An opportunity “too good to be true”

I caught the travel bug early on in my career. After quitting a short-lived career training to qualify as a chartered accountant, I spent over five years abroad as a travel rep, working my way up to the leadership level of a travel company based in the Canary Islands. 

Various roles at travel businesses followed, taking me from yachts in the Caribbean to the Alpine ski slopes. I found a knack for leadership, heading up on Travelopia’s sale to TUI Group; and for entrepreneurship, starting my own travel business during the dotcom bubble, which reached £10m in annual revenue before its acquisition. 

Through all this, I was introduced to TrustedHousesitters, meeting founders Andy Peck and Rachel Martin. What started as an advisory role quickly became an opportunity to run the business as CEO. 

At first, the business seemed too good to be true. As a pet owner, you can have your pet looked after for £100 a year. And as a pet lover, you can travel the world and stay in these fantastic homestays for £100 a year, with the added benefit of pet companionship. 

But there was no catch. TrustedHousesitters had done more than just reach product market fit—they were a category creator, a truly unique operator with a unique business model that was highly differentiated. In the end, it was an easy decision to commit to joining full time.

Capturing post-COVID tailwinds

The immediate shock quickly turned into a huge opportunity. Strong continuity in revenue, and the fact we didn’t need to do any marketing, meant we could weather the pandemic without needing to take on growth capital. Not only this, but we saw that the tailwinds from COVID would be good for us.

For one, pet ownership was increasing at a rapid rate—in the UK alone, around 3.2 million homes acquired a pet during lockdown. This was combined with a trend towards pet humanisation—consumers’ increasing closeness to their pets meaning they weren’t happy to leave them with any old stranger. Thirdly, when travel did recover, people would want to travel in a more purposeful and sustainable way. 

So really, any pause in activity gave us an opportunity to focus on our priorities as a business. We had work to do on our pricing model, putting in place new pricing tiers that are still in place today. This allowed us to offer and capture more value from our members, seeing average order values going up as new members subscribed to additional premium features. This gave us a much better tolerance of CAC for when we were going back out into market. 

Then we realised we needed cash in order to effectively capture the COVID tailwinds once demand returned. We went out to raise our $10m Series A, the right amount of growth capital that would allow us to make the most of these tailwinds and capture new markets. The results speak for themselves—membership hit 100,000 in 2022 , and by the end of 2023, reached 200,000. Revenues in 2023 were four times what they were the year I started. 

Leading TrustedHousesitters towards a buyout

With the wind in our sails, we had an important strategic decision to make towards the end of 2022—to Series B or not to Series B? Against global economic uncertainty, particularly in the UK, it became apparent that a Series B was probably not on the table. Instead, we were looking at an acquisition or management buyout. 

The first thing we wanted to do was demonstrate that there’s a profitable business model here. You can afford to be operating at a loss at pre-seed, but in today’s market, profitability is really key if you want to raise any investment from Series A onwards. So we throttled back on CAC, developing a new scaling model that meant being more intelligent in growth—not just going for land grabs, but being laser targeted. 

In early 2023, we started looking for our next investor. We travelled around a lot, going to private equity houses on both sides of the Atlantic to meet investors, talk about the business, and gauge interest. We got a great response, and quickly built up a group of interested parties who we started giving quarterly updates to. That meant when it came to October, and we were ready to start the negotiation process, we had closely engaged investors. 

Mayfair quickly came out on top in these negotiations. They had a great track record of investing in businesses at the crossroads of tech and consumer, having taken stakes in the likes of OVO Energy, Epic Games, and Seraphine, to name a few. We saw a great cultural fit with them—they didn’t just want to throw money at us to supercharge growth, they really got the business, and they understood that we are purpose driven and care as much about the people and the planet as well as profit. 

More so than capital, we saw a huge amount to gain from working with them. Despite our team being mostly UK based, the US is our biggest market—and Mayfair has great local US expertise that we could tap into. They also have a strong arm of consulting experts, where we felt we could tap into knowledge on marketing as well as an AI opportunity around algorithmic matching that we’re working on. 

Don’t underestimate the time it takes to find the right investor for your business—because it really is worth taking the time to assess fit and potential benefits beyond capital. This can be dangerous—it can take you away from the business for a stretch of time, so make sure you have robust processes (like OKRs) in place to ensure you know what’s going on in the business. 

Fresh capital and new ownership puts a renewed energy into the business, and a renewed focus into doing what we do well. Ultimately, the platform exists to make sure our members have the best possible experience. For pet owners, you feel happy that your pet is being looked after by someone who is doing it for love rather than money. For pet sitters, you get an incredible experience of pet companionship and a unique homestay rolled into one. 

A recent survey revealed that 97% of members say that TrustedHousesitters has improved their lives. This is proof enough for me that we’re getting something right.