Let’s face it, I’m a dinosaur in this fast-paced world of agency building. While it seems like running a one-person agency and hitting seven figures in your first year is the norm these days, my journey was much different. It took me over ten years of dedication and building a fantastic team of 15 talented folks, crafting web apps and software for early-stage startups and scale-ups.
But let me tell you, the adventure didn’t stop there. Just when we were to embark on our next growth journey with our team, life threw not one but two acquisition offers our way. One came from another agency in our field that wanted to scale rapidly and the other? It was an unexpected counteroffer from one of our favourite and most respected customers.
We weren’t even actively looking to sell, yet we took a leap of faith and decided to embrace something new, joining forces with our customer to bring Amba, an exciting product in the age tech space, to life.
Fast forward almost two years, and I am settling into my new full-time CTO role. But I’ve kept the conversations alive with fellow agency leaders. And I’ve realised that sharing our journey, the ups, downs, and everything in between, could be valuable for the younger entrepreneurs starting their own (crazy) agency-building adventures.
This series of posts will possibly be a long and therapeutic exercise where I will look back at almost 15 years of my entrepreneurial life and recount experiences and insights gained through that journey. Having been quiet for the past two years, I hope to have some insights to share with the younger entrepreneurs who are starting their (fascinating) journey of building and growing an agency.
From freelancer to entrepreneur
I’ve always known, from my teenage years, that I would have some entrepreneurial drive. Unlike the familiar story of the entrepreneurial kid making his first few dollars at the lemon stand, my motivation wasn’t money but freedom.
I’ve always been driven by building software and achieving some level of freedom. This is why, when I was a pothead 15 years old, I dreamed of myself as an open-source developer, living on a remote farm in the Alps mountain.
Even if my life changed, and instead of owning a farm in the Alps, I own a suburban house around Bristol, the mindset is still relatively similar. A certain level of freedom drives every decision I take in life. In my early 20s and 30s, freedom materialised by having enough money to live the life I wanted. These days, freedom means I can be a great dad to my kids and spend as much quality time as possible with them.
When in France ….
I grew up in France, and in my early 20s, rather than going to university or following the engineering school path, I decided to build a business instead.
Technically, I was freelancing, but since this was over 20 years ago in France, freelancing wasn’t to be trusted. I’m sure my website at the time was filled with “we” and “our team”, but it was me in my bedroom.
It was the burgeoning era of the web, and I was a webmaster. I was mainly building the first dynamic websites for small local businesses (think little shops/estate agents etc.) in the pre-WordPress/Magento era.
Like anyone else at the time, I was building my own “CMS / Admin interface” where people could control the content on their website, change images, and add or remove products. And they loved it since they didn’t have to pay another couple of hundred euros to change an image on their website. I was even, in the end, building small e-commerce websites without any framework.
But I sucked at business. I was too cheap. I would spend too much time on each client, and while I was making decent money for my young age, I would burn it all in nonsense items like any young chap with a bit of money would do.
After a few years of this freelance life, I got headhunted by a medical software company and became a full-time developer.
This new full-time job provided me with some financial stability and indeed removed a lot of the mental burden that comes with freelancing life. It also allowed me to meet Nathalie—the person who would become the most important person in my life.
Moving to a new country
After a year together, her studies bought her to the UK for an internship, and I decided to follow her. We settled around Bristol, and I found a software developer job at Hewlett and Packard (HP).Fast forward a year in the country, and I was missing the freedom again in this new role. We’re now circa 2009; I’ve been crafting things in Ruby on Rails and enjoyed the framework. So I set out to be a Ruby on Rails freelancer.
But this time, I would treat it differently than my early attempt in France. I would have a reasonable day rate, monitor my time and focus on building good case studies.
But I didn’t have a network here. I need more network to overcome. I needed people to get to know me. So I became more active online, running my little events (meet-ups about Ruby on Rails) and attending many other people’s events in my niche (entrepreneurs, startup founders).
I rapidly became known as “the Frenchman who works with startups” around Bristol (my thick accent was finally useful at something). Strangely enough, this was also when I was introduced to a person called Stuart. I built a project for him and enjoyed working with him. He was both extremely smart and driven while being incredibly humble and friendly. Never would I have thought that, through the next 11 years:
- we would build another 4 projects
- he would end up acquiring my company
- we would build something new together.
After two years of freelance work, I had a good run and was working on exciting projects. It was also the time when Nathalie (who was about to become my wife) was looking for a new role. She is trained in international marketing and’s the actual brain of everything we do.
We then decided to team up, building a company that would sell software development and marketing to early-stage startups.
It was the beginning of our grown-up entrepreneurial journey. And by working together, we would be (at least we thought) in control of our destiny and freedom. So, in 2011 we decided to incorporate our agency, get married and conceive our first child. It’s a make-or-break year.
But when I think about it with more insight, this decision set our mindset for the next ten years. We were young, in a new country and without any safety net. Failure wasn’t a luxury that we could afford.
What’s next?
As I started writing this post, I realised there’s a lot I want to say. I’ve decided to split the content into a series of posts. This chapter is simply setting the tone, and I hope it has given you a little more insight into my mindset.
Later this week, we will look at Navigating the Entrepreneurial Landscape: What starting a business looks like, the mistakes we made in our initial market research, how we decided to position ourselves and why we voluntarily limited our growth.
