We’re delighted that Nick agreed to be interviewed for our blog series where we speak with successful founders as part of our regular guest expert series. 

When did you start Design my Night?

We started Design My Night in November 2010 based on idea we’d come up with in 2008/2009. My co-founder Andrew and I had always had our heart set on on starting our own business. The big driver for me was looking at what my GM was doing at L’Oreal, which was the step above my marketing manager role. She was just doing lots of charts and graphs and reports to Paris head office and that’s just not what I wanted to do. I liked the hustle and bustle of marketing and advertising at that time and to put it frankly I didn’t want to become a chart monkey. So if that was my next step up, then I thought, Okay, I’m gonna go and do something myself.

Tell us about raising money, the good, the bad and the ugly?

We always wanted to be bootstrapped, we didn’t want to raise huge VC money because we wanted to keep as much equity to ourselves as we could. We also didn’t want a VC behind us driving the business forward. It was important for us to do it at our own pace in our own vision. So in our case, we were very lucky, the actual raising money bit was very easy. We met the head of entrepreneurship of the London Business School at a chance dinner party. He was a friend of a friend’s dad, who happened to be in the kitchen at that time and started speaking to Andrew about Design My Night and he offered to be our mentor. He mentored us for three months and it really helped. He suggested we look at raising some some Angel money, and he helped us put our pitch and business plan together. When he saw the business plan, he told us he wanted to invest himself and that he knew six other angels that would be able to complete the round.

We went and met each of them individually, and pitched Design My Night, and luckily, they were all in. So we managed to close that round quite easily. It was £250k raise and within the agreement there was a follow-on follow in the second year for another £250k and that was the total money that we ever raised.

How’s your finance team structured?

We don’t really have a finance team. Andrew is the more analytical side of our partnership, he was at Accenture, he was really the money man. We had a finance manager, who actually started as office assistant and finance manager, and then just became our finance manager. So it was again, a very bootstrapped financial operation as we did everything on zero budget.

Beyond the operational, what role did finance play in your organisation?

Toni our finance manager played the level headed role in the organisation. Beyond the operational side of things, we also used finance as a yardstick. All of our ideas and growth ideas were driven by the money we had in the bank. We’d measure whether something was a good idea based on the money we had and the return we’d make. Whether that be employee happiness or revenue on our bottom line, we ran in very tight ship. It always however came down to what we could afford.

Finance is seen as a necessary evil by some what’s your take?

I’m not a finance person at all I can barely add up past my fingers. So for me, it was a steep learning curve, but something I actually loved learning, learning how to do a P&L, learning how to do these monster spreadsheets. We had a huge five year budget plan for Design My Night where you could change certain parameters to flex the model. I ended up being the one messing around with that a lot of the time, seeing how spend would impact revenue, how would that affect our EBITDA. For me personally it was a steep but very rewarding learning curve, it really helped me get under the skin of the business.

if you don’t have a grip on your finances that’s probably the number one reason why a company is eventually going to fail.

Talk us through the exit. How did it come about? What were the challenges? Why did you think it was the right time?

We were very structured in our route to exit. When we took on the second tranche of angel investment we put in a five year plan with the angel investors and that five year plan was for exit. We worked back from that point and luckily Andrew and I agreed on the ballpark figure on what we wanted to sell Design My Night for. We were always very open about this and this was crucial so we were aligned. Neither of us saw DMN as long term and we didn’t want to take it global. It was our first go at starting our own business, we wanted to enjoy the ride. At the end we wanted financial freedom personally, to allow us to go and pursue personal and professional projects. In that sense it was a bit mechanical, a means to an end. Once we agreed on the ballpark figure that we both were happy with and factoring in the figures software in hospitality was selling for we just worked back from there to work out what we needed to do.

From then on we tracked and tweaked the business to ensure we kept on track for our EBITDA figure.

The year before we sold we engaged a broker as we were confident of hitting our target the following year. The process with the broker took about 4 months preparing our sale pitch. There was a lot of back and forth but we arrived at the right result. we drew up a list of potential buyers and the broker said to us it would unlikely be anyone on that list. He was right.

He focussed in on a company called Access Group who are huge UK software provider, they’d just set up a hospitality division and were buying up the best in breed hospitality solutions. We said yes to them quite quickly.

Any lessons you’ve learned along the way you wish you’d known sooner?

I think for us lesson the main lesson is focus. In the early years you can get easily distracted, different business opportunities, different partnerships, different parts where you can take the business. We lost quite a bit of time getting distracted and it was one of our investors who got us back on track. Focussing us on what we knew.

Any touch and go moments you’d like to share business wise?

We had a few moments especially in the early days. SEO was our main strategy to get traffic to Design My Night. It’s fair to say we weren’t really experts at the start. So we hired an agency who we thought were doing great stuff because we were jumping up the rankings and getting big traffic increases. It was about 80% of our traffic. But the agency was employing a bunch of black-hat tactics. Unfortunately for us Google were getting wise to these and when they rolled out their Penguin update it had a major impact. Overnight our traffic fell off a cliff. We obviously fired the agency and resolved to learn SEO ourselves and did it the right way going forward. 

Any advice for younger startups?

So apart from keeping focused don’t try and do everything? Try and find the niche within a market that you can just become the expert at? I think that’s the most important thing. On an emotional level try and keep on an even keel. I think that’s something we did very well as founders, the highs were never too high and the lows were never too low. We never overly celebrated success. We would High Five each other and then get back straight to business even once we closed funding.

What’s next for you?

Andrew and I miss the real startup race. When you become big and you have big clients and a big team  it becomes a lot more run of the mill. But you actually get into a startup because you love making decisions and coming up with new strategy and product. So we’ve thrown ourselves into angel investing.

We want to make sure that we’re investing in companies that we can really help not just give passive money. We’re in about 25, UK and US startups at the moment. So we’ve moved pretty quickly and across many verticals.

For us, as long as we understand the business, the vision, and it’s something that we can help with and it’s a realistic business to revenue and profit. It also important the founder or founding team are the right caliber of founder and we think they can hack it. We’ve formalised that now into something we’re calling a startup playground. We’ve called it Horseplay Ventures. Check it out here. We want it to become a hub for startups to be able to get tools and grow and improve whether they work with us or not. Alongside this we also launched a podcast called Pitch Deck. We’re super pleased with how that’s gone so far, we got into top 10 Global and top five UK business podcasts.

What’s your take on the current landscape, impact of lockdown and the way out?

I think the current landscape is still very ripe for angel investing. I’m seeing that in my angel investing networks, there’s still money out there, people are still investing. Out of adversity come great opportunities. We launched design my night around the time of the big financial crash. It’s been a horrible personal period in people’s lives and of course professional with businesses having to tighten their belts or closed down through no fault of their own.

But I really now look to the startup world to take us through this and on to the next level. I think it’s going to come from startups, not governments, not big conglomerates. And so whether that be the future of work and remote work, or environmental issues, and equality issues, I see all of that as great opportunities for the startup world.