended up setting up. And they were signing up 10, opening 10 new accounts a month. And I just implemented this system, and they're opening 60 and 70 new accounts a month based on what I implemented within 30 days of implementation. And it was a bit of technology and a bit of mindset shifting and a bit of a cultural shift as well, and a bit of systemization. So it wasn't just one thing, but a bit of change management as well.

James Ashford [00:09:10]:
One of the things that people do, Omer, is they always think, yeah, but that I couldn't do that because my service is bespoke. Right? And it's bullshit. It shouldn't be bespoke. There's always a way to productize a service. If you've got a service, how do you productize it? Like there's always. And the moment you productize your offering, you go from thinking about what you do to thinking about the result that I can give to my client. So that was what I was helping businesses to do effectively.

Omer Khan [00:09:37]:
I love that. So it sounds like before you started building the software, you were already sort of selling the solution where you sort of describe with a bit of technology, bit of change management and so on. And so was that kind of like your mvp?

James Ashford [00:09:54]:
It was, but I didn't know it was because I was just like happy to pay the bills at the end of the month. I'd always had this idea that I wanted to build a business that run without me. I wanted something that made me more money while I was asleep than when I was awake. Like, I wanted to build a business I could sell. I wanted to create an asset. Like, I had all these ideas in my mind but didn't realize I was actually sat on the thing already. Then I met this accountancy firm, went in there, solved the problem for them. But again, I only just solved it for one business, a standalone business.

James Ashford [00:10:23]:
And it was only when another accountancy firm heard about it and said, how do we get what they've got? And that was the first time that I'd been taking. Taken this idea and it was the first time within the same industry that someone has said, I want it too. And I'm like, right. And the beauty of the accounting space, the beauty of accounting services, if you go to a web designer, they all offer different services, right? And they call it different things. The beauty of an accountant. They all offer the same services and they're all called the same thing, right? So it was a simple business to pick up and drop and have somebody up and running with it in a very short space of time.

Omer Khan [00:11:02]:
So tell me about the technology piece at the time before you started building the software. What, what actually was the solution you were giving them.

James Ashford [00:11:09]:
This is going to blow your mind. Okay, so my developer was a WordPress developer and the initial bits of software was just a WordPress plugin that we're adding on that could put the menu on their website. And then we had like a. Only their staff could access it. And it did what we needed to do, right? So when I hit on the idea to build the product, I just remember looking at. There was WordPress websites and then WordPress multi sites. And I remember looking, and this is what I mean, where naivety can really benefit you, right? I remember looking at a WordPress multisite and thinking, I think that's got the same DNA as a SaaS product. Like, it runs off a central database, it has separate secure installs, it has the concept of, you know, users of passwords, of, like, the basics are there.

James Ashford [00:11:58]:
Could we build something on top of that? So my analogy is, rather than build the engine, I've gone to Rolls Royce and said, look, can I just have your engine and will you maintain it for me as well, and then we'll build our product on top of it. So we built, I think it was PHP or maybe some other things as well, like built the chassis on top of the engine effectively so no one ever KNEW it was WordPress. And then the more I got into it, the more I realized that we thought it had creak at like 100 customers. When we got to 100, got to 500, got to a thousand, never creaked. And then I found that actually there were people with SaaS products built with this, with 10,000 users on, and it was a legitimate strategy. And I was always nervous when we came to sell the business that they'd go, hang on a minute, it's just a word, right? We're not buying this. It was never an issue, it was never a problem. So it meant that I could get the MVP out the door for £4,000.

James Ashford [00:12:56]:
Wow.

Omer Khan [00:12:58]:
Wow. Okay, let's talk about the shift to accounting firms. So you talked about you did it. You kind of implemented the solution for one accounting firm, then the second one heard about it. I think you mentioned briefly, Paul Barnes earlier, that that was an accounting firm that you started to work with. Um, and then you kind of did a. An interesting exchange there, which bought you sort of instant credibility in the accounting space. Just tell us a little bit about that.

James Ashford [00:13:28]:
Yes, I was warned when I went into the accounting space. One rang me, who'd kind of attempted to crack it and been in it for a long time. He said, I think you're making a big mistake. Like, they're out. They do not welcome outsiders. You're not an accountant. They don't like selling, they don't want to spend money. And I thought, yeah, I'll figure this out.

James Ashford [00:13:44]:
It's okay. And so I gave Paul 10% of the software business because it was inspired by his firm in the first place. And he'd contributed some concepts to some pricing models and various things in exchange for 10% of his accountancy firm. So immediately, although I wasn't an accountant, I now had 10% of an accountancy firm that was very profitable, that commanded very high fees, that was very well respected in the industry, in the space, basically was based in Manchester. And so now I could stand on stage on social media and I could wear multiple hats. I could wear the vendor hat, I could wear the client of an accountancy firm hat as a business owner and I could wear the director of an accountancy firm hat. So I could speak into any part of the process I wanted to. So I got instant credibility.

James Ashford [00:14:34]:
But where I gained immediate credibility or more widespread credibility was so we kicked the product off the build of it and it took like three months to build. While that was kicking off, I wrote the book called Selling to Serve. And what Selling to Serve was was effectively right. If you want to price and sell your services more effectively in an accountancy firm, this is how you do it. So it's effectively the recipe book that I wrote for how to do what our software was enabling people to do. I knew how to, I knew how to. I wrote it in two weeks, the book, I knew how to publish it and myself and turn it into a best selling book. So while the app was being built, all I was doing on social media was pushing the book and driving people from that back to a wait list.

James Ashford [00:15:20]:
So by the time we launched, I had a few hundred people on the waiting list, had the number top best selling book in the accountancy space. So I was ready to hit the ground running.

Omer Khan [00:15:30]:
Awesome. So what did you do? Did you self publish on Kindle?

James Ashford [00:15:33]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Omer Khan [00:15:35]:
That's smart. So, okay, great. So you're getting a lot of credibility very quickly. You're an owner in an accounting firm. You are writing about this methodology and this solution to help them solve this problem that they know that they all have. And it's an effective Legion tool as well. Tell me about how easy or hard it was to get those first 10 accounting firms. Once you had the first one or two, were you off to the races or was it still a struggle to get each sale?

James Ashford [00:16:14]:
Yeah, I think we got the first hundred fairly quickly. Within the first month or two, we were up to 100 customers because of the wait list. So we'd been building the wait list. We got the book out there. The firm that it was in was strong. And what I find is that, you know, if what you're bringing to the party is genuinely innovative, there will be people in that space that are hungry, that are looking for the next thing that they want that. And it's like, just show me what it is. Like they're already looking for the solution.

James Ashford [00:16:45]:
And so I always kind of picture this Pyramid, where you've got 3% of the market that are actively looking for the solution. So I was able to kind of pick those off there very quickly. But then what I was able to do is to move down into the 30% which is people that they need your solution, they just don't know they need your solution. So they're not product aware that they're problem aware. Okay. And so all of my content was educational content then. So I was posting videos every single day on social media. And what I concluded is that no one can move as fast as me because the big software companies, like, you know, you've worked for big companies.

James Ashford [00:17:24]:
How long does it take to produce a social media video, to have it approved, to post it? Like you're talking weeks and weeks. I could literally be on a phone call with a customer and so, and they're like, oh, this really helps to solve this problem. Or they're asking me a question and I'm solving it and then I'm coming off the call, I'm saying, right, hey guys, I've just been asked this question about da da da da. And then literally within 5 minutes I posted the video. And one of the things that people don't talk about in marketing is speed and relevance and relevancy of the content. I just knew I could outpace everybody. So I'll give an example. We used to attend events like 0con or Intuit's big event or you know, accounting web event or whatever.

James Ashford [00:18:08]:
So there's little old us there, tiny bootstrapped, but I've got a little camera and I'd go around and film parts of the event. I'd film a bit of the keynotes, talk on stage, I'd go and grab interviews with vendors. And then at the end of the webinar, at the end of the the event. So let's say the event finished at 5pm on Friday. At 4pm I'd do my wrap up video about what an amazing event it was, thanking the organizers, what I've learned from it, amazing people I've met, etc. And the event organizers would post their amazingly well filmed broadcast quality video two weeks after the event.

Omer Khan [00:18:44]:
Right.

James Ashford [00:18:45]:
My view was if the event finishes at 5pm, everyone's on the train going home at 6pm I need the video posted at half past six so I just could move. I would just move quicker than anyone else. So our videos used to get the highest views even though they were the cheapest thing. Love that.

Omer Khan [00:19:04]:
So we talked about buying the credibility through the stake in the business and the book. But when you're starting to create, a lot of founders want to start creating content that talks to their target audience, but they're not an expert in that space. And they always feel like I don't have anything useful or valuable to say or tell these people. So you have, you have the credibility on paper, but when it comes to creating content, how did you walk that line between creating content that spoke to these people that was valuable and you could still come across as an insider without having that deep experience?

James Ashford [00:19:46]:
Yeah, sure. So my challenge back to people that think that is that you do have incredible knowledge. You've got incredible insights that you don't even think is interesting to people. Right. I've got a friend, he's a butcher in near where I live and he's got a great tick tock channel and he posts about, you know, the meat that he produces, etc. And then I went to him once, I said, have you ever done a film about your mints mincing machine that minces the meat? And he's like, who cares about that? I said, evidently my wife, because she showed me a mincing video last night, right? And it's like, but that's just what we do every day. And it's like, I know it's what you do every day, but it's not what everyone does. So there's so many, there's so many things that have insights that you have that your customers are so interested in even to contribute to the app development.

James Ashford [00:20:36]:
Like nothing gets more engagement I found than saying, hey guys, just where does the button look best? On the right or the left? Does it look better with rounded corners or squared corners? Do want you. Does this wording make sense or this like people love that shit. They love to feel like they're contributing stuff. So I. So what people do is they build something behind the scenes and then kind of go, ta da. It's here, right where they could have been building the drumbeat for that thing all the way while it's been building even the problems. Hey guys, we've been doing this today, it's just gone wrong. Like we hit this snag here, but this is how we've resolved it now and we think it's stronger because of it.

James Ashford [00:21:17]:
People love being brought on the journey, right? So there's so much. But in answer to your actual question, where you can bring the most insights, where I think my genuine superpower was in this space Omer was my proximity to the market, okay? So I made it a point for those Five years that I would speak to an accountant every single day for no reason. Not to sell them anything, but because they'd commented on a post that I'd done. Because the community that we had, the Facebook community, someone shared something about a challenge they've got or something a member of staff has said or whatever it meant. We just lost a client, right? We just lost a client. Don't know what to do. I just say, I'd message Jack, my head of support, and say, jack, get me that guy's number. I'm gonna ring him.

James Ashford [00:22:03]:
I say, hey, hey, what's happening? Like, what's going on? Like, are you feeling okay? And I just learn for no reason. I've got friends today from. From the accounting space. I was on the phone to one of them early today that, like, I knew from years ago through. Through this, I've been for drinks with them. I've been to their homes. Like, and what I realized was the closer you can be to your customers, like, the more you really understand what they're going on, you will develop features and content that no one else will understand that because they don't know where it's come from. They don't have your depth of connection and knowledge.

James Ashford [00:22:40]:
And it set me apart from everyone else.

Omer Khan [00:22:42]:
I love that. Love that. So it's like, I think the distinction I heard is don't. Don't try to go out there and pretend to be an expert on something that you're not. Go and share what you're doing every day, whether it's something you learn, a problem that you're dealing with, something interesting or, you know, exciting that happened, or. Or just the sausage making, right? Or the mince machine. It's like, who knows? I often wonder about that. Somebody said something similar to me about the podcasting, and I can't remember what it was about.

Omer Khan [00:23:20]:
Some headphones, using headphones. And I was like, who cares about that stuff, right? But it's like, apparently people do.

James Ashford [00:23:28]:
Absolutely. So it's this idea. There's two things, I think Omer. One is switching the idea from producing content to documenting. You're just documenting what's happening. And when you're speaking, like, when you're doing a video, like, you're just doing it. Like, you'd FaceTime someone. Like, you don't overthink it.

James Ashford [00:23:45]:
Like, if I was FaceTiming someone, I wouldn't prepare it. I wouldn't do my hair. I just FaceTime. And it's the equivalent of that. And. And then the other thing is, is we made Marketing, the core of the business, and one of my favorite concepts is to. To market like a celebrity chef, right? So you look at someone like Gordon Ramsay, he shows you how to cook his food, he produces recipe books, he produces videos on how to do it. He gives it all away, yet you still want to go to his restaurant, Right? So you might watch the video, you might even buy the recipe book, you might even cook a meal out of it once, but you still go to his restaurant.

James Ashford [00:24:23]:
So one of the philosophies that we had with marketing, whether it was producing a video, doing a webinar, giving a talk on stage, it would genuinely be in the service of anyone that was listening to that, like, 100%. Like, what most people do is they'll produce, they'll give a talk, or they'll share a video, whatever. And it's not really educational content. It's kind of a bullshit sales pitch in disguise. But if you want the rest of it, if you don't know how to really. If you don't know how to make the secret sauce, buy my product. Okay? My view is, I'm going to tell you how to do it without my software. Like, you don't need it.

James Ashford [00:24:59]:
This is what you'd have to do. If you want to do it quicker, slicker, faster, with less effort, you know, then buy our software. Right. But I'm going to help you anyway. And my best confirmation of this was when we sold the business and I announced to the world that I was leaving the accounting space. There was this one guy who'd been following me for years, commenting on everything he said. James, I just want to thank you for the impact you've had on my life, the impact you've had on my business, the impact you've had on my family. We've made significantly more, you know, increased revenue because of everything you've taught me.

James Ashford [00:25:34]:
And I never even bought your product. Wow. And I thought. Didn't. Yeah, I thought you did. Right. And I remember reading that and thinking, that is confirmation that everything I've done is right.

Omer Khan [00:25:46]:
I love that. That is awesome. Let's go back to the. So the first hundred or so customers you said came pretty quickly because of the wait list, the book, and everything that you had been doing there. What happened next? Because now you said you're going beyond that 3% to people who are not product aware what was going on with them. Were they. Were they largely people who were using kind of more generic solutions like Pandadoc or these kinds of things which generate proposals, but they're not designed for accounting firms in any way or were they like nothing? And at best, maybe there's an Excel spreadsheet somewhere with some numbers there. So where were they? Because both are hard to sell to, but for different reasons for sure.

James Ashford [00:26:47]:
And there was one other player in the mix there as well, Omer, which was, there were two other software companies that were specifically for accountants and one of them a major competitor that had, well, at the time when we launched $25 million of investment and a seven year head start on us and they kind of had the bulk of the market and then over the time they raised another $50 million investment. And I just picked off their top customers in the UK like before they knew what was happening. I remember speaking to them afterwards and they were like, we'd no idea what was going on. We just were customers were just like, our top customers were just leaving and we didn't know why. And that's, I think because we had a more compelling product. But one of the things I came up with, I got it from a friend of mine called Daniel Priestley, was the way that I structured all of my content, all of my videos, emails, webinars and events and everything that I was doing leveraged the next thing, by the way. So I wrote the book, the book helped me to then generate the content regularly on socials, the social content got me speaking gigs and so everything kind of leveraged the next thing. Right.

James Ashford [00:27:57]:
But the structure that I would use is, I've called it the path method. So it's pain, aspirations, traps, and then how to do it. Okay, so what the pain is, is so whenever I give a talk, whether it's a, let's say, a webinar, all I would talk in to start with is what is the pain that you're facing? What is the challenge that you're facing right now? And not the surface pain, but the core pain, the real issue that you're actually facing for accountants, which is, look, I know exactly what's going on, you know, and I would speak into it in such depth, I would describe, I'd be able to describe a day in their life to them. And it was like, and here's the thing with this, you've got to be able to explain their problem to them better than they understand it themselves. And the moment you do that, it's deal done. The deal is done at that point. Because what they conclude is if you can explain my problem better than me that I'm facing, you must have a better solution than me. Right? So, so we got.

James Ashford [00:29:01]:
We became masters at speaking into that. And people used to comment on the webinar, like, it's like you've had a video in my office. It's like you've been watching me, like, you know exactly what's going on. Then we'd explain what their goal is, where they're really trying to get to. But then here's the next bit, which is the traps they've fallen into in the past in trying to solve that problem. Okay? So you effectively, you're undermining all of the other solutions, which may be a generic document, it may be a spreadsheet. And in that, you don't call it mistakes, because if you call it, no one wants to think they've made a mistake. Because then I'm blaming you, right? But if you call it a trap, it's like, well, someone else set the trap.

James Ashford [00:29:41]:
So it's like you can. It's not your fault. You don't want to blame them. And one of the things. So let's say for our main competitor, their main marketing message was with our proposal software, you can produce a proposal within 24 hours, right? So one of our traps that we used to say was. So we never used to mention them by name, but we'd say, if it takes you 24 hours to produce a proposal, you're exactly a day too late. And we'd explain why. And I wasn't just having a go at them because I wanted to kind of beat them.

James Ashford [00:30:12]:
I was having a go because that is wrong. Like, you shouldn't take a day to produce a proposal, right? So we cleverly undermined all of the other solutions that they were doing. And then the H is the how. So this is how you solve it. Number one, you need a consistent pricing methodology. Number two, it's got to have a clear menu of services. Number three, every member of your team has got to be trained at number four, you'll be able to do it within 15 minutes. And by the time you've explained all of those things, the only conclusion they can arrive at is that our software is the only thing that solves the problem.

James Ashford [00:30:47]:
So once you've explained, I knew that if they agreed with the how method of how to get there, we were the only thing that could actually do that. And so that was my. And I learned that parts of that from Tony Robbins as well. But that is the structure that would present. And that got people over the line really.

Omer Khan [00:31:04]:
Well, I want to understand, like, like before we sort of talk more about acquisition or whatever, where where does your energy come from to be able to do this stuff and go so fast? And you know, I mean both, you know, you and me, we're not, you know, spring chickens, you know, and you're, you're a dad, we've got kids. It's not like you're a, you're a 20 year old who can work, you know, 100 hours a week or something. Maybe you still do, I don't know. But you've got lots of other things going on in your life. And so where does this energy and drive come from? And how do you balance that with everything else that's going on in life?

James Ashford [00:31:45]:
I think it came from constant paranoia and fear that it was all going to go horribly wrong at some point. I think that was like a major driving force, right. And I've got to get there, I've got to do. I really felt that this was it. You know, there's a great book by John Warrilow called Built to Sell. And this product, my product was built to sell from day one, you know, before we'd even got our first customer. While the product was being built, I figured out who could be potential acquirers for the business. And so it could be Intuit, it could be Receipt bank, it could have been Xero Sage.

James Ashford [00:32:29]:
And so I got my logo and I wrote underneath the logo and changed the color of the logo for each of those potential acquirers and I printed out on the wall and I'm like, it's going to be one of them. This is it, we're going for it. I did a financial planning exercise with my wife with a great financial planner where we figured out how much money would we need to live the rest of our lives. And it was £5 million. If we could get 5 million, we could live comfortably for the rest of our lives without ever having to earn again. So all of a sudden, now at a very compelling goal that I was aiming towards, I believe that this was the vehicle to get me there. I kind of knew who the acquirers would be. I knew the levers I'd have to pull to be able to move the multiple of the business up.

James Ashford [00:33:12]:
I kind of knew I'd have to get to a million pound in revenue. So now it was. I remember someone saying to me, you know, we talk about like building a defensible moat around your business and, and people used to say this phrase, yeah, but the big companies, they're just going to eat your breakfast. Like these are just like phrases that people kind of banter about. I'm like, no one's eating my breakfast. Like, I'm just going to go super, super fast. And also, not only that, Omer, but have the greatest impact I can and have a team that's going to drive this business forward and provide the very best levels of customer service that no one else has experienced before. Like, if you signed up for our app, so let's say you signed up for it before you put your car details in.

James Ashford [00:33:58]:
So you started your free trial before you put your car details in, a member of my team, within a few hours would have logged into your app, gone and got your logo off your website, got your brand colors, put them into the app and sent you a proposal for you. Called you and said, hey, Omer, I've seen that you've signed up for an app. I've gone and set up as much as I can for you. I'm just welcoming you to the Go proposal tribe. Is there anything else we can do for you? Right. Within three days of that, we would have got your address off your website. You would then receive a physical gift in the post a box. We call it our shock and Awe pack.

James Ashford [00:34:32]:
And inside that would be a signed copy of my book. It would be a golden ticket to our Facebook community, like a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory style golden ticket. And an onboarding brochure guiding you through what the next 30 days was gonna be like. Right. And because our cost of acquisition was so low, we saw this as part of our continued cost of acquisition. So it just wowed people. Like no one was experiencing this level of service. And like our NPS score was like 78 or something like that, like, which is just considered to be world class.

James Ashford [00:35:06]:
And we were a small team. We were 12 people at the time of selling and we just operated at a very high level.

Omer Khan [00:35:12]:
So the first hundred customers, were you charging $75 or 75 pounds out of.

James Ashford [00:35:18]:
The gate, 100 pounds a month for how many users that was for? And then you added, the more users you add, you added more on. So like maybe a top paying client was paying like a thousand pound a month or something like that, but typically maybe around the 2,300 pound a month mark where they were paying.

Omer Khan [00:35:37]:
Got it. Okay, so that gets you to 10, 20,000amonth or something like that. But when you eventually sold the business, you were doing about one and a half million pounds. That's like well over two million dollars in revenue, right?

James Ashford [00:35:53]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Omer Khan [00:35:54]:
So tell me about the next stage of growth and acquisition. How did you find people? Were you still relying on the book and just generating leads through there or what else did you start doing?

James Ashford [00:36:07]:
Yeah, so our cost of acquisition was low. We were the most prolific people, we were the most prolific company on social media. I became the number one influencer in the accounting space on LinkedIn. We had the most video views across all vendors. Top rated book. Still the top rated book on Amazon now for like how to run your accountancy practice. But there were still sticking points on the way, right? So I always remember like 18,000 pound a month was a sticking point. Just couldn't get past it.

James Ashford [00:36:35]:
Like, so you like you'd hit and then you drop, hit and drop. Like, what is going on? What I came to learn, Omer, through this process was that so we want to have something. So I want to have, let's say it's 25k a month, right? So the thing that informs what you have is what you're doing. Okay. So we have to change what we, what you're doing in order to get something different. If you keep doing what you do and you're going to keep getting what you're getting. Right. But then here's the next bit that I came to learn which is what sits below what you're doing is who you are.

James Ashford [00:37:06]:
And so the question I came to ask myself is, right, okay, we're stuck at this point. Who do I now need to be? Who do I now need to be at this point to move on? Okay, is it someone that lets go of this task? Is it someone that trusts these people to do this? Is it expanding my marketing team? Who do I now need to be? And very often in our businesses there's a great book called multipliers and you become an accidental diminisher of your team. And I remember doing this assessment against these like six metrics about where, which you scored highly in. I bossed all of them like I was an accidental diminisher. Like one of the questions is, if you get cc'd in an email with your team member, are you the first to reply? Yeah, I'm the first to reply. So it's how do you get out the way and how do you start elevating your team and become a mentor to your team and to push them forward and elevate, elevate them. So we have these sticking points. But one thing I came to, I've came to learn afterwards was especially because a B2B business, if you imagine the first hundred customers just need to hear that you're here, like, we've got a better software proposal, software.

James Ashford [00:38:14]:
This is what it does. They're in, right? The next hundred customers need to watch a three minute video and then they're in. Okay. The next ones need to watch a three minute video, opt in for your lead magnet and receive two emails.

Omer Khan [00:38:27]:
Okay.

James Ashford [00:38:28]:
And so the deeper you get into that market, the more touch points, the longer you have to have been with them. And I can't remember what the number is, but it's like, it's getting close to like 10 to 15 hours of content. And to be able to have that amount of content available for people to go and watch webinars on demand, to be able to go and watch your keynote talks on your subject, to be able to consume emails. Our email nurturing campaigns by the. So we'd send an email out every week and people used to thank us for our emails. So our emails weren't selling the software, they were educating people on how to command higher fees, how to never give a discount, how to get a junior member of staff, you know, delivering a sales meeting, whatever it may be. Right. So at the time when we came to sell, we had three years of nurturing emails.

James Ashford [00:39:20]:
So if you opted in for a lead magnet, you would get an email every week for three years. Okay. And you'd be grateful for them. This was solid content. Right? So, and now with like doing podcast, podcasting is so valuable because I think with short form content, especially with AI, there's more content getting produced because I can just go on to chatgpt, get it to give me a script, and anyone can hold their own for like 60 seconds. What we're doing here is hard to hold your own, right? You would, you'd be able to call me out quickly if I was full of so long form content. Podcasting, hour long episodes, two hour long episodes is such a valuable thing that you can do to serve your industry. So you've got to get to several hours of content.

James Ashford [00:40:10]:
Is it possible that someone coming to you could consume 10 hours of content? You know, my book was five hours of audio. If they bought the audiobooks, I've got five hours bank there. Right? And what this does, Omer, is people talk about business development as a sale, as a. So we think about a salesperson is biz dev business development, right? That's not true business development. Business development isn't developing your business, it's developing theirs to the point where they want to buy from you. So if somebody came to us, one of the first questions we'd ask, let's say they've been referred to us, one of the first Questions we'd ask is, have you read the book? No. Okay, don't sign up for the software yet. Let me send you the book and just read this one chapter, please.

James Ashford [00:40:55]:
It'll take you 15 minutes. Ready? Read this one chapter. What that does is it develops them to be a better customer before they now arrive. So when they come to us, they'll sign up quicker, they'll stay with us for longer, they'll spend more money and they'll use the product faster.

Omer Khan [00:41:10]:
I mean, that on the one hand makes so much sense, but it also can put you in a place where, like that guy who commented when you stopped, when you exited the accounting world, they never actually buy anything from you.

James Ashford [00:41:26]:
So this is the thing. So it's to make sure that what you're doing is you don't have to be explicitly kind of directly selling all the time. It's just a ps. Oh, by the way, if you want to move forward. So it's just a footnote in a post, it's just a P.S. at the end of an email that would transition them into the sale. And for us, the sale would be like a group webinar that we do. We'd run once or twice a week.

James Ashford [00:41:47]:
They'd book, they could either opt in for the product or they'd book onto the webinar. And, and then that webinar was a very explicit sales webinar so it would take them through. So you only really sell into people who've said, I want to buy from you. You know?

Omer Khan [00:41:59]:
Got it. And the reason for doing the webinar was it probably helped with activation retention because they were more prepared going in to the product and just saying, here's a login. Good luck.

James Ashford [00:42:12]:
Yeah, for sure. And we had loads of like great video content that would guide them through. And once they're into the product, we'd get them on to kind of like a fast track webinar and, and get them to speed with it very quickly. So yeah, and we became really good at activating, you know, the idea of time to value. So for us, the time to the golden moment was them sending out the first proposal and it being accepted. So everything was all around how, how can we shorten that time to value and get them to that golden moment as fast as possible? So the fastest we ever did it was in within 24 hours. And the moment someone did that, the product would effectively pay for itself, for life if they did it correctly.

Omer Khan [00:42:52]:
Got it. So by the time you exited, as we said, you were doing over 2 million in ARR, in terms of US dollars, you had over 1000 or 1100 customers. So this thing is really scaled. You're still using WordPress multisites. Just explain a little bit about how that product evolved from that basic plugin that you started with and it sort of seems like it's a great MVP solution. But surely at some point when you're running a 7 figure ARR business with over a thousand customers, you've got to hit a ceiling. If you're still just using WordPress.

James Ashford [00:43:36]:
I'm not sure. I don't know where the ceiling is. I know of an app that has got over 10,000 customers on a website, WordPress Multisite. So I don't know when it breaks. But to your point, we had started to build things away from the product. So for example, like the integration module, how it integrated with all of the other apps that we were integrated with that became a standalone module that we'd created. So the goal was to transition away and I think they have done that now. And we'd started that journey by moving key parts away from the core products and not everything was tied up to that.

James Ashford [00:44:11]:
So we became less and less reliant on it as when we came to sell. But it helped. There was, there was an interesting moment in the due diligence process where we, where it got. They brought in the companies to test the quality of the code and to do penetration tests. And that was quite an interesting. Well, it was a very interesting phase and how we got through that, but yet it held up, held up to everything.

Omer Khan [00:44:34]:
That's really amazing. And the acquisition, you were very intentional about that. You wanted to sell this business and you sort of built it to sell, as John's book says. He's been on my show. And was that a book you read before you started the business? Okay, so you were very clear about it. And that's a great book for having that mindset that you're going to have this exit. And it's almost like you mentioned Jim Rohn and Tony Robbins and you seem very clear about a big goal and having a kind of a clear vision driving you and the logos of these potential acquirers. But how did it actually come about? Did you just wake up one day and there was an email from somebody at Sage saying, hey, James, guess what?

James Ashford [00:45:28]:
No. No. So one of the things that we did was we forged a lot of really good partnerships with all of these businesses. So we were speaking at their events, we were invited to give fireside chats to their teams because we Were like, so close to our market. We had a lot of information. We'd speak at their events, all these things. If you can hear explosions, by the way, it's bonfire night here tonight, so that's what's going off outside.

Omer Khan [00:45:53]:
Remember, remember the 5th of November, right?

James Ashford [00:45:56]:
Yeah. So we had a lot of good relationships and we're trying to do a partnership deal to structure a sales deal between me and this company. And it wasn't working out. And what they proposed was not favorable. It was meant to be a win win, and it was a massive win for them and a massive loss for us. So I spat my dummy with him and I said, yeah, I'm not doing the deal. We're done. And they were a huge company and they said, well, aren't you going to negotiate? I'm like, no.

James Ashford [00:46:24]:
Like, we entered this to create a win win. Like, it's not even on. We're not even close. So I'm not prepared to, like, do it, do anything with you. We don't. And they said, well, could we buy you instead? And I said, that's a different conversation. Let's start. So we started a conversation with them and then another company that we were partnering with, that we integrated with, came to us a couple of weeks later, just by chance.

James Ashford [00:46:48]:
I think it was because we'd got over a million pound in Reven. I think people have been watching us very closely. We had a very strong reputation in the industry. We're very highly regarded. Our events were very well attended. Our webinar, we used to have the webinars that we used to run. We get 600 people book onto our webinars with zero marketing spend, you know, and so our event, what, I was the top rated speaker, every event, highest rated book. So we were, we were there.

James Ashford [00:47:16]:
So people, there's a great phrase that my friend said to me. It's worth writing down this. People listening, they're watching. Know this, they're watching. Because sometimes you feel like you're in a bubble. You feel like no one's noticing you, no one cares. They care, right? So. And it turns out they were watching.

James Ashford [00:47:36]:
And so then another company came to us. So we have three people now chatting to us, interested in kind of banging multiples around that was higher than what we were looking for. So we knew in the ballpark. And then they all fizzled to nothing. They all just disappeared.

Omer Khan [00:47:50]:
No way.

James Ashford [00:47:51]:
Just going into Christmas as well. So it was like a bit of a blow. So I came out in the new year and then I saw another software business that was in the space that was of a similar size to us sell. And I kind of got an inkling as to what multiple they could have got. So I then I thought, you know what, maybe now, now is the time to sell. We're still very excited about the product. We still. We just launched another product that we developed that bolted onto Go proposal that took us into the compliance space with this idea of the golf swing.

James Ashford [00:48:22]:
So we're very much at the bottom arc of the golf swing of the product. There was still huge upside potential. We were dominant in the uk, but we had a foothold in America, Australia and in Norway, bizarrely. So we kind of showed global potential. And so I just. We had loads of ideas, the roadmap was strong, we had money in the bank, everything was great. But I just thought, I wonder if now's the time to sell. So I contacted the M and a company that had done the deal for this other firm that sold and I approached them and I said, do you think you could get us a similar multiple? And they said, yeah.

James Ashford [00:49:03]:
And what I said to my team was, look, we're going to go through this process. I told my team, we're going through the process. This is rare, like most people hide this from the team, but I've been very clear to every team member that you are joining a business to sell and I wanted them to come on the journey with us. So I said, look, what we're going to do is we're going to go, we're going to take it to market and if it sells, then we'll sell. If we find the right acquirer for the right price that fits our direction, we'll sell. And if not, we'll learn a whole lot through this process and we'll be a stronger business because of it. And if we don't sell, it's not an issue. We're all still enthusiastic about what we're doing.

James Ashford [00:49:39]:
We'll just get our heads down, crack on and take it to market in a year or two's time, it's like there's no loss. And what was great was this M and A company, for the first kind of three or four months, they're preparing you for exit and they're preparing you to exit to a PLC. So the scrutiny that a PLC is held to is far greater than a small SaaS business is held to, small startup is held to. So they're preparing you for that level of scrutiny for a top four accountancy firm to come and look in your business. Right. And so they just went through everything with a fine tooth comb. They went through every minute of every meeting of every monthly board meeting. They went through all of our monthly management accounts.

James Ashford [00:50:21]:
They went through absolutely everything. They did 3 year and 10 year cash flow discount, cash flow forecasts that. I still don't know what that means. But they did them and they seem to be a big deal preparing them. Right. So they got us ready and then they took us to the market. They compiled the list, they approached them with im, the information memorandum that they get sent out. So an anonymized document goes out to everybody.

James Ashford [00:50:49]:
They can then say, yeah, we want to go into the data room and have a look at who this business is. And then if they're interested, they can request a management presentation. So we did six management presentations, and then two of those came to us and said, we want to make an offer. And they did. We picked one and then went through the due diligence process.

Omer Khan [00:51:08]:
It's like a lot of founders only start thinking about doing that when they're ready to sell. Not you kind of did it from day one. So this was like five years in the making, really. Even though there was a lot of, you know, heavy lifting that happened right at the end, for sure.

James Ashford [00:51:30]:
And, you know, one of the things was that our business. I'd come across this concept from another, another big SaaS business of playbooks. So we had a playbook for everything. Every single thing had a playbook that somebody within the business owned. Whether it was how to do a welcome call, how to send an email, how to set up an event, how to run a webinar. Every single thing was documented to the letter to ensure that the standards were met. So we had a process for everything. Whatever you.

James Ashford [00:51:59]:
There's a great, another great phrase from Dr. Edwards Deming. Whatever you expect, you have to inspect. So for every expectation we had in the business, there was an inspection process to ensure that it was met. And then every process was reviewed on a cycle to make sure it was getting better. Nothing stays the same. It's either getting better or it's getting worse. And if you're not actively trying to make that process better, it will be getting worse.

James Ashford [00:52:23]:
So. So we had that installed from the start, preparing for exit so that we knew that if someone came along, we could say, that's the book. That's how you run it. That's how you handle customer success support. It's all figured out. So we were prepared to sell from day one. We're in very good shape. But it still took Three or four months to take us that final step as well.

James Ashford [00:52:45]:
And you know, you have to be exit ready, Omer. You have to be exit ready now because you don't know what the future may bring. Your personal circumstances could change and you need to sell, right? Or, you know, an incredible opportunity could come your way or a pandemic could happen. Like, you don't know what's going to happen, but if you're not ready to take advantage of the opportunity, then you're going to miss the boat. Or you make, like I say, it may be a forced sale because of circumstances. You have to be exit ready at all times.

Omer Khan [00:53:15]:
Did you ever think about raising money? I mean, you went on this journey bootstrapped all the way, you had a successful exit. I just, I'm curious, do you think things would have been maybe different if you had raised a few million dollars? Would that have accelerated growth or not made that much of a difference?

James Ashford [00:53:36]:
I used to, every year when we did an annual planning, we used to have a two day annual planning event with all the team members involved. And I always used to say, right, if like, how much money? What's the craziest thing we could do? How far could we take this and how much money do you need to do it? You know, like, should we take investment and whatever an amount anyone came up with, I'm like, we've already got that amount. So no one was ever coming to me with anything beyond what we already had. And I think there's something really key. Again, I learned this from Tony Robbins, which is we often blame a lack of resources, but the ultimate resource we have is resourcefulness. And I think that sometimes not having money can force through better solutions. So for example, I remember going to we event, we did an event in San Diego and like a one off, one week, zero, whatever, like a conference thing, right? And I remember saying to Heather, who was the operations director, how much does this cost us? Like how much to get this team here to do all this stuff, right? Because I looked our competitor and we had like the bronze, the shitty little bronze stand and they've got the gold, platinum, huge stand, right? Because they're spending their $76 million of investment on the next big stand, right? But this is my money I'm spending, so how much it costs? It was like 20, 25 grand. For one week.

James Ashford [00:55:03]:
For one week event. I'm not doing it anymore. We're not doing it again. I said I can hire a full time videographer, I'm convinced. A full time videographer for 25 grand. When we get back, we're pulling out of all events. I'm going to hire a videographer. We are going to crank the handle on our online content because that content will be seen forevermore.

James Ashford [00:55:22]:
It will be 24,7 content that we can just dominate that space for 25 grand rather than doing it event after event. So because you don't have result and then six, six to 12, maybe 12 months after that, the pandemic hit. So our competitor strategy for continuing to do events was gone. Meanwhile we'd have this ramp of producing content and was just dominating, you know, online. And so I sometimes think if you're given a lot of money, it can paper over cracks, it can force you to make bad decisions if you don't have it and you're thinking resourcefully and I'm thinking, do I spend that money on that event or do I take my family on holiday? Like, like this is my cash. It forces you to squeeze everything out of what you're doing.

Omer Khan [00:56:11]:
So eventually 2021, you sell the business. You joined Sage for a few years probably as golden handcuffs. The. You still, you still own what, 90% of the business when you sold?

James Ashford [00:56:29]:
Yes, correct. Yeah.

Omer Khan [00:56:31]:
So all those goals that you had set at the start, selling to one of these companies having at least $5 million. I think everyone was checkbox right by that point.

James Ashford [00:56:43]:
Yeah. And several times over in the financial case. Yeah.

Omer Khan [00:56:47]:
So what's next for you? I mean it's what a whirlwind, right, to go on for five years to do that. Like what's the follow up act? What are you doing now? What's the plan?

James Ashford [00:57:04]:
Yeah, so the bit that we don't need to go into detail but I had a complete crash afterwards like once I'd completed the earn out period, I like hit the lowest point ever and I've got a lot of understanding of this and I've, I have written a new book and about my journey and I share everything in it and I go into depth about this and I think there's some real key learns in it. And one of the key things, Omer, is that we strive for these goals, whatever that goal is, whether it's a financial goal, new house, new car, whatever it may be, we want the goal, but it's not the goal we really want. It's the feeling that we think the goal will bring us. Okay, and so we get the goal. So I got the goal, I got the prize and then woke up the next day and I didn't feel any different. I felt like I'd always felt. And you're like, what was the point? What is the feeling? I'm trying to get what's lacking in me? And it sent me on a spiraling downward journey till I kind of hit rock bottom. And then I had to assemble a therapist, mentors and people to then dig me out of where I got to and kind of put the scaffolding up and help me.

James Ashford [00:58:09]:
And I got introduced this concept of preparing for the second half and that I'd completed the first half of life trying to get to this point. And when this guy met me, I was kind of in half time and now he was preparing me for the second half of life, which is very different. It has different characteristics to the first half. In the first half of life, we feel the need to know, like, yeah, I got all the answers to everything. Now I'm in the second half of life and I'm like, I don't know, like, let's figure this out. Okay, I'm comfortable not knowing. Let's just go explore this, let's be curious and let's see this. You know, he kindly termed me as a wisdom carrier.

James Ashford [00:58:46]:
So you become a wisdom carrier in the second half of life, which is a bit quieter and I think a lot more humble as well than I perhaps was in the first half because of the. Especially of the crash. And so the big thing I want to. That I'm doing at the moment to answer your actual question is to pass on as much as I've learned to other people who want it. And it's not that I figured it all out, and it's not that my answers are your answers, but I think we hit on some really interesting conclusions and I just feel the need to pass that back. So I've written the book, and I've primarily written it for my kids. It's not a childish book or anything, but if they ever want to kind of run a business and if anything were to ever happen to me, I'd at least want to pass my learnings on to them. So it's written very directly, it's written with a lot of love, and I just share everything, just give it away.

James Ashford [00:59:38]:
There's nothing, there's no agenda. It's like, just, look, guys, here. Here it is. So that book's going to be launched in the new year. I've invested in a couple of really boring businesses and I'm helping them to grow and scale and exit, which has been. That's been good. It kept me busy at a time when I need to be busy. And then now I've come full circle and I'm back to a SaaS startup.

James Ashford [01:00:02]:
So we've just launched one today, actually.

Omer Khan [01:00:04]:
Today?

James Ashford [01:00:05]:
Today. Got launched today. So it's been in the physiotherapy space. It's in the physiotherapy space again. I've caught this idea. I think it's unique to me. I do steal a lot of my ideas and I do try to credit people where if I've stolen them, but I think this might be unique to me and it's this idea of small tech, big exit. Like you don't need to develop a big piece of technology, you don't need to develop a unicorn business.

James Ashford [01:00:29]:
A unicorn business is mythical. Right. Just because there is an Instagram or an Uber or a Facebook, I'm not being defeatist. You're probably not going to do it. Right. Just because someone wins the lottery doesn't mean that you actually have a chance. By buying a ticket, you don't have a chance. Even if you bought a ticket, you're not going to win.

James Ashford [01:00:46]:
Right. But you don't need to do that. You can build a racehorse business that will give you a great life. Like for most people, if you got. If you built a business to a million pound in revenue and sold it for 5 million or sold it for 10 million and you owned the business, it would be life changing. So it's this idea of small tech, big exit, solving a small problem for one industry in one market. That's it, you know, so that's what we just launched with this in the physio space. But this time, rather than me being the domain expert as well, I've partnered up with the domain expert in this space in the uk.

James Ashford [01:01:23]:
We've had it tested, we've had an MVP that's been tested for a few months in different physio clinics. It's worked really well. So we've put the payment mechanism on. We just got 15 new customers that have signed up today that have been aware of it. So we've just been kind of underground. Wow. The next thing is we'll write the book, we'll film the videos and we'll just follow the model that we did last time. And then I've just had a price in for another project that we're going to start that will be.

James Ashford [01:01:50]:
That will then get finished in the next three months. So it's just this idea of just partnering with cool people who've got interesting ideas, taking the methodology that we've learned and like, we never had AI. Like, we did well. But I look back now and I think it was like we had horse and carts with what we did. Right. I just look at this new world with AI and I'm like, yeah, we're going to get to a million pound in revenue in 12 months. I'm not. We're not.

James Ashford [01:02:12]:
I'm not going to wait five years. This will be done in 12 months this time, and we're just going to go for it. So I've invested in some, some. Some other cool software businesses. My friend Daniel Priestley, that's got some really cool businesses. One's called Score App and he's just launching one called Video Flow and I'm investor in both of those as well. So, yeah, just trying to keep out of mischief. Really good.

Omer Khan [01:02:34]:
It sounds like you spiral to the bottom and then have made a great recovery and are back on the saddle.

James Ashford [01:02:41]:
Yeah, for sure. Do you know one of my big things that. So I hit the top of the mountain and it was a mountain beyond. I'm not being disrespectful to my family and friends. I love them all very dearly, but it was beyond anything that they had achieved. Right. So it was beyond what I'd achieved, my family had achieved, and I thought I'd reached the top. Okay.

James Ashford [01:03:02]:
But I couldn't understand why. I felt like I just wanted to keep doing something else. Two weeks ago, I went to Necker island and had a week with Richard Branson, Daniel Priestley, a load of other really cool people for a week. And I was chatting to him. And what I learned from that experience was there are. I talk about having limiting beliefs, and I think that I don't have limiting beliefs. I have limiting beliefs until I went there and I realized what limitless thinking is actually all about. Like, if you want to start an airline, start an airline.

James Ashford [01:03:31]:
If you want to release hostages from Iraq, go and release hostages. Like, there's nothing. He's done all these things. So now I've got a new mindset, which is to keep going and not. And it's not about the top. It's not about earning more. It's not about I've got enough. It's the fact, Omer, that I'm a mountain climber.

James Ashford [01:03:53]:
I just need to keep climbing mountains. I need to create things. I love the climb. Yeah. Getting to the top was not what I thought it was. It wasn't what I wanted. I'm very grateful for what we got, but what I've realized is that I just need to Keep climbing.

Omer Khan [01:04:10]:
What's the new book called, by the way?

James Ashford [01:04:14]:
It's split out into three books. So the trilogy is Scale Fast and Exit. And it's been split into three books which is Start strong, scale Fast, exit Big.

Omer Khan [01:04:23]:
Okay, and when does the first one get published?

James Ashford [01:04:26]:
That's a good question. When should I publish it? Maybe in the new year. I've got like, I've got 50 people. Whenever I've done a book, the first thing I do is I create a Google Doc and then I invite 50 people in to kind of knock it into shape for me off LinkedIn and whatever people who know me. So they're currently knocking it into shape as we speak. So it's had some good feedback. So I think probably in January the first book will be available.

Omer Khan [01:04:48]:
Okay, awesome. Great. Well, let's wrap up. Let's get onto the lightning round. Got seven quick fire questions for you.

James Ashford [01:04:54]:
Let's go.

Omer Khan [01:04:55]:
What's one of the best pieces of business advice you've received?

James Ashford [01:04:58]:
Whatever's going on, it's to ask however bad something's happened, whatever events happened, it's to ask where is the gift? There is always a gift.

Omer Khan [01:05:08]:
I totally agree with that. It's just like. And every time I've asked that question, which is not easy to do when it hits the fan, something good comes out of it.

James Ashford [01:05:18]:
Yeah, there was not into detail, but there were problems that happened. And when I asked that question, what could have lost our revenue, increased our revenue just by asking that one question.

Omer Khan [01:05:30]:
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?

James Ashford [01:05:33]:
I think Built to Sell by John Warrilow is a fantastic book. It's a great one. And then beyond that, I would go to Daniel Priestley's books, which are. There's three fantastic books there, but the main one would be Key person of Influence. So the model that I used to scale the marketing was based on the key person of influence model.

Omer Khan [01:05:51]:
Great. What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?

James Ashford [01:05:56]:
It's to doubt yourself is to question yourself and to think that you're not good enough. And. And it's. And we think that that's a negative trait that we have and that we should get rid of it. But it's. That is actually a gift because it's that feeling that we're not good enough that makes us want to strive to become better and to be more. And I don't think you ever lose that feeling, if I'm honest. So I think it's a.

James Ashford [01:06:19]:
It's a driving force that should Be embraced.

Omer Khan [01:06:23]:
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?

James Ashford [01:06:26]:
This is going to be unorthodox, but it's right. Okay. It's the ultimate productivity hack. Okay. Ignore people. You've got to get comfortable ignoring people if you want to get done. If you want to get something over the line, you've got to be prepared to turn your phone off, not reply to messages, not answer a voicemail, not look at your inbox and not give a sh T either. Like when I'm writing my book, I've not spoke to my mum for weeks.

James Ashford [01:06:52]:
I know she's pissed off with me, I know she's unhappy with me, but if you, if you attended every message, every and got pulled in every direction, you'd never get anything done. So you've got to get comfortable with pissing people off and ignoring them.

Omer Khan [01:07:07]:
That's one thing I need to learn to do better. What's an. This one might not be fair.

James Ashford [01:07:12]:
What's.

Omer Khan [01:07:12]:
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the time? I think you're kind of already doing that.

James Ashford [01:07:17]:
Yeah. And now I need to set up an art studio. I want to set up an art studio and a paddle ball court. They're my two things that I need to. That I feel they need to set up. Then I think my life will be complete.

Omer Khan [01:07:30]:
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?

James Ashford [01:07:34]:
I used to be a close up magician at weddings and corporate events and that's the only sales training I've ever had which is how to walk up to a group of pissed people at a wedding who hate magicians. They didn't ask you to go and talk to them. They don't believe in magic and they don't want you there. And you've got five minutes to convince them that magic is real. It was the ultimate sales training and I choose to nail it table after table.

Omer Khan [01:07:59]:
Awesome. And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?

James Ashford [01:08:04]:
My greatest achievement is my kids. Like I just, and it's probably cliched, but I just, you know, love them to be. I take my primary goal in growing the business. My primary goal was not the actual revenue amount. It was taking my kids to and from school every day was my number one goal. The second goal was taking off 12 weeks holiday a year which coincided with their school holidays. Like they were, they were my non negotiables. So maybe I could have.

James Ashford [01:08:31]:
Everything good comes at a cost. I could have maybe Scaled it faster, could have maybe scaled it bigger, but it would be at the cost of taking my kids to and from school every day. So my passion is helping them to become all they can be.

Omer Khan [01:08:43]:
I love that. It's so funny you say that. It was only yesterday I was driving to pick up my daughter. I pick her up every day from school and I was just thinking, I just love doing this. Even when I pick her up and she's a teenager and she's in a grumpy mood and doesn't want to talk to me, I still love it. And I know one day I'm going to look back and miss that. And I feel so grateful that I'm able to do that. I have the freedom to be able to do that for sure.

James Ashford [01:09:13]:
Joe Rogan shares an interesting thing, which is if you ever like get start getting annoyed or angry, just imagine that you're 90 years old, kind of getting close to the last days of your life and you got a wish, which was to come back to this moment in time and relive this moment once more. And so it doesn't matter whether she's shouting, screaming, upset, you've returned to this to experience it one more time.

Omer Khan [01:09:37]:
That's beautiful. Great way to end, James. Thank you. It's been a pleasure.

James Ashford [01:09:42]:
Thank you.

Omer Khan [01:09:42]:
Omer, just what, what a whirlwind story. I mean, when, when I sort of came across your story, I was just like this, I've got to talk to James and, and, and I think you have definitely delivered on, on what I was hoping we would get out of this conversation. So thank you so much. If people want to check out Go proposal, they can go to GoProposal.com but today, if they want to get more information, what you're up to, the upcoming books, the current books, everything. Jamesashford.com yeah, but the place where we're.

James Ashford [01:10:18]:
Most active is on LinkedIn or on Instagram. They can find me on there.

Omer Khan [01:10:21]:
Great. We'll include those links as well in the show notes. So thank you. It's been an absolute pleasure and can't wait to see what you do next.

James Ashford [01:10:31]:
Thank you. Thank you, my friend.

Omer Khan [01:10:32]:
All the best. Take care. Cheers.