Bootstrapping Using Services to $35M from Ireland, Then Raising $70M: Teamwork CEO Peter Coppinger (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How long did just the two of your run the agency?

Peter Coppinger: We grew the agency to about 40 people over the next few years. We had never ran a proper business and we had no idea what we were doing. How do you do pitches? How do you do pricing? How do you manage the margins on different projects you’re doing. How do you stop being the busy fool? When should you hire people?

We made all the classic mistakes in the early days. If we had done a little bit of research, maybe we could have avoided them. I would say that, back then, you didn’t have the knowledge of the world at your fingertips. There wasn’t a lot of people to ask for advice. Today, we are all-in on helping agencies scale and avoid the mistakes we made.

It took us four or five years of making mistakes before we wizened up. We started doing staged payments. We started hiring more. We stared controlling our margins. We started offering extras on our projects. We became quite a successful well-run agency, which is where the idea for Teamwork came from. Our agency was thriving, but we were struggling to manage the sheer amount of work.

Sramana Mitra: When you say that you made the mistakes that led you to the idea for Teamwork, were the mistakes you were facing primarily around managing these projects, staffing these projects, tracking, and figuring out how to run these projects?

Peter Coppinger: Yes, it was all about the management. We were great at technology and building projects. When you’re juggling client communication, juggling support, and other things, it’s just a lot. There’re also simple mistakes that you can make along the way. We have a blog post on Teamwork.com that’s called 11 Mistakes We Made Running Our Agency in the Early Days and How We Fixed Them. It’s one of the most popular blog posts we ever produced.

A lot of this stuff is basic. We didn’t charge enough. We doubled our prices one year and people said, “We were wondering when you were going to wise up.” What’s interesting is, we got to a really good place. Then we found that we were victims of our own success. The next problem is, how do you scale? How do you do this as you hire more people? How do you replicate things? We tried different software platforms to manage the workload.

What we found was, that nothing was built for agency and client work. That’s where the idea spun from. We were building pretty sophisticated applications for our clients. We felt building a straightforward platform to run an agency was something that we could do easily.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Bootstrapping Using Services to $35M from Ireland, Then Raising $70M: Teamwork CEO Peter Coppinger
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