Learning from Arjo Ghosh

 

Arjo Ghosh is a fascinating guy. You probably know his history, he set up one of the UK’s first SEO companies, Spannerworks, and sold it for tons of money. Spannerworks is still going, without Arjo, and is now called iCrossing – maybe some of you have worked in their offices in Black Lion Street over the years.

 

I’ve listened to Arjo give a couple of talks over the years, and he was on my panel at the Brighton Summit last year. And there is always something to learn, whenever he speaks. Here’s what I picked up at the Brighton Chamber breakfast the other day.

 

 

 

Many people think that you have to be boring to be respectable or taken seriously in business. Arjo’s history and his current work definitely means that he is a man to be taken seriously, but he talked about many of the things that he’s been involved in, which would normally be thought of as “serious” business activities. I could see many ears pricking up when he talked about hanging out with a guy testing ecstasy pills, organising all night parties for his staff and customers at Devil’s Dyke.

 

 

Arjo talked about how there were many people who wanted to buy Spannerworks, but he chose a company, and people that he thought that he could get on with to continue work it started. He didn’t say so, in so many words, but I think this is really important, because if you sell your company you’ll have a “earn out” period when you have to work with your new bosses. For many people this is the worst part of selling a business, and they really hate that eighteen months or three years when they have to still be in the business, but somebody else is in charge. Arjo wisely picked somebody that he respected, which I hope made his three-year earn out more bearable.

 

 

One of Arjo’s stories was about going to meet the people that he was going to sell company to, and then going back to the airport in a taxi with one of his colleagues. You might have thought that you can have any kind of private conversation in a taxi, but it turned out that the driver had worked for iCrossing and passed on what he heard. By not disclosing what they would be willing to sell for in front of the taxi driver, Arjo thinks that the price went up by 1 million quid. It pays to be paranoid, sometimes.

 

 

You got the impression that Arjo has had a lot of fun in business, along with some sad and serious times. Too often we don’t leave enough room for fun in our work, we too busy hurrying onto the next thing. And of course, this is one of the elements that successful entrepreneurs often talk about having missed out on. Arjo was a good reminder those possible to build up a great business, develop some serious value in it, but have a good time while you’re doing it.

 

And although I’m struggling to find a learning point in this, I did love the idea of the ten-year-old Arjo building a treehouse in his hippie school and trying to tunnel from London to China. Maybe the learning point is that he seemed very cool with the fact that this failed.