He Built the Perfect Exit. It Nearly Broke Him - With Ian Goodwin

So I want to – let's get back to Cluedo.

And you've obviously, like you said, you've recognized a gap in the sales force market.

You've made a conscious decision to go and get co-founders or bring people around you versus going it alone as a solo founder.

Yeah.

What was the driver behind

that? It was recognising where my greatest strengths were.

And I'd also, at Sherpas, I'd worked with some incredibly talented people.

And in doing some work with them, there was a couple of them where, you know, we'd have a coffee during a project, you'd sort of shot the... shot the breeze a little bit and um the seeds had been planted yeah the seed had been planted so uh when i came up with the idea that the two people uh luke and james that i had um that i had uh i guess in my mind would be great to join the business uh and that was really both very deep in terms of their salesforce expertise both great guys good character and young, smart, motivated.

One was a technical architect.

The other one was a solution architect.

So the sorts of skills.

So my role, I saw my role in the business as the lead, the commercial, certainly the commercial lead of the business and really the figurehead.

But then having people who were deep in technology, good with clients and just good with the knowledge of the Salesforce platform.

And as it turned out, it was a great combination.

Yeah.

And did you, and so you were in for those guys on day one, we're going in like a third, a third, a third co-founders or as a leader, do you position it a bit differently?

What we, no, what we did was we, I remember I flew down, they were both Melbourne based.

So I was based in, uh, in, I live in Brisbane.

Um, we, you know, we had some, like some Google Meets or whatever.

And I flew down to Melbourne and we met in a coffee shop in, I think it was in Abbotsford.

And we sat down and we really started to go, what is this going to look like? And one of the questions that I asked straight up was, what do you guys want out of this? If we're going to do it, what do you want out of it? And what does an end game look like? And that was, I think, really formative and interesting because the conversation, both of them said, you know, it was fundamentally we want to build something that we can sell.

And that aligned.

As

quickly as possible or just build it and sell it?

Not as quickly as possible, but ultimately, you know, to build something that had value attached where at some point there could be an exit and we could hopefully do well out of it.