A few years ago I bought a new website from a stranger. My own IT company could have built it. They just never told me they did.

That small story is the whole problem in miniature. Your customers can only buy the thing they know exists, and the adjacent work you'd love to win keeps slipping off to someone else. In this solo episode I make an argument most founders won't enjoy: the relationship you're proudest of is exactly why you've got no plan for it. I get into the research, the A/B/C system I use to sort accounts, and the three questions that turn a warm relationship into real revenue growth.

We get into:

The two forces that stop founders selling more to their best customersWhat 38 years of sales research says about being the likeable oneThe A/B/C system for sorting accounts before you planThe three questions every account plan actually needsWhy your customer base is the real moat before an exit

Most founders are sitting on half their next year of growth and don't know it. Here's how to find it.

⁠Subscribe to the 2 Commas Journal⁠

⁠Order the 2 Commas book⁠

⁠Follow Josh on LinkedIn⁠

$20 and a fax machine. That's what Steve Dunstan started Huffer with.

Twenty-six years later, he'd built one of New Zealand's most recognised streetwear brands, scaled it to around 200 people, survived the GFC, wrestled with a US expansion that didn't go to plan, and lost a co-founder along the way. In this one, Steve is straight about the part founders rarely admit: what happens to your identity when you and the brand become the same thing, what it takes to sell a business you built from the ground up, and how you rebuild yourself once it's gone.

We get into:

• The $20 start and why the constraint helped
• $35k to over $1m in four years, no outside money
• Surviving the GFC as a fashion brand
• Why belonging became the thing that drove performance
• The exit after 26 years, and what came next

Would you know how to stop being the business, the day you finally sell it?

Subscribe to the 2 Commas Journal

Order the 2 Commas book

Follow Josh on LinkedIn

Connect with Steve Dunstan

In 1937 a horse kept scratching its backside on a farmer's brand new car. That horse accidentally started a company now closing in on a billion dollars a year.

The farmer was Bill Gallagher. He wired the magneto off a motorcycle to his car, shocked the horse, and realised he had a business. His first electric fence was illegal, wired straight into the mains until an inspector made him rip it out, which pushed him to invent the world's first battery powered energiser. This is a solo episode on the Gallagher Group, from a Waikato shed to Buckingham Palace, British Gas, and four of the Five Eyes intelligence sites. It is one of the great New Zealand business stories and a genuine masterclass in diversification, succession, and turning what you already know into what you sell next.

I get into:

• How the 1984 Rogernomics reforms wiped out Gallagher's farmer customer base overnight
• The world-first pivot into perimeter security that saved the company
• Why the best diversifications sit where your capability meets a rising global tailwind
• Why they put 10% of revenue into R&D every year, good times or bad
• Why they handed the CEO role to a 24-year employee, not the next Gallagher
• Sometimes the next billion dollar business is just your old invention pointed at a new problem.

Subscribe to the 2 Commas Journal

Order the 2 Commas book

Follow Josh on LinkedIn