You have a gut instinct when you meet someone and trusting that is very important.
I’ve gone and thought that someone isn’t the right person, but I desperately need to employ someone, and on paper this person looks right; I’ve gone ahead and employed them, but it’s usually turned out where they haven’t been the right person.
Part of starting a business or being a business owner means you do have to make hard decisions, and some of those hard decisions mean letting people go.
We got approached by Fleetmatics, and when you look at their business, and the size of their business, the product they sold, and the two products together, it makes a lot of sense to go after the market that we go after. We both go after very similar customer bases.
When you go through an acquisition there’s a huge amount of legal work, documentation and due diligence that you have to go through. Being as organised as possible in your business is vital to making that process go really quickly.
During that process maintaining your focus on continuing to grow the business is important and that is really challenging. Your entire day is being sucked up by speaking with lawyers and the acquiring company.
I think the important thing is having a number of mentors around you that you can speak to who can give you advice.
I had a board of directors when we were a private company in Australia, I would go to a monthly board meeting and I would share my direction for the company.
I would speak to each one of those board members on a regular basis to get advice. And I chose each of those board members based on their experience in different areas of business. One was in legal, one was in marketing, one in sales, and one in technology. That gave me all the different skillsets that I needed to be successful inside the business.
We’ve built our own automated billing system, so every customer pays by credit card. We automatically bill customers based on the number of users who have used the system in a month.
The beauty of a subscription business is you know how much you’re going to get paid every month, so it makes it very easy to manage your cashflow.
Having had a business that had huge amounts of cashflow that went up and down, my goal was to build a business that had very regular and stable cashflow.
