I had Matthew Duhig on the pod this week.
For those of you who don’t know Matt, he’s the CEO and co-founder of FX Digital, a connected TV and streaming agency with offices in London and Barcelona. He and his co-founder Tom built it from nothing.
A £300 website for his sister’s bridal shop at university. One referral became two. Two became a team. A team became 75 people and £10m in revenue.
£1.5m to £10m. Not in a decade. In 6 years.
We talked about the full journey. The early days, the scaling, the near-death experience that nearly ended the whole thing, and what he now believes about building a business that most founders get completely wrong.
The number that stuck with me wasn’t the revenue.
It was this: at one point, one client represented 60% of their income. And then that client decided to in-house the work.
Matt and Tom looked at each other and said: this could be it.
They didn’t make redundancies. They didn’t panic-hire. They made a decision I’ve seen very few founders have the nerve to make at that moment.
It worked. But it was close.
When I asked Matt what he now believes that most people think is wrong, he had four answers.
I’m not going to give them away here, that’s what the episode is for.
I will tell you this much.
One of them is about vision. Where it actually comes from. How you get it. And it is not what any business book will tell you.
One of them is about promises. The kind founders make their teams with the best intentions. And why those are sometimes the most damaging ones.
One of them is about risk. And why the badge of “risk-taker” that most entrepreneurs wear with pride might be the thing holding them back.
And one of them is about sacrifice. The real kind. The kind that doesn’t make it onto the highlight reel of Linkedin and Instagram.
Matt is a founder who has been through it — the near-death experience, the scaling, the moment he had to stop being the one doing everything and start being the one running the business.
That transition is the hardest thing most people in his position ever do. And most of them do it too late.
Matt did it at the right time.
If one of his four beliefs lands harder than the others, reply and tell me which one. Those are always the best conversations.
