I am thrilled to announce the launch of Growthblade Partners.
Since leaving SHR Group at the end of October 2023, I have taken time out to think about what comes next. I feel blessed to be able to have taken 6 months away from work for the first time in 30+ years, focusing on family and friends. I was convinced that the obvious route was to go again, take on another CCO role in a SaaS organisation and ignite another exit. It is a brutal company growth phase and it takes its toll but I love it. It’s in my DNA. I have 4 exits now under my belt across my career to date, including my most recent as Chief Commercial Officer, Board Director at Avvio which exited to SHR Group generating a 5.5x non-leveraged return for our fantastic outgoing Private Equity Partner partner, Calculus Capital.
What I have since learned from that experience is that founders and their teams need help. I have met with a lot of founders, advisors and private equity companies over the past few months. I’ve kissed a few frogs if I’m honest but have engaged great people with a common theme. Scaling the go to market (GTM) piece is hard. There is a significant opportunity to lend my support across multiple companies but to also offer access to my “safety blanket” of partners I have personally worked with for years across multiple organisations that can help plug gaps now, without needing to budget immediate fulltime hires and without needing to commit long term. This allows scale ups to pivot quickly and directly address growth challenges head on with low barriers to get moving.
You see, founders don’t always get it right first time which is totally fine. All aspects of a typical business are akin to plate spinning. Founders naturally gravitate to where they excel – often the product or the engineering side, which makes absolute sense as it’s the reason they launched the business in the first place. As companies move from start up to scale up, some of these plates crash. These are very normal growing pains.
When to appoint a sales, marketing and or customer success leader and at the correct level is a tough call. Mistakes can be made and hindsight is a wonderful thing. Wrong person in the wrong seat can create a culture shock wave that can damage thriving elements of an organisation’s growth plan, which can be tough to recover from. Typical hiring timelines for CxO level can take 6 months to find the “right” person plus three to six months current notice period. You need to be prepared to give them at least a 12 month runway by which time, you might have equity dilution as part of that hire agreement and it just hasn’t worked. In some organisations I have engaged with, this has happened multiple times. Hard earned cash wasted and an extended problematic cap table that doesn’t feel right.
Growthblade Partners plugs that gap. By offering “GTM as a service” and have access to top tier partners that support everything founders and their teams need to achieve their growth ambitions.
Finally, I never had any ambition to become a “founder’ but this feels right and the feedback has been super positive. Over time, I will reference some of the great companies and partners I am proud to be working with and will look to showcase some of the feedback and results.
If you would like to find out more, please visit growthblade.com or contact me directly. I look forward to meeting more founders and their teams, advisors and private equity partners to see how Growthblade Partners can ignite your growth ambitions.
