Ross Williams

In July 1998, I founded Rawnet — a digital agency that grew over the following decade into one of the largest in its region, winning clients including Honda, Honeywell, Castrol, and O2.

Rawnet was profitable and award-winning. It also taught me the single most important lesson of my career: agencies have no recurring revenue. Every month begins at zero. You deliver a project, invoice it, and immediately chase the next. There is no compounding. No momentum. Just an unrelenting cycle of acquisition.

That experience — watching talented people work extraordinarily hard without ever building durable, compounding value — is what led me to the subscription model. I became focused on a single question: what happens when you build a business where revenue recurs, compounds, and grows while you sleep?

I believe credibility comes from the complete picture, not the highlight reel.

The online dating industry evolved dramatically over two decades. Consumer behaviour shifted. Competition intensified from venture-backed incumbents with access to capital we had chosen not to raise. After years of navigating an increasingly challenging landscape, Venntro's portfolio was sold to Ambervine in 2024, concluding a twenty-one-year chapter.

Building a company to $50 million in annual revenue and sustaining it for over two decades without external capital is an achievement very few founders can claim. Navigating its evolution taught me an equally valuable set of lessons about market timing, operational resilience, capital allocation, and the decisions that compound positively versus those that quietly erode value.

The leaders I work with deserve an advisor who understands both sides of the equation: the mechanics of building compounding subscription revenue at scale, and the discipline required to sustain it through market shifts, competitive pressure, and the inevitable surprises that no business plan anticipates.