I accepted a LinkedIn connection request today. And if you know anything about me, that alone should tell you I was feeling unusually generous.

The profile looked decent. Business coach with plenty of experience. Not obviously spammy, actually sort of interesting. Against my better judgement, I figured, why not – let’s give this one a shot.

Connection accepted.

About five seconds later, the message comes in:

“Thanks for connecting. I work with entrepreneurs who want to scale, bla, bla… Out of curiosity, what challenges are you facing in your business?”

I read it. Smiled. Shook my head.

And disconnected.

Total interaction time: maybe 20 seconds. Quite possibly a new personal record for shortest LinkedIn connection ever.

The Pattern

What’s funny is – this isn’t unusual. It’s the default.

Accept a connection request and within seconds you get some version of the same script. Slight variations in wording, same underlying intent: skip context, skip curiosity, go straight to the pitch.

It’s almost impressive how consistent it is. People seem to believe that once you accept a connection, you’ve implicitly agreed to be pitched. As if clicking “accept” is some kind of green light for a templated outreach sequence.

It isn’t.

A connection is not a transaction. It’s not even a conversation yet. It’s just…proximity.

What happens next is what determines whether it becomes anything meaningful or ends 20 seconds later.

Why This Fails

It’s not the pitch itself that’s the problem. It’s what sits behind it.

If your first instinct after connecting is to sell, you’re telling me everything I need to know. You’re not paying attention. You’re not curious. You’re running a script. There’s no intent to connect, no effort to understand, no signal that a real human interaction is even desired. It’s a volume game dressed up as outreach.

There’s no curiosity about who I am, what I’ve done, or whether I even have a business that fits the narrative. No attempt to understand context. No pause to consider whether a conversation might make sense before forcing one.

Just a presumption: I must have a problem. You have the solution.

All delivered within seconds of connecting.

What makes it worse is the positioning. When this comes from someone who claims to be a business coach – someone whose job, by definition, is to understand people, ask better questions, and apply judgment – it becomes self-disqualifying.

Because if this is how you initiate a relationship, what does that say about how you actually work?

There’s nothing strategic about it. Nothing thoughtful. It’s just a sad, desperate attempt to manufacture opportunity out of thin air, without doing the one thing that might actually make it work: paying attention.

And that’s the part that’s hardest to ignore.

What Actually Works

The people worth connecting with tend to operate very differently. They don’t rush. They don’t script. And they certainly don’t assume.

They pay attention.

They take a moment to understand who they’re talking to, what that person has done, what might actually be relevant. Sometimes they don’t say anything at all at first. They observe. They engage where it makes sense. They let context build before forcing a conversation.

And when they do reach out, it feels different.

There’s signal. There’s intent. There’s usually some form of value – however small – attached to the interaction.

One of my favorite rules applies here: the best way to start a partnership is to bring gifts.

Not literal gifts. But something of value.

An insight. A thoughtful observation. A relevant introduction. A perspective that shows you’ve actually paid attention.

Something that says: I’m not here to take. I’m here to contribute.

That’s how real conversations start. Not with a pitch – but with relevance.

Closing

This is exactly why I rarely accept LinkedIn connection requests.

Not because I’m antisocial. Not because I’m uninterested. But because most of what comes next is just so predictable – and low quality.

When I do accept, I’m not looking for perfection. I’m looking for signal. A hint of awareness. A sign that there’s an actual person on the other side, not just a script running.

That’s a really low bar. And yet, it’s rarely cleared.

The irony is that the people who are actually worth connecting with don’t behave this way. They don’t rush the interaction. They don’t try to convert immediately. They understand that relationships – especially valuable ones – don’t start with extraction.

They start with attention.

And sometimes, with something as simple as a small, thoughtful gift.

The post The 20-Second LinkedIn Connection appeared first on Tomco Capital - Coaching, Advisory & Investments.

From the outside, life after an exit looks deceptively simple.

You sell the company. You gain freedom. You slow down. You enjoy the fruits of your labor. The story writes itself neatly, and people project onto it whatever version of “made it” they happen to believe in.

My experience was not like this at all. It was quieter, stranger, and far less linear.

The exit didn’t end momentum. It removed the structure that had contained it. What followed wasn’t relief so much as a prolonged recalibration – a period where the questions changed faster than the answers. The exit didn’t solve my life. It simply removed the constraints that had been organizing it for decades.

What came next unfolded slowly, unevenly, and not at all the way I would have predicted.

Year 1: Relief, Noise, and a Machine That Wouldn’t Shut Off

The first year after the exit was defined by excitement and relief – but only briefly.

There was real gratitude in finally exhaling. The pressure lifted. The stakes softened. For the first time in a long time, I didn’t wake up with a backlog of urgent decisions waiting for me. That alone felt like a gift.

But almost immediately, something else became apparent: I didn’t know how to stop.

Just a couple of months after the sale, I started another business. Not because I needed the money – that part was no longer relevant. And not because I had a particularly clear idea of what I wanted to build next. I did it because it was what I knew. For nearly thirty years, I had hustled hard. Building, fixing, pushing forward had been my default operating system. Turning it off didn’t feel like an option. At the time, it barely even felt like a choice.

Intellectually, I understood that I didn’t have to work anymore. Emotionally and behaviorally, the machine kept running. The rhythm of building, problem-solving, and momentum had been ingrained too deeply to disappear overnight. The idea of simply stopping felt foreign, almost impossible to imagine.

So I kept going.

In hindsight, that first year wasn’t really about direction. It was about inertia. About discovering that freedom without structure didn’t immediately translate into rest – it often translated into motion without clarity.

And at the time, I didn’t question it. I didn’t even recognize it as something to be questioned yet.

Year 2: Unfocused Drift and Intellectual Sprawl

If the first year was defined by inertia, the second was defined by curiosity = unchecked, fun, undisciplined curiosity.

Suddenly, everything looked interesting.

With no single operating mandate and no externally imposed constraints, my attention scattered. New ideas surfaced constantly. New industries looked compelling. New technologies promised leverage and reinvention. I was like the proverbial kid in a Lego store, surrounded by infinite pieces and convinced that I could – and maybe should – build everything.

I explored broadly. I experimented freely. I started things, paused them, revisited them, and layered new ideas on top of unfinished ones. Nothing felt obviously wrong, but very little felt anchored. Without realizing it at the time, I was substituting motion for direction.

The absence of urgency was liberating, but it also removed a natural filter. When everything is optional, discernment becomes the real work – and I hadn’t learned how to apply it yet. So I kept playing. Building. Testing. Tinkering. Always moving, rarely committing.

In retrospect, that year wasn’t wasteful. It was exploratory. But it was also unfocused. Intellectual sprawl crept in quietly, disguised as curiosity and experimentation. I was learning a lot, but not necessarily moving toward anything coherent.

At the time, it felt like freedom. Only later did I recognize it for what it was: a necessary but messy phase of recalibration, where breadth preceded clarity.

Year 3: Fading Relevance and Finding a Voice

By the third year, something subtler began to happen.

It wasn’t dramatic. There was no single moment I could point to. But gradually, unmistakably, my professional relevance started to fade. The calls slowed. The steady flow of emails thinned out. Zoom invites, once routine, became occasional. Then rare.

No one pushed me out. No bridges were burned. I simply wasn’t needed anymore.

That realization landed more quietly than I expected, but it lingered longer. For decades, my identity had been tightly coupled to being in the middle of things – making decisions, solving problems, being relied upon. Without that gravitational pull, something felt oddly weightless.

It was around this time that I started writing.

Not because I’m particularly good at it – I’m not – and not because I had ambitions of becoming a writer. I started writing because I still had things I wanted to say. Ideas, observations, and experiences that didn’t seem to have a natural outlet anymore. Writing became a way to stay in the conversation when the conversation no longer came to me automatically.

It was also a way to test whether my voice still mattered.

That question sat just beneath the surface for much of that year. Was I still relevant if I wasn’t running something full-time? Did my experience still have weight if I wasn’t attached to a title or a growing org chart? These weren’t existential crises, but they were real, and they were new.

In hindsight, Year 3 wasn’t about output or experimentation. It was about identity. About separating who I was from what I had built, and learning – slowly – that relevance doesn’t always announce itself the way it used to.

Sometimes, you have to claim it quietly.

Year 4: Clarity, Selectivity, and Finally Feeling at Home in It

By the fourth year, something finally shifts.

There’s no dramatic breakthrough, no announcement, no sense of having “figured it all out.” Instead, the noise recedes. The signal becomes clearer. The things that actually matter begin to stand out on their own, without effort.

I know now what’s important to me – and just as importantly, what isn’t.

That clarity takes time to earn. It doesn’t arrive through hustle or experimentation alone. It comes from letting enough things fall away that the remaining ones can be seen properly. The unfocused drift of earlier years gives way to something quieter and far more satisfying.

I still feel like the kid in the Lego store. The curiosity hasn’t gone anywhere. The desire to build, experiment, and create is very much alive. The difference is that now I have a plan. I don’t reach for every box. I don’t feel compelled to try everything. I choose deliberately.

I say no far more often than I say yes.

I still do meaningful work. I still surround myself with exceptional entrepreneurs and builders. I still serve on Boards. I still experiment and stay intellectually engaged. But I do it without pressure. Without the grind. Without the sense that every idea needs to be pursued immediately or every opportunity must be captured before it disappears.

If something doesn’t get done today, that’s fine. It will still be there tomorrow.

For the first time in my professional life, everything happens on my time, my schedule, and my priorities. Not because I’ve lost ambition, but because I’ve refined it.

And sitting in that place – after years of recalibration – feels better than I would have expected.

It feels earned.

What Actually Changed – And What Didn’t

Looking back across those four years, the most meaningful changes weren’t external. They were internal, structural, and largely invisible from the outside.

What changed was how I relate to work. I no longer confuse activity with progress, or breadth with ambition. I don’t feel compelled to manufacture urgency or chase momentum for its own sake. Time, once scarce and constantly under pressure, is now something I allocate deliberately. Focus has replaced volume. Precision has replaced accumulation.

What also changed is my tolerance. I’m far less willing to accept unnecessary complexity, misaligned incentives, or work that expands simply because it can. Scale is no longer a default aspiration. It’s a tool – useful in the right context, destructive in the wrong one.

What didn’t change is just as important.

I’m still a builder. Still curious. Still intellectually restless. I still enjoy hard problems, thoughtful people, and the quiet satisfaction of designing systems that work. I still care deeply about creating things that are well-constructed and durable – businesses, tools, relationships, and ways of working.

The difference now is selectivity.

I don’t need to prove anything through motion anymore. I don’t need to fill my calendar to justify my time. I don’t need to say yes to remain relevant. The work I choose to do is enough on its own.

Four years after the exit, life hasn’t become simpler in the way people imagine. But it has become clearer. And that clarity – earned slowly, unevenly, and without shortcuts – has turned out to be far more valuable than the freedom I thought I was chasing in the beginning.

That, more than anything else, is what life after the exit actually looks like.

The post Life After the Exit (4 Years In) appeared first on Tomco Capital - Coaching, Advisory & Investments.

Rather than pursuing growth for its own sake, we focused on strengthening the foundations of the firm: clarifying where we deploy energy, which assets deserve renewed investment, and how Tomco Capital should evolve as a long-term operator and builder of technology businesses.

At its core, Tomco Capital exists to launch, invest in, and operate successful SaaS and technology ventures. That mandate remains unchanged. What did change in 2025 was our level of precision – in deciding what to scale, what to pause, and what to redesign.

The year delivered several important signals.

ERPlingo crossed a critical validation threshold, demonstrating sustained daily usage and global relevance within the SAP ecosystem. Medicus, after a period of strategic pause, revealed renewed opportunity through inbound corporate interest — prompting a decision to reposition and relaunch the business in 2026 as an enterprise-grade BLS compliance platform for companies. Other assets, including Viral Followers and Daily Gratitude, remain in the portfolio as dormant options – intact, operational, and awaiting the right operating system and leadership to unlock their next phase.

Alongside the portfolio, Tomco Capital continued to support a small number of founders through advisory and coaching engagements. While advisory is not the core business of the firm, it remains an important cornerstone – both intellectually and strategically – and a meaningful way to compound experience across ventures.

2025 was not about acceleration.
It was about alignment.

Tomco Capital exits the year with a clearer mandate, a more coherent portfolio, and renewed conviction around where to invest time, capital, and attention in 2026.

Portfolio Overview & Business Unit Performance

2025 was a year where the portfolio didn’t expand outward, but it revealed its true shape. Each asset under Tomco Capital clarified its role – some through traction, others through renewed strategic relevance, and a few through patience.

ERPlingo – From Validation to Platform Thinking

ERPlingo delivered the clearest signal of the year.

What began as a focused solution for SAP professionals matured into a widely used platform with real operational gravity. Over the course of 2025, ERPlingo consistently exceeded 5,000 daily active users, and on November 24th reached a peak of 531,000 unique users in a single day following the Black Friday announcement.

These numbers matter not because they are impressive in isolation, but because they reflect real, repeat usage inside professional workflows. SAP practitioners around the world are using ERPlingo to solve problems quickly and efficiently – which is ultimately the only metric that counts.

With validation firmly established, the focus now shifts. In 2026, ERPlingo moves decisively from usage growth to monetization, feature expansion, and deeper user value. The opportunity is no longer theoretical. It is operational.

Medicus – Strategic Pause, Then Purposeful Rebuild

Medicus spent much of 2025 in what we intentionally described as strategic purgatory.

The business remained operational, stable, and self-sufficient – exactly as it was designed to be – but broader shifts in the EdTech landscape, particularly the impact of AI, challenged its original model. At the same time, founder conviction waned, prompting restraint rather than forced expansion.

Late in the year, however, renewed inbound interest from corporate and institutional buyers reframed the opportunity.

As a result, Tomco Capital made a deliberate decision: Medicus will be repositioned and revitalized in 2026 as a BLS compliance platform for companies, shifting away from selling individual courses toward an enterprise-grade, audit-ready compliance solution for SMBs.

This pivot aligns Medicus with where real demand now exists – recurring, defensible, and operationally embedded compliance – and reflects a broader Tomco principle: adapt structure to reality, not nostalgia.

Viral Followers – Dormant, Not Abandoned

Although dormant, Viral Followers remains part of the Tomco Capital portfolio.

While not actively scaled in 2025, the asset continues to exist as a latent option. It is operational, intact, and available to be reactivated should the right operating system, distribution strategy, or operator emerge.

Experience has shown that timing and structure often matter more than ideas. Viral Followers will wait for both.

Daily Gratitude – Optionality with Intent

Daily Gratitude occupies a similar position.

It remains dormant by design – preserved as a clean, lightweight asset that can be redeployed when conditions align. The product speaks to a category with long-term relevance, but like other assets in this tier, it will only be reactivated under a structure that supports sustainable growth rather than distraction.

Dormancy, when intentional, is not failure.
It is discipline.

Advisory & Coaching – Depth, Leverage, and Precision

In parallel with operating our own portfolio companies, Tomco Capital continues to engage in advisory work with founders and leadership teams – not as a scaled service business, but as a high-leverage extension of our operating expertise.

This work takes two distinct forms.

The first is long-term founder coaching, deliberately capped at four clients at any given time. These engagements are personal, intensive, and outcome-driven. In 2025, one such engagement concluded with a successful exit, ahead of schedule and on strong terms. As a result, two coaching slots open heading into 2026.

The second – and increasingly important – form is focused advisory sprints.

Rather than open-ended consulting, Tomco Capital has been refining a set of time-bound, outcome-oriented advisory formats designed to address specific leverage points inside SaaS and technology businesses. These typically run for approximately three months and concentrate on a single transformation area, such as go-to-market strategy, revenue and monetization, operating model design, or exit readiness.

These sprints reflect a core Tomco belief:
most companies don’t need more advice – they need short, intense periods of clarity and execution.

Advisory work at Tomco Capital is not designed to maximize billable hours or headcount. It exists to compound insight across the portfolio, sharpen operating judgment, and create asymmetric impact where experience matters most.

Entering 2026, advisory remains selective by design – fewer engagements, clearer mandates, and defined outcomes – aligned with Tomco Capital’s broader focus on building durable, scalable, and ultimately exitable technology businesses.

For founders interested in coaching or advisory engagement, details and the application process can be found here:
https://tomcocapital.com/coaching/

Strategic Lessons & Operating Principles

If 2025 reinforced anything, it was that operating a holding company post-exit requires a different kind of discipline than building a single business.

The instinct to move fast, add initiatives, or manufacture momentum never fully disappears. What changed this year was the willingness to resist that instinct and let structure, data, and conviction lead instead.

One clear lesson was the value of intentional focus. ERPlingo succeeded not because of constant expansion, but because we committed to solving a narrowly defined problem extremely well. Medicus, by contrast, taught us the opposite lesson: when conviction fades or market conditions shift, restraint is often the most strategic move – until clarity returns.

Another principle that sharpened in 2025 was optionality over obligation. Keeping assets like Viral Followers and Daily Gratitude dormant is not indecision; it is a deliberate choice to preserve upside without consuming attention. Not every asset needs to be active to be valuable.

A third lesson, and perhaps the most powerful, was the power of time-boxed intervention. Both in advisory work and internal portfolio decisions, short, focused periods of intense attention consistently produced better outcomes than open-ended effort. This reinforced Tomco Capital’s bias toward defined operating cycles, clear objectives, and measurable outcomes.

Finally, 2025 clarified the importance of founder alignment. Businesses move fastest – and cleanest – when structure, energy, and intent point in the same direction. When they don’t, even well-designed companies stall. Recognizing that mismatch early is a skill that improves with experience and one we now prioritize across the portfolio.

These principles are not theoretical. They emerged through real decisions, real pauses, and real recalibration. They now form the backbone of how Tomco Capital allocates attention, capital, and advisory effort going forward.

Looking Ahead – 2026 Priorities & Closing Reflections

As Tomco Capital moves into 2026, the direction is clear.

The firm will continue to focus on building, investing in, and operating technology businesses where structure, clarity, and leverage matter more than raw scale. ERPlingo enters the year with proven usage and a renewed focus on monetization and feature depth. Medicus begins a purposeful rebuild, repositioned as an enterprise-grade compliance platform aligned with real corporate demand. Other portfolio assets remain intact, preserved with discipline and optionality.

Alongside the portfolio, advisory and coaching work will continue in a selective and constrained manner, through long-term founder engagements and clearly defined advisory sprints, always in service of the broader mandate to help founders exit successfully.

Underlying all of this is a refined operating philosophy that emerged clearly in 2025:
short, focused periods of intense attention consistently outperform open-ended effort.

This principle now shapes how Tomco Capital allocates time and energy. Deep, concentrated work followed by deliberate space to observe, measure, and let systems operate undisturbed. That rhythm – intense engagement paired with intentional restraint – was difficult to sustain during the hustle years of company building. Post-exit, it has become both possible and powerful luxury.

2025 proved that this mode of operating is not only personally sustainable, but strategically effective. It produces better decisions, cleaner execution, and businesses that are built with intent rather than urgency.

Tomco Capital enters 2026 smaller in surface area, but stronger in structure. Fewer priorities. Clearer standards. More conviction behind each decision.

This annual letter reflects a firm that is no longer experimenting with what it wants to be – but steadily becoming it.

Here’s to an amazing 2026!
Thomas Michael

The post Tomco Capital – 2025 Annual Letter appeared first on Tomco Capital - Coaching, Advisory & Investments.

That line stuck with me.

For most of my career, I was obsessed with summits: hitting revenue milestones, landing big clients, shipping products, selling a company. The numbers changed, but the feeling didn’t – each time I reached a goal, I just moved the bar higher.

Eventually, I realized I was playing the same game as Sisyphus – the guy from Greek mythology, doomed to push a boulder up a hill only for it to roll back down, again and again.

No finish line, no rest, no peace.

That’s when it hit me: the point isn’t the summit. It’s learning to enjoy the climb.

My Climb

For years, my entire operating system was goal-driven. I thought in milestones, numbers, and targets.

• Launching the first 100 courses
• Signing up the first 1,000 customers
• Making the first $1,000,000

Every time I hit one of those goals, it felt incredible – for about five minutes. Then I’d reset the target higher. The climb never ended, the summit kept moving, and I didn’t realize I was quietly signing up for a lifetime of pushing the same damn boulder uphill.

In the founder world, especially in groups like Vistage and EO, where I spent years, the unspoken rule was simple:

Grow or sell.

If you weren’t chasing exponential growth or prepping for an exit, you were considered stagnant. Still standing? That meant you were weak. Or worse – complacent.

But I started questioning that dogma. Was constant growth really the only definition of success? What about building something right-sized? A business that ran smoothly, grew organically, kept customers happy, paid its bills, and didn’t give me a heart attack before 40?

That shift was a turning point for me. I realized the endless chase for “more” was an illusion and that true success might just live in the space between hustle and peace.

The Shift – Enjoying the Ride

Once I saw the pattern, I couldn’t unsee it. I realized I didn’t actually need another summit. I needed a new relationship with the climb itself.

These days, I run my businesses differently. There’s no frantic push for growth-at-all-costs, no obsession with valuations or vanity metrics. I run lean, calm, and deliberate. I focus on building things that matter: solving problems people actually want solved.

When something we build lands with a customer – when they send that one-line email that says “This saved me hours” or “Finally, something that actually works” – that hits deeper than any quarterly target ever did.

I get joy out of seeing systems work smoothly, teams happy and motivated, customers served well. That’s the payoff.

Because when you finally stop sprinting toward the next summit, you start noticing how much you were missing along the way: the view, the air, the people who climb beside you.

The business doesn’t own me anymore. I own it. And I enjoy it because it’s built to serve my life, not the other way around.

And to be clear: this isn’t permission to coast. I still have goals, targets, and big ambitions. But I no longer chase them for their own sake. I hustle with intent, not insecurity, driven by purpose, not pressure.

The journey matters more than the summit.

The Message – What Founders Get Wrong

I recently had a founder reach out asking for advice. His company, he said, was “in trouble.”

When I asked what was going on, he told me: “We missed our revenue goal, We only grew 9% instead of 15%.”

I just stared at the message for a second, then laughed. He was in full-blown crisis mode, losing sleep, questioning everything… while I would’ve popped champagne and sent the team home early for a long weekend.

Same situation. Different perspective.

This is where most founders lose the plot – they turn success into suffering. They confuse progress with failure simply because it didn’t match an arbitrary target they made up six months ago in a spreadsheet.

I’ve been that guy – obsessing over growth curves, KPIs, and projections that ultimately meant nothing. It’s a trap disguised as ambition.

Here’s the truth: no one writes books about the view from the top of Mount Everest. They write about the climb, the frostbite, the fear, the perseverance. That’s where the meaning is.

So, if you’re building, chasing, grinding… don’t forget:

The goal isn’t to get to the top.
The goal is to still love the climb once you’re there.

The View That Really Matters

These days, I don’t measure success by how high I’ve climbed, but by how it feels to keep climbing. Am I challenged? Engaged? Curious? Peaceful? If the answer’s yes, that’s success.

I’ve reached plenty of summits in my life – big exits, major milestones, personal goals that once felt impossible. And every single time, after the initial rush, I looked around and realized: there’s no music up here. No parade. No confetti. Just the same mountain wind and the next peak in the distance.

That’s when it hit me: the magic was never at the top. It was in the building, the learning, the experimenting, the failing, and the trying again. That’s where life actually happens.

So now, I choose to climb differently. No panic. No pressure. Just purpose, presence, and perspective.

There may be no books written about the view from the top of Mount Everest, but there are thousands written about the courage it takes to keep climbing.

And that’s the story worth living.

The post Why Are There No Books About The View From The Top Of Mount Everest? appeared first on Tomco Capital - Coaching, Advisory & Investments.

From Consultant to Creator

For years, I was perfectly happy as an SAP consultant. I was good at what I did, billed top rates, traveled the world, and worked with some of the biggest companies on the planet helping them implement and configure SAP software.

But once I got married, the constant travel started to wear thin. That’s when my good friend – and fellow SAP expert – Kent Bettisworth told me about a company in Europe that had just started offering online SAP training. This was around 2006, and back then, even SAP itself didn’t offer online training. The idea was unheard of.

Naturally, I had to check it out. What I found wasn’t impressive – the execution was clunky, the content uninspiring. But the spark was undeniable. The idea was right. They just weren’t doing it well. And that’s when it hit me: I could do this better.

So I dove into a world I knew nothing about: online education and authoring tools. I experimented with formats, failed repeatedly, and eventually landed on a model I liked. To my surprise – and relief – people responded well. I built one course. Then another. Then another.

At first, it was just me, in between consulting gigs. But I wanted to test the idea that I could create a revenue stream not tied to my time. By the time I’d created 20 courses, the writing was on the wall: it worked. The business had legs.

From there, I hired SAP experts to draft scripts, instructional designers to build lessons, and voice-over talent to record audio. What started as a side project grew into the world’s largest independent SAP training platform – until SAP itself finally entered the market, knocking us down to #2.

What began as a personal experiment had turned into a scalable company.

Step 1: Start Small and Validate

Looking back, the smartest thing I did was start small. One course. That’s it.

I didn’t spend months writing a business plan. I didn’t raise money. I didn’t build a giant website with dozens of features. I just created a single course and put it out into the world to see if anyone cared.

They did. And that’s when I made another. Then another. Each course was a test. Each one taught me something about what worked, what didn’t, and what people were actually willing to pay for.

The beauty of starting small is that the risk is minimal. If nobody had bought my courses, I’d have wasted some nights and weekends – nothing more. But because I tested early, I discovered a viable business model while keeping my downside limited.

It’s easy for entrepreneurs to get paralyzed, waiting for the “perfect” idea or obsessing over a 40-page business plan. My advice: don’t. Launch early, fail fast, iterate often. That’s how you validate.

Step 2: Build Systems, Not Dependencies

After the first 20 courses, I hit a wall. There was no way I could keep creating everything myself while also running consulting projects. If the business depended on me, it wasn’t scalable – and certainly not sellable.

So I started building systems. I brought in SAP experts to write lesson scripts. Instructional designers to build the actual courses. Voice actors to record audio. Later, a customer service team to handle support tickets. Every piece of the puzzle that once lived in my head was broken down into a repeatable process that someone else could execute.

That shift – from dependency to systems – is what turned my side hustle into a company. Without it, I’d have been stuck in the freelancer trap, just with a fancier product. With it, I had a machine that could scale far beyond me.

This is the difference between running a business and owning a job. If your business stops when you do, you don’t really have a company. You have a dependency.

Step 3: Evolve the Model

At first, the business was simple: I sold individual courses to SAP professionals. It worked – but it was still small scale.

Then I started thinking bigger. What if I could sell bundles of courses to entire companies? That’s when I built a B2B sales team and hired account managers. The shift paid off. We sold a lot of corporate training packages, and revenues climbed fast.

But the real breakthrough – the move that put the company into overdrive – was switching to a SaaS subscription model. Instead of one-off course sales, everything became a recurring contract. Customers signed up once, and their access renewed automatically until they canceled.

That single decision doubled the value of the business. It gave us predictable revenue, steadier cash flow, and a multiple that investors couldn’t ignore. SaaS wasn’t just a new model – it was the turning point that made the business scalable and highly attractive for acquisition.

Step 4: Prepare for Exit

Growth is exciting. But if you ever want to sell, growth alone isn’t enough. Buyers don’t just look at your revenue; they look at how your business runs without you.

That’s where preparation made all the difference. I spent over a year making the company “exit-ready.” Every agreement, every contract, every financial statement was organized and accessible. Processes were documented, teams were trained, and I deliberately made myself less important.

By the time we went to market, the company didn’t need me anymore. And that’s exactly what buyers want to see. They’re not buying your personality or your hustle; they’re buying a machine that will keep running long after you’re gone.

Because we had recurring revenue, clean financials, and a business that ran on systems – not me – we attracted serious buyers quickly. And when the right deal came along, we were ready.

Preparation wasn’t glamorous. It was tedious, detail-heavy, and sometimes felt like a second job. But it paid off in multiples when it came time to exit.

The Playbook for Productizing Expertise

Looking back, the path from consultant to SaaS founder to exit wasn’t magic. It was a series of very deliberate steps:

1. Start small and validate. Don’t wait for perfect. Ship something, see if people care, and learn by doing.
2. Build systems, not dependencies. If the business relies on you, it’s not a business. Process everything.
3. Evolve the model. One-off sales might pay the bills, but recurring revenue builds enterprise value.
4. Prepare for exit. Get your house in order early. Clean financials, documented processes, and a business that runs without you make all the difference.

That’s the framework. It works whether you’re selling training courses, SaaS, or any other form of productized expertise.

The biggest trap experts fall into is clinging to the billable hour. The biggest opportunity is turning what you know into something that scales without you.

I did it in SAP training. You can do it in your industry.

The post How to Productize Your Expertise Into a Scalable Business appeared first on Tomco Capital - Coaching, Advisory & Investments.

Why TomcoCapital Went AI-First

At TomcoCapital, we made a decision early on: whenever we face a business challenge or need, we ask a simple question – can an AI-first company solve this faster, smarter, and with less friction than a traditional team? The answer, more often than not, is yes.

After selling my last business and getting a clean slate, I had zero interest in rebuilding the same human-heavy, slow-moving org chart. The world has changed. AI isn’t a gimmick anymore – it’s the competitive edge. That’s why every new portfolio company we launch, acquire, or scale starts with this mindset: automate first, hire later (if at all).

The difference isn’t just about efficiency or cost. It’s about building companies that are leaner, more adaptable, and fundamentally prepared for the business landscape that’s already here – not the one we left behind.

We don’t default to human resources for operational problems. We default to AI. Only after AI has hit its limit do we assign a person—whose time is then focused on strategy, relationship-building, and high-leverage creative work.

The net result: our companies move faster, spend less, and scale smarter. In a market defined by volatility and relentless competition, this isn’t just a cool tech experiment. It’s how you win.

Inside the AI Team – What Our Agents Actually Do

The real power of an AI-first company isn’t just that AI can handle simple, repetitive work. It’s how broad and deep the capabilities now go across our entire business stack.

At TomcoCapital and our portfolio companies, our AI agents aren’t just running social or cranking out blogs – they’re actively replacing or augmenting roles you’d normally need to hire for. Here’s a snapshot of what our AI team manages every week:

• Copywriting & Content Marketing:
  AI writes, edits, and optimizes web pages, ebooks, case studies, and even technical documentation. Our “AI copywriter” can handle everything from product pitches to long-form guides – faster and often with fewer errors than a human.
• Website & Product Updates:
  Want to add a new feature, fix a bug, or update pricing tables? AI writes the copy, generates the code, and often pushes changes live to production. What once took days now takes minutes.
• Customer Support & Service:
  Incoming emails and support tickets are automatically triaged, answered, or escalated – 24/7. The AI doesn’t sleep or get frustrated. Simple inquiries are resolved instantly; complex cases are flagged for a human, who now handles far fewer tickets.
• SEO & Analytics:
  AI reviews all outbound content for SEO performance, suggests improvements, and analyzes traffic/usage logs. We know what’s working and what isn’t, in real time, with actionable recommendations – not just reports gathering dust.
• Sales Operations:
  AI agents help update pricing, research prospects, draft outreach emails, and follow up on leads. Our sales pipeline is more active, more organized, and less dependent on human error.
• Marketing Automation:
  Newsletters, nurture campaigns, and social posts are scheduled, written, and A/B tested by AI. Marketing email copy is customized to audience segments, then launched and tracked – all hands-off.
• Business Development & Research:
  AI finds and analyzes potential business opportunities, identifies new partners or acquisition targets, and even does preliminary due diligence.
• Ecommerce & Product Management:
  Inventory, pricing, and product descriptions are managed by AI. Site changes, promos, and updates go live without waiting for a human bottleneck.
• Personal Productivity:
  My own “virtual assistant” AI manages my calendar, flags key emails, and even prompts me to hit my health goals or follow up on critical projects.
• Recruiting & HR:
  Our recruiting agent can source candidates, screen for basic qualifications, and schedule interviews, though, ironically, we haven’t needed to use it yet.

Bottom line:
Nearly every role below senior leadership can now be at least partially replaced, accelerated, or supported by AI. Our “team” is a real, dynamic roster of digital employees – always on, always learning, and immune to office drama.

What’s Left for Humans (and Why That Matters More Than Ever)

Does this mean people are obsolete? Not even close. The reality is, in an AI-first company, the bar for human contribution gets higher – not lower. AI crushes the grunt work, the repetition, the tasks that used to chew up your best people’s time and patience. But it can’t replace vision, strategy, leadership, creativity, or the human touch required for high-stakes deals and nuanced judgment.

Here’s how we deploy our human capital now:

• Strategy & Vision: Humans set direction, make bets, and decide which mountains to climb. AI can analyze data and suggest tactics, but it can’t replace gut instinct or experience.
• Relationship-Building: From investor relations to key partnerships, trust and persuasion are still deeply human skills.
• Complex Problem-Solving: When a situation is ambiguous, political, or requires cross-domain thinking, you need people—not just pattern-matching algorithms.
• Innovation & Big Ideas: True breakthroughs – whether in product, business model, or go-to-market – rarely emerge from code alone.
• Final Accountability: At the end of the day, a company needs real leadership. Someone has to take responsibility for the big calls AI isn’t built to make.

By freeing humans from busywork, we let them work on what actually drives value and competitive advantage. In fact, our team is smaller, but every person is working closer to the top of their skill stack.

This isn’t anti-people. It’s pro-talent. When you let AI handle everything it’s good at, you can finally let your best people focus on what only they can do.

Lessons Learned & Advice for Founders and Investors

Here’s the truth from the trenches: building an AI-first company is not a theoretical play – it’s a competitive necessity. And it’s moving faster than even the tech press is reporting. Most leaders are either sleepwalking into irrelevance or tinkering at the edges while their competitors are quietly eating their lunch.

What I’ve learned:

• Don’t wait for perfection: If you hold out for flawless AI, you’ll be left behind. Deploy, test, refine – iterate weekly, not yearly.
• Audit ruthlessly: Every process, every workflow, every department. If an AI tool can do 80% of the job, that’s 80% of time and cost back in your pocket.
• Upskill your humans: The people who thrive here are the ones who can direct, supervise, and quality-check AI. You want operators who treat AI as leverage, not as a threat.
• Expect resistance: You’ll get pushback from people invested in the old way. That’s fine – progress doesn’t wait for permission.
• Measure the right things: Speed, adaptability, and margin matter more than headcount or legacy org charts.

My advice:
Stop thinking of AI as “tech support” and start thinking of it as your operations backbone. Build around it, not on top of it. The companies that win in the next decade will be those who made AI their core operating system, not a bolt-on afterthought.

If you’re still hiring armies for jobs that AI can do better, faster, and cheaper – you’re not building for the future. You’re just adding risk and friction.

The New Playbook – Are You Ready to Compete This Way?

The landscape has shifted. The old metrics – headcount, square footage, layers of management – don’t mean what they used to. The winning formula now is simple: fewer people, more leverage, relentless automation, and the courage to let go of how things “have always been done.”

If you’re a founder, operator, or investor and still building companies the traditional way, here’s your wake-up call. Start treating AI as your first hire, not your last resort.

Audit your processes, challenge your assumptions, and get uncomfortable.
It’s not about being trendy; it’s about survival and having a real edge.

This is exactly what I work on with our portfolio founders and with a select group of coaching clients who are serious about building lean, AI-first businesses that scale with less risk and more upside.

If you’re ready to leave excuses behind and actually transform how you build, book a call with me.

The post Building an AI-First Company: Why We Start With Automation, Not Headcount appeared first on Tomco Capital - Coaching, Advisory & Investments.

I went to London Tech Week.

It was loud. It was global. Kicked off with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer on stage and Nvidia’s CEO, promising billions in AI infrastructure and a digitally upskilled Britain.

Big energy. Bold headlines.

And yet, as I walked the expo floor, I kept asking myself:

“Does anyone here actually build anything that works?”

I saw beautifully branded booths. Well-rehearsed founders. Slick decks.
One startup was promising advanced blood testing subscriptions with deep biomarker insights. Another claimed to let you spin up AI agents to perform “any task” in minutes.

Naturally, I wanted to see more.

So I went to their websites… and was greeted with the same thing in both cases:
“Join our waitlist.” No product. No pricing. No signal they’ve shipped anything at all.

Let me translate that: “We’ve built a vision, but not a business.”

This wasn’t a one-off. It was the norm.

And it tells you everything you need to know about the current founder mindset: presence is prioritized over progress.

Scene 1: Polished Panels, But Pitch-Drunk Founders

The panels were flawless. The production value was premium.
But beneath the surface, I heard a lot of founder-speak that made my old operator instincts twitch:

“We’re pre-revenue but post-traction.”
“We’re validating monetization.”
“Our next round will unlock growth.”

No it won’t.

I spoke to too many founders who were chasing runway instead of revenue. Decks instead of distribution. Their “traction” was engagement on LinkedIn posts – not paying customers.

If you don’t have your first 100 customers, why are you roaming around London Tech Week?

To raise money? There are better avenues – and smarter ones.
To get publicity? That can backfire hard and fast when a journalist or investor asks, “Can I try it?” and you don’t have a product.

It’s not just premature scaling. It’s delusional signaling, like dressing for a wedding when you haven’t even proposed yet.

Takeaway for Founders:

Start with the problem.

Not the pitch, not the brand, not the slide deck. The real problem – not the one you think sounds hot. If the problem isn’t painful enough to make someone pay you to solve it, there’s no business.

No problem = no customer = no traction = no funding = no exit.

If you can’t clearly explain:

1. Who your customer is
2. What you solve for them
3. How you make money doing it
   
   …you don’t have a startup. You have a hobby with a pitch deck.

Scene 2: Government Grant Chasers

There’s this dangerous narrative spreading in the UK founder ecosystem:

“If we just get that InnovateUK grant / NHS pilot / AI booster voucher, we’ll be good.”

No. You won’t.

The government handing out grants is like an Instagram influencer pitching for likes – a little sad, and it never really turns out to be as good as we all thought.

I met several founders who were months into paperwork and pitch prep for public sector funding – but hadn’t spoken to a customer in weeks.

You’re not building a business. You’re playing bureaucratic lottery.

Takeaway for Founders:

Use grants only to accelerate something that’s already working, not as a lifeline for something that isn’t.

And more importantly:
Don’t let the vague promise of a possible grant distract you from your core mission:
Sign up customers. Solve their problems. Make money.

The market doesn’t care how much you raised. It cares what you built.

Scene 3: AI Wrappers and Investor FOMO

Everyone is building an “AI company” now. But most are just wrappers – a light UX layer slapped over ChatGPT or Claude, packaged with buzzwords and a slick landing page.

I’m not judging from the sidelines on this one. At Tomco Capital, we made the same mistake.

We launched our portfolio company ERPlingo as a ChatGPT-powered SAP support platform. We thought it was the coolest thing since sliced bread. And to be fair, our prompt engineering is solid. Better than most.

But here’s the truth:

ChatGPT is already “good enough” at everything.

Getting someone to stop using ChatGPT and switch to your platform – no matter how niche – is tremendously difficult. You’re not just selling features. You’re trying to overcome default behavior.

We’re actively fixing that right now at ERPlingo.

If you’re building the next hot AI tool, you need to be doing the same – or you’ll be just another wrapper that demoed well but never stuck.

Takeaway for Founders:

AI isn’t your differentiator anymore. Your results are.

Ask yourself:

• Are you solving a problem 10x better than ChatGPT does out of the box?
• Is your tool sticky, indispensable, and revenue-generating?
• Would you switch if you were the customer?

If the answer is no, you’re not building a product – you’re just giving OpenAI free distribution.

Final Thoughts From the Balcony

Being a retired founder gives you a different lens.

You see the games being played. The narratives being sold. The self-delusion being scaled.

London Tech Week had all the ingredients: ambition, innovation, capital. But the most successful founders I know aren’t chasing buzz. They’re ruthlessly focused on fundamentals:

• Solve a painful problem.
• Get someone to pay you for it.
• Build systems that scale you out of the equation.

That’s it. That’s the game. And it’s still undefeated.

For Founders Still in the Arena

You don’t need another round. You need a win.

Pick one number that matters – ARR, retention, CAC payback – and kill anything that doesn’t move it.

If you want someone to call your bluff, rip apart your strategy, and help you scale like someone who’s already exited: I coach a small handful of serious founders each year.

Book a call.

If not, just build something great. And email me when you exit.

The post Confessions of a Retired Tech Founder at London Tech Week appeared first on Tomco Capital - Coaching, Advisory & Investments.

I keep replaying the same conversations in my head – the acquisition calls, the half-answers, the missing systems, the founders who want an exit but have never actually prepared for one. And layered on top of that is my own recent experience: having just come through a full due diligence process myself, from both sides of the table, twice over.

I know how unforgiving that process is. I know what gets examined, where pressure builds, and how quickly optimism collapses under scrutiny. I know how much discipline, structure, and advance preparation it takes to move through it cleanly. Most importantly, I know how rare it is to be genuinely ready.

That contrast is hard to ignore.

What I’m seeing isn’t a lack of ambition. These founders are driven, capable, and serious about what they’ve built. What’s missing is perspective – the kind that only comes from having been through the exit process end-to-end, not as an advisor or observer, but as the person whose company is under the microscope.

And for the first time since selling my own business, something begins to feel obvious.

There is a real need for experienced operators who have actually been there – not theorists, not motivational coaches, not people selling frameworks – but founders who understand what it takes to turn a running business into a transferable asset.

Not because it’s lucrative.
Not because it scales beautifully.
But because the intellectual challenge is real, and the work matters.

At the same time, another truth sits alongside it, equally clear.

I don’t want this to be the center of my professional life.

Coaching as a Response, Not a Destination

As the idea takes shape, it becomes clear what this is – and what it isn’t.

No, I don’t suddenly want to become a full-time coach. I’m not interested in building a practice optimized for volume, or in positioning myself as a public authority dispensing generic advice. That doesn’t appeal to me, and it never has.

What does appeal to me is the work itself.

Sitting across from an ambitious founder who wants an exit but doesn’t yet understand what that actually entails. Helping them see their business not as a personal extension of themselves, but as an asset that must stand up to scrutiny. Working through the uncomfortable questions early, before the stakes are existential and the timelines compressed.

That kind of work is intellectually satisfying. It’s precise. It demands judgment, pattern recognition, and honesty. And it’s work I’m unusually well suited for, precisely because I’ve just lived through it.

I know what buyers care about because I’ve been interrogated by them. I know where founders tend to overestimate readiness and underestimate fragility. I know which gaps are cosmetic and which are fatal. That perspective doesn’t come from reading about exits. It comes from being inside one.

So advisory and coaching start to make sense – not as a business to be scaled, but as a focused, high-leverage way to work with a small number of founders who are serious about where they’re headed.

Important, yes.
Central, no.

Because alongside that clarity sits an equally strong instinct: I still want to build.

The Pull Toward Building On My Own Terms

The more I sit with the idea of advisory work, the clearer another truth becomes.

As much as I enjoy the intellectual challenge of helping founders prepare for an exit, I don’t want my professional energy to be spent primarily inside other people’s businesses. I don’t want to clean up inherited complexity or retrofit structure onto decisions I didn’t make. I’ve done that before, and I know exactly how much friction it carries.

What I want is authorship.

I want to build systems from first principles. To design the structure intentionally rather than reverse-engineering it later. To create products, platforms, and tools the way I think they should be built – with clarity, leverage, and optionality designed in from the beginning.

Buying an existing company increasingly feels like the wrong vehicle for that. Not because it can’t work, but because it starts with compromise. You inherit assumptions, habits, and constraints that shape everything that follows. Even when the business is sound, you’re still adapting to someone else’s architecture.

I don’t want to adapt. I want to design.

That realization settles quietly but firmly. The excitement I feel isn’t about acquisition anymore; it’s about creation. About starting with a blank sheet and building something that reflects how I want to work now – smaller surface area, higher leverage, fewer dependencies, cleaner systems.

At the same time, I’m realistic enough to know that I don’t want to build just one thing again. I don’t want another monolithic company that consumes everything around it. What I’m drawn to instead is something more modular – a structure that allows multiple ideas to exist, evolve, and compound over time.

That’s when the shape of it begins to appear.

Not a single startup.
Not a fund.
But a personal operating platform.

Designing the Container

Once I start thinking in terms of structure rather than individual ideas, everything begins to feel more coherent.

What I’m circling around isn’t a single product or a single company. It’s a container – a way to hold multiple ventures, experiments, and operating ideas under one roof, without forcing them into the same lifecycle or level of commitment. A structure that lets me build, operate, and evolve businesses deliberately, without recreating the sprawl and complexity I’ve worked hard to leave behind.

A personal holding company starts to make sense.

Not as a grand strategy, but as a practical response to what I now know about myself. A framework that allows me to launch and operate technology businesses on my own terms, while keeping optionality intact. Some ideas may grow into substantial ventures. Some will fail spectacularly. Others may remain small, profitable, and self-sustaining. A few may never make it past the prototype stage. That’s fine. The structure doesn’t demand that every experiment become a centerpiece.

What matters is that the container is intentional.

I don’t yet know what the portfolio will include. I’m not forcing a thesis prematurely. But I am certain of one thing: whatever I build next will be deeply shaped by technology – and increasingly by AI. Not as a buzzword or a pitch, but as an enabling layer that fundamentally changes what small, focused teams can accomplish.

AI shifts the leverage equation. It compresses time. It reduces the need for scale where scale once felt mandatory. It makes it possible to build systems that would have required entire departments not that long ago. For someone like me – drawn to structure, tools, and clean systems – that’s not abstract. It’s catalytic.

So the direction becomes clear, even if the details do not.

I’ll work with a small number of founders who want to prepare their businesses for an eventual exit, because that work is meaningful and intellectually honest. But the center of gravity will be elsewhere – in building and operating my own ventures, inside a structure designed for clarity, leverage, and longevity.

I don’t have a name for it yet. I don’t need one.

What I have is something more important: a sense that the next chapter won’t be about replacing what I sold, but about designing something fundamentally different.

And for the first time since the transition period ended and the inbox went quiet, that feels like enough to move forward.

Cheers,

-Thomas

The post I Stopped Looking – And Started Designing appeared first on Tomco Capital - Coaching, Advisory & Investments.