From Selling His House to Selling His Company with Craig Joel

What would make you sell your house and put the money into a business you weren’t even sure would work? 

For Craig Joel, part of the answer was being naive enough not to fully understand how hard it was going to be.  

Craig is the founder and CEO of Now Book It, but his story started long before software. 

He bought his first restaurant at 24, learned some brutal lessons about tax, numbers and running a business, then spent years inside hospitality before spotting a problem restaurant owners kept complaining about.

We talk about what happened when he put everything behind Now Book It, the moment COVID shut down virtually his entire customer base just as the company had finally become profitable, and how they went from signing roughly 150–160 restaurants a month pre-COVID to as many as 400–500 in some months afterwards. 

Then we get into the part most founders barely think about until it’s happening: selling the business.

We get into:

→ Why Craig believes hospitality, financial and marketing acumen are the three skills that can make or break a hospitality business

→ How listening to restaurant owners complaining about booking fees and losing control of their customer data became the opportunity behind Now Book It

→ The roughly $600,000 initial software build, why Craig sold his house to protect his equity, and why he says knowing what he knows now might have stopped him doing it

→ Going from finally reaching profitability to watching COVID shut down the restaurant industry, then building a takeaway solution in four days

→ How Now Book It jumped from around 150–160 new restaurants a month pre-COVID to 400–500 in some of its biggest months

→ Why AI makes software dramatically easier to build, but relationships, integrations, distribution and customer understanding create the real moat

→ What Craig learned selling Now Book It, including EBITDA, revenue multiples, earnouts and why you need to know your numbers before talking to a buyer

→ Why the highest offer isn’t necessarily the right exit when your team, your role and what happens to the business afterwards actually matter

You can spend years obsessing over how to start and grow a business without ever thinking seriously about how you’ll eventually leave it. Craig has lived both sides, including what happens when the founder sells but isn’t actually ready to walk away.

Chapters:

0:00 Meet Craig Joel, founder of Now Book It
1:00 Selling the house and going all in
3:00 Starting in hospitality at 16
6:00 Buying a restaurant at 24
10:00 The three types of acumen business owners need
14:00 Finding the problem that became Now Book It
17:00 Finally profitable… then COVID hit
22:00 Why human customer service still matters
23:00 The $600,000 build and bootstrapping Now Book It
28:00 AI has changed the cost of building software
33:00 The booking fee problem Craig wanted to fix
38:00 Pricing Now Book It and investing in AI
45:00 What breaks when a business scales
49:00 Selling the business without planning to sell
57:00 Valuations, EBITDA, multiples and preparing to exit
1:00:00 Why Craig stayed after selling
1:16:00 Craig’s advice for founders considering an exit

If you have any questions about the episode, have a burning question you would like me to answer on the show, connect with me and the rest of our incredible community on Instagram:

→ https://www.instagram.com/delusionalwithsammykennedy/
→ https://www.instagram.com/sammykennedyofficial 

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

That's why I sold the house, much to my wife's disgust.

SPEAKER_01 0:03

At just 16 years old, Craig Joe entered the hospitality industry.

SPEAKER_00 0:06

And they got a job as a busboy, basically, for those that don't know, picking up plates and throwing them in a dishwasher. So it was a pretty average to shitty job.

SPEAKER_01 0:14

Today he's the founder and CEO of Now Book It, a global hospitality technology company responsible for more than two and a half million bookings every month, with 8,500 venues and 40 plus integrated partners.

SPEAKER_00 0:27

We thought we knew it all, but we knew nothing about running a business and our accounting practices were shit out.

SPEAKER_01 0:32

He became a restaurant owner himself, spent 12 years as the president of the Catering Institute, and is also the co-founder of Gift a Restaurant, Australia's largest restaurant gift card wholesaler.

SPEAKER_00 0:43

If I sat down and looked at what I was planning to do now, today, I would be delusional to think that I could do. And I think if I knew what I knew today, understanding a lot more about technology, I may not have taken that plunge.

SPEAKER_01 0:54

Now he's helping shape the future of what hospitality looks like through technology, customer data, and AI.

SPEAKER_00 1:00

There were so many people that would have been invested into this business, but we really wanted to bootstrap it. We wanted to do it ourselves. So I sold the house.

SPEAKER_01 1:28

He has absolutely blown me away with his knowledge, his experience, and his passion for what he actually does. As the CEO and founder of Now Book It, I've invited Craig Joel to come on here and talk about all things business, exit strategy, how the heck you keep going, even when it feels like you're delusional and you just want to give up. Welcome to the show, Craig. How are you doing?

SPEAKER_00 1:53

Yeah, great. That was, as I said, it was a great intro. You make me feel really good. But it's um, yeah, it's a pleasure to be here. I'm I'm happy to have a chat and see where it goes.

SPEAKER_01 2:02

I'm grateful for your time. And I just want to say, when you told me that you sold your house and went all in on this business venture, I knew you were the perfect guest for delusional. I ask every founder the question what's something that you've done that's completely delusional and ended up working out for you?

SPEAKER_00 2:21

Well, I'm I mean, if today I sat down and went and looked at what I was planning to do now, today, um, I would be delusional to think that I could do. And I think one of the things that um why we had success was my naivety. I don't think that I really understood technology enough to understand the impacts. If if if I knew what I knew today, understanding a lot more about technology, I may not have taken that plunge. But I backed myself because I knew the people in the industry and I knew what the industry wanted. And so that's so I think that would, you know, if I was to do it again, I would be delusional. I probably wouldn't do it. I probably wouldn't. Because it's uh you there's so many ups and downs. It is a roller coaster ride, uh, you know, being a business owner of any kind, but when you're in hospitality and then adding in uh technology, it is a it is just a mind screw. It's it can be pretty full on. Because it you literally have these huge ups and huge downs. And we've had many.

SPEAKER_01 3:26

You can't escape them. No business owner has a perfect linear journey.

SPEAKER_00 3:32

No, definitely not. And I've had a few businesses and and every one of them, but you learn, you definitely learn from those problems. Um, there's some that we've been able to learn from and adjust to, and then there's others which we had to adjust to, things like COVID that came into the market that impacted everybody. Uh that, you know, we in some ways we were lucky, in some ways we were clever. You know, there's there's lots of different factors that add up to make up your success. And and I think we just ticked all those boxes, fortunately.

SPEAKER_01 4:00

So take me back to you being 16 years old, you've just stepped foot into the hospitality industry. How did you know that this was going to be something that you would continue on with?

SPEAKER_00 4:11

Well, without telling you too much about my background and my youth and why I did what I did, there was opportunity at Crown, what which is now Crown. It was called Genting Palace then. And it was a yeah, it was a massive uh new Malaysian resort that opened up and they put a casino in there, and I saw an ad. And at the time my mum was doing a lot of marketing for them. So my mum's a very astute businesswoman in a time as well. And she sort of said, Oh, you know, this is something you should look into. So I put a a resume in, was my school resume, it was nothing. But they were looking for people, and I got a job as a bus boy, um, which is basically for those that don't know, picking up plates and throwing them in a dishwasher. So it was a pretty average, to shitty job. Um, but very quickly I realized that hospitality was about being hospitable, and there was a lot of really cool, fun people in that in that place at Crown at the time. So I worked my way up till I was about 18, started bartending. I did a uh hotel management class there for three or four years, and then I just started traveling. But um, yeah, that initial I remember being in Crown once, just after opening day, and just feeling that thrill. There was thousands and thousands and thousands of people coming through that venue, and it was not prepared. I remember we had nowhere to wash glasses, and they were literally getting the dirty glasses and throwing them in the bin because it was we could not facilitate how to wash them. We had nowhere to put uh the cash that we were getting at the end of the night. I remember a guy coming up to me, he was getting money out of the till and putting it into garbage bags and wrapping them up and giving to me and saying, Don't put that in the freezer, and it'd be like, Oh my god, yeah, you'll put it in the freezer now. I w that someone could have just walked out with that. I don't know. But the reality is there were no processors or not sufficient processes, so it was a complete disaster. But they had multiple soft openings, and that's probably why. But it was it that's I just the thrill of that got me into hospital, and I just loved the people within the the industry and and I thought this is me, this is what I want to do.

SPEAKER_01 6:18

So, did you do the dishes and you acted as busboy for two years?

SPEAKER_00 6:22

And no, I did bar backing and all that kind of stuff. So I actually was making cocktails um for a guy on the side. So we had a here side hustle. He was working there and he was doing cocktail parties at 17 I was making cocktails. Don't tell anybody. Um but yeah.

SPEAKER_01 6:39

RSA laws have changed now, and that's the day.

SPEAKER_00 6:42

Very much so. But I yeah, it was it was one of those things where it was the end of me being 16, so I was going on to be 17. So it was about a year and maybe three or four months that I sort of worked either as a glassy or a or a or like a barback or a um yeah, someone who's picking up dishes.

SPEAKER_01 7:01

You're 18 years old, you've been working at what's now crown, going through that crazy process. At what stage did you go, hey, one day I want to own my own restaurant? Because that's a big gamble.

SPEAKER_00 7:13

Yeah. I think again, it just came back to there was a few things that happened in my life. I there was one that I I won a cocktail competition when I was eight, so I turned 18, and I'd be making cocktails, and I won the state championship for for cocktail making.

SPEAKER_01 7:27

What are they judging you on?

SPEAKER_00 7:28

Oh, there was a bit of flair, you know, there was that time of cocktail, that movie cocktail. And so there was a bit of that, but it was more about the mix of the drink you were making, how quickly you made it, if it was all level, you made several drinks for several people, and there had to be nothing in the shake, you know, there was it was a few things. Um, but that just gave me heaps of confidence. I had a little bit of confidence, but after that, I had a I just felt like I was, you know, walking on clouds and felt like I could do anything. And that just gave me I don't know, people say that in in life sometimes they get these moments that give them, you know, that was the thing, that was a defining moment that gave them the confidence to do something. And that was mine. I know it sounds pretty trivial, it was a cocktail comp, but for me, it was a big thing. I went to, you know, in Australi the Australian titles after that and met other people, and I just got connected with industry that way. And then it wasn't probably till I went to the US and just did some on a travelling holiday and I was working there that I realized that this is something. I was working in restaurants more than bars, and I realized I want to do this, I I can have one of these one day, I can I can pull this off. And then at 24 I bought a restaurant and knew nothing about business. Um, and that was you know, I le you had to learn very quick. It was uh it was a big downfall when I got a knock on the door saying, Hey, you haven't paid any tax yet, what's going on? Um, you know, you there was just things that we didn't even think that we had to do. I was a front-of-house person, knew a lot of a lot about hospitality, but didn't know enough about business. So we learned some hard lessons very quick.

SPEAKER_01 8:56

What were some of those hard lessons in the early days?

SPEAKER_00 8:59

Yeah, again, the taxes was one. You know, we weren't paying tax efficiently, we weren't paying it on time. Um there was, you know, just laws and regulations around our the the food safety and things that we had to have, things that we didn't have, that we had council coming in to do spot checks on us. You know, there were certain things that we had to have, you have to have in a row, and we didn't have them. And our accounting practices were shit ours. I mean, we're just we were young, we were 24. Like I was 24, my mate was 25, I think. Um we thought we knew it all, but we knew nothing about running a business. We knew a lot about making people happy and being hospitable, but not enough about what happens behind the scenes.

SPEAKER_01 9:40

So how long did that venture last? Was it a success or was it?

SPEAKER_00 9:43

Yeah, no, we had it for about three and a bit years, and then the government put through a tunnel in our backyard, um, which was the Northbridge tunnel, which is now the Graham Farmer Freeway. And so they segregated Northbridge. They literally cut it, dug a massive hole, and then put a lid on it. Um, and our backyard was one of those properties that was impacted. So the lead up to that, luckily, we were approached by our fish the fishmonger, the guy who sells us the fish, and he wanted a tax break. So he wanted something that he could ride off some of his fish with, and so he bought the restaurant and lasted about a year and a half after that, from what I heard. But it would have been tough because we sold just before the tunnel started to get constructed, and we were freaking out, but there was definitely a downturn because they started to to move traffic and you know, direct people uh to other parts of Northridge. So we felt like we were a little bit segregated, so we were very, very lucky. I mean, we we uh lost a little bit of money on the sale, but we were very fortunate to to get out of that. And we had a great time and learned lots of valuable life lessons and business lessons during that period.

SPEAKER_01 10:52

What was the most valuable one from that?

SPEAKER_00 10:55

You need to have acumen about business. You need to have some financial understanding. Even if it's basic, you need to you need to have some basic financial understanding. Otherwise, you just you know you're gonna be heavily reliant on someone else to do that for you and it's gonna cost you a bomb.

SPEAKER_01 11:09

I remember you mentioned something to me about the best business owners have three acumen.

SPEAKER_00 11:14

Yeah, well, the best bit in hospitality I can speak for, particularly because I reckon it's for service-based.

SPEAKER_01 11:19

When you were telling me I was like, it makes sense.

SPEAKER_00 11:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:22

What are those three?

SPEAKER_00 11:23

Well, in my belief is that if you're from hospitality, you need to have if you've got uh a uh background in working in hospitality, that's obviously beneficial. So that's one. The most important is the financial acumen, I think. If you don't have the financial acumen, it's really difficult. And then marketing, being able to get yourself out there, your brand out there, promote yourself. I always say to when I was doing some consultancy work, if you have two of those three acumen, you're in a really strong position. If you have three of them, you're in an amazing position. Uh, if you have one, you're probably gonna struggle. Um, but if it's business, if you have that business acumen, uh particularly accounting, you might have a chance of getting through it. Because those people black and white, they don't see the gray and they say, right, well, we're not making money with that, so we're not gonna sell that anymore. And even though it's popular, we don't give a hoot what the customers think. We're gonna cow we're gonna can that. So I think um those those three things are the are probably the most primary acumen that you need.

SPEAKER_01 12:23

I think that's so relevant to businesses because a lot of the time someone starts a business because they're deeply passionate about the product or then it comes down to the numbers and they're like, oh, I'll just charge what so-and-so is charging. They have no idea what money they're making. They don't know if they've got debt, if they've even making a profit, and then it just becomes this like race to the bottom where everyone's just trying to outlast each other.

SPEAKER_00 12:48

Well, I think there's the you know, when you go to borrow money as a restaurateur, um people, the bankers will ask you particular questions focused on how passionate you are to make sure that the passion doesn't get in the way of the of the business acumen. And for me, I was uh I was way more passionate about it than I I realized until I got in there and realized I didn't have that business acumen.

SPEAKER_01 13:12

My dad has this saying that he learnt through many of our failed businesses is like don't let passion overcloud your judgment.

SPEAKER_00 13:19

Yeah, definitely.

SPEAKER_01 13:21

You just say, Oh, I'll get this and I'll buy this and we'll add this in. And it's like, is there a demand? Are you truly passionate about it? And do you cost it?

SPEAKER_00 13:28

Because it's also exactly what I see in now in technology is that people build things because they have an idea and this would be a great thing to have, but not really understanding the landscape, and or if there's a need or a pain point that you're that you're fixing, because if there's not, then and you you're not gonna build something and people are gonna come. It's not like you're Noah and you can part the seas, and you know, all these people are just gonna rock up. That doesn't happen like that. And the same with restaurants, people think that their passion is gonna flow out, and that because they've been in the industry for a long time with restaurants that they're gonna open this up and they've got lots of friends and they're gonna come, but they can't come every day and have a coffee. You know, it's about creating word of mouth and getting other people talking about the experiences they're having because they're they're genuine, not your mate going, hey, my buddy's just opening a restaurant and you should go and check it out. That is has a very small lifespan.

SPEAKER_01 14:17

As you're saying that, a thought that comes to mind is it becomes deeply personal. It's almost like art where it's so subjective based on your taste. And so you might pour all of your time and energy into building this business after this dish, and you love it, and you think everyone else is gonna love it, and other people go, Oh, is that it?

SPEAKER_00 14:35

Yeah, yeah, true. I mean, and imagine there's I wasn't a chef, I was front of house, but I imagine there's plenty of chefs out there that, you know, are trying to see if their food's good enough. Can they sell it themselves? Are they are they and a lot of them, you know, don't have that business acumen either. They might not have great food control. And but you're right, I think there's a lot of people that probably open up businesses in passion, not just in hospo, in all kinds of different industries that do it from passion and maybe don't do so well.

SPEAKER_01 15:04

It's a tough one because as a visionary, you see a gap in the market and you're like, ooh, I need to fix this, I want to create this opportunity and bridge the gap. But then sometimes it's like, do other people, are they receptive to that? You know, do they want that solution or are they aware of how it's going to benefit them, or is it just this cool idea?

SPEAKER_00 15:24

Well, that I think that was a benefit with we had with Now Book It was I was sitting on that association and I was constantly doing these talks across the the country where I'd sit in a forum or a panel and be asked questions about the industry and where it was going and the direction and what the future looked like. And I'd always go and talk to my restaurant mates before that, saying, guys, what do you think of the pain points? And they'd always say, for years it was staff, staff, staff, staff, staff. We can't get enough. It's not uh good enough, we're not getting enough imported staff, we're not getting enough help. Um, and then all of a sudden it started to change.

SPEAKER_01 15:55

And what year do you reckon?

SPEAKER_00 15:57

That was in 2014, I reckon, that was. And I started to hear more well, because then it started to change to this whole we love taking online reservations, but what we don't like is what it's costing us and what's happening to our customer information is we're not getting to own it, and that was a big problem. So people saw the benefit of taking online reservations, but they didn't. I think when they first saw it, they didn't realise the impact of it. And as they started to realise the impact, I started to hear that noise a lot more. Um, and that's where I saw an opportunity and started to investigate the opportunity, started to talk to restaurateurs about what the pain points were, and then filled that pain point.

SPEAKER_01 16:36

It's pretty wild when you think about what restaurants look like before booking software, because there's no way of projecting. Well, you pick up a telephone pretty much where you don't really know how many people are going to come in because you can't well, yes, if you were doing that in an old book, it's not like you get this nice little visual of how many tables have I got left during this time like you would now.

SPEAKER_00 16:56

Yeah, or if you're not in the restaurant, you have to call up someone in the restaurant or go to the physical restaurant to get the only reference point, which was a book that sat by the till, you know. And and there'd be times when the chef would pick that book up and go to the kitchen and start looking through it and writing down numbers, and then someone would ring and it wasn't at the front desk.

SPEAKER_01 17:15

And how are you meant to get your customers to return? You can't do any marketing to them.

SPEAKER_00 17:19

It was very difficult.

SPEAKER_01 17:20

It's just like, please come in today.

SPEAKER_00 17:22

Yeah, I mean, there was no really no reference point or contact point.

SPEAKER_01 17:25

So So COVID, that was the pivotal moment for you when you developed Now Booker.

SPEAKER_00 17:31

Well, it was one of the pivotal moments. I think I I told you when we were just having a chat at the coffee shop that the month prior, so we were doing our numbers, and the way that we collect our revenue is on a monthly basis, it's a SaaS model. And we in March, the first week of March, we got our February numbers of March of 2020. So I don't know if you recall, but 20, I think it was the 23rd of March, the whole world shut down or in Australia it shut down. And it happened really quick. Like the lead up, but you know, there was talk about it, and there was things that there was like restrictions, but then all of a sudden it was just like boom, tomorrow we're shutting the door. Um, but that we were celebrating the first week of March. We're like, yes, we finally had made a profit because the way our business grew was we would get to a point where we're gonna make a profit and then we would add more people to our to the resources to sell because we knew that if we did that, we were gonna get a return on our profitability moving forward. And as a SaaS company, your revenue compounds, so you want to compound it as quickly as you can. So we kept adding people, and yeah, and as a result of that, COVID came in. We made a we were a profit all of a sudden, and then we got shut down pretty much. I mean, every restaurant in the country shut down, as every business did. And I think I was telling you, I was in the fetal position by my bed in tears, not really, you know, put everything on the line. Um my wife was incredibly supportive, and um and you know, we it was sort of like, well, it is what it is, you know. We're if everyone's gonna be impacted if everyone's gonna be impacted, so let's just stick together and work through it. And I have to say, it was probably some of the best times of my life during COVID with that six weeks, because I traveled a lot and worked a lot, and not that I didn't work then, I was working hard, but I had my kids and my family where everyone we were living in an apartment, like it was equivalent of an apartment, was a small house that was like two bedrooms and with four of us in it, um, with one toilet. So, you know, it was in a really nice suburban, it was across the road from the beach, so I wouldn't make it sound like it was I was living in a shack or anything, but it it was a shack, um, but it was close to the beach. So we were going to the beach a lot and we were doing a lot of stuff together as a family. And um, but that whole time I remember going, oh my god, it's COVID, what are we going to do? And then we started working out a plan to keep all of our people. And what why we were really fortunate is because all these behemoth competitors that we were going up against that are billion-dollar companies, were all foreign. So they were all from the US, from the UK, France. And as a result of that, they couldn't get any benefits from the government as a business because they weren't Australian companies. So, JobKeeper, as an example, literally saved our business because we we were able to keep every employee. We didn't like make anyone redundant or sack anybody. We waited till the very last minute, and we thought we're going to try to just manage it with the with the funds that we have at our disposal. And we were quite fortunate in that regard that we had a little bit of extra cash flow. So, yeah, we we decided to just keep everyone on board, and then JobKeeper came in. And we also, in that time, we built a takeaway solution in four days. So we pivoted into building a takeaway solution. Our devs worked all night and day for three or four days. We built a solution and then we got it to market. Because the other thing that was happening was everyone wanted to sell takeaway, and the takeaway providers didn't have the the staff or the resources to make it happen to onboard them. So, and we did because we had all these people that were doing nothing. So we turned all of our people into takeaway salespeople. So we were starting to onboard people and we started to generate significant revenue from that. Um and everyone wanted takeout because everyone had loads of cash because the government was just throwing money at people. So it was we were very fortunate and we were very lucky. I mean, there was a bit of you know, we were, I guess, I say luck, but there was a bit of we were we were fortunate that we had the resources to to continue to build the product. Um and I think that set us up because what happened when COVID, we came out of COVID during multiple phases, uh, and we were fortunate in Perth because obviously we only shut down for six weeks, and I think once or twice after that, but other people were, other states were shutting down very regularly. But what ended up happening was we got um we got to a point where the everywhere started to open and no one had any staff, our competitors didn't have any staff. So if you were using a different platform, As a competitor, and you rang them up and said, Hey, can you get me onboarded? And there were hundreds of customers trying to get re-onboarded. They couldn't do it, they couldn't facilitate it. And we had this huge network. So we just started doubling down on people. They were all coming to us because other restaurants started to talk, and it's quite an incestuous industry, and our numbers just blew up. So we were doing, we were signing an average of about 150 to 160 restaurants pre-COVID a month. And then we grew at there were some months we were doing four or five hundred.

SPEAKER_01 22:27

Whoa, it was full on.

SPEAKER_00 22:30

For about three months that happened.

SPEAKER_01 22:31

I was watching one of your YouTube success stories from one of your clients, and they were saying he sat down with you, been using Now Book It for 10 years. He absolutely loves it. And he mentioned the onboarding experience. And if there's ever a problem, not that he had any, he knew he could call. And I think that is just one thing that no matter how much technology, no matter how much automation we have, people who are stressed out and they want help, they just want to talk to a human.

SPEAKER_00 23:00

Yeah, I think that's probably another thing that sets our business apart is that we really focus. I think again, because we're from hospitality and everyone that we've employed has come from hospitality from a sales perspective or a customer service perspective. And so as a result of that, they have an innate understanding of the industry and they can relate to how the restaurants are and what they're feeling and what they're going through and give them advice, consult in some ways. But also, if you look at any of our Facebook or any of the like Sydney bartender pages, Facebook pages or um Perth staff pages, when there's recommendations of people looking for recommendations, our customer service comes up all the time because you get to speak to a person aside from someone in Mexico for some of our competitors or or a chat bot or we we offer that as well, but there's a phone that you can call 24-7 and get a response.

SPEAKER_01 23:52

I love that. Something that you've done incredibly well is now your product. And I think when you look at the career you've had, you've gone from working for other people through to owning your own thing, working for other people again. How did you actually come up with the funds, the idea, and the initial I'm just gonna go all into this for now book it?

SPEAKER_00 24:17

Well, I had some funds, firstly. So we started off building the product. Um, and I had a business partner, and my business partner is incredibly generous, very wealthy guy. Um, he's self-invested, so he's he's he's created his own wealth. Uh, he's a mentor of mine. I worked for him for a number of years, for I think 15 or 16 years prior. So we had a really strong relationship. And I was working for him, and I think I told you at Coffee that I said to him, you know, my dream was not to make you millions of dollars. I love doing it, but I I'm gonna set something up myself, and this is what I want to do. Do you want to be part of it? And he immediately was like, Yes, I do. And that was really, you know, there's a lot of gratification in that uh because I had so I, you know, hold him in such high regard. But yeah, we we basically built the product. Um, I think initially we paid about 600 grand to an agency to build it uh over a period of months, and then they were working with we were flying people in, restaurateurs in, and they were sort of you know getting feedback from the restaurateurs about what was right, what was wrong with the product. It got to a point where we started to employ people. We did a test with a guy that I'd worked with before who was a great hospitality sales guy, and he told me that he was going to go and travel around Australia and he didn't have a job for three months. So I said, mate, come and work for me. Um, I'd love you to just test this out to see if I'm I'm trying to work out if I should employ and how many people I should employ. And in that period, he he sold our platform to like 30, 35 restaurants or something like that. And I was like, holy shit, hang on a minute, and by just doing the math there in my head. Um, you know, he was nearly profitable. He made himself almost pay for himself in three months. And being SAS, the revenue compounds every month, right? So you you know, you're getting, let's say you've got 10 customers and you're charging 200 bucks, you're getting 2,000 bucks that month. But if you sign another 10, the next month you're getting 4,000, and the next month you're getting 6,000, and then 8,000, and it just it compounds. And so what we realized really quickly after that was we need to freaking double down here, triple down. And that's when it came to the conversation about well, how are we gonna do this? How are we gonna finance it? We could have got money, we could have, you know, had there was so many people that would have been invested in wanting to be invested into this business, but we really wanted to bootstrap it, we wanted to do it ourselves. So I I sold the house. Um and yeah, we invested into the business and Ben had access to cash. So I didn't want to lose my equity position. So that's why I did the uh sold the house, much to my wife's disgust. Um, but it was really it was a great decision because it, you know, later on when we exited, it obviously it was paid its dividends. Yeah, correct. But it was a huge risk, and as I said at the beginning of this talk, I probably knowing all the things I know now, um, I don't know that I would have taken that punt. I would have been a little bit I I definitely would have been a little bit more um yeah, I would have thought about it a lot more. I was sort of so I just had it, I was fixated on this idea, and I worked all day and all night to make it happen because I was so heavily invested in it. It had to happen. It had to be successful. There was no option for it to fail. So I put everything into it.

SPEAKER_01 27:35

You're probably maybe the tenth person on this podcast to say failure is not an option. I think when I've had guests who've had multi-million dollar businesses and they've put everything on the line, you just can't afford to fail. You put so much here, your family are going through it. And I think part of being naive and being delusional is that you don't know what's coming up, so you just keep going anyways. If you had your whole timeline played out and you saw all the challenges, you'd just be like, Oh, I can't be bothered.

SPEAKER_00 28:06

It's a lot of people my my kids and my wife lived and breathed every moment of coming in and out of COVID because we were in a in a box and I'd be on the phone having conversations with all my staff, and it was just full on. Like they would I'd get off a call and they'd be like, Are you all right, Dad? And or my wife would be going, What are you gonna do about that? How you because they could hear everything that was happening. Um so yeah, I think it it it wasn't an option, and we were heavily invested.

SPEAKER_01 28:32

So looking back now with how you've done it, not having investors and things like that. When you sold the house, for people who have no idea what goes into a software company, because you said it's six hundred thousand dollars to get it started. I know the next million you said was basically doubling down on people and finding the sales reps to scale it. With Claude and AI and all these other crazy things out there, if you were to redo it, do you think it would cost less money?

SPEAKER_00 29:01

Oh god, yeah. I think in a matter of months, even now, people can rebuild our software quite easily. But in in a matter of months, I think um someone who's got no idea about development or or building a uh an AI company or a software company could literally if they put their heart and soul into it, they could literally in three or four months have a have any business that's online. I mean, it's that simple to replicate now with natural language models. What I would say is, and where it gets tricky, is that then you've got to host it. And then you've got to, you know, the architecture has to be right, and you've got to run that business in an effective way and make sure that it's scalable. And that's where people fall. Just because I did that business, I had huge amounts of connections. I had been working in hospitality for a long time. Um, the association had given me a conduit to thousands of restaurateurs. The previous business I worked in, we had 10,000 restaurants that we worked with across Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia, South Africa. So, you know, I had a big network of people that I could call on. But there's also nowadays there's the integrations, and getting integrations now are far more difficult. So if you're a small startup, trying to get an integration with someone that's big, like a big point of sale company as an example, is incredibly difficult because they're just like getting hit up every minute by these thousands of mosquitoes that are coming in going, hey, I want to integrate, I want to integrate, I want to integrate. And it's just noise. So they just palm them off. So I think where people build moats and where we've built our moat is probably in the relationships we have with our customers and more importantly, the um the integrations that we have that allow multiple pieces of technology to talk to each other and then give you access to information and data, which is incredibly powerful. I think that's where the differences are. But anyone can build anything.

SPEAKER_01 31:02

It's crazy. I think because it's so simple, now we're seeing a mass influx of all these different softwares and booking systems, but they're not necessarily game-changing, like they're all just someone who's gone, oh, here's an idea and put some things together. But I think your deep experience and understanding of the consumer because you've been able to ask all those questions, you can kind of like prejudge the issues that are going to come up before they do. Whereas everyone else is like reactive or copying what's already out there.

SPEAKER_00 31:34

Correct. I think you can you can cop I mean we were a bit of a copycat in in some respects, but our whole business model was different because we weren't creating a marketplace and trying to create a place where people could come to book. We were white labeled, we were sitting behind the scenes, we had a very different vision. Um, whereas if you're just trying to copy a product, again, it's about the distribution, how you're going to distribute it. Um I mean, we the way that we built our business is I got 10 people, about 10 people in a room with some pizza, red wine, and a whiteboard, and we talked about all the problems I were having and wrote down on the whiteboard, this is, you know, these are the things I love, these are the things I hate, and let's leave all that shit out and put all this shit in. And then we we started having these individual conversations where we flew people in and out. And I think we still do that today. Like when we're building a feature or a product, we're talking to our customers about what they want to see and how they want to build. Because if you're not doing that, you're just you're just building and hoping they're gonna use it or hoping they're gonna come. Because in the past, we've definitely built features that we thought were gonna be used en masse and have definitely not big and costly things, like things that we've spent four or five months building. But to come back to the point, for you could build you could build anything very, very quickly. Um, and for all those people out there that are listening and not using AI in some capacity, um, I'm just saying go out there and get your head into it. Just start learning because it's gonna, it's unfortunately it's coming. If we don't want it or we do want it, it's coming anyway.

SPEAKER_01 33:04

I literally just spent an entire week vibe coding, setting up a funnel for our own Christmas functions bookings, and it's fully customized to what we need. The food, the bar tab setup, the bookings that goes into our CRM, it all links in, and I'm like, wow. Because other booking softwares, they have some parts that I love, but then they're really average in all the other areas, and I think that's where I struggle. It's like, I don't need that feature, I don't want that thing. What I love about your software being different from others is that you have the flat fee, it's putting the business owner first, which we spoke about price up and arbitrage. Arbitrage.

SPEAKER_00 33:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 33:46

And when you were explaining it to me, I was like, this was something that all my clients when I was doing consulting in the beauty industry were facing. So Fresher is a booking software where they initially started off being free. And it sounds great. But then, you know, they take card fees and they do all these other things, and then there were hidden costs like your email marketing and this and that. Yeah. Then they had their marketplace fee and they were taking 20% of any booking. And I wanted you to explain what was happening in the restaurant world where these people were taking money, even though they were naturally searching for it.

SPEAKER_00 34:21

Yeah. So well, there was lots of stuff going on. But I think the primary things that were happening and the complaints that I was getting when I was in the association and on those panels and hearing about the pain points was that it was really costly. And I was trying to understand why it was costly. And I was told by a bunch of restaurateurs that basically the way it worked was they were paying per reservation. So, or per customer, actually. So it'd be three dollars per customer for some of them. Let's just say use those numbers. So it's three dollars per customer. So you've got a group of three people coming into a restaurant, or you and I are six bucks, right? On face value, you think, well, okay, well, they're promoting and they're doing all the marketing and they're driving all these customers, but that's not what was happening. What was happening was they had a product, um, and it's not around anymore, so I can use that brand, but there was this this one particular one that was quite large, it's called Dimmy. Dimmy had a had a consumer-facing product, and they were trying to get customers to book via Dimmy, but they didn't have any customers. So what they did was they set up the infrastructure to take reservations. So they built a booking system, they actually licensed a booking system out of the UK, but they used that system and they sold it to restaurants for, let's say, a hundred bucks a month. And then what they did was every time that someone made a reservation, they were booking via DIMMI, the DIMI widget. Even though you go to a restaurant's website and they would collect that customer information and then they would put it into their DIMI database and start marketing and going, hey, if you love that restaurant, look at these amazing other Sydney restaurants I've got, or Perth restaurants I've got. They're unreal. And then they would charge those restaurateurs $3 for driving that customer. But the worst bit, the thing which really pissed me off and got me realizing is there was a site called Similar Web that's still around. It's a um it's a data site that you can look up any website and go, I want to see what traffic they're getting, and it will give you basic data. And I could see just from looking at the basic model that there were people, Dimmy were putting up ad words for a restaurant. And what that means for anyone who doesn't understand what ad words are, is that let's say this is very common in the um in the hotel world where you go to make a reservation and I type in Hiatt Melbourne, because I'm going to the Hyatt Melbourne, because I've been there before. I've got this, I'm a true, tried, trusted customer of theirs. So I type in Hiatt Melbourne, and at the top pops up this thing from booking.com that says, book here for free at the Hyatt Melbourne. And so you go on there and you book. Um, what you don't know when you're doing that is that the hotel is being charged 15 to 20% for that privilege. But the customer didn't get they didn't discover the Hyatt from that ad word. They discovered it because they typed in the word. And so what was happening in the restaurant world was exactly that. And the equivalent, I think I gave you an analogy, and it was an analogy that we used to restaurants because they completely understood it. And it was, let's pretend that I'm a marketing person and I say to you, hey mate, I want you to give me $3 for every customer that I'm gonna drag into your restaurant. I'm gonna stand on the street and I'm gonna literally pull people in. And I'm a promoter, and you're gonna give me three bucks for every person. You go, yep, not a problem. But what you actually do is you hide behind the pot plant at the front of the restaurant and you're sitting there, and as people walk in, you jump out and grab them and say, He's with me. That's what they were doing. Literally, it was they were just stealing, I'll say stealing, they were stealing customers. And that's still common today in hospitality across hotels in the US. It's very common in with reservation systems. Um, but it's allowed somehow. Google allow it.

SPEAKER_01 37:50

So if you look at booking.com, luxury escapes, things like that, how much of a percentage are they actually taking from these venues on average?

SPEAKER_00 37:59

I think booking.com's valuation is like uh 180 billion or something. I mean, that gives you a bit of an idea of what kind of revenues they're generating.

SPEAKER_01 38:07

It's crazy.

SPEAKER_00 38:08

They're significant.

SPEAKER_01 38:09

We were talking just earlier off mic about the RBA surcharge situation. And something that I've started to realize is like it's these middlemen that make the most money that they don't have to own a bank and they don't have to own a business, but they can take a dollar from a big thing.

SPEAKER_00 38:25

Well, listen, it's smart, it's really smart business, but it's unscrupulous as far as I was concerned, and that's why we had a big point of difference was I wanted to try to to as a former restaurant owner as well, I think it helped is I wanted to do what was best for my mates, but at the same time felt like I could build a business that I could make money and charge a fair price.

SPEAKER_01 38:44

How did you come up with your pricing? You've obviously seen all these other venues.

SPEAKER_00 38:48

We started really low. We started way too low.

SPEAKER_01 38:51

Like how low? Like $10 a month.

SPEAKER_00 38:53

Oh, no, no, no. We were doing, I think when we came out, we were doing $99. And the problem with that was that people were paying up to $2,500 or $3,000 a month for the pay per booking model. So there was a significant difference. And people were jumping off and coming to us predominantly from price. But what you realize when you have a pricing matrix like that and you go in we we had a replicable product, like our product actually did some things that theirs didn't. But what the mistake we made was people the bit the the question we would get more often than not that would crush the sale was what's the catch?

SPEAKER_01 39:26

Oh, it's too good to be true.

SPEAKER_00 39:28

It's too good to be true. People thought that the pricing was too, and so you've got to be really careful when you're pricing whatever whatever you're in. Um you've got to it be in that heavy medium. So we've gradually put the pricing up, and you just you can measure the appetite by just having a conversation with someone.

SPEAKER_01 39:44

So what would you charge now and how do you do that? Because my question is as someone who's come from a service-based industry, a lot of the time these booking softwares in, for example, your barber or hairdresser or beauty, they go, you pay a monthly subscription, then you've got to pay per staff member. And oh, if you want to unlock this feature to see their reporting, now you've got to pay another map. And it's crazy.

SPEAKER_00 40:09

Yeah. So what we did was we have a platform fee, which is about $249. If you were to ring us up, it's $249. And that comes with our marketing platform. So there's integrated marketing. So it pulls all the data that you collect every night and then allows you to uh dump it into our marketing system with automation. So if you're a restaurateur that doesn't have any um, you know, clue about the marketing component, you can set up four or five automations that will just send the emails out. So you can set and forget and it will generate revenue and tell you how much revenue you're generating. We've recently had some things that we've built products, significant products, when I say significant cost to our business, that we have started to create in a modular format. So as an example, we co-built an AI voice assistant, and that enabled us to, you know, restaurateurs, if you can think about, they're very time poor. And if you've middle of service, your phone's running hot, people wanting to make reservations, even with an online reservation system. We're doing 75% of reservations come through online, but still there's still 20 odd that don't. Um people want to make have a special request, or they might have lost, left a pair of shoes there, or a pair of pair of sunnies or something there. You get questions about the menu, you get questions. There's the phone is ringing hot. So we built an AI agent that basically takes the call and then pushes reservations in or directs people to the right channels, it looks for your lost property. Um, and so those things, there's a significant cost to us, to the business. Like if you're using a language model, every time that someone uses that, there's a significant cost that we get charged. So we obviously we've got to pass that on. So there's modular things that we've added as we've gone, but the core product itself has fluctuated from $99 to $249. But there's I mean, there's thousands of things that thing does. And as you said before, there's only certain things that you might use as a specific restaurateur that's suits the needs and wants of your business, but there's large entities that still use the software that you know use every single piece of it day in, day out.

SPEAKER_01 42:20

Like you've invested to bring AI into your company.

SPEAKER_00 42:23

Every resource that we have is using AI, but uh it'd be hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars. I mean, just hiring people nowadays. If they're not using AI, um, we probably wouldn't employ them, even if they're salespeople.

SPEAKER_01 42:39

I find it really interesting how Claude has really capitalized on you need to buy tokens and they get used up, whereas Chat GPT hasn't, and there's unlimited prompts. And I believe that at some stage they're gonna flip the switch and we're all gonna be addicted and have no choice but to get paid for it.

SPEAKER_00 42:55

Without question. Without question. Nothing's for free. And that's been bankrolled and not making money, so there has something has to change. But the same with Facebook was the same. Facebook came out, created a, you know, they had um a billion users and we had a massive valuation. I think their valuation was like, I can't remember, I think it was like 10 or 15 billion or something. And they weren't having didn't have any revenue yet. But you knew that that what they were gonna do, they were gonna at some point get a revenue stream, which they got Facebook ads, and then you could just start choosing your audiences. It was really clever.

SPEAKER_01 43:28

It's pretty crazy what's available now. Like I've got go high level, use that for everything, and they've got the AI studio, which just links into everything, saves me from having to do WordPress, and then this doesn't talk to that. And then they've got the AI agents and things, and I've had other companies be like, we can do this for you. And I'm like, but I can do it myself. But on the other end of that, you have to be someone who's willing to learn to invest the time into setting it up. And I think that's where a lot of people are like, I just want to add this on. Give this to me. You've got all the experience, you've got the data, and it can be customized. It blows my mind hearing how much money is being invested into AI and how much AI is costing. Because the credits, the tokens, like I was reading one um one company, I think they spent like $80,000 in one month on credits.

SPEAKER_00 44:17

Yeah, I mean we spent a lot, but I think we're also government. So there's so many different things that you can do to restrict the usage and make sure that you're getting the best value out of it. But if you're, you know, if you're just learning how to use Claude as an example, you're probably going to just burn through tokens.

SPEAKER_01 44:34

Do you use clo work?

SPEAKER_00 44:36

Yeah, a little bit. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 44:38

That's kind of my next thing that I really want to learn. How can I implement that into my business?

SPEAKER_00 44:42

Yeah, there's lots of stuff. We use a thing called granola across the business, which I love. It's the simplest little thing. It's a note-taker for appointments you have when you have doing team meetings, but it breaks all the meetings down. We do it with sales as well. And then you can understand later on what the prospect really wanted out of the meeting. Do they really want to use our gift card platforms? Are they really interested in events and creating events? So then when we do the onboarding process, we send those notes to the onboarder that are legible as opposed to someone scribbly shitty handwriting. And then you get a really good outcome from that because they think the customer experience is better. So there's lots of things like that that are little things that make a massive difference. I think it's the one percenters that actually give you, you know, better productivity. There's there's lots of stuff that you can do with Claude and build things, but um for me, the productivity things are the things that we try to get the most value out of.

SPEAKER_01 45:35

What do you feel like you struggle with the most in business?

SPEAKER_00 45:38

Oh my god.

SPEAKER_01 45:40

Is it focus if you really focus on productivity?

SPEAKER_00 45:43

Uh it's not it, I think the problem with when you get to a certain size, scale is a a beautiful disastrous beast.

SPEAKER_02 45:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 45:51

Because when you build a business, you build it on what you have in in place. You put processes in. And as a growing entity, you everything breaks, constantly breaks. The processes break down. What was great when you had 400 customers is no good when you get a thousand customers, and when you get to 2,000 or 7,000, or it's those, they're the things that dementi me the most is that you get, and it's really easy to get what we call vendor lockdown. So you choose a vendor and then you get you build everything with that vendor and around that vendor, but then it's virtually impossible to get off. So you've got to be really careful of that. I think that's probably the biggest risk when you're building software, is to be very mindful of vendor lockdown because you'll get caught up. I I won't go into it, but there's a there's something we're trying to remove now within our business, and it's freaking painful. That's probably the thing that dements me the most.

SPEAKER_01 46:45

And throughout all of this, you're a dad, you're a husband. Yeah. How has the stress levels been? Has that been something that you've just not been home because you've had to stay late nights and everything?

SPEAKER_00 46:56

Or have you been really I mean, I listen, I I think when my kids were little, I I they probably thought I was Superman, you know, whereas every probably young kid thinks of their father. Um I missed out a lot of of their lives, unfortunately. It was pretty I mean, I I there was one point where I was traveling every second week. So I was like live working, you know, in fly in, fly out. Um, and that was really tough. Really tough. I think on everybody. For me, they they all knew what I was trying to achieve and what I was trying to do. And I think what I felt like was gonna happen was at some point we were gonna we were gonna sell the business and move on and and I'd have more time. But I think I'm I've so for clarity for the listeners, I've I've exited. Um, and I'm still the founder and still the CEO of this company, and I'm and I'm just as passionate as I was then because it's it's like my baby. Um obviously I've got a huge benefit, financial benefit from it, and and that's been unbelievable. But I found I've I'm one of those people that stores it in within. So I get my stress out probably with my people, unfortunately, sometimes, um, sometimes maybe with with at home, but I try to keep it all within and then try to do my own thing. I have my outlets. So I go to the gym, I play tennis, I try to surf or get to the beach regularly to swim. Uh you've got to have an outlet because you can't keep that shit inside. And I think that's probably more to the detriment if I I just didn't want to put that burden on at home. You know, come home every day and talk about all the freaking problems you have as a business owner. This doesn't at some point, you know, my wife's gonna leave me and probably my kids. So I think it was more about just um keeping it within and yeah.

SPEAKER_01 48:47

Finding a way for you to process it that doesn't harm others.

SPEAKER_00 48:50

Yeah, that's it. I mean, it was just yeah, and I think even today, I I probably every once in a while I'll be sitting there on the countertop and just be like, Oh, for God's sake, you know, swear here and there. And then they're like, Wow, what's going on? It's like a nothing, don't worry about it. But I just yeah, I get a little bit theatrical sometimes with it.

SPEAKER_01 49:09

I mean, you are passionate about what you do. There's gonna be moments where it just triggers you that little bit more.

SPEAKER_00 49:15

Yeah, without question. Without question. But I've try to keep it, I try to keep it contained as much as I can.

SPEAKER_01 49:22

Exiting your business. Yeah, that's a massive achievement, firstly, because there are a lot of businesses out there who open up, they put everything on the line, and then they just go, I can't do this anymore, and they close down.

SPEAKER_00 49:36

Yeah, we were lucky, I think. Well, when I say we were lucky, we were, you know, I feel it wasn't probably till after we exited that I for a long time after, maybe six months after, um, I was sitting with someone and they said, Man, have you stopped to reflect on what you've done and what you've achieved? And and I hadn't, and uh and that was pretty cool, just that moment. But it you know, I I exited the business and I was still working in the business, so it wasn't like You didn't have this grieving process.

SPEAKER_01 50:06

I didn't loved it.

SPEAKER_00 50:07

I didn't. Um It was weird, you know. We we had a really amicable uh exit, meaning that I think it was really valuable for both parties. And as a result of that, I think there wasn't any regrets. On I I think what of I think when you do an exit, you've got to be really careful. So for me, we had multiple parties that were approaching us. We had two different parties at the same time that were sort of fighting, but we I was getting approached every week because there's scouts out there for every MA company on the globe that are just looking on LinkedIn and looking for things that are growing and looking at your comments that you're making as founders. So they I don't know what their algorithm rhythm is, but I was constantly getting hit up. Um, and for the first couple of times, I I made some calls with people and just to hear what they wanted to say because I wanted to get some experience. Had we got to a point where we wanted to exit, and I think I mentioned to you before, I had no plan on exiting. I didn't build this business to build an empire and then exit. That was not my strategy. My strategy was I wanted to do something myself and make myself a a living and enjoy whatever I was doing. You know, I didn't I didn't want to wake up and be in a daily grind. Um, and I was getting to the point in the the job it had before, that that's how it was becoming. So this was a yeah, this was a really good opportunity for me. But I think going to that phase of building the business and and going through the exiting phase was was one where we just spoke to different people and got lots of this is we don't want that guy, we don't want anything like that, and we don't want anything like this. We do like that from what these people are offering. So when it came to the negotiation phases, we were in a position where we knew what we wanted to do and what we didn't. We had no intention of selling the business. What we were actually looking for was someone to invest in the business and get us to the US and Canada, because that was like a dream of mine. I'd worked in the States before. It's it's a big opportunity financially for a business, and I wanted to see our brand in the US. That was like a goal of personal goal of ours. You know, when we came to that exit, it was the people that we exited with Valsoft, who are like a billion-dollar company out of Canada. They had done this before. They'd had experience, they'd had 150 odd companies that they'd bought in the past. They buy and never sell, which was really the thing that sort of was the clincher for me. Because that strategy is very different from most MA companies that'll come in, they'll buy a company, they'll build it up, build it up, build it up, then sack everybody and make it look really profitable and then sell it off again. And I didn't want to be involved in that. I didn't want to build up a business with people like my biggest asset is my people. And as because of that, I wanted to make sure I looked after my people. So with certain people in the business that had been with us a long time that had options in the business, and then they're just people that I wanted to make sure that if I left, they weren't going to get sacked. Or if we continued the business, that there was going to be no major redundancies or anything straight after we did the exit.

SPEAKER_01 53:05

I think that shows that you have a lot of integrity because it's not as common in today's business world. There's people who are happy to cut costs, cut people, high profits, do whatever it takes, and then they use the good old quote, it's just business. And it's like you don't have to do things.

SPEAKER_00 53:20

Listen, I think it's your what whatever your purpose of building the business was. And my purpose, and I think Ben as well, my my um my mentor and business partner, our purpose was was to make a business and obviously to make it profitable and to be successful, but it wasn't the number one thing. You know, there's I think people do business for different reasons. Ours wasn't to build a business and exit. That's not where we built it. We built it, we were solving a problem. There were times in our business where we felt as a business we were coming in into hospitality on a horse as nights, you know, just chopping the heads off the enemy. That's how we felt. Like we really felt like we were doing the right thing for the industry. And I think we got more gratification from that than anything else in the business.

SPEAKER_01 54:04

If that was your thoughts and feelings towards it, what actually made you decide, yep, we're gonna exit?

SPEAKER_00 54:10

So it was probably a little bit of pressure from my wife. Uh, we'd been renting for eight years.

SPEAKER_01 54:16

Um in the little shack with the one bathroom.

SPEAKER_00 54:19

Yeah. Um which we loved. I mean, you know, we had that that that little shack brought our family very close together. We've got a really unique bond, uh, I think our family. But, you know, she'd been through this as much as I had as well. And we'd been looking at homes and now we we could go and you know, choose a home as opposed to be forced into living where we may not want to live or in a suburb that we, you know, had second thoughts about, we we could choose. And I think that was we were I'm incredibly grateful because the industry's given me that. Um so yeah, I think it was just it was just the time. It was good timing. It was good timing for lots of reasons. But the main thing was that again, you know, if I'd held on to the business, we probably could have got more money for it a year later or two years later. But I think my partner was probably ready.

SPEAKER_01 55:09

Was he older than you?

SPEAKER_00 55:11

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think he's just had his 70th, so he's 70.

SPEAKER_01 55:14

Oh, he's happy retiring. No, he's loving life.

SPEAKER_00 55:16

I mean, he sold his his previous business and and you know, was very successful in his previous business dealings, and he's had mu he's a multiple uh entrepreneur entrepreneur and investor, and and he yeah, he's done really well himself.

SPEAKER_01 55:29

So when you sold the business and you got well, you still got to stay on as founder and CEO. I think that's pretty cool. Um was it everything you thought it would be? Like, did you actually feel this sense of achievement or fulfillment and like you could finally give back for all those years that you guys had struggled together? Or was it just a keep going, what's the next thing?

SPEAKER_00 55:50

And well, it's just I mean, you know, when you've got when you're working for someone else as well, their needs and wants are not necessarily the the same. It's not always alignment. And the one thing I think has been great, I'd be grateful for is that with the guys that we exited with, we've had the opportunity to um to have alignment for most things. There's been some robust conversations, and I think there would be, you know, if if it was with my business partner or someone else, there's going to be robust conversations when you've got partners, you've got to be transparent, upfront, frank.

SPEAKER_01 56:23

Um who do you report to now? So is there a board?

SPEAKER_00 56:27

There's a guy in Canada that that sits on the board, so we pretty much report to him. The idea of it was that that we run our business as we run it, and then they they're very analytical. So they've got data coming out of their woes, and it's just you know, you're constantly going, look at this report, look at that report.

SPEAKER_01 56:43

Um Are you good at numbers?

SPEAKER_00 56:45

I am, I'm I'm a lot better than I used to be, but you you you know, you don't have a choice. Again, when I had that restaurant, I became very accustomed to the numbers, and then um in the previous businesses that I've had, you you start to realize that it's a really important acumen. So yeah, but I mean I can look at our business every month now and like in in seconds detect where there's a problem, but you know where the problems are are gonna surface before they before you see your PL being our the business model that we have. We know where the next month is, before the next month is.

SPEAKER_01 57:15

For someone who has built up their business to a significant amount of revenue, they've got decent profit and they're looking to exit. What did you not know in the early stages that really helped you get the best out of your exit?

SPEAKER_00 57:30

I think our accountant recommended that we speak to someone within their business who was an advisor. That helped a lot during the exit. They knew how to talk the talk. Uh this person uh was a director at Judobank, so they had the chops, the financial chops, and the and understood the MA world back to front. And they were asking the you know, the prospective buyers lots of very pointed questions that delivered answers. And I think where most people fall down is they don't know what they don't know. And we didn't know a lot about exiting in software. We'd exited out of other businesses, but not in software. So this was a different, a different realm. Um and when you're looking at software, typically the valuations are based on run rates and and where the business is heading. And depending on who you talk to, depends on what valuation you're gonna get.

SPEAKER_01 58:28

I find that super interesting because it's the same with, for example, if you're selling um, I don't know, a clinic, a bowling alley, a restaurant.

SPEAKER_00 58:37

Are they looking at the profit and then multiplying that by a number or typically they're gonna look at your Ibidar and work it out on a model of Ibidar times three or five, depending on the type of business it is, and depending on the growth of it. We in software typically you're looking at um the growth, where's the growth coming from and and and what's the trajectory of the growth? And then you're also looking at um the if it's financial, if it's profitable. If you get if it's you know doing 25, 35, 40% growth and it's profitable, they're very good signs. Like you're gonna get multiple, you're gonna get multiples of revenue. Like so you can get you know three, four times multiple. You know, if you're exiting, you want to know what your numbers are. You want to know your numbers innately before you start even talking to anybody. Because they're gonna just drill you with questions about what's your business doing, what's your run rate, what's your CAC, what's your all these you know, acronyms that you're just going, what the hell does that mean? You know, you you're sort of googling why they're why they're um mentioning them to you. Because there was a lot of things that they were talking about that we had no idea what the acronyms were. But as you go through the phase of talking to people, I would recommend that you talk to lots of people, not just one. Some people don't have that privilege, unfortunately, they're just they're looking for an exit. Um, if you're looking for an exit, I would probably be talking to brokers about the exit and and have a plan about what you want to do. Like, do you want to stick around, do you not want to stick around? Because that's a big consideration, and and some people might want you to stick around and want you to stick around to do the right thing, and they might put part of your your uh your exit cash into how you what happens in the future. Like we had an earnout as an example, and it was based on our revenue to make sure that the growth continued. So if the growth continued at 25 to 30 percent, um anything that grew over year on year, we'd get 100% of the growth of however the much the business grew. So it was in my interest to keep it at 25 to 30 percent because I wanted to get 25 to 30 percent of the revenue.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:47

So, how long are you expected to stay on?

SPEAKER_00 1:00:50

Is it like there's no I could have left day one and still got that earnout. Yeah. But I wanted to drive it, firstly, but secondly, I didn't want to leave because I wasn't ready to leave. And I and I think to myself now, you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna retire and do what? And play tennis with myself. Like it's not like my mates are retired or I'm not ready. I'm not definitely not ready to do that. So I'm not ready. Definitely not.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:11

And you're looking at all the things you know now that you've had all those fun experiences and wisdom. What type of business model do you think would give you the lifestyle that you want?

SPEAKER_00 1:01:24

I've got another business, which I think I I was talking to you about before. Um, gift to restaurant, which is sort of like a set and forget business. It's a really great little business. It's profitable, it's it's small. Um, it's small in the sense that it's got two people working in it, but it's we work with the likes of Qantas, American Express, uh, Luxury Escapes, all these huge brands that have huge amounts of data, customer data, and then they sell the gift cards to their people. So there's a big opportunity with that business. I think it's just starting to grow now. Um, but I don't know. I'm I'm quite happy where I am for the moment. I think I uh, you know, no, I'm enjoying now Book It's still challenging. Um I still want to see it grow in the US a bit more. And then I'll probably hand the reins down to someone within the business if that's what Valsoft won. I mean, it's they're gonna be their call. Um, you never know, they might get rid of me. They might not want me in the business. I I I don't know. You know, that's either way I'd be happy. Um, but I I would like to continue to be there for for some time yet. It's pretty crazy when you try to think about what would my life look like without that thing when you're Yeah, I mean I wouldn't have the hysteria, but I'm a I'm a I can't I'm the guy who goes on a holiday and can't sit on a deck chair. You know, I can't sit still. So it would do my head in to to be sitting at home. You know, I'd have to be doing stuff. And you can only do so much stuff. Um you know, I can travel and but you know, how much can you travel? You know, you can kill yeah, I don't know. Maybe I haven't really thought about it too much, but I just don't see myself not having a purpose.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:08

That's probably the easiest way to explain it.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:10

How old are your kids now?

SPEAKER_00 1:03:11

My son's 18, my daughter's 16.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:14

So they're older now.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:16

Yeah, my son's traveling around the world. He he's in India at the moment.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:19

Oh wow.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:20

Yeah, he's trekking with some buddies.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:22

And are they similar to you? Like, are they very driven? Are they ambitious?

SPEAKER_00 1:03:27

My daughter, they're very they're different, actually. I'm quite musical as well. So I love playing music. And my my both my kids are very musical, but my daughter's an exceptional singer. My son's a self-taught pianist, but his grandfather taught him how to play, and he's quite musical as well. So they get probably some of their musicality from him. Um, they're very creative, which comes from my wife's side. She's a photographer, and again, the grandfather's been very influential on their life, as as has their grandmother. And uh they yeah, they're very creative, I think, as a result of both of them. But I think my daughter's probably a little bit more like me. Um my son is uh just the most beautiful boy, can be a pain in the ass, like any other teenage kid, I imagine. But he's um he's just a good, good like, and I just think that's all that I could have asked for. I mean, I don't really care if he wants to mow lawns or do whatever, but he's he's just a good kid, and I think that I I'm I'm proud of that. Um I think my daughter might want to pursue doing something with with her music. She's talked about doing some psychology or something along those lines, but she's 16. I mean, I didn't know what I wanted to do until I was 30, maybe 35, probably. It's you know, you can't be making decisions at 16 about what you're gonna do with your life.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:48

That's my biggest regret. The amount of debt I got from a uni degree that got cancelled halfway during COVID. I've got 45 grand debt. I'm like, who lets someone at 17 or 18 make that decision? It's like well it was a pathway.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:01

I mean, I think that was a difference nowadays, is you don't have that, that the pathway's not necessary. In fact, I don't even think that that that pathway will exist in three or four years.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:10

I don't think AI has changed everything.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:12

Yeah, it has. It has and will, and some for the better and some for the worse. I don't know that it's all great and gravy, but it's I think it's um we should be embracing it to a certain extent. I don't think we should be investing everything and everything into it.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:28

Would you recommend starting a business to your kids or would you Oh hell yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:33

I mean, I think just before my son went and travelled, I was trying to get him to start using Claude, and he's he's promised me that when he gets back, he's he's been using it at work a little bit, but he's promised me that he's gonna start building stuff at home. Um I think that there's a huge opportunity for the younger kids coming out of university, um, coming out of school to to embrace AI and become incredible. Incredibly wealthy very quickly. If you've got a great idea, you can put it into practice really quickly and really simply. And if you've got an idea and you've got a great prototype, you can get funding very easily nowadays. So I think it's there's lots of opportunity for people. Way more opportunity than there was before. Because Joe Smith, the local lawnmower guy, can go and build something using Claude.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:27

There's a kid I follow on Instagram. He's 14. His handle is Alby's Journey. And he had Jarp's Grief. You know, Frank and Jarks. They like exited 180 million. They mentored him. This kid's 14 and he's making like 20 grand monthly recurring revenue in USD. And then he's like, oh, I'm CMO of this company and I've just exited. I'm like, I'm 24 and I feel like what? But I think it's crazy what is available and if you capitalize on those opportunities. And like you're saying with your son, learn Claude. How cool that you're telling him that not the other way around.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:03

Yeah, well, I well, it is, but I just, you know, we're unfortunately as well. I, you know, I saw it coming probably a year ago. We've been using AI for a long time. And a year ago, when it was, you know, we I could see the writing the wall, and I was just going, I'm and it gets to a point where it actually has a pretty big impact on you because you can see how it's being used, where it's being used, and you know, there's models that are coming out now that we have access to, you and I and the general public. They are seven, eight models ahead. They just haven't released it. And the really reason they can't release it is because they it's got to be QA'd, it's got to be tested, and that testing process is a little bit longer, but it's also because, you know, these models uh uh it's not just about testing to see if it works, it's about testing to see what can be done on them and how uh you know dangerous, I guess, that that can be. Because there's lots of things that can happen that are outside the realms of our control when you've got you've heard of that paper clip, the analogy of the paper clip of of AI creating the paperclip and destroying the world. I don't know if you've heard of that, but it's a it's a it's a analogy that's basically saying if you you know how dangerous it was in 1968, and a scientist came out and said, you know, this is the paper clip uh analogy. And it's like go to tell AI to go and build a paperclip. And that prompt is or to to build as many paper clips as you can. And that prompt sounds really harmless. But if you let it be autonomous, what AI could it's just gonna keep going and going. So it's gonna start breaking down anything that's got metal in it, so it's start pulling down their buildings and start destroying things to build more paper clips because it run out of steel. So then it starts trying to transform other things into steel to that. So it just, you know, the uh the whole the concept behind it is if you're not careful from just the simplest of requests, it's like the Aladdin's lamp, you know, I'd love to be skiing right now. Well, I'm not really dressed quite appropriately to be going skiing, so it'd probably freeze my ass off. But it'd be a great thing. In theory, what I want to do is I want to be skiing on a mountain with my goggles and all my shit on, but I don't want to be in my sands, my sand shoes and my linen pads on the top of a mountain right now. So that's the whole analogy around AI and being very careful of how we prompt it. Um, and that's where I think the danger comes in.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:23

It's wild. Like Nick and I, I think maybe six months ago, we started watching all the mission impossibles from the very start up until now. In the first one or the second one, they're talking about AI. That movie came out in like the 1980s, and it's crazy how I guess there's been all these little droplets kind of talking about it, but now it's so blatantly obvious and in your face. But it's like it's always been there. I think the more money you make, the more rooms you get into, the bigger your business gets. You also start to see the world through a very different lens versus when you're just an employee working with someone else, you rock up, go to work, go home. It's it's definitely eye-opening. Um, something that I wanted to ask about with the future, with the capital gains tax and how you've obviously exited your business now versus what would look in the future. How are people meant to navigate that? How do you think that's gonna impact small businesses?

SPEAKER_00 1:10:22

I mean, you know, again, I'm quite fortunate that we exited prior to all that that change. Um I think for someone starting up a new business, it's they're not gonna know any different. So it's not gonna impact them. I think for people that were thinking about exiting or had business strategies that like I got a friend who's got multiple properties and was using capital gains to benefit so that he was using that equity and the capital gains tax, the the returns he was getting, he would invest into more properties and uh and it was compounding, so he was doing quite well out of that. Now that model's dead. Um, or maybe not dead, but it's a lot more difficult. You've you've got to have the the capital now to to do it. You can't rely on the capital that you're gonna get from your returns. So listen, I think it's gonna be more difficult for people to navigate. I think it's gonna be like the GST though, whereas it was incredibly painful to start with. People like, oh my God, how are we doing this? Why do we do it? And then you look back now and it's just something that's there, and you we don't know any different, right? Uh I think it's gonna be like that. I'm not a big fan of it, just to be clear. Um I think we get taxed enough. We get taxed when you employ someone, you get taxed. When people are on holidays, you get taxed. I mean, as a as a small business owner, it's really difficult to navigate the the tax system. And there's got to be some simplicity there that the government can adopt because it's freaking ridiculous. As a small business owner, you need to employ really good accountants and lawyers to navigate the current system. And I think that's freaking ridiculous because you can barely pay most business owners to pay for their own staff, let alone getting outside help. So it should be pro getting these businesses up and running, not compliance after compliance. The compliance is necessary, don't get me wrong, but it it needs to be managed.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:16

I just hope that it doesn't get people down to the point where they don't want to be innovative or try, because small business is such a huge opportunity for people to go out there, bring something of value, something that's going to impact others. And I think when you take away the reward or the perception of a reward, then you're like, what's the point of trying? Where do you believe for business owners for the next decade should really invest their time and energy into? Would you say it's AI or something else?

SPEAKER_00 1:12:48

Listen, I think that every business owner needs to be using AI. If you're not using AI, you're going to be left behind because you'll be coming across companies that can do things incredibly fast, they can adapt and pivot really quickly. To give you an idea, our business, when we built our technology, we built it eight, nine years ago, we built it on old school uh foundations. So there's what they call brownfields and greenfields technology. Brownfields is I've got an old system, it's a legacy system, and I have to systematically, even if I use AI to add things onto it, I've got to bolt it on like Frankenstein. Whereas Greenfields is is it's built on AI or you're using new technology and modern technology and you're building on that and scaling with it, and it's far, far quicker. So the same thing applies in business generally. If you're not using AI to fast track and get more efficiency and productivity, then unfortunately you're gonna your your peers, your uh peers, your competitors are gonna use it and you can get left behind. So I would think it has to be the number one. It's like the the listen, I love AI, but I hate AI. I just want to be really clear that it's like, whilst I think there's some beautiful benefits of it, we're gonna see some. I know there's a lot of hysteria out there in talk, but I do think we're gonna have some job losses and there's gonna be people that are gonna struggle, and um and I don't think we as a government are prepared yet. I don't think the government even understand how our AI works or how it's gonna impact people's lives. They've got no understanding. Um, and hopefully that happens soon, because otherwise it'll be too late. But I think there's gonna be some incredibly big changes, and I think if business owners aren't adapting, the problem is you start to think about okay, so every business owner starts getting efficiencies and potentially making their business autonomous and removing people out of their business, but then there's no one to sell to because the very people that they're unemploying are the people that buy their products, it's a vicious circle. So at some point, something's gonna just shift. I don't know what it is, and I don't have a crystal ball. And I don't know everything, I'm just giving you my opinion. But I think it's I think it's um I think right now business owners should be focusing on what we do know, and that is that you're gonna get lots of benefit, uh, productivity benefits, particularly from using AI in your business. It doesn't matter what your business is.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:10

I think when you look at AI and what it does, the efficiency, the automation, the instant gratification of getting something done, the inverse will also become more in demand, like client experience, being able to have human connection. And I think that's where you know hospitality has actually gone up in its spending in the last quarter. You look at people are investing back into experiences. So as much as it might feel a bit doom and gloom with some things getting taken over.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:40

I totally agree with that. I think it's you're right. I mean, I don't think you know, people are all always gonna be wanting if we're talking to robots at some point in our lives, we're always gonna be wanting to have that human connection. I don't think I think you're 100 spent 100% spot on. I think where it starts to get a bit weird is when um robots take over. Well well, yeah, well, all accountants have you know don't have jobs because you know, I mean, you can do most of the stuff that an accountant can do now using Chat GPT or an advanced version of Claude. So um the white-collar workers that are currently employed and don't have jobs that are going out to restaurants and spending, that's where the problem is. It's not about having the restaurants and people not wanting to do it, it's people being able to afford to do it, I think. So there's lots of different scenarios and things to think about. But again, you know, we're spitballing on crack. We don't we don't know, no, we don't have the crystal ball. It'd be interesting to see what happens. But time will tell. Yeah, that's it. That's it.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:41

Well, thank you so much, Craig, for coming on. I've loved having you as a guest. I feel like I have learned so many valuable things, more so from understanding how the software works and then also nailing the product, putting the people first, which is what you've done very well. If anyone wants to connect with you or look at bringing Now Booker into their business, where is the best place to go?

SPEAKER_00 1:17:03

Um, either our website at nowbook it.com or you can reach out to me personally on LinkedIn, just Craig Joel. Um, I should be pretty easy to stalk and find. But um if there's any other founders out there that are looking to exit and just want some advice, I've I've I've you know just because I'm a big fan of seeing Australian entrepreneurs, particularly in the tech space, um, particularly in hospitality tech, but not just in hospitality tech. But I I love hearing the stories and love hearing the you know the energy that comes from founders. And if there's anyone that I might be able to help, they're more than open to having a chat with them too.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:39

Thank you so much. No worries. Thank you, Sam.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:42

It's been a pleasure. Cheers.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:43

Thanks for listening to this episode. I will catch you for next week. Bye.