Warning – This Blog Post May Radically Alter Your Business

We’ve got some huge positive changes happening here at KashFlow – and it’s all because I was asked one question.

We’ve had lots of interest from Venture Capitalists over the past year or so, and a few months ago I thought it might be fun to have a chat with some of them to see what was possibly on offer.

One particular expression of interest caught my attention – essentially I’d have taken a 7 figure sum personally and the business would have a few million to help it grow more quickly and I’d still have a reasonable amount of equity. Nice!

Being relatively new to this kind of thing, I spoke to a few of the elders (they’ll kill me for calling them that!) on the tech scene for some advice. Mainly William Reeve  and Alex van Someren.

William asked me what I’d actually do with the money which really got me thinking. I told him we’d relocate the business to London,  hire a CTO I’ve had my eye on for ages plus lots of other great stuff that I’m not going to disclose publicly – but the move to London is the pivotal part of it all.

He then asked “If moving to London is such a good idea, why not do it anyway?”

A little time spent with a spreadsheet showed we could move to London, hire the CTO and implement a lot of the plans for far less than I thought. In fact, we can actually fund it out of existing cashflow.

So I’ve said “thanks, but no thanks” to the VCs, hired the CTO I wanted and negotiated a lease on a new office in London (SE1).

It still leaves me without the big chunk of capital that would have kept the family happy and enabled us to move down to Brighton as we’ve been planning for a while. But we’re moving to Brighton anyway now – just more modestly than originally planned. Once we’ve grown some more I’ll consider selling some of my shares to get some capital together.

So the question to ask yourself is “What would you do with your business if you received a few million in investment?”.  Then look at those plans, pick out the important parts and find out what it’d really cost to do it.

You might be pleasantly surprised.