Saud Juman built PolicyMedical, a company enabling hospitals to document their procedures and policies, into a software company growing 100% a year when he sold it for 7.2 times revenue. It was a remarkable exit for a business Juman started in his mother’s basement.
There is lots to love about Juman and his exit, including:
Juman garnered 37 written offers for PolicyMedical. He played bidders off each other, jacking up his value in their eyes from around four times revenue to eventually agreeing to 7.2 times revenue. Like Juman, creating a competitive marketplace for your business is one of the essential steps in punching above your weight in a negotiation to sell. Get the entire game plan, The Art of Selling Your Business, set to be released on January 12th. Order it today and earn some gifts.
In his more than 20-year career as a business owner and entrepreneur, Saud Juman has worked through every possible business challenge in a variety of industries — from designing unique products, developing new markets, creating corporate culture plans, recruiting and building a world-class team, navigating through significant growth, change, and executing a highly successful exit. Saud himself has grown, run and sold a multi-national business called PolicyMedical Inc. that developed numerous hospital data management systems trusted by over 3000 healthcare organizations. As a result, Saud knows and understands what founders and CEOs face on a daily basis.” www.Saudjuman.io, LinkedIn: @saudjuman, Email: saudjuman@gmail.com
John Warrillow:
Hey, before we get into today’s episode, I want to take a second and describe a new project I’ve been working on for the last year or so. It’s a book called, The Art of Selling Your Business: Winning Strategies & Secret Hacks for Exiting on Top. It’s coming out on January 12th, 2021.
John Warrillow:
What I’ve done is to still down some of the best practices, hacks and ideas and strategies of all the episodes we’ve done here in Built to Sell Radio. There’s more than 250 of them now. What I try to do is codify the best ideas into this book. It’s divided into three sections. Everything you need to do before you get started, how do you drum up multiple offers for your company and then finally, how do you punch above your weight class in the negotiation to sell. To get a copy, just go to builttosell.com/selling.
John Warrillow:
Here’s the next episode. Next up is Saud Juman. He built the company called, the PolicyMedical. Built it up and sold it for 7.2 times revenue. How on earth is that possible? It’s such an enormous exit but embedded within this story are some of the secrets that Juman followed in his journey, including how to find a mentor and I found our whole conversation about mentorship really interesting. The first half of the conversation is really dedicated to mentorship.
John Warrillow:
If you’re into more of the negotiation tips and tricks, you can fast forward to the second half of the conversation where we get into the things he did to prepare his business to sell. The three things you wrote down on a card that he insisted on and helped him filter out the 37 offers he got for his company. Again, he moved them from four all the way to 7.2 times revenue to tell you how he did it is Saud Juman.
John Warrillow:
Saud Juman, welcome to Built to Sell Radio.
Saud Juman:
Hey, John. Pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.
John Warrillow:
Yeah. Tell me about PolicyMedical, treat me like an idiot. Describe it to me as though I’m like a 15-year-old. I’m streaming through TikTok like I have a lot of time. Explain to me your business model.
Saud Juman:
What PolicyMedical was, I mean, certainly, it wasn’t the sexiest of spaces. My wife and I, she’s a journalist at really cool TV and radio stations. I would say, “I’m in healthcare regulatory compliance software.” They would say, “Oh, that’s good.” They kind of move on to her. In a nutshell, what PolicyMedical did and does, the flagship product, it originally automated and made electronic a manual process within the hospital setting.
Saud Juman:
Hospitals, Canadian and US hospitals, but our main market was the United States. They have these documents called policies and procedures. Every corporation has policies and procedures, your time off policy, everything else, your expenditure policy, et cetera. However, hospitals, their policies are around, for example, disinfecting a scalpel after surgery.
Saud Juman:
Another one, for example might be, how do we properly mop the entryway of the hospital to make sure nobody slips and falls. All of these are super important, because if they’re not managed and executed properly, there could be serious, litigious, repercussions for the hospital.
Saud Juman:
I found that niche years ago, where I realized that hospitals were getting into trouble. They were getting sued. They were not getting, in the United States, the Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements that they needed, because they couldn’t follow their policies and procedures correctly. We came along and we allowed them to take that stuff off the shelf, put it into some software and get to it a lot easier.
Saud Juman:
Then, I followed the chain, I realized that they were writing these documents based on these government documents called standards. Then, we said, “Oh, it’d be kind of cool to kind of show them how the standards they have to follow married to the policies.” That was the software that was the play that we did initially. The driver, it really was the United States healthcare and regulatory compliance space that was the real driver for this type of software.
John Warrillow:
I can’t believe there aren’t competitors in this space. I mean, there must be other companies that do this, like create policies that the hospital employees can access via the internet.
Saud Juman:
Yeah. There are and there were. It’s interesting. I mean, I forget who wrote this, but maybe it was Malcolm Gladwell years ago. When people come up with ideas in history, somebody’s sitting somewhere in the world, and they think that they came up with this really novel new idea. When I started that company, I exited in 2018. Before that exit, it was 17 and a half years, but 18 years before that, I’m in Toronto thinking I came up with this brilliant idea. A year later, I see this other company come up in Idaho and they were called, policy something else.
Saud Juman:
I always thought that they copied me, but I exited, he exited, and another competitor exited years later. I always thought, my own narrative is, they copied me all along. They rode my coattails. You know what, after all the exits happened, I actually reached out to those former competitors, because we had nothing barring us from talking.
John Warrillow:
Sure.
Saud Juman:
It turns out that they legitimately came up with the idea themselves around the general time that I did and we launched it.
John Warrillow:
Isn’t that funny? Isn’t that funny? How did you finance the business? What was your financing structure?
Saud Juman:
It was completely bootstrapped. I’m from a part of the Greater Toronto Area called, Scarborough. I’m a kid from Scarborough. Scarborough is a pretty low-income, tough and rough place.
Saud Juman:
To start a start up there around the year 2000 is not the thing that people do. I started it in my mom’s basement in Scarborough. We ran it pretty old school. The original premise was built product, get product done, sell product, get money from product, save some to fund growth, take some to pay bills. That was the general formula that we built the business on, and we really grew the business based on organic revenue.
John Warrillow:
Wow. How did you acquire customers?
Saud Juman:
In the beginning of the company, it was very different from the last chapter of the company. In the beginning of the company, it was dialing for dollars. I felt like I was in Boiler Room, the movie, and that was my background. I’m not a technical engineer founder. I’m a business sales founder. I was a software sales guy before.
Saud Juman:
I was very comfortable picking up the phone, burning the midnight oil, making 100, 150 calls a day, calling hospitals. When I realized hospitals were the main target, all the way back then, I bought this thing called, the hospital bluebook. It’s like a phonebook that lists all the phone numbers of all the hospitals, and has the names of all the executives. I just went through that thing all day long. While my co-founder, whatever people would ask for in the phone, I would say, “Yes, we have that,” even though we didn’t. I’d hang up and I turned to him, I say, “Josh, I told them we have this thing. We got to build this now.”
John Warrillow:
Love it. Love it. Ready-fire-aim approach to start ups. It’s perfect.
Saud Juman:
Yes.
John Warrillow:
How did you guys deal, you and Josh, figure out the equity piece? Did you guys co-founded and kind of went to 50/50 down the middle or did he come later? How did you guys structure it?
Saud Juman:
Back then, it was 50/50. There was this thing called a casting vote. That the lawyer that we used at that time said one of us needs to have. It ended up with me. I guess, in a way, it was like 51, 49 but it was pretty much 50/50. He built the product. He was the engineer. I sold it and then we grew, and grew, and grew organically. Then probably seven, eight years into the journey, he wanted to leave. I wanted to stay. We had different ideas for the company, which was fine and then it took us maybe a year or so to figure out how to part ways, and I bought him out. He moved on and then I was left with 100% of the company.
John Warrillow:
How did you value the company when you bought him out?
Saud Juman:
That was so, so difficult, because we didn’t know. We’re just two young guys. Again, in the city of Toronto, the tech ecosystem has boomed so much, but we didn’t really have a lot of mentors or resources or an ecosystem to go to, to say, “Hey, how our tech companies valued?”
Saud Juman:
We just simply went on the amount of revenue we were making at that time and divide it by two, just split it. Yeah, just split it right down the middle. We were making, I think, just under $500,000 a year. For two guys in my mom’s basement, which is where the office was, that amount of money was fine, because we were original. A lot of people ask us, “Hey, so did you have foresight? Did you see where this thing was going?” The truth is, we didn’t. We were building it and we were just taking maybe every quarter as it came. Everything was exciting at that time.
Saud Juman:
We kind of valued the company based on the revenues. I said, “Okay, you know what, I’m going to pay you half of that and then you’ll be on your way, and I’ll end up with 100% of the company.”
John Warrillow:
To go back, you’re generating, to be clear, $500,000 of annual revenue at that time?
Saud Juman:
Of annual revenue. Yep.
John Warrillow:
Got it. Was that considered ARR? Was it recurring revenue in a SaaS sort of?
Saud Juman:
No, no. No, this issue that you raised was one that could have potentially killed the company later on because the software licensing model we used at that time was called, the perpetual model. The perpetual model is the old school way of selling software, which is, you sell software, and you get a large lump sum of money. That’s just in the first year. Every year afterwards, you get about maybe 15% on aggregate for a support and maintenance fee. It’s not the lucrative annual recurring revenue piece. When we get later to the re-launch of the company, I not only had to rebuild the product, but we actually had to migrate everyone onto a new contract as well.
John Warrillow:
Got it. Got it. To be clear, you had $500,000 of perpetual software sale licenses and how did you guys choose to value that revenue? Were you using like a multiple of top line revenue or multiple of bottom line profit or how did you cut a place to value on?
Saud Juman:
We were just two simple guys. We just said, “Okay, for the last two years, how much money are we making on average?” It wasn’t exactly $500,000. It was $400 and something thousand, but it was close to $500,000. Then we said, “Okay, well, you know what, let’s just divide that in half and I’ll pay you for half.” That was it. He was fine with that. I was fine with that. That looked like an enormous amount of money back then.
John Warrillow:
You pay him a check like basically 250 grand? Is that how?
Saud Juman:
Yes.
John Warrillow:
That’s how it was …
Saud Juman:
Yeah. I paid him in installments because I didn’t have $250,000.
John Warrillow:
Okay.
Saud Juman:
We said, “You know what, it’s going to be over X amount of months, I think it was 24 months, and it’s going to be interest free, and I just pay you these installments every single month until you get your final money.” Then, we had a mutual lawyer. Then the plan was, when that was all done, we had his share certificates in escrow.
John Warrillow:
Got it. Got it. Okay. That makes sense. You’re 100% owner of this company, what was the next step in the journey? It sounds like you re-launched or did something different?
Saud Juman:
Yeah. When he left, I had the company on my own for about a year, a year and a half, and I really sat there trying to make the goal of it. It was me and I think two other employees. We had an engineer because I was not an engineer, I needed somebody to replace Josh’s skill set and then I add just an all-rounder, six men off the bench, if you will, if this was basketball. Somebody that could help do some sales demos, help pick up the phone to do some customer support, et cetera.
Saud Juman:
Then, it dawned on me that I’m running a lifestyle business, which is not bad, but it’s not what I wanted. I started the business when I was a single guy in my mom’s basement, no overhead in my life. Then, by the time Josh had moved on, I was married. I had two kids. I thought, you know what, I mean, the setup isn’t bad. The office is around the corner, I can drive there. It’s making enough money. It’s paying my mortgage. I got a nice car and a minivan and everything’s good. It wasn’t what I got into the business to do in the first place.
Saud Juman:
I originally got into this business. I got into health care, because I wanted to make a significant impact on people’s health and just have my legacy or my impact built started in that particular way. The number I was tracking was one million patients. I wanted to impact one million patients a day based on the software. I was far from that number and I realized I couldn’t get there running a lifestyle business. I needed a high growth, high impact company.
Saud Juman:
It dawned on me that I need to restart and re-launch this company from scratch, but I just don’t know how to do that. That’s where our mentors came in and mentorship came in.
John Warrillow:
Tell me more.
Saud Juman:
I was at a barbecue in Toronto. I met a friend that had just exited. He had a great exit and we were chatting about that. I said, “What made the difference? What was one thing that made the difference for you?” I said, “Don’t tell me stuff like in YouTube or I can find out at Y Combinator, just tell me something that not a lot of people are talking about.” He said, “Honestly, it’s mentorship.” I said, “Really?” I said, “I’ve tried coaches before and things like that.” I said, “Tell me about mentors.”
Saud Juman:
We broke down his mentorship journey. At that barbecue, we deduced it down to a formula. We pretty much realized that in his journey, he looked for two mentors. One was an industry specific mentor and the other one was a general business mentor. Then after I left him, I said, “You know what, I’m going to do that,” because one of my superpowers is I know I don’t know a whole lot of stuff but I do know when something resonates as being true.” That mentorship formula resonated as being true.
Saud Juman:
I left that barbecue thinking, I need to find two mentors. Then, I ended up looking for an industry specific mentor, and here was my criteria, I was looking for somebody that had exited, or that had built a business of at least I don’t know, where I pull these figures out of, but it was $150 million. I was willing to travel anywhere to see that mentor because I thought, “You know what, I might see them a few times a year, I’ll pick up a flight, I’ll visit them wherever they are.”
Saud Juman:
For the general business mentor, I wanted somebody here in Toronto. I wanted somebody that had built up a business of over half a billion dollars a year. My rationale was, if they were to ever meet, the general business mentor’s ego would be neutralized by the other mentor’s knowledge in my specific industry. The other guy’s ego would be neutralized by the sheer size of what that guy has actually built.
Saud Juman:
I put my Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich hat on. I made my affirmations. I sent my thoughts out into the ether. Then before I knew it, I found my industry specific mentor. Then, I also found the general business mentor as well.
John Warrillow:
How did you find the industry specific mentor?
Saud Juman:
I made a list actually of three people. Because for me, I was really specific, anywhere in the world, I’m willing to travel. I want somebody that not just tech but within tech, healthcare, within healthcare, hospitals, within hospitals, regulatory compliance. There were only like three people that meet that and then that had built up like recurring revenue ARR of over $150 million, so that it came down to three people. I thought to myself, “How am I going to meet these people?”
Saud Juman:
This is where actually the Napoleon Hill stuff actually comes in because the same friend at the barbecue, he called me one day and he said, “Hey, there’s this entrepreneurial organization, it’s headquartered in Silicon Valley. Here are the types of programs they run. Here’s an example of one, keep this on your radar in a few months, you might want to plan a trip or something to go down to the valley and then you can attend one of these.”
Saud Juman:
Then, I looked at the link that he sent me, and it was one of those events like a meet and greet thing with founders and successful people that have done things within health tech, but it was if you were living in the San Francisco area. It was just an evening thing for two and a half hours. Something in me said, “Go to this event,” and which is very unlike me. From my office, I called my wife and I said, “I know we’ve got two young kids, but I feel like I need to go to this event.” She was, “This event? Where’s the event? Where is it in Toronto?” I said, “It’s in San Francisco.” She said, “Go, just go, but it’s the youngest ones first birthday in two days, you better be back.”
Saud Juman:
The next evening, I was driving across the Golden State Bridge and going to this particular event. I showed up at the event and I sat at the table. Around the table, people were asking me what I did. It was my first time to Silicon Valley. The people around the table, they were heavyweights in the tech industry. All of them said the same thing after they heard what I did. They said, “That’s it? That’s all you do.”
Saud Juman:
I got out of my little bubble in the north of Toronto and I went there and they just pretty much shot holes. They just said, “You need a lot of help.” I said, “Okay.” I said, “Who would be able to help me?” They said, “This particular guy.” I said, “He’s on my list.” They’re like, “What list?” I said, “List of potential mentors.” They said, “He sometimes comes to these things, but he probably won’t be here because he just sold his company and he said he’s taking a few years off.” That night, that guy showed up.
Saud Juman:
I just walked over to him after the crowd had kind of diffused around him. I said, “Hey, I’m so and so.” He said, “Okay.” I said, “I flew here from Toronto, just for tonight.” I said, “I need you to mentor me.” He was kind of taken aback, but that was the start of that particular relationship.
John Warrillow:
I find that so fascinating because it sounds almost unbelievable. What was his reaction to your approach? Where does it go from there? It’s weird to agree to mentor someone at a function like that. I can’t imagine he agreed right on the spot. How did you convince him?
Saud Juman:
No, he didn’t. He had thought I was stalking him. I said, “I’m not stalking you.” Within five minutes, I tried to explain the best I could how I ended up there and he’s on this list that I have and everything else. He said, “Okay.” He said, “I don’t know if I want to mentor you. In fact, I don’t want to mentor anybody. I just sold my company. If you like, why don’t we meet up for a coffee tomorrow night?” I explained to him, I said, “I can’t. I have to fly back to Toronto because it’s my younger son’s birthday tomorrow.” He said, “You’re from Toronto,” then he realized that.
Saud Juman:
Then, he tried to brush me off. He said, “You know what, if you lived here, then I make time for you and then we could see if there’s a fit of some kind.” I just said, “Okay, when?” He said, “What do you mean when?” I said, “When would you make time?” He said, “Next Sunday, I would be free?” I said, “Okay, tell me where?” He said, “Are you serious?” I said, “Yeah.” I said, “I’ll meet you wherever you want me to meet you next Sunday.”
Saud Juman:
We’d agreed to meet at a Starbucks or something in the suburb where he had lived a place called Pleasanton. I flew back to Toronto, and then we were corresponding over email and then he pretty much said, he said, “Look, if you’re coming all the way here, then why don’t we spend more time together?” I said, “Okay.” I said, “I’ll be staying at this hotel close, close to where you said your house is.” He called me the following day just before I came and he said, “You know what, don’t stay at a hotel. Just come stay at my house.”
John Warrillow:
Really?
Saud Juman:
Yeah.
John Warrillow:
You met this guy once. This is bizarre.
Saud Juman:
Yeah. It is bizarre. To kind of fast forward the story, years later, it turns out that he had just moved into that house and the house was like a house and then there’s this little guest house on the property. I stayed in the guest house, but they had just moved into that house.
Saud Juman:
His wife, before I came that night said, “Who the hell is this guy that’s going to be sleeping in my house? No one’s even slept there before, not even my mother.” Ironically, my wife told me before I went to Pearson Airport in Toronto, she goes “Whose house are you sleeping at? Who are these people?” We met at that guesthouse and then we spent a few days together. There were long days. We were together from 6:00 AM until 1:00 AM for a couple days straight, laying the groundwork. He kind of gave me a bunch of to do’s.
Saud Juman:
In retrospect, he was testing me to see as a mentee if I was going to execute on any of the things that he actually said. The fact that I had started executing right away bonded us closer together. That mentor actually ceased to become a mentor to me, because he ended up becoming a partner within the company.
Saud Juman:
There were so many similarities between not what he did before in his previous company, but the contacts we both had, who I sold to versus who he sold to, that he ended up becoming part of the company. He became my head of product and the chief medical officer. For me, in my books as a mentor and a mentee, these days I mentor a lot of people, and I’m also a mentee. I think that if there’s ever an exchange of equity, or shares or money or anything like that, the mentor-mentee relationship goes away. You kind of become partners at that point in time.
John Warrillow:
Yup, yup. This is really a very small company, $500,000 in perpetual licenses at that time, is that right?
Saud Juman:
Yes, yes.
John Warrillow:
How did you guys figure out like, what percentage he would get versus you? How did you work out the economics of that?
Saud Juman:
You know what, I mean, to tell you the truth, I went to my general business mentor, when the mentor relationship stopped between the two of us and it was clear that he was coming into the company. I was going back to California and I knew we would have the discussion around equity and how much equity he would want into it. At that point, I had seen like he was putting in months and months and months of just sweat equity or like asking for nothing. He was working more hours than some of the few employees that we actually had.
Saud Juman:
I saw how committed he was. My general business mentor, they’re such an interesting set of people. They run a family business that’s well over a century old. They do billions a year in revenue every year. They’re very good family, because they give most of the money away to charity. They have their own way of doing business.
Saud Juman:
I went to my mentor for advice. I said, “How do I figure out how much to give this guy?” He said, “You know, you need to really understand him. You need to become him.” I said, “How do I do that?” He said, “Try something really strange.” I said, “Okay.” He goes, “Sit in your office one morning, before all the employees get in. Just turn off all the lights, make sure there’s no tech on and set a timer for an hour. To sit in a chair, close your eyes, and try to become him. Just try to feel like you’re him. You’re going to get bored after the first 15, 20 minutes or so. Then, you’ll start feeling what he wants to ask for.”
Saud Juman:
I said, “This is going to feel really weird doing this.” He said, “Just do it. What do you have to lose?” He goes, “All you have to lose this some time.” I did it. Through that exercise, I thought of a number. I can’t share the number here, but I thought of a specific number.
John Warrillow:
A percentage of equity?
Saud Juman:
Percentage of equity.
John Warrillow:
Okay. Right.
Saud Juman:
Yup. That he wouldn’t be paying for. It would be nominal. It’s kind of a nominal fee he would pay for it. Then when we met up in California, eventually the conversation came to him being involved and everything. I said, “You probably want equity.” He said, “Yeah.” I said, “Okay.” I said, “If you’re getting equity, then I want you to head a product,” because the great thing about him was, I’m not a clinician, I’m not a doctor. He is also. He was a great cardiologist. I saw in him the ability to take our software deeper into healthcare, as opposed to being a tech product that marketed itself to a healthcare vertical, but it wasn’t really deep into any vertical.
Saud Juman:
I said, “Look, if you do that, I want you to execute on that prototype that we built,” because the first couple of days that we’d spent together in that guest house, we pulled out this prototyping tool called, Azure. Not the Microsoft one, it was this old prototyping tool, where you can just put screen frames and everything else, but without the guts of the software behind it. We came up with this whole prototype that ended up being the product roadmap for the whole company.
Saud Juman:
I said, “You got to build that prototype. That’s our agreement here.” He said, “Yup, that’s the plan. I would love that. That’d be a lot of fun.” I said, “What do you want?” He said, “The number,” and that was the number I thought of when I was sitting in my office. He was ready for some back and forth and I said, “Good. Done.” He said, “What do you mean?” I said, “That’s it, we’ll figure it out. We’ll call the lawyer and figure out how it all happens.” He said, “I’ve never done it before.” That’s what it was.
John Warrillow:
He didn’t put any cash into the business. It was just sweat equity effectively that he put in and you already had some equity in a business?
Saud Juman:
Yes.
John Warrillow:
Got it. Got it. I find it fascinating though, because this was a luminary. You said, you were looking for someone who built $150 million ARR company. You didn’t want to work for two years. He’s built this house. He sounds like a big shot. It sounds amazing to me that he would sort of agree to get involved in another startup. What was the secret to getting him to be interested in being part of such a small company again, given the fact that he built such a large company?
Saud Juman:
You know what, he was part of the restart. The restart wasn’t beautiful and artistic and smooth. There were a lot of bumps in the road. There were times where he would say, “Saud, I don’t know what the hell I got myself into here.” He goes, “You know, when you found me, I just sold the company. I told everyone in my life, I’m not doing anything for a little while, and then you found me and I said, yes.” He goes, “I don’t know what the hell I got myself into,” because there were times where we came through some really difficult … We had to overcome some really difficult challenges.
Saud Juman:
I think for me, it was a belief like I believed that this was going to work. Also, I think he saw in me that I had re-opted into the business because when Josh had left and I bought him out, and I had the business there, I actually asked myself, “Do I still want to do this?” Because I believe I could go do other things, but I decided, like I re-opted into it, which is different than operating a business out of desperation and feeling like you have no other choice, you got to make this thing work. I think he saw that in me and he heard my one million patients thing and everything else and it’s all true.
John Warrillow:
Where did it go from there? Because you built from, it sounds like, just a couple of employees up to many dozens of employees by the time you actually exited. What was that journey like? What do you see as the main inflection points on that journey?
Saud Juman:
You know what, these days with a small amount of my time because I’m getting ready to start another SaaS venture, but with some of the people that I coach or advise or I help out with entrepreneurs, I kind of take them through a version of what I went through over five and a half years, because from the restart to the exit was about five and a half to six years. It went in different chapters.
Saud Juman:
For example, the very first chapter was product rebuilt. For any type of people listening and watching to those particular episode, I originally thought that, you know what, let’s refactor the code. Let’s save what we have and let’s launch it. None of that worked. It was clear that we had to rebuild the whole thing from scratch. We decided to build it in this new risky environment called, AWS.
John Warrillow:
Not too risky of course.
Saud Juman:
Yeah. Not too risky but in healthcare, back then, no hospital wanted to go to the cloud, or like it’s not secure, there’s no way, it’s not going to happen. I made the decision, we got to go to the cloud, like I saw that that’s where everything was going. We made the decision to do that, and that was difficult.
Saud Juman:
That rebuild took us 18 months. It actually took us 12 months, but then the mentor talent turned product manager, chief medical officer guy that I brought in. He insisted on prolonging the development cycle to build another component into the software. That was really, really important to us because even when we were acquired, we had, I think, like 37 employees or something, but we were servicing over 3,000 hospitals in the United States.
Saud Juman:
They were trying to figure out, how did you scale to that amount of customers and you have them and they’re fanatical about you guys with just small number of employees? That engineering decision that he made, which was to set up this little admin console in the software that would allow any non-technical employee to quickly provision the software for any new client or any size of client was a bit of a game changer for us. Because he had seen in the valley, many companies that were selling, and they were selling and selling and selling, but they couldn’t invoice or collect because their engineering department was bogged down provisioning and setting up instances of the software.
Saud Juman:
It took minutes, even though the hospitals thought it took weeks to set up their instance of the software. That allowed us to not have to hire a whole lot of people within client success and customer support and training and implementation and those types of roles. After the initial product rebuilt, then the next headache was migration. We needed to migrate all the existing clients, which were in the hundreds at that time. It wasn’t in the thousands that we had at the end. That was really difficult, because they were all on premise. They have different versions of the software. Technically, it was challenging. That was going on.
Saud Juman:
Then, we had to do financial or contract migrations. That part I didn’t bank on. Basically, we were going to hospitals, our clients, and saying, “Hey, I know you pay every year this small amount of money, however, we’re going to give you this new version. By the way, you have to take it, there’s no option to keep the old one. By the way, you’re going to have to pay us maybe triple or quadruple what you pay us currently,” because there’s this new licensing thing called annual recurring revenue.
Saud Juman:
They freaked out. They’re like, “What are you talking about? Why would I do this?” It took a lot of flying on my part, a lot of sitting down in hospital cafeterias and CEO suites and things like that, to explain to them that if they were to go out in the market right now and acquire our product, they would be spending this much. I know that they only spend this much on us right now so I’m only asking for this much because we’re giving them … we’re grandfathering them in.
Saud Juman:
Once they realized after many conversations like that, that I’m actually telling the truth, then we were able to migrate almost all of them.
John Warrillow:
Got it. You moved them all over. What’s the revenue situation like at this point? You mentioned you built it up to 37 employees? Are you able to talk about sort of roughly what kind of revenue you were generating by the time you decided to sell?
Saud Juman:
Yeah. I mean, I can’t disclose at the time of sale, but around this time, so this was like a five to six year journey, right?
John Warrillow:
Yeah.
Saud Juman:
We’re only doing maybe $2.5 million in sales at this time.
John Warrillow:
In ARR?
Saud Juman:
In ARR, yeah.
John Warrillow:
Got it.
Saud Juman:
All the figures I’ll give you are all ARR.
John Warrillow:
Annual recurring revenue, if you’re following along.
Saud Juman:
Yup.
John Warrillow:
Yup. Got it.
Saud Juman:
We would invoice them on an annual basis, not on a monthly basis. Then, the other chapter, we embarked and came along as well is the sales team that would come to me and the sales team were only two guys. They came to me and they’re like, “Saud, we got a problem.” I’m like, “What’s the problem?” “As you know, every new client asked for references.” I said, “Yeah, well, we got a few hundred customers.” They’re like, “Yeah, but we only have three references, and one of them dropped out. Now, we have two references.”
Saud Juman:
I said, “We only have two references?” I said, “Out of all the clients we have, only two on references.” They said, “Yes.” Then, I realized that we have clients, we don’t have fans. We don’t have anyone that’s a fan of us. A lot of the big clients, they don’t think of policy medical, they think of me because I was the guy that was around. I have the relationship with them and everything else. Then I thought, “You know what, we need to move these clients, from clients to fans.”
Saud Juman:
That’s a nice motivational thing to say, even in a podcast. In order to do that, I implemented a bunch of specific processes and systems in order to make that happen. I came with a live …
John Warrillow:
Like what? Give me example …
Saud Juman:
We have the daily five. The daily five is, everyone that worked in sales, marketing and clients success, one of the engineers set up this kind of like spreadsheet that would pop up on their screens, five phone numbers and client names and the name of the hospital that they had to call that day. They would have gotten an email that week that say, “Hey, here are the two or three talking points when you get them on the phone to talk about.”
Saud Juman:
It could be something like, it usually went like this, “Hey, John, how’s it going? I’m Saud. I’m calling for PolicyMedical.” They’re like, “Oh, okay.” How are things going with the software? Is everything okay? Do you need any additional help?” Usually, it’s like, “No, no.” If they had a bug or they’re waiting for some feature, we would know that ahead of time. Then, I’d say, “Hey, you know what, a new release came out last week. There’s this one feature that your hospital will probably really, really benefit from. It’s this. It’s the ability to edit Microsoft Word documents in the cloud.”
Saud Juman:
That now is commonplace, but back then, that was unheard of. “By the way, are you going to be at the Health Care Compliance Association Conference, because we’re going to be there in Booth 411 and our CEO is giving a talk or whatever it is, he’d love to meet up with you afterwards.”
Saud Juman:
It was a couple of talking points and it was random. What that did was that allowed every customer to hear from our company about every 60 days from different people, so then they started to think of the brand instead of us, right?
John Warrillow:
The people, got it. Yeah.
Saud Juman:
Exactly. The other thing we did is we started a certification. There was no one certifying anyone in policy management software. I thought to myself, well, why not us? People inside the company said, “You can’t do that. There’s got to be some kind of process to start certifications.” I just said, “If there is, then the certification people are going to come to me and say, ‘You’re not allowed to do that.’ Until then, let’s just go ahead with it.” We created a certification for our type of software. Then, our competitors, customers started coming to get certified, our customers, et cetera.
Saud Juman:
That also created this credibility around the brand, which also led clients to fans. There were so many other little things, but the thing is they’re all put into a process. They were tracked. They were measured. It wasn’t just one offs. What I didn’t want is, “Oh, yeah, so and so over there. Yeah, he’s great with customers. Yeah, let him talk to them.” No, it had to be the whole little machine had to be turning them slowly into fans.
John Warrillow:
Got it. Let’s get into the actual exit itself. What triggered you to want to sell this company?
Saud Juman:
Around year 15 of my time at the company, I wanted to leave. I wanted to leave because, I’ll be completely honest. Actually, one thing I’m about to say I haven’t shared in any other podcasts before. I wanted to leave because it just wasn’t fun anymore. I felt like I had done everything I could. I told my wife, I said, “If there was a hospital healthcare policy management Olympics,” I said, “I’d be on the podium and I had gold, silver or bronze.” I know this niche so well already.
Saud Juman:
I wanted to leave. Also, I looked at the company and the company was continuing to grow, right? In fact, many of the employees and then we had an ESOP, employee stock option program. We had a few shareholders with the employees, they’re all excited. That thing is growing and growing and growing. I realized that I’m not the best leader anymore. I’m not the best CEO. This organism, PolicyMedical, it needs a new leader. It needs a new home, so it can continue to flourish. I decided, I need to leave. It was either going to be one of two scenarios, sell the business, or if that didn’t work out, because I’ve never sold a business like that at that size before, hire somebody else to replace me and I would mentor that person and remain as the chair of the board and all of that type of stuff.
Saud Juman:
The problem I had was, the thing I haven’t shared before is, I realized that my desire to sell was probably three years too early. That if I wanted to extract the valuation for myself, my family, the shareholders, everything else, I should probably stick around for another two and a half to three years. Now, that’s a really hard thing for entrepreneurs. I’ve spoken to some people that want to leave. Emotionally, they’re just so done with it, right? I stayed. I stayed for the two, three years.
Saud Juman:
I used something that I don’t think a lot of entrepreneurs use, because we’re surrounded by too much self-help motivational stuff out there. It’s just sheer will. Right? It’s just sheer will, right? I buckled down and I got really honest with what the business needs to either be prepared to welcome a new CEO in or to be attractive enough to sell the thing. I actually had to do a bunch of hard things to prepare for that exit as well.
John Warrillow:
What did you have to do? Have you think about the things that made the biggest impact over that two or three years?
Saud Juman:
The good thing is I had a lot of great mentors around me that had been through it before. We were very well-prepared, at the end of the three years, to sell. For example, before the three year sprint, if we can call it, our financials were not audited. In Canada, they’re just called notice to reader. They had an accounting firm that did notice to reader. That’s what it is. They’re not audited. I was told by all my mentors, if you want to sell it for what you want to sell it for, audited financials of at least three years history, it’s a must, right?
Saud Juman:
Also, it’s probably better not to get your cousin Bob’s accounting firm in his basement to audit it for you. You probably want to get a reputable firm. We started on that journey, right? I interviewed all the top accounting firms. I picked the one I felt the best with and we started auditing. That was one. The other one was, if you’re cleaning up your CRM or customer relationship management software, there is so much dirty data in most company’s CRM, but we started to clean that up in a big, big way.
Saud Juman:
The other thing that we did was we started to create our own what’s called a data room early. Within the data room, for those of you that haven’t been through an exit, you have to eventually build a data room. In the data room, you have all the documents for your company. In that data room, I started to gather employee contracts, previous employee contracts, and the vendor contracts. That was one of the biggest things that I did.
Saud Juman:
One of my mentors said, “Build a huge spreadsheet. On this spreadsheet, you should list all your clients, all of the key terms, everything else.” I said, “We don’t need to do that. We can pull reports from Salesforce. This is a waste of time.” He said, “Build the contract spreadsheet. Trust me.” You know what? During the due diligence, the fact that our financials were audited, by who they were audited by. The other side, they were like, “Oh, yeah, okay. That’s great.”
Saud Juman:
When they had questions about, “Oh you know what, how many clients do you have that have this clause in their contract?” We were able to get back to them so swiftly, like, within sometimes minutes or within the hour. They were taken aback like, “Oh.” I said, “Yeah, you can go ahead and check in the data room. That’s the amount.” That stupid Excel spreadsheet that I gathered, I put together for three years’ worth that was really, really, really invaluable.
Saud Juman:
Those are some of the tactical things I did. Behaviorally, as a founder, probably the hardest thing I had to admit and do was the following. I kind of imagined in my brain, that there’s a bridge. On one side, I’m the founder-entrepreneur. Then, I have to walk across the bridge and on the other side, I become entrepreneur and CEO. I realized that I was still running the business like an entrepreneur. I’m not running it like a CEO.
John Warrillow:
What’s the difference?
Saud Juman:
The difference is a CEO runs it with more rigor, more discipline, less emotion and with more data. I was still using my gut. My gut feels this way, my gut feels that way, right? I would resist, at times, running regular board meetings. A CEO doesn’t go on vacation and then go meet with a client, and then write the whole thing off as a business expense, right? That’s the type of discipline. That’s the difference between entrepreneur to CEO. It’s more of a mindset. That was difficult but I ended up kind of crossing that bridge.
John Warrillow:
Got it. What was the next step? When you went through this period, you prepared the business, you got the data room set up, what next? How big a company are you? How did you get on your front foot and actually start to market it to folks?
Saud Juman:
Yeah. At that point, in terms of the size of the exit and the valuations, I knew it was going to be eight to nine figure exit, right, up in that range.
John Warrillow:
What made you sure of that? Why were you confident in that? What were you basing that on?
Saud Juman:
I didn’t have much to base it on originally, but then I was told that I need to hire this person called an investment banker. I didn’t know what an investment banker did. I felt like if anyone has ever watched Seinfeld. There’s an episode where Kramer walks around, calling everything a write-off. That’s a write-off. This is a write-off. At the end of the episode, Jerry Seinfeld says to him, “Kramer, you don’t even know what a write-off means.” That’s what I was like with the term investment banker.
Saud Juman:
Eventually, I understood what an investment banker was, right? He or she functions like a realtor in a real estate transaction.
John Warrillow:
They hate that comparison by the way just so you know.
Saud Juman:
Oh, they do?
John Warrillow:
They do.
Saud Juman:
That’s what they are. That’s what they are, right?
John Warrillow:
Really well paid, though.
Saud Juman:
Really wealthy. I realized I needed to get an investment banker. I had all the other people lined up. I had my regular lawyer. I had my tax lawyer. I had my regular accountant. I had my tax accountant. The investment bankers came in. For me, I always go very, very specific. I wanted an investment banker that has only done mainly transactions in healthcare technology. I wanted an investment banker that was licensed in Canada and the US. I wanted an investment banker that has a very recent transaction of closing deals for Toronto-based companies selling them to the US.
Saud Juman:
It came down to literally two guys with those particular criteria. I show them the financials or whatever else they asked for. I said, “What do you think the valuation would be?” They said, “You know what? It’s going to be four to six times revenue.” They both said that. “It’ll be four to six times revenue.” I’ve signed a bunch of stuff saying I can’t disclose X, Y, and Z, but what I can disclose is, because of the preparation we did, investment banker probably won’t like me saying this. Because of the prep we did, we didn’t pay the investment banker any of those monthly preparatory fees.
Saud Juman:
Usually, when they come in, they’re like, “Okay, all right, before we start the process, we’re going to need to get your house in order. Here’s a retainer you’re going to have to pay us.” I pretty much said, “I’m not paying your retainer.” They said, “Well, no.” I said, “Okay, you look at what I have, then you tell me what else you’re going to do, then I’ll pay your retainer.” They both looked at it and said, “There’s nothing to do. You’re ready to go.”
Saud Juman:
The only thing they helped us with is crafting a CIM, confidential information memorandum, which is the fancy PDF that shows your company out there. We ended up extracting 7.2 times revenue. I believe that was because of the preparation. The speed at which we could respond to things during the due diligence process, along with a couple of other things, helped to bump that valuation up a little bit.
John Warrillow:
Tell me about the process the investment banker went through. Did he or she kind of market it to? How did they sort of promote the business for sale?
Saud Juman:
Yeah. We came up with a list together. To be honest, most of the people, not all of them, but most of the people on that list, companies on that list, they were already reaching out to me. The business had gotten to a point where we were getting a lot of legitimate outreaches. I’m not talking about really junior guys working at some private equity firm in Boston or San Francisco randomly calling a list but legitimate outreaches.
Saud Juman:
I had a list compiled. I shared it with them and they added a few more to that list. In total, we had between 40 to 50 people on the list …
John Warrillow:
What was the proportion of strategic acquirers versus private equity groups?
Saud Juman:
It’s mostly private equity. There was probably like 50% private equity, another 25% pseudo strategic. They were strategic, but they’re owned by and funded by a private equity firm so I kind of bundled them into private equity. Then there were your strategics as well. He ran a process and it was a very disciplined process. If I think back, he pretty much sent out the CIM after collecting NDAs. Collect the NDAs. Once he collects all the NDAs, he sends out the CIM.
Saud Juman:
They look at the CIM and then everybody had, I think, 7 to 14 days to request a phone call with me, a phone call or two. Then, I did a bunch of conference calls. Then after those conference calls, that time was closed. Then, they had another several weeks to submit their offer. I remember my wife and I, we did our first trip without the kids, right around that time. I remember being on that trip, getting the email with some spotty internet and looking at the Excel spreadsheet, and I was just dejected because all the offers were too low. They’re all really low.
Saud Juman:
I was down on like, “I guess, it’s going to be Plan B. I guess we’re going to be hiring a CEO.”
John Warrillow:
When you say low, what multiple of revenue were the original offers?
Saud Juman:
Four times revenue, considering that we ended up … I was aiming for six. They told me four to six, so I was aiming at the top end, right? So it was like four. I’m like, it’s not going to work. What ended up working was I saw that … When I came back from the trip and the investment banker was kind of looking at it saying, “Yeah, well, you know what? This is how it is.” My tip to anybody listening to this is get the best advice you can, however, get away from it and think about what you actually think.
Saud Juman:
Because there were so many times in that process that the other side, the other side meaning people wanting to buy the company, told me stuff. That my own people told me stuff that would make me feel like, “Okay, well, this is going in a direction that I don’t want it to go in.” For example, the original offers were along the lines of, “There’s nothing we can do, Saud. This is it. This is the market.”
Saud Juman:
I sat looking at that list and I saw two of the higher offers, I vaguely remember them approaching me two years prior. Then I started digging in. I realized that they came to me to buy my company two years before. I said no because I was willing myself to keep on building it. They went and they bought my competitor, which is smaller than us. I went back and asked my investment banker, I’m like, “Find out what happened in that transaction.” Like, “Why did so and so win.”
Saud Juman:
What I ended up doing is, I said, “If this was a house, let’s put these guys against each other and drive it up.” That’s what we ended up doing. We pitted them against each other. We asked them to resubmit. That actually ended up driving it up and getting me to where I wanted to go. Then [crosstalk 00:56:30].
John Warrillow:
Sorry, Saud. How many offers did you originally get? How many on that original spreadsheet, when you were on vacation?
Saud Juman:
Thirty-seven.
John Warrillow:
You had to 37 offers?
Saud Juman:
Yeah.
John Warrillow:
Really? That’s incredible. That’s incredible. You asked them to resubmit and what was the next stage? What was your reaction to the next set of offers?
Saud Juman:
There’s a bit of negotiation at that time. Them resubmitting and me saying, “I don’t know, man, I’m talking to somebody else. You have a bit of a history with them. I can’t disclose who.” I’m saying the same thing to the other people. Then, one side was mainly cash and the other side was like half earn-out, half cash. That’s when I pulled out this piece of paper to myself and I wrote these three things on this piece of paper, and I stuck it in my wallet.
Saud Juman:
Those three things, they were my deal makers or deal breakers. If I wasn’t getting one of those three things, I don’t care what anybody says, I’m walking away from the deal. That piece of paper was the most valuable tool than anyone or anything else. That paper said all cash. I didn’t want to hold back. I don’t want anything in escrow. I don’t want any of that. The second thing is fast transition. I was willing to give six months that I wanted to be out. The third thing was Brazilians. Brazilians meant that most of my engineering team ended up being from Brazil. They came to Toronto, not casually, like these people emigrated here. They had their permanent residency. They were on their path to becoming Canadian citizens. They brought their spouses, one guy brought his dog. There was nothing in Brazil to go back to, right?
Saud Juman:
I got the sense from most of the people that I was talking to that they were going to cut the engineering team. Because to take over that engineering team, you have to take over the sponsorship responsibility and finish the process. That was a deal. Because I didn’t want those guys getting deported, right? That was my last third thing on that list. When I was pitting them against each other, I was like, “It’s got to be all cash.” They’re like, “Oh, well, Saud, that’s not how it’s done. Typically, it’s like this. It’s like that.” I said, “I guess we have nothing to talk about here.”
Saud Juman:
One of them ended up agreeing, in principle, to most of the stuff. Then, we signed exclusive LOI, which meant that we stopped talking to everybody else other than them and then the process…
John Warrillow:
Sorry, Saud. How many are you down to at this point, where you got your list of three criteria. There’s a little bit of back and forth over cash versus earn-out because you had 37 offers, how many are you down to at this point?
Saud Juman:
Just the two.
John Warrillow:
Two final offers.
Saud Juman:
Yeah.
John Warrillow:
What happened to the other 35?
Saud Juman:
They were so low that it wasn’t even worth it.
John Warrillow:
You say so low, but you say four times revenue, Saud. It’s an enormous amount of money. Why do you say it’s so low? I banker said four to six, so they’re not offering you 50% of revenue.
Saud Juman:
Yeah, you know what? This wasn’t my idea but I had this figure in my head and I forgot how I came up with it. Money is really hard for me to think in terms of money because for years before the exit, people would always ask me what my price is. It’s like, what’s your price? What’s your price? What’s your price? What’s your number is what they would ask. Then, one of my good friends who was an ex Wall Street investment banker guy, he said, “What if your number wasn’t dollars, what if it was a date?”
Saud Juman:
This was about three years before the exit. In 2015, ’16, around there, I picked the date of August 1, 2018. In fact, I wrote a little statement out, I put it on my bathroom mirror. I will sell the company by August 1, 2018 for X amount of money by doing X, Y, Z. I had that there. I kept on seeing it every morning, every night, every morning, every night. The date that the company was sold was July 5th 2018. Almost right around that time.
Saud Juman:
Yeah. To go back to what you’re asking, it was down to the two, we went exclusive with the one. During that exclusive time, there was still some more haggling around the whole back piece, the all cash piece. Here’s where like, where there’s a will, there’s a way. I was so hung up over, no, I’m not going to hold anything back. Because I’ve heard so many stories of people, finally, when the escrow is ready to be released, there are so many claims against it and they can’t get the money back. It becomes contested.
Saud Juman:
We found a way around it. We found an insurance company that insured the whole back. It was called reps and warranties insurance. What I agreed with the acquirer is, hey, we’ll split the premium. The premium was each side had to pay $100,000, right, so $200,000. In my mind, for me to pay 100K to get millions and millions of dollars to be released to myself and all the shareholders ahead of time was very much worth it.
John Warrillow:
Who were the shareholders at this point? You had your partner, the chief medical officer and head of product, who else has got shares at this point?
Saud Juman:
It was him and I then you get the VP of sales that used to be his VP of sales that he brought in as well. I needed that guy for optics, really, we can get into that if you want. Then, there were two really, really talented engineers at the rebuilt out of Mountain View California, that I’d given some equity to as well. They were the brains behind how to bring that prototype to life. Then, after that I put a little pool aside for employees to incent key employees to actually be part of the actual journey.
John Warrillow:
Are you talking to your other shareholders, the head of product, the engineers during this back and forth over the negotiation? Are you saying, “Yeah, we got offers of four times but I’m going to push back and shoot for six.” Are you bringing them in to these conversations?
Saud Juman:
Only myself, the head of product and the VP of sales.
John Warrillow:
What was their reaction?
Saud Juman:
Their overall reaction was they didn’t want to sell. Let’s just keep running this for another five years. For them, they weren’t in it from my mom’s basement for, at this point, 17 years, they came in the journey earlier. Also, for context, they also went through a massive exit before as well so they could afford to say, “You know what, let’s just wait another five years, see where this thing goes.”
John Warrillow:
Got it. Got it. This was like a lifetime of money that you wanted to monetize, it sounds like.
Saud Juman:
Yeah. We’re in the middle of a pandemic right now. Imagine if I didn’t, right, and we had to weather through this and get out to the other side and rebuild from there. I’m very thankful that the exit actually happened.
John Warrillow:
Did it become acrimonious with your head of product? You wanted to sell and he didn’t? How did you guys sort through that?
Saud Juman:
No, I mean, at the end of the day, they always said, and credit to them, “Hey, here’s our opinion. What we said from day one, this is your call, this company is your call. Whatever you feel the final decision should be, we’ll support that. If you want to know our opinion for data here’s what we think.”
John Warrillow:
That’s helpful. I should have asked it earlier, but the numbers you’re talking about, four to six times and getting 7.2, people listening to this are going to just think, “Oh my gosh, that’s outstanding, unbelievable numbers.” Obviously, the SaaS market is very hot, can you share your churn rate or your growth rate? Are you able to share either of those two?
Saud Juman:
Yeah, absolutely. Churn in healthcare, the beauty about healthcare is that you have to be really screwing up to lose customers. Our churn was a fraction of a percent, we rarely ever lost customers. To be honest with you, over the 17 and a half years, we may have lost, in total, maybe 15 customers. A chunk of those were around 2008, where there’s the economic downturn. Believe it or not, me as a Canadian, it was heartbreaking for me to learn that in places like upstate New York, you had hospitals where the board would invest their funds into the stock market. When things crashed, the hospital shut down.
Saud Juman:
I thought, how can a hospital shut down, because that wouldn’t happen here in Canada. Some of those reasons came in. Others didn’t want to move to the cloud and we lost them in that way and that’s how it went.
John Warrillow:
Got it. Then growth rate?
Saud Juman:
We were aiming, and this was the Silicon Valley influence of the people that came in, we’re aiming for one to 250% growth year over year.
John Warrillow:
Wow.
Saud Juman:
They taught me a lot about rolling pipeline. It’s surprising to me, many entrepreneurs, when I say, “Open your CRM, let’s see your rolling pipeline.” They’re like, “What’s a rolling pipeline?” Rolling pipeline is this idea that the pipeline has to be kept at a rolling boil if it was water. As you lose or win deals, as it drops out of the funnel, you have to have enough of a machine and processes in place to be replenishing the pipeline to keep it at a certain amount, because if you’re doing the right things, if you keep it at a certain amount, a predictable amount of revenue is going to drop at the bottom.
John Warrillow:
Got it. Got it. Hence, the rolling pipeline definition. Saud, I think it’s an incredible story. I’m so happy for you to be out and cleared given where we’re at these days. What are you up to now? Where can people reach you? Do you want to send people to a website? What are you up to?
Saud Juman:
Yeah, yeah, I mean, to answer your questions in that order. I mean, the first thing I did after I sold the company was I took a year off. I took a year off to sleep, to rest, hang out with my wife, my four kids, in that way. I always thought I had a really balanced life but I realized after I left that I wasn’t always present when I was around them. Even though I’d physically be around the family a lot, I wasn’t always dialed in and present. That was really, really enjoyable.
Saud Juman:
Then, I probably took six months shaking off the rust. Then, for the past year, I’ve been focusing on probably three things. One is figuring out what the next tech venture would look like that I would want to start because I don’t want to be in the sidelines. I’ve invested and advised and mentored a bunch of different tech companies. I wanted to start another one myself. That has now started with a few partners so that’s exciting. That’s got a lot of my focus currently.
Saud Juman:
The other area that I’m focused on is writing. I’ve committed to writing a series of books. One of them I’m co-authoring a book currently. It’s essentially a parenting book for entrepreneurs, around raising entrepreneurial kids. Then, the last little bit of my time in terms of my work time, I do a lot to help entrepreneurs, mentor them, coach them, et cetera. Most of them are tech based entrepreneurs that are trying to replicate some of the things that I did in my journey.
Saud Juman:
In terms of reaching me, my website is probably the best bet, which is www.saudjuman.io. My only social media channel that I’m semi active on, I’m kind of an ancient person when it comes to actually using tech, even though I build it is LinkedIn. You can find me there @SaudJuman.
John Warrillow:
Awesome. We’ll use the spelling of your name in the show notes so folks can find you. Saud, it was great to meet you. Congratulations again. It’s awesome.
Saud Juman:
Thanks, John. Pleasure being here. Thanks for having me.