Two Failed Ventures Led to $250k in 11 Months
Most of the time your first business won't work. Sometimes your second one doesn't either.
Phil Hayes-St Clair knows this firsthand. His first two ventures failed before his third one, The Partnership Lab, where founders and executives learn to close six-figure partnerships, hit $250k in revenue in 11 months.
In this deep dive, we'll explore how Phil's early experiences shaped his approach to partnerships, why he prefers bootstrapped companies over venture backed ones, and how he built The Partnership Lab with one of the simplest sales funnels you'll see.
Let's dive in.
Before The Partnership Lab
Phil started his career in the Australian army. He was an army cadet in school and wanted to become an officer and eventually an aviator.
But during the transition from soldier to officer training, they discovered Phil had an eye condition he didn't know about. The army called him "unserviceable."
Phil had to leave the military and figure out what came next. He ended up taking a job at a bank call center in 2000. For context, online banking wasn't a thing yet.
The job taught Phil a lot about customer service. How to talk to strangers, make them comfortable, and get them to a resolution quickly.
Eventually, Phil moved into broader parts of the bank where he was more focused on user-based design.
His first venture
While working at the bank, Phil organized bike riding events that raised close to half a million dollars for skin cancer research. When they handed the checks to the medical research institution, the money just got absorbed. Nobody really knew what impact the donations had.
That experience got Phil curious about how nonprofits handle donations. He discovered that in Australia, people get a tax deductible receipt for donations over $2, but only 34% of people actually use those receipts. The other 66% were leaving money on the table.
In 2008, Phil started an agency to help people claim those donations on their taxes. Similar to the United States, if you donate more than $2 in Australia, you can lower your taxable income.
There were a lot of issues with that agency though. As Phil put it, this was "a first time founder classic story where the problem is poorly characterized and the ambition is completely outsized for what you thought you were gonna go and solve."
One key mistake? Never figuring out the economic model for the business and trusting he'd figure it out later.
After 5 years, Phil shut it down in 2013 and had to get a full time job to pay the bills.
While working his full time job, he started his MBA. During this time, Phil's daughter was born and after talking to his wife about it, Phil quit his job to spend more time with his daughter and focus on his MBA.
Phil is a serial entrepreneur though. He was in the car with his daughter all the time and came up with the idea of Shazam for broadcast media so he could share his favorite clips from the radio channels he was listening to.
He took that idea through an entrepreneurship class in his MBA, found a cofounder, raised a little bit of money, and they did okay. But after 5 years, this venture didn't pan out either.
DropBio
At this point, Phil had tried two ventures, had a family, and was feeling lost on what to do next.
Phil came from a family of doctors and nurses. He also had an undergraduate degree in immunology from his time in the military. With two failed tech ventures behind him, he thought he might build on his degree and family ties and go to medical school as a mature student.
He only told his wife and one other person about this idea.
That other person bought him dinner to convince him not to go to medical school. Instead, they wanted Phil to meet some people with technology that could predict the onset of chronic diseases through blood.
Phil co-founded DropBio with these people and was the CEO for 5 years. The company was doing well, but after going through COVID and working long hours, Phil was burning out hard.
One day, Phil heard his youngest daughter say to his wife, "I'm really worried about daddy's health."
That's when Phil knew he had to make a change. He stepped down from his CEO role and handed the reins to his co-founder.
The Partnership Lab
When Phil made the decision to step down from his role at DropBio, a friend of his asked, "can you document how you create partnerships?" because he kept building great partnerships to grow DropBio.
At this point, Phil had realized he had been using the same partnership model for the last 15 years and it consistently worked.
And that started what Phil now is working on, The Partnership Lab. Helping founders and executives build six-figure partnerships.
Phil started it as just being a consultant for some companies but has evolved the model over time. Similar to how Jessica Lackey evolved her business in a recent deep dive.
Over time, Phil has done less 1:1 consulting where he's in the day to day of a business to more of a cohort teaching model where he's more teaching and advising.
A membership to The Partnership Lab costs around $5,000 these days and Phil's consulting helped kick revenue for The Partnership Lab to over $250k in annual revenue in just 11 months.
The difference between being bootstrapped and venture backed
Phil is a little unique in the deep dives I've done. He's built both venture backed companies and bootstrapped companies.
I asked Phil how different it is and his answer was simple: "Very different."
The biggest difference? Fundraising takes over all of your time. After trying to fundraise, you might have created 50 different versions of your deck from all the feedback you get.
And if you're fundraising, you don't have time to actually build the business. Investors still want to see the company growing though. That's why most venture backed companies need a co-founder.
Phil prefers bootstrapped companies. You get more flexibility to reward your team how you want and you can pivot in any direction. You call all the shots.
Investors do bring value. They're a sounding board for feedback and can help with connections. But their expectations and need to see a return on investment isn't always worth the tradeoff.
Growth Strategies of The Partnership Lab
Phil has one of the simplest sales funnels you'll see.
At the top of his funnel, he has previous relationships and LinkedIn. For engagement, he has his newsletter and a public virtual masterclass every Wednesday. Then that all leads to his cohort/community business model with The Partnership Lab.
Previous Relationships
One thing that stood out in talking to Phil was how all of his experiences rolled into each other. It wasn't even necessarily intentional. The army gave him professional experiences for the first time, the call center gave him customer service experience, and every venture taught him how to build a better business.
And in all of that, Phil's relationships carried through.
So much so that when he said he would consult on partnerships, it was a pretty easy customer discovery process because he knew a lot of potential clients out of the gate. It's a big reason why he was able to get to $250k in just 11 months compared to the average timeframe of 2.5 years.
Social Media (LinkedIn)
Phil's LinkedIn was already pretty solid from all of his past roles. He just poured gasoline on that fire.
Phil posts consistently on LinkedIn, particularly his partnership playbooks. They're in-depth (not a quick scroll) but they're great if you're interested in learning how to grow your business with partnerships.
Those posts and his network have paid off. A lot of his current community members found Phil on LinkedIn.
Phil is proof you don't need a huge audience to build a valuable business. He has just over 17,000 followers which is a lot, but not earth shattering numbers.