How Three Business Meetings Sparked My Journey in SaaS, Consultancy, and E-Commerce

I’ve spent the past week meeting up with three old business contacts, each one different and special in their own right. My aim - to uncover problems and therefore opportunities. On reflection, each meeting provided value in its own unique way, and helped me personally in ways I didn’t expect.

Before these meetings, I had a known aspiration, and a known problem.

My aspiration: To create SaaS products used and loved by millions of people

My problem: I’m living off my (dwindling) savings and have zero income

Perfect solution? Build SaaS products, get loads of users, make money from them. Kill two birds with one stone. Sorted.

Unfortunately, the perfect solution, as is usually the case, doesn’t work. I have to resolve my problem before I can work on reaching my aspiration.

So I went in with an open mind, but a mind very much aware of my brokeness.

The small business owner

I originally met this person at an event a few months ago, when my business was on its last legs and as a last-ditch attempt, I was hoping equity investment could save it. She’s a switched on, creative person who had a fun and imaginative idea and turned it into a business. She juggles a full time job and works on this in the background.

Through my chat with her, I felt the passion she has for her business, but I got the impression she doesn’t know how to take it to the next level. She had loads of ideas, but perhaps not quite the knowhow about how to execute them. I feel like she probably spends so much time in her day job, plus juggling the day-to-day running of her business, plus everything else in life, that she never finds the time to improve on the things that would actually save her time in the long run.

This really resonated with me. Only 1 year ago I was in the same situation — a head full of ideas and dreams, but a work burden that never gave me the chance to think about them clearly. And that was my day job — I didn’t have another to juggle like she does!

Sat talking in a coffee shop, I knew was not really the best place for me to help to the extent I wanted, so I offered to go to her place of business to do what I called a ‘full business review’.

Since then I’ve sat down to have a proper think about what this means and where to start. My brain’s been whirring and I’ve come up with an absolutely huge list of things to find out and ask when I go to do this business review.

I don’t know why, but when I suggested this idea it really excited me, and made me consider the idea of starting a consultancy business. There are millions of small business owners, probably tens of thousands just in the city I live in. If I can access their internal operations, take a deep dive into their way of doing things, brainstorm and provide a fresh perspective, more often than not I’m sure I can find ways to improve, automate and simplify their processes.

The old supplier

I’d been working with this supplier for around 3 years. In my business, suppliers were extremely hit and miss, but he was definitely one of the good ones. He always looked after me, never messed me around like so many suppliers did, and he was distraught when I told him that my business had gone under.

A few months ago he told me on the phone he had this ‘AI idea’, but didn’t want to elaborate at the time. He was very secretive about his idea, as he can rightfully be. He might have fallen into the trap of thinking an idea itself can be worth millions. Well, maybe this one is…

When we met up I passed his initiation test and he told me his idea in full. Without giving too much away, it would simplify and automate the data collection and research part of his job.

He knows how manual and repetitive this part of his job can be, he knows it can be made better, and he knows there are hundreds of thousands (actually, probably millions) of people with a similar job title who could also benefit from this idea becoming a reality.

My mind spun around thinking about the huge potential of this idea. As a burger and a pint turned into two pints, then three, then eight (?), we discussed the idea in a bit more detail, but conversation quickly shifted away from business to everything else. The sign of a great business meeting.

The thing is, the idea is really similar to an idea I had many years ago. Too much of my time was spent looking through list after list of deals I received from my suppliers by email. I would have to go through every line, manually check the supplier’s price against the price on Amazon, and after checking maybe 200 lines, would find one that was profitable. I gave up on the idea after a short attempt, mainly actually because I was in the territory of ‘the small business owner’ above. Spending too much time manually checking lines to spend any time on automating the process.

The stage is set differently now, though, and the fact I had this idea, the fact he has this idea, validates it in a small way. This could be the perfect opportunity to build a simple version that melds our ideas together and saves him a lot of time in the short term.

And if it works as we envision it, it has absolutely huge potential in the long term. He estimates this process takes up about 60% of his day. If it could take up 10% of his day instead, he’d be able to reinvest all that saved time in growing his business. Imagine if a company with 100 people in a similar job role automated this process. We could price the software at £1,000,000 per year and they would still buy it because they’d be able to reduce labour costs by 50% and somehow save more money than that! Can you tell I’m getting excited?

Fortunately, he’s as ambitious as I am about this, and it could lead to a very interesting journey, with myself doing the technical stuff and him in sales.

It’s still in the very early stages but I’m excited to see what we can come up with together and to hopefully start building this thing very quickly to prove that the concept works.

The investment guru

This guy has a wealth of knowledge in equity investment, having raised investment himself in his role as a co-founder for a B2B digital services platform. He’s taken a backseat from that and now helps small business owners with growth, and in particular financing that growth.

It turns out he’s thinking about his future plans, and in particular is mulling over the idea of starting up an e-commerce business of his own. He wanted to get my take on how an e-com business works, the costs involved, and scalability.

He also wondered if I would want a part in it.

My instinctive thought was “fuck no, I’m never doing that again”.

But honestly, while there were parts to running that business that I absolutely despised, there were other parts that I loved. So I told him I’d think about it, and once again I sat down, had a think, and came up with a plethora of ways in which I could help, focusing on the parts I was good at and enjoyed doing. As long as it doesn’t involve actually buying stock and running a warehouse, I’m game.

Now, I get the feeling that when I go back to him with basically a mini business plan, and he sees the upfront (and ongoing) work required, it might make him reconsider, but that’s okay. I’d rather show all the gritty details upfront than do any additional work for him to turn around in a couple of months and say it’s not for him.

He also provided another nugget of opportunity.

He asked how I would feel about co-hosting an event he’s running, on the topic of e-commerce.

Again, I said I’d think about it, while shitting myself about the idea of public speaking. But it could be a fantastic way to find new small businesses who could benefit from my trademark Full Business Review. Also, this isn’t meant to be easy. I need to do things that challenge me to keep growing.

Overall thoughts

Each meeting provided its own unique value that not only uncovered opportunities, but helped me to understand myself and what I want to do. I’m an optimistic guy, but I still had doubts about contacting people, whether they would actually want my help and whether I’d be able to make a living from this. In hindsight, I’m really glad I did.

I think what has also helped in this situation is having no expectations, but always overdelivering. Of my 3 meetings, nothing solid has been agreed, but I’ve had follow ups with every single one. I’ve put many hours into thinking over, researching, and planning out each opportunity, and so far nobody hasn’t said “wow, you’re one step ahead of me” in follow ups. If they back out now, I would be completely fine with that, because I’ve still gained knowledge and experience. And also, they know who to come to if they ever need help with a problem in the future.

So while this hasn’t resolved my problem of having zero income, it feels like a big step in the right direction, and has convinced me to not go looking for a ‘real job’ just yet.

Push yourself

Even after 3 meetings — granted, each with a familiar business contact — I was able to not only open up opportunities but also learn about myself.

I’ve got nothing on, no responsibilities, but I’m not sitting around doing nothing all day. I like to call this an explorative stage in my life right now. The old supplier bigged me up, telling me it’s clear I’m pushing myself, getting out of my comfort zone, meeting up with “an old fart like him” (or something along those lines). He did say that about 6 pints in, but it stuck with me. It made me feel like everything I’m doing now is for the right reasons.

And without pushing yourself while you’re in an explorative stage of life, your chance of getting lucky and finding an opportunity that is right for you is so much lower.

As the investment guru told me a while ago, the conversation that takes you to the right opportunity starts at one conversation, that leads you to another, that leads you to another, that finally leads you to that conversation. It’s not about what you know, it’s about who you know (and who they know).

The explore/exploit tradeoff

This is something that I will hopefully have to find the sweet spot of very soon. Especially as, if I play all my cards, I could potentially be starting a SaaS, while running a consultancy business and co-founding an e-commerce business, all at the same time.

The explore/exploit tradeoff is the amount of time and effort dedicated to taking advantage of opportunities you already have available (exploiting) compared to the amount dedicated to finding new opportunities (exploring).

The idea being that if you continue to exploit without exploring, the fruits of that labour will dry up. There always needs to be some exploration, some expansion, some randomness, some illogical behaviour in what you do.

It’s why many old, traditional businesses fail. The world itself is constantly changing, and so much of what happens isn’t logical or predictable, so you should never rely on the same source of work, of income, of food, of anything. Otherwise, in the long run it will come back to bite you.

Everyone and everything needs some element of exploration and randomness to be optimal.