Serial entrepreneur Kevin Beales may have been encouraged to build a corporate career, but his desire to run his own company – which began as a schoolboy – wouldn’t leave him. He has since gone on to establish and sell a series of successful tech companies based in his adopted North East. His latest venture, MySalesCoach, launched this year and is already flying high, having attracted over £1 million of funding. But is this really the end of Kevin’s entrepreneurial journey, as he tells Alison Cowie?
The entrepreneurial spirit was strong in Kevin Beales from a young age, even if some of his early business ventures landed him in trouble with his headmaster.
He explains. “I got suspended from school for selling lottery scratch cards as I think my fellow pupils were spending too much of their lunch money on them.”
Kevin’s next side hustle of selling computer discs, however, proved much more acceptable – so much so that he began supplying the discs to the school directly.
At university, Kevin – who was born in Brighton but spent his adolescence in Manchester – began organising coach trips to local nightclubs for his fellow students. This soon progressed to stag and hen trips to Europe’s best-known party cities, such as Dublin and Amsterdam. These proved so popular that Kevin’s Financial Services degree took a back seat.
His parents, however, were keen for their son to pursue a more traditional career path and the university drop-out eventually relented and began searching for a corporate job.
Kevin’s break came six months later when he joined adidas.
“I was working at a print and design company and was distraught when my contact at adidas said she was leaving. Then she suggested I should apply for her job.”
Kevin joined the marketing team at adidas in the late 90s, just as the digital revolution was beginning. One day, his boss said to him: ‘You’ve used this internet thing. Do you want to be our New Media manager?’ Accepting the role, Kevin was responsible for developing adidas’s first website in the UK.
The media manager had begun working more globally with Adidas when Sunderland Football Club approached Kevin to ask if he would be interested in becoming its New Media manager.
“The club was looking to use the internet to do everything from streaming games to building online presences and communities.”
Kevin accepted the role and relocated to the North East to work for the Black Cats. But his entrepreneurial spirit was still burning bright, as he explains:
“While I enjoyed my time at adidas and Sunderland AFC enormously – and I was fortunate to work for some great people on those journeys – I found it frustrating. I was always trying to bend the rules and do things differently. I was described as a maverick, which made me realise that working in big organisations wasn’t my destiny.”
Kevin worked for two start-up tech companies – including a fast-growing North East company called Communicator Corp, which was owned by the Leighton Group.
This work helped cement to Kevin that his future lay in establishing his own business – something that initially didn’t go down well with those closest to him.
“I remember telling my wife, Helen – who I’d met while at Sunderland AFC – that I wanted to leave Communicator Corp and set up on my own. She started crying and begged me not to. “We’d just started a family and she was worried about the risk. But I knew it was something I needed to do. We agreed I would try it for six months and if things didn’t work out, I would return to a ‘proper job’.”
In 2007, Kevin established The Test Factory with co-founder David Copple. The company provided online assessment solutions to corporate and education clients.
By his own admission, Kevin made many mistakes in the early days and learned plenty of lessons “the hard way.”
But the company developed and attracted major clients such as Microsoft, HSBC, Pret A Manger, Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press. The United Nations even used the SaaS platform to identify the right personnel for peacekeeping missions.
“We had the internal tagline that we were ‘responsible for world peace’,” Kevin recalls with a smile.
Despite making mistakes along the way, The Test Factory grew to 50 employee and around £3 million in revenue. It was acquired in 2014 by GL Education, one of the biggest providers of tests in UK schools.
Kevin agreed to stay at The Test Factory for the next 18 months but only lasted six weeks.
“I knew after the acquisition, The Test Factory would be different and a far less entrepreneurial business, but I found it harder than I anticipated. I was chomping at the bit to start another business within weeks,” he says.
Kevin’s next business was Refract, another SaaS platform he established with Richard Smith and Paul Fleming, whom he worked with at The Test Factory.
As someone with a natural flare for sales, Kevin had often found it challenging to coach colleagues effectively and set about trying to solve the problem.
“One of the things that frustrated me as a sales leader was trying to coach people on the conversations they were having with clients and potential clients.
“The only thing I felt I could do was sit in on the meetings and then provide feedback to them, which was time-consuming and not very efficient.”
He continues: “There are countless studies that show the impact good sales coaching can have on performance and revenue but, on average, sales managers only spend around 5% of their time doing it. They are often tasked with countless other things, whether it’s hiring or onboarding, reporting to the board or managing changes in revenue. All of these things are more time critical than sales coaching, which can always wait till tomorrow, and often doesn’t happen at all.”
With Refract, Kevin and his co-founders created a platform that captured and analysed sales conversations – be they phone calls or video calls – and then used AI to identify what the best performing salespeople did differently compared to their less successful colleagues.
Kevin explains: “The technology would slice the conversation up into coachable moments. It would look at things like rapport, how objections were handled and how much was talking about the product and the price point.
“Managers could then provide coaching by surfacing those moments where the revenue was won and lost.”
The AI insights, which were bespoke to each organisation, proved popular and Refract was soon attracting a hefty client base that craved a more effective sales approach.
The potential of Refract attracted the attention of US company Allego, which acquired Refract in 2020.
The acquisition happened earlier than Kevin and his co-founders expected but the opportunity proved too good to miss.
The founder of Allego, Yuchun Lee, was one of the infamous Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) students who made a fortune card counting in Las Vegas (their exploits were made into the film, 21). Yuchun used his winnings to fund his first business – which he later sold to IBM for $480 million.
“I found Yuchun a really inspirational character and that’s a big part of why we ended up working with Allego, and later was acquired by the company,” Kevin adds.
Refracts’ founders joined the executive team of the newly acquired company. Kevin stayed for two-and-a-half years, heading up the European teams. But history was to repeat itself once again when Kevin left to establish this third company – MySalesCoach.
The reason, Kevin says, was he felt he hadn’t fully solved the problem that
sales managers still didn’t have the time to coach effectively.
“There was now technology and tools to help identify areas of coaching but sales managers, more than ever, lacked the time to coach and support. The problem we started to solve eight years before had actually got worse,” he adds.
He and his co-founders, Mark Ackers and John Richardson, developed MySalesCoach, a subscription service that combines a SaaS platform with expert sales coaching delivered by specially selected coaches who could provide tailored one-to-one coaching sessions.
MySalesCoach only launched in January this year but it has already managed to attract more than £1 million of funding from the North East Innovation Fund and from angel investors.
Securing investment at this early stage is surely at least in part due to Kevin’s impressive ability to establish, grow and sell tech companies. This faith already seems to be well placed as MySalesCoach’s CEO reveals the company is growing beyond expectations.
“Things have gone better than we could have imagined. We’ve grown really quickly. We’re now eight months in and we’re up to a team of nine, plus over 30 coaches. We’re ahead of where we planned to be at this stage and our revenue is almost half a million.”
MySalesCoach is already working with major tech heavyweights such as Hubspot, Google and LinkedIn, although Kevin is keen to point out the company is working with smaller enterprises, too.
“The opportunity to amplify and accelerate results through better coaching is evident in every organisation,” he adds.
Coaches are now clambering to be part of MySalesCoach but Kevin reveals only 5% make the cut to ensure the sales professionals are matched with the very best personal coach.
While VC investors have placed MySalesCoach on a trajectory to being sold one day, Kevin believes the journey will take longer than his previous businesses.
“We’re still scratching the surface of this global opportunity and fully realising the huge market potential will take a while.”
Kevin maintains MySalesCoach will be the last business he creates.
“I’m fortunate enough to advise some early-stage tech companies, be an angel investor and sit on the board of a couple of those companies. I love doing that and I’m sure I’ll do more and more in the future. But I do genuinely think that this is my last entrepreneurial journey,” he says.
Only time will tell whether MySalesCoach satisfies Kevin’s epic entrepreneurial spirit.
For more information on MySalesCoach, visit www.mysalescoach.com
