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Realised values created to date $150m+

I love investing into and building agile technology businesses with teams who are restless for change....!

Kiddicare.com
Sold 23.5x EBITDA

Bliztscaling the baby industry

I cannot fit the entire journey into a paragraph or two, but I remember the first order and our last day saying goodbye to some of the best employees I’ve ever put together – lots of emotions.

My wife’s family business with values and the courage to let me build a technology platform to enable the transformation from small independent store to a European powerhouse shipping 17,000 items a day – receiving 45 industry awards along the way.

Today it’s referred to as “bliztscaling” we killed the competition by implementing ideas today and launching tomorrow – ie we strapped a jetpack to our backs and pressed go everyday – failure is not an option when it’s family money.

We later discovered during the acquisition process that our corporate competitors were paralyzed by our speed of change and focussed entirely on our business not their own..!

We received 17+ offers for the business and sold to Morrisons Plc in 2011 for £70m – achieving 23.5x EBITDA multiples.

As part of the sale agreement Elle and I were retained for two years and I transitioned into the CEO & Chief Architect of Morrisons.com.

Understand when to sell: Mothercare, Mamas & Papas, Etoys, Toys r Us have all disappeared from our high streets in the last 10 years or entered into administration.

Kiddicare Press Release
Elevaate.com
276x return for Haatch Angel

Digital supplier contribution transformed

Elevaate was so obvious to me and maybe that makes me different…?

In-store paid-for-product positioning was normal and was often referred to as “supplier contribution” by the retailers who received payments from suppliers to boost sales – ie Wrigley’s chewing gum paid to be at the checkouts and thus improved their sales by a factor of x.

Wrigley’s increased their sales and the retailer received a marketing contribution towards their margin a win – win.

I created on cloud based real-time bidding platform to mimic the old store model and enabled suppliers to influence and move products higher up the search results on their retailer partners websites powered by the Elevaate engine.

Amazon was already transforming the way third-party sellers / suppliers were behaving on Amazon.com by allowing them to bid in real-time against each other for product position to boost sales.

I had played with the technology on Kiddicare.com and decided to bring my old engineering and ecomence team back together for another ride and created Elevaate.com

Foundered in 2014; we created a stunning technology platform to allow brands / agencies and suppliers to bid against each other in “real-time” on a host of retailers partners across the UK delivering 3.1 billion impressions via 300,000+ promotions during my time

The business was acquired in 2018 by Quotient Technologies Inc (NYC listed) and has since grown to 50+ people based in American, UK and India.   The platform has been successfully implemented into 15+ grocery retailers in the U.S with a combined bricks and mortar turnover of $150+ billion.

Elevaate
Press Release
Elevaate
Elevaate.com - 260x return for Haatch Angels

Digital supplier contribution transformed

Elevaate was so obvious to me – supplier contribution was old fashioned and store based; I grabbed the opportunity to create a digital platform and jumped in with both feet regardless of the challenges.

Amazon was transforming the way third-party sellers / suppliers were behaving on Amazon.com by allowing them to bid in real-time against each other for product position to boost sales.

I had played with the technology on Kiddicare.com and decided to bring my old engineering and ecomence team back together for another ride and created Elevaate.com

Foundered in 2014;  we created a stunning technology platform to allow brands / agencies and suppliers to bid against each other in “real-time” on a host of retailers partners across the UK delivering 3.1 billion impressions via 300,000+ promotions during my time

In simple terms the technology allowed suppliers to allocate new marketing or supplier contribution budgets to retailers on the Elevaate platform, delivering incremental gains for the retailers and data / extra orders for the suppliers.

One of the defining decisions was to create a platform to develop retailer / supplier relationships on a 1-1 basis – called “private marketplace” which enabled the retailers who embraced the technology to move into the 21st century and battle the Amazon’s of this world head to head.

The business was acquired in 2018 by Quotient Technologies Inc (NYC listed)

Elevaate.com
Press Release
Quotient Press Release