Remember Kitchimo?

The majority of these weekly updates have been talking about 2 of my new businesses - FounderON and Cassidilly .

But you might remember back in November we announced a business called Kitchimo that has gone almost unmentioned in this newsletter (as pointed out by Ethan Kitching numerous times).

Does that mean it's been a flop? Or put on the back burner?

Actually no.

Quite the opposite in fact.

We've successfully followed all of the advice that we now dish out to early stage founders, and it's worked. Which means that actually, there's not too much to talk about in this newsletter. Other than just bragging about how well we've done.

With FounderON and Cassidilly, I'm still figuring out exactly what they are, if and how they'll work and sharing the ups and downs.

With Kitchimo I'm just focussed on working with the amazing clients that we're supporting. Great for Kitchimo. Boring for a newsletter.

But, this week, partly to keep Ethan quite, and party because I think it's useful for people in the early stages of their business. Here's what we did.

1. We identified a market need.

Most agency founders have an ambition to sell at some point. Those that don't, still aspire to greater growth or profitability. But scaling an agency is hard. New business is hard. Growth and all of the problems it brings with it is hard.

So there was a clear need in the market for agency scaling support.

2. We created a proposition to service that need.

As we have just scaled and sold an agency ourselves, this puts us in a very strong position to support founders with this challenge. Even more so the fact that me and Ethan were mainly focussed on the new business and proposition areas of our agency. The two biggest levers for growth and profitability.

The fact that we were never really Amazon experts ourselves (my agency was an Amazon agency), this allows us to much easier transfer our knowledge and skills into other agencies, no matter what service they offer.

3. We created awareness via our personal brands.

As soon as we identified our target client persona, we started creating content on Linkedin and the FounderON blog that gave free value to that audience. We talked about the problems that we faced, and suggested solutions that worked for us. We weren't selling. We weren't asking for anything. We were just offering support, and building trust.

4. We linked our commercials to value, not hours.

Our job at Kitchimo is to help our clients grow their agency and, if it's their goal, get an exit.

So our value proposition is based around the future value of our clients asset, not linked to how many hours we are working each week.

The majority of clients we are working with have already more than covered our monthly retainer with new business or upsells that we've helped them bring in.

We made the commercial aspect of the proposition a no-brainer, to remove friction from the sales process.

5. We launched day one with clients.

Day one of an agency isn't the day you decide to start one. It's the day your first client contract begins. As a result, you should be able to start an agency with little to no start up capital.

We launched on 1st November with 4 clients. But we started sharing content and building trust many months before.

We are now at full capacity, with a selection of agencies that have huge potential to scale and sell. We're absolutely loving the challenge and working with exciting founders and their teams. But we can't take any more clients on right now, to make sure we do a good job for the ones that have trusted us with their dream.

So that's why you haven't heard from us recently. We're still here.

Read about the agency that we built and sold in my weekly blog - www.founderon.com/my-blog