Andrew Butt is the Co-founder & CEO of Enable, a modern, cloud-based B2B software solution for rebate management. Distributors, wholesalers, and manufacturers across over 50 industries now have an easy, seamless solution to execute and track their full range of trading programs. The company has more merchants and suppliers in the UK and USA than any other comparable software solution and is backed by $16M in funding from notable Silicon Valley investors, Menlo Ventures and Sierra Ventures.
Launched in 2017, Andrew and his co-founder, met twenty years ago while learning to fly helicopters. In March 2000, they formed their first business together, DCS E-Commerce, a profitable software engineering company, employing a team of 100. The company was ranked in the Sunday Times as the 50th fastest-growing private technology company in Britain.
Four years later, they co-founded Information Matrix Ltd, a B2B SaaS business, which was acquired by London-based private equity firm Sovereign Capital.
What is Enable all about?
Enable is the collaboration platform for maximizing the performance of your B2B deals while improving financial transparency and operational efficiency. Companies use Enable to create, execute and track their full range of trading programs, helping them to work seamlessly with their trading partners so they can better serve customers while at the same time accelerating profitable growth.
Tell us a little bit about your background and how you started your company?
My two passions in life were always flying and computing and I had dreams of being an airline pilot. I was lucky to stumble into a flying school at the age of 12 where I was inspired by entrepreneurs learning to fly. They all had IT challenges, including my co-founder, Denys Shortt OBE. Denys was already an established entrepreneur building the DCS Group, the largest distribution company for health, beauty, and household products in the UK.
After launching two successful software companies, Denys and I formed Enable together and built modern cloud-based software to help every B2B distributor in almost any sector to replicate DCS’ success – to create, track and execute joint business plans with their suppliers and maximize profitability in the process. This allows suppliers and distributors to work together seamlessly to better serve customers while enhancing profitable growth.
What was the biggest problem you encountered with your business and how did you overcome it?
The biggest challenge was winning our first few customers while bootstrapping. Customers want to see successful case studies before they sign up, and when you have no customers, that is tricky. Also, while bootstrapping, we had to charge for all of our time in order to make payroll. And that made the set up costs quite high. We overcame this by funding a lot of our product development costs through selling professional services and custom software development services, and re-investing all the profit in our early product development.
What were the top mistakes you made starting your business and what did you learn from it?
As a young and naive startup founder, I can remember sitting at the table of a $30B company, explaining why they should use our solution rather than an established competitor. They were giving me a grilling and asked “what do you think about the risk of failure if we select you” and my response was along the lines of “there is no risk — this project will be a guaranteed success.”
I realized almost immediately how naive my response was. Of course, there is always a risk of failure and my response reduced my credibility even further. In the end, we won the contract, so it wasn’t a fatal mistake.
What is one thing that you do daily to grow as an entrepreneur?
Meet new people. I aim to meet new people every day. Investors, prospects, customers, founders, and CEOs, thought leaders. The most success is often found in the least likely connection. It’s serendipity. Important to meet lots of new people constantly.
What are three books or courses you recommend for new entrepreneurs?
- “Selling The Cloud” by Paul Melchiorre. A modern must-read on how to build a highly successful SaaS company. Paul has been on the journey building many multi-billion dollar companies over the past twenty years, yet he has more humility than you can imagine. His advice is pragmatic, actionable, and I promise, generates big results.
- Salesprocess.io is a course that helps SaaS companies and online service businesses scale their sales.
- “Behind the Cloud” by Marc Benioff is an inspirational SaaS book about the strategies salesforce.com used to flourish in a competitive market of SaaS.
What is the one thing you wish you knew before starting your business?
I wish I knew about Silicon Valley and the venture capital ecosystem. We spent many years running a profitable services business to incubate our SaaS company, because I was not sufficiently educated on how to access capital. This meant we spread ourselves very thinly providing a broad range of services to many different types of customers and it added several years to our journey to launch a best-in-class SaaS product. If I had been more aware I would have raised capital sooner and grown faster.
What has been your most effective marketing strategy to grow your business?
For us, referral marketing has been very effective. Having established strong relationships with our customers, through our sales and customer success team we have been able to leverage this to our advantage and build trust. Not only is new business from a referral less costly to acquire and easier to close, but it also ensures our newest customers are happier, more satisfied with our product, and less likely to churn.
If you only had 1000 dollars to start a new startup, knowing everything you know now, how would you spend it?
I would teach myself to code using the latest generation tech platform and identify a very focused niche where there is a specific problem. I would then meet as many people as I possibly could to understand the problem, prototype a solution, and get as many people to trial the solution and provide feedback as I could. I would spend the money on a premium LinkedIn account and some development tools. I would iterate on the product until I had 10 ‘customers’ gaining value, and being willing to pay. Then I would go and raise a seed round.
What’s your best piece of advice for aspiring and new entrepreneurs?
Focus on solving a specific problem for a specific group of people. You cannot be too differentiated. 100x better to be a narrow and deep product for a single type of buyer. Then you can expand out into adjacent spaces as you gain traction and move to scale.
What is your favorite quote?
Success is going from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.
Winston Churchill
Besides the obvious social media tools available, what are the top 3 most useful tools or resources you’re currently using to grow your company?
We have recently implemented a marketing automation tool, Marketo so we can set up lead nurturing and marketing campaigns that are automatically triggered based on certain criteria, meaning people only receive the most relevant content about our product.
Google ads have also been instrumental in bringing more traffic to our website.
We also run monthly webinars so we can demonstrate the software and discuss the world of rebates. These have brought in many leads for our sales team.
How is running a tech company different than what you thought it would be?
People believe that running a company you are the ‘boss’ and can command and control everything. Not true. Running a tech company, you’re constantly selling to every stakeholder: existing team, new candidates you’re interviewing, customers, prospects, investors, and the board. And the board is your boss! So it’s no easy ride. But when you win it’s also hugely satisfying – beyond what you could imagine.
How can readers get in touch with you?
The best way to keep in touch with me is via LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/awbutt.
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