After many cold calls and speculative emails, several face-to-face meetings and some hastily made up pricing, the likes of PwC, Accenture and IBM became our first paying clients and we were up and running! We reached the national final of a startup competition run by HSBC called "Unipreneurs" in 2008, pitching live to Peter Jones of "Dragons' Den" fame and whilst we didn't win the overall prize, our confidence in the business continued to grow. 

I'll always look back incredibly fondly on these early years. "Working" with two of your best friends never felt like work despite the long hours; we had a huge amount of fun along the way and developed a work ethic and early culture that set us up for a successful future. 

2010-2013: Growing up

By 2010, we were firmly on the map in the UK early careers recruitment marketing space and decided to raise some investment funds from a group of angels led by Gareth Cadwallader and closed a round of £130k. With six figures in the company bank account, a growing number of paying clients and website traffic going one way, we had the confidence to start scaling the business.

We moved out of our bedrooms and into a tiny office in London and took on our first few employees, including the incredible Lizzie Brock who is still at RMP as Marketing Director.

Under the new 'RMP Enterprise' banner, we launched the "National Placement & Internship Awards", a printed "Top Undergraduate Employers" guide and began exploring the running of physical promotional activities at universities on behalf of our clients (what would go on to become On-Campus Promotions).

2011-2013: The seed of a new idea

With an increasing budget for marketing activities, we hit the road to promote RMP at universities around the UK, signing up 10,000s of undergraduate students via the good old fashioned paper form. After literally hundreds of hours spent attempting to manually transcribe often illegible handwriting, losing 1,000s of sign ups along the way, we began to explore more innovative solutions to this challenge.

iPads were new to the market and it was the early days of modern mobile applications. We turned to our trusted web designer and developer Andy Higgs, who was responsible for all of the early web development in RMP, and built a basic app to capture student details via a simple form interface on an iPad or iPod Touch (remember them?), and that crucially could operate in offline mode and sync the data later. 

Like many great ideas, we solved our own problem first. The app then quickly captured the attention of the big graduate recruiters who were also out on-campus dealing with paper forms, and the idea for Akkroo was borne...

2014-2021: RMP established early-careers market leaders

As I increasingly shifted my focus towards developing Akkroo, I stepped out of the day-to-day operations at RMP. The business continued to go from strength-to-strength under the leadership of Ali, Ollie and the management team. 

RMP has over the years developed a suite of offerings in the early-careers space, including the launch of RMP Connect (built on top of Akkroo) and RateMyApprenticeship, and is now firmly established as one of the major players in the market. Employing over 60 and based at RMP HQ in Brixton, the business has 100s of customers and has helped millions of students take the first steps in their career. Visit RMPEnterprise.co.uk to find out more. 

2022: Management Buyout

In 2022, RMP received a substantial acquisition offer which was ultimately rejected, however this did lead to the current Leadership team completing a successful Management Buyout (MBO) in December 2022. Our early investors were bought out (with, I'm pleased to say, a considerable upside on their original £130k SEIS investment in 2010!) and I also sold a significant percentage of my shares as part of the new structure. 

2023-onwards: Advisory capacity

Following the MBO, I have returned to the business in an active advisory capacity, supporting the new Board and Senior Leadership Team on strategy and direction, a role I enjoy and am excited to see where the business goes in the next few years. 

We experimented and had success selling Akkroo into various markets; our early clients included huge brands such as Adidas, Mercedes-Benz and PayPal. Use-cases for the app varied dramatically; from capturing promotional data at live sports events to collecting in-store customer feedback and even a plumbing firm using the app for their engineers out and about on jobs! Our early pricing was inexpensive, often one-off or for short-term contracts. 

We learnt a huge amount during the first 2-3 years however our revenue was very spiky, inconsistent and the product was spread thinly across the different use-cases.  

2016-2018: Fundraising and B2B focus

Over the course of 2015, we started to generate leads from B2B organisations who were regularly exhibiting at trade shows and other live events. They were looking for a better way of capturing and processing event leads compared to the traditional lead retrieval scanners they had to rent from organisers or collecting a stack of business cards.

We were outsiders to the events industry and it would be fair to say only knew the very basics of B2B Marketing Technology at the time. However, the more we learnt about this particular use-case, we realised two things: 

1. B2B organisations spend incredible amounts of money to sponsor and exhibit at trade shows. The primary reason for this is to generate leads for new business

2. The traditional ways of capturing these leads were still stuck in the dark ages. Paper forms, business cards and renting 1990s hardware to scan a barcode on a badge and then waiting for the organiser to email a spreadsheet of 'leads' a few days later.

In early 2016, we took the decision to go all-in on trying to solve this B2B 'event lead capture' problem, and took the brave decision to turn off our B2C clients, update all of our positioning and marketing materials, and I'm pleased to say it was the best decision we made!

Our solution was aimed at B2B, midmarket and enterprise organisations who exhibited regularly at events. We provided them with a customisable lead capture solution that could scan event badges, business cards and capture key qualifying information from any conversation that took place on the show-floor, off or online, using their own devices. Leads were then synced back into the customers' Marketing or CRM systems enabling fast, appropriate follow up. We dramatically improved our customers' event lead processes and crucially, their overall event ROI. 

The focus on a single, albeit complex, use-case galvanised the team. Our product roadmap became clearer, our messaging became more concise, our target audience narrower, our sales pitch more repeatable and we were able to shift to an annual SaaS subscription pricing model. 

Andy and I had positive initial conversations with several of the well known VC funds in London, however were particularly taken with the 'just-in-time' fundraising approach of Conviction Investment Partners (CIP). Their GP, Andrew Jenkins, was already one of our early angel investors and their model and team felt like a great fit. 

We closed a round of £1.75M in the summer of 2018, in what was going to be part 1 of 2 Series A rounds with CIP, with a view that we'd add an additional but less dilutive ~£2m in 2019 to fuel the next stage of growth. 

However, a message received on LinkedIn on the 24th July 2018 changed that plan and much more...

2018-2019: Acquisition by Integrate

A short message in my rarely-checked LinkedIn inbox from Jeremy Bloom, CEO of a company called Integrate, expressing interest in what we were building at Akkroo and if I'd be open to a chat. 

After reading about Jeremy's incredible sporting career prior to the success of building the business, as well as the growth of Integrate, I was excited to learn more. Integrate had recently closed a large Series E funding round and were exploring how to fill a gap in their product suite around events, as well as opportunities to expand into the EMEA region. 

As we entered Q4 2019, things finally felt like they were starting to click into place for most. The US sellers were largely enabled and the sales pipeline was building nicely, we'd made a decision to sunset the Akkroo brand and sit fully within the Integrate suite and I went into 2020 feeling incredibly positive about the year ahead. 

January and February 2020 did not disappoint. We closed some huge new business deals and were on track to add $1M+ in new-ARR in Q1 alone. I flew out to the US and spent time visiting new and existing customers along with the Integrate team, as well as presenting on stage to a packed hall at the B2BMX event in Arizona. 

At that event, there were a few rumblings about this virus outbreak happening in Asia...

Undeterred, after a couple of weeks back in the UK, Andy and I flew back out to the US for more meetings and to attend the 2020 SaaStr Annual event in San Jose. We landed and switched on our phones to find the news that SaaStr had taken the difficult but correct decision to cancel the event due to Covid. This just happened to be the first US trip on which Lucy and my kids had joined me too! One of the more surreal weeks of our lives as San Jose, like most cities around the globe, shut down and became a ghost-town; after a bit of a scramble, we managed to catch one of the last flights out of San Fransisco to London.

Part 2: Covid

As the pandemic took hold and it became clear this was not going to pass quickly, we tried to adapt however it was difficult to escape the fact that our solution was exclusively for use at live, in-person events and it was safe to say no-one had any idea when they were coming back. Like many B2B tech firms at the time, the digital parts of the overall Integrate offering actually thrived and Jeremy and the SLT did a great job leading the team remotely with weekly town-halls and an array of inspiring guest speakers. Closer to home however, it was painful to see much of the momentum we'd built grind to a halt. We sadly had to furlough and then let go a group of the UK team as well as see others decide to pursue opportunities elsewhere. 

In 2021, with little sign of in-person events returning any time soon, my role evolved into a broader remit as General Manager, EMEA, and I was fortunate to work closely with Integrate's then CRO, Jim Soss, and VP, EMEA Sales, Nigel Arthur, both of whom I learnt a huge amount from and enjoyed working with. Despite the challenges on the events front, the overall Integrate business continued to see impressive growth in the US and here in EMEA. 

As the year progressed, my mind started to turn towards life after Integrate (Andy and I were both on a 3-year 'earn-out' as part of the acquisition) and as news emerged that Audax Private Equity were acquiring a majority stake in Integrate at the end of 2021, the time felt right for me to close the Akkroo and Integrate chapter.

A whirlwind 3 years of my life; I'll forever be grateful to Jeremy and Integrate for the acquisition and who knows what might have been had Covid not hit. I continue to follow Integrate's progress and am excited to see what was Akkroo continue to evolve as part of Integrate's Demand Acceleration Platform.