EE 348 - Execution Beats Idea Every Time - Ronan Perceval, founder of Phorest

I was thinking about the branding on the trucks that I was going to have working for me.

Um. So he did that and you know I'd I'd have gone out in deliveries with him, loaded the van in the morning before school. You know I would have been part of that, plucking the pheasants even during pheasant season we won't do the rhyme.

He wasn't really, you know, he wasn't into that at all. So I'm going to have to go and have my own business then where I can do what I want. Um. So I kind of had those thoughts from an early, early, early days. And then that morphed into, you know, went to college here in dublin, met for the first time, met people like-minded who also wanted to start a business.

Um, and the two people I met who thought that way were one was dylan collins, who's fairly well-known entrepreneur now, and another guy, sean Blanchfield as well. And the three of us were like, right, we're going to have our own business. Didn't know what it was going to be, but I was always thinking, yeah, we're going to do this business, but in my mind I'm going to do this for the rest of my life.

You know, this wasn't like going to have a business and sell it in five years and then do another business like this serial entrepreneur or that catchphrase or whatever. I just never thought that. I was like, no, I'm doing this for the long run. And then over time that kind of morphed into this idea that your life, this is going to be your life's work.

I guess is probably the way describe it now like having your own business and building it, creating it, developing it and seeing where it goes over your life, your lifetime, so that's 40 or 50 years or more you know, whatever that amount of time is, but long, a long time, and that's just that idea just appealed to me, and it just appealed to me when I was in my early 20s and has just stuck it's so fascinating more now.

I mean, in tech, technology moves quickly, so companies come in and out of you could say in and out of fashion, but in and out of usefulness as well. Do you know what I mean? If they don't evolve and if you're very successful at doing something and solving something, it can be quite hard to evolve. I know, like today, that that was kind of a more accepted kind of view and I'm today.

You know, when you have your Googles and Facebooks and Amazons and stuff and they're all like massive and they're not going anywhere because they're constantly able to adapt to the new technologies or if it's AI or whatever, they're able to, just you know, kind of consume that and make it part of what they are, then there's such a scale.

yeah, they're not going to get blown over by a stiff wind, yeah exactly, exactly, yeah, but for smaller tech companies, it is more likely that you create something that's successful and then you sell it before it becomes, you know, not useful. Do you know what I mean?

Usually, yeah, the names that you think of aren't being gobbled up, but, like there's constant. You know, startups and smaller companies are constantly being acquired and stuff like that. So I think it happens there. We just don't have that many truly massive tech companies. So we do have one. I mean some. I suppose it's someone like stripe or something like that you could say is a huge tech company, although it's technically wasn't really started here there's not that many companies like that.

Do you know what I mean? So of that scale, like, let's say so, when you're a smaller scale, you are more likely to be gobbled up. Do you know what I mean? So I think that I understand that now, but it definitely frustrated me. I used to write blog posts about this, like 10 years ago. It used to frustrate me how people have a good idea it's going well and then they'd sell, you know, and that seemed to be what everyone wanted you to do. The investors wanted you to do that.

Um, you know the founders, who you know. Everyone wanted you to do that.

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Do you know what I mean?

So we do ideas like this generally, we're just like we're going to create a dot com or whatever. And it's interesting. Some of those ideas Like that's like Etsy now or something, do you know what I mean? Like there's, and that kind of taught me Something as well. You have loads of ideas and all the ideas Are probably fairly good, but it's actually Executing them and getting them Actually working properly.

So we went around the buttery which I think is gone now in Trinity, and the pubs where people would be hanging out in the summer and we used to just collect people's phone numbers Because mobiles had just come out, maybe the year before, and people had just started texting. Because phones came out for a year or two and then people started texting. I think 2000 or something, the first text message sent, so people were texting.

And think 2000 or something, the first text message sent, so people were texting and we just got all the names and numbers and wrote them down. We collected maybe a thousand, and in those days there's no GDPR, so you just go can I have your phone number and people would go yeah because there's like sounds great, but nobody ever thought yeah, yeah, deadly, I'll get a text.

We say, yeah, we'll just send you some texts on stuff, cool stuff, maybe places to go or whatever cool, they're like yeah so you just collected a thousand. I remember we were going, we're going to collect a thousand. So it took us like a week or two to do that. And then we went to.

We found this company in Limerick that sent bulk text, built a little web page that could do it, sitting on top of that thing, and then we went to um, uh, bars and nightclubs all around trinity so like um, there's a place called pegs I don't know if any of these mean anything, but there's the pod and there's all these kind of the kitchen and it was quite a good in those days like there was a massive nightclub scene in dublin, which doesn't really exist now, but it was like huge then the student

market is huge, yeah and it was just like students and get them in vodka, red Bull for three euros, kind of thing, you know. And so we went to these places and just said like we'll send a text message out for whatever hundred euros and we just put an offer on it and if they show it on their phone they can get in and get this offer or whatever, and that just just went gangbusters, like I remember, for that place, pegs. It was like a tuesday night. We sent out the text and it was a queue.

I remember we went around onto nasa street and it was just a queue of students like all the way down class you know what I mean, and we were just like. We did that.

If you texted a number, they sent you back the Smirnoff Ice logo and like, this is pre-smartphone and it's, like you know, pixelated kind of logo thing that you could put on your phone. So when you started your phone it had the Smirnoff Ice logo.

So we have to go to pay phone and ring them and constantly say you know where the account's receivable here. We haven't got the money yet, or whatever, and they knew that it was out in the street.

We did that and that went on all day and then the next day she rang us and said stop fucking texting me. Here's the money. So we were like cool. I'd say we were probably the first people ever to use text messaging to collect bad debts.

We were like controlled text messaging, like it wasn't like right, we're going to be a bulk text messaging, that's going to be our idea for a company. We were like this is just to help get us going and really what we want to do is something deeper or more, you know, more meaningful or something like a really cool technology thing. And sean blanchfield, who was, became the cto of demonware and he had he was working on his phd and it was basically like a distributed systems kind of thing.

So basically it was this idea that computer games it was really expensive to do computer games online at the time because it's not like today where you have AWS and you've you know, just a totally different scale of providing online connectivity and things like that. In those days, everyone's still on dial-up and things like that. In those days, everyone was still on dial-up. You know, having a server in a like a server farm or something like that is like massively expensive.

You know, and if you wanted your own website then you actually had to go and buy a server somewhere. Do you know what I mean and put it in yourself? Interlocation you know it was a huge amount of work. So when computer games were starting to be played online, it was massively expensive for the computer game companies. So he was working on this idea peer to peer networking idea similar to Skype.

I don't know if you remember Skype was really innovative at the time because it didn't require a server you spoke directly to you. You used the power of your pc on each end to do the to do the call. So it didn't need the server, um, and at the time that was needed. From a cost point of view you couldn't scale skype. They'd have needed like infinite resources, like you know, in terms of the cloud and everything like that, to fund it, which wouldn't have been possible to do free calls right.

So that allowed it to be free. So that was the idea. So it was like we'll take that concept and apply it to computer games and have people play computer games to each other where it's peer-to-peer, and then you don't need these, you know hugely expensive, you know server infrastructure or whatever. So that was the idea. It was a cool idea. It was at the time, was really cutting edge, and so we had this business going doing the text messaging. We left college, uh, so we left college in 2002.

We had enough money coming in we probably had a grand or something a month coming in enough to rent an office on talbot street which was like just a complete dump of a time. It was a room, tiny little room that could fit like five people sitting around one desk, one massive desk table like, and we all went in there and it was like 300 pounds a month or whatever was 300 euros a month.

And we, uh, and we're like, right, let's get this thing off the ground and um, so we kind of split yeah, like we it was me, dylan and Sean, and then we had two other people who joined us as well and we basically kept selling the text messages to more and more types of businesses, like sports clubs and lots of different people, to send out reminders or send out messages, and then get this raise money for this idea, the computer games idea, which we did, like.

We raised 700,000 back then, when people didn't there was no such thing as seed. We didn't even call it a seed round. That terminology wasn't even used in Dublin. People didn't Jeez, that's big money then. Yeah, young people didn't raise money either. We didn't know anyone our age 20 years ago, out of college, who'd raise money. Do you know what I mean? It was kind of a most investor. They'd kind of look you'd raise money. Do you know what I mean? Like it was a kind of a a most investment.

They kind of look at you funny. Do you know? Um, it wasn't a thing. It became more of a thing over the following 10 years. Yeah, um, so that.

Because when all that stuff is brand new to you, you just think, oh, you just raise money. But when you raise money, you're now on a train that's going in a certain direction and if you want to go somewhere else, that train is on those tracks. It's not like a car that can just go turn left and just change your direction. You're on that train and once you raise money, you have to give a return to your investors or you wipe them out. You know what I mean like. So I'm saying that's really bluntly.

Obviously that happens over 5, 10, 15 years. Yeah, but they're expecting you. You know you can't just walk away from that, do you know what I mean? Or you give up everything or whatever. So I realized that just walk away from that generally, or you give up everything or whatever. So I realized that, okay. So now it became really apparent to me um, you know, I remember sitting down with dylan after, right, we've.

So we've raised the money, we've found a new office around the corner, middle abbey street, we're starting to hire, like the devs, that we're going to need to build this thing, and the objective was right we just need to get in 12 months time. We're going to need to build this thing and the objective was right, we just need to get in 12 months time.

We're going to run out of money, or you know, we'd run out in 18 months, but in 12 months we need to have raised the next round, so what you'd probably call series a Now you know what I mean. We'll need to have raised the series a. So what do we need to do with the 700 grand to get us to raise the Series A, which is going to need to be, you know, a couple of million or whatever? What do we need to do?

And in my mind it was like I thought we were building a business, but it felt like we were building something just to raise the next round and then that round would help us raise the next round, help us raise the next round and then we exit, and that's what we're doing, and that wasn't the kind of that's what Not what I'd signed up for.

So it was a big success and it basically is the online, it's all the online capability for Call of Duty. That's basically what it is now. So, whenever, whenever someone's playing Call of Duty online, they're it's on Demonware, like we watch what we started. So like it is cool. It's cool to think that's what it was then.

And then that that like, obviously what that does is it gives you money, it gives you an exit, and then you go on and you can do. It gives you experience, gives you a network and you go on. You can build another company that's bigger and another company's bigger which is what Dylan's done and he's, you know, really successful at that, and I really admire it because it's not how my brain thinks. You know what I mean. So I really admire the way he thinks, because it's very different to me.

But, yeah, I need it's like no, no, no, like we need to build a business here. I want to build a business that can go on for ever or well, forever is maybe a bit ridiculous, but like your life's work For decades. you know for my life. So I realized it had to be bootstrapped like. That was probably the biggest insight I took for that I can start a business. We keep building it. We had a name Forrest, so we had the name. Once Demonware got funding, I left.

How we organised the split was we actually stayed in the same building. They gave me a room. I took one of the guys that had been there who was kind of interested in doing it with me, a guy called Jamie, and we were kind of more aligned on that. You know what I mean on building the business.

We we thought like I prefer to do something for small business. That was about as far as it went and it was just like we want to help small businesses and for me that was helping someone like my dad. You know he had a small business. I'd like to build software or something to help them do. Well, like that means more to me. You know it got me kind of excited thinking about that and he had some. You know he had similar kind of feelings that's a class story.

You know, peer to peer was what people thought the future of networking was going to be do you know what I mean. Before the arrival of AWS and all that kind of stuff, do you know? People felt that's what it was going to be, and so machines were getting more powerful in everyone's homes. That was kind of where the future was, and so, yeah, it felt like I was getting off that train. Was I a fucking idiot to do that?

Yeah, again, I know, like it's 2024, like this sounds so basic, I think today, but at the time that was like 2003 or something like it was like, wow, you know, let's, let's do text message reminders and for loads of businesses and we were going to do it for doctors and dentists and everyone, and we're like that's a huge idea and we'll save them all their no-shows and stuff like that, which is obviously costs the world.

You know, we'd worked out, you know 500 billion a year in missed appointments or something.

We had a restaurant, we had like the dublin dental hospital, you know like we a cherry picker company, like we had random businesses using it that all had some sort of appointment right, and we had a salon and it it anyway, jamie's girlfriend at the time owned a salon as well, so it was like he was like knew a little bit more about that, and so how it ended up was that, uh, we weren't earning very much money from the text messaging stuff.

It was enough to sort of pay the rent and pay like a coder and stuff like that, but we weren't really able to take any money out. So I needed to go get a job. So I ended up going to work there just to kind of see, was there? opportunity for in a salon as a receptionist, kind of to see if there was an opportunity. But also it paid the bills as well. You know I love that Rather than.

Rather than go and do Some other stupid job Like do you know that would or not stupid job, but another job that would.

You know like I'd work behind a bar, barman stag's head for a year. You know like worked in a spa or a center I can't remember what it was now for like a year, third year in college. I'd worked in a takeaway in rathmines for a year. So like I'd work behind a counter where people are coming and you're taking money and you're serving them, right. I've done that a lot. Um, but doing it in a salon is very different because everyone comes up to you, comes in, really excited to be there.

Do you know what I mean? Like like you don't. When someone comes to you in a shop or a dentist, they're not like really excited about coming in. So they're coming in, yeah they're looking forward to getting pampered and whatever, and it's the highlight Of a lot of people's week or a month. It's the bit of me time For people and they come in so you get that energy.

They go get treatment and then, and then they come back to the desk and then they pay you and then you'd rebook them, but they'd be even better for them than they were like when they came in, which was good for them already and it's very hard like my day went by like within two days. I was like it's mad how quick the day goes, because when you're just having banter with people and it's friendly and happy, it's suddenly six o'clock and you go home and you're actually not knackered, do you?

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And anyway, when I was in there, like so I didn't have a problem with that, and then I was having fun there, and then it was like quite clear that she had a big problem with no-shows. So we, because I was there, they didn't, they wanted to use their paper appointments and they used the. You know, they would use our thing because I was there and I was there on the reception desk and I would write the appointment in on the paper and type it into our little program.

And we started sending out these reminders and we cut down on those shows by about 85% almost immediately. Because, like, remember in those days as well, well, I don't know if you do remember all the way back in ancient history, but like people got texts and were like, what is this? You know what I mean? Everyone's like oh my god, I got a text. I worked in a phone shop from when I was 15 until I was what 21, and this was back.

Yeah, somebody coming in, they're 25, 30 it was their first phone and this was like very rarely in life. I said this to someone the other day about it was actually he was having a baby and I was like very rarely in life do you get to do something for the very first time and this was this bit of tech that just blew you away.

there isn't really there's new things you vision pros or your watches and things, but that's much more so yeah, it's much more kind of subtle like this was actually changed the way you communicated, changed the world. Not to be dramatic, but it definitely changed the world, and it's like the PC came out. I remember I was around for when that became ubiquitous, and then you had the phone thing. It seemed like every five years this was happening. That's true, actually.

You're gives you a little bit of a like oh, that's unusual, that's cool, I like that.

We'd said about the queue, you know, down Nassau Street, got that feeling about the reminder Could see how happy Tina was, you know, small business owner, really like we'd saved her a lot of money. And then also getting that feeling that this industry was nice, like it was a nice industry. Like and I it's sometimes hard to explain to some people, but like, if you're going to spend your life doing something, explain to some people.

But like, if you're going to spend your life doing something, you kind of want to be around sound people and it's not that there's not sound people and other things, but here was an area where we could use technology to help people and sound people as well. Like a lot of sound people and don't get me wrong, there's a lot of in every walk of life. There's a-holes, right, so it's not like everyone's nice, but on the whole, the vast majority of our customers who are salon owners are fairly sound.

A lot of them are very sound and they're lovely to work for and they're kind of appreciative of what you can help do for them, which is just a nice feeling to get and at the same time, encourages you to want to help them more you know what I?

There is big businesses in salons as well, but like the vast majority, 95% of them are owner operated. You're helping a real person. Do you know what I mean?

You can be sound about it, like you know someone that you can work together with.

You know, and like everything that was going on in COVID, that was the number one search term. Like just why was that? Like people would have kind of dismissive of the industry up to that point. It's just this like there's little salons or whatever, but the role that they play in the community is much bigger. Like they bring this. It's in a small town. There might be no pub anymore or there's no post office or whatever, but the salon is still there, social engagement, there might be a cafe.

You know, there's certain businesses that are still doing well on the high street and they're a source of people, of employment, of communication, of connection, all that kind of stuff regular connection as well.

Yeah, you know what I'll just tell this person also because they are a stranger, because if it was their friend they probably wouldn't, because it might involve someone they know, you know what I mean, but here's this stranger who I can trust, who can touch me, they can tell this thing to, and they don't know who I'm talking about.

whatever you were, you went to two or three christmas parties yeah so you go to the salon to get done up for that and like that was kind of how society kind of operated around christmas time it still does, but it was extra, extra, so then so you'd have this rammed and then after christmas, like no one goes into the salon for three months because they're broke and you know.

So salons have this like peak, and then this trough Okay, and so that was my experience of that, because I was there, and then I remember coming in in January, first week of January, and it's like the appointment book was empty.

You, you kind of live in the moment, and the reason you live in the moment is because you're so busy, like you've so many things to do, you don't have time to sit down and plan strategic planning isn't exactly yeah my dad. He's in the car doing the next delivery and collecting money off this guy and having to source the new cheese over there or whatever. So you don't have time to plan it out. And so January was empty and we were like shit, what do we do?

We know March will be good, but we've got to get from now until March. Got to hit payroll, got to pay the rent or whatever. And it was like that was. I can't remember the exact moment, but I remember like it was over a few days. We were like we had over a thousand phone numbers that we collected from all our clients, sending the reminders, send a text message. We're like, why don't we send a promotion out to those numbers? And so we managed to get hold of like these little shampoos.

Like her care staffs was her brand of shampoo that she sold and they had this new range and they had them. We got them for free for travel sizes of them as samples to give out to our clients. And so we sent out a text message to all the clients saying if you book a haircut in January, we'll give you a free shampoo and conditioner of the you know, the cool, newest, hottest new shampoo and conditioner that's available, right.

And we sent that text message out on like a Wednesday and it went out and then nothing happened. You know you send it out. Nothing happened for about seven or eight minutes and then the phone started ringing really so seven or eight minutes. We're like alright, ah, shit. We were just like hopefully this will work. The phone started ringing. I was overstepped, so I was answering the phone. So I was just like, okay, oh, yeah, cool. And she was like, yeah, I just got a text.

Yeah, book me in for that quick, you know. So I was booking it in before they're all gone the phone just wouldn't stop ringing. You know, we were all like grabbing the phones and it was just coming through and we had that beep, beep when your phone on, on hold and everything, and we were just frantically booking these appointments in and after three days we booked out the whole of January, which is unheard of in a salon, like do you know what I mean?

Even now, like it's unheard of to do that and so and we were even booking them into February at that point, do you know what I mean? Because we were like people were forwarding the text to their friends really, and we didn't have anything. Oh, you have to have the original. You know, it was a viral thing in terms of people were sending to their friends.

You know, kind of felt that we were getting there, but now it's like I have it, I have it now. I don't know, it won't maybe always be this, but I'm going to be working with salons for for a long, long time and we're going to be helping them do stuff, because this is a great fucking feeling. And so, yeah, I I hung around for a bit, but it was other salons started to ring in like asking what's that texting thing? You got going or whatever, and I'd be like, yeah, I'll pass it on.

And it was very basic but it was a salon only thing, so we could charge a bit more and we had maybe I think, 15, 20 salons just using it as well and we still had all the other companies using it. But we had enough now, when I went back to the business, to actually start taking a salary. I mean, like you know, 18 grand or whatever it was, but take a salary and work at how sweet was that feeling walking back in on day? one. It was a really good feeling, and Jamie did it as well.

We both started paying ourselves on the same day and it was a really good feeling. It was kind of like yeah, we've, you know, we have employees and ourselves and it's all in our power. We're bootstrapped. You know, an investor can't tell us we need to do this or do that. We can decide what we want to do, do you know what I mean? And we can take our time figuring it out. You know, we're not under any rush. We can do it ourselves, and that kind of really appealed to me.

So it felt good and that's really where forest came from. Then it it came from that idea of like we're helping salons and we're helping them with the marketing get busier, and that became our mantra, which was like we help salons get their clients in more often, spending more, like that. It's still, you know, we don't use it as much as our mantra as we would have, because a lot of competitors kind of copied it.

Eventually, you know, once we got more successful, a lot of competitors kind of copied it. Eventually, you know, once we got more successful, a lot of the catchphrases got. You know, other people have a version of it. So we stopped, but for about 15 years, I would say, maybe, maybe a bit less, that was our phrase like on our website, everywhere. It's just like you know, we help you get your clients in more often, spend more and um, not a bad offer, yeah.

And then we it went from text message promotions, then that, you know, start doing filters and then you start doing emails and then you start doing loyalty programs. And then it went from tax management to promotions. Then they, you know, start doing filters and then you start doing emails and then you start doing loyalty programs and then you start giving them their own app in the app store for all their clients for bookings, for you know.

You need a lot more customers to pay the bills, but we only needed to, in those days, sell like 10 of those a month and we were paying everyone's bills. Do you know what I mean? yeah and it was a great experience. I we spit it. Jamie was the sales guy. I was everything else, so like I would. Basically he would sell it and then I would go out and install it and do everything you were everything else.

Yeah, yeah so and support and everything, and which it was a fantastic couple of years, like we, you know. Um, I just drove, driving up and down the country, had a little van, you know, just funny, I had the same van my dad had. So my dad had like this Peugeot Partner, like I don't know, if you remember yeah, I remember them yeah they're little like. They're kind of like a small car van thing, and I had a Peugeot Partner as well nice little synchronicity.

There isn't there and there's a great picture I found the other day of both of us parked in our two future partners outside our house where I'm from in Mayo, and it's a great picture. So it was like, you know, we'd buzz our heads out the window. So it was kind of like there was a little bit of kind of coming back around to that. I'd load it up on a Monday morning drive around the country. You'd spend the overnights. You know you'd be down in Donegal or you'd be in Cork or wherever.

Stay with them, make sure they really understood the product, all that kind of stuff Get to know them and then learn about the industry every time that product brand's good, that stylist's doing well, that's a good manager there. You know Mary, up the road she has it. You know and you really get to understand salon owners and what they're about.

It allowed us, like you know, 10 of those a month is, like you know, 70 grand. That's like nearly a million a year. You actually didn't have to do many to get a business going that paid all the bills people on support and everything like that so it allowed us to be bootstrapped. So I was really grateful for that. But, um, I think what happened like that, that was great.

And then the big thing, the big challenge for us, came when the crash in 2007, because it was an expensive purchase as well, right so? we were charging seven grand to salons and salons got like mashed all together in the in the crash. Because you can imagine people are cutting back, yeah, and like. It's not that they're like, don't go to, they still need to get their hair cut they're not stopping, but they're like they're, like I can only pay half of this.

And so salons you know they're getting decimated and so people start doing loads of offers. You know we will go cheaper, so everyone, the prices start to come down, which means they're making less money to keep it busy or whatever.

And we yeah, like I remember the cost, that seven grand dropped about four grand, you know, over the course of like a year or two, and we and we weren't able to that business model as such, all those customers were our customers and they were still paying us monthly and sending texts and all that kind of stuff. So we had business from them but we needed like Ireland wasn't big enough, you know for us to get enough signups every month or whatever. So that's when we went to the UK.

You know, we were pretty panicky and because we hadn't raised any money, we'd just been. This is one of the downsides to being bootstrapped, or positives, you know, it depends on how you look at it. But when the downsize was basically this idea that we've no money in the bank ever like, you know what I mean we just we spent what we had right, we never spent more than we had, but we never spent less than we had either.

So it was quite so that, yeah, so we knew we had to go to the UK and then around that time Jamie stepped away as well, because Jamie, his real love and passion was kind of fitness rather than salons, and he, he went off to start his own sort of gym business around that time as well. So it's kind of on my own. This is kind of right. First it's only me.

So we were, we didn't have kids or anything like that. So I was like well, I'm going to go over on a Monday and come back on a sort of Thursday or Friday every week and I'm going to just basically sell door to door or we'll try and get leads around the country in the uk and this other lady did the sales in ireland sue, who's still with us as well, and she.

So we kind of split it that way and that was kind of the moment when forrest went from just being an irish business to being a you know more of an international business it's full commitment though.

So we had this car, vauxhall Astra or whatever and we used to just drive like fly in early morning flight, 6am flight, get this car, drive to wherever the salon appointments I could get. So we had a guy you know we were doing at that point. We probably had 17, 18 people in Forest. We had somebody working on marketing, okay filling the form yeah, yeah, yeah, we'd like a million, you know we were doing about a million in revenue.

So we had, you know, we had a team and we were doing Google AdWords and stuff like that around that time. That's kind of where we probably started doing that kind of stuff. Okay, and like that was you know? So we were doing there wasn't that many people bidding for Salon Software and Google AdWords Like today. It's like mental, like you know, everyone does it, because even the competitors then weren't even doing that a lot of them, do you know what I mean?

So you're, we would get picking up like demos around the UK and I'd be going over calling into the salon and then I'd drop into the salon next door while I was. You know if I was in Margate or Milton Keynes or Hull or like random places like all across the UK. So I spent four years that's serious graft and it was brilliant, though it was amazing, like I also never done sales before, because, remember, I was saying yeah, you were the other guy. I've said I didn't.

I never thought sales was my thing, but I just sort of threw myself into it because I had to. Yeah, jamie left and you know the business was not going to make it just in Ireland and we always wanted to go abroad. You know when the when the chips are down you have to go and do it. So you kind of I'm going to have to start doing sales and I'm going to have to start going abroad or whatever, so did that. It was an amazing experience.

Drove all the way up and down the UK, got to know like honestly, I've been to every town in England. Like it's funny people always say and Ireland's beautiful, like do you're going to the new forest and all these like down to cornwall, up to the highlands, scotland, we've. You know, one of our first clients in scotland was on in lirwick in shetland islands. We've loaded salons down and you know the, you know guernsey and jersey as well like literally the whole thing.

That's class and uh, it was cool and like it'd be. And I remember just mad things, like I was in this salon, one of our earliest salons in scotland a bit after that one and someone came in and said, do you go it? Uh, to the owner and we were basically um, like right in the top, like about two or three hours north of um inverness, so like right the top top, right of next stop norway. Norway like yeah yeah, and they were speaking Gaelic, like Gaelic, not Scots Irish or whatever or Scots.

You know the Scots language, that's bizarre. They were speaking Gaelic and it was weird, Like I had. You know what I mean it was just like there's just random things you experienced around the place that you'd never. There's no reason why anyone would ever go on holiday where I was. I couldn't even find a B&B to stay in, like no one went there it was just like sort of like rural farming area and you ended up there selling them sound software.

It was only because it was selling sound software. I happened to be there and I had to like stay like 40 minutes away because there was nowhere, people would never go there. So you went to loads of places that you just never but they have a salon. Because that salon was where all the women mainly who lived around there you know, farmers, wives, different people that's where they all went. It was this just in the back of she was.

It was on a farm because her husband was a farmer and she built this like really successful salon business, like you know, and you're just coming across these mad places and it was just fascinating experience. I loved it, like so how long? did you spend in the UK Four years, just until my yeah, until I got married and my son was born. Wow that's serious going but amazing experience.

And we built Forest Up like it's the number one provider of software to salons in the UK now, like it's the number one provider of software to salons in the uk now, or has been for a long time. But we you know that that was what got started. You know I had to go there to do that. It wouldn't have happened. You know I hadn't thrown myself into it. You know, um, and once you've done in one country, then you're like, okay, we, you know you just believe you can do more countries.

Those people we were selling to were real people, busy lives, and they like to see someone. Do you know what I mean?

You know, see, everyone got used to that and it and it worked really well. But you don't have the same connection Like we, when we used somebody go out to set you up. The connection that you had with those customers there so many of them are still our customers today it's like a real deep connection. They know who you are. You just don't get that online, even though you can sign more people up and you can grow faster. But it does miss that bit. And I just think with the ai stuff.

I notice all these ai tools and we use ai in our product. We, you know there's a but with sales. There's a lot of talk about oh, you're going to be able to automate, like strs and all these conversations and everything like that, or all these emails you're going to get. You're going to just receive an email from someone and it's going to. They're going to know all about you.

So it's going to be the most perfectly written email, yeah, but if you receive the most perfectly written email every five minutes from someone else about different things, they're no longer. You know, it doesn't matter how well it's written.

And in the US it's kind of a bit further down the line, like they embrace kind of online SMBs, embrace online sales much more than much quicker than in europe, because smaller countries, um, you know, if you're operating in ireland you can kind of probably meet whoever's selling it to you, stuff like that that's easier.

So we're trying to just getting better and better at doing that and the results are just way better. Like we just get much better clients, you know, much more committed clients, much lower churn from them. You know what I mean. And the more you do of that, the better, the more of that you get. And we notice that none of our competitors are doing it.

If I work in HR, same thing, you know. So, um, like, if you're going to build a tech company, you know, you, you, the probability is, if you're going to succeed, the probability is it's going to be some sort of b2b sass application. Because, even if it's an ai thing, you know, if you're bringing some sort of ai nuance to some problem that you're solving, it's probably going to be delivered in the form of a monthly fee, do you? You know what I mean For that solution. So you're basically B2B SaaS.

Still, even if you're AI or whatever you're using, do you know what I mean? So I think, yeah, you just got a better chance of succeeding if you understand the problem in a business, and a business usually has money to spend on something, so I don't know if that answers your question.

And I still have that goal to know as far as it can go. And I, you know, I think it's still got a long way to go. You know, I still think we, we only we only have 11 000 customers in this million salons, do you know?

And then, even when we serve those salons, there's loads of cool things we can do Help them with other problems that we haven't even figured out yet. Do you know what I mean? I love that. I love that A long-term ambition.

The bootstrapping forever, bootstraps, you die, and all this sort of stuff, which was fun to do at the time. But like in hindsight, it was just because I didn't, I was just quite anti-VC or something. Do you know what I mean? But like now, I don't, I don't feel it like that, you know. Like I think you, some businesses need funding and or at certain times the business needs funding and you've got to get that funding and you know where's that money going to come from.

So we had built a business that was doing a million, you know turnover or whatever, but it needed, we needed to fully embrace the cloud and we didn't have the money to hire the developers that we needed to build a cloud product, because the developers we had were specialised in the kind of on-premise technology that we had back then in the late 2000s, so we needed to hire some pretty expensive people to do it, and especially then now there's a lot more people able to do that kind of stuff.

Back then, you know, as technology is developed, it gets easier to do things, but back then it was like it was quite a more difficult thing to do or to find people like that that would come and work for you. So when we didn't have any money to pay them, you know so, uh, so we did. So we raised like a million euros from a bunch of angel investors and Enterprise Ireland and stuff like that, and that was 2011.

And that allowed us to hire a new CTO, a bunch of devs and also spend a bit more on marketing and sales in the UK. So I was able to hire salespeople in the UK to allow me to come back to dublin. Do you know what I mean? Okay? which suited me personally anyway, because for family and stuff like that, I didn't want to be traveling all the time.

Then, you know, once you had a family and stuff, so, so, um, so that that allowed us to do that and we wouldn't have been able to do it without that injection. And how would we've got money like we, a bank wouldn't have lent us, especially then like one and a half million, they just wouldn't have. Plus, you'd have that debt hanging over you. So investment capital makes sense. You know what I mean. So, and we had a future, we had a big opportunity.

So I just had to kind of come to terms with actually, you know, the world isn't black and white. Do you know what I mean? It's not like it's bootstrapping or you're sending your soul to the devil, which is what I've been telling myself and other people, you know it's evolution, though, isn't it as an entrepreneur that's?

And this guy called pat garvey, who was a chairman up until about a year and a half ago and he's a very successful entrepreneur in Ireland. He founded a company called Sharp Tech which basically became DCC, which is really well known. You know a couple of billion turn over that. He was the founder of that and so he, you know, very successful tech entrepreneur from an early wave of tech in Ireland. So he's seen it all, invested in loads of companies.

He'd been chair on public companies, you know just had done everything and he just yeah, we just were kind of, we were like-minded but very different as well different skill sets.

And I was like, well, I don't really want to sell for us. And they're like, yeah, but we kind of need our money back. So what's going to happen? And for us going really well, you're one of our good investments because you've grown loads you know what I mean? um, and because we'd probably gone from 1 million to maybe 10 million, and at that point it was 10 million ARR.

Because, it was all recurring revenue by that point and so we'd made that transition gone really well, gone into some more countries, you know things were going really well. So we had to find an investor.

But I didn't want to bring in vc plus vc mightn't have come in anyway uh, to something like forest, because it was quite old at that point, you know it was over 10 years old and vcs are kind of, you know, to get into the start to see the big rocket ship whatever, and forest was kind of more of a steady eddy.

So we went, we went out and I met about 60 private equity firms over the course of about a year until, like on each one, I said I want someone long term who's going to back long term, because I needed somebody who was prepared to invest now, for if the company was doing really well they'd stay.

They weren't under any commitments to that we have to get out after three or four years and most of the private equity firms have three to five year horizons, so that wasn't the right source of capital for a forest. But we found two in the end and we went with one and it was basically someone who was genuinely long-term. They're not a typical private equity firm and basically how it works is the people who are really long-term. It's really family money. Do you know what I mean?

It's called private equity, but the money probably comes from some kind of family endowment or some really rich entrepreneur who's put a load of money that he wants to invest but he doesn't. It's his money, so he doesn't need to return money to his LPs or shareholders.

So I get that final say, and it was important to kind of from a to maintain that structure so that, yes, you know, we, we are going long term and the final decision rests with us. We don't have somebody saying, right, it's time to sell today or tomorrow. Do you know what I mean? Beautiful. So I think that's and it's worked out well and thankfully, those guys, they invest under that mindset.

They think that if they invest in companies that go longer or that, the founder will know you know when the founder wants to get off, that's the time to get off, as opposed to when we say the time to get off that they'll get better returns and they'll get better companies I mean which, to be fair, they have some great businesses in there, but it's less about the show. It's more about building a really good business and stuff like that I'd love to see that.

It's a bit dated now but it's, you know, in terms of the companies it talks about, but the things in it, like core values, you know, having a mission, taking the long-term approach and really understanding what are the key business metrics that are going to make you money, like all those lessons I learned by reading that book five or six times and everyone in our management team would have read it years ago and we, you know, catch up on it again.

It's just the business fundamentals, like our fun, are so well explained in that book. So I love that. I think you can't go wrong with that one and then more. There's a book called by Richard Rummelt, called Good Strategy, bad Strategy, and oh, yeah, black and White Cover yeah, and that's probably my favourite ever business book and I would have. You know I go through phases of reading loads of business books and then you know.

But, like, over the years, I've read a lot, I've learnt I had to learn a lot from books and audiobooks as opposed to having learned it myself. You know that's how would you learn how to build a sales force? You read a lot of stuff and you make silly mistakes then or whatever. But that book on strategy is just unbelievably good, like it. Just I can't recommend that high enough.

That kind of like just flying by the seat of your pants, which is a lot of fun, doesn't work, and we probably flew by the seat of our pants for longer than we should have. You know, when you kind of need to just plan things out better, and I'd say even today we could be better at it. I'm not saying we're good at it because we're not, but we, you know you, as every year goes by, I appreciate that side of things more as the company evolves.

But generally speaking, I think I've probably sacrificed the growth of the business more, like one of the things that I've been able to have your own business be in control of it is that, like, after I moved to the uk and I moved home, I probably should have moved to america for forest you know what I mean like if I'd moved to america then forest would probably be a bigger company today, but I wasn't going to do that. I wasn't you know what I mean. I wasn't going to do that.

The sacrifice that would have made for my family and things like that I wasn't prepared to make. So it's like we have to do it, but it's going to take longer and we're going to have to do it, I think that's a good trade-off travel so yeah, so I'm kind of, you know I'm not saying you know, obviously, like work consumes me when I'm in work, outside of work, it doesn't consume me as much as it would have. You know, like I finish work at five or six o'clock every day. I rarely work late.

You know, I rarely travel really probably travel to the States twice a year. You know, like we have really good people. It's forced me to have good people to do those things. You know what I mean. But it's meant that it's taken longer.

I'll definitely help other people if they want my help or whatever, and advisory and all that stuff, but I won't do another company because it's just something I wanted to do once, but do it really well, you know what?

They just won't believe any of it unless somebody looks them in the eye and says I'm won't believe any of it unless somebody looks them in the eye and says I'm a real person. This is why this is true. Do you know what I mean? So, uh, yeah, I think we're going to see an increase in that in-person stuff I like it contrarian, but I'm bullish with it as well.

You know, you don't have to necessarily have the best product, um, or the most funding or any of those things, but if you can last the pace and you're prepared to just keep going, it's like the hare and the turtle.

You know, in the race I've seen so many companies in our space come in, raise loads of money and burn out, even when they were like beating us and everything with that money, because they just it was all, it was all a bit too much, and they kind of we were just like, well, we'll just let this burn out and we'll still be here. You know what I mean.

And like, these things come, they punch you, you take the punches, but you still stay standing and if you kind of take that attitude like you, you just have a much better chance of winning. I think.

Thank you so much, cheers, I enjoyed it as well. Thanks, gary.