2 Commas: The $multi-million exit show with Josh Comrie

$100,000 in year one. $10 million by year four. When people ask Sarah Page how she did it, her answer makes them uncomfortable. She did nothing else.
Sarah is the founder and CEO of The Kindness Collective and the 2024 New Zealander of the Year for community work. What began as a car full of pantry cans driven to a woman's refuge during the darkest period of her life is now a charity supporting over 130,000 New Zealanders a year. This is a genuinely honest conversation about total focus and what it costs. Sarah has ADHD, which she's reframed from a source of shame into her greatest asset, and she's candid about the parts most founders won't touch: the brutal shift from founder to CEO, learning to give up control, and being told she's too much.
We get into:
Why doing nothing but the one thing scaled the charity so fast
How ADHD makes founders 400 times more likely to start something
The founder to CEO identity shift and why it nearly broke her
Learning to hand control to a board smarter than her
The charity misconceptions that cost real people real help
The intensity people find uncomfortable is the same thing that built it all.
📩 Subscribe to the 2 Commas Journal → https://www.joshcomrie.com/subscribe
📖 Order the 2 Commas book → https://www.joshcomrie.com/2-commas-book-order
👤 Follow Josh on LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshcomrie/
🔗 Connect with Sarah Page → https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahpagenz/

Rich Conway spent hundreds of thousands of dollars proving he was hiring the wrong salespeople. He was wrong about that too.
He was bringing in good people, then setting them up to fail with no systems, no metrics, and no structure to succeed. When he finally hired a sales manager who put that scaffolding in place, the same calibre of people started producing straight away. It's one of the more honest leadership admissions you'll hear from a founder. Rich is an introvert with imposter syndrome who built Pure SEO into the number one search agency in New Zealand, arriving here in the depths of the GFC with no friends and no family. He refused to guarantee Google rankings when every competitor did, nearly went under, then watched the market swing his way.
We get into:
Why his best salespeople on paper kept failing and what he owned about it
The systems that turned the same people into producers
The emotional call to let go of his best mate, who he'd hired as GM
Two exit processes that fell over and why he's glad they did
How he rebuilt the whole business around AI search
Sometimes the hire isn't the problem. The setup around them is.
📩 Subscribe to the 2 Commas Journal → ⁠https://www.joshcomrie.com/subscribe⁠
📖 Order the 2 Commas book → ⁠https://www.joshcomrie.com/2-commas-book-order⁠
👤 Follow Josh on LinkedIn → ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshcomrie/⁠
🔗 Connect with Rich Conway → ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/pureseo/

Most founders sell a business once, with no idea what they're doing. Shivani Gupta refused to go in blind.
Before she sold her wellness business, Shivani tracked down more than 20 founders who'd already exited and asked every one of them the same questions. What did you sell for, did you use a multiple of EBIT, what would you do again, what would you never do again. She put every answer into a spreadsheet, found the three lessons that came up most often, and applied all three. It added 25% to her final sale price, with no broker. A former electrical engineer who left corporate life after a trip to Nepal, Shivani had already built the business to 10X and exited at 11X. This conversation is the closest thing to an exit strategy masterclass you'll get from someone who taught herself the whole thing.
We get into:
The research process that added 25% to her exit
Why squeezing every line item flows straight through to your valuation
Why she turned down a higher offer that would not give her staff contracts
How she brought her key leaders inside the sale rather than hiding it
The scaling mindset she now uses to help founders think past incremental growth
The best time to learn how to sell a business is long before you have to.
📩 Subscribe to the 2 Commas Journal → https://www.joshcomrie.com/subscribe
📖 Order the 2 Commas book → https://www.joshcomrie.com/2-commas-book-order
👤 Follow Josh on LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshcomrie/

The Comma Club is now open for founding members — a private community for NZ founders building toward a multimillion-dollar exit: https://www.joshcomrie.com/club
Shane Young flew to Sydney six times to get a single purchase order out of Woolworths. On launch day, he walked into the flagship supermarket to find his product had separated in transit and was leaking yellow puddles across the shelf. Four years of work, and he thought it was over in an instant.
It wasn't. This is a special episode of 2 Commas built around one question: what does it take for a small New Zealand business to take on far bigger competitors and win? Three founders answer it from three angles. Shane covers product, and how getting locked out by contract manufacturers forced him to build his own factory and made the business unbeatable. James McGlinn covers strategy, and how Event Finder survived the NZ Government launching a taxpayer-funded competitor by fighting back with a guerrilla Twitter campaign that put the responsible minister on the spot live on Breakfast TV. Cornelius Boertjens covers market, and how raising his prices, building a deliberately annoying presence in Australia, and engineering deal tension between two acquirers turned a niche agency into a Havas exit.
We get into:
Why Shane's Brisbane disaster became the thing that made his business defensible
How James won against a competitor with millions in government funding behind it
Why pricing up got Cornelius more demand, not less
The modesty penalty that quietly costs NZ founders across the Tasman
The annoying itch strategy that makes a giant come to you
If you're building something small in a market full of big players, this episode is three different maps for the same territory.

The Comma Club is now open for founding members — a private community for NZ founders building toward a multimillion-dollar exit: ⁠https://www.joshcomrie.com/club⁠
Grant Baker was sitting in his office on credit watch with BNZ when his phone rang. Eric Watson was calling from Palm Springs to say he'd sold Blue Star for a hundred million dollars. The deal had been done on a golf course in the dark. Grant thought he was joking.
He wasn't. Ninety million came in shares. Six months later, when the lockup expired, those shares had doubled. Blue Star had grown from $2M to $1B in sales through 56 acquisitions and almost no working capital. That was exit one. Then came Empower, an electricity retailer Grant built to 150,000 customers and 10% of all NZ electricity sales before selling to Contact Energy. Then 42 Below, which Jeff Ross was making 500 cases a year of in his garage when Grant got involved, sold to Bacardi for $165M USD on $20M revenue. Then Turners, bought for $70M when Grant's own company was worth $20M, now approaching a billion dollar market cap. Along the way: a bowel cancer diagnosis the morning of his first Bacardi meeting, 50 Ferraris, and a decade backing Liam Lawson from a $4,000 airfare to Formula One.
We get into:
What 56 acquisitions taught him about what kills a roll-up strategy
Why Bacardi paid a technology multiple for a spirits business and what that tells you about brand
How to build a business that a specific buyer will have to acquire
The cancer diagnosis, the 50/50 odds, and what his father's death three weeks later changed
Why he disagrees with "follow your passion" and what he'd tell any young NZ founder
If you're building something and wondering what four decades of exits, setbacks, and survival actually looks like from the inside, this one's worth your time.