The Part of the Story Nobody Talks About

Apparently, the best way to make money is to sell a business. Build one until it generates £500,000 to £1 million a year, then sell it for multiples. That's the advice. And it's probably right.

But that advice skips everything that matters.

It starts with belief

Maybe you want to build something and sell it. Maybe you're an entrepreneur chasing a number. Maybe you're the kind of person who wants to build something substantial, something that outlasts you. A legacy.

It doesn't matter which. You need an idea, you need belief, and you need passion, regardless. And not a little. Enough passion that it builds into a belief so strong it crystallises. Into a vision that lands so precisely you can put it on paper.

That vision needs to do two things. It needs to tell your story in a way other people understand it. And it needs to land in a market that actually exists. But if the market is there, you won't be the only one targeting it, so your message has to be stronger.

Passion. Belief. A crystal clear vision that translates into branding, a message you tell other people in such a way that it transfers your belief system forward.

Then comes the marketing. Which is really just repetition of that message in variations, going for so long that people actually start to notice. And it takes an awful lot of time. So you need to be very strong at execution. You need a system. And the system needs to be built on that belief, because without it you will fall flat on your face. You will run out of energy, and you will stop.

In this life, it's all about falling and getting back up, but not falling so hard that you can't.

People are different, and that changes everything

So you've got the strategy. You've got the branding. The marketing is running. And you're making the thing, the product, the service, whatever it is.

Now you need people. And people are messy. Believe me.

The first mistake you make is thinking they think like you. They don't. Two brains are never the same. In fact, they are never even slightly similar. Whatever you say, however clearly you think you've said it, you're wrong. And you will learn you were wrong, over years. It takes years to discover the very simple fact that people don't understand what you're saying, even if you speak exactly the same language, even if you're from the same town, maybe even the same home.

I've been reading David Rock's Quiet Leadership recently, and something in it crystallised what I've seen over two decades of working inside growing businesses. Your job as a leader is not to make people think like you. It is to understand that they are different and to build systems, real systems, that let them open their wings.

And those systems are needed far, far earlier than anyone expects.

Where I entered the story

Here is where I started to participate. We joined this business in the capacity of IT.

And let me tell you something I never thought about until now: we were one of the very first elements incorporated into this business. With belief, from the founders, that this would give it its wings.

Only now, looking back, do I see how everything rolled after that.

IT gave the business the ability to systemise. To standardise. To automate. To reduce and remove friction. To communicate internally and externally. To put its strengths into the areas they needed to be: marketing, operations, and eventually finance.

After we had been with the business for a year or two, only then did they employ a finance director. They did have a credit control person, but she also joined part-time, about a year after we were already in. She was the person who helped us build a proper agreement between NBS and the business.

Then came the finance director. And this was the person who made it all happen.

Ten years, step by step

It took ten years. Let me run through the journey.

They employed an HR person. Only then did they employ an IT manager, who freed the finance director from working with us directly, because by that point there was simply too much going on in IT.

The IT manager then employed an IT support coordinator, who worked directly with us. And through that coordinator, we helped the business grow even faster, introducing coordinated IT into the systems supporting production, marketing, and finance.

We supported all the processes a rapidly growing business requires. Onboardings. Offboardings. Emergency lockdowns. At the same time, we were improving the security of the business. More and more processes were created and intertwined within IT. We could look at them, review them, and improve them further. We could improve the IT processes of the IT we had implemented.

At some point, it just started to roll.

The owners could focus on what they were passionate about. When there were hiccoughs, we were removing them, most often before they even became a thing. Everything was standardised. If there was a problem anywhere, we knew how to sort it everywhere else. There were fewer problems. Less money spent.

Only then, with all of that underneath, could we start automating. Rapid onboarding. Rapid offboarding. Rapid workstation deployments. Rapid application deployments.

Documentation helped us move quickly around our systems. Nobody's holiday created a crisis. If there was a problem with something, thanks to having everything documented, in our documentation systems and in the tickets, which were documenting every change: who requested it, who approved it, why, what, how, when, change became managed. Controlled.

And eventually, every surface of the business was looking like what it was: an attractive, well-run proposition.

It got sold. For hundreds of millions of pounds.

The part nobody talks about

Coming back to the first thing I said: the quickest way to make money is to start a business and sell it.

I'll tell you this, you need IT at the very early stages. Or at least when you're at about ten to fifteen people and you can afford it. This is the very first thing you should implement. And if you cannot do it internally, delegate. Ideally, delegate to someone who can look after the whole lot for you, and who understands where you're coming from, where you are, and where you're going.

The technology we built for this business was kept after the sale. Not replaced.

We consider that the clearest measure of genuine integration.

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