Why most businesses stop growing, according to an ex-VC

Kiran Mehta 0:00

So they've gone from 300K ARR to 1.5 million in 18 months and I used to get probably 500 pitch decks a year. I'd meet maybe 50 management teams and in 4 years I invested into 11 businesses. So the funnel is brutal. Some people are like, oh, you have like 30,000 followers, get good engagements, blah, blah. you must get loads of leads, and I go, the direct leads that I get from LinkedIn that I close is a number very, very close to zero. The most overrated advice with going out on your own is

Mike Lovegrove 0:27

Welcome to Going Sollo. The show with solopreneurs and subject matter experts who show you exactly how they find clients, close deals, and build revenue on their own terms. I'm Michael Lovegrove, the founder of Sollo. And my guest today spent 4 years on the other side of the table as an investment manager at Mercia Ventures. He put more than £20 million into UK tech businesses. He sat on boards of the companies he backed as well. And today, through his firm, Catenae Advisory, he works alongside founders as a fractional chief of staff, helping them grow without the internal chaos that usually comes with it. He has seen what makes a business work from both sides of the table, and today he's going to tell us what separates the ones that make it from the ones that don't, and how you can grow without it all turning into chaos. Kiran Mehta, thank you for joining us.

Kiran Mehta 1:14

Thanks for having me, Mike.

Mike Lovegrove 1:16

So, man, I want to jump straight into this. So, at Mercia, you looked at a number of businesses up close. And what separated the ones that worked from the ones that didn't?

Kiran Mehta 1:27

Yeah, that's such an interesting one. I think if anyone had the exact formula to that, they probably, well, certainly if I had the exact formula, I'd probably still be an investor making loads of money, did not. It's really difficult to work out what does work. I think what you quickly do find out after a good couple of years of experience is working out what doesn't work. And then if you can avoid enough of the things that don't work, then the odds are going to kind of swing into your favor for things that do work. So yeah, there's definitely not an exact science to it. The bit that blew my mind as an investor is you would get a pitch deck off a founder and I used to get probably 500 pitch decks a year, I'd meet maybe 50 management teams and in 4 years I invested into 11 businesses. So the funnel is brutal, right? But the pitch deck tells you absolutely nothing about the way in which that business actually executes. It's a lot around the idea. It got the team bios in, it's got the strategy, but no one tells you how the decisions get made. How easy is the founder to work with? How good are they at building a team and a culture? How do they cascade their cascade their view and their kind of vision of the business through the team, set KPI, set objectives, and kind of build the quickest feedback loop, possible? The bit that always blows my mind even to this day about the VC process. And I kind of get it, right? I don't see how he could design a better process. But you get a pitch deck, you talk about the idea, you talk about the opportunity. That's all you see. You know, you might do 6 weeks, 12 weeks of due diligence at the most for some later stage round. You are never going to get an idea as to how well that business executes otherwise. And for me, that's the biggest, the biggest kind of driver for success. Ultimately, you can have the best idea, the best idea in the world and I've seen this, you know, a couple of times over. If you're not able to do the boring stuff and actually build repeatable processes for your business to scale, it's going to be really hard to get where you want to get to.

Mike Lovegrove 3:12

And I'm keen to explore that for a second. How would you, as a, as a VC, how would you even be able to start to understand whether they have some of those repeatable processes where they can even build some of those repeatable processes?

Kiran Mehta 3:25

It's hard, right? It's really hard. I can see why so many VCs back second time founders because at least you've got something to put your hat on to say, they've been there, they've done that. been through the journey before. For me, I used to look at idea as a proxy for how good the team was because ultimately every team's going to look like the best team in the world and they're going to sell you like the most positive vision of their business. But how do you really assess a good team, right? unless you're invest in latest age and you use traction as a proxy. For me, it was just the idea, right? Does the idea seem incredible? Do they have the right strategy at a high level? So you're kind of optimizing for the biggest off. But shot, I mean, going into the office was quite a big one for me. Like if you kind of go and sit in a potential investee companies office, you'd get some of that, but they're all on the best behavior, right? Everyone knows the investors are coming in. I'm not going to see a fan. not going to see founders arguing. amongst each other in the middle of the meeting, you're not going to see someone shouting at an employee like whatever that may look like. So that gives you gave you a little bit of insight. Honestly, it's like flying blind, right? I think it's one of the reasons why I got out of it. I just think it's like the toughest job in the world and clearly, there are, there is some science you can put behind it, but it's, yeah, it's really difficult. I can see why they after they found this in the office for that initial kind of period because if you've got someone, if you can get someone in the office for 4 weeks, then yeah, you can maybe see how they work in the tougher times. If you're going to go and sit in their office for 2 days across, you know, 3 or 4 months. You're not really going to get a genuine insight into what that business is doing in my view.

Mike Lovegrove 4:49

Yeah. Totally so. It's always interesting because you always hear about the success stories, right? The headlines would be like, Acme company raises X amount of dollars and you constantly see this narrative and you think, oh, it mustn't be that difficult to do so, but as per those stats than you just mentioned, It's the funnel is brutal. And so amongst all of that, Kiran, you've obviously seen some of what you think is the recipe, the science, as you said, before, to a successful company, which I suspect is some of what you've taken and then decided to create your own consulting business. And so, I mean, for anyone that's meeting you here for the first time. Who do you now work with, Kiran, and what do you happen with?

Kiran Mehta 5:30

Yeah, so I work with scaling set business is mainly B2B software, um, and primarily UK nationally, but more often than not, they end up being in the north of the UK. And then what do I help them with is the ultimate question? And obviously my position, my positioning is very much around that kind of fractional chief of staff, fractional COO world. But I think the best description was actually this morning. So we've had a senior hire in one of my clients and he reached out and said, I've seen you on a few calls. I know what everyone else does. What do you do? Can we jump on a call and run through what that looks like? And I said to him, strategic and important enough that it makes them to the CEOs to do list. But it's not quite strategic or important enough for the CEO to actually do it, right? Which is actually quite quite a long list of pretty important tasks. Fundamentally, boosting the CEO's capacity, you know, someone that can operate at a similar level to them and get stuff done and also bringing a slightly different skill set. So I'm more data process, analytical, than your typical CEO who's, I would say CEO goes like that, I'll tend to go like that. So there will be stuff on his or her list. that not that they usually avoid because it's things that they don't like to do, but luckily that is often the things that I do like today. So that's the kind of big picture. And then the 2 areas it almost always comes back to is revenue growth, how do we grow quicker? Now I say, I'm not a sales specialist by any means, but what I am is someone who can put in place the right process. As an example, you've got a sales problem. Actual tendency says, let's go hire some more salespeople. That's great, but actually it might not be a sales problem. It might be a positioning problem. So what would be better is how do we speak to our customers? How do we build a framework to understand what we're selling and what they're actually buying? How do we narrow the gap between the 2 and then once that's working, how do we put a process in to track the various stages of the sales funnel? So that actually you can run a series of once you've got the data, our very simple experiments to see if you change X, what that will do to Y. And then instead of guessing, going, I think I've got a sales problem, need a salesperson, you can actually understand which of the components of that isn't working and how to and how to change that. And then the second bit, when it's not sales, it's the operational stuff. So it's a founder that's got a business that scales them really, really quickly. And he or she goes, the best place I can spend my time as the founder is the next product, the next market, the next big partnership deal that's going to take us from 5 to 10 million of ARR. I've got this team of 30 people that I want to manage. I don't want to. I don't want to kind of completely hand that off. But I need a better process to manage that. I need someone that can take my five-year plan, step it down into what we do in the next 12 months, break that up into the individual teams that fit into that, build me some data, um, dashboard so that I can track and manage the team in a way where I can open a dashboard on a Monday morning and see what's happening across the business within 2 hours as opposed to spend my, spending my money going to the product meeting, the tech meeting, the marketing meeting, the CS meeting, the sales meeting, getting to the end of the day and going, shit, I've got a day job today. So a lot of it's just around kind of process and organisation working with the founders.

Mike Lovegrove 8:33

So what you described is super hard. What made you want to not only do that particular type of job or role consulting work within these businesses, but also focus on B2B software here.

Kiran Mehta 8:47

So B2B SaaS is what I primarily did as an investor. So back to 11 businesses, 9 of them were enterprises, as a touchdown briefly, right? I am not a vertical specialist. I am not a sales guy. I am not a marketing guy. I'm not a finance guy. I can do 7 out of 10 in all of those disciplines. So I've got to specialize somewhere and having seen so many software businesses. I just think the model and the framework that I use probably could be translated to another sector, right? If you're disciplined, if you follow the data, if you don't assume anything and you make sure you're digging all the way down to facts. You can probably do that in a manufacturing business or a retail business or an e-con business. I just don't have experience in that, whereas I do have 6 or 7 years experience of working with enterprise class businesses. So, yeah, might be a bit of a lazy way of looking at it, but it's what I know, it's where I've got the experience and I guess for all the other chaos of, I'll just figure it out, which comes with being a solopreneur, the one that I like to stay disciplined on is the sector.

Mike Lovegrove 9:43

Totally. Yeah. If there's anything that the last couple of years of, of working as a solopreneur and that's starting to build Sollo has taught me is that your offer, being the positioning of your offer and who it's for, is incredibly important and so, as you just said, you could absolutely walk into a manufacturing business and create value for them. But you have this success with B2B SaaS companies. And so from your own personal sales point of view, if you then tried to walk into a manufacturing business and said, by the way, guys, I worked with all these guys over here, who look completely different to them. They're not going to believe you, but if you walk into a B2B SaaS company. Enterprise SaaS company. They'll be like, this guy does know what he's doing because you have that background. So what lessons have you taken from your experience at Mercia into the fractional consulting world?

Kiran Mehta 10:35

Yeah, it's really different in terms of my business. So obviously, BCs are not investing into consultancy, so over in her businesses. So, I think understanding the value drivers for a business and how they ultimately get to that next goal. You know, there's a, some of the businesses I work with a VC back. So there's obviously a good, um, a good insight in terms of what you need to do to get to the next round, not around just the deck and the positioning, but actually what does your business, your metrics, what your team need to look like to be able to get to, whether it's an exit or a series B or a series A, whatever it looks like. So that kind of certainly helps on that front. But then equally, I work with a couple of bootstrapped businesses as well. And that's a completely different sort of mindset. And it's interesting so I'll carry different roles with different clients. So I've got some clients that are like, very high, got a very high risk tolerance and I'm almost like the conservative one trying to pull them back. Usually the VC back businesses. As on the other hand, I work with some bootstrapped businesses that are like, you know, we've got 200K in the bank and we don't want to go to less than 200K. You kind of go, but you've got plenty of cash here. Let's go, let's invest, let's move on, move forward. Yeah, I guess knowing the value drivers and just bringing a different perspective to teams that may not have been down that road before.

Mike Lovegrove 11:44

Cool, man. And you touched a little bit on growth in that sentence. And so, When a business starts to grow faster than it can handle, what's the first thing that you're typically looking to first?

Kiran Mehta 11:56

That's a good question because the first problem is usually it's not growing as quickly as they'd like. When it, when it is growing at pace, these are just the operational stuff, like that's the bits that, because the, yeah, I guess around that kind of side of it, how do we continue to ensure that the team's working well, how do we ensure that we've got an onboarding and hiring process, right? If you think about going from 2 or 3 founders to a team of 10 more often than not the majority of those hires are going to come from your internal networks? They're going to be people you know and trust anyway. Whereas actually to go from 10 to 30. Often that's so hard in terms, you know, on how, whether it's hiring devs, whether it's hiring sales team, whoever it may be, you need quite a different process there and you're going to need a different cultural fit through that stage. So yeah, I guess hiring keeping people on the, um, on the right track. And yeah, just continuing to swing the right people into the organization.

Mike Lovegrove 12:46

I know that now with this AI wave and the ability to scale out your own agents as opposed to hiring people in certain, like for certain tasks, right, whether or not some of that, the scaling growth pains that other companies may have faced in the past, whether some of them are more easier to deal with because of that, I mean, sure cracks will probably appear at some point. But I wonder if some of that starts to to ease in a different type of way or maybe the problem shifts as where those issues are arising.

Kiran Mehta 13:15

Yeah, I would agree with that. So it's funny, someone jolts every week about what we're going to do about performance reviews for all the agents that we run in now and I've absolutely not figured out how that world all hangs together. But interestingly, I was in another meeting with the CEO and their FD. And the FD said, just to let you know, your AI spend is now about 30% organization. Your AI spend is now equivalent to hiring one more person. And he was like, wow, we need to spend more, right? Because actually the kind of leverage that you get on that is huge. It was funny. was looking a bit more of a, we're spending a lot, and the CEO was more going out of hiring the next 5 people, if I spent one of those 5 people's worth of salary from a development perspective, I can probably get to the same output. Yeah, AI is an interesting one. And an interesting one for solopreneurs as well, twice I've come close to hiring people in the last 2 years, and both times I've built spec, thought about who it would be, and then actually give that, given that spec to Claude and Claude was going, yeah, I can do 90% of this for you, for, you know, £80 a month instead of what it would cost you tires somewhere.

Mike Lovegrove 14:12

Yeah, it's um phenomenal, isn't it, when you what we're able to build now? But Something you said earlier was like, not many people have this problem, being growing too quickly. So if want to change tack and talk about the thing that actually is the thing that most businesses struggle with, which is that growth is stalled, they slow down. What's the first thing you look to try and fix?

Kiran Mehta 14:34

Focus, always focus. So there's this, I know, I mean, this is a bad way, but there is a natural tendency for a founder to believe that he or she can do absolutely everything, right? We can have a wide ICP, we can have ten priorities. fine. I work the weekends. I work evenings. I stay up all night if I need to. I'm just going to smash this, but you could take all that effort. Whatever your effort is, whether you work 9 to 5 minutes Friday or whether you work 100 hours a week. And if this is your focus right now, kill that, kill that, just focus solely on this middle bit, where you've got the biggest pain point for your customers, where you've got the 2 or 3 marketing messages that really resonate and just put everything behind that. I think that is a way easier way to scale a business. And you can, there are so many ways you can continue to narrow it, whether it's the product, whether it's got sales messaging, whether it's marketing, whatever it is, I just think, keep it as niche as possible. How hard is it to build business that, you know, especially software led product business, you've got to fundamentally sell the same thing to multiple customers, the wider that becomes, the harder all that decision making is.

Mike Lovegrove 15:37

Totally, man. When I, but my first business was we were, we were selling a chatbot platform to anyone that wanted to buy it. This is in 2016, pre, like proper AI models, maybe if I'd had the, the brains of some of those, the, like the, the founders of Anthropic and OpenAI, maybe would have been different. But in any case, we try to build this flat, not, like, industry, must platform. And the brain power that was required to switch context between different customer types was insane. And as soon as we picked insurance and narrowed on insurance, that's when we signed some of the biggest customers we'd ever signed. That's when we were ranked as the top 2 fintechs in Asia Pacific, by exactly what you're saying, by focusing on a specific, but in this case, type of ideal customer profile. What I really like about what you said as well is that you have personally done this. As a consultant, you're focused on B2B SaaS. And I think everyone can take a lesson from that if they are a solopreneur and listening to this.

Kiran Mehta 16:34

Yeah, it's funny, the shoemaker's kids have got the worst shoes, right? Like, I spend so much time with my clients and narrower folks keep, you know, uh, be more disciplined and actually it took me 2 years to really kind of niche down and kind of refine the offering and refine the offering. And I think it's because ultimately when you've got a, um, when you've got different pulls on your time, you're going to do the client stuff first, right? And your deep thinking for your business is going to kind of continue to fall to the bottom of the queue. But yeah, it's something I've consciously done probably over the last 6 months. But yeah, the first couple of years I was definitely going to too wide with some stuff. So yeah, maybe I need to practice a little bit more of what I preach.

Mike Lovegrove 17:09

I did the same thing when I first went out and went solo. And then I also see it with a lot of the Sollo customers that are like, because they're super good at what they do. incredibly intelligent people. They can do a lot of things, but as you're saying, when you've spread thin on your focus of like, I could help this type of customer, this type of customer, this type of customer. They then don't know what box to put you in. And that's the hardest bit, is that you struggle to actually get the clients in the first place because they're not too sure if you're the right person for them.

Kiran Mehta 17:40

Yeah. Yeah, that was exactly my experience. When I started, it was very much like one network of people that knew me that wanted some help and support. They had a few problems, all their problems were different and it was come in and tackled them. That's a great project, that's come in and tackle this problem. We'll decide whether we're going to move to problem 2 or 3 later. Um, there was no kind of process. There was no framework. It was just, I can add value to your business. And actually, that's probably fine for the first year or so. And then once you get out of the first year, you go, I say, I've worked with 6 businesses and they've all got these 2 exact same problems, right? And then they're the products that you can build out and then instead of going into a meeting where a customer comes away and goes, yeah, that guy was a smart guy. He might be able to help me, but he didn't really tell me how, whereas actually, you can now go, these are the 2 bits I'm really going to help you with in the from now to 3 months time if we work on this project, this is where you're going to be. It all becomes a lot easier after that because at best you're going to get repeat business from that client and do other things and at worst, you're probably going to get a referral to somebody else, but it takes a bit of time of doing the manual stuff. But for me, it took a bit of time of doing it manually to actually work out what are the common problems at businesses one top.

Mike Lovegrove 18:48

Yeah, I mean, when you get their data, then you can make better informed decisions. So when you're working with the founder and you say that they haven't yet picked their focus or maybe they have, but they've still got so many things on their plate. How do you work out what the 2 or 3 things are that actually matter?

Kiran Mehta 19:05

It usually comes from either tracking what's working or through speaking to customers. So ICP is like a classic one, right? If you've got a big spread of typically customer size or customer sector, you need to, I go in with the mindset if you probably need to narrow this down. Depending, it depends on what data you've got when you get in there, but if they've got a decent CRM, if you can work out what segment or what customer size closes in the quickest period of time, with the least objections, with the least product changes, refinement, whatever. That will usually guide you into this is the area to repeat. If it's earlier stage, then it might be a case of putting in that tracking, putting in that monitoring so we can actually see that. And I often find if I get a blocker of internal data to solve a problem, just speaking to 5 or 10 of their customers of what have you bought, why have you bought it, where does it fit? And actually, it blows my mind, how many have actually bought something different to each other, even though they've got the exact same product. At the end of it? So yeah, just tracking the data and speak to customers.

Mike Lovegrove 20:06

Yeah, that's absolutely key thing. I made the mistake of not speaking to enough customers when I did my first business and this business, I personally onboarded every single person to understand why they bought. And yeah, it's it's eye-opening and it also directs you on what you need to build because it's if 80% of people are coming for the same problem. Well, there's the thing to solve.

Kiran Mehta 20:27

Yeah, and it's hard because there's so much narrative around you, businesses have got a scale pass founder like sales, which they do, but the founders still got to be speaking to customers because sales is a different process, right? Sales is, you've got all these people here. How do you get them into the basket there? And there's not really, you might get some senior salespeople that will give you, this is the feedback on the product, but ultimately their goal is still to get as many of those people into that basket. Whereas a founder, you can go, actually, it's not just this basket. There's 15 different baskets I can tap into. And the quickest way of filling this one might be a slightly different route. So you can, you can get more feedback from the customers because you're approaching them calls with a very different mindset than someone who rightfully so is incentivized based on the amount of deals that they close.

Mike Lovegrove 21:10

Yeah. Yeah. Totally, man. I want to change tack now, Kiran, and... And I know you touched on this earlier, but I'm still keen to explore this, is that if you looked at a one person consultancy, the way you looked used to look at a startup. What's the first thing that you would check?

Kiran Mehta 21:27

I probably wouldn't, um, candidly like. It's just such a different framework, I guess, because... For a VC backed product business, your goals are growth, right? You know, all the goal is growth and getting to an exit. By definition, most solopreneur businesses will not drive to an exit. Some will, right? Some will learn how to build scalable revenue. And I'm not there yet, right? But someone will learn to build completely hands off scalable revenue where maybe there's a brand value at the end of it and there's an exit. But I guess as a as a business, it's VC box and going through that journey. You're driving to this exit. As a solopreneur, you've got so much flexibility, right? But so many people say to me, how are you going to scale? how are you going to scale the business? I watch scaling plans for next year? And go, I don't want to scale. Right? I've got no ambition to scale right now. I've got 2 or 3 years of just treading water. It fits into where I am in terms of personal life and family life. It's just such a different lens to look at it for, you know, if I sat down with a solopreneur and they said, can you help me with my business? My first question would be, what do you want to achieve? What does good, good look like? Because there's no point me giving you advice as to how you go out and 10 X, your, um, like your customers and your revenue, if the feedback is, actually, I'm happiest just when this is just me and I can kind of do it 3 days a week and play padel on a Thursday, Friday, right? Everyone's got different objectives.

Mike Lovegrove 22:49

I love this point. And for you, Kiran. I feel like I remember seeing someone on LinkedIn, like you work typically 4 days a week.

Kiran Mehta 22:59

Yeah, I try to. So my working pattern is I don't take on more than 4 days of paid stuff and some's retainer, some projecty stuff, so it kind of differs. But in my head when I kind of plan out what I'm doing. I make sure that I can do most things within 4 days a week. And then I work 5 days a week, um, sometimes 6, but kind of very much fit it around, um, I like, like to go to the gym, like, like to try and keep fit. I usually do at least like an hour, 2 hours of exercise a day. If I can do that in the day and then at half past five, I'm at home, I've got a young child. So yeah, I kind of work 5 days, but I try and do 4 days worth of work across the 5 because I feel like I'm in like a really interesting phase, like my 20s to 30s was like corporate jobs invest in everything else and that was just very much like learn your trade, learn stuff, grow, do loads of hours. If you do twice as many hours as everybody else, then you'll learn twice as quick. that was kind of the mentality that I was in. I feel like 33 to 35 is going to be, Prioritize, earning what you want and need to earn, but in as little time as possible, because I want to spend it as much as possible with my daughter before she goes to school, and then who knows what 35 to 45 will bring, but I think that will be some level of scaling, whether that be for the consultancy business or whether I end up kind of getting a full-time COO chief of staff job in the scale up. But yeah, you can, that's benefit of being on, being a solopreneur, right? You can make it fit for your stage of life and for some people that scaling it and hiring people and building loads of kind of different revenue streams and for others, it's just going, I'm going to niche down and do the high value stuff that allows me to work lesson and spend time at home.

Mike Lovegrove 24:38

Yeah. I really want to get into how you go about finding your own leads shortly because that is one of the things that people that are going solo really, really struggle with. But I want to hold off for a brief second because when people are starting out, before we even start talking about leads. What are some of the things that they do, do you think? What are some of the things they've spent on, which has been an absolute waste of money?

Kiran Mehta 25:05

I don't know what others have spent on, because I've just try and focus on, I guess, my own business and sort of what I'm doing. I try not to kind of pay to outsource something until I've done it myself with the exception of like accounts. Um, So yeah, I can see people burning a lot of money on there, I'd say, especially in the age of AI, if there's stuff you can do yourself first, do that, at the very worst, you'll know what success looks like for the person you outsource it to. At best, you'll figure out that, hey, I can do more to it for you now anyway. One of the disciplines I tried to have, when I started is, there's all, like every, you can get excited across the tooling kind, I can get this CRM and I can do this and I can do that. And I basically, I probably maybe got 12 or 15 different software tooling solutions, but for the first 3 months, I, um, everything I did, I did on a monthly and then I diarized for 3 months after, because some of them are half price right, if you switch to annual. The discounts are huge. But I just did 3 months if I'm going to test stuff. Then at the end of that 3 months, I'll decide, is it bringing me value in which case I'll move to annual or if it's not, I'll just cancel it. So I'd say try and not get locked into like expensive tooling, early doors and yeah, just do as much of it as you can.

Mike Lovegrove 26:11

Yeah, nice. I heard it. Spoken to a few people that have come and joined Sollo, or maybe they've been looking at joining Sollo, and one person actually. Didn't, because they had spent with a consultant, £15,000 on setting up HubSpot for them. I could not believe it. And the amount first off, the person that had been ripped off having purchasing something they don't need, because it's too obviously really complicated for an individual, but to the amount, that, that they, that they paid to do that. And I see things like that that are like that you just outlined. Seems super sensible. But an approach of trying to buy anything early before testing on a, at a level like that is, is crazy.

Kiran Mehta 26:56

Yeah, I am, I looks again, a website rebuilt this year and I was going to just outsource that and I got a quote and I've got a friend that runs a marketing agency and in the end I didn't go with it and I just rebuild it myself and Claude and it's still not finished, but that's fine. It's not finished. So not large, but the exercise of doing it myself meant that actually the website got superseded because I got too busy with some sales conversations because what I found was by redoing my marketing, the conversations. I was having with people actually changed because I got to that, it helped me understand more the value I was delivering and my own kind of personal messaging around that. And I remember saying to the person who was going to get to build my website, I'm so glad I didn't because I would have paid you for it and you would have delivered exactly what I asked you for and I would have been unhappy because I was going to ask you for something that wasn't what I wanted because I didn't fully understand what I wanted. Whereas actually, the 2 weekends I spent building it in Claude meant if, if and when I eventually finish it and I'll now give it to a marketing agency, at least I know what I want it to look like.

Mike Lovegrove 27:53

Yeah. Funny you said there was your approach. I did the exact same thing with the Sollo website. I built it myself, and Claude, more because I was like, I don't want, I want this to come out of my brain and look like something. And then gave it to someone who actually knew how to build like a good website and then they took it from there. So, hey, hopefully great minds think like.

Kiran Mehta 28:13

Yeah, fingers crossed.

Mike Lovegrove 28:14

So a lot of fractional people that I speak to, Kiran, they end up getting to a point where they're like, man, have I just got myself a job with less security. And so how are you going about thinking about the upside of the flexibility that you have versus the downside of the fact that fractional work isn't as like quote unquote secure.

Kiran Mehta 28:37

Yeah, that's interesting. So I was quite lucky when I started. I knew I wanted to move on from my corporate job for a while and I had loads of like life events that year. So I knew from the January I wanted to leave, but I just had a lot of stuff going on and kind of, I remember so many times, I said to my wife, I was like, I'm going to leave this month and she was like, just a few more moments. We basically moved house, renovated the house, had a baby and got married or within a year. So it's like, can we just wait till we've paid this? Can we just wait till we paid that game? So anyway, I knew from January and I didn't end up leaving till, I think it was like September, October time. But because I knew, I'd already like started to think about it on the weekend and I had this little spreadsheet of like who I was going to approach and stuff like that. And then by the time it comes to leaving, I actually had stuff that was like relatively warm anyway, and that was easier for me than other people because I was in the investing world and moved to the consulting world, so there wasn't really any kind of conflict to me, thinking about stuff during that period of time. So that made it easier in terms of that initial diving. So I would always recommend people to do that. And then in terms of the flexibility versus the security. So I had this initial um, kind of thesis that the clients I would work with would be 3 to 6 months projects because they just have one problem, I'd go in, I'd solve it, I'd put the scaffolding around that so that they could kind of work without me, which is exactly what's happened. But then when I've got to the end of that 3 or 6 months, they've gone, I've got another problem And I've got another problem. And sometimes I've got 2 problems because you found those problems. So my average time with a client now is probably like 18 months and I've only got capacity usually to work with like 3 or 4 clients at any one time. So I'm probably only looking for one new client every 6 months. So that's quite a nice position to be in. So I'm not on that hamster wheel. Obviously, if you're running like 8 week sprints for clients, then you've got to find a lot more clients than I have. So I'm in quite a fortunate position. From that angle. And then I was catching up with a colleague, an ex colleague a few weeks back, and I said, oh, at the moment, I've got like quite a high customer concentration risk, like the 2 biggest customers probably contribute at the moment, like 60% of my revenue. And he said, wow, you're doing a lot better than me, right? Because my biggest client contributes 100% of my revenue and they have done for the last 7 years because I'm employed and you go after the, there's just pros and cons to this, right? Like, um, and I think as long as you've got spread, and as long as you've got a warm pipeline that you can probably switch on quite quickly, and you do a good job where you can find more work with your existing clients, if you need to. Um, then you've got a disproportionately bigger chance of losing a smaller percentage of your income than if you was employed where you've got a lower chance of being made redundant and losing all of your income. So yeah, I've learned to get comfortable with it, but at the same time, I think I am quite lucky that clients tend to stay around for a while.

Mike Lovegrove 31:18

It's, Yeah, so I think it's a super interesting conversation because I think what you just said before around like 100% of that person's revenue comes from the one employer and in today's world where where the AI is replacing a lot of people or there's business whole businesses are being changed because of that landscape, economic landscapes, whatever it may be, that job security isn't what it used to be. In your case, if you're saying, okay, X percentage of my current revenue comes from one client. Yeah, if they decided that they could no longer afford you, then that's not going to turn off all of your income. You're not going to be looking for something to replace all of your income again. You're looking for a smaller part and and I actually think now there may be a shift where it becomes easier to get some of these short-term projects with businesses than it used to because now it doesn't require a full-time person to do that.

Kiran Mehta 32:11

Yeah. Yeah, I'd agree with that.

Mike Lovegrove 32:14

And so, One of the things that I really like about what you do, Kiran, is that you've been super active on LinkedIn, and you've built quite a big following there, and I'm curious, like, what does that actually do for your business?

Kiran Mehta 32:27

Honestly, not as much as you think. Um, so it's interesting LinkedIn. Some people are like, oh, you have like 30,000 followers, get good engagements, blah. You must get loads of leads and I go, the direct leads that I get from LinkedIn, that I close is a number very, very close to zero, right? I get a lot of leads through LinkedIn. They're not my ICP. They usually get qualified out really quickly. However, I also get a lot of leads. Most of my leads are the leads and the people I end up working with come in through warm network. And I'm convinced I get more from my warm network because they see my LinkedIn stuff and they got, and you know, it's classic, right? I do this with people. I probably, you know, 15 sales consultants that do just the sales vertical and sometimes they're a better fit for a project than me. I kind of do horizontal stuff. They do want it area really well. If it's definitely that area you got a problem in. I'll just tell someone, you better go in with one of these. I probably refer to 2 or 3 people that I've seen most recently, not because the other 12 are bad or good. Everyone, I think everyone will do a good job, but it's just people that are front of mind. And I think when I get stuff from my network, it's not because I've seen them and have had a coffee with them in the last month is because actually they've opened LinkedIn 5 times this week and they've gone past my post like 2 or 3 times. So definitely, it has a benefit. It's like that old adage, right? Like 50% of marketing's working. just don't know which 50% of it is. So it does, it does have a benefit. It's really good for deal activation. I think my kind of first meeting to close stats are better because after that first meeting, someone can go, let me go and have a look at his LinkedIn. actually. He's got a 1,000 posts. You not going to read all of them, but he's got a 1000 posts that explain his thinking. I can just check that my thinking is aligned with his thinking and it's the kind of person that we'd work with. But that helps. Yeah, top of top of funnel, lead gen. absolutely nothing.

Mike Lovegrove 34:14

I really like that response. There's also someone that posts daily and spends a whole bunch of time and energy on what I'm actually talking about because I see the exact same thing. And then from, you know, people that are using Sollo that might have been decided, okay, I need to post on LinkedIn. And I think a lot of fractional people, consultants, coaches that go out on their own after a big corporate career, they think, okay, activate the network. I'm going to post on LinkedIn what I'm doing and they hear nothing. Yeah. And it's, it's a rude awakening too, where I think, you have to eat a lot of humble pie when that happens and realize, I actually need to go out to these people directly and start to, and start to network on a one on one basis in order to get those first few clients. And as you're saying, keep posting and adding value to like a digital community of sorts. So that people that know you, see what you're doing or the people that you are talking to, go and view what you're talking about, which increases the chance that they convert.

Kiran Mehta 35:16

Yeah, yeah, agreed. Someone said to me very early in my career, there's like, um, networking is a contact sport, like it absolutely is. One of the bits that I use more frequently in the last probably year, is actually just DMing people, like if people have engaged with my post, jump on a, jump on a call, that is going to build a relationship that will last. Yeah, even if you don't necessarily kind of follow up with that, I was not fit, that will be a lot more long lasting, then how many posts does someone see on LinkedIn a day, right? I post one today and people, once a day is a lot. I'm going, yeah, but people might consume 50 posts or a 100 posts. So the attention I've got is minuscule, whereas if I have a half an hour cold, then or if I go and meet them for a coffee for an hour, if they're local, that will yield way better results.

Mike Lovegrove 35:56

Yeah, there's a really good metric on this or a study out of Google where they found that in order for someone to trust you and therefore buy, then it has been 7 hours across 11 touch points and 4 different mediums. And and what you'll just describe, and the LinkedIn post, if they see 50 of these and they scroll right past it, they might spend, what, if you're lucky a minute on the post? if you're lucky. And so how many of those need a stack before they, before they trust you versus what you just said is like, can you then reach out to them? Can you then jump on a call? You suddenly increase that amount of time with that person, and so that level of trust with you just increases. And with that comes the next step, which may be potential work in the future. So I love that approach, man. And so when you're busy delivering for clients. How do you how do you stay on top of this at the same time?

Kiran Mehta 36:47

It's not easy and I definitely don't profess to do it well whole year round. I tend to find summers like quite a good time for networking for me. And like kind of back end of the year, December's a little bit quieter on delivery as well. So I do stuff then. So I'm not um, I'm not as good at being kind of consistent all year round. I do the LinkedIn stuff, which obviously kind of hopefully keeps me front of mine, but in terms of like that active networking, it does kind of peak and trough. There's a VC, 50% of your job is networking, but it's fine because your time's someone else's time, right? Because you're employed. Whereas when you're solopreneur, your time's your time and if you're out networking, then you're not getting paid. So I've done some stuff where I've managed to get like 2 paid engagements through that kind of cohort work that is also lead gen. So I kind of getting paid for sort of delivering more of like a low touch solution to multiple clients, but then they could turn into retain clients later. So that helps me. I'm in paid networking group, which results in very few leads, but the leads that I do get are almost, almost always close and are with the right value of clients. It's quite expensive, but it's cheaper than wasting my evenings going to free things that don't move the dial. So I kind of do that as well. And then, yeah, just try and kind of keep in touch with one network for me, because I'm not high volume. There's probably a bank of about 10 to 15 businesses that I'll have a coffee with once a quarter and they tend to be the ones that will, when something stops. I can kind of easily plug one of them in. Um, Yeah, it's just, I guess it's just kind of figuring out what works for you, right? If you're a lower ticket, higher volume service, then you probably need to do more marketing and less sales. For me, it's more sales less marketing.

Mike Lovegrove 38:24

Yeah. Yeah, understood me. I want to now change tack a little bit to some of the work that you do as a chief of staff. And so, Can you tell us about like one founder that you've worked with where something was going wrong before you arrived and then what what you ended up doing or helping that business do differently by the time you left?

Kiran Mehta 38:45

The one of the clients I worked with, their smallest customer would pay them £600 a year and the biggest customer would pay them over a 100K a year and when I initially started working with them, that was kind of go to market strategy. And it was early and it made sense to kind of test and learn things. Um, but there was kind of no visibility, no granularity of sales process, um, what's working, what's not working, which clients retain, all that other stuff. So actually, it took quite a while. It probably took 3 months maybe to get everything implemented where we had that visibility of tracking and it was a very complex sector where they basically had like um parent child relationship with their customers had apparent child relationships and sometimes is sold to a corporate. Sometimes they sold to more of a franchisee. So it was a bit difficult to work out where the value let. So put in a proper ever, stashboard, starting to see, started to see that with data and actually what kind of flow, come out of that was the smaller ones we just couldn't service economically, even though we tried to hire some more junior sales staff and do more of it for marketing. That didn't kind of work. The big ones, actually, the kind of founder that the sales focus could continue to tick them over in the meantime and when they landed great. But the ones in the middle that was 5 to 20 K a year of annual revenue, you could build a sales motion around that, you could hire a team that could go out and do those days and they, you know, they weren't the 18 month cycles of sales cycles or the big ones. They would close in like 8 to 12 weeks. So we basically just stopped doing all that other stuff, doubled down on that, and as a result, revenue moved relatively quickly. So that's probably, wouldn't say that was necessarily the biggest win, but that's probably the one that's easiest to conceptualize. And one of the most common problems across multiple businesses.

Mike Lovegrove 40:25

What's the proudest you've been from the work that you've done with founders so far?

Kiran Mehta 40:30

Yeah, so one of my clients has scaled really quickly. So they've gone from 300K ARR to 1.5 million in 18 months and I definitely cannot take the credit for that, right? It's the founders, it's the team, um, that are doing the work that are in there day to day, moving the dial forward. But I do think I've played a role in that. And I think I've helped him on that journey. Not raised any cash. So they was previously, they previously invested backed, and then they got to break even quite quickly, and they'd just been growing organically, and actually, to do that level of growth without any external funding in such a short period of time. That's been the biggest success story, but very much shared success between the team I've done 90% and I hope I've helped them with kind of 10% along the way.

Mike Lovegrove 41:13

That's awesome, man. Those are great stories. And I bet you have been a big part of that. And then, even if we go back to the very start of this conversation, when you're talking about who you help, that story, to get your next client, whenever you need to, is like, the, the best story, to be able to walk into a new company with, I've done this. I could have you do the same thing.

Kiran Mehta 41:36

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, no, it's good to share some of the successes.

Mike Lovegrove 41:40

And so if someone's running their own business now, a founder that is like, all right, I might have some problems that this guy, Kiran, could, could help me with. One of the questions that you're asking initially to see if you can help.

Kiran Mehta 41:51

Ultimately. Where are you? Where are you right now? Where do you want to, where do you want to get to? Um, and what are the kind of gaps in between the 2? It's almost always, we want to grow quicker. We want to win more customers and kind of focus around there. And so that's kind of the business solution, like where are the gaps and are those gaps of ones that I can help with? There's obviously, is it a stage fit? I don't really help businesses that are kind of product market fit pre-revenue. You know, I used to work with them as an investor, but in terms of what I do now, you've probably got to have kind of half a million plus of revenue for it to make sense to kind of invest into what I can help you with as a business. And then in terms of forgetting the business and thinking more about the founder, can I work with this founder? And it's usually, do we have different skills, but where the founder is self-aware and relaxed enough to go, I'm not good at these bits and I just want someone else to do it. I've had, obviously, I've had multiple kind of clients over the years and I've had a few, uh, they want help, but are they consciously want help, but subconsciously they still want to do it all themselves? And that's really difficult. So yeah, I guess the biggest thing for me nowadays is does it fit? Do we fit in terms of people and can we work together?

Mike Lovegrove 43:03

Nice. What's one piece of advice, Kiran, that you find yourself giving founders over and over?

Kiran Mehta 43:08

Yeah, probably the stuff that I said today, but just stay focused. Just stay as focused as you can. And it's easier said than done because there's a big proximity problem, right? You think you're focused because you've got no one kind of holding up that mirror. But yeah, do less and do less things, but do them very well.

Mike Lovegrove 43:27

What's the part of working for yourself that nobody warns you about?

Kiran Mehta 43:31

I think the bit that no one warns you about before you start working for yourself is just how hard it is to be your own sounding board, right? You often don't have anybody, um, to bounce ideas off. You don't have anybody to help you through some of the more challenging days. Solopreneur, the keyword is solo, right? You're often in it on your own.

Mike Lovegrove 43:50

What's the most overrated advice of going it alone?

Kiran Mehta 43:54

The most overrated advice with going out on your own is just do it. I think some people delay it too long, right? So I understand why that's popular, but fundamentally plan, prepare, execute, try and get a soft landing, and will lead you to a lot better place than just quitting your job without plan.

Mike Lovegrove 44:12

What's the most underrated skill for running a business?

Kiran Mehta 44:15

Probably touch on this one a few times, but the most underrated skill for running the business in my mind is calm and focus.

Mike Lovegrove 44:21

And what's one book every founder should read?

Kiran Mehta 44:24

The one book every founder, or maybe even every person should read, in my view, is Factfulness.

Mike Lovegrove 44:30

Awesome man. Kiran, this is all, this has been a really, really cool session and I think there's a couple takeaways for me as a, as an avid listener and reader of what you post on on LinkedIn. The first one is, I always say, around focus and like, Having the ability, I think, is an individual to hold that better up to yourself, to better say, like, am I focusing on the right, right areas? And then that, that second one is around now, as, as a founder, right, thinking about how I can systemize and scale. So selfishly, I was really interested in some of the things that you said there. But yeah, this has been, this has been awesome. I bet there's plenty of solopreneurs and founders out there that are scaling businesses that could get a lot of value from this. So if they want to reach out to you, Kiran, how can they find you?

Kiran Mehta 45:15

Easiest is just DMs on LinkedIn or if you want click through from my LinkedIn to my website and you'll find my direct contact email.

Mike Lovegrove 45:25

Perfect, man. So what we'll do is we'll put that in the show notes. Otherwise, Kiran, thank you for coming on the show and we'll talk to you soon.

Kiran Mehta 45:31

Perfect. Thanks for having me. Cheers, Mike.