How we went from idea to IPO in 12 months

Earlier this year, I released a book called Progressive Partnerships – The Future of Business. The central tenant of the book was that we are moving away from competition and into a period of collaboration.

I showed how, whatever stage your business is at, even if it is nothing more than a vague idea, you can use partnerships to achieve pretty much anything. I gave specific, step-by-step guides to how early stage businesses can easily generate several thousand dollars a month in extra profit purely through partnerships within their sector.

I also talked about how the same concepts could be applied at a much bigger level to create a ‘collaborative IPO’.

Unfortunately, the book had to go to print before I got the chance to ring the bell on our own IPO, so the below is a quick recap for how you use partnerships to go from idea to IPO in 12 months.

The journey to our IPO

On June 8, our small band of entrepreneurs rang the bell at NASDAQ OMX in Europe so hard that the rope fell off. Nearly a year’s worth of anticipation, frustration and excitement was extracted on a hundred year old brass bell in Stockholm.

Eleven months earlier, in July of 2015, my business partner Jeremy Harbour and I sat around a table drinking tea in the lobby of The Fullerton Bay hotel, Singapore. Opposite us was a small business owner and his advisor. In front of them was a two page document that laid out, in the simplest possible terms, that they were willing to swap 100 percent of the shares in their company for several million euros worth of public stock in a company that didn’t yet exist.

The idea

On paper, Jeremy’s idea, which we would later name ‘Agglomeration‘, made so much sense. Most small businesses are too small to benefit from all the advantages you get from being on the public market, so let’s create a collaborative IPO where 20+ small businesses come together to create one big company that lists.

By being part of that group, those companies would instantly double, or more, their valuation. They would be able to bid for much bigger projects by pointing to a $100m balance sheet instead of a $5m balance sheet. And they would have the freedom to sell little bits of stock on the exchange whenever they wanted.

Unlike a traditional roll up or M&A strategy, we would leave the founders in place and with full control of their business. Their brands, their budgets, their hiring/ firing decisions. We were building a platform to allow them to scale, but we were giving control to them not taking it.

We only needed four companies in the group to get listed, everyone else could join after that. But those first four had to take a complete punt on Jeremy and I being able to do what we said we were going to do. And even we didn’t know we could do that for sure.

The first deal

Opposite us, his pen hovered near the agreement, but he still had more questions. We answered with as much confidence and nonchalance as we could muster, but the reality was that if we couldn’t get this first agreement signed, we were back to square one. In any partnership, your first deal is critical, it doesn’t need to be the best deal, but it is the one that starts your momentum and gives you the credibility you need for the next deal.