“So what’s your exit?” is a classic question experienced investors ask  startup founders at the end of a pitch; meaning, “what’s the payback?” but also, “do you plan to be acquired? Will you IPO? Is this the rest of your life or just the next three years?” Sometimes it’s asked to deliberately rattle you, other times it’s a gentle prod to encourage you to think about the future.

Not just the immediate future of feature requests, bugs, visitor conversion rates and unpaid bills, but also about the distant future — about how you want your startup journey to end.

It’s always a good idea to have a goal for your exit. Startups are a team journey, shared by you, your co-founders, investors, employees and customers. If you don’t share the same definition of a successful end to the journey it can break the startup apart before the exit arises. It can break up close friends when one group of founders/investors gets the exit they hoped for, while the others would have preferred another way out. Agreeing on how to end this before you begin is just smart planning.

So as experienced startup co-founders, it’s a little embarrassing to admit that when we started The New Agency we didn’t have an exit in mind; in fact, we didn’t even have an entrance in mind!

At the time, we were between opportunities, knew each other well, and we knew we had some skills and experience the nascent Australian startup industry could benefit from.

We wanted to design a service business that could help startup entrepreneurs get their startups started, but we didn’t know what that really looked like.

A rare TNA team get-together. Left to right: Torsten (back of his head anyway), Rai, Tony, Andy, Loic, Oliver, Jim, Jinka, Steven and Zach (the hand holding a bottle of Little Creatures).

A lean service agency for startups

The New Agency became an exercise in lean startup methodology applied to agency service design — what was most essential to servicing our startup customers? What could we leave out that would allow us to be leaner, agile, more profitable and responsive?

Most of the trappings of a traditional digital agency went out the window before we even opened the door — no glamorous city offices, no beautiful receptionist at a spotless desk in a reception area from a photo book on Italian Modernist design. No eccentric meeting rooms for our masses of employees. In fact, no employees at all, other than the two of us.

Some of what we added in was working in the cloud with independent experts drawn from the startup community around us — coders, designers and growth-hackers at first, and gradually as we expanded, adding product management, media relations, social media, even a lawyer and a CFO.

That was scary at first —for us and for some of our clients — as there’s no question a room full of busy people makes you feel like work is being done. But busy people cost you salaries and desk space whether they’re really busy or just trying hard to look that way. And traditional full-time employment just doesn’t scale up or down as efficiently as working on a project basis with other people in the cloud, especially when they’re proficient with cloud-based tools for communication, project management, collaboration and billing.

Future of employment

Yesterday, Tony and I met Bruno and Jim for quick pre-workshop coffee, and it was the first time I’d seen either of them face-to-face in months, but it didn’t matter — we’re so enmeshed in each other’s personal and professional life streams these days there’s almost nothing to catch up on when we’re face-to-face.

The four of us took the elevator up to the offices of a new client, and delivered a half-day workshop intended to refine the scope of a new startup venture for a 100 year-old professional services firm taking advantage of the internet’s ability to disrupt industries.

And we killed it! I mean, we totally killed it. It was inspiring to watch these guys fluently, expertly filling in the gaps, challenging the assumptions and drilling down to the core value. In the space of a couple of hours a whole new business came into focus across whiteboards, Post-It notes and drawing paper. Overnight and today it starts chunking up into sub-projects, estimates, deliverables and timeframes even though Tony and I are in Newport and the city, Jim’s in Milson’s Point and Bruno’s back on his farm near Dorrigo.

Working this way is future of employment for more of us than you’d imagine. But as William Gibson once said, “the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed”. You may not get to experience it for a few more years, but it’s coming, believe me.

And why the exit

While we’ve been killing it most days since we started The New Agency, there have been times when we’ve wondered how we could scale the business to such a size that maybe we could take a little money out of the business as a reward for all our hard work. We figured we had to be about 10x our current turnover to achieve that.

One alternative (call it “A”) we’ve explored was to raise money from investors looking to back a new kind of service agency. It would mean less flexibility in the sine curve which describes our growth and more pressure, not less, to succeed.

Another alternative (“B”) was to raise money from investors looking to invest in the early-stage startups we bring to market, like our mates at Pollenizer and BlueChilli have done. It’s gotten a lot easier since they raised their funds, but there’s still a lot of heavy lifting, and honestly, we didn’t fancy competing directly with BlueChilli and Pollenizer — those guys are just too like-a-boss, and good friends.

Which meant there was one alternative left — “C” smash our shit together with somebody who’d already successfully made option A or B work.

Which is why yesterday, you may have read that The New Agency has been acquired by BlueChilli, effective immediately, with a transition over the next four months in which we hope to complete ongoing client projects, some new short-term project leads, and set some up to be delivered by BlueChilli’s services arm, BlueChilliX.

I’m going to revel in the glorious title of Chief Growth Hacker at BlueChilli, responsible for helping our startups market themselves, communicate with audiences of customers, partners, investors, industry and media. As COO, Tony will be the rock upon which systems, processes and people build BlueChilli’s startups, just as he has done for the past two years co-founding The New Agency. CEO Seb Eckersley-Maslin will be able to focus more on 10x-ing BlueChilli’s growth, investment and relationships with industry and government.

Left to right: Tony Burrett, Seb Eckersley-Maslin, and I announcing the acquisition.

So two years into The New Agency journey, we’ve found an exit. We didn’t set out with an exit in mind, but the next step in the journey for what we wanted to achieve is an exit. 

Tony and I like to thank an awesome cloud of expert startup practitioners and supporting professionals who have helped us build a new kind of business for a new economy:

• Adam Trouncer
• Alejandro Gurovich
• Andy Coffey
• Andrew Karrasch
• Bruno Mattarollo
• Charlemagne Trindorfer
• Danielle Hickie
• Dominic Wroblewski
• Ellen Ferris
• Emily Dawson
• Felicity Reynolds
• Gary Barker
• Oliver Maruda
• Oliver Rozynski
• Jagadeesh “Jugs” Vijayakumar
• Jessica Dunn 
• Jim May
• Jinka Meagher
• Jo Sabin
• John Beale
• Jon-Paul Broom
• Kate Brady
• Karen Bond
• Kurt Falkenstein
• Lindsay Tagg
• Loïc Golliard (#thisisbulsheeeeet)
• Maddie Pitkanen
• Matt Chapman
• Melissa Turnock
• Nat Bradford
• Nyree Corby
• Peter Fellows
• Paul Manka
• Pratibha Rai
• Robert White
• Robin Miller
• Ryan Wardell
• Simon Bond
• Stephen Steneker
• Stuart Dawson
• Svetlana Hammond
• Tim Lumsdaine
• Torsten Lachman
• Wayne Wang
• Zach Kitschke

- alan