2 Commas: The $multi-million exit show with Josh Comrie

Josh Comrie
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Welcome to 2 Commas: The $multi-million exit show I've spent over two decades helping founders scale their businesses and achieve successful, multimillion-dollar exits. I've also achieved this myself on multiple occasions. With my experience as an entrepreneur, advisor, and investor, I’ve had the privilege of guiding companies through the highs and lows of business growth and exit strategies. Each episode will bring you the previously untold stories of entrepreneurs who have successfully scaled and exited their businesses for seven-figure (2 comma's) plus returns. You’ll hear more about the journeys, challenges, and pivotal moments that led to these transformative exits. My goal is to inform and inspire founders who are looking to scale their ventures to seven, eight or nine figures and beyond. Follow me on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/joshcomrie Download my e-book, "The Exit Factor" and sign up to receive the Business Growth Journal weekly: https://www.joshcomrie.com/the-exit-factor

  1. 1d ago

    26 years of Huffer, and what came next | Steve Dunstan | 2 Commas by Josh Comrie

    $20 and a fax machine. That's what Steve Dunstan started Huffer with. Twenty-six years later, he'd built one of New Zealand's most recognised streetwear brands, scaled it to around 200 people, survived the GFC, wrestled with a US expansion that didn't go to plan, and lost a co-founder along the way. In this one, Steve is straight about the part founders rarely admit: what happens to your identity when you and the brand become the same thing, what it takes to sell a business you built from the ground up, and how you rebuild yourself once it's gone. We get into: The $20 start and why the constraint helped$35k to over $1m in four years, no outside moneySurviving the GFC as a fashion brandWhy belonging became the thing that drove performanceThe exit after 26 years, and what came nextWould you know how to stop being the business, the day you finally sell it? Subscribe to the 2 Commas Journal Order the 2 Commas book Follow Josh on LinkedIn Connect with Steve Dunstan

    26 years of Huffer, and what came next | Steve Dunstan | 2 Commas by Josh Comrie

  2. Sep 23

    An illegal fence, an angry horse, and a billion-dollar company | 2 Commas by Josh Comrie

    In 1937 a horse kept scratching its backside on a farmer's brand new car. That horse accidentally started a company now closing in on a billion dollars a year. The farmer was Bill Gallagher. He wired the magneto off a motorcycle to his car, shocked the horse, and realised he had a business. His first electric fence was illegal, wired straight into the mains until an inspector made him rip it out, which pushed him to invent the world's first battery powered energiser. This is a solo episode on the Gallagher Group, from a Waikato shed to Buckingham Palace, British Gas, and four of the Five Eyes intelligence sites. It is one of the great New Zealand business stories and a genuine masterclass in diversification, succession, and turning what you already know into what you sell next. I get into: How the 1984 Rogernomics reforms wiped out Gallagher's farmer customer base overnightThe world-first pivot into perimeter security that saved the companyWhy the best diversifications sit where your capability meets a rising global tailwindWhy they put 10% of revenue into R&D every year, good times or badWhy they handed the CEO role to a 24-year employee, not the next GallagherSometimes the next billion dollar business is just your old invention pointed at a new problem.Subscribe to the 2 Commas Journal Order the 2 Commas book Follow Josh on LinkedIn

    An illegal fence, an angry horse, and a billion-dollar company | 2 Commas by Josh Comrie

  3. Sep 17

    Three exits, three very different endings: What fast money does to founders | 2 Commas by Josh Comrie

    Money that arrives fast doesn't fix you. It finds out who you already are. Everyone assumes building real wealth takes twenty years. These three founders didn't wait. Seeby Woodhouse registered Orcon for $29.85 at nineteen, doubled it every year for nine years, and exited at twenty-nine, then spent $18 million on property six weeks before the GFC. Keith Davison failed at five companies before Cloud Conformity went from nothing to a $120 million exit in under two and a half years, with no founder taking a salary for most of them. Joshua Parsons was a cop at seventeen, cleaning pools at twenty-seven, and had built and sold two companies by his early thirties. This best-of episode is three honest accounts of fast money and what it costs. We get into: Seeby doubling his company every year for nine years straightWhy Keith took zero salary for two and a half years before a $120m exitHow Joshua learned to sell as a cop before he ever ran a businessWhat Seeby did with millions at twenty-nine and the GFC lesson that followedWhy all three say the money was the start of the hard partGetting rich young is a skill nobody teaches you how to survive. Subscribe to the 2 Commas Journal Order the 2 Commas book Follow Josh on LinkedIn

    Three exits, three very different endings: What fast money does to founders | 2 Commas by Josh Comrie

  4. Sep 9

    3 X GM's hired but only 1 exit: How I got this wrong | Dom Sutton | 2 Commas by Josh Comrie

    Dom Sutton hired three general managers to run the business he built. Two didn't work out, and he owns most of the reasons why. Dom started Pumpt with his last paycheck, running cold calls from a tiny room next to the toilet while his two boys slept on a mattress beside his bed. He grew it into an advertising business putting 70 million items into NZ letterboxes a year. This is an unusually honest conversation about the founder-to-owner transition, the difference between delegating and abdicating, and why the lack of the right metrics let good months quietly slide into losses. He also tells the story of the toy business he bought on a lick-of-paint story that lost him a dollar a minute for two years, and how that exact disaster became StockTrim, the inventory forecasting software he now sells in 26 countries. We get into: Why two of his three GM hires failed and what he'd do differentlyDelegating vs abdicating, learned the hard wayThe $1.2 million toy business mistake and the due diligence lesson behind itHow that failure became a global SaaSWhy he walked away from selling Pumpt before finally exiting to his own GMSometimes the business you build next comes straight out of the one that nearly broke you. ⁠Subscribe to the 2 Commas Journal⁠ Order the 2 Commas book⁠ Follow Josh on LinkedIn

  5. Sep 2

    How I went from "I Think I Want to Sell" to the $$ in 81 days! | Dr. Michael Filosi | 2 Commas by Josh Comrie

    81 days from "I think I want to sell" to the money clearing. No broker. No lawyer. Dr. Michael Filosi did the whole thing himself. He sold the largest dental practice in Adelaide to private equity at 41, at a multiple well above the industry norm. Ten years earlier he'd bought it with a possum living in the wall, two chairs, and pen-and-paper appointment books, the practice nobody else wanted. He saw the busy patient base underneath the mess, took it from worst to first, and built it into a genuinely sale-ready business. That's why, when he finally decided he'd had enough, it sold at warp speed. We get into: Why the sale moved in 81 days when most deals take monthsThe buy-in structure that locked his purchase price years in advanceWhat frictionless actually means to a buyer, and how he engineered itWhy he refused to let private equity condition him down on priceThe four Ds model he used to get out of the chair and design the businessBuild it to sell long before you ever want to, and the exit takes care of itself. I'm building a community for founders serious about a real exit. Come find out what it's about, Click here to join the FREE Webinar. Follow me on LinkedIn Connect with Dr. Michael Filosi on LinkedIn

    How I went from "I Think I Want to Sell" to the $$ in 81 days! | Dr. Michael Filosi | 2 Commas by Josh Comrie

  6. Aug 27

    $100k to $10 million in four years: The cost of doing nothing else | Sarah Page | 2 Commas by Josh Comrie

    $100,000 in year one. $10 million by year four. When people ask Sarah Page how she did it, her answer makes them uncomfortable. She did nothing else. Sarah is the founder and CEO of The Kindness Collective and the 2024 New Zealander of the Year for community work. What began as a car full of pantry cans driven to a woman's refuge during the darkest period of her life is now a charity supporting over 130,000 New Zealanders a year. This is a genuinely honest conversation about total focus and what it costs. Sarah has ADHD, which she's reframed from a source of shame into her greatest asset, and she's candid about the parts most founders won't touch: the brutal shift from founder to CEO, learning to give up control, and being told she's too much. We get into: Why doing nothing but the one thing scaled the charity so fastHow ADHD makes founders 400 times more likely to start somethingThe founder to CEO identity shift and why it nearly broke herLearning to hand control to a board smarter than herThe charity misconceptions that cost real people real helpThe intensity people find uncomfortable is the same thing that built it all. 📩 Subscribe to the 2 Commas Journal → https://www.joshcomrie.com/subscribe 📖 Order the 2 Commas book → https://www.joshcomrie.com/2-commas-book-order 👤 Follow Josh on LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshcomrie/ 🔗 Connect with Sarah Page → https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahpagenz/

    $100k to $10 million in four years: The cost of doing nothing else | Sarah Page | 2 Commas by Josh Comrie

  7. Aug 19

    The non-performing salespeople weren't the problem. I was. | Rich Conway | 2 Commas by Josh Comrie

    Rich Conway spent hundreds of thousands of dollars proving he was hiring the wrong salespeople. He was wrong about that too. He was bringing in good people, then setting them up to fail with no systems, no metrics, and no structure to succeed. When he finally hired a sales manager who put that scaffolding in place, the same calibre of people started producing straight away. It's one of the more honest leadership admissions you'll hear from a founder. Rich is an introvert with imposter syndrome who built Pure SEO into the number one search agency in New Zealand, arriving here in the depths of the GFC with no friends and no family. He refused to guarantee Google rankings when every competitor did, nearly went under, then watched the market swing his way. We get into: Why his best salespeople on paper kept failing and what he owned about itThe systems that turned the same people into producersThe emotional call to let go of his best mate, who he'd hired as GMTwo exit processes that fell over and why he's glad they didHow he rebuilt the whole business around AI searchSometimes the hire isn't the problem. The setup around them is. 📩 Subscribe to the 2 Commas Journal → ⁠https://www.joshcomrie.com/subscribe⁠ 📖 Order the 2 Commas book → ⁠https://www.joshcomrie.com/2-commas-book-order⁠ 👤 Follow Josh on LinkedIn → ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshcomrie/⁠ 🔗 Connect with Rich Conway → ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/pureseo/

    The non-performing salespeople weren't the problem. I was. | Rich Conway | 2 Commas by Josh Comrie

  8. Aug 12

    By interviewing 20+ founders, she added 25% to the price! | Shivani Gupta | 2 Commas by Josh Comrie

    Most founders sell a business once, with no idea what they're doing. Shivani Gupta refused to go in blind. Before she sold her wellness business, Shivani tracked down more than 20 founders who'd already exited and asked every one of them the same questions. What did you sell for, did you use a multiple of EBIT, what would you do again, what would you never do again. She put every answer into a spreadsheet, found the three lessons that came up most often, and applied all three. It added 25% to her final sale price, with no broker. A former electrical engineer who left corporate life after a trip to Nepal, Shivani had already built the business to 10X and exited at 11X. This conversation is the closest thing to an exit strategy masterclass you'll get from someone who taught herself the whole thing. We get into: The research process that added 25% to her exitWhy squeezing every line item flows straight through to your valuationWhy she turned down a higher offer that would not give her staff contractsHow she brought her key leaders inside the sale rather than hiding itThe scaling mindset she now uses to help founders think past incremental growthThe best time to learn how to sell a business is long before you have to. 📩 Subscribe to the 2 Commas Journal → https://www.joshcomrie.com/subscribe 📖 Order the 2 Commas book → https://www.joshcomrie.com/2-commas-book-order 👤 Follow Josh on LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshcomrie/

    By interviewing 20+ founders, she added 25% to the price! | Shivani Gupta | 2 Commas by Josh Comrie
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About

Welcome to 2 Commas: The $multi-million exit show I've spent over two decades helping founders scale their businesses and achieve successful, multimillion-dollar exits. I've also achieved this myself on multiple occasions. With my experience as an entrepreneur, advisor, and investor, I’ve had the privilege of guiding companies through the highs and lows of business growth and exit strategies. Each episode will bring you the previously untold stories of entrepreneurs who have successfully scaled and exited their businesses for seven-figure (2 comma's) plus returns. You’ll hear more about the journeys, challenges, and pivotal moments that led to these transformative exits. My goal is to inform and inspire founders who are looking to scale their ventures to seven, eight or nine figures and beyond. Follow me on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/joshcomrie Download my e-book, "The Exit Factor" and sign up to receive the Business Growth Journal weekly: https://www.joshcomrie.com/the-exit-factor

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