How Two Co-Founders Stopped One Thing To Change Everything

The two founders of Stelligent were burnt out running their consulting business until they agreed to stop doing one thing that changed just about everything.

To read a transcript of this episode, click here.

Rob Daly and Paul Duvall co-founded Stelligent in 2007, a company that provides automated processes for building, testing and releasing software through Amazon Web Services (AWS).

In their own words, the first five years were ‘a slog’ with spotty revenue and short-term employees. Daly and Duvall decided to make one simple – and profoundly lucrative – switch to their business model and the company took off growing from $1 million in revenue to a $25 million sale in just five years.

Once ready to exit, Daly and Duvall completed The Envelope Test and Short List Builder modules of The Value Builder System™, which helped them decide when to sell the business, and to who.

You’ll learn a lot of different factors around building company value before a sale, including:

• The danger of using part time “gig” employees
• The benefits of specialization
• The definition of a “leechable” partner and how to find yours
• How to find an advisor
• How many companies you can expect to approach to find a buyer
• Why you need a walk away number and how to calculate it

From specialization to the envelope test, Daly and Duvall took the lessons of Built to Sell and applied it to their company. You can do the same. Start for free right now by getting your Value Builder Score.

 

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About Our Guest

Paul Duvall is a founder of Stelligent and CTO of Mphasis Stelligent – a Premier Consulting Partner with the DevOps and Financial Services Competencies that has been implementing Continuous Delivery solutions on AWS since 2009. He is an AWS Community Hero and 4x AWS certified including AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Professional. Duvall has architected, implemented and managed software and systems solutions for over 20 years. He is the principal author of Continuous Integration: Improving Software Quality and Reducing Risk (Addison-Wesley, 2007), a 2008 Jolt Award Winner.