About this episode

Richard Willis shares his journey of building and exiting a successful education IT business with zero ad spend.

In this episode I'm joined by Richard Willis — someone I met at one of my events, who briefly mentioned what he'd built and exited, and I knew immediately I wanted to dig deeper. Richard built Salamander Soft, a software and services company in the education IT sector — helping schools integrate their systems with platforms like Active Directory, Microsoft 365, and Google Workspace. What started as "an accidental business" — Richard just wanted to work from home and support his family — grew into a company turning over £2.5 million a year, with zero ad spend, eventually reaching 60% of UK secondary schools and every school in Wales. We talk about the power of going niche (and why that made him impossible for bigger competitors to compete with on search), how he built the business almost entirely through existing contacts, online communities, and word of mouth, and the journey from "working, eating, or sleeping" as a one-man band to building a leadership team that eventually ran the business without him. Richard also walks us through the exit process in detail — including how the business was valued (a multiple of EBITDA), what nearly went wrong when one buyer tried to drop the…

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