Our guest is James Leatham, founder of Vendor Panel, who spent 16 years building the company

from scratch before successfully exiting to Acel KKR.

Now, we can't disclose what the value of the transaction was,

but if you look at the types of businesses ASL KKR buy,

this was a real exit.

In this conversation, James shares the real founder journey

from bootstrapping for years,

running close to the wire and pivoting through five business models

to eventually build a SaaS platform

used by over 100,000 organizations with deep network effects in government procurement.

In this episode, we dive into how he approached his exit and why he spent years quietly

building relationships with potential acquirers before selling.

We also talk about the hard lessons learned from expanding into the US, integrating acquisitions, hiring the right people and building a culture that actually scales.

Conversation also talks about something that founders rarely talk about that get to exit, what life feels like after the exit when the chaos stops.

So those are my notes. What do you think?

There's a lot of golden nuggets in this one.

I think we touched on acquisitions, but exit, and there's some, there's some things in there for founders that we don't often talk about. Having edited it, it's a playbook. If you follow

these things, you will achieve success. And the other little reflection, whilst it isn't

discussed in the episode, if there was ever

an embodiment of PAEI in an individual, producing, administrating, entrepreneurial, integrating,

it's James. And it just demonstrates when you have a threshold of each of those ingredients,

you can build something amazing. I think, yeah, it's a great reminder that businesses don't grow on a straight line. And for any founders that are listening that are playing in the enterprise or selling to government, it's just a good reminder that it's never an overnight success and it was really the 10 years in the making. And for James, it wasn't until eight or nine years in the journey until he did the series a and up until that point he was

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