What It Really Takes to Build & Exit a Multi Million £ Brand by 33
Over the past few months, I’ve been picking the brains of one of my oldest friends, Jonny Teeling, about his journey building & exiting a £50M eCommerce brand.
I’ve known Jonny for over 20 years, and even back then, it was clear he wasn’t like most 16 year olds. At 36, he’s still in a league of his own. An entrepreneurial powerhouse with a rare mix of business acumen, opportunity-spotting instinct, and wisdom well beyond his years. Despite his success, he remains as grounded and modest as ever.
In this interview, I aimed to ask questions that would be most useful to budding entrepreneurs and those in the eCommerce space. It’s a deep dive into business, opportunity, and the mindset that sets him apart
It’s well worth a read…enjoy!
1. From Idea to Exit: How’s it done?
Q: You’ve successfully built and sold multiple ecommerce businesses - can you take us through the journey from identifying a business idea to scaling it and ultimately selling to a PE (Private Equity Firm)? What were the standout moments along the way?
A:
That’s a big question with a lot to unpack. We’ll do our best, but some of these are probably big enough topics in their own right.
Everything I’ve done has been with my co-founder, Will, so I’ll stick with we/us throughout. That’s probably a point in itself - if you’re starting something, make sure you’re either happy to go it alone or find a co-founder who complements your skill set. Will and I have pretty opposite strengths, which fit together really well and I’m pretty sure we’re yet to properly disagree on anything!
Finding the Right Idea
How we identify business ideas has evolved massively over time. Early on, our approach was… let’s call it enthusiastic opportunism - we’d spot something that seemed to be working, often from another country, and we’d jump straight into building our own, improved version. There wasn’t much overthinking, just a bias toward action, which was probably our biggest asset at the time. It meant we could spin up multiple ideas quickly and see which ones had legs.
Of course, the flip side of that approach is we sometimes found ourselves quite deep into an idea before realising the unit economics were quietly trying to kill us. Or we’d discover a structural flaw we couldn’t see from the outside looking in. Nothing humbles you faster than building something you’re sure will work… until it doesn’t.
The biggest cost of that “just go” approach wasn’t even the money - it was opportunity cost. Every time we went all-in on one idea, it meant we weren’t working on others that might have been a better fit. Over time, we evolved into being a bit more scientific upfront - testing not just product-market fit, but long-term sustainability before committing.
Pre-Validation Through Creative Testing
One of the biggest unlocks for us was building test brands before we even had stock. We’d spin up a full brand identity - website, CGI products, even social feeds - and run Facebook ads to see how much interest we could generate. If the numbers hit certain thresholds (CAC, repeat rate potential, etc.), only then would we go all-in on actually building the brand. That shift saved us a fortune in bad launches and made sure we were only chasing ideas with real upside.
Our First Big Hit
Our first real success was a tea brand inspired by one we saw in Australia that wasn’t available in Europe. We built our own version, improved the product and branding, and thanks to being super early on influencer marketing, we grew it fast - eventually far bigger than the brand we originally saw. That one hit £20m revenue with £6m EBITDA, which was great - but we learned an important lesson: repeat rates matter.
Even with great margins and insanely low early CAC, the business was harder to exit than we expected because the repeat rate was decent, not spectacular - which isn’t what strategic buyers are looking for.
Learning What Buyers Actually Care About
That experience fundamentally changed how we approached the next brand. From day one, we weren’t just thinking about how to grow it, but how to make sure it was exactly what future buyers would want - strong repeat rates, clean supply chain, great margins, and being in a sector where acquisitions were already happening regularly. There’s no point building something amazing if no one’s buying businesses like ours when we’re ready to sell (unless obviously you intend to keep the brand).
The Exit Process (Spoiler: It’s Wild)
The actual sale process is honestly a topic worthy of its own post. We think a lot of founders — ourselves included the first time — assume if you build a good business, selling it will be straightforward. It’s really not. Even with all the numbers in our favour, it’s a psychological and emotional rollercoaster — but also, hands down, one of the most exhilarating rides you’ll ever take.
2. What really matters when it comes to branding?
Q: What do you think separates a brand that truly connects with customers?
A:
Firstly, there are loads of copycat brands out there – and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Sneak wasn’t the first energy drink aimed at gamers or creators to hit the market. But we took our time to really understand our customer. A big part of that was asking: where do our customers actually spend their time?
We weren’t trying to target a generic gamer through traditional media channels. Instead, we wanted to reach them where they already were – and for us, that meant Twitch. A lot of gamers stream and play live on the platform. It was difficult at first to get our product in front of them, but we realised something important: a lot of smaller streamers really look up to the big guys – the ones with millions of followers.
Now, we were never going to work with those big names in the early days. They were too expensive, and honestly, gaming is a loyal but pretty fickle community. So instead, we decided to support the smaller streamers. We sponsored them, we paid them, and in doing so, we earned a reputation for giving back to the community – not just trying to sell to them.
We didn’t get an immediate return on that investment. But what it did do was position Sneak as a brand that was part of the gaming world, not just trying to take from it. People trusted us early on because they saw we genuinely cared.
Another big one: be active in the community you’re working in.
Don’t just say you care about your customers – show it. We hosted pop-up events, got involved in gaming meetups, did things that weren’t purely focused on return on ad spend or direct ROI. Like I said before, it’s about actually being part of the space you’re trying to serve.
When we started to scale, we moved into limited product drops.
We’d announce a new product on a Thursday, launch it on a Friday, and it would sell out fast – we’re talking hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of product sold in a matter of minutes.
But with that scale came challenges, especially around customer service. When you’re doing 15,000 orders in a single minute, it’s no small task to get every one of those out on time. Especially if people have paid extra for next-day delivery – which a lot of them did.
One launch in particular, we took next-day shipping payments from thousands of customers. You’d qualify for free shipping if you hit a certain spend, but if you wanted next-day, it was about £5.95 or £6. We collected all that money…and then DPD completely messed up.
Now, when people are buying a limited drop and paying for next-day, they want it the next day. That’s the whole point. We ended up with around £40k worth of next-day shipping that didn’t get fulfilled.
Most brands would have sent an apology email with a tracking link, maybe said it was out of their hands. But we didn’t. We refunded every single customer their next-day delivery cost – no questions asked.
And that moment genuinely put us on the map for customer service. The conversation on social media flipped overnight – it went from “Where the fuck is my order?” to “Holy shit, they actually refunded me.” That trust and loyalty showed up big time on future launches.
And finally: just do the basics really well.
It sounds obvious, but the brand has to look good. No cutting corners. We finessed every detail – every bit of packaging was polished and thought through to stand out. Every piece of content had to be solid. We had this motto in the office: “Good enough’s not good enough.”
Me and Will – the other founder – would personally sign off everything before it went out. I think you can tell pretty quickly which brands have that standard and which ones just slap a label on, set a price, stick a Facebook ad up, and hope for the best.
3. Growth Strategies: What Moves the Needle?
Q: Once a business is up and running, scaling can be the real challenge. What have been your most effective growth strategies—whether it’s marketing, product expansion, or partnerships? And what’s one growth tactic that worked surprisingly well?
A:
We’ve always found that being early on marketing initiatives is where we’ve had our biggest wins. It lets us exploit the sweet spot where cost is low, and value is sky-high. Let me give you a couple of examples.
The first time we really nailed this was in 2013 and it pretty much happened by accident. Instagram was about 3 years old and still relatively nascent with no links in bios, no real ads. We had launched our tea brand, ticking along at £2-3k a day in sales, when one evening we spotted something intriguing in a fitness account’s bio: “Message for paid posts.”
This sounds obvious now, but back then, it was like discovering fire. We messaged what turned out to be an 18-year-old kid running an account with 300k followers and asked how much a post would cost. He sent back a PayPal address and said, ”$10. Just send the caption and image.”
We sent the money and thought nothing of it. The post was set to go live at 7:30 PM. That night, I had 5-a-side footy, left my phone in the car, and when I came back… absolute chaos. Orders were flying in, all from that single post. That $10 turned into around £10k in sales.
Needless to say, we doubled down. We locked in hundreds of accounts with exclusive deals, built a structured posting schedule, and scaled the brand to £20M revenue within 2-3 years. I’d argue we were one of the first brands to do this at scale on Instagram. Looking back, I wish I had been more prepared and used this once in a lifetime arbitrage for a brand with more staying power… but I can’t complain!
We kept running this strategy all the way up the chain, eventually becoming the first brand globally to strike a marketing deal on Instagram with the Kardashians/Jenners (cringe I know but back then they were printing money for brands.)
Fast forward to 2018 and influencer marketing was completely oversaturated. By then, launching a brand with that as the core strategy was throwing money away. Our new brand, Sneak Energy, was built for the online gaming community, which meant Twitch (where gaming influencers stream live to massive audiences) was key.
But here’s the problem: nobody knew who we were. We sent hundreds of emails, LinkedIn’s, Instagram DMs, even spammed their agents - nothing. No one would give us the time of day.
Then, we spotted something interesting. On Twitch, fans can donate money to streamers along with a message that pops up on-screen. Every time a donation comes in, an alert sounds, and 9 times out of 10, the streamer acknowledges it live.
That was our in.
Most donations were in the $5-10 range. So, we started donating $50 with messages like “Love your stuff - check your email” or “Would love to work together - check DMs” with our brand name as the username.
Before long, we had a roster of 300+ gaming influencers drinking our product live in front of millions of viewers. It gave us the credibility we needed and cemented Sneak Energy as a core brand in the gaming community.
In summary, scour the web, look where no one else is looking, act fast, and sometimes, $10 and a bit of luck is all you need.”
5. Advice for Selling to PE Investors?
Q: You’ve sold businesses to Private Equity investors - what are they actually looking for in an eCommerce business? What are the key metrics or signals that make them willing to invest or acquire?
A:
That’s a big question - and there are a lot of variables involved.
One of the biggest ones is timing. That might sound a little outside the scope of what makes a brand attractive to a private equity (PE) investor specifically, but it’s actually a big part of what makes a brand sellable in the first place. Timing and idea are absolutely everything.
Your brand needs to be riding a trend that’s happening right now - but not just a seasonal spike or a flash-in-the-pan moment. We’re talking about long-term macro trends.
For example, after certain regulations and bans around sugar came in, we started seeing a huge macro trend toward sugar-free products. So even smaller brands that were doing well in that space suddenly had a clear growth path going up against the big players. That’s the kind of long-term consumer shift PE funds look at when they’re assessing categories.
When it comes to what PE is actually looking for in an eCommerce brand, it’s a mix.
Sometimes they’re actively on the hunt. But more often, the best brands naturally stand out.
At a fundamental level, though, the first thing they look at is financials.
Growth rate is a key indicator, but again, this really depends on timing. Take 2021, for example it was a hot period for M&A (mergers and acquisitions). There was a lot of money in PE, and a lot of assets were being snapped up that, frankly, wouldn’t get sold today.
Back then, it was “grow at all costs” - the bottom line didn’t matter, the belief was: we’ll make profit later.
But now, because some of those acquisitions haven’t performed well, PE funds have become more cautious. They want to see sustainable growth and profitability.
If you want to command a top-end multiple right now, you’re probably looking at needing around 50% year-on-year growth - and you need to be profitable. Especially in eCommerce.
It’s a different story if you’re selling to a trade buyer.
Take Unilever, they’ve been quite inquisitive recently. They’ve picked up brands like Wild (deodorant) and Dr. Squatch. Trade buyers are usually a bit less bothered about profitability, because they can plug the operations into their existing systems and create efficiencies through synergies.
But PE funds? They want to see a clear profit path now.
So the first thing they’ll do is go deep into your numbers. Then they’ll look at your leadership team - your C-suite. Who’s the CEO? The CFO? Have you got a solid handle on your finances and marketing?
If you’re an owner-managed business and you’re looking to exit, one of the first things you should be doing is building out a proper management team. In most PE deals, you sell a portion of the business, and you might not be incentivised to stick around long term. They don’t want to be left with an asset that has no one to run it.
Next up: marketing metrics.
They’ll want to know things like: are you profitable on the first order? If not, how long does it take to get profitable from a new customer?
LTV to CAC (lifetime value to customer acquisition cost) was the buzzphrase back in 2021 — and while it’s still important, LTV is notoriously tricky to calculate. It often relies on arbitrary formulas. At the time, a 3:1 ratio was considered strong. I’ve been out of that space for a little while, so I’m not 100% sure what the benchmark is today — but the principle still holds.
They’ll also look at your business fundamentals.
If you stepped away, would the business keep ticking with the management team in place?
What does the competitive landscape look like? Do you have a moat? Are you protected in your category, or could a nimble startup - or worse, a big corporation - come in and replicate your model overnight?
Then there’s tech dependency. If your business is entirely reliant on, say, Facebook Ads - and if the algorithm changes - does your entire revenue model collapse?
So yeah, there’s a lot they’ll look at. It’s not one-size-fits-all.
But if your brand is growing and profitable, that’s the best place to start. The rest will come out in due diligence - and that’s where you’ll find out whether you’re going to get the deal over the line.
6. Biggest Lessons from Failure & Success
Q: Can you share one of your biggest failures in business, what you learned from it and how it shaped your future decisions & mentality?
A:
My first real ‘home run’ in eCommerce was a brand called Bootea as i mentioned earlier.
I launched it when I was 23. The business took off really quickly - Year 1 we did £1M in revenue, Year 2: £4M, Year 3: £9M and by Year 4 we were at £20M.
It was incredibly profitable. On that £20M revenue, we were doing about £6M EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Tax, Depreciation and Amortisation).
At 27, I honestly had no idea what I was doing - I was just happy to be making good money. I didn’t know anything about M&A or private equity. It hadn’t even occurred to me that people bought businesses. It just wasn’t on my radar.
Then a good friend of mine, who works in corporate finance - you know, the people who help sell companies - asked how the business was going. When I told him, he said, “You’ve got a company doing £6M EBITDA, it could be worth £60M+.”
And I thought, Fucking hell… let’s try and sell it.
The problem was, the business wasn’t built to be sold.
We had no management team - it was still just the founders running it day to day. We weren’t keeping proper records. Our accounts weren’t by the book. Me and Will were still putting personal expenses through the business, taking big dividends to buy houses… it was chaos, really.
So by the time I’d met with advisers and gone to market, Bootea had pretty much peaked.
It was a faddy product - a weight-loss tea - and those kinds of products usually have short life cycles. They blow up quickly, everyone gives them a go, some get decent results, and then naturally, people move on to the next big thing.
So while we’d been growing rapidly, all of a sudden we weren’t. We weren’t declining yet, but we’d plateaued - and I was in the market trying to sell a business that was effectively on its way down.
I thought it would be an easy sale - I mean, £20M revenue and £6M profit - that’s rare.
But the reality was very different.
Because we had no proper team. Because we didn’t have a handle on our marketing spend. Because the accounts were a mess. And because the brand had started to lose momentum — nobody wanted to touch us.
We did get a couple of lowball offers, but they never materialised.
I did eventually sell Bootea (about two years later) but by then it was through a more traditional, drawn-out process. And while we got a decent result, and managed to take a good amount of money out in a tax-efficient way, I still see it as a failure.
I should’ve been able to sell it for a lot more. But I didn’t know what I was doing.
That experience taught me a huge lesson: if I’m ever in that position again, I want to be ready to sell at any moment. That means having everything in order - proper accounts, advisors in place, structure, process, the lot.
So when Sneak made its first £10, I did it all differently.
The accounts were watertight. We brought in corporate finance advisors within six months of starting the business. I was having conversations with potential buyers two years before I was even thinking about selling - letting them know what I was building and what was coming.
Sneak was conceived, launched, scaled, and sold — all within 3.5 years — for over £50M.
And that sale? That was only possible because of the lessons I learned from the Bootea experience.
7. #1 Tip For First-Time Entrepreneurs
Q: If you were starting from scratch today with no money and no contacts, what’s the first thing you’d do? And what’s one piece of advice you wish you had when you started?
A:
Sitting here now, I wouldn’t say I’ve got one specific business idea in mind, like “I’m going to build this” or “I’m going to build that.” A lot of people would probably say they’d start something in AI or whatever’s trending - but that’s not really how I operate.
My career, effectively, has been built on being a bit of a pest on the internet.
I’d grab my laptop, lock myself in a room for a week, and just start digging.
I’d scour the internet, looking for brands or businesses that were doing well and I’d try to find something that seemed attractive to me.
Say it was in food and beverage, I’d jump onto Google or even ChatGPT and start researching things like typical margins in that category. From there, I’d break down the makeup of the business:
“Okay, they’re selling this for £35. I know the margins in this space are probably around X, net margin maybe around Y.”
Then I’d go to the Facebook Ads Library and check out what kind of ads they’re running. I’d also make sure they were running on Shopify.
And I’ve got a little hack for that.
If they’re on Shopify, I’d actually go and place an order and hope their order numbers aren’t scrambled. A lot of Shopify stores still use sequential order numbers, so if I placed an order on a Tuesday at 3pm and the order number was #350, and then the next day at the same time the order number was #400 - I’d know they’re doing about 50 orders a day.
If their average order value is £35, then I’ve got a rough idea of their daily revenue.
That’s how I’d figure out if a business ticked a lot of boxes. And from there, I’d ask: is this replicable? And more importantly - can I do it better?
That’s how Bootea started.
I saw a tea brand in Australia. They were doing about half a million a month. They didn’t ship to the UK, and honestly - the product was quite shit. So I phoned a tea supplier that same afternoon. I only had about £1,000 to start that business — it wasn’t like I was throwing in hundreds of thousands or had any outside investment.
I just started. And built gradually from there.
I think too many people sit around waiting for a ‘world-beating’ idea.
They want to find a groundbreaking concept or solve some huge problem. But the truth is - a lot of those problems have already been solved. There are already businesses doing well in those spaces.
Take Sneak, for example. There were already six or seven energy drink brands in the space — and every single one of them was doing over £10M.
That doesn’t mean the people running them are some sort of geniuses. It just means they found a product that worked, figured out the margins, understood the process, reverse-engineered the business model and made it happen.
So for me, it’s less about sitting around waiting for the perfect idea and more about identifying something that works, unpacking it, and figuring out how I can do it better.
If there’s one thing to take from this interview, it’s this: don’t wait for the perfect idea. Find something that’s already working, dig deep, ask smart questions and figure out how to do it better.