I was chatting to Steve Sharp , CEO and founder of Nuvo, on the pod this week.
An accountancy firm in Derby, 400 people, built by buying up the practices whose partners wanted to retire.
He left school at 16, qualified at 20, the youngest in the country that year, and set the firm up on his own at 21.
Bosch.
I’d been looking forward to this conversation.
45 practices bought in the 17 years since, and he’s the one having the founder-to-founder conversation every single time.
When someone tells me they’re doing a buy and build, I automatically think no. No you’re not. You’re doing a buy. There’s no building going on.
So that’s what I went in wanting to know. Whether any of the growth was actually his.
Then he told me the organic growth was double digits. That’s what I fucking call building.
And not one redundancy in 22 years. He’s never sold one on or shut one down either. 45 for 45. Show me a private equity firm that can say that.
The whole firm works four days a week on full pay. Four years now, and fewer than 3% of them leave. I mentioned it to my team. There’s now a WhatsApp group.
It took him 20 years to get to £5m. Then 3 years to get from £5m to £35m. 149% in the last year alone. Just gold dust. Magic. Now, how? In accountancy. Where nothing grows 149%.
Not private equity. That came after the growth, not before it.
Not the acquisitions. He’d been doing those for a decade already. For 17 years this firm was flat out.
Like a badger on a bypass, as my Irish wife would say. Every single person in it, busy. And a decision no founder was going to make.
Here’s how Steve turned other people’s retirements into a £35m firm.
The decision? No, it isn’t hiring a CEO. It isn’t hiring a COO either. Work out what you’d have to give up, then see if you got it right.
Then listen to the last thing he says about those 17 years. Most founders can’t name the decade they got in their own way. He can name the year.
In partnership with CEOfriend.
I’ve sat with a founder who had £2m in the bank and 3 weeks until a cash flow problem they couldn’t see.
Revenue growing, pipeline strong, but invoice timing and payroll had quietly lined up against them and nobody had put it on a page.
Your accountant tells you what happened. CEOfriend’s CFO advisor tells you what’s about to. Upload your P&L and your forecast, and it shows you where the money gets thin before it does.
Not a post-mortem. A warning light.