3 X GM's hired but only 1 exit: How I got this wrong | Dom Sutton | 2 Commas by Josh Comrie

Dom Sutton hired three general managers to run the business he built. Two didn't work out, and he owns most of the reasons why. Dom started Pumpt with his last paycheck, running cold calls from a tiny room next to the toilet while his two boys slept on a mattress beside his bed. He grew it into an advertising business putting 70 million items into NZ letterboxes a year. This is an unusually honest conversation about the founder-to-owner transition, the difference between delegating and abdicating, and why the lack of the right metrics let good months quietly slide into losses. He also tells the story of the toy business he bought on a lick-of-paint story that lost him a dollar a minute for two years, and how that exact disaster became Stocktrum, the inventory forecasting software he now sells in 26 countries. We get into: - Why two of his three GM hires failed and what he'd do differently - Delegating vs abdicating, learned the hard way - The $1.2 million toy business mistake and the due diligence lesson behind it - How that failure became a global SaaS - Why he walked away from selling Pumpt before finally exiting to his own GM Sometimes the business you build next comes straight out of the one that nearly broke you. ⁠Subscribe to the 2 Commas Journal⁠ Order the 2 Commas book⁠ Follow Josh on LinkedIn