Ticket Tailor - Bootstrapping to £6m after selling business to TimeOut and buying it back

0:04There's so much possibility, there's so much opportunity in the tech industry to rethink why we do business, not how we do business, why we do business. I want to use what we've got to demonstrate that you can have it all. I want to demonstrate that you can have a purpose-driven business that is not only for the sake of feeling good, but for the sake of actually it drives growth as well. If we become more purpose-driven, the growth will follow.

0:29Welcome to Secret Leaders. Today, I'm joined by Johnny White, the founder and CEO of TicketTaylor. If you've been to an event in the last 10 years, there's a good chance you've encountered TicketTaylor. is a bootstrap business that helps event organizers sell tickets. Johnny started with the goal of making£2 ,000 a month before wanting to take it full time. Now Ticket Tailor makes over£6 million annually and shows no signs of stopping. The reason we're bringing you this story is the overwhelming desire from our listeners to hear more stories of founders going the bootstrapping path versus raising lots of money and wanting to hear some more insights from relatable founders, following in the footsteps that so many others choose to take instead of the crazy overhyped venture capital route.

1:14As a result, we're going to learn more about how to bootstrap a successful business. How do you hire, grow, sell when you've got limited cash? And we're going to also uncover the downsides and hidden costs of bootstrapping that you might not know about. Johnny, that's a lot of promises that I've just put on you, so you're here to deliver. Welcome to Secret Leaders. Thanks so much, Dan. So great to be here and really excited to talk about bootstrapping because I think it is a really viable way to run a business and has a lot of upsides. So very happy to share that. Yeah, all upside, no downside, right?

1:47Yeah. Yeah, of course. Okay, so let's start at the beginning. Why Ticket Tailor? Like, why did you want to start this business? Did you, when you were younger and everyone else was choosing astronaut and doctor, you were like ticket seller? Yeah, really good question. When I was growing up, we didn't have any of the kind of usual technology that a lot of my friends had. You know, we didn't have any games consoles. We didn't have a VCR. We only had one English channel on the TV. I grew up in Germany. But we did have great computers when we were growing up. You know, we had a 386. We had a Pentium.

2:24We had a ribbon printer. My oldest brother was really into it. And my parents clearly realized there's something in getting this tech to like foster this passion. And sure enough, it's my passion as well. So I spent a lot of time as a kid learning about computer programming and saw the like evolution of the Internet. You know, we had a modem before there was even a search engine, you know. And so I never really knew what I wanted to do, actually. But I was definitely very passionate about software, studied software engineering. and then whilst I was at university studying software engineering, the thing that wasn't available, I was at Birmingham for university and the thing that wasn't available at the time was any way to find out what was going on in the city.

3:04So all you really knew about was the student events and for me that wasn't my cup of tea, I wanted to know what was the music happening in the city. So I created this website called What's On In Brum and I would go to all the record shops, pick up flyers, take them back to my study type in the information to this PHP website that I've made and yeah people will come onto the website find out what's going on and it was like the first kind of what's on guide for Birmingham through that then I've got a lot of freelance work building websites for nightlife kind of club brands in Birmingham and also got a gig working building a ticketing platform as well which integrated with what's on in Brum this website I built.

3:49So I got into ticketing through that. And then after off the back of that, got more and more requests for building ticketing systems. But usually, you know, you get a request saying, oh, can you build me a ticketing system? I'll put together a quote, and then it would be too much, even though it was a very reasonable quote, but just people wanted to have their own system. They didn't want to use an agency. They didn't want a middleman. And after this happened a couple of times, I thought, hang on, there's definitely an opportunity here. I can definitely build something that is the template of a ticketing system that then I can resell.

4:22And around that time was when, you know, SaaS was becoming a thing. And I was thinking, okay, this is it. This is it. I can sell software here. Instead of people using an agency, I can sell the tool for people to be able to do it themselves. So that's kind of where the idea came from. Got it. Okay. So it turns out like a lot of people, you kind of stumble into it. I mean, obviously, you're getting practical experience the insight starts to come that you could probably do this better um like how are you at this point and I guess more importantly you know what were people around you in your social circle doing yeah so well when I started that website what's on in Brum I was at university that was a lot of fun actually socially because we'd get invited to things with my mates and would get all the opening parties and things it'd be really cool um and then off the back of university I was actually yeah built freelancing as a web developer for two or three years I moved to London moved into an office with another like a web development agency you know they were like five people I was just me and then I hired someone and so I was two people but I was kind of like looking at what they were doing looking what this agency were doing thinking do I want that do I want to grow this like web development shop to what they're doing and actually I realized I didn't.

5:39It was really valuable being in the same office as them because I could see the struggles, right? It's like, okay, sales pipeline, hiring people, you're selling people's time. And I really kind of realized my desire that actually selling time is a really hard thing to do. Selling software is way more scalable. So obviously moving into starting Ticket Tailor, did you have a big plan? Did you have a vision? Were you sort of just doing it for the fun of it? Like, would you imagine even then that you're still doing it today? no i didn't have any of those things um partly it was the idea of and any software engineer will relate to this the idea of having a kind of completely blank canvas to to build something it's like oh there's some people are asking for this and almost like kidding myself that i could do it you know i could i could like create this business but really like right then the point being it's fun to geek out on a new framework or something for for for a while and so i was building it for about six months in my spare time alongside doing client work and it was really good fun for a while and then you hit the points like okay right I've been working on this for a long time and you really have to be honest with yourself about am I actually gonna is this gonna be the one that I take over the line or is it gonna sit on the pile with the domain names and the half-built products um you know the graveyard basically and yeah it's when you hit things like the forgot password process or getting the terms and conditions written.

7:01And I really hit this stumbling block where I was like, okay, I've forgotten whether people actually want this. It was so long ago that I had this idea that this idea was valid and I needed some more validation. So one of the things I did was I decided, okay, I need to find a customer. I've got this product like 80 % there, but there's quite a lot still to do, you know, not least building a marketing website to promote it. And so I decided to load up Google Maps. I'm this is 2000 and when 2011 2010 end of 2010 beginning 2011 and I'm in Shoreditch and I load up Google Maps and I just pick off the places along Brick Lane and I decide to cold call them but my anxiety levels are incredibly high so what I actually do is go and buy a book called how to eliminate fear on cold calling and I read the first page and it does the job right it gives me the confidence I'm like okay I don't need all the techniques I just need the confidence to pick up the phone and sure enough the first page gave me that so threw the book away called up the called up the first person and uh yeah get the answer oh the manager's not in uh so like oh put the phone down phew thank god for that give it half an hour and then i've plucked up the courage to call up another one and um yeah it doesn't it rings off and i'm like oh thank god i don't need to speak to anyone wait another half an hour and then i get through to the brick house which was a cabaret venue on brick lane and the manager picks up and i start explaining what i'm doing and he's like oh yeah we're looking to do ticketing actually and we don't want to use an agency and i'm thinking this is amazing um and we have a meeting the next week i don't have a website at this point i don't have anything i print out some price plans on a piece of a4 paper and i come to this meeting and i show him the demo on my laptop and say you know these are the prices do you want to sign up and he does a bit of negotiation and but he signs up to a 40 pound a month plan when the product launches and that was all I needed that was a validation that then was like okay I'm going to do the terms and conditions I'm going to build the marketing site I'm going to get this thing over the line get it live and you know it's that nugget of motivation it was it's just interesting to reflect on that about like how motivation is the most valuable resource that you've got basically as a kind of individual person trying to trying to trying to get a bootstrap business like live it's interesting though because what was your motivation it sounds a little bit like your motivation there was overcoming fear but you know as someone who you know kindling media make secret leaders that is a bootstrap business our motivation is uh want to hire people want to not run out of money don't want the business to fail want to you know all of the things that i'd actually say a lot of the motivation uh often comes from fear right you know you often seem much closer to death when you're running a bootstrapped company, especially if you're looking to grow it.

9:47If you're happy keeping the status quo, then not really a problem. But anytime you're trying to take any kind of risk, it does feel a lot riskier. And the downside is a lot, it feels a lot higher. And so I guess that's my experience running a bootstrapped company. But what is yours? And how do you relate the difference between motivation and discipline? the motivation at that point was to stop selling my time so i you know i guess initially my motivation was like oh i'm gonna geek around on something new technically then my motivation became uh okay this is the one i want to get over the line so that i can stop selling my time so i'm not gonna become the agency you know that was the alternative right it's like grow like a web development agency freelance model so that was my motivation to move away from that and to think i I could pay my bills with a product business, with a software business rather than a selling time business.

10:39So that was my motivation. Yeah, and relating motivation to discipline. Yeah, I worked a lot of long nights that first year and it does require discipline. And I needed that. My motivation ran out and I needed that push. once I'd had that once I'd had that once I knew that like okay if I can get through this slog of really boring stuff now to get this live and that's discipline then I'll believe that there's going to be something at the end of this and the goal I set at that point was okay I believe I'm going to get at least one customer because I've got one now I want to get to two thousand pounds a month and then that's when I'll stop working stop selling my time and I'm going to focus full that that that new goal um I could work towards why two thousand pound a month where does that plan come from and what was the next plan yeah so two thousand pound a month I'm not sure um I was living in London so I don't know how that was enough um but uh also living with my now wife who was in a um is a works works at a law firm so she had a strong stable job and you know gave some security around that right so it probably wasn't enough money to live off but it was enough to be like okay I can make the leap and uh you know Lara will take care of bills if if it doesn't work out so definitely had that safety net which which helped a lot and I guess if I didn't have that maybe that goal would have been higher but it was two thousand pound a month and the next goal so yeah so we hit that goal after after a year or so of of kind of growing and then I was wondering what to do next and what everyone was talking about at this point yeah 2011 old street was dubbed silicon roundabout it was tech meetups everywhere and yeah and everyone was talking about getting funding and so i thought okay what i need to do is get funding because that's clearly what happens now right i've proven the business i've got some product market fit now it's about getting business getting some funding and someone someone suggested i should raise 400 000 pounds um to to take this business to the next level and who wouldn't want the security of that in their bank account at that stage right it sounds very tempting to be like okay you're going from um yeah making a small amount of money to being able to almost feels like it should be relaxing right to be like okay all that money that's that that that gives a lot of breathing room and yeah and so so i put together a pitch deck for like getting this investment but i didn't even know what i wanted to spend the money on, you know, didn't know what£400 ,000 would do, had absolutely no idea, had no experience like managing people or growing teams or anything like that.

13:26But actually, as it happens, whilst this was going on as well, I got an email in my inbox that said, hey, Johnny, I'm the product director at Time Out and we're interested in doing ticketing. Would you be interested in having a chat, see if Ticket Tailor is a good fit? and this was quite exciting because it was a you know huge customer potentially but I was also thinking well basically a one-man band here how will we support a customer of this size the conversations progressed and soon enough it turned actually into an acquisition conversation timeout we're looking to integrate ticketing into the timeout website so that the transaction could happen on the platform and and yeah we were talking about an acquisition and you're talking about an acquisition really like so early at a point where you might be raising money, you might be, you know, employing your first employee.

14:24It's unusual, right? It's unusual to get this very left field thing happening. And, you know, you're describing yourself as a one man band, I'm assuming don't really have advisors around you who can help you through this process. So what did you do? Yeah, it wasn't a done deal. It wasn't like this opportunity came along and I was like, yeah, I really want to go for this. It was really hard because this business was taking off. It was, I didn't know which direction it was going to go, but I felt like I was onto something and I put a lot of work in to get into this point. In terms of people around me, yeah, the office I was in, again, coming back to this, like being in this office with this agency, these guys are a lot wiser and smarter than me in that regard and could you know talking to them about it really helped and put stuff into perspective you know about about the opportunity the other thing that I was reflecting on as well was I had never worked in a job I'd always worked for myself always either been just me or me and I've hired one other person for a while and so I had no experience of actually working with other people I had no experience with meetings I'd no experience of any of this stuff so that played into the opportunity as well it's like hang on a minute there's not I can get an opportunity here of experience and yeah that that that seems quite appealing okay so how did you make the decision what happened next yeah um there was a few things playing into it in terms of the decision there was like the glamour of selling your business right again with people getting funding that was one thing that's talked about the other thing that's talked about is people selling their businesses so in my mind I was like if I do this I'm going to be a hero I'm going to be on you know the cover of wired magazine and uh you know really playing up in my head of it being this uh amazing thing um for my like ego the other thing was uh the money it would be nice for this work that i put in to uh you know it'll pay back for the for the like loss of earnings i guess and the sweat that i put into it um so that played into it as well and then thirdly was was the experience and you know what is on the call with um one of the i think it was the ceo of time out of time and he said you know what you'll be able to build another one of these things um later on in life and I was like actually maybe I probably will and will I get many opportunities like this and actually probably not and I probably really need it I probably really need to go and work in this environment um so that was how I made that decision and so but the funny thing is going from that like negotiation experience which was quite fun and quite like you know could go either way the ball's quite in my court because uh you know could yeah as I say could go either way through to actually the deal getting done is a long time from agreeing yes okay let's do this uh in principle and then months months before actually signing and it happening and that that period being on your own uh running running a business on your own was a very stressful time super stressful I got a lot into meditation at that time and And I just really wanted to get it done and actually made quite a few mistakes in that process as well.

17:30So one thing I did was I, in terms of like finding a law firm, I found a law firm that normally buys and sells houses and thinking, oh, this will be fine. This will be, you know, how different is it selling a house, selling a company? Turns out absolutely very different. And, you know, I wasted a month's time there and we had to start again and I had to find another law firm to help get this over. so that was very stressful very drawn out and you know in that period you don't want to think about growing the business because there's no point timeout weren't buying it to for the growth of the business so i was doing things like google ads and really you know putting my energy into this every day and then once i'd made that decision all that energy stops uh and and the point of it also stops so it's like why waste money on this when if this deal goes through which it could also fall through um would would just be a waste yeah interesting your motivation changes entirely doesn't it to come back to that word you know you sort of change your plans and your motivation towards why you're doing the thing um okay so give us a high level on the deal that happened like what's the snapshot of the reality and I guess you know I want you to tell the story uh sort of from start to finish um not not for the rest of the podcast by the way but just you know from start to finish of this moment of you're about to sell and then what transcribes back because I think this is unique doesn't happen often and is very interesting for listeners to actually hear this without being interrupted by me and then the questions that I've got I will come in with afterwards cool yeah so the email comes in we have a negotiation that's really exciting I decide to do it and then it's two or three months of legal work or silence as well then it's getting close to the deal day I'm getting more and more excited I go to the law firm to go and sign it's a Friday afternoon and I'm going up to this law firm in the West End to sign and you know this is the point that it's been building up to and I go into the office and the only other person that's there is the other solicitor that's been working on it from the other side and we meet for the first time but we've been chatting on email a lot with my law as well sign the paperwork and then and then it's done and that's it and it's like okay cool what happens now and I've got no one to celebrate with at this point it's like a Friday mid-morning there's no one else you know like it's in because because I'm a solo you know running this business solo there's there's no one to kind of celebrate with I've always had to keep it completely confidential so I've not told anyone as well um and so uh and then also on top of that as well there was no like uh there's no announcement about this we're not we're not telling the press or anything like that um so all that stuff where I thought okay this is the thing that's going to like change my uh change my life as a you know as a person is just was not was not true and so yeah that part of it which played into the decision right that's one of the three things I mentioned playing decisions that like immediately like went away and then I went back to my office and I was literally refreshing uh my bank my bank my bank accounts to see the money land right and uh very anxious about that and it's it's been a few hours and the money's not landed I'm going back through the uh the contract and I see my bank details are wrong uh in the in the contract and so I'm then calling up the lawyer and saying the bank details are wrong the bank is wrong and then yeah then they say oh no no don't worry don't worry we knew that we knew that that actually wasn't in the very final one that you signed we corrected that before it signed and I was like okay fused we haven't paid the money somewhere else so anyway then the money comes in the afternoon um and then a week or so later I start working at timeout and I come into timeout and I'm my job is to integrate Ticket Tailor into Time Out to so that transactions can happen through the platform and I'm feeling pretty cool you know I'm feeling like I'm the young guy I've sold my business coming into the business in this unconventional way as a product manager and a meeting gets set up every fortnight called the steering group and in that meeting is the whole c-suite of timeout um so ceo cpo cmo cfo people dialing in from new york this is a big deal this this steering group is a big initiative um for timeout and i've got to run the meeting and i mentioned earlier i've never run a meeting uh before other than like a one-to-one kind of sales meeting or something that's very simple i have no idea what i'm supposed to be doing in this meeting i feel like it's something where i'm supposed to be presenting something or i've got no idea it's about getting decisions made or about i just i just i'm so out of my depth but every fortnight i stress about this meeting and come up with some slides and um and i think it gets to about i don't know maybe six or seven meetings in and people are starting to realize okay this actually this guy is not doesn't have the experience we thought or i don't know don't know what realization is happening but but the integration is not going as well as um as well as as well as hoped and uh the project gets shelved so that point is like a real learning curve for me like I'm very grateful to have that be thrown in that deep end and you know fail essentially uh because the experience was just absolutely tremendous you know um no I don't think many people get that get that kind of experience um and then I'm working as a product manager I'm just on the product management team I'm working on different products I'm working on the daily deals platform which you know is a lot more comfortable because I'm suddenly like oh okay that's it the more of my like skill level here this is actually um what I can do I can see how I can add value here and I'm learning loads I'm learning loads on how to work with people um and how to how to be a product manager and how to how to get decisions made how to how to move things forward in a company like that so that was an valuable experience um yeah and so i work at time out then for 18 months um and i think okay i'm done here i've got i've done that experience i've made some great friends i've got some great experience um but i don't think i've got a lot more to learn and i didn't know what i wanted to do next i didn't have another plan of like what's the next business and i was like buying books on things thinking like is this the thing is this the next thing um and but i handed my notice because i know that you know i've got a three-month notice period as well so i think i'll find out an idea within three months and so it'll be fine um when i handed my notice the i ask can i cut my notice period down to one month because three months is excessive like i think you know coming in at the level that they assumed I was at, three months would make sense.

24:28But as a mid-level product manager, three months seemed excessive. And so I said, can I cut it short to one month? And they said, no, because we've still got your business. So Ticket Tailor is still running in the background, still doing about 2K MRR with the customers that it has. But the product hasn't changed much because we didn't get very far with the integration. So they say, no, we can't cut your notice period short because we don't know what to do with Ticket Tailor. And if we cut it short, then we're going to be stuck with it. And again, I go back to this friend who said was running an agency and who has work in the same offices in Shoreditch and explain the situation.

25:06And he comes up with a great idea. He comes up with the idea of saying, right, okay, they've basically got three options, right? One is they keep running it. One is they shut it down. And one is they can sell it back to you. And my default mode of anything like that would be like, oh, I wouldn't want to ask to sell it back to me it seems too cheeky or it seems too like um i don't know doesn't doesn't feel like a very comfortable thing to do right but when he put it like that uh it's like actually okay i'm doing them a favor in a way of being like okay here are your options here's here's how it can play out and you know working out the cost of what it would be to keep running it internally and offering consultancy to do that as well and then working out the cost of what it would be to shut it down you know how long that would take and so on and then presenting the buying back option as the easiest one, right?

25:52And it's like cover all the legal costs, just make it a complete no-brainer to be like, they want to get rid of this thing and I really want it back. And so present these options and they're like, yeah, go for it, let's do it. And so then in my last three months, quite good actually having three months notice period then because wanting to get the heads of terms signed and being in the building and chasing after the CFO to get that signed was quite handy because they're busy, they're doing other stuff now, they've moved on and I'm like yeah serving out my notice but also want to make sure this deal actually happens and it doesn't get forgotten so yeah that's how it plays out so then I'm there two years later it's 2014 and I've got a completely fresh head I've managed to pay off some of the mortgage and I've got this experience of working in a team so it's an incredibly lucky and valuable experience okay so basically long story short you start a ticketing company at the right time and before you've had the whole nightmare experience sorry let me rephrase that the amazing opportunity of employing people um then uh you get swept off your feet by time out um they take the product they grandfather it almost immediately after realizing that they don't actually understand how to integrate it in the first place and that maybe they were a bit hasty you then get to learn how to do a really important job and also understand culture and feedback and you know team dynamics and hierarchy and all of these things on someone else's dime on top of all the money that they paid you and then get to basically uh step back realize that you want to carry on with unfinished business and get to take that product back and start afresh with all these skills that were always going to be important in your journey but you just basically had someone else entirely fund your education to do it is that roughly right uh yeah it's roughly right yeah yeah yeah and also i suppose you're like a fucking leprechaun people should just be around you or like rub you for gold or something well and then the other thing is just you know seeing what a big business is like as well and what i don't like about big business you know that's another value very valuable experience you know i've gone through that well what don't you like about big business i guess being a small cog like not being able to have impact um so a lot of wastage um in terms of effort uh whereas small businesses you know it's very you won't go very far if you're wasting effort.

28:30Okay, so it's 2014. You've got Ticket Tailor, you're the CEO, you've got presumably some product ideas and some ambition at this point about where you want to go and what you want to do with it. What are your next steps? Like how do you get into things like customer acquisition, hiring, some of the tricky stuff that people who bootstrap businesses find exceptionally challenging, getting customers and finding the right employees. Take us through this. so and it goes in that order it was a couple of years of getting customers without hiring people um and then making the decision to hire people so in that first bit of getting customers i actually was i didn't want to take on the stakeholder of hiring people at that point coming out of time out i wanted to focus on customers entirely actually i wanted to get stuck into the the code again and i wanted to grow out the business from a from a customer level i met this guy called Pietro.

29:24He's a bootstrapper and he runs a company called Mobaloud. And we meet at one of the meetups around Old Street. And he introduces me to the world of bootstrapping. He tells me about MicroConf, the conference for, you know, solo founders, bootstrapping businesses. And I'm like, wow, okay, this is a way forward. This is actually a way to run a business. And so we move into an office together. Then we go to other meetups, we find other bootstrappers, they move in, and we create this mini co-working space. It's just us running some desks in an actual co-working space. And we have stand-ups every week talking about what we're going to be doing that week.

30:02We're creating the rituals that people have when they have more people, but across our individual companies. And the amount that you can learn or the amount that I basically could copy, my friend Pietro was absolutely amazing. So I remember customer support was taking up half my time. And this is a common problem for solo founders is you want to be doing the customer support. So you hear all the feedback, but at the same time, that's going to take up half your time at some point. And it got to that point. And I thought outsourcing customer support was such a massive risk. And I saw him do it. I saw him hire someone on Upwork and saw how he hired two people and had them going at the same time.

30:40You know, these kind of tricks to see who is best. And that kind of thing just gave me so much. it wasn't me taking the risk he was taking the risk on that I could then copy him and we would spend lunch times just talking about growth hacks and things like that so it was an incredible again I suppose it's similar to the first part of the journey where being in the same office as that agency getting so much value from that is the same thing of like being in an office with other people doing bootstrap businesses and I was pretty comfortable I remember thinking at one point right I've got to 8k MRR I could hit the pause button right now and I'll be happy um happy forever but actually a couple of years go by and I'm actually like okay I've reached my limit now I've redesigned the website three times and it still looks rubbish I've reached the limit of what I can do on my own um and that's when I think okay I'm ready now ready to take on the stakeholder of hiring people and I'm glad I took it that seriously because it is as soon as you hiring one person and hiring 10 people is kind of you've you've lost a bit of freedom you've lost because because you've now got responsibility to a new stakeholder and I actually thought it was really interesting actually thinking about stakeholders because I also hadn't taken on the stakeholder of investors so really I had initially you know back in the very early days when I was just um geeking out you know thinking learning a new framework the only stakeholder was me actually at that point it was like I just want to learn then it was okay customers actually uh Because we need to grow the business.

32:11And then this third stakeholder would be like, okay, now I want to build out a team. Building out a team. I'll go into that. And it was, yeah, I hired a designer. I hired a head of engineering and hired a few engineers. And these were quite easy decisions in that had the money in the bank. um so also yeah i had this rule right of like one way to de-risk the hiring was to get enough money in the bank to pay the salaries for a year and then i wouldn't be in a position where i'm feeling stressed out because i can't make pay payday so that was like my uh my de-risking strategy of hiring um and then yeah making unrisky hires you know hiring engineers hiring designers hiring a designer i knew we had lots of work in that space so actually um you know they were quite good quite quite easy decisions the bit i find really difficult then was actually going from thinking of the company as literally just a company that makes technology and the customers find us through seo or a few growth hacks to them being like okay we we i want to hire a growth person i want to hire an ops person and how to make that transition because it's also a transition of potentially spending quite a lot of money as well and thinking like and also like a high risk point of making the wrong hire at that point completely changes the um could completely yeah change change the company and so that was a really difficult bit made made quite a few mistakes there of hiring people that weren't the right experience level so quite you know something i've done in the past is pitch for mid-level hire really what i needed was a was a top level hire and you know and it didn't didn't work out because you know what i needed was the skills of someone who could come in and kind of do it and do it really well that's really difficult at that point for a bootstrap business to go from okay we're doing all right to then okay now we need to hire someone and it needs to be a decent salary and we need to get that right because the amount of time and effort and money wasted if we get that wrong is it's hard and you could even get it wrong by what is the job what type of job do you need how do you build that team up you know it's not like uh and I imagine you know imagine a funded business where you're like okay we've got all this money we need to make put this team in place so we obviously need this this and this and this it's more like what's the hire that makes sense at this point and I thought about it doing doing it incrementally and gradually but I actually had a very amazing experience I was working with a coach coach was helping me completely with all this people stuff um and he did this exercise where it was kind of imagine yourself you were in a room he's sat in the corner he's got a notebook and i stand in the middle of the room with my eyes closed and he's like imagine where you are in two years tell me what you're having for breakfast what's going on in your house you know who's there what's happening um and this real visualization and it's like okay you're going to work who's at work what's happening going into more of the detail of it and so really getting me to picture what i want my life to be like in two years time and then he's like okay step back a month what's happening now and it's like okay step back another month and we go back and back and back and back and then I realized okay I need to hire a growth person and an ops person and I need to hire them today basically to make this plan work and that gave me the confidence to go all in on that plan rather than think I'm just gonna dip my toe in over here uh you know it was like okay no we need I need these people and they need to be good so I'm just gonna commit and that was a bit of a game-changing moment so but got those hires in place um yeah head of growth head of ops um in place by 2020 and you know the other thing is like going in on commit uh on uh recruitment fees as well uh you know spending 10 000 pounds on a recruitment fee is a huge huge huge deal for me um but knowing that getting the right hire uh is an even bigger deal you know this idea of what do you reckon what do What do you reckon the cost has been to you so far in your business experience over the last 10 years of getting the hire wrong?

36:25It's probably, I mean, it's probably, you know, sets us back about a year, right, of wasted time. So however much, however you compute that in terms of money, but I more compute it in terms of like my energy and motivation. And it's probably like if I'd got that, if I knew that, if I knew this hindsight and I could have got those highs in, we could have been a lot further along a lot quicker. Yeah, I think this is really it's the difference between a bootstrapping business and a, you know, a proper funded one. And obviously, you know, I'm involved in two in both of them. You're right in the funded one, you get to have a plan of the people that you want to hire and how they will fit into a system and how they'll make sense over time.

37:11and in a bootstrapped company you really can only generally see the one hire in front of you at most times or you just have really great discipline for long enough and wait long enough to build up the reserve to then hire two or three but very few people do that so you are like super incrementally growing and fundamentally like trying to get your culture right when the growth is so slow as well is also so complicated, right? Like that's another thing too. It's, you know, culture feels so different going from one to two. Culture feels so different going from two to four. But when it goes from one to two and two to four and then maybe no one else for another year as well, you know, you kind of have to sort of create this energy and this vibe that's so tight knit at that level.

38:06and yeah I mean I guess where I'm where I'm sort of leading towards with this is wanting to know you mentioned you hired these high-level roles at 2020 what was your MRR like then and by the way that's a monthly recurring revenue to listeners that don't know that term it's specifically a subscription type of term often in software but you were mentioning before like for example you were 8k MRR and then you were thinking about your first hire and then you've then you've talked about you know and suddenly we're in 2020 and you've got a head of growth and a head of products and like you know these kind of people where were you positionally as a company then what had changed yeah so as a company i'm literally loading up the dashboard now actually to give you an exact figure so in january 2020 we made 110 000 pounds so doing all right you know doing things are going well so it's like it almost feels like it's a waste not to do this this business is going places and uh if we if i don't if i don't jump on this if i don't put the team in place then it's i'm gonna waste it it's gonna um yeah it's gonna it's gonna be a real waste of all this momentum of being at the right place at the right time in terms of the other thing about the culture side of things as well was you know going from being on your own to growing a team and say one or two people you don't need to think about this too much um but you need to think about it to an extent is and then going to three to four and then hiring top level people as well was you really need to codify what it is that you think makes your business successful and what it is that gets you out of bed every day and that comes just instinct to came coming as instinct to me right I'd never had to like articulate this in any sort of way and to unpack that and to detangle it and to figure out which bits actually were important and which bits weren't was so difficult and that was what I spent hours and hours with with my coach is like figuring out that stuff and you know I remember at one point being uh really thinking like I wanted the office to be uh decorated a certain way you know back in 2018 or something and um it was someone else's job to like do the office and uh and it was a big deal and my coach was like well what is this is this is this business about what you want it you know is it is it is this business all about you or is it about what you want to achieve and it's like actually yeah you're right this is a complete detail that is not important at all um i should not be like holding on to this idea this isn't the thing this isn't the thing you know so so untangling all that stuff when you've got all when you can make all the decisions and you can act so instinctively to then coding that into values in terms of what you think it is that makes this formula successful was a lot of work so i guess you're you're you're building a team you're codifying things you're you're doing the things that you know ultimately at some point every business owner figures out that they need to do the question is like it's been at this point almost 10 years and yeah you've had an exit and bought it back and all the rest of it but are you still interested are you still motivated every day and if so why like what is it that is getting you out of bed every day yeah so 2020 got these new hires and uh it's exciting because we've got this new team in place um covid comes along and then actually we've got a completely different uh you know a completely different uh mindset we throw our strategy out the window and we've got to go into survival mode and we bet on events coming back and sure enough they come back and in 2021 our revenue has is doing really really well so in 2021 we made um 2.4 million pounds and we had profit margins of 50 percent and nps of 67 um we sold 6.7 million tickets that year so you know things are going really really well and i should be feeling amazing i should be feeling like this is it i've made it and and essentially i have made it right like it felt like this is success and but yeah i mean that that is right in so many objective measures that success you know more than anything you've got 50 profit margin so you're doing it right yeah and the thing was it was the feeling was like exactly that question why what am I getting out of bed for what am I doing this for like are we just going to keep growing this thing is we just is the goal just to get that bar that line to keep going up and to the right like is that is that all it's for like what's the what's the point in it and so I had this real moment of uh reflection of okay well what is it what is it all for actually what do i love about work and a whole bunch of things came to mind right working with a great team was one of them right um you know going on team trips um and uh you know one thing we did was like we gave some money to charity ad hoc amount end of the year would give uh like five grand to a local community thing and that felt really good you know growth itself the opportunity provides and also like providing an outstanding service to all our customers so all this stuff was like yeah all that stuff's great um but how can i how can i bring that more to the fore and it be about that more than it be about just get the line going up to the right in terms of revenue because that's all that people talk about in tech and about and in terms of aspirations for tech businesses as well and i love this idea of business as a force for good and it wasn't you know it didn't just come across me at that point you know i didn't just think okay no i want to be about business force of good something i've been talking about throughout but not really articulating i have little spatterings of things here and there of like okay we'll give a bit of money to charity or um you know we'll um i don't know have charity discount or uh these kinds of things and so i said to the team uh the leadership team i said i explained that i was feeling demotivated like great that we've got this far everyone's done a really great job like what amazing results well done um but what are we doing it for we need to we need to answer this question and so we had there's only so many Porsches Johnny can buy before he's born of Porsches so yeah it's one I mean it's one of those kind of you know um uh head of growth kind of put it as like it's a little bit like um being in a situation where yeah you've you've got lots of money and you don't know what to do right i suppose it's like it's what it's like um and i we go into this meeting and i say the the main remit is i don't want us to be business as usual i don't want us to um i don't want i don't want to think that way it just seems a bit depressing uh and we go into this meeting and we put loads of ideas down and we come up with this idea called growth on purpose and this is now our like our mantra our vision for how we want to grow and the idea is that for every ticket we sell, we want to have a positive impact across all our stakeholders.

44:55And I think that's a really key point across all our stakeholders. That's our users. That's our team. That's the planet. And we made a whole bunch of decisions to bring all this together from being a smattering of things and kind of some nice ideas to being something really tangible. And so a few of the things that we like committed to at that point was like, okay, well, we'll do a profit share scheme. So we set up 15 % profit share, uh, end of the year, we shout 15 % of the team. And we do that based on pay grade or anything like that it's just split out and uh if you've been around a bit longer you get a little bit more um we also decided to donate a penny uh we call it a penny for the planet we donate a penny to climate causes for every ticket we sell so then we found some charity partners that we work with all about restoring wildlife so cumbria wildlife trust ocean conservation trust and a couple of others and so for every ticket we sell we put a penny aside and uh we donate every quarter quarter just gone we donated 32 000 pounds across our across our charity partners and last year it was like over 140 grand we donated and it really and then and then on top of that then we also became b corp certified just like uh you guys are at heights and as you know it's a difficult process it's not something you do uh lightly and um so then we try having a physical supply chain and see what lightly right yeah exactly yeah yeah yeah sure it's even harder um but we wanted this external accountability we didn't want to just be feeling like okay cool we're doing some good stuff pat ourselves on the back we wanted it to be like you know held to a high standard and so b corp obviously is the gold standard um for this sort of thing so yes we've packaged it all together in this growth on purpose and honestly this transformed my motivation like i'm more motivated today with the idea of how far can we grow this business knowing that the growth is positive from all stakeholders um and it'd be a force for good and how can we inspire other businesses as well to do the same um so yeah that to me now is the real motivating thing that's my why now that's why i get out of bed and it's like it's like tuning that tuning that growth more towards positive impact than it is by default basically yeah and i think there's a really interesting lesson here so a lot of bootstrap businesses really struggle and you know you've described a business over 10 years.

47:04The first thing I wanted to say is the thing that people never consider is everyone thinks about what happens if and when my business fails. That's sensible and logical. Not many people think about what happens if it doesn't fail and it just carries on and at some point after 10 years you really like I mean usually much sooner than 10 years you really need a good reason to just go back into work and just keep doing it because at some point you feel stuck you feel stuck doing the thing that you started like it's amazing being an employee giving your best work to a company and then if you want to just leave and you know move on and and give your best work to another company that will pay maybe even more for your time so founders don't really have that freedom and especially not bootstrap founders.

47:58So you have to really position the company to a certain point to actually have any position to maneuver yourself. And I think there's multiple ways of doing this. Now for a lot of bootstrap founders, the fires keep on coming, the problems keep on coming. And if you're a problem solving type of person, that actually can often be enough motivation for you because you believe that one time you're gonna solve the problem that's gonna solve all the other problems and everything's gonna go away and everything's gonna be successful and then it will all be great. But actually, you know, sometimes you build a business over 10 years and it becomes successful and profitable and kind of looks like it can't lose.

48:35You know, the core focus of how the business is set up, especially in technology businesses, of course, is at a point where you could go multiple directions. And I think what you've identified is an amazing adept, like framework to rediscover your own why inside your own company. yeah and I think bootstrapping is definitely uh the reason why that's been possible you know and one of the things that I say you know when talking about business as a force for good is be careful in the early days to not shut down your options you know if you if you take on investment and you're promising investors skyrocket growth you've made a promise and that's your that's that's what you're that's going to be the direction your business can have to go you're going to have to focus on that as the thing um and you may cut out the option of being like actually do you know know what I want to make this about purpose and so being aware of that early on which you might not be but it's good to check in and see see if it see if it might be to keep those options open as as it grows I guess a really important question is you know what next like do you actually want to sell the business at some point or has rediscovering this sort of taken that off the table and I know it's a really hard question to ask on a podcast where you know you might feel like you have to answer a certain way but I'm really curious genuinely like how do you feel about it all yeah I feel really excited about it I feel like we've got so much potential to grow the business and I feel like there's so much there's so much possibility there's so much opportunity in the tech industry to rethink how why we do business not how we do business why we do business I think there's a huge obsession with growth and I think we're not sure why as in like we don't stop to think why why why are we growing these businesses and uh yeah so i don't want to sell the business i want to use what we've got to demonstrate that you can have it all i want to demonstrate that you can have a purpose-driven business that is not only um it's not only for the sake of feeling good but for the sake of actually it drives growth as well so the the fact that we inject purpose into the business creates tons of motivation for me which means i you know put all my energy into my work every day it also means the team you know the the same for the same reasons you know the team are coming to work because they know that the impact that we have uh is is very meaningful and so that brings a lot of motivation it makes hiring easier it makes retention easier um and all of these things so what i really want to do is yeah take this business as far as it can go and show that business and purpose actually go a lot more hand in hand than we think and if we become more purpose-driven the growth will follow and will really help okay so tough question but as we're coming to the end if ticket taylor fails why will that happen what do you think the big stumbling blocks are that are likely to you know cause a great big unseen down fall what's your blind spot um ticket taylor fails it will be hmm what could it be um i think for us i think i mean it depends how you define failure as well like i think for us if we took on funding if something happened and we needed to raise money i think that would be a failure in my current version of things but maybe i did just my uh perspective on things there yeah i'll speak to the night before you take the money and be like just take it johnny it's okay um but you know that freedom actually like losing that freedom of like we're independent and that's what enables us to do all this stuff is like that would be a failure for me um i think uh i mean i struggle to like think what failure is because even if it all got taken away tomorrow it's still been amazing right so like in a way and i always used to think this as well i always used to think like to get over fear around stuff like when i bought it back from time out i always used to think anytime i was doing anything that was slightly anxious about i think well i could have always not bought it back you know so in a way it always feels like um uh there's been so much luck along the way that um so yeah i don't know i guess i guess like we're seeing a ton of momentum at the moment um because uh eventbrite have just put their prices up and so we're seeing a lot of new customers coming through there i think for us a failure around that might be um that we don't position ourselves correctly someone else comes in and um swoops up that business that's a real opportunity for us to like um yeah to to change change trajectory as a business um and i mean i think i guess just like you know we're we're we're we're a very broad platformer across multiple industries uh companies pop up in individual industries and uh that we can't necessarily compete with so that's something that could eat away at us is like an industry specific things coming along and kind of taking the market away from us piece by piece um which is obviously something that we're you know trying not to have as a blind spot yeah makes sense okay so uh 10 years in the hot seat well over 10 years in the hot seat as a bootstrap founder uh what would you say to your younger self to make this journey slightly easier i would say trust in your gut more like trust trust the ideas around business for good and just just want to know that he just pointed to his heart which might be the first problem but hey yeah yeah um yeah so really trusting trusting that instinct and because because it's often felt like it is going against the grain of of of uh certainly in tech the tech world so trusting that and being really confident about that but then also taking in as much as possible from how businesses grow as well so you know where i worked with a coach and that was absolutely transformative and so um fast forwarding that fast forwarding that process of working with a coach doing doing that more and uh but making sure that i that did not blind what what i felt in terms of how the business needs to be a force for good um yeah i think it's that it's right it's about being very like receptive to how businesses grow and advice from people um but being very uh fixed on the idea of okay this is why this is why i want to do it so adjust the interpret the advice with that filter would be would be would be the be the advice not very succinct yeah that's okay it wasn't one of your tips so not really a problem um okay the last question uh a lot of our listeners are bootstrappers right and that's something that we've learned and so what tips are you giving i want three tips for bootstrapping success from someone who has been doing this for over a decade yeah okay cool so hire people that align with what you want to do so making sure you know where you might want to take the business as you go and make sure you hire people that align with uh with with with that vision that's really important yeah be careful not to close down options always be very cautious about any uh one-way door that you're going through um because the more doors you can keep open the more uh you can evolve the business in the way that you want it to as as it goes um and then finally i think ultimately I think as humans we all care about legacy that that we leave behind and my tip not just to bootstrappers to any business leader is instead of thinking about positive impact and legacy as something that we might do in retirement or something that we might do once we've made all the money is how can we integrate it whilst we're making the money whilst we're growing the businesses because it's way more impactful.

56:42You know, businesses live way longer than people often do. So you can have a lot more legacy and a lot more impact if you work out how to integrate that into the growth engine of your business. Yeah, it's interesting because it's similar to just the general startup advice people give when people ask all those questions, which is just start. You want to make an impact? Just start. You want to leave a legacy? Just start. Same as starting a business, right? Yeah. And no step is too small as well, right? Like that's the other thing is people feel like, oh, if I do this, then I'll feel like I'm, I don't know, greenwashing or something.

57:16And it's like, don't worry about that. Just if you feel it, if it feels authentic, just do it. Yeah, great advice. Thank you, Johnny. Thank you so much for coming on Secret Leaders and sharing the story of TicketTaylor. As you know, I'm a very happy customer and I'll be continuing to use it for another decade. Thanks so much, Dan. It's been an absolute pleasure. If you enjoyed this episode and found it useful, please write us a review and subscribe wherever you listen to your podcast. It makes a real difference. And we genuinely love reading what you think. We read every single review. I've been your host, Dan Murray-Surter, and we'll be back next week with more lessons for entrepreneurs and leaders.

57:55This episode was produced by Alex Graham, Ruth Edwards, and all brought together by our head of podcast, Will Stollerman. See you next time.