Earlier this month we sold Accelo, a company I co-founded 15 years ago, and last Friday was my last day at the company. With this transition, I wanted to share a few reflections on a massive journey, appreciation for the work of our amazing team and thanks for support of our many thousands of clients.

Accelo was my third startup, following on from Internetrix (an award winning digital agency), and briefly Omnidrive.

From the beginning, my co-founders Chris, Eamonn, Glenn and I knew we were doing something really hard, but also really important.

The first hard thing about our mission was the fact that we had a ridiculously ambitious product vision without a lot of capital. I was in Silicon Valley on and off in the late 2000’s when Eric Ries popularized the idea of the Minimum Viable Product (MVP), but we knew that to deliver what we now call client work management, we needed a lot more than a narrow product. We needed a Minimum Viable Platform.

The second hard thing about our mission was that target market was small and medium businesses (SMBs) in professional services. Not only was it hard to reach people because it is a fragmented market, but it was extra hard because we needed to build awareness and educate the market about the problem before we could sell our solution. And even when we were able to reach someone, getting them on-board was hard because SMBs don’t have much time or money, so their costs of adoption made it hard to win new business. In summary, the market was both hard and expensive.

There’s also been a bunch of bad luck that has made things even harder than they needed to be. Mistakes in hiring, especially with some key executives, set us back significantly. There was also the challenge of the pandemic, and finally over the last year and a half we’ve seen a challenging economic environment for our customers. 

If you think of it like game play, there’s no such thing as “easy mode” in a startup. But the difficulty of our product ambition, the challenges of selling to our target market and then the setbacks inside and outside the company meant it has been more like starting out on expert mode!

When it comes to the really important bit, we have always cared that the failure rate of professional service businesses is so high – half of them don’t see their fifth birthday. Because professional service businesses are the largest employers in the western world, the costs of these failures are huge to society, costing jobs, health, marriages, homes and more as these otherwise promising businesses fail at a massive cost to society. The reasons they fail are numerous, but the two most common are a lack of information to make good business decisions and because of cash flow issues.

We were crazy enough to think we could create technology that could give these hard working business owners and managers super powers. Technology that could automate workflows and resources, technology that could provide real time reports and data to make better decisions, technology to make invoicing easier so they could get paid faster, and at its core, technology to help them run a much more prosperous and successful business.

And that’s why I’m so proud of what we achieved. Only 4% of SaaS companies get to $1M in ARR. Only one in 250 get to $10M in ARR. Last financial year we did much more than this… profitably. Everyone on the Accelo team should be so very very proud of what we achieved.

While playing on expert mode, we were able to create the world’s best platform for managing client work, with high scores on G2, CSAT scores routinely over 95% and our clients doing billions of dollars a year in revenue. I’ve lost count of the number of times our clients have told us that our platform was what allowed them to double their profit margins, that gave them insights they never had before into their business, and generally reduced the chaos and confusion that held them back every day.

Without doubt, we were able to achieve something special: we created a major product with limited capital that made a massive difference to the lives of thousands of people every single day.

For now, I don’t have any immediate plans other than to spend some overdue time with my wonderful wife and three little girls and decompress after what has been a particularly challenging last 5 years of this third chapter.

Then I’ll be back to write Chapter 4, and beyond.