https://youtu.be/6rsNoTrAYY0
Jim Barnish is the Founder and Managing Partner at Orchid Black, a growth services firm that helps tech-forward companies build better game-changing businesses. We talk about finding your ideal client profile, value creation strategies for flatlining companies, and dissect Aaron Ross’ Predictable Revenue.
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Create Predictable Revenue with Jim Barnish
Our guest is Jim Barnish, who's a 20 year entrepreneur, operator, investor, and M&A expert. He runs today Orchid Black, a growth services firm, helping founders let technology companies grow and exit. Welcome to the show, Jim.
Thanks, Steve. Happy to be here.
Great to have you. So Jim, tell me a little bit about how you cut your teeth in entrepreneurship and then also, you know, where this journey led you, because you're a very early starter, as I understand. So tell us a little bit about that, and then I'm going to have a follow-up question about what you're doing now and how you kind of transitioned over to your current stage.
Sure. So I may be the only person your audience will ever meet that appears on both the 40 under 40 list and has also been growing and exiting businesses for more than half of their life. But ultimately I got my start in my family business that was doing well, but was your typical family run business really focused on trusting family and only bringing in family to help run and drive the business. And so at the ripe young age of 15, I was put in charge of finding our target acquisitions.
And then ultimately later on in charge of both acquiring and integrating these businesses into our existing business. And, you know, thinking about what most people are doing at 15, probably the other stuff I was doing, going to school full time. But ultimately was entrusted with a pretty major operation with very little to rely on other than my gut and a learner's permit.
Okay, so that was your family business, and this is where you got started, and are you still involved with it now, or are you focusing completely on Orchid Black, which is your current business? What are you doing right now?
I'm no longer involved with that business today. It's doing well through the years. While I was there, it grew to over 600 million, and now today, it is over a billion in our enterprise value. So a nice family business that's now worth, you know, quite, quite a bit and a lot of great, great success stories there.
What it really did was instill a fire inside of me to help founders and CEOs, similar to what my family was going through, that are founder led companies, wondering if their company could be worth much more and what to do to drive growth within that existing business, whether that's organic or inorganic. And so ever since the family business, that's what I've been doing is building and growing businesses focused on tech founders, CEOs that have typically hit some sort of growth stage revenue obstacle, you know, 5 million, 10 million, 25 million, and are ultimately looking to maximize the value of their business and leave a legacy for their family. Just, just like, uh, the family story I told.
And so what's really great about that is I've been fortunate enough to have worked with a number of other serial entrepreneurs, C-level operators, and investors who've seen and done it all and had a bunch of exits behind them as well. And that's what Orchid Black has really become is helping to turn good, but somewhat stagnant companies, tech companies into great high growth companies with a hand-selected team that can really drop in and provide guidance and operational support, whether that be around M&A like myself, or more allowing customer success, sales, marketing, partnerships, really anything that when combined with our playbook as an organization, we're able to help founders navigate all of the growth stage obstacles that could possibly be presented to them, because we've been there ourselves.
So how did you get Orchid Black started?