Reflecting on ContentCal's journey with The Accelerator Network...

As we all get a few days to catch our breath, I wanted to reiterate my huge congratulations to Alex Packham who earlier this month announced that his company ContentCal has been acquired by Adobe (Bloomberg estimate for a 9 figure sum!). The break has given me an opportunity to reflect on ContentCal's inspiring journey with us (and also dig out some retro photos!). It’s been amazing to watch this inspiring journey which all started when he joined The Accelerator Network community back in 2016.?

ContentCal is a B2B SaaS business for companies to manage content creation and content management needs; to plan, manage, automate and report all in one place. It’s the perfect marketing tool and one that we ourselves rely on! Our relationship with ContentCal, and its driven founder Alex Packham, began with an introduction from a prominent media entrepreneur we knew well, who had been an early backer of the business at the pre-seed stage and knew they could benefit from growth training and access to a wider funding pool.

Our support for the company began with their 2016 selection into the Accelerator Academy, our seed stage support programme for emerging entrepreneurs. A young Alex is front and centre, in this picture (from a time when phone cameras were not great!)

Back then the founders were not yet even quite full time in the business!

With the business reviewed and entrepreneur assessments undertaken, the business was accepted to the Accelerator Academy’s 13th cohort (we are currently preparing?for our 31st cohort!), which provides seed stage growth training and investor readiness support, pairing founders with exited entrepreneurs as mentors.?

Alex’s assigned mentor Colin Smith (sat on the left in the below tweet) from The Accelerator Academy participated in ContentCal’s 2017 Seed round. (Full disclosure, this round saw The Accelerator Network agree to invest as well, a decision we have not regretted, seeing a >10X return). The Accelerator Academy provides exited entrepreneurs as mentors, and Colin ultimately became ContentCal’s Chairman, seeing the business through to its successful tradesale this month.

The Accelerator Academy delivered seed stage support, as part of The Accelerator Network which then continued to help ContentCal in its preparation for scaling and attracting Series A funding. We introduced the business to its next round of investors for the Series A investment in early 2020; coming from Fuel Ventures who have invested multi-million pound cheques into the business across a number of rounds in quick succession. We’ve stayed close to CEO, Alex since his Series A raise in 2019 and he’s kindly been back a number of times to share his experiences to other Series A stage businesses on our VC readiness programme.?The last VC round ContentCal secured in April 2021 saw Fuel invest more, and new participation from our friends at Guinness Asset Management, adding ContentCal to a list of companies we have supported.

If you’d like to hear more about how our programmes can help you to build a great mentor relationship you can hear directly from Alex here: https://bit.ly/31ueQZB?

As this latest chapter unfolds with this brilliant business becoming part of a global $300bn global software giant, all I can say to Alex, his team and his backers, is well done on creating such a fantastic case study for ambitious UK tech scaleups, and one others could study and learn from. The interrelationships between value-adding advisors, entrepreneurs and investors in a connected ecosystem, plus the ability for growth training to accelerate the success of an ambitious tech business is keenly showcased here. ?

ContentCal is in my view, an object lesson in tenacity, single minded focus, metric focussed growth and cultural advancement as the business made the step change from startup to scaleup and beyond…To our team over the last 5 years who have worked hard to support this business (and hundreds of others) across multiple stages, well done too (esp @Luigi). It was then especially rewarding to receive this acknowledgement from Alex on WhatsApp 2 weeks ago, on the eve of the deal being announced:

“It’s been fantastic to have had the support of The Accelerator Network over the years. You have been great advocates, partners and advisors to ContentCal at critical parts of our journey. Cheers!”

Thank you Alex for trusting us to help your ambitious startup at the seed stage, and again at the start of the scaleup phase on the approach to Series A funding and beyond as your business quickly scaled…all the way through to a successful exit for everyone! I can’t wait to see what’s next for both Alex and ContentCal as part of Adobe. I know it will be impressive.

Personally, as the founder of the Accelerator Academy, and later as Chair of The Accelerator Network, I have been proud to assemble an amazing team, enabling us to work with around 1,000 startups/scaleups who have now raised around ￡500m of funding. In building this support network for ambitious tech founders, my key goals at launch were to help provide the experience of exited entrepreneurs to seed stage entrepreneurs to accelerate growth and avoid pitfalls. "Educating Emerging Entrepreneurs" was our strapline when we came to market as [only] the 3rd UK accelerator in 2011. Drawing on my experience of launching, financing, growing and ultimately selling my own businesses, I wanted to create a programme, and later an environment and community, where exited entrepreneurs shared their hard-earned experience with aspiring entrepreneurs, to better understand how to get to sustainable growth (in revenue bands: ￡0>1m, ￡1>10m), and alongside this, as well as providing brilliant connections to experts, customers, partners and investors. My learning, as this grew, was to double down on support by individual "lifestage", as each step change faced by a growing early-stage business (pre-seed to seed, seed to Series A, Series A+) has different learning - and investment - requirements and growing pains. Lastly, I was passionate that the process of growing a business and raising capital along the way should become more fluid and less transactional, with different programmes available for the same entrepreneurs as they needed us at different points in their journey, always with a focus on "accountable acceleration"; particularly when benchmarked against investment outcomes.

As my first decade within this business comes to a close, I am absolutely overjoyed to see ContentCal's success; having included learning across lifestages and accessing various funding sources at different moments in time, with the structured and continuous support of The Accelerator Network - delivering against my/our original mission. ContentCal is one of a growing number of alumni companies who have and are continuing to utilise this lifestage specific support to grow some of the best of British startups and scaleups. Congratulations to Alex, and indeed, all of our entrepreneurs!

If you are a UK tech entrepreneur who wants to consider this path to growth and venture? backed success, get in touch. The Accelerator Academy is for companies with sub ￡1m net revenue, and has supported 300+ startups raising ￡150m+ of seed funding to date.

If you are a little later-stage (￡1m+ revenue) and would like to find out more about how The Accelerator Network can help you to raise ￡2-20m VC investment for your business take a look at The ScaleUp Accelerator and parent organisation White Horse Capital.