Hi guys,
My name is Luke Rix – I’m the founder and CEO of KC Ventures – a strategic finance advisory firm focused on helping Aussie startups scale.
You may have seen me on LinkedIn cooking with my business partners at Keeping Company Tim Wearne or Ryan Miller or taking Founders on a virtual tour of the Australian venture capital ecosystem from Blackbird Ventures to Shearwater Capital to help them better understand the VC landscape.
And now, we’re in newsletter form. We decided to launch “After the cap raise with KCV” for one simple reason: I feel there’s way too much content out there about how to raise capital, but very little on what you do once you receive it to build a better business.
“After the cap raise with KCV” will focus on how Founders can make a plan to convert that capital to the ultimate goal - revenue. And it will look to draw on lessons from a community of Founders and people I speak to in the market every day who’ve been in your shoes before and are one or two steps ahead of where you’re at today.
Today, I want to go through how exactly we arrived at this moment in time: working with a great team serving 50+ clients all running high-growth startups. However, sometimes you need to go back in time before jumping to the present.
I want to take us back in time to the year 2007. People were wearing fluoro outfits to music festivals, John Howard was Prime Minister and Ministry of Sound was the soundtrack playing on most CD players (or an iPod if you were lucky!).
I was also in the final year of High School and along with two friends launched my very first business - Thrust Australia (forgive the name, I was a teenager after all).
Thrust was a clothing brand which started off selling hoodies to our friends and family in Western Sydney. My mates and I spent hours after school and on weekends, and often during school hours to the annoyance of our teachers, designing new hoodies and figuring out how to make them a reality. Merch stores weren’t a thing back then, so we had to beg and plead an industrial screen printer to lower his minimum runs from 1,000 units to 25 as that was the max we could afford for a first batch.
We launched the first hoodie just in time for winter with what the time we thought was a killer design - a massive Southern Cross on the back. This was the time when the Southern Cross was becoming a popular symbol, but before every second person had it tattooed on their body.
And to our surprise they were a wild success. The first 25 went within days and we ordered two more runs which sold equally as well. We started having visions of taking over the world and planned pop up stores at the local mall. We had more than one celebratory dinner at the restaurant of choice for 17 year olds - Sizzler.
With all the momentum behind us and money rolling in, we invested in launching our next design. We increased the order size to 50, confident they would be as popular as last time. But there was one big difference - we got rid of the Southern Cross.
And lo and behold the hoodies tanked. We couldn’t give them away, let alone make our money back. The box of them sat in my mate’s garage for years and they are probably floating around Salvos stores somewhere today.
There’s probably a bunch of lessons you could take from that story, but it’s probably no more complicated than give your customers what they want - which was for us a Southern Cross.
That was young Luke. I’ve made plenty more mistakes along the years, like every founder does. Through this fortnightly newsletter, I’m keen to highlight many I’ve made, as well as other Founders I know, so you don’t need to make the same ones.
KC Ventures Key Lessons:
✅ Unless you’re Mark Zuckerberg, your first foray into business is unlikely to be a success. But you learn a bunch of practical lessons that you take into the next one and it’s rare to make the same mistake twice.
✅ One of the hardest things I find in a startup is not letting the highs get you too high and the lows get you too low. It’s always a rollercoaster and each state is temporary. We probably dined out a bit too much on Sizzler cheese toast thinking the good times would never end!
✅ Understand cash-flow management. Betting the house on anything is rarely a good idea.
For more of this, as well as genuine insights on how to best keep your Founder journey on the right track, keep an eye on your inbox each fortnight. From direct experience scaling high-growth startups, to our close connection across clients such as Springboards, Minikai to Updoc, join us on a unique journey into what it actually takes to scale your company with success.
And remember, if you’re a Founder looking to level up your finances, feel free to drop me a DM on LinkedIn or you can reach out to me directly to [email protected].
Cheers,
Luke Rix & the KC Ventures team
