In this episode of the Blue Vignette podcast, I am interviewing Dominic Wells. Now, Dominic is an entrepreneur and he wrote a blog post. That blog post was seen by a friend of mine who shared it with me. And when I read it, my first thought is this is something we in the Adventist ecosystem need to hear because we value autonomy.

We value this decentralized way of doing business, so to speak. We have a decentralized ecosystem and that comes with a lot of benefits. It also comes with a number of trade-offs. What I found very interesting is the fact that Dominic has gone to both extremes in his business.

He has gone to the decentralized approach where each of his business units are operating individually with their own CEOs effectively. when now he has swung back the other way, not in an extreme way, but now he has center in his own description. He has centralized strategy and decentralized execution. And I think this is a lesson that we can learn from as a church. So when I finished reading his article, I reached out to him directly and asked if he would be willing to be on the show.

And he said, yes. And so what you're about to hear is that context. So I hope you enjoy it. And thank you for joining us for this episode.

Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the Blue Vineyard podcast. My name is Luke, and today we have a special guest on the show. We have Dominic Wells.

Welcome to the show, Dominic. Hey, thank you. Yeah, happy to be here. All right.

Dominic, in preparation for this call, I was having a poke around and doing the cyber stalking thing, looking at your LinkedIn profile. And I'll just read the opening paragraph that you got there. It says, CEO and founder of Onfolio Holdings Incorporated. We buy, grow, and operate profitable internet businesses primarily in the content space.

Through our expertise, we can optimize businesses across any vertical. Now, as I read that, the first thing that came to mind, and I'm going to go back and I want to get a little bit of your backstory, but as an initial starting point, when you first started, the idea that you're working with businesses in many verticals, Was that something that was scary to start with considering everyone says, you know, no, just do one thing and do it well, or was that what did you know that that was the right path? It's funny because I think it's more of an evolution over time. And in terms of what's the right path, I think it's more about like what works well for you.

So I definitely know intuitively that, yeah, focusing on one thing makes a lot more sense and you probably get better results. But I think also you have to play to your own strengths or play to your own weaknesses. And my weakness is I'm not really able to just focus on one thing. The business model that worked for me was running multiple businesses at the same time that were primarily content in the beginning.

And as you were reading that, I thought, okay, I need to update my LinkedIn a little bit because we're not really in the content space anymore. When I very first started, I built one website. and I was writing all the content myself and doing the SEO and conversion rate optimization, all the things that you do when you own a website. And then I would think of another idea for another website and another idea for another one and another idea for another one. So I was often starting multiple.

And part of that is I think until you've seen a little bit of success, you always come out with new ideas, maybe because you're impatient or I think just the kind of beginner mind is a bit of a butterfly. So you're thinking about all these different things. And so people would say to me, like, just focus on that website you've got. It's making a grand a month or like whatever.

You could probably get it to 10 grand if you just focused on that. Stop starting new websites. Yeah, that was a good advice, but I also felt like sometimes... I got a little bit of success if I could maybe get one website to 2K a month or three and then sell another one to get that one to two or three.

I didn't know how to go from say three to 10. And so I think it's just about what is your core strength. If I can jump on one thing you said there, the skill set that it takes to get you to two or three thousand a month is different to the skill set that it takes to get you to $10,000 a month. What is the primary difference would you say?

Probably the ability to focus. I think, yeah, I think the kind of analogy people usually use is like going from zero to one or from one to 10 or something. And there's definitely a skill set going from zero to one. I think you need to have a lot of early enthusiasm and a lot of early kind of like massive action doing a lot of different things, being excited.

And then that builds you the kind of inertia to get to like whatever that one is. But then going from that stage to another stage, it almost requires a completely different personality or entrepreneurial style. I think it's more data-driven. It's more disciplined.

Like zero to one, maybe you need to throw a lot of spaghetti and see what sticks. And then one to 10 is like, okay, that spaghetti's stuck. So what do we do now? Maybe we need to create some sauce and brown the mints and stuff.

Some people can do both. Some people learn to do both. And some people just kind of stay in their lane. For me, it was about, even when it became buying businesses, moving from starting businesses to buying businesses, I was good at finding a business, seeing some opportunities to grow it.

Like maybe they hadn't fully optimized something and I knew if I bought the business, I could then optimize it. I didn't really know what to do beyond that. So I would just go out and buy another one and optimize that and get the same kind of... So it was like I was scaling horizontally rather than vertically.

So I'm not even sure if there's an answer, just other than like figure out what you can do and then like do more of that. One thing that you mentioned before, it's hard for you to focus on one thing. You like doing multiple things. I can very much relate to that.

In my entrepreneurship journey, I've had a number of people say to me, Oh, look, you should just stick to this thing. And I have a, you know, fair inability to do that. So some of my questions here are going to be selfish in nature because you're a lot further along this journey than I am. But maybe just to focus on your unique toolbox that that makes up who you are and what your value you bring.

What would you say? I like maybe the two or three main skills or viewpoints that you hold that have allowed you to find success in the channel that you have. I think one actually is probably tenacity. This probably applies to people who focus on one business as well, maybe even more so.

But it can be very easy to get overwhelmed by doing 17 different things at the same time, whether that's within a single business or within multiple different businesses or just in everyday life. And I think it's almost like brute force that allowed me to keep going where maybe other people would have failed or not giving up. And so it's kind of like just being able to cope with it is one element of it. And the other I think is, I think I'm pretty good at delegating and kind of identifying who or what to delegate or who to delegate to.

I don't think I'm necessarily a good manager, like in the kind of day-to-day management sense. But one thing all good managers have is they have that ability to delegate. I'll constantly find myself in an area where I think, okay, I'm doing too much. And too much is obviously subjective, but I might think, okay, I'm doing too much.

I need to either cut something out or I need to bring someone on to... delegate this to and you kind of delegate the responsibility rather than the task. So you're like, this is what I want to achieve. This is how you do it or this is how I've done it so far. Feel free to improve it and then kind of let them get on with it.

I think that's been a big part of it. Like whenever I try and take something on by myself, again, I can get that little bit of initial momentum and then unless I bring someone else in to take over. it doesn't go anywhere. So yeah, I think those two things are probably the key drivers of how I've got to where I am now. Let's focus for a second on the founding of Onfolio.

You mentioned some of the things that you did beforehand, but If we're to look at that, what was the catalyst for getting started? Because I mean, I think I could see some through lines from what you were doing before. But what was it that made you say, yeah, I'm actually going to get into buying businesses? There was a number of different things, I think. helping people get started in affiliate marketing, like starting their own business.

We did done for you website creation and we helped people pick a niche and then gave them the tools that they needed to go beyond that. I had people in my audience who had more money to deploy and they didn't want to start a business from scratch. They wanted to buy an established business. A few things started happening at the same time, actually.

So I had bought a few businesses myself and I realized, oh, this is actually a way faster way to scale. And I'd started learning about investing. And I'd also, I'd been to a conference where I was, at least in my mind, everyone was miles better than I was in terms of success in life. And I think I'd been an entrepreneur for Only five years at the time, but it felt like I've been working.

Those first five years feel like 20. I get it. Yeah. And I think my business did a million in revenue that year.

So I felt like I've been working really hard, spinning my wheels and I've objectively had a lot of success and I've got way further than most people get. But at the same time, I also felt... I was frustrated with my progress. And I went to this conference, which was kind of private invite only conference.

And everybody I met there was kind of two things. One, they were way more successful than I was, which was super inspiring. And two, they were really encouraging and optimistic. And they would be like, what do you do?

And I would tell them what I did. And they just said, wow, that's amazing. That's so cool. I think everyone kind of assumes if I was there, I was a lot more successful.

It kind of made me realize, one, I should be thinking bigger, and two, I probably can be bigger or I can achieve those things I'm thinking about. It helps that a lot of the people at the conference were American, and you know, Americans have that very gung-ho, like, yeah, you can do attitudes, whereas like in the UK, it's a bit more like, why do you want to be an entrepreneur? All of these things kind of happened where I was thinking, okay, how can I be bigger? Or how can I spend the next five, ten years of my life working on something with a much bigger payoff?

I think at the same time, it was around about this time that I read What It Takes, I think it's called by Stephen Schwartzman, who founded Blackstone. He had a quote that basically said, if you want to succeed, I'm paraphrasing, but it was basically if you want to succeed in business, you have to dedicate yourself to business. You can't kind of do it part time. So therefore, if you're going to dedicate yourself to something, you should do something that has a huge payoff.

And it's no harder to do something huge than is to do something small. And I definitely agreed because I felt my business was small when I was working like 60 hours a week or something. So I thought, yeah, that actually rings true. So all these things kind of happened and I was thinking, okay, what do I like?

I like buying businesses. Could I do that at scale? Yeah, maybe I can raise some money and start a fund or something. I had no idea how you did that, but I was thinking, okay, maybe that's possible.

And then I had people in my audience saying, we want to go out and buy businesses. Can you help us? And so all of these things happened maybe within the space of... three to six months. And so I thought, okay, I'm going to start a new business on the side.

Call it Onfolio because I was trying to think, you know, online portfolio. Webfolio.com was already taken. So funny story actually, Onfolio.co was available and.com wasn't. And I Googled it to check like nobody else had the.com and it was, it was not available.

So I was like, okay, great. I'm not like, it was like a dead website. So I thought, okay, I'm not going to. muscling on someone's copyright or trademark. But it turns out Microsoft actually owned Onfolio.com and they had bought a kind of asset management asset, as in web assets, like JPEGs and stuff.

They bought this company called Onfolio, I think 15 years before, and they just merged it into the Microsoft suite. and then they hadn't renewed the trademark. So I was like, okay, good. I'm not going to get in trouble, but eventually I was able to buy the domain off them. So Onfolio started and in the beginning it was, okay, I'm kind of building a portfolio.

I'm building a team to help me run that portfolio. If someone else wants to buy a business, I'll help them buy it and then they'll own it and my team can run it for them. and we'll get profit share and fees and everything. So I did that for about a year and it grew really quickly because basically everyone was saying to me, I've been looking for someone like you for a long time. So it was like, okay, great.

Perfect. So the business grew really well. But after about a year, I realized we're essentially a glorified agency here. I'm reading books about Blackstone and Berkshire Hathaway and holding companies.

And really, we are just like a kind of glorified content creation agency or SEO agency for these people. And so that's when we pivoted into being our own holding company, said to people, we're not going to work with individual investors. We're all going to pool our money and make a holding company. And that's actually better for individual investors anyway, because diversification and so on.

Yeah, so that's kind of how Unfolio evolved into the the kind of model it's at today. Excellent. If you had to break up the history of Onfolio into chapters, what would those chapters be? Yeah, I kind of touched upon it a bit.

So chapter one was just kind of like the inception. We're working for individuals. I think we were managing 30 websites, but it was all 30 different individuals or a couple of them had a few properties. So that was...

Late 2018 through to probably April 2020. Yeah, in hindsight, it was like I pivoted to a holding company pretty much in when COVID was in its early throes, but it was pure coincidence. I'd been thinking about this model and making the switch for two or three months. I think I sat down and I wrote six or seven pages in a notebook about, here's the problems we're doing individually.

Here's the pros and cons. Here's the different holding company models we could have. The holding company model I liked the most was actually the public holding company model. And it was really simple.

It was like, I kept saying to people who had holding companies, you raise money into a holding company, you buy some businesses, what happens when you want to raise more money? And they would say, well, you either make a new holding company. And I thought, well, that sounds like a mess because then you've got people own 10% of this one, 15% of that one. And they say, oh, you calculate the value of the holding company and then issue more shares.

And I thought that sounds really complicated. I get why maybe public companies, it makes more sense because you can just see the value. You don't have to calculate the NAV plus the public holding companies you in theory, because we are a public holding company and we are not experiencing this, but we will one day. You get some arbitrage where you're in you're buying businesses.

It's a three to four X profit Public companies usually trade for say 20 X you instantly get this at was not instant But yeah, you get this arbitrage and so I thought oh, yeah Maybe I'll build a private holding company grow it really big and go public later and do this So there's kind of chapter Chapter 1.5. I guess was me starting to pivot this way. But then I connected with someone who actually said you can go public very early and use it as an accelerant to all of the things you're trying to do. Now, again, this was in 2020.

Everyone was very high on Trump's economy, which was kind of like Biden's economy, Trump's, and really Obama's economy. But it was a very different economy to what we have today. Yes, absolutely. It was like, yeah, you can grow really fast.

You can raise money at high valuation. You can leverage the fact you're a public company to do better deals, better structures. You can recruit talent. You can attract more deal flow.

You can get a more significant valuation. You can leverage the stock. A lot of that actually has come true. Some of it is work in progress.

So chapter two is, okay, we went public in... 2022 in the end. So it took us, was it 2022? Yeah, August 2022, we went public. So basically, late 2020, we raised some more money from basically those same investors we were working with.

We said to them all, hey, we're going to do this now. Are you in? And most of them said no, but enough of them said yes. And then 2021 was just growing and preparing for going public.

But then late 2021, we connected with some investment bankers who said, you don't need to go public on a smaller exchange. We can take you public on NASDAQ and you can raise some money in the process, which will help you grow. And then Russia and Ukraine had a fight and inflation happened. And so it took us about another seven or eight months to finally IPO.

So then I guess chapter three is, or chapter two, kind of the chapter we're in now is like, okay, we're a public company. and hopefully chapter three and chapter four are coming soon. Yeah, they're all on their way. Yeah. So just to sort of like shift and talk about the decentralization and like that sort of phase that you went through and the article that you wrote that was the trigger for us connecting, you were talking about the decentralization and like how you organized leadership.

How was the leadership team structured before you originally decentralized how you were leading the companies in the portfolio. Yeah. So again, if you think about, I touched upon this a little bit, but when we very first started, we were buying content websites. And for listeners who might not be familiar, content website is essentially like a blog.

Maybe you get a lot of your traffic from Google by free organic SEO traffic. And then You either make money through advertising. So we own some recipe websites and those things where you have to read for 20 minutes to get to the actual recipe. We own some of them.

We also had affiliate articles where, so once upon a time, if you Googled what is the best safety razor or what is the best straight razor or cutthroat razor, number one was a website I owned. And it just recommended different razors from Amazon and people would go to Amazon. And if they bought something, we would get a commission. That model really suited centralization because we could have one SEO team, one content team.

And sure, there would be writers who were better at recipes or who were better at like men's grooming and stuff. But generally you could have one central team. We had a bunch of virtual assistants who were logging into WordPress and uploading everything. So very centralized.

And the part of the theory there is that you get operating leverage where maybe you have these fixed costs, but then every time you buy a new business, you're not necessarily having to build a new team. So you get the leverage and maybe your team costs 50 K a month and you're earning a hundred. And then you buy another business, you're earning 120, but you're still at 50 K and so on. And what we found was Not everyone can cope with doing 17 different things at once and so our teams were basically spread too thin They would they wouldn't necessarily complain because I think it was I Think they were telling the truth, but they would basically say we need more people We could get way better results if we just focused on one website, but obviously that website there wasn't a website that was making enough money to justify the team expenses.

And so then we thought, well, how large was your team at this point? Let's say probably 30 or 40 people. But like our SEO team, for example, was costing us about 30 grand a month and they were managing about 10 websites and those websites were generating let's say 40 grand a month. So there wasn't a lot of wiggle room.

And I thought, well, maybe I could just go out and buy one big content website that is generating a hundred K a month and then have one team running it and then another big content website and have another team running it. And that made me nervous because you don't get diversification when you do that. But it's where I started thinking about having dedicated teams running dedicated businesses. And I think in late 2020, we realized the writing was on the wall for content websites.

Well, we didn't even think of AI at the time. So we got, we made the right decision, but maybe the reason the writing was on the wall was wrong. We just felt like Google was rewarding kind of niche websites a lot less. And so every time we saw one, we thought we can't buy this website because one Google update wipes out 50% of its income.

So that's not a very good investment strategy. And so we started pivoting towards like agencies because we were essentially an agency. So we understood the agency model. Also, I tend to read up on a lot of other holding companies and seeing there's a lot of literature out there about decentralized holding companies and the ones that get the best results tend to be decentralized.

Again, it's kind of like the decision to become a holding company in the first place. or the decision to start Onfolio in the whole place. I've been holding these thoughts in my head and gathering information and sort of building confidence in my belief, I guess, that this was the right decision. And so after we IPO'd, we bought some quite different businesses. We bought like a digital course.

We bought some more agencies. We bought two agencies. We bought one digital course and we bought some WordPress software. And so at that point, we thought, yeah, like this makes way more sense to be decentralized now.

So we kind of spend the next two or three months going all in on decentralization. So what that meant in practice was instead of having one Slack channel for everybody. And so for example, maybe you've got six different websites and you hire someone and they join Slack. And the team who's hired them is like, Hey everyone, this is Sally, please welcome her.

And all the other teams are like, Hey, welcome, welcome. And it felt really disingenuous because a lot of people were like, I'm never going to speak to you. We're never going to be on a call. We're working on complete different businesses, but I have to say happy birthday to you like twice a year, once a year.

I just felt like it wasn't the right way to do it. So every company got its own Slack channel and the culture's actually... became stronger because each company was able to go all in on its own culture. Dedicated business manager or CEO for each business, dedicated teams and so on. That costs more in theory because now you have to pay for five Slack subscriptions instead of one and five HREF subscriptions and five managers instead of one. it more generally if you have the right people in the right seats generally it more than makes up for it because the performance of those businesses benefits we started out centralized and then we went oh actually we should become decentralized and we did that for about 18 months before we move back to where we are now which is what i wrote an article about and what prompted you Yeah, so I want to hear more about that.

Just curious, in that phase where you were, or where you moved to a decentralized model, it sounds like you had, like it did have a positive effect. Like, would that sound like the net effect of it was positive, at least for where the business was at at the time? I think so. Yeah.

I don't think it necessarily reflected in the performance of the businesses. And I don't know if that's necessarily a centralization, decentralization issue, or if it's just that we had the wrong people running those businesses. It's tough to know because they were good people. Yeah, there's definitely positives though.

So for example, all of the individual teams have better culture and that is a big, that is important. To some extent, being decentralized actually allows for more knowledge generation because If you're centralized, you can share information a lot more easily, but if you're decentralized, typically you've got more people. Different ways of thinking are filtering among the companies. Someone might hire someone who they wouldn't hire if they were centralized, but in a decentralized way, that person may bring in a bunch of knowledge.

As long as you as a company are able to help. pass that knowledge around the companies by having regular meetings with individual leaders and having them disseminate that knowledge. So it might be, for example, someone discovered something about email deliverability or what have you. And so you've just got, it's kind of increasing your surface area for innovation or like insight discovery, and then you're able to spread it among the teams. So it did have a net positive in many ways.

One of the things that led to us changing to now where we kind of have what we call centralized strategy and decentralized execution is ultimately the businesses weren't performing great and we needed to make some cuts. And we felt like we could probably make significant savings if we let go of all the business managers. And then we thought, do they deserve to stay? Well, according to the P &L, no.

According to the fact we like them, yes. So it was a tough decision. Once we let them go, we realized actually the reason the businesses were struggling were because a lot of the CEOs didn't necessarily know everything that they should be doing. So they worked hard.

This is that altitude view that you were talking about in your article, right? Yeah. It was really hard thing to kind of articulate. Sometimes it was things we thought they were doing and they said they were doing, but then we've kind of found when, so my CLO, When we replaced the CEOs, he stepped in to be basically CEO of three businesses.

And he would be like, why is this data not really being tracked properly? And they would say, well, we are tracking the data, but then we'd look at what they were doing. And it was kind of, oh, okay, that's like, yeah, you have a dashboard, but you're not really paying attention to it. Or you're not understanding how to interpret that data.

For example, one business, I mentioned this in the article, one business manager was saying, yeah, I generated some new sales from emails. So we were like, okay, great, he's doing email marketing. But then we found out he was just going through his inbox for previous leads and just emailing them like, hey, are you interested in buying more content? And so it was kind of like, I think when you're not sure what you should do, you tend to optimize. for what you are familiar with or what you know how to do.

And so they were all working hard and keeping themselves busy. They were not lazy or anything. Potentially they felt underpaid maybe and we felt, what are we paying you for? Which is kind of the dynamics existed forever.

But kind of realized we're always going to get better results than they are because we We see everything across all the businesses. We therefore learn faster and we have more knowledge to apply. So it's maybe not necessarily that they were bad, but it was that we could kind of see the woods for the trees and they were kind of stuck. So we kind of said, well, my CIO taking over was always temporary.

And so we started to think, what are we going to do when it's time for you to step out? Are we going to just hire new CEOs and hope for the best this time? Maybe hope we pick them better? Are we going to incubate new leaders in the businesses who kind of shadow you for six months or a year or whatever?

Or are we going to try something different? And we've kind of realized, well, yes, we can create to-do lists and have the teams execute on that to-do list and we guide them. But it's not a ton of work for us to actually help create those to-do lists. And then the teams generally are in touch with their audience a lot better than we are.

Their customers, they're answering customer support tickets or reading feedback on Facebook ads and things like that. So it's almost like a two-way thing where they're telling, they're helping us understand the problems of the business, but maybe it's almost like they're just data dumping on us. And then we're kind of like, oh, okay, I see what's happening here. We should do more of this.

So then we say to them, here's what you should do. Again, when we were kind of more fully decentralized, we'd be like, here's what you should do or you tell us what you should do and we'll just let you get on with it. Whereas now it's more like we're not going to micromanage you or anything, but we're going to kind of watch you do it or we're going to check in. And it's almost like we were becoming loathe to get involved because we were like, no, we're decentralized.

We shouldn't get involved. Whereas the reality is, just do what it takes. So if this business needs you to get involved and help, just get involved and help. Don't do it in a negative way.

Just be there. I actually think the CEOs that we let go probably would have benefited from that as well. We're kind of like, well, we hired you to tell us what you should do. And they're kind of like, yeah, no, I get that.

But it's like you're sitting in the back seat and you're just watching the person drive off the cliff because you're like, well, You're the one having the driving lesson. When I learned to drive, my driving instructor had pedals as well. I think that's probably standard. I guess to some extent, it's a little bit like that.

Unfortunately, we weren't able to discover that until we let them go and we got back in the seat and we realized, okay, here's what all the problems were. How did you navigate that process of letting them go? Because I imagine that would have been a pretty difficult thing to do because you don't hire a CEO lightly, right? So like, how did you navigate that and like mitigate whatever risks there might have been?

Because I imagine that would have had ripple effects like within those organizations. Yeah, well, there's a few different things. First of all, there was the decision that we made as a, I think that was three of us that made the decision. It started out as a financial decision.

It turned out to be the best decision we've made because the business is a, you know, we were thinking we just need to save some money. If we let go of these people, we can save 20K a month. And it turns out not only have we saved 20K a month, but we've like one business has this time last year it did, which was maybe three months before we let go of the person running it. It did a hundred and I think about 150K revenue in April last year.

And this year it's flirting with 400K in April. It's done. Wow. That's huge difference.

Yeah. I think, so what is it? It's April 30th. So I think it's done 350K so far this month.

So it's a huge difference. It's more than 2X. So significantly better than saving 20K a month. When we made the decision, we were like, okay, we can save 20K a month.

But the fear was, will the businesses die without them? What happens if we let go of these people? We save 20K a month, but then two months later, the businesses have declined. And so we had to figure out, can we at least keep them afloat?

And we felt comfortable like we could. There's also an argument, if we don't fire them, the businesses will decline as well. We made that decision in the course of about two weeks where we felt like, okay, yeah, we're definitely going to do this. And then we thought, okay, how are we going to navigate it?

The people we let go, we gave them a little bit of notice and we gave them severance. I think it was two months, which again, you always want it to be longer, but at the same time, you kind of do what is standard. And also if you pay them too much, you might as well have kept them. There was like a three or four week period Handover period and so the thing we were concerned with I guess we were most concerned with was are we what happens if the teams rebel or Yeah, like we're seen as the big cut-through people that just fired the leader that you liked and so on and yeah That's right.

There's where's the loyalty going right? Yeah, and I'm not entirely sure how it went because it was my COO who had those calls with the team I think, like in hindsight, it went quite smoothly and we did actually let go of some contractors as well. The ones who were most likely to kick up a fuss, we kind of wanted them to leave anyway. So the fear was what about the good people?

And in hindsight, I would probably say the good people are happier now because they see the businesses are growing. They see that we're, or my COO is a good manager. I think everyone feels like, yeah, it was the right decision. At the time, it was very much about just having calls with them and just reassuring them, this had to be done.

We want you to stay. It's a tough decision, but it had to be done. And I think there was probably trepidation, but over time, trust builds and people realize, okay, yeah, your heart was in the right place with these decisions. Yeah, it's never easy, but you just kind of have to do it as kind of truthfully and openly as you can.

We didn't say we fired this person because they were bad. We just said we had to, you know, unfortunately it had to be done and we're going to try and make things better. You mentioned that we're talking about these three CEOs that you mentioned who were transitioned out. But obviously, there are a lot more companies where their managers or their CEOs stayed.

What was it about those scenarios that made you say, no, we're going to leave this person in, or these ones were going to leave, take out? What was the decision criteria? They were harder to replace. I think it was that their businesses were... probably in better shape and yeah, they were more embedded in the business.

They came with the businesses that we acquired. Also, to some extent, it was that we also felt they could help out running some of the businesses that are now leaderless. So one person we let go of was running a content business, like a content agency. And one of the people who stayed was running two SEO agencies.

And we felt, well, okay, he can probably take over the content agency as well. And that's what he did. So it was a little bit like, we feel like his business is going in the right direction. He knows what he's doing more.

He can probably help take on some of the burden. like picking up the reins. So it's kind of interesting because I said we didn't make this decision purely based on performance. It was based on we need to save some money. But at the same time that I guess there was some performance element to it because otherwise we would have fired everyone.

So yeah. Yeah, no, that's just it's just interesting. So another another thing I'm thinking as far as the day to day of how this operates. So there's this shift that you've taken to bring the strategy component into a centralized place.

So with the other portfolio companies whose leadership remained intact, from what I'm understanding, it's not just it was business as usual for them. You're still taking on the strategic work internally and they're just handling execution now. Is that how that operates? Yes.

Or is it on a case by case basis? Kind of both. I would say it's more it's going to be more of a gradual thing with them because obviously They're still there. So we need to, we need them to buy in.

We can't just say, this is what you're going to do now execute. They'll be like, well, I was doing, you know, I was CEO last week. So it's case by case, but I think basically everybody's realizing, and this is why I said, if we had known this back when the other CEOs were in, uh, still in the jobs, they might still be hard to say everybody's realizing this is a better way of doing it. So the people who did survive are still like, Yeah, actually, this is a good strategy.

We appreciate your insights. It's almost like an advisory board helping us come up with a strategy. And even though we centralize strategy, that doesn't necessarily mean strategy is dictated from the central part of the company. and then they just have to follow it blindly. But it's like, we're taking control of the process of creating the strategy.

We're rolling up our sleeves as well, and working with them to do it. It needs to go both ways because we might say, hey, have you thought about this? And they might say, That's not going to work because ABC reason, whereas the alternative is us kind of blindly be like, hey, what are you going to do this month? Okay, cool.

Get on with it. Like decentralization for the sake of decentralization, basically. Obviously, this means that your as in your responsibility and especially your CEO's responsibilities changed as a result of this shift. How much extra effort or extra time would you say it's taken? you and your COO compared to what you were doing before the centralization of strategy?

For me, less. For me, I just get to write the blog posts and take all the credit for it. But for the COO, yeah, more. But we're kind of in a place where we just have to do whatever it takes to grow the company and get out the other side.

For him more, yeah. For me, a little bit more, but not like Not a ton more. Yeah. How scalable is it?

Like, how do you think about, OK, when we, you know, double the size of the portfolio, you know, is it a case of hiring more people like your COO who can function as that, like, you know, nexus point for multiple companies? Or like, how do you think about scaling beyond where you are now? That's how we're thinking about it. Yeah, it's.

Again, wait for me to write a blog post 18 months from now saying, hey, we changed again. I think all good companies do that. That's how we're thinking about it. I think my COO is very unique and he is a rare breed, I guess, but I don't think he's entirely unique.

There are others out there like him. We can't exactly take on many more businesses in our current structure without needing to hire someone else. But I think it is repeatable. And we've actually seen that.

So my COO actually took most of March off because he had surgery and said he was off for maybe three weeks. And before he went off, it was very much like, okay, let's get a couple of the people under him. learning this process. And so it would be these are the calls that you need to have with either the CEOs or with the teams. It was very much like, let's hope nothing breaks while he's gone.

But actually, I think the businesses thrived without him. Credit has to go to him for putting the foundations in place, of course. But that demonstrates to us we can train and hire other people who can follow the process. Because now we have two or three people in the team who are able to do this.

So if you can do two or three, you can probably do 20. So I think how it would probably exist is it'll be a little bit of incubation. So bringing people up from the company, taking on more responsibility, but that takes years, maybe even decades. that's okay because we're thinking in years and decades. But also, it'll be about hiring the right people and just working closely with them to see rather than be like, hey, you're a talented person, go figure it out.

It'll be like, you're a talented person, but here's the structure, here's what we're building, here's how it works, we're going to make sure you get it. I think that's the way to do it. As it stands right now, how many companies are in the portfolio? Well, the ones that drive meaningful revenue, by which I mean pretty much all of the revenue, I'd say six companies.

So we did 7 million revenue, just under 8 million revenue last year, but we're probably on about a million a month now, so call it 12 million run rate. That million a month revenue is driven by... Maybe five companies. Yeah, so there's a lot of smaller ones some like legacy ones like some content sites that are just We don't even think about them and they pay us five grand a month Yeah, just some other ones basically.

There's like a collection of sites that probably Won't be in our portfolio in a couple years time Okay, one one more question before I start before I wrap up obviously if you've got those companies and you're looking after those At the, at the administrative side of the organization, obviously there's yourself, there's just your COO. Are there any, is there anybody else at that top level or is, or are you both directly leading everything below that? No. So my COO has two people under him who have the title, uh, director of growth, uh, director of strategy and director of, uh, operations.

Um, and they. They're involved with every company as well. They're a lot more like, well, director of strategy, less so, but the director of ops is a lot more like action task focused. Like, okay, this team, can you fill out this document?

She started contacting everybody for this month saying, hey, new month's about to start. Can you record me a video? Like, what went well in April? What are you planning for May?

That kind of thing. So it means there's more like, there's more bandwidth and there's more ability to cope with everything, but also four brains are greater than one. So there's like a lot more, you're able to do the centralized strategy a lot better because there's more people collaborating on it. At the same time, you don't want too many cooks in the kitchen.

So at the moment you got, this is a pretty good sweet spot. Yeah. All right, so my last question for anybody that is leading a decentralized organization, of which I know there's a number in our audience, anyone who's leading a decentralized organization and is seeing what you have said and thinking to themselves, yes, that is the problem that I have. What would you recommend as any specific advice that you would give to them as to how to take steps in this direction?

What would be the most helpful advice? I mean, hopefully you don't have to go out and fire a bunch of people. I think you don't because I think we only discovered that there was this alternative model after we did that, but I think you could make it work without that. One thing that we were guilty of was, I touched upon it a few times as being decentralized for the sake of it and almost like we don't want to kind of insist on some things or... suggest certain things because we're decentralized and that's not what we do.

And it's more like just figure out what model works. And so knowing, well, we can become more involved and we probably are better equipped to help than the individual CEO is because we have access to more data, we can see more businesses. We have that kind of strategic altitude. I think for the most part, the leaders of those organizations or the individual business units or however, like whatever the terminology is, they generally would welcome it.

They're kind of like, yeah, like tell me, help me, tell me what you know. And then that actually for us as an acquirer is a huge superpower because when we go out and we want to acquire a business and we can tell them. you stay if you want to come in and join us. The advantage that someone gets when they join our portfolio is they benefit from all of that insight and the kind of playbook above them that when they're just running their own thing, they don't have access to. I think even if someone is just running an organization and isn't necessarily going out and acquiring new ones, it still remains true that you have this layer above your individual operators or managers or whatever that should be used.

And so where the system breaks is if you're all trying to do everything or you're all trying to know everything about everything, which is why you don't want to go fully centralized. I would say just try it and see how it goes and just be flexible. I think don't adopt a certain philosophy and stick to it. I love that.

Dom, thank you so much for sharing your experience. We really appreciate that. We'll definitely be adding links to find you and Onfolio in the show notes. So if anyone wants to learn more that they can.

Thank you. Really appreciate you being on the show. Yeah, thank you. Thanks for having me.