Founded by James Ashford, GoProposal’s pricing, proposal and engagement letter software enables accountants and bookkeepers to price consistently, increase revenue, sell more confidently, and minimise risk across their entire firm.

In October 2021, the company was acquired by Sage, one of the UK’s leading technology companies. With over 12,000 employees in 22 countries across North America, UK & Ireland, mainland Europe, South Africa, Australia and Asia, the company has millions of customers across the globe.

The deal, which comprised 100% of the share capital in the company, was part of Sage’s commitment to building a portfolio of modern and forward-thinking practice management solutions in the cloud for accountants in the UK and globally.

In the first of a two-part series, we caught up with James Ashford to see how it all came together and What Happened Next…

Tell us a bit about GoProposal and how the business grew and developed…

I was working as a business consultant, going into different businesses across different industries and helping to solve their key challenges in terms of driving revenue and profitability. In every case, the specific thing I found myself solving was how they priced and sold their services. Basically, if they could just charge more, if they could just convert a client faster, if they could just empower more people in the business to sell their services – to new and existing customers - then they’d make a lot more money.

I was going from one business to another and I developed a little bit of technology to help with the process. Eventually, I met an accountant who claimed they already had a decent process but it turned out that it actually wasn’t very good. So I worked with them to implement the system I’d been developing and it had a hugely positive impact on their business.

Initially I didn’t really see the commerciality of developing my technology any further than for that one individual business. However, another accountancy firm heard about it and they asked me to help them too. This was the spark that led to me developing it as a commercial product.

And how did the business grow from there?

I'd always had in my mind that I wanted, not to just develop a business, but to create an asset that could run without me, grow without me, and which I could ultimately sell. So, right from day one the offering was all designed to eventually sell. I even did a financial planning exercise with my wife to figure out our ‘magic number’ - how much money we would need for the rest of our lives, how much to never have to work again, to live a good quality life etc. I then had a target in mind in terms of the revenue the business would need to be making so we could hit the right number in terms of valuation.

Even at this early stage I also started thinking about potential acquirers for the business – ‘Go Proposal: A Sage Company’, ‘Go Proposal: A Xero Company’, ‘Go Proposal: A Quickbooks Company’, just to imagine where things could go. Also, every single member of staff who subsequently joined the business knew that they were joining a business that was being built to sell – they were all part of that journey.

The key thing is that everyone exits their business at some point - you’re going to sell, you’re going to die, you’re going to merge etc. However, very few business owners actually have an exit plan. I think it’s vital to be ready right from the start – ready to scale, ready to franchise, ready to go global and, ultimately, ready to exit. You want to get to that point as fast as you possibly can.

What was your target market?

Initially it was solely aimed at accountants. We did try and branch out to creative agencies but that didn’t quite work as each business had a very different set of problems to solve, whereas accountants tend to have the same set of services and the same set of products.

So we stuck with accountants and solely in the UK. But then we slowly started to pick up contracts in  other countries. This began with English-speaking countries – Canada, USA, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa – before we started moving into non English-speaking countries. Norway was our first and then France and onwards.

When you’re a start-up, it’s quite tempting to lose focus on your UK business when you’re getting so much interest from abroad. But we always ensured that we kept the UK as our main market and this is what drove our decision making – overseas was almost just a happy accident. We always supported our international business but we never lost sight of the fact that we had just 2% of the market on our doorstep – and with 50,000 more accountants to go at!

What were the practicalities of entering into those international markets?

It’s interesting. With English-speaking countries you think that it's going to be a straightforward – a few tweaks here and there – but it never is. There's always so many more complexities to each territory that you don't consider when you commit to being in that space, and you have to make far more adjustments to the product than you think. Even just taking payments in a different country can be a huge issue.

You also have to ensure that your marketing is bespoke. For example, in the US there’s different spellings of words for websites, a requirement for different sorts of images, and there’s also different terminology. In America ‘turnover’ doesn’t mean revenue, it means that the business is going under, you’re losing staff etc. And that’s all before you even consider time zones and product support. Then, when you move into non-English countries you have to get involved in translations.

It's also interesting that in the day and age of globalisation, each territory still wants to feel unique. For example, Canada wants clearly to differentiate itself to the US so you need local case studies and testimonials for the website, not to mention bespoke tweaks to the app. There are a lot of things you haven’t even considered before you moved into that space.

Any cultural barriers you had to get over?

There are some very subtle ones that you learn along the way. Obviously, the product is designed to enable users to charge customers more, make more money etc. In North America this was a key marketing message for us but, when we went to Norway, we found that making money isn’t a big driver there. They have a great standard of living, they’re making money, but they don’t like to talk about it. You have to be agile enough to make a subtle shift and adjust your marketing messages to each market.

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