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Kathryn Strachan  0:01  

And you know, I do think it is something important to do that if you do want to sell, to like have those conversations long before you need them, because then you are ready, rather than like you know doing a fire sale or you know needing to exit really quickly and not having any of these relationships, not having people who you’re on the radar for. So I mean, a smarter play is to have these conversations all along and to be nurturing and building.

VO  0:26  

You have questions about selling a business. We have the people who’ve been there. This is Business Answers with Tommy Boyle.

Tommy Boyle  0:36  

Welcome to the Business Answers podcast, where we look at the personal impact, both positive and negative, of growing a business, and in particular the experience of exiting a business. I’m Tommy Boyle. I’m delighted to be joined today by Kathryn Strachan, founder of CopyHouse, a specialist B2B technology content agency that she scaled to over 2 million in annual recurring revenue and a 32-person team before exiting in 2024. She has since written a book called *Scaling Business: Building Brands That Break Barriers* and now works as a fractional chief marketing officer for AI and tech companies. She’s an international speaker and AI strategist, advising fintech, SaaS, and purpose-led firms. She is also a mentor, a tech scaler, and a university lecturer. Kathryn, you’re very welcome to Business Answers. Hi,

Kathryn Strachan  1:20  

thank you for having me. I’m happy to be here.

Tommy Boyle  1:23  

Welcome to the Business Answers podcast, Kathryn. Copyhouse is what we’re here to talk about primarily. Before CopyHouse existed, what were you actually trying to escape from or build towards

Kathryn Strachan  1:38  

in life? I mean, I worked agency side, and I guess you know the moment that made me want to leave being an employee and you know start on my own. Remember it quite clearly, actually. I was working for another agency, local here in Edinburgh, and you know I was doing. I was also trying to juggle being a mom. So I have a daughter who’s now nine. At the time she was quite young, and I asked them for a very small raise. So you know, I had been doing good work, I had been putting in long hours, and I asked for a very small raise at the time. I can’t remember exactly, but it was probably a couple grand. Like it wasn’t massive at all by any means, and they just said no. And I said to my husband, you know, I can do this on my own. You know, I don’t need to work for them to make this kind of money. No, I can make more money probably on my own. And my husband, who’s always been one of my biggest advocators and supporters, said, “Go for it. So I left the agency to become freelance, and it was my freelance business that really proved the market fit, but also really started to take off, and that turned into an agency, which I think is quite common for agency owners. They normally start as the person that does the doing, and then you know if their agency grows, they move out of that and become more of a CEO and you know leading the company once you have a team behind you, but definitely started as a freelancer, and that demand then grew into it.

Tommy Boyle  3:08  

And what was the moment, Kathryn, that told you that this was becoming a real business rather than a freelance hustle?

Kathryn Strachan  3:15  

Probably when the work started to outstrip what I could do individually. So you know, as an individual, as a one-person person, you only have so much time in the day. You only have so much that you can take on. So when that demand started to outstrip what I could possibly do, I started to look at how I was going to build the agency by hiring. So I decided quite early on that I didn’t want to work with a pool of other freelancers, but I really wanted to build a team. I really wanted to build a team that I could invest in, that I could develop, that I could nurture, that could turn into you know something that I could rely on more than a pool of freelancers who you know are more of an arm for hire. They don’t really have any skin in the game in any sense of the word, when it comes to the agency, you know they’re just in arms for hire. But with a permanent team, you know you can really invest in them, you can really develop them, you can really, you know, nurture them and watch them grow. And you know I’ve always been a big fan of mentoring and nurturing and developing others, and that ultimately led me to decide to hire, so in the end of 2019, beginning of 2020, I hired four employees, which was obviously fantastic timing.

Tommy Boyle  4:28  

And who was the first person you hired? And those four people, what did they teach you about letting go of control?

Kathryn Strachan  4:35  

Yeah, I mean, my I always kind of approach hiring as taking things off of my plate. So when I started to hire my first employees, I looked at what I was doing a lot of and what I needed support on. One of the first employees I hired was a copywriter because I was obviously doing a lot of copywriting at that point. You know, it’s now been a long time since I’ve written anything for anybody, but I. Was doing a lot of copywriting, so I needed somebody who I could hand off copywriting to. And then the other thing I was doing a lot of was managing clients. So I also, at the same time, hired a account manager who could take on more of those client relationships. You know, and as we grew, it was always about you know getting myself out of the agency because if you build an agency to sell, you have to remove the founder from the equation. Agencies can’t be sold when the founder is stuck in the middle of it because they’re essentially valueless. If the goal is to sell an agency, you have to get yourself out of it, which means constantly looking at your workload and what you can move off. I mean, delegating has never been something that like came particularly hard to me, so I was able to you know take these employees on with less of the challenges that I’ve seen other founders struggle with. But what became really difficult was a little bit further on in the journey when we were a bit bigger. I found myself in a position where I was becoming a bottleneck for the team. You know, at that point I was overseeing all the content, so all the content that went out the door had to go through me, and you know, I became a bottleneck. It also meant that I wasn’t doing the things that I should have been doing. I wasn’t leading the company. I wasn’t looking after the company’s larger vision or strategy. So what I did at that point was I hired a creative director who was 20 years my senior? So I brought him in, and he pretty much pushed me out the door and said, “You know, I have this. Let me do this. And you know, it really required an identity shift from myself because I had to stop thinking of myself as the doer. I had to stop thinking of myself as a really great copywriter or, you know, the really great content manager, and move into a CEO leadership role.

Tommy Boyle  6:45  

If you don’t mind, Kathryn, at what point in the journey was that 18 months in or 24 months in? How early did you make that call?

Kathryn Strachan  6:53  

Was about a year in. A year in. I mean, it was when we got to we grew quite quickly. So it was how was big? How big was the team? Well, probably about 12 copywriters at that point. And you know, when you start to do it in volume, you know, you do need somebody overlooking it to make sure that it’s you know a good standard and that it meets a standard that you want to represent as an agency. But it probably almost definitely should not be a founder.

Tommy Boyle  7:21  

I’m just interested that you said that if you wanted to sell a business, like when you set up CopyHouse, did you do it with a view to saying, “I’m going to sell this. That’s you know my primary aim is to build and sell. Was that always your goal from the very very start?

Kathryn Strachan  7:36  

Yeah, pretty much.

Speaker 1  7:37  

Okay,

Kathryn Strachan  7:38  

from the very beginning, maybe about four or five months in, we started working with Spencer Gallagher and Peter Hoole, who had a M and A consultancy called Cactus, who were quite well known in the agency space for brokering such deals, and they were Neds who had gone on that journey themselves, and they were very much my role models in the whole entire agency journey, before I worked with them, I read their book Agency Nomics. I helped to edit their second book, Agency Nomics, so I was very much like nurtured and mentored by two brilliant people

Tommy Boyle  8:13  

throughout the process. Throughout the process, from the very start. Okay, very good. And what was the actual moment then that you decided the business was ready to sell. What was the real trigger that caused that decision or made that decision happen?

Kathryn Strachan  8:29  

I mean accumulation of things. So like I said, we had been working from the very beginning to get it ready to be sold and designed with that in mind. Also, what that then meant was that along the way I was having conversations with people who had bigger agencies or ran agency groups that we might be a good fit for. So after a while, you know, as we started to go and grow, and after we reached the 2 million threshold, a couple of things happened. So I was quite burnt out at this stage, running an agency, working 7080, hours a week. I had expanded us into the U.S. so we had clients in New York as well as here. Meant that I was travelling to New York and the U.S. every other month, which was a lot. I was living in London while my husband and daughter were living in Scotland, so I only got to see them occasionally on the weekends and working.

Tommy Boyle  9:20  

And in relation to that, Kathryn, you said delegating was easy to you, and you made that bold move to take in the creative director after 12 months. Did you stop then? Why did you not continue delegating so that you didn’t have to do that transatlantic as often and do the 80 hours a week? Was it that the business was growing too fast, that the structure couldn’t keep up, or how was it that the delegation that you started so well to do didn’t seem to be serving you as well as earlier?

Kathryn Strachan  9:51  

I think there’s a difference between having a lifestyle business and having a growth business. So, I mean, even when you are very good at delegating, you know, there’s always more that can be done. There’s. Always a bajillion things that can be done. I purposely didn’t hire in the U.S. market because U.S. salaries are significantly higher than in the U.K. So if you can keep, you know, your payroll costs down as an agency, your biggest cost is payroll. So I mean, you don’t necessarily want to add to payroll if you don’t have to, if you don’t need to, and there’s always more that can be done, and you know I’m incredibly ambitious. So it was not so much that I was not good at delegating. It was an intentional, strategic decision to not hire in the U.S. As anybody who knows U.S. salaries will know, you know if you can avoid those, that’s obviously good, especially if you’re able to bill at U.S. agency rates, but deliver with a team that’s not based there. Then your profit margins obviously higher. But I mean, I was very ambitious, and there was so much that needed to be done that could be done. That you know, even with a sizable team, you know, I think I probably could have had all the people in the world, and there was still more that I wanted to do, needed to do. I mean, I became quite a big figure, so I’ve got over 20,000 followers on LinkedIn, and growing my personal brand was a big part of the agency growth as well. Which meant, you know, a lot of the public appearances, a lot of speaking events, you know, these sorts of things weren’t something that even could be delegated. You know, there was something that had to be done by me because it was me that people knew it was me that people wanted to speak on their stage. So you know, sending our content director, who was brilliant, but sending him to an event to speak at that stage when he didn’t have that brand, it wasn’t him that was invited to speak, was obviously not going to work. So I mean, it was less about delegating and more about intentionally wanting to stay out of the U.S. and then you know just being maybe a bit too ambitious and you know not wanting to do everything at once and really attacking it with full force. But you know we grew and we did that agency journey in five years, and I don’t think that that would have been possible without my work ethic.

Tommy Boyle  11:59  

And so when just going back to that, when was the decision? Okay, I’m not doing this anymore. I don’t want to do it anymore. I can’t do it anymore. When did that actual decision? When did you make that decision? Was there a particular point? Yeah.

Kathryn Strachan  12:11  

No, I don’t think that there was one specific moment. I think it was an accumulation of many things, and then the right opportunity coming along at the right time, so you know it was a combination of being burnt out and you know having my work impact my relationships, and then the right opportunity via these Neds who we’d worked with from the very beginning came available of a larger agency group that wanted to acquire us.

Tommy Boyle  12:41  

Had you briefed them and prompted them and just say you better start looking here because I’m in the space to move on if needs be.

Kathryn Strachan  12:46  

No, but they were constantly looking for the entire journey.

Tommy Boyle  12:49  

Okay. Yeah. Okay.

Kathryn Strachan  12:51  

I was speaking to investors and potential acquirers for the whole journey, and you know I do think it is something important to do that if you do want to sell to like have those conversations long before you need them, because then you are ready. Rather than like you know doing a fire sale or you know needing to exit really quickly and not having any of these relationships, not having people who you’re on their radar for. So I mean, a smarter play is to have these conversations all along and to be nurturing and building.

Tommy Boyle  13:21  

That was very clever on your behalf. You’re so right. You’ve got to have good advisors surrounding you when you’re engaging in a process like that. And then, from your family point of view, and and from your friends’ point of view, or from a staffing point of view, who did you feel that you couldn’t tell that you were doing that, or was there anybody in that boat?

Kathryn Strachan  13:37  

Oh yeah, I mean, we didn’t tell most of the team until it was a done deal. Obviously, I had a strong senior leadership team. So my head of ops, who was my left hand, who built you know a lot of the systems and processes in the agency, was with me throughout the process. He was not a co-founder, but he ran it like he was a co-founder. So I mean, he knew obviously from the beginning and was quite essential in that process with all the due diligence that needs to happen, you know it’s quite a cumbersome task, and definitely isn’t something that you can undertake on your own. And then the rest of the senior leadership team gradually became aware throughout the process. But like some of the more junior employees didn’t know until day of.

Tommy Boyle  14:19  

And what was the hardest single decision, Kathryn, in the sales process. What was the single hardest decision you had to make in that process?

Kathryn Strachan  14:27  

Well, they weren’t going to take everybody because part of what they were doing was a consolidation as well. So because we were joining a group, they had some of the roles already within the group. Yes, that some of my team did. So one of the things that we had to do was decide who was going to go and who was not going to go. I really cared for my team, so having to make decisions about who was not going to go, who was not going in the move, and who was was probably one of the hardest. I’ve had to make redundancies and restructures, you know. A couple of times in that journey, and I hate having to make decisions that really negatively impact somebody’s personal life and their personal, you know, well-being and finances. I mean, what I did do was I took anybody who wasn’t making the move, and I used my network to find them a new position. So you know, made sure they weren’t just left out in the cold because you know they had worked hard. They did deserve to be there, but you know the choir, you know cares but doesn’t fully care. You know they need to make it into strong business case. And when you’re joining a group, you know quite often there’s functions that already exist. So for example, finance is consolidated in a group, and there’s a central finance department, so they don’t need to, you know, CFOs, for example.

Tommy Boyle  15:43  

People buy businesses so that they can get economies of scale and they get synergy and they can cut cost. And yeah, I think everybody would agree with you that the hardest decisions anyone has to make in business is to let people go who they cared really about. But sometimes it’s not a choice that you have. You just got to do

Kathryn Strachan  15:59  

1. Yeah, and it’s not personal. I mean, it’s a role that’s not needed. That is a cost, rather than you really like them or you really have a close personal relationship with them. And quite often in business, you have to take the emotions out of it, no matter how hard that is, which is not easy. Not easy. I’d

Tommy Boyle  16:17  

agree. So I believe you turned down a higher valuation for your business, so that you could just walk away clean. Do you think you sold at the right price and at the right time? And maybe there was more in it, but as I say, you did turn down that higher valuation. It was more important that you left at that particular point.

Kathryn Strachan  16:35  

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think you can’t put money on some things like my health. You know, I was in a really unhealthy, unhappy place, and my marriage, I think, you know, is priceless. So yeah, I mean, I had set it up in a way that our head of ops, who I mentioned earlier, could take it and could run with it, which made it a possibility for me to leave instead of doing a managed buyout, which was obviously a very smart move. But yeah, I mean, I could have had a higher valuation if I had stayed, but I did not want to stay. And my life now is so amazing, and I am so incredibly happy, and I get to do, I get to travel a lot, and I get to really live a life that I could have only dreamt of, you know, even as a 20-year-old and when I was running the agency, and you know, money’s. I think after a certain point, you know, the amount of money you have doesn’t really greatly impact your happiness. There’s a lot of psychological studies into that. So yeah, I mean, I think I got a good deal for it. I feel proud of the work that we did. I feel proud of like the opportunities and the doors it has opened for me since, and the life that I have now is incredible.

Tommy Boyle  17:43  

So, describe the actual day the deal closed.

Kathryn Strachan  17:46  

Yeah, I mean a lot of mixed emotions because that was also the day that we had to tell the team, and we had to tell the team that wasn’t going, that they weren’t going. And I mean, you feel happy, you feel proud, you feel sad, you feel lost, even because you don’t know what you’re gonna do with yourself after, so I mean it’s kind of a whirlwind of several different emotions all at once that are both amazing and awful. So I mean I guess it’s like the day to day of agency life. I mean the day to day of agency life is up and down and up and down and up and down, and this is a mass accumulation of that, where you have everything all together, all in the same spot. So, I mean, it’s kind of difficult to put into words.

Tommy Boyle  18:30  

And you know, you’ve said that, you know, and you’ve said it here that it nearly broke your marriage, and you know, the flights and the weight loss, and you know, just the general ill health that you experienced on a day-to-day basis before the sale. There, like, what did that look like at its worst? Was it you know, gone for 10 days at a time, not seeing family, not sleeping? Just you know, what was it actually like to experience that level of pressure,

Kathryn Strachan  19:04  

yeah. I mean, I guess it’s 1415-hour, days. You know, I actually trained myself how to work while sleeping, which is annoying because even when I was asleep, I didn’t get time off. So you know, I was working all the time. My husband and daughter lived in Scotland, and I lived in London, so you know I only really saw them three weekends of a month, so I didn’t get to see them very often. Yeah, on and off long haul flights. I did lose a lot of weight, but I wasn’t necessarily like eating healthy or going to the gym, which like obviously wasn’t great. I lost a lot of my hair, and I had an eye twitch that never went away. I even had like bad gums. Like it’s amazing what stress will do to your body because it impacts like every element of you. I mean, but it was also amazing. I learned so much. I met so many incredible people who I continue to have like touch with today. Built a fantastic business. Had a really strong team. So I mean. Yeah, it was mixed. I mean, there was obviously lots of bad things, but I mean, I would be amiss if I didn’t mention, you know, all the good things that it created as well.

Tommy Boyle  20:10  

Of course, and then you’ve also said, Kathryn, that you know the first six months after the exit were grief, and that you had to reformat your entire identity. It’s interesting that the relief led to grief. So, what was that feeling, and what did you have to go through to kind of recalibrate thereafter?

Kathryn Strachan  20:31  

Yeah, I mean, I’ve heard it with other founders as well. So, I don’t think I’m necessarily alone in this. But when you put, you know, everything into something, and when it becomes your whole being and who you are and how you identify. I mean, when your introduction goes, “Hi, I’m Kathryn Strachan, CEO of Copyhouse, you have to figure out what comes after, “Hi, I’m Kathryn Strachan. Then, who are you? And it’s a lot like going through a breakup. So, obviously, financially, it’s good. You know, financially, you benefit, but money is only one element of how we perceive the world, obviously, and for me, it was a lot like going through a breakup, but like a breakup that you knew was right for all the right reasons. You know that it’s the right move. You know you’re benefiting financially. You’re benefiting like from more time, more freedom, etc. But you still have this massive hole in your life, especially if you don’t do like a managed exit, because you go from working 7080, hours a week, so in love with something, to like zero, and then you’re like, “Whoa, what is this? And I mean, the same thing happens. I have a friend who runs ultra marathons, so she runs like 100k marathon, and like you know, she trains up for that, she’s ready for it. She does it, but then, like the week after, she’s totally bummed out. She’s like, “What am I supposed to do now? Like, I just smash this marathon, and now I have this

Tommy Boyle  21:49  

something that’s all consuming.

Kathryn Strachan  21:50  

Yeah,

Tommy Boyle  21:51  

to non-consuming, it’s it’s just

Kathryn Strachan  21:53  

massive, massive drop.

Tommy Boyle  21:55  

And yes, you’re right. A lot of sellers of businesses do experience that to to some degree or other. Thereafter, I suppose when you gathered yourself, you could have built another agency, maybe, but you went on and

Kathryn Strachan  22:06  

only if I wanted to get divorced.

Tommy Boyle  22:08  

Yes, indeed. Oh my goodness! If

Kathryn Strachan  22:12  

I said to my husband three months later, yes, oh yeah, I’m going to start another agency.

Tommy Boyle  22:16  

Yes.

Kathryn Strachan  22:16  

Oh yes,

Tommy Boyle  22:17  

that was not going to happen. No, very good, very good, very honest, very honest. So you went and wrote a book instead, and you became a fractional CMO.

Kathryn Strachan  22:28  

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I enjoy being involved in businesses, and you know, helping them to grow and scale, which is what my book’s all about. You know, I I really enjoy that still, but I’m glad to not have the level of responsibility of payroll of you know having sales targets that you absolutely have to hit if you want to feed your team if you want to grow your business, you know I’m responsible for sales targets as like a fractional CMO. But it’s kind of the difference between babysitting your niece who you absolutely adore and having your own child, like you know, you’re not gonna feel the highs and lows of your niece’s development journey as acutely as like her parents are, obviously. But you’re still gonna like care for her and never let anything bad happen to her. And it’s kind of the same as being a fractional CMO. You care a lot about your clients. You don’t want anything bad to happen to them. You want to see them grow and thrive, and you know ultimately succeed. But at the end of the day, you get to go home and go to bed.

Tommy Boyle  23:29  

Very good. Yeah, no, I understand that, and and and well said. Just in relation to the AI space, because obviously AI is fascinating to all of us, and it’s infiltrating our daily lives at a rate of knots. Is it true that you spent 400 hours training your own AI assistant? Is that true?

Kathryn Strachan  23:46  

Oh yeah, probably way more than that now. I mean, that’s probably like kind of an outdated fact now. Yeah, I’ve spent a lot of time training Maven, who’s my my AI assistant.

Tommy Boyle  23:56  

You talk about AI needing trust at its core. So you know how are the people that you’re advising and and the the business people that you’re advising how are they getting the AI kind of speed versus responsibility balance that you speak about?

Kathryn Strachan  24:12  

Yeah, well I mean AI is used in my workflow for like pretty much everything that I do, but at the end of the day I’m still responsible for anything that is delivered to the client. So it’s not like I have an AI app where my client is directly engaging only with the AI app and and not with myself. So you know I do think that that’s the right balance with AI is you know somebody needs to be responsible for those decisions and it’s kind of like having you know a junior employee. You’re not going to like have your junior employee do your investor deck, not check any of the numbers, not looking at any of it and pass it on to investor, and then when the investor questions it, goes, “I don’t know, my junior employee did it. Like obviously, you’re not going to do that. So, I mean, how you should use AI is very similar to how you train a junior employee. You should brief it. You should give it all the context, all the information that it needs to do a good job, but then you need to thoroughly check. It actually produces so that then when you give something from your desk, you’re taking full responsibility for it. So I mean, I use AI in pretty much everything that I do, but it’s never used unchecked. And I mean, I’m not building an AI company, so it’s not you know used in a pure sense without any human intervention. And I think for most people, that’s really the ideal of how it should be used. It’s different, of course. If you have like an AI financial advisor, people know that they’re chatting directly only to an AI tool, and you know that’s very clear. That’s obviously a different situation than like most workflows, but most workflows really should be human AI human, and you should really be responsible for what you produce. So I use it in everything I do. It makes my work a lot quicker. It makes it possible for me to remain a one-person team without needing to, you know, bring on a PA or expand further. But yeah, is definitely not used unchecked.

Tommy Boyle  25:55  

It’s well described and it’s very good advice. Thank you for that. That’s really good for a founder sitting, you know, two years out from an exit. What should they be doing right now that most people would leave until it’s too late?

Kathryn Strachan  26:08  

Yeah, I mean, I think it depends on the type of founder you are and like what kind of business you’re running. Obviously, a service and an agency basis is going to be very different than a product-based business. But I mean, if you’re thinking about exiting, you really should be getting advice from people who have exited, who know that route, who know what you need to do to prepare, and be putting those works and those things in place now. Because it, I mean, to wait until you’re ready to exit and then try to do all of it would be a nightmare. You know, the easiest thing is to build the systems and processes and documents, and you know everything that you need in place now as you grow, as you scale, and have it ready for when you do exit. Then to wait till you’re ready to exit, and then try to like circumvent and like redo all of that. So I mean, if you’re thinking about exiting, I definitely recommend speaking to an advisor. Our advisors were priceless.

Tommy Boyle  27:03  

And what would you tell a founder who’s terrified of selling the business that will mean losing their identity? Given what you went through, what would you advise them now?

Kathryn Strachan  27:11  

Well, I mean, you don’t have to sell. Some people have like lifestyle businesses or legacy businesses, or sell it into their team, and then their team continue to run it, and they continue to be in place. I mean, my journey does not have to be everybody else’s journey. So, I mean, I guess I would start with what is it that you really want and that you really want to achieve. And if you do really want to sell and you do really want to exit, I guess just be ready for it. You know, be ready to go through the what happens after you do, and you know, speak to some of the people who’ve been there before and have a plan in place and a support network. I mean, my husband is one of the most incredible people in the entire world, and he was 110% there for me afterwards. You know, through everything. You know, you need somebody like that with you.

Tommy Boyle  27:56  

Would you say, Captain, that? And again, this is-I don’t know the answer to this-but would you say that, given your experience that it may have been better, albeit the pressure you were on that was unsustainable, it may still have been better. Maybe it would be good advice to some sellers that a step down whereby they actually do an earnout over a period of months would be easier to come to terms with the fact that that this is no longer their baby and that they will. It gives them time then to recalibrate and create a new sense of purpose for themselves.

Kathryn Strachan  28:25  

Yeah, I mean that could work for some people for sure. For me, I definitely made the right choice. For some people, it’d be difficult for them to work for somebody who owns your business because when you sell it, you no longer own it. So you know you may still have stocks and shares in it, but you’re not going to be able to, you know, call all the shots like you used to. You’re not going to have the control of it, and I think for some people that would be quite a difficult pill to swallow as well. It’s almost like you know somebody coming in and taking over your household and being like, no, this is how we now do it, and you have to like go along with that. You know, you if they really want to do something, if you’re only a 49% even if you’re 49% shareholder, and but they really want something like you don’t have the majority there to make it go your way. So I mean, if you can deal with that, it might be an easier transition. I mean, for me, I was in a point in my life where I didn’t want to work for somebody else at my company, but I also, you know, needed to not be there anymore. I mean, I ran it hard, and I ran it as hard as I could for as long as I could. But when I was done, I was done, and I’m kind of one of these people that, like, you know, I’ll love you completely and wholeheartedly, but like, when we’re done, we’re done. So I, I’m glad I made the decision I did, but yeah, I mean, for some people it might be an easier transition. They should be aware of both both options. They should be aware of both pros and cons. But yeah, I mean, it could be.

Tommy Boyle  29:52  

I think what you achieved in the period of time that you ran it was remarkable. The numbers that you were hitting from an employment point of view, from a sales revenue point of view. And you did all that during COVID as well. It’s quite remarkable. You should be really, really proud of what you achieved. Also, I think very commendable in how you exited the business because you made the right decisions for the right reasons, which was to protect your own health and to protect the nature of your family and the people that are in it. I think that’s been really, really powerful. Looking back, or just today, is there anything you regret about the process of selling it, or how you sold it, or when? Is there anything that you regret in all of that, and said, “Yeah, despite all that, but haven’t said that. If I had another twist at it, I might have done this.

Kathryn Strachan  30:35  

Yeah, I mean, I really miss my head of ops. You know, he stayed with the business, obviously, and I didn’t, and that naturally meant that, like, we needed to stop talking as much as we were talking. I mean, we were talking every single second of every single day. We were incredibly close, but you know, in order to let go of the agency, I almost had to let go of him, and I probably miss him the most of everything. So, I mean, I guess I don’t know what other option there would have been because the way that my life went and the way that his was going meant that we needed to also, you know, kind of break up. You know, if I could change one thing and still have my current situation be my current situation, it would be that I still had him.

Tommy Boyle  31:19  

Very good, Kathryn. It’s been a real pleasure having you here today. Thank you for your honesty and telling us about what selling CopyHouse actually cost you and what it actually gave you. It’s been very interesting talking to you. I think you’ve given great insights in what it’s like to run a business, and that it’s not always glamorous as people make it out. And I think people listening will resonate with a lot of what you said and give them plenty of food for thought. I wish you continued success and sincerely thank you for taking the time to join me today.

Kathryn Strachan  31:50  

Thank you for having me. It’s been a pleasure to be here.

Tommy Boyle  31:53  

That’s it for this episode of the Business Answers podcast. Until the next time, take care.

VO  31:59  

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