Episode #642: Building to Sell, Starting Again and Where AI Changes Business Value - with Gavin Bell

What would you do differently if you knew from day one that somebody else would eventually need to run your business?

In this episode of ScaleUp Radio, I’m joined by Gavin Bell, entrepreneur and founder of Yatta, the paid media agency he deliberately built to be sellable before its acquisition by Velstar in 2024.

Gavin’s story is particularly interesting because selling Yatta wasn’t something that simply happened after years of building the agency. It influenced how he designed the business from the outset.

Inspired by Built to Sell, Gavin moved away from building a business around his own personal brand and expertise. Instead, he created packaged services, recurring revenues, repeatable systems and, crucially, a business capable of delivering without him.

That meant progressively removing himself from sales and client delivery, bringing in people who could take over those responsibilities and resisting the temptation to maximise his own income at the expense of the value of the company.

The result was a business attractive enough to be acquired by Velstar, with Gavin negotiating the original two-year earn-out down to nine months and ultimately leaving after eight.

There’s an important lesson here for any founder, whether or not you currently intend to sell.

The one key thing: build a business that works without you before you need it to work without you.

The disciplines that make a company sellable are often the same disciplines that make it scalable: recurring revenue, clear propositions, good people, repeatable systems, healthy profit and reduced dependency on the founder.

Today, Gavin is applying some of those lessons to a very different venture.

Talo is an online lifestyle pharmacy focused on treatments that people may be less comfortable discussing with their GP. Its longer-term ambition is much bigger: moving towards what Gavin describes as precision health, using diagnostics, personal data and AI to help create increasingly personalised and proactive healthcare.

One of the interesting aspects of Talo’s approach is that, in a market where technology is often being used to remove human interaction, Gavin is deliberately putting some of it back in.

For its weight loss offering, Talo plans an upfront consultation followed by ongoing coaching. The intention is to improve outcomes, create greater trust and tackle the high customer churn seen in a market where customers can easily move between providers and introductory offers.

We also explore how AI is changing Gavin’s approach to building the business.

Rather than spending heavily on developers to test every new idea, Gavin is using AI development tools to create prototypes before passing them to professional developers.

That makes experimentation faster and considerably cheaper.

But Gavin believes there is a much bigger strategic implication.

If AI makes software increasingly quick and inexpensive to reproduce, simply owning proprietary code may become much less of a competitive advantage.

The real value could increasingly sit elsewhere: in your customer relationships, proprietary data, distribution, marketing capability and, most importantly, your ability to demonstrate that what you do actually produces results.

That is a significant question for founders thinking about where the long-term value of their businesses really lies.

In this episode, we discuss:

• Why Gavin deliberately designed Yatta to be sold from the beginning

• What Built to Sell changed about his approach to entrepreneurship

• Why recurring revenue and packaged services helped make Yatta attractive to an acquirer

• How he progressively removed himself from sales and client delivery

• Why optimising company profit can sometimes matter more than maximising founder income

• The hiring constraint that ultimately limited Yatta’s growth

• How the Velstar acquisition came about

• Why Gavin negotiated his earn-out from two years down to nine months

• What starting again feels like after successfully exiting a business

• Talo’s approach to the online pharmacy and weight loss markets

• Why adding human coaching can create differentiation in a technology-led market

• How Gavin is using AI to dramatically reduce the cost and time involved in prototyping

• Why customer data, marketing systems and proven outcomes could become more valuable than proprietary software

• Gavin’s vision for precision health and more proactive, personalised healthcare

• Why Facebook advertising is outperforming Google for Talo

• Why successful paid social requires large amounts of creative testing and patience

• Why founders need to give marketing channels enough time to learn before deciding they do not work

Standout message

As technology becomes easier to build, the competitive advantage moves away from the technology itself and towards the customer, the data, the distribution and the outcomes you can prove.

That makes this a fascinating conversation not only about selling a business, but about what makes a business valuable in the first place.

Feeling busy but stuck?

Most founders I speak to feel busy but stuck. Plenty happening, but no real clarity on what matters most this quarter.

Here’s what more than 500 interviews on this show have taught me: the founders who scale choose less, and deliver all of it.

That’s what the G90 Summit is for.

It’s a structured half-day where we cut through everything competing for your attention, agree the three to five things that must happen in the next 90 days, and build the rhythm to make sure they do.

Quarterly, virtual, £97 a seat.

Smart90.co.uk/summit

And if you know somebody with an interesting ScaleUp story who would make a great guest for ScaleUp Radio, you can nominate them for a future episode.

 

Scaling up your business isn't easy, and can be a little daunting. Let ScaleUp Radio make it a little easier for you. With guests who have been where you are now, and can offer their thoughts and advice on several aspects of business. ScaleUp Radio is the business podcast you've been waiting for.

If you would like to be a guest on ScaleUp Radio, please click here:

https://bizsmarts.co.uk/scaleupradio/kevin

You can get in touch with Kevin here:

[email protected]

 

Gavin can be found here:

https://mrgavinbell.com/

https://jointalo.com/

 

Resources:

Built To Sell by John Warrillow - https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/built-to-sell-creating-a-business-that-can-thrive-without-you-john-warrillow/d0d51f969be59f14?ean=9798256105150&bkshp-astro=t

The E-Myth by Michael E Gerber - https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/the-e-myth-revisited-why-most-small-businesses-don-t-work-and-what-to-do-about-it-michael-e-gerber/dc9f0ce70842d643?ean=9780887307287&bkshp-astro=t

Asana - https://asana.com/

Wispr Flow - https://wisprflow.ai/