Lessons from Losing, Gary Winter and Jamie Brusey (RevWise)

Episode 10, recorded at Awin ThinkTank UK, 3 September 2026. Guest host: Jess Smith (Awin). Series outro: Rob Davinson (Awin).

Timecodes are mm:ss from the start of the V2 edit, taken from the Premiere transcript. Speaker names applied and misheard names corrected (Awin, RevWise and similar), otherwise the text is as Premiere transcribed it.

[00:06] JESS

Welcome to Lessons from Losing. I am Jessica Smith from Awin, and I am the regional agency lead for the UK, Benelux, Italy and Spain, a couple of other regions.

[00:17] JESS

Is that part of the global agency team? And as part of my role, I get to work with these two lovely people. So I'm here with Jamie and Gary, who are co-founders of RevWise.

[00:30] JESS

The agency was founded in 2022 2020 3rd January, and we've pretty much worked with each other. Ever since then, haven't we?

[00:39] JESS

From the very beginning. So we go way back and, yeah, it's been a real journey of, I don't want to put down on it, but rags to riches. You started out with our Awin Access platform, and really had exponential growth overnight, really, over the last couple of years. And we've worked together pretty consistency from the smaller brands, right up to some really big enterprise brands that you now work on across Awin.

[01:07] JESS

So it's been a pleasure going on that journey with you, and I'm very excited to hear some of your lessons from losing today. I think there's going to be some good stories knowing you both, but do you want to give a quick, intro about RevWise and how you kind of met and the story safe are for anyone that doesn't know you?

[01:26] JESS

Just just the quick version of how you came to start the company and what you do today.

[01:32] JAMIE

Yeah, yeah, well, very happy to be here. Thank you for having us. So. Yeah. Where do we start? So I'm Jamie, this is Gary. We are co-founders of RevWise, as you mentioned. Yeah. Started in January 2023. And funny story is, we we actually only met each other a month before incorporating the business together.

[01:55] JAMIE

Which is pretty bizarre. Very unusual. But it, it some would say. But, yeah, I don't know. We, we seem to think it was the right, the right move at the right time.

[02:08] GARY

I was consulting in a different field, so I was sort of involved in a consultancy with a dozen people, like doing sales for lots of performance marketing businesses and ad networks and other agencies.

[02:22] GARY

No affiliate agencies, but agencies. And so I was doing sales outreach and client acquisition and was pretty good at it. And the consultancy got into a good size. It wasn't my business though, but I was at partner level, so I was kind of running it with someone else. And then I got offered to work on an affiliate program, and I had a bit of a background in affiliate, but not massive.

[02:42] GARY

So I took it on and thought I would work out how to do it later. And so I was kind of working out how to do it for a month or so, and I was doing it my way, you know, just a cold outreach to publishers. It was going to. Right. But then someone at the client side put me in touch with Jamie and said, oh, this guy's been recommended to me.

[02:58] GARY

He was consulting as a loan band, like a one man band consulting. And, he said, here's his email. He's he's come really highly recommended. See if you guys think we could use him. And I'm thinking, well, this guy's treading on my toes, you know what I mean? Like, he's, And I looked at his CV and where he'd come from, and he was basically running GoGroupie for ten years, and he was the head of marketing there, and now he's consulting.

[03:20] GARY

And I actually didn't know that much about the delivery side. But I was, you know, working for this one client, like in my consultancy. So I saw him as a threat. And I was like, okay, thanks for that. Wayne, you know, sent me this thing. And then I phoned Jamie up and I spoke to him and thought, shit.

[03:35] GARY

Now I am in trouble because he really could do what I'm doing. But way, probably way better and cheaper as well. So I hired, I said, you want to come work for my consultants. And I hired him, Jamie. And and then I went back to the client and said, you know what? I want to add more value to you guys.

[03:51] GARY

So I have taken this guy on, and you're not gonna have to pay any more. And they were like, wow, well, you're a hero. And it was a good value. Bad. But I was doing it for selfish reasons because I saw him as a threat and I want to take him off the chessboard.

[04:02] JAMIE

Yeah, that was the first time I probably witnessed Gary's persuasion techniques.

[04:06] JESS

So, Jamie, you know, you you've just given the story of how you've met, but what have you subsequently discovered about each other or about Gary that you definitely didn't know when you incorporated the business? You had this whirlwind experience meeting Gary and what would you say? Has anything changed since then, or is it still the same dynamic between you both?

[04:27] JAMIE

I mean, look, we only knew each other for a month, so there was a lot I learned after starting the business with him, but I think it came at a time in our lives. We both had young families and we both we both were very ambitious and I don't know, like, we both had this, we shared a think, a common sort of just confidence in ourselves and our abilities.

[04:47] JAMIE

And, we especially thought we could do something different within, within the affiliate industry. But yeah, didn't know too much about Gary other than that, he was as much of a fan of The Office as I was.

[04:59] JAMIE

So that was how we. So this day our relationship is pretty much glued together by David Brent quotes.

[05:04] GARY

Just to finish off that as well, like I brought Jamie in. He was then running this program. I was part of this bigger consultancy that was doing B2B sales, nothing to do with the villas. And then I actually parted ways with the actual owner of that consultancy, and it was a bit messy as well. It was sudden.

[05:21] GARY

It was messy. It was kind of unpleasant. Part of my career at the time was probably the single hardest thing that I dealt with in my career, because essentially the guy that had all the cards in that business decided to pull me out.

[05:36] JESS

And so is that an early sort of lesson?

[05:38] GARY

That was definitely a lesson from those, like, I should have had equity in that business.

[05:42] GARY

I was, I was, I was a the, the driving force of that business. So he, he kind of cut me out. But I was able to carve out stuff like the affiliate client I had that was working with Jamie and some other business that I was doing. And then from that moment on, very quickly, very violently, I was out on my own and I went to Jamie and said, look, this what's happened?

[06:02] GARY

He only just met me. He only just worked on the affiliate. And I said, I see the affiliate, business as huge potential, but separate to the other stuff I'm doing, which is really busy for agencies. I said, so I'm going to keep doing that to pay the bills. But I think, you know, there's an affiliate agency here.

[06:16] GARY

And he knew the world so much better than me because he'd been in it for ten years at a high level. So he went and I said, here's what we'll do. Will be 5050 partners or grow the business to this level. Showed him some big numbers as I were going to, you know, go on and make this agency.

[06:29] GARY

This is my plan. What do you think? And it didn't have a name or anything. And he said he looked like it was like, this is a surprise, you know, and he was probably worried about you can tell me this is true, but more concerned about his immediate retainer at the moment because he'd only just got the gig.

[06:42] GARY

But he said, let me sleep on it. And then actually later that day he said, let's do it, mate. And we jumped on,

[06:48] JESS

Say, one of the kind of lessons you took from that. There's a couple things there is, like you failed quite quickly and early on when you kind of saw the opportunity for affiliates

[06:57] GARY

Lesson from the previous consultancies. I got kicked in the nuts big time, and I knew it. I saw it come in for two years, and I didn't do anything about it because I thought, I know my value. So if this does happen, I'll pivot. But when it happened, it was a very inconvenient time for me as well. Like personally, financially. So I was like, that was a hard kick in the nuts.

[07:16] GARY

And the lesson from that is two part number one is to cover yourself. Don't do business on handshake. No matter how close you are with somebody like you got to have your legal protections. That's number one. And number two, when I got kicked in the nuts and I was really, really like I said, I was I was in dire straits because I thought, right, I've got bills to pay kids and I've got money that's meant to be coming to me that now isn't coming to me, that I was relying on for tax and other things.

[07:45] GARY

It's a real mess. I brushed myself off. I didn't feel sorry for myself for a day. I was like, what the fuck's going on? And then the next day I was locked in obsessive, putting in 12 hour shifts on my laptop to my back. Was hurting. Working out okay. What? What mapping out? What are the numbers? What's going to happen?

[08:02] GARY

How am I going to do this? And I came out of that with the idea for proposing to Jamie. Let's do RevWise. And so I crunched. And the lesson is don't spend too long licking your wounds. Don't spend too long like everyone has. Things happen that throws a spanner in the works. Don't spend too long feeling sorry for yourself.

[08:21] GARY

You need to have a Victor mindset, not a victim mindset. You only you're in charge of your life and you can't control what other people are going to do. So I if I look back now, I'm quite pleased with how I pivoted that. Like how quickly I bounced back like a phoenix from the ashes. Me and Jamie were off to the races and we never looked back since.

[08:39] GARY

For RevWise. Obviously the rest is history. Like we started it in January. That happened to me in December. By January we were trading with RevWise, he lived in Bulgaria. He flew to the to London. We met in person for the first time. We had picked the name, we were making the logo, we built the website and we just went headfirst into it.

[08:55] GARY

Obviously it's terrifying starting a business, putting yourself out there. You know this because you started the, a a a a a a, so it's always quite a scary time. But you've got to like, put the fear away and just crack on.

[09:06] JAMIE

I think as well, like we the client that we, we shared initially as well like that, that gave us great confidence and that we could really do this.

[09:14] JAMIE

I think we grew it from like the program from 32 to 300 K within three months. And that was, you know, and that was a combination of both my experience. But also I think what what Gary brought to the equation and what was a differentiator for us is he treated publisher recruitment like a sales pipeline because that was his background and that was how he he approached it.

[09:37] JESS

Say it's fair to say the comeback was better than the setback in that scenario. It was a quick turnaround.

[09:43] GARY

The business that I ended up leaving, like I said, violently and suddenly I thought it was a big and sexy business that I was part of building for two years. We eclipsed that in the first year, you know, and and now we're sort of like, you know, in a whole nother league with RevWise.

[09:57] GARY

Then that business ever was. And I was impressed by that business. So, like, you just need to keep raising the bar, I guess.

[10:03] JESS

And what would you say since then? Obviously you then went into the RevWise realm and that's gone from strength to strength. Has there been a point or what has been the biggest setback or learning since then? Because you've kind of just seemed like it's all going so great because

[10:18] GARY

We've got a narrative here, which is the beginning. I think it'd be interesting to talk about the first six months of RevWise was was a scary time. Right?

[10:26] JESS

So I was on maternity leave at the time, I believe,

[10:28] GARY

And but we moved our first program over one the one client, we had one client paying us good money, though it was a good retainer, but it was one client and we moved that over to Awin that kicked off our Awin partnership.

[10:39] GARY

We brought you guys a nice program and it was a good way to start. But we were nobody, you know, like we were we shouldn't have been taken seriously, but we were treated really well by Awin. So I just want to mention that while we're on your podcast, like the only reason why we're so Awin centric now is we're obviously across other networks.

[10:53] GARY

We have a great relationship with other networks, and we do a lot of business there. But we've we're always going to be really good, loyal partner to Awin as well, because the way we were treated when we had no clients. Shout out to Nielsen. Shout out to Niels de Groot. Niels to Group Tyson. Neil deGrasse no. And Niels.

[11:10] GARY

He's still a friend today, but he also is the reason why we're sitting here with Awin. But anyway, six months, one client, and he and I, we didn't get any good clients for like, another 3 or 4 months. We had a few kind of bad clients that that were desperate for us, and we shouldn't have signed them. And there was nothing there for us, but we had to go and learn that.

[11:30] GARY

But we both would speak to each other every day. We probably spoken to each other every day for the last three and a half years. Because that's what it's like when you're a co-founder, but feels weird if we don't speak to each other for a day. But we were both very we were both very nervous because we were we both knew that we were in an existential threat until we had liftoff, and we were like, imagine if we just have to wrap this whole thing up, say, yeah, it didn't work and stuff, and then go back.

[11:55] GARY

But then what really changed is because we were fumbling around for like six months, we weren't. I am a specialist in winning clients from cold specifically and in sales and building systems to do that. He is a specialist in marketing and running affiliate programs, both pub side and ad side. Yet we were both doing everything together. He was on sales calls of me adding no value, and I was on client calls or poking my nose in with strategy and I don't know what I'm doing there.

[12:22] GARY

So it wasn't until we separated and we picked our lanes come spring 2023, he said. I think it might have been you said, look, you just do all the sales. I'll do all of the client delivery. And from that day on was when we started to take off and we finished 20, 23 with 1 million pound business.

[12:39] JESS

I think that's another good lesson to just pick up on there, I guess, around playing to the strengths of your yourselves and your team and and finding that out early. If you if you're bringing people on and they're not adding value to your clients, you just need to like cut that straight away. Don't you? And just just play to the strengths that you've got when you're speaking to them when you were in that first six months, just pick up on that a bit more.

[13:02] JESS

Is there any I'm very intrigued by this question. Having worked with a lot of agencies and never had the opportunity to ask it, are there any services that you decided to trial? And, you know that you might not actually have had a huge amount of knowledge in and be like, oh, we could offer that to our clients.

[13:20] JESS

And then it didn't actually work out. And you had to be like, no, we actually don't know anything about that.

[13:25] JAMIE

I don't I don't think it was a service. We didn't try out a service, but it was more more like a pricing model.

[13:30] GARY

We did the opposite actually. So we had a we signed clients that weren't right for affiliates in the early, early days.

[13:36] GARY

And then when they start complaining after a couple of months that it wasn't working, we would will I would get wheeled out and I'd say, hey, listen, what about cold outreach to retailers to get you more sellers? And I'd start selling my old doing my old consultancy business, which was very effective. And then we might have been with that client for another nine months, and we got them into like boots or something from Cold Outreach.

[13:57] GARY

So that wasn't the business that we had, but we were like, we would go, what about this? You know, and I'd do something else that was good at, but that was not sustainable or scalable or an affiliate agency. But one thing we never did was get shiny object syndrome and say, now we're in Amazon agency, now we're going to do a PC, now we're going to do better.

[14:11] GARY

I think the reason we've been successful is we stuck with a specialist channel of affiliates and influencers, and we've never deviated. Yeah, that was for survival.

[14:20] JESS

Some of the I've listened back to a couple of these podcasts and kind of preparation of this session, and I think that comes up quite often of wishing that you'd stay. They'd stayed focused on one kind of specialism.

[14:33] JESS

And I think you've done that from the AFT and kind of not had to learn that lesson, if anything. But yeah, I think, so in terms of your, your biggest setback, then what would you say? What's been your biggest challenge?

[14:46] JAMIE

I think, I think, I think yeah, I can't, I can't think of one big setback that, that we've had.

[14:51] JAMIE

But I think as we, as we realized we needed to start building a team, that obviously comes with a lot of challenges, picking the right people, making sure you're building them in the right roles and delivering in the right way for the clients. And yeah, we are, you know, we have been up until this point, primarily a people business, and that comes with a lot of challenges.

[15:15] JAMIE

And the the business that we started started with after six months, we hired the first person, second, third, fourth, fifth. You know, those were the early days. Those are the those are the

[15:25] JESS

How many do you have working for you now?

[15:27] JAMIE

We have 50 now.

[15:28] JESS

So that's a huge kind of growth over a short amount of time.

[15:30] JAMIE

And and the people you get in those days, it's very important you get the right type of people because it's it's not necessarily skill set and experience you're hiring for.

[15:38] JAMIE

You're you're hiring for like will. So it's will over a skill set and knowledge. And those people have got to be happy with ambiguity and problem solving and creating. And then over time, there's going to be different types of people that you you need to hire because you're at a different scale now. So you might have people who are there's a good analogy.

[16:01] JAMIE

It's like you have pioneers and you have migrated people who can pick up things and start building repeatable systems and processes. And then you have settlers. So once you hit a certain skill, that's kind of where we're at now or have been for a while, which is trying to just keep on improving and creating an excellent service because those people are experienced at that.

[16:20] JESS

And as a certified fangirl of your Bulgarian office and coming to see you in Varna recently, have you had any lessons from being across two countries, and has there been any kind of lessons from that across working across the UK and Bulgaria and quite remote locations like Colchester? You know, it's not far from London, but you're not in this thing.

[16:41] GARY

We're going to be really real here. Like we have had big, we've made big mistakes and we've had big lessons and some of them have been expensive and one of them is like growing that quickly. So year one we finished with like, I don't know, 20 something clients. And then and then it was like then it was very quick, like 40, 50 clients.

[17:01] GARY

60. Now we're at like 90 odd clients who got TikTok shops. So you've got 53 people in the business today. It's gotten to that size in three years and we've never done this before. So we had to learn by being quite sharp and like researching, but then often just by doing it wrong. And one of those examples is like we turned around at one point.

[17:22] GARY

This was a little while ago, but we turned around and we're like, what? We thought we were making this much money. And then we got a new accountant or a new kind of like fractional CFO. And they were like, oh no, you're not making you're making any money right now in this moment. So we would like we had a freaked out and we were like, what the are we doing this for?

[17:40] GARY

The whole business is meant to be this much profitable and it's not at all. And we had to dig. Jamie and I had to learn to basically do what we call drains up. So we'll put the drain up and get into the swamp and look at every single cost. Everything in the business. And what we found is a bunch of stuff.

[17:56] GARY

But for example, we were spending like we had a budget, let's say of five grand a month for like travel and expenses and this and that. And we were doing like 25 grand on a bad month, you know, like blowing money on, like just shit that we weren't budgeting for. We had a we've got a large payroll in Bulgaria that comes with a lot of extra tax and things that are done differently to the UK.

[18:17] GARY

You have to pay quite a lot of tax on those staff and everything, and we thought we were accounting for it properly, but we were off by like a third. So there's many tens of thousands of pounds a month that you're not making that you think. So if we're going to get real, I think our biggest mistake, which we've now corrected over the last year, and we have an absolute iron grip on our business and our numbers now because we've had the right people, right advice and we've taught ourselves is that at one point, you know, about over about a year ago or so, we we

[18:44] GARY

Woke up one day and found out that our business was way less like the numbers were all wrong. Even though the business was big. We had all the clients, we had all the staff. The service is great. The actual fundamentals of the business were not what we thought they were at all, and that's because we didn't understand how to run a business that size and what it takes, which is like proper management, accounting, proper like cost of goods sold.

[19:07] JESS

So I guess the lesson there is making sure you get multiple perspectives.

[19:11] GARY

And I would say more than that. Like I hear this advice from entrepreneurial like speakers and it's so true if you're starting a business of any kind. The first high, one of the first investments you should make is in someone who is who understands the numbers and don't run off of a Google sheet, punching your costs in and having your revenue there, because that's not going to be correct once you get that worked for us for the first 18 months, me and Jamie would update every cost in a Google sheet.

[19:36] GARY

We would have our revenue. But once you get to the millions of revenue and then millions of spend, you're not going and you've got probably thousands of line items, like someone bought a coffee and bought a train ticket for £50. And it's like, this is happening every day, like hundreds and hundreds of transactions.

[19:52] GARY

Then you've got your supplier invoices like it got it got out of control, and we were just using a Google sheet to update it all.

[19:58] GARY

And actually what you need is proper financial management accounting. And we now know that. And we've had it for a while. And it's so nice to know exactly what the business is doing, what the money is it making, where can you invest? Where are you overspending? Where are you under spending? Because what what isn't measured isn't managed. And we didn't know that at the beginning.

[20:16] JESS

What isn't measured, isn't managed well, isn't measured, isn't managed good. Good takeaway.

[20:20] JESS

And that leads us on, I guess, for like on the topic of financials is you've never taken outside investment in the early stages of the business. Was there ever a moment where you genuinely wondered whether RevWise was going to work, or did you have that complete belief from the beginning?

[20:39] JAMIE

Was a lot of moments every day, probably for the first four. Yeah. First 5 or 6 months. And yeah, it's I think it's, I think that's, I think that's normal for any bootstrapped, bootstrap company, like we always believed.

[20:54] JAMIE

And we were we were fortunate enough to, you know, Gary had quite a good network, we knew lots of agency and agency founders who were a few years ahead of us. And we kind of had like inspiration from them. And we had templates from them about how we were to grow there.

[21:10] JAMIE

So we we had an idea, a good, really good understanding of how we were to go about it. But it doesn't mean that, you know, those days were like without fear that it could all go, it could all go away. But I think for me personally, I think it was when we started to hire people and we started to have a team, we started to have offices.

[21:30] JAMIE

That was when people's lives. And that's when the fears started to to go away somewhat and

[21:35] GARY

Weirdly, signing a five year lease for a five figure monthly, you know, like cost of an office actually brought him relief. But yeah, that, that that is true. The first six months, almost every single day, we were probably doubting ourselves.

[21:51] GARY

And then the problems changed. You know, the business is here to stay now. And, you know, actually that you're probably going to keep growing at a respectable right now. And but you're now stressing about explosive growth, like, how do we keep the explosive growth going if we're not growing by 100% a year or 80% a year, then you feel like you've failed.

[22:10] GARY

And that's a weird thing to wrestle with. And you have to try and like, take stock every now and then and actually remember, like you've got time to. And also having a co-founder I think is so important because I know lots of founders and some of them are solo founders, and they're going through all of the head fuck that we've been going through, but on their own.

[22:30] GARY

And that's why a lot of them end up selling out, selling chunks of the business to someone who sells them that they're, you know, guru, and then they lose equity in their business because they feel like they can't do it alone.

[22:40] JESS

But it sounds like, there's a bigger commitment than marriage. You'd hear being co-founders

[22:46] GARY

Say, yeah, I mean, I'm, I'm not married, but we we we have paperwork between us and and a lot more. We have a deadlock agreement.

[22:54] JESS

Have you got any matching tattoos?

[22:56] GARY

He's got to pay me even if I die. Yeah, and I've got to pay him. If he dies, we've got we we we're like,

[23:01] JESS

You're locked in.

[23:02] GARY

Yeah, yeah. It's bigger than a marriage. It's a good job.

[23:05] JESS

But that's not a lesson in losing that you. It's a lesson in winning. Picking a good co-founder. Yeah.

[23:11] JESS

And from all of that and kind of to date. What what did the experience of sort of powering through that doubt and all the pressures of hiring people and signing that five year lease on the office? And what did that teach you that you still carry into running the business? See, you know, it's been three years now.

[23:29] JESS

What are you still learning from and bringing into that every day from those early days?

[23:35] JAMIE

I mean, the fact that we have got through that is clearly shown us that we've got, you know, great tenacity and staying power. And we're, you know, obsessive and excited. And as, as you grow, like, your ambition grows and, you know, that's just, I think part and parcel of it.

[23:55] JAMIE

And, yeah, everything, every mishap that happens along the way, I think it and every win as well, it just it helps you become a better person, better business person, and you grow in confidence. And and then when you do have mishaps in the future, they don't seem as, as bad and big because, you know, you've gone through it all before.

[24:13] JAMIE

I'm not to say that, you know, we won't wobble, you know, in the future and have massive freak counts. But if somehow it doesn't, it doesn't feel as

[24:22] GARY

For me, it's cash flow. So everything he said plus cash flow, because we're bootstrapped. Maybe if someone takes in £1 million and starts their business, they don't have to worry about this as much.

[24:32] GARY

But like we sometimes refer to ourselves like jokingly as cash flow kings. Like, sorry, the bootstrapped kings were like, how did we get how did we get here? So like multi-million pound business, without any outside investment, like when you actually look at it and lot of sort of more, I guess seasoned people that I speak to, they can't believe it.

[24:53] GARY

They asked me, how did you guys get money to start it? And we say, no. And they understand the scale of the business. Their minds are blowing. They're quite they're quite impressed. However, what they don't know is like, well, they probably realize, but like what people don't realize is the VAT. When you have a six figure VAT builder, pay plus all your star plus or everything.

[25:11] GARY

Like you have to manage that so carefully and the cash flow would be my number one thing to say. Like if someone's bootstrapping, cash flow is everything, you could be the most profitable business in the world, but if your cash runs out,

[25:24] GARY

You're out of business. It's over. And that happens to a lot of people, especially when they're growing fast because you're signing all these clients now, you need to hire more staff really quickly.

[25:32] GARY

You need to add more software, more everything. So your costs going up at the front, and then the clients have a lag before they pay you. Right. And that leads me to another point. Probably one of our biggest lessons was credit control. We have a full time person who just chases invoice because we've got like 90 plus clients.

[25:48] GARY

That's 90 odd people that, you know, we had a client go bankrupt this year, this shit this year. And, that was a special case because they owed us like 28 grand and we just had to write that off. But we knew we were taking on that risk because they're a big name client, and they insisted on long terms.

[26:07] GARY

And we were watching it thinking we'd been with them for years. They've been a great client for us. There were a great logo that helped us get partly get to where we are today. We'll take a bath on that, right. So we actually allow that to happen. However, we had a client burn us for 30 grand. Was it 37 K in our we'd been trading just over a year.

[26:27] GARY

It was a company that we should have known were going to go, we're going to go bust and basically leave us holding the bag because they didn't pay us for so many months, but we didn't want to see them come off of our revenue because we were so early and we were trying to create we were creating a false economy.

[26:44] GARY

So we were like, maybe we'll be okay. Maybe we care. We call the founder who's like, just give me another week. And

[26:48] GARY

It was like having a bit of a reality check. Now, if someone doesn't pay us after X amount of time very quickly, they get cut off from service and they either don't they're not a client anymore or they pay us.

[26:58] GARY

And as sad as that is sad, if a client, they've got cashflow problems and if we stop working with them, we lose a client. It might be a good client, but we've learned now that you literally have to be. It has to be non-negotiable when you're a bootstrap business. And cash flow is so important because yeah, one of the big lessons we had was a year old.

[27:15] GARY

Every penny really mattered to us, and we had a 38 grand black hole in our cash flow.

[27:21] JAMIE

To your original question, though, it's like, what have you learned for all of that? I think it's it's about what Gary just said. Like we act a lot faster now.

[27:30] JAMIE

We because we're working with people on the client side and people within our business as well, like, sentimentality plays a huge part in our decisions and our decisions, you know, to keep working with people even though they're not paying us. And, and that's just not good business sense. So from, from that sense, like, I think it's just taking action quicker. Because

[27:51] JESS

And business is business. Right. You've got to take kind of the partnership out of it. And that's hard when you're early on and you want to do right by your client.

[27:58] GARY

I have percentage in our again, going back to what isn't measured isn't managed management accounting, proper forecasting, cash flow forecasting.

[28:06] GARY

We have an accrual for bad debt. Now, even though our bad debt is so tiny, people don't go bust. People don't like, we don't have bad debt. Like, we we like I said, in the first year we got really burnt. There are some outliers, like that big brand that I mentioned this year. You probably know who I'm talking about

[28:23] GARY

But there's an outliers like that. But but that is an accrual now in our management accounting. So we expect to lose a small percentage of our revenue every single month. And that's accrued so that even when it happens we our numbers don't change. We've made the right amount of profit revenue. Nothing gets hurt cashflow wise. And and then often that is an overestimation. So we actually have more profit than we would have

[28:46] JESS

And now to slightly changed the direction of the conversation and being the sales, obsessive excited everything I know about you, Gary, what is a business idea that you've had that you genuinely thought would work? But it's actually just a really terrible idea. Like you must have some

[29:06] GARY

I launched three businesses. The first one was when I was 17. It was a t shirt company. I don't know how old you are, Jess, but Myspace. I was a Myspace emo kid back in the 2000,

[29:18] GARY

And I saw somebody who was actually an influencer technically, even though it wasn't called influencer, and she was like a Myspace person with loads of following, and she had a really successful clothing brand.

[29:28] GARY

There was a lot of Myspace clothing brands back then, and I went off and started a clothing business when I was 17, somehow got my hand on a few grand, borrowed from friends and family and stuff, put myself out there in a big way, sold about ten units and then had to move on.

[29:44] JESS

Have you still got you've still got some of the t shirts.

[29:46] GARY

They're absolutely wack. We're gonna have to insert so bad T-shirt so bad. But basically I started this business and knew nothing about marketing. I just thought I'd make the t shirts and then they'll be able to sell them. So it's just like naivety. But it was quite painful, you know, even at that age to, like, have lost money of people.

[30:03] GARY

I had to then pay them back like for years. And that was quite painful. And it was just completely amateur of me to the way I launched that. Then, then another business that I launched was, a like an e-com product, but that did okay. Like it sort of basically washed its face. And then I didn't carry on because I don't understand how to carry stock.

[30:25] GARY

And then I actually had another business during the, just before the pandemic, which was an ad network that started with an O that I used to work with. We started this ad network, and we grew it to about 25 K of monthly revenue. And our forecast was like we needed to be at 250 K monthly revenue by this point. So like it was losing money. So we shut that down. And so yeah.

[30:44] JESS

What about you? Jamie, have you had any wacky business ideas that you in at the time really believed in that? Looking back on it, you think

[30:53] JAMIE

I'm one for one? Like, this is my first business.

[30:56] JESS

That's not a lesson in leaning.

[30:58] JAMIE

Well, I mean, yeah, some of us are just. Yeah. Born winners. Yeah. Born winner.

[31:04] JESS

In terms of advice that you would give to someone who's just starting out a business now, what would you say to them if someone came to you and said, you know, I'm thinking of starting this business. I've got this idea. First of all, you'd want to vet the idea, right? But,

[31:19] GARY

Make a business plan, make a forecast, look at lead metrics, not lag metrics.

[31:25] GARY

So if your business is a service business and this many clients makes this much revenue, okay, your lag metric is the client. So your number of client wins. That's your lag metric. That comes after a bunch of other stuff. Right. But what's the lead metric. How many phone calls? How many emails? How many meetings do you need to sit to get that one client?

[31:43] GARY

Those are the numbers that you need to be focusing on in your forecast. So build your business plan with a forecast with lead metrics, not lab metrics. And then also, cash flow management accounts. Understanding your numbers don't do what we did and run it all off of a Google sheet for the first year and a half, like actually get like get proper accounting software and do it properly and educate yourself on the economics, because no matter how sexy your business is or how successful it is, on the surface, if you don't have the fundamental accounting correct, you're not actually you don't have a business.

[32:13] JESS

And I can't, kind of interview both without mentioning your own podcast. Marketing Over Milkshakes been a big success, but you've done some really quite experimental shaking things up in terms of your marketing strategy. I would say as RevWise, there was the RevWise album and a couple of other kind of LinkedIn posts that are really creative.

[32:36] JESS

You jump on a lot of trends. I think that works really well for you guys. Have you done anything a bit with your marketing that went wrong or backfired, or did you have any complaints ever? Have you got any stories about that or is it all just gone quite well? Smooth sailing

[32:52] GARY

Done well, but we've probably pissed some people off. But there's a lot of stuff that never made it onto social media. That was my ideas that we have. We had a very sensible marketing manager that would basically be like a handbrake, you know, Jess. She would basically like I would say, let's do this post about, I don't know, Honey or something. And she's like, no, you're going to get in your favor there.

[33:14] GARY

Or I think she was, because like, well, it wasn't even just Honey. It was like I might be attacking like some tech partner that I find boring. And I'm like, let's just do it because it's funny to me, and let's do this funny, let's do this funny meme. And she's like, why? Because you're going to piss off like Awin or you're going to piss off PR live, you're going to piss off all these partners that we kind of like, want to work with.

[33:33] GARY

So and she was right about that. So yeah, this is stuff that never made it live. And then this stuff that we spent ages on and loads of effort and maybe money on and then never did anything, never got any engagement and was like and then yet a post of some a team at dinner. Our team having dinner might do like might go crazy.

[33:50] GARY

So it's just weird. You never know with marketing what's going to go off.

[33:54] JESS

And then to wrap things up and kind of move away just from the losing and all of the the challenge is, what does winning really look like for you both? And I guess we're going to give two very separate answers. But then collectively as a business as well, I guess personally, what does it mean? And then business wise. Yeah.

[34:14] JAMIE

Well I think I think we've we've grown a hell of a lot on this, this journey. Through the challenges that we've both worked through together. And so I think, I think when it comes to when it comes to having a team, a team of people that big, that's not something we ever really envisaged.

[34:37] JAMIE

And we didn't imagine the challenges or or the great stuff that could come from that. So I would say that one of the most, the biggest signs of winning for me going forward is actually the team finding what they're doing to be important. And as well as all the numbers and the progression for everybody like that, it's actually having something they believe in and that they find as important as goals as us.

[35:04] JAMIE

And that's, I mean, I, I want this to be a business that, you know, I would have wanted to be an employee in. That's always been my sort of philosophy, I suppose.

[35:14] JESS

And if it helps, I feel like that when I come to your office. I wish I worked it so cool. Good, good vibes from the team.

[35:21] JAMIE

Yeah. So I think that would be my. That would be my takeaway.

[35:26] GARY

Mine's a bit more kind of, maybe a bit more, but like, I have this theory that a lot of very ambitious people, whether it's in business, in sports or in their career after their business owner, you could be a mega ambitious person in a career as well, like what is an employee?

[35:41] GARY

But a lot of these people are like drug addicts, where they're actually trying to chase something that's going to complete them. They got a gap and a hole in themselves, maybe a lack of self-esteem or self-worth that we're trying to plug. And I can relate to that myself. It's like this never ending and it's never enough, because once you achieve something, it gives you a quick relief to go, yeah, yeah, I am the person that I want to be and that's important to you.

[36:06] GARY

But then immediately it fades and you're chasing the next thing to try and get that feeling again, like smoking a cigarette. So for me, what success would look like is that's getting better in me. Like I'm being more happy in my skin. I think having children makes a difference. Going through stuff personally, over the previous years of my life that have taught me what's important and just being grateful every day.

[36:26] GARY

And maybe I can say that from a privileged position, because RevWise is a pretty successful business and makes money and, you know, provides a lot of jobs. And so maybe I've already done the same level of achievement. So it's easy to say that, but I think anyone can feel like that at any point. And then all of the work stuff just becomes fun.

[36:44] GARY

It's like a game if you look at it as a game, right? We all need money. We need to live, we need to pay our bills. But like, just treat it like a game. Have fun, make sure you're in the environment that you enjoy. That's why we try to build a fun company where the offices are fun. The shit we do is always fun.

[36:57] GARY

Like we're try and build a good culture because we've got to live in it ourselves, right? So why would you build a crap business that's not fun if you've got to work in it as well? So we've done it for ourselves and our staff love it. And then I get enjoyment from doing stuff like this and putting myself out there and doing new things.

[37:12] GARY

And that's, I think, the most important thing, and try not to obsess over the numbers and the status and the achievement, because that's probably coming from a place that's not so healthy, that's coming from a place of trying to, you know, fill a hole

[37:24] JESS

And taking stock of the journey as well that you've been on. I mean, obviously it's happened quite quickly, but continuing that. that and seeing these achievements evolve and like you say, just being happy in the moment and enjoying that, that journey really.

[37:39] JESS

Thank you for joining us, Jamie and Gary. And. Yeah, that was a really interesting session, I think, working with you. We've covered some new stories, new territory, which was really fun for me today.

[37:51] JESS

And. Yeah. Make sure you join us on the next one of lessons in losing. Thank you. James. Stress.

[37:58] ROB

And that brings us to the end of our first series of Lessons from Losing. Across ten episodes, we've heard ten very different stories, but there have been some remarkably consistent lessons along the way. It's rarely follows the path you expect that knowing when to keep going can be just as important as knowing when to change course, that the people you surround yourself with matter enormously, and that some of the experiences that feel most like losing at the time can ultimately shape what you build next.

[38:27] ROB

Perhaps most importantly, we've heard that there really is no single playbook for building something successful. Every founder we've spoken to has had to figure parts of it out as they went. And their definition of winning has often changed along the way, too. So a huge thank you to all of our guests for being so open about the moments that didn't go according to plan.

[38:46] ROB

And to everyone who has watched or listened to the series, Lessons from Losing will be back next year, when we'll be heading across the Atlantic to hear from a new group of founders and business leaders in the US. But you won't have to wait until then for more from us. The Awin-Win Marketing Podcast will be back soon with new episodes alongside a new series of the Performance Marketers Toolkit.

[39:08] ROB

For now though, that's it from Lessons from Losing. Thanks for joining us. And remember, sometimes you have to lose before you learn how to win. Goodbye.