The Crazy Story of Starting My Own Company Part II

Sometime in August of 2014, my professional life was in shambles. I had just moved to San Francisco to accept a job with a new startup company called “Seedchange”, which was effectively a broker-dealer for early-stage startup equity. The idea was to give investors, outside of the Silicon Valley bubble, access to these burgeoning startups and vice versa to increase startups' access to liquidity.??

2014 was a huge year for startups with VC capital from non-conforming VC entities reaching a record level. It made sense what Seedchange was trying to accomplish and I had just left a career in environmental services (think Clean Harbors ) because I desperately wanted to play in a bigger game. Captured in my blog “The Crazy Story of Starting My Own Company ”, I tried to illustrate the insanity of the period of about two months when I left Boston for SF, started with this new company, and then had it fold in under 6 weeks.? It is funny how many great people I met during that six-week period at Seedchange. The founders of StarCity Jesse Suarez and Mo Sakrani sat right behind me, one of my future employees Millie Beetham sat to my right, and the founder of Delegate, Patrick Hudgins , was at a table to my left. All of these people went on to do great things from what were ops, admin, and sales jobs at very, very small startup companies operating out of the co-working space Vault on Jackson Street in San Francisco.?

One of my clients at Seedchange was this guy Ben Jorgenson , who has gone on to achieve an ad-tech exit and then to become a significant figure in the crypto space. Ben was instrumental to the creation of Blarney Ventures, essentially “egging me on” to start this business and even introducing us to our first major client.? After Seedchange shut down, I was mortified and, after some soul searching, I started Blarney Ventures LLC in September 2014. I had no idea the type of journey that I had just begun. After proving there was a market for sales-as-a-service in 2014, we spun out FullFunnel because, as my business partner famously said, “Blarney Ventures is a stupid name for a sales and marketing business.” We hit a vein in the market and it took off. Essentially, we believed that there were a ton of companies out there that did not really understand how to stand up a lean and efficient sales and marketing program and that, if given the ability to outsource that function, they would. We were correct. FullFunnel grew to a company of about 35-40 people within a few years.?

Then, in 2018, we had the opportunity to acquire one of FullFunnel’s clients called Practice Alchemy. This was really the beginning of what Blarney Ventures is today. Our thesis was simple. FullFunnel was running the entire customer acquisition process for this company successfully, and the founder of the company wasn’t fond of the operational requirements to service 20-30 client accounts doing marketing and advertising for law firms. We acquired the majority of Practice Alchemy in 2018, installed management, and it has been growing ever since.??

Right before the pandemic took hold in 2020, I met Shabri Lakhani , an amazing sales leader who had started a company called SalesWorks . It was a training and development company focused on helping companies outsource their onboarding, training, and continuous professional development of salespeople. I loved the idea of bringing SalesWorks into the BV portfolio. Really, I was obsessed with the idea of BV having an offering that would allow companies that would never outsource their sales and marketing functions (there is a significant part of the market that will simply never do this) to still interact with our organization and derive value from our services. We closed on the SalesWorks transaction in September 2020, about six years after we founded BV.? SalesWorks is super fun and exciting for us for a couple of reasons. The first is that we brought on the founder to remain as the CEO and partner in our firm which was different from our acquisition of Practice Alchemy. The second is that SalesWorks was a UK company and for us to acquire the business we needed to start a UK subsidiary. There were many “Prestige Worldwide” jokes being passed around the office during this period.? We fundamentally believe that sales training and revenue operations are broken markets with very few systematic, integrated, and sustainable offerings that help enhance a company's bottom line through upskilling and training of their staff and improvements to their infrastructure. We aim to solve that problem.?

As we went into 2021, in a world still trying to figure out what a new normal looked like, we had to take a look at ourselves as an organization and a holding company and nail down who we were and what we were doing in the market. Originally, Blarney Ventures was just a holding company that owned FullFunnel. Seven years later, Blarney Ventures was a holding company that owned four companies, three of which were standalone professional services businesses with the fourth being an alternative asset investment arm.

Sometime in Q4 2020, I was approached by a top-tier venture capital firm looking at getting some turtles in the BDR-as-a-service space. We hit it off and ended up having six months of due diligence and an exploratory phase that culminated in their investment board not signing off on the deal. This six-month period was a crazy learning experience as I got to interact with pretty much all of their portfolio companies and understand the inner workings of the modern VC model.? While we were not able to agree on terms for a deal, I feel like I made a lasting business connection with the partner there and it opened my eyes in terms of where we needed to take FullFunnel as an organization. We are heads down trying to accomplish that vision.?

During this same time frame, something exciting happened in our Practice Alchemy business unit which manifested itself while we were trying to generate return on marketing spend numbers for a number of our law firm clients. One thing we kept running into was that these law firms could not pull and analyze their financials in a meaningful way. It was a striking realization that some of these businesses doing $3-20MM a year had really terrible financials. At BV, we are obsessed with metrics and transparency, so I started showing some of these clients what we worked with at the holding company and asked if they would find value in that type of accounting transparency. The reaction was incredibly positive, so we took on a few beta clients, and Practice Alchemy started offering accounting and bookkeeping services.?

Within six months we had dozens of clients and our satisfaction and retention rates were incredibly high. Then we started to wonder if this business line was applicable outside of law firms, so we went to a few of FullFunnel’s SMB clients and asked them if they would be beta customers. We ended up with a few SMBs who, after two months of service, essentially said that this product was exceptional. We realized we had just organically launched a new business in under a year that had a really tight product-market fit. With that, the BV team is very excited to announce the launch of our fifth company, “finairo,” which is a tech-enabled accounting and bookkeeping platform that liberates startups and SMBs from the frustrating reality of trying to accomplish best-in-class financial accountability and performance. We alleviate the need to hire outdated CFOs who are not in touch with the latest technology and enable companies of all sizes to access real-time business intelligence that powers their growth. The best part of this product is that for a fraction of the cost of one full-time hire, you are provided with a finance team, an analytics and financial reporting stack, and access to our proprietary tools.?

Blarney Ventures has successfully turned into a micro-PE firm where we leverage our own capital to acquire and organically start businesses that are in the sales, marketing, or tech-enabled professional services space. Interestingly, our story is incredibly unorthodox to practically every PE or VC investor we meet and it's somewhat difficult for them to wrap their heads around what we are doing. While we are not sure where this path ends, we know it's been incredibly fun and rewarding getting here, and we believe our future is bright.?

Onward.