Sage

“We would never be able to afford for this first version of a course hiring an ops person or hiring a content manager or hiring a software engineer. And we probably need, we need it. We need somebody to project manage us. We need somebody to help us manage all …”

“There's only one London listed tech company worth more than ten billion, and that is Sage.”

“And the reality is that you build all those things You will be able to sell to HubSpot if you're building a HubSpot, you know, business, or Sage, or Shopify, or whatever it is, right? They're gonna, if you could convince them that people who sign up to your se…”

“There's different types of forecasts. The plan, your stretch, and your BHAG. Your plan is 60% likely to hit. And this is what you want to do in building what your valuation's coming from against these metrics that we've talked about. But this is what you want …”

“And then on top of that, we brought in a strategic investor, which was called Sage. And altogether we raised thirty million about 14 months ago with those guys.”

“Yeah. A little bit lower. It's around about one 30.”

“It was just over 16%, just over like clean.”

“So we had always had a plan in early 20, 22, we'd go to market and raise a hundred and twenty million dollars. That was very clear to the board. So it was a two stage process. Thirdly in, get a product out to market with Sage and then do the one 20, early 20, …”

“And the reason why Sage bought us at the end of the day is they compete with NetSuite. So do we. But it's no secret that if you go to their website, you don't see a sector specific solution for retail, but obviously we are a sector specific solution for retail…”

“Three 60 enterprise value, and then some separate retention stuff on top, but enterprise value in terms of equity was three 60, which everyone was very happy with.”

“I wanted to raise money to build a better accounting solution within Brideboro specifically designed for retail. But when I looked at it, the cost of doing that and having a clear idea of what the strategy was to win in a highly commoditized market didn't real…”

“So we're just a little four and a half million dollar company, and we bought like seventy million dollars worth of revenue.”

“Revenue was about 5.6 million.”

“Well, I mean, they were paying 18, 15 to 18 times profits at the time. So we were, you know, we were looking for probably two times sales, which was unusual. Only crazy companies got two times sales.”

“No, we sold for 10 and a half million.”

“We compete with, you know, three, well, two, two mainly really large companies, but three companies around the world, Sage in the UK, NYB in this part of the world, and Intuit in the US, and none of those are founder-led companies, and there's very few founder…”

“We're a leader in the UK, and we've beaten Sage to the cloud”