From Police Officer to 7-Figure Exit: Eddie Whittingham’s No-BS Guide

Welcome to LaunchBase, a fast-paced podcast exploring the latest in tech funding and product launches.

In under 30 minutes, we break down key trends, interview industry leaders, and uncover what's driving the next wave of innovation. And now your host, Jon Radford. Hello, and welcome to another episode of LaunchBase. This is the podcast that dives into all things tech in under 30 minutes. I'm your host John Radford and each week I chat with individuals who shape the startup scale up and tech landscape. So my question for you today is are you a massive whopper?

If so the guest today is probably not the guest for you. Today I'm lucky to be joined by Eddie Whittingham who is a former police officer, a lawyer turned tech entrepreneur and Eddie founded the Defence Works which was a cyber security company, bootstrapped it from the ground up and successfully exited to Proofpoint, a Nasdaq listed company.

Eddie is now focused in the Ministry of Work, premium co-working space designed to bring together ambitious founders entrepreneurs and executives eddie also has a no-nonsense no bs approach to linkedin and speaks very openly about his journey and what he does every day so eddie thank you very much for joining us pleasure mate happy to help yeah great how was that introduction is there anything you want to add to that about your journey and where you've been about anything i've missed

any points that you want to add no i don't think so i'm happy to delve into some of that in a bit more detail with you.

Fantastic I do I do want to quickly before we go on talk about your your massive whoppers and all the other sort of stuff like at some point I don't know whether we do that now or when we get to it sort of what you're what you're doing later on but yeah I definitely want to touch upon that but we'll talk about the exit first because you know a lot of the people who kind of listen to the podcast a lot of people I'm connected with and I'm sure that you're connected with you you

engage with on a daily basis and also the people who come to your. Co-working space are building startups with a view to, I know some of them want to change the world and whatnot, but generally speaking, they want to make some money, right? And they want to exit. That's kind of the goal for a lot of people.

Let's talk about that, if you don't mind. Talk us through the journey, how it all started. I'd like the bootstrapping part of it. That's quite exciting for me because, you know, there's different narratives around how to build companies and all that sort of stuff. So talk us through that. And if there's something that comes out of I'll kind of dive into it a bit deeper, if that's right. Of course, yeah. So I started the startup originally in 2016.

So prior to that, I'd been a police officer for nine years. Then I went into law and quite quickly realized I hated it. Spent two years to get qualified because I'd spent all the time studying, so I thought I better qualify. Then within months of qualifying, I decided, like, now I need to escape. If I lock myself into sort of a decent wage, I'm knackered and I'll never do it. Right. So originally, I actually just started selling my time for money, really.

So we were providing corporate debt investigation reports to law firms. That was literally the idea because quite simply, I'd seen what we were getting charged to do that at the law firm. And I thought, well, I could kind of do that with my background a lot easier. Right. So started out really organically, quickly realized there was a bigger opportunity in cybersecurity. And I hadn't, truthfully, had any experience in cybersecurity.

I just kind of saw the opportunity was there. And I thought if I can learn about it quickly enough, then I can capitalize on that.

Built that business which was basically a sass business we had like what you call a simulated phishing platform where we send out phishing emails to members of staff to test how they're responding to them whether that's going to be a security risk or not because that's one of the key sort of cyber security risks that companies face and then backing up then with training but we we basically tried to make the training i sort of say the least shit of what

training there is because most online training we all know is absolutely dog shit right yeah so our role was to try and make it the least shit so we had like bbc comedy writers writing comedy sketches it's.

A good bar to have yeah yeah it's a good slogan actually yeah so we had like bbc comedy writers writing comedy sketches we had a team of animators making animated like interactive video content and things like that yeah the goal was was simply to to do that i was to try and keep it yeah keep the content as good as it could be in in the context of its online training about cyber security long long story short bootstrapped that i was a sole founder we got a few

lucky breaks along the way gdpr came around which massively catapulted our revenue and then right place market conditions wise for an acquisition yeah a couple of the bigger players in the marketplace didn't have great training and they were looking for a way to kind of tick a few boxes with their clients and sort of a you know industry reports to say they had bad training how could they fix that and then as i see it you know

really by acquiring my company they kind of ticked that box for the next year and kept some customers happy so it was kind of for them a bit of a a no-brainer acquisition for me and a no-brainer sale really cool there's a couple of bits that I've just struck a few things in me that the one you just said you've got a couple of lucky breaks.

I'm I'm a bit of a believer that sort of luck is when hard work kind of meets preparation and I don't know where you sit on this and like there's a lot of narrative about kind of the the grind is dead and it's all about work-life balance and all that sort of stuff where do you where do you sit on this I kind of feel like if you're a founder it's all about the grind and luck is what happens when you work hard and you make the luck, as it were. I agree. I think it's interesting. I think you...

Luck's still an important part right i think to be like in averted commerce successful you need like to work extremely hard undoubtedly you need like some natural talent like i was able to create that content in a in a way and bootstrap it in a way that meant it was successful not everyone could have done that but then the third bit that people don't normally like to admit to because it diminishes their achievements is luck but i agree without

those other two you're never going to benefit from the look so you've got to put yourself in a position to benefit from the look that if that look comes around in my in my case it was at market conditions yeah so yeah sort of make luck easy to find you if that makes sense i think i think so and like yeah mate the whole work life thing is is a complete load of bollocks like if you are starting a business you have to work incredibly hard yeah it's no coincidence

that these people on the sort of the influencer arc they they work really hard they get really successful then they in order for them to be able to continue selling their courses and books they tell you it's not worth risking your work life balance for even though that's what they did to get to the the place they're at now right.

Having having said that there's also the counter argument to that that just because you work hard does not mean you might be successful you might be because you can work yeah you gotta work smart as well quite yeah so like you know people will have worked a lot harder than me and made a lot less money but yeah that's why the luck came into it i think yeah yeah but so so on that going going back to the start of that like it it

didn't sound like you it didn't have this sort of traditional founder market fit type thing in terms of you'd worked at like a cyber security company for 10 years and really learned your craft and all that stuff you just sort of gradually went into it and yeah talk us through that and where you sit on that how important it is you know because you work with investors and all that sort of stuff now on the other side i think it's,

It's one of them like myths sometimes that you can do that or that every business does that.

Fundamentally, business is just about spotting an opportunity, isn't it? In my case, I was providing those services to the law firms. I was basically making a very small wage doing that. And I was like, oh, that's not really what I want to do either. And then I'd seen someone talk about the idea of selling software as a service rather than selling the time.

And I was like, that's interesting. and that's what triggered me to go literally from that talk i went away to my desk and i scribbled down anything in my skill set that i had at that stage and at the time the things that i did have in my skill set were i've done like a lot of fraud investigations from the police at the law firm albeit i'd only been there two years i'd involved i was involved in like quite a lot of policy stuff for like anti-fraud and bro

anti-bribery laws and stuff like that and fraud. I figured that initially, maybe the service would be a thing to help businesses prevent fraud. The numbers were all there, like, oh, fraud's really bad, scary, and all this. But fundamentally, was there a big, I guess, a trigger pain point for someone to buy a service? But originally, I started out with this idea on paper of offering a whole plethora of services to help businesses reduce fraud. There was going to be a policy management tool.

There was going to be online training there was going to be a helpline there was going to be like another helpline where you could ring up and like shop someone if you thought they were being fraudsters all this kind of stuff that i just dreamt up and then very quickly when i started to try and sell it because that's the fucking test right if you if you cannot sell something you have a hobby not a business correct, when i started to try and sell it no one was interested in all

of that shit and but what they were interested they were saying ah actually i could do some training to teach my staff around this this and this and that became the cyber security angle so many familiar stories like there's a pivot in there somewhere then isn't there 100 and then it sounds like was there would you say that potentially you took too long to get to that learning part no no i don't think so because really the reality of my journey on that

first year was i started in the february 2016. That was when I was doing the work with the law firms. Come the June, July, I was starting to think about this fraud idea. And then come the end of that year, we were doing the cybersecurity training with our first customers. So it probably moved quite quick. Didn't feel probably like it at the time. But if I look back now... Now we've seen people take six months to not even build an MVP.

You know so well so fully enough i i was chatting to this about someone yesterday where i think i sold in may 2020 i've got a conversation in my linkedin with somebody who was building a disruptive startup in 2021 we've got a long sort of email linkedin thread and they are still they still haven't launched it and on there i just saw them do a post about they're doing a beta launch in 2025 i'm like fucking hell mate like four years ago like just fucking yeah because the reality is

it's probably a shit idea correct so you know as soon as you launch it unfortunately the bubble's gonna burst and yes correct but you can pretend you're a tech entrepreneur in the meantime yeah right yeah and you can you can go on podcasts like these and stuff like that yeah so let's go through to you you launched it you got customer feedback which is all of the lessons that we all hear about and all that sort of stuff

you've actually exited a business so that's something i'd like to focus on actually because we know about all of the you know customer feedback stuff that's all great you obviously did it you built the business scaled it to how many people.

Staff wise we had um yeah i think at the largest we were 10 but i think when we sold it we were like eight i think okay so nice so sort of still yeah nice yeah yeah yeah great so how did the acquisition happen did you kind of actively you know go out and look for a buyer or did someone come to you yeah we'd made some like deliberate efforts to kind of get noticed in the marketplace mm-hmm, One of which was basically in the industry we were in, it was almost like,

it was I think called Gartner Peer Insights, which was like a trust pilot equivalent. You can pay to be on Gartner and be in like their magic quadrant, which says you're a thought leader and all this sort of shit. But it was like 50 grand a year and I wasn't paying it. So we ended up going on their Gartner Peer Insights platform on the basis that it was just you could get your customers to leave reviews and it was free. It didn't cost anything.

So we basically set up like a whole marketing campaign really to our current customer base.

To say like are you happy with our services if you are please leave us a review but we had like a whole email series followed by the customer account managers would reach out and then if they didn't like respond to that then i'd reach out because i had i'd obviously onboarded a lot of these customers and we sort of in the space of three months went from like zero to over 100 five-star reviews on this platform and at the time like part

of that was a we're going to use that for our own marketing but it was also just to sort of start to get a little bit noticed.

It it probably happened then a lot quicker than i anticipated would because not long after we had like two of the big american players sniffing around one of them wanted to license our content the other one wanted to acquire us but that was just literally a linkedin message wow from both of them actually it was just a linkedin not connected to you know from you know the general manager of this the division improve point saying would you be interested in the collaboration

and obviously i sort of just naively went into the start of that process off and said well yeah let's let's have a chat and see where it leads and it led to an exit yeah and talking through that any like any stumbling blocks any problems any lessons learned. Do you know like i hear a lot of like horror stories of.

Exit and i have to say mine was like relatively painless those are the usual like not hearing back from a while blah de blah like you know i think i think they originally reached out in the august and i sold in the may so it's still a relatively quick timeline but there's still periods in that particularly the start where it was a will they won't they are they interested they'd sort of danced around valuation quite a lot and then they were due to fly out to to come

to see us in manchester and they wanted to meet the team and i sort of politely but firmly emailed them on the sort of the day before they were due to fly out saying like look if we're not going to even get a ballpark figure in mind yeah so who blinks first on that one did you get the number out of them yeah we got like some assurances that we would be in the same game at least right because i was like my my fear at the time was we were such a small team if i suddenly go oh by the way guys like

let's have a look let's all chat to these americans that my whole team are gonna like shit themselves yeah because they're gonna be gone in six months well they're gonna think i'm i'm trying to sell the company truthfully at that point wasn't i was i was looking at the you know what opportunities there are but i didn't want someone just to come in really upset the dynamics of the team and then them give me a derisory offer of a million quid and me say well

that was a waste of time and i've upset my team as well do you know what i mean so it was kind of like that that there was that but but generally the process was pretty straightforward and and actually the acquiring company proof point were were really good and really fair they'd like there wasn't sort of loads of smoke and mirrors.

There's the usual negotiation tactics it was yeah maybe i'm looking back at it it feels a lot easier than it was i don't know anyone advising you on that a couple of people but.

Not massively i'd like financial advice and a few people i would trust for advice but i wouldn't like we didn't have like a you know a an exit strategist or anything like that it was just i get a feeling that you're might be reading between the lines a little bit here that you're not massively big on a lot of these coaches and strategists and experts and it depends on it i think the problem is anyone can be an expert these days like all they need to do is have some,

relatively polished content and all of a sudden we believe them so no i'm not i'm not fully sold on it and you know what that and that comes through my own lived experience of it because when I first started my business, and I say this a lot, actually, I think when people first start the business, they're in a uniquely vulnerable position. And I think it's an industry that gets preyed upon. So when I first started my business, I had a guy who was introduced to me as a mentor.

He did a month's free mentoring with me. And I was not in awe of him at the time, but I remember thinking, oh, he's really helpful. And then he ended up then asking for two and a half grand a month and 10% of my business. And I was like.

With respect mate you haven't fucking done anything you've you've been a you've been a senior leader at a but you've but you've not done it you're not you've not built from zero to a million or whatever yeah so you've got no credibility in my eyes yes you've been a you've been a vp at a company that's turned over 10 million but a lot of people can do that a lot of people can't go from zero to to whatever absolutely like it's and they're very different skill

sets it's not to diminish him he was clearly very good at what he did but he wasn't good at what i needed no and so that's the bit that pisses me off i think there's a lot of people who prey upon startups because like say you're uniquely vulnerable and you're probably more open to to that so i get i get a bit pissed off with that whole thing yeah no fair it is fair it is so you exited your company there would have been an earn out period

or something like that i'm assuming but then that allowed you to let's talk move forward to present day the ministry of work which looks amazing by the way you know i've seen i've seen it all and you've done a brilliant job.

Talk us through that talk us through your vision and where you're at and you know what the plans are yes that it's a kind of weird thing you obviously sell a business and you're like right now what next yeah a little bit and obviously it was a life-changing amount of money and i could you know i could sit and do nothing invariably the people who think oh you go sit on a beach the people who won't sell a business it's not in your nature right no you want to still achieve

stuff so i'd sort of said from for a long time to my wife i was like i think a co-working space in the suburbs would work really well yeah only if it's in a cool building because you still got to compete with the lure and the pull of a city center sure and i guess when i obviously had then the capital to sort of execute on that idea that that idea probably span around in my head a little bit more and so i was looking find myself looking on

like commercial right move and so on and so on and then i saw this place come up for sale it was an old chapel derelict basically and i went for look around which is the fatal mistake you should never do particularly if you've got sort of money burning a hole in your pocket because you're going to fall in love and then that's it yeah yeah and I sort of walked in and I I brought a guy to look around it with me who's a builder who I sort of trusted his opinion on

and he's like yeah this is this is a fucking shit hole it's going to need a lot of work and then I sort of rang my wife sheepishly and said I think I've just bought an old church it's one of them places you can see past.

It's the usual kind of cliche you get on fucking grand designs in it but you could sort of see the bones were good and if i could pull it off i looked at the catchment i mean i did my research obviously before doing anything rash but i looked at the catchment area thought yeah even if it's sort of a very traditional co-working space it will do well it's not a big site we've we've only got like we've got 36 desks upstairs and eight private offices so it's not it's not you know 20

000 square foot building or anything it's 5 000 square foot so i'm pretty confident that this could be both a great a great asset for me to own because it's going to appreciate in value right you know it's an investment but also a great income because it will it'll give me a month a monthly income and more probably importantly at that stage like a purpose because what i didn't want to do is just kind of struggle around you know you've gone

from having a team and then they they you leave that team and then you're on your own again and it's kind of a strange place to be so it served a few purposes for me it's an it's an income it's an asset but it's also giving me a real purpose so we so i posted about purpose yesterday because it's one of my four p's that purpose there talk us through what the real kind of purpose and the passion of like ministry of work is and why it exists and why it's sort of different to

a yeah well so interesting a year ago it started out just as like a an alternative to co-working the city center sure what's been really interesting the last year and it's and it's really helped hone and now focus my purpose even more so because we're outside the city center we've actually attracted a different crowd now my experience of. City center co-working is it's mainly young professionals often in the very creative space yes here because.

Of where we are we've attracted a slightly older crowd potentially a little bit more serious or a bit further along in their journey and invariably they've been business leaders or founders so that's kind of happened organically why do you think that is just because they can't be asked commuting into the center i think so truthfully like i'm a bit old now i'm 39 i've got two kids i can't be asked going into town every day and that's pretty much almost the motto of the building yeah but

then as so that's happened this last year and then meanwhile i've sort of seen this this new trend in london called a work club where it's like combining the sort of social elements but also with somewhere to actually work and then interestingly saw a guy then lift that from london and apply it to southampton and he's got a really great booming ecosystem he's got like 120 odd members or whatever he's up now and it's like really powerful and so i've been looking at that from afar

from like the london model and saying well. We're sort of organically doing that maybe we should lean fully into it so that's what we're doing from from the start of this year in 2025 we're leaning massively into the idea of this work club so, It's like a nuanced and more intentional direction. So rather than just be co-working for anybody, like day passes and all that sort of stuff, we are now strictly only for ambitious founders and business leaders.

And I say that in the nicest possible way, not even founders at super early stage. If you're a super early stage founder, there are loads of really great free programs in the city center run by NatWest, Barclays, and various other organizations that will help you get your idea from zero to 10 grand a month.

But what we are focusing on is the ones who are trying to get to one two three million turnover yeah okay and try and attract that because that's where in my eyes the sort of level of support drops off yeah the idea is we're way more intentional i mean to now who we let in the building okay with us how are you qualifying that then it's looking at basically baseline qualification would be revenue and team numbers in the team but not strictly because there's

always going to be the people who might be turning they might have only be turning 50 grand but actually they're on they're on a fast track scale to getting to getting big quick but generally that's the sort of baseline and then the power of that becomes you get people with the same challenges in the same building and there's all sorts of really cool stuff happens whether that's collaboration whether that's work passing around or whether that's just knowledge sharing and that's where

it's quite exciting and it's still quite an unusual thing to happen so we're still early in that we only launched that like literally a week ago we've had five five people join that work club already i'm confident we'll get that to 50 by the end of the year that's like my sort of medium goal but my stretch goal is to try and get to 100 as quickly as we can because i think if we do that we've got this like amazing self-sustaining ecosystem of really interesting businesses yeah right.

Businesses who want to get involved in that what sort of what sort of support can they expect if they if they get in sure i think it's a threefold benefit really as i see it you you get exclusive access to the the space it's a premium workspace more almost of like a hospitality kind of led environment than than a workspace one so it's access to that you can access it 24 7 you get meeting rooms and you get conference rooms and

all that sort of stuff that's the stuff you expect of any co-working space right but i think the benefit then comes in the second and the third part so the second part being that exclusive community access to being amongst those like-minded people so we've had like a member join she actually you know is she's in preston so it's a little bit further out of the initial catchment area than i envisaged but she wanted to join because she fundamentally wants to surround herself with.

People who are dreaming a bit bigger she's got an md in place in the business but she wants to surround herself by this not the visionary more visionary people but people are going to make her dream rather than you know she turns over a million quid well she wants to get to 10 million quid her md might want to just get to 2 million yeah so it's trying to find that the people are going to challenge her and i think for me it's like the idea of i

want to always be the thickest person in the room and i think if you if you've got that mentality you're going to surround yourself by people who inspire you and push you on and on and on yeah great man so the community is steve jobs is hiring methodology was that you know i want to hire people smarter than me because they push me on yeah absolutely it's that community that's really powerful but then the bit that then like almost

stokes the value from the communities like the events that we run whether that can be like the informal breakfast one lunch club or.

Like so they're like the social value ones but then we also have like the educational value and the support value so we'll have the shared knowledge founders talks that we do throughout the building we'll invite experts in to come and deliver their knowledge on a on a strictly no sales base it has to be value-led and then also things like we have a think tank so a bit of like a roundtable group where people bring a problem we'll

all try and flesh through it in a really small group so kind of like a building where it's like chatham chatham house rules no selling trustworthy you can share your deepest darkest problems about your business and you'll get some.

Sometimes brutally frank but needed advice as well you need yeah 100 you can't i say like you can't go into your workspace and start talking with your staff about how many people you're going to need to make redundant before the end of the year because you can't have that conversation you can have that and it happens yeah wow okay that's pretty powerful yeah i think so so going from one to 10 million is quite a big jump and oftentimes people need or want a VC capital to

kind of accelerate that is that do you have kind of a network of VCs that people can kind of tap into or is that not really part of what you guys do or yeah we were so we're really well connected with the VCs here in Manchester and various sort of angels as well I wouldn't say that's our focus though I think there's there's a lot of that in town already we're we're more focused on like helping the businesses build up and have the right support network from the people the like-minded people

almost but yeah certainly like we've got we've got quite a few here have been raising some some serious numbers you're a bootstrap founder to exit where do you sit on the kind of bootstrap versus raising capital debate it totally depends i used to be fiercely against investment truthfully but that's because i didn't get it i've since had a business that we've had investment for. And there's a right place at the right time. If you can avoid it, then bootstrap it.

The value of my business when I sold it was because I owned 100% of the shares. So actually, a relatively modest, in inverted commas, sale was tremendous for me. But to get that same money out, if we'd have had an investment, I'd have had to sell it for like five times as much.

So it depends. But there are a lot of businesses that genuinely can't scale without without real investment yeah and you also don't want to miss an opportunity by being anti-investment so i've probably changed my tune on a little bit i used to be very sort of anti it but i totally get it now yeah i think it is a it depends thing but you know i'm i'm a i'm a fan of that kind of chasing capital once you've got a little bit of something and there's tools out there now to sort of help you build

like early if we're talking purely like sort of tech products and that sort of stuff you know you can get that early validation pretty quickly so you shouldn't be sort of chasing investment from day one no no it's like wasting your time yeah i see that a lot yeah you haven't got like a few grand to put in your pocket then probably you're in the wrong game you know that's my harsh opinion no i think you're right and i think like ultimately

and if if you if you sort of being frustrated by that you need to find a way to.

Get a few grand and that might be you're gonna have to go and uber for a few you know a few two nights a week for two years save up if it really if you're really that passionate about it i reckon you can make it happen and like the bootstrap thing isn't easy so i quit the loft i then managed to get some like weekend work it was relatively decent paid work but i was working monday friday in the business and then the weekend i was doing the work like paid work so it was a pain in

the ass and i worked really hard and that's the bit that people sometimes forget from, people's journeys it's like it was a fucking slog and like there was no guarantee i would have got to the end either i just was putting one foot in front of the other with the best of intentions and that's sometimes it as well one foot in front of the other that's it that's a good one there's a good book on that as well though because that's

that's exactly what it is just keep keeping one foot in front of the other eddie we're getting close to to the end of our time i'd like to sum up by seeing if there's a you've just given a little nugget there but any other advice for sort of let's talk about say early to. Mid-stage startups and scale-ups, what sort of advice, you know, if you're going from that kind of early to mid-stage? I think fundamentally, wherever you are based, it's trying to find that network of other people who get it.

There's no point surrounding yourself in a room of other people who are losing. You need to be around other people who actually are trying to achieve what you're trying to achieve and probably in a different space because you'll learn from them, but you'll also be inspired from them.

And you'll also like dream a little bit bigger because you're not going to you're not going to reach the moon if you're only shooting for you know somewhere half between you need to shoot beyond the moon and you'll probably land at the moon it's that kind of vibe so you know i i'm seeing that value firsthand here i i saw that value firsthand when i joined an accelerator program when i first started my business because i literally had no experience in business so i was

learning from people ahead of me and then the sort of the level we get in businesses that we get in here it's like you need to have people ahead of you to learn from there's no point, you know, sitting still and expecting the same results. Eddie, thank you for joining us. Pleasure, mate. Eddie from the Ministry of Work. And if you are looking for a co-working space just outside of town in Manchester, this is your guy. And thank you for joining us on this episode of Launchbase.

If you like this, please do subscribe, leave us a review, and we will see you on the next one. Cheers, Eddie. Thanks, mate. Thanks. Thanks for tuning into Launchbase. If you enjoyed this episode don't forget to subscribe and share. Stay tuned for more insights on tech, funding, and product launches. See you next time!