Coffeez with Joe Shalaby - From Basement Startup to $100M Exit ft. Alexis Sikorsky | Coffeez for Closers with Joe Shalaby

Episode Date: August 22, 2025

This week on Coffeez for Closers, we’re joined by Alexis Sikorsky—UK-based entrepreneur, investor, and the brains behind a $100M+ exit in enterprise tech.Alexis built his company from a basement in Switzerland… scaled to $12M in revenue… then nearly lost everything in the 2008 crash. But instead of folding, he mortgaged his home, fired half his team, and fought his way back—eventually selling to private equity and rewriting his future.In this brutally honest episode, we cover:• Firing people vs. losing millions• How private equity really works• How to build a company that sells• Why most founders confuse motion with progress• And why raising rich kids with grit is harder than it looksAlexis now coaches founders through his Apex Method—helping them scale to 9-figure exits without losing their soul.If you’re playing for legacy—not just lifestyle—this one’s for you.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

I am sitting here with a legendary entrepreneur based out of the UK, currently residing in Spain. Mr. Alexis Sikorsky has had multiple exits with his last exit north of $100 million. Please welcome Alexis Sikorski. Alexis, thanks for being on the show today. Thanks for having me. In here, Alexis, I like to start to show off the same way I start with every entrepreneur. And what's your morning routine? I don't have a morning routine anymore because I have two young.

kids so my morning routine is changing diapers and bottles yeah I remember that I have four young kids so I totally get it what was it before you had the two young ones I was that really a routine kind of guy I had more an evening routine so get to the office like relatively early but not crazy early like eight nine and then work the day back at home at six fit the kids put them to bed and back in the office at 10 was my daily routine. Nice, nice. Well, hey, what when you began your entrepreneurial path, you started at 15 years old. What really drove you at that early of an age to start your entrepreneur's journey? I thought I was very, very smart. That's something all 15 years old

have in common, right? I thought I knew everything and I was very, very smart. So I say, why not like buy stuff cheap and sell them expensive? Let's do export. Input. and become a billionaire. So you started export-import business at 15? Yep. Wow. How'd that go? Not good. Was it filled venture?

I was fucking 15, so yeah, it didn't go. I started my first entrepreneur venture, but at 14 as well. And yeah, definitely a failed venture, but a lot of fun. Yeah, and it's, remember, it's a time like before the dot-coms, right? It's the 70s, so like the 70s, early 80s, so 80s in that case. So it's before like the internet. It's before like it's another time. Gotcha.

Now, growing new access from your basement in Switzerland, what personal fears or doubts kept you kept you up at night when you started that first company, new access? Firing people. Really? That's the only, honestly, I was more scared to have to fire people than to lose my money. What is it about firing people that really scared you? Makes me physically sick every time I have to do it. Like literally physically sick, I hate doing that.

And like literally my brother, I was working with my brother at some point. He literally went to the hospital when you had to fire a lot of people. makes us physically sick. So how do you deal with it now? Stimwell dealt with it before as humanly as possible. And when someone has to go, it has to go. And I managed to, at least on an intellectual point of view, justified by understanding that they were contract.

It's a specific contract that actually defined, the way you can separate so like you don't betray people and also I'm older so I'm less of the it's a family we Kumbaya we all love each other

and it's more like but still like I don't enjoy doing that probably will have to do it again soon and it's also different when you have to fire people because of performance or to fire people for

economical reason right if it's for performance, it's therefore, if it's not economical reason, it's your fault. So it's a little bit different. Yeah, you know, firing people, thank God, I'm in a company where I have an HR department that deals with that for the most part, but it always gets under my skin because, you know, I live by a model, coach up or coach out and you continue to coach them. If you can't coach them up, you have no choice but to coach them out. Yeah. Yeah. And it's basically you have a responsibility, You choose them and you made a mistake. So yeah.

So when you've navigated some massive growth through various acquisitions and various crises, what was your toughest low before knowing that you were actually on the right path to success? Okay, just give you a little of background. Super quick to answer your question. 2000, we started the company, a bespoke internet development company. 2003, we acquired electronic document management software company for banks. Grow that from 2003-2008. 2008, we are a 10-12 million revenue company, 2.5 million profit.

And I'm the king of the world. I'm so smart. I'm so bright. really convinced I know everything, every money, every penny we make, we spend, we hire more people, we open more offices, we develop the product more, and then 2008. Boom. We are a banking software company, 100% of our clients are banks, and on a regular Monday morning, the clients are calling me, say, by the way, for the next two, three years, we're not buying

anything from you. revenue drop 75% on like literally in a day. And that's when I realized that it was really, really not that smart. And I didn't forget your question. And I had to grind from 2008 to 2014, like literally to the point like I mortgage my house. Like every every month you said, Like, are we throwing good money at bad money?

Is it really worth going on? And 2014, we were just kind of break-even. And then the private equity came by 77% of the company. And to answer your question is, the moment the private equity money reached my bank account, that's where I knew. Not one day before. You took a lot of risk.

How did you deal with the 2008 crash? I didn't even think about European companies, how it impacted them. I've been in mortgage for 20 years. So I went through the ups and downs and I had to pivot my mortgage path in the crash. But I didn't think about European software storage companies. I didn't think about all the other. Obviously, the whole world was impacted. But you only kind of think within the confines of what companies were impacted.

here in the United States, but you, I mean, you were obviously impacted in Europe. I mean, it wiped you out. And you weren't even in the mortgage banking or mortgage brokering world. You were just providing the technology for them. So how did you really navigate that? Firing three quarter of the company, reducing cost as much as possible, begging the client to at least not cancel what they were paying and try to find smart way to open new lines of profit that are kind of counter cyclical.

Like the crisis brought new challenges for banks. So they were not spending on everything related to growth, but they started spending on stuff that are more crisis related. If you think like bank stability, know your customer, all that stuff. compliance in general. And yeah, I tried to develop new stuff that the bank were actually buying.

That's how we grew back from, like, I don't know, we were 12 million in 2007, three million in 2008, and back to 12 million in 2014-15. Some big jumps. That's amazing. So you've said you left

$50 million on the table because you didn't understand PE, private equity. How did that realization shift how you now define success? Well, 50 million and five years, that's what I said. That's the cost of my mistakes in general. Not only PE. To be honest, the PE who acquired my company have been fantastically honest and have been incredibly lucky because with the knowledge I had, they could have led me dry.

And they decided not to do it. So I got lucky. Now I know private equity. I actually speak private equity, which is very, very important. There's lots of stuff. Private equity is a very uncomplicated business. It's very similar to real estate that we'll talk to you.

It's a leverage business. That's all it is, right? it's you you get a mortgage, you leverage your investment, you buy a building, you the building takes 10% you resell the building, you double your investment, right? Basically, that's real estate,

private equity, same kind of thing. It's a leverage business. So when you understand that, all the jargon they put around that they used to make you feel stupid and make you think you don't understand, it's actually pretty simple. And more than that, you have to

understand what they want. And that's the absolute key. Now when I help my client selling, it's like we talk private equity. And it actually helps the client and it also helps the private equity. On that note, can you give me a one minute explanation or crash course on private equity? Yeah, very simple. Let's say you want to buy a company. You can't get very, very simple number. On average, you pay you pay 10 times EBIDDA, 10 time profit. So you want to buy a company that make one million profit, your private equity, so you're going to pay the company 10 million. You put three million of your cash, you borrow seven million from the bank. You keep the company for seven years, and during the seven years, you just pay back the bank with the million of EBITDA

you have. Everything being equal, you didn't, you didn't. generate a penny of growth. You just keep the company exactly the same. You basically didn't do anything. So now you bank loan is paid. You resell the company for the exact same price, which is 10 million, and then you three million has, have tripled.

Fair enough, it's a leverage business. You reimburse the debt with the company, the bidda, and the genius part is the debt is on the company, not on you. So you have zero risk. in terms of that. The risk is in the company you bought. And that's it. So your capital is three,

your capital risk is $3 million. And, and your risk is that, you're $3 million. And obviously that's not the game. The game is to grow the company. And for example, the total cash

my private equity put in the company is around 17, I would say. Total cash with the initial buying, the earn out, and the subsequent MNA, $17 million, and they sold north of $100. $500 or $100? No, there's north of $100. Yes.

So they made time six, and I made a lot of money, and everybody's happy. A lot of people don't know P.E. I didn't even know that P.E. works like that. I didn't know as a total levered business myself. You know, I didn't know that they're just taking, taking bank loans. It's basically like buying a house, but you're buying a business. It's exactly like buying a house. Except your leverage is a little lower.

You get like 70% leverage, not 90. And it's a little higher risk, but it's way, way better rewards. Way better rewards. I mean, the payouts are insane. As long as you're calculated on the risk that you're taking for the company. And you study your leadership, et cetera. Yeah, and that's why at some point, you think 2016, 2017, the valuation, the P.E. were ready to pay were completely crazy.

They were massively overpaying. And it's calmed down a little bit now. Now, now you're building a roadmap, your Apex method. And it came after your own exit experience. When did you realize your story could actually get? guide so many other entrepreneurs. It's a process, right? I sold my company 2019, 2020, retired, did nothing for three years, starting to get a

little bit bored and start an executive MBA in Oxford University here in London. During my MBA, I started meeting entrepreneurs. And they were telling me their story. I'm like, fuck, they're doing the exact same mistakes I've been doing my whole life. So let's see if I can like give them a hand. Like just like tell them, no, no, that's stupid. Don't do that. Like have a world chest.

Stop confusing what's urgent is what's important. Like basic concept. And then I started actually billing that because when you don't take money, people don't listen to you and started to work pretty well. And after a while I'll say, well, you know what? Like, okay, I'm going to be able to help 10 entrepreneurs. But if I wrote a book, it's going to be more. So that's why I wrote the book, pretty much.

So the book is called The Apex Method? It's called Caching Out. Cashing Out. Okay. Where can we find that? And is it on Audible? Yeah, it's on Audible. It's on Amazon.

It's everywhere you find. I'm lucky enough that I have a complicated name. So if you search everything with my name, we'll either find a helicopter or my book. So don't buy the helicopter. And what, what, What is your Apex method? Listen, it's a method because it's nice to have a method in a book.

But basically it's for concept, right? First you analyze your company. Like you talk with entrepreneur all the time. You are amazed by how little they know about their own company. Like they don't know what they have. And I'm talking like, I do not talk with startups. That's not my business. I do not talk with solo entrepreneurs or with one million dollar company.

I talk to like minimum five million revenue companies and they don't know anything. They don't know. They don't have the proper numbers. They don't know their clients. They don't know what makes them unique. They don't have a plan. And especially the most important, they don't know where they're going. Lots of them have massive engines and no steering wheel.

Like, where are you going? What are you doing? When are you selling the company? Are you selling the company? Is it a lifestyle business? Is it a gross business? Do you want to leave this company to your kids? Or do you want to sell it?

Do you want to make one million per year to finance your lifestyle in the company? Or do you want to make a quarter million and all the rest is growth? All this question, like very basic, they don't know. The reason they don't know is they're grinding. And they spend way more time in the company that they spend on the company. And that's one of the things I bring to these people. So analyze, basically, two, three months, understand your company. Then from that, you have a plan.

So let's say your company is now making $10 million. $2 million in Bidda, it's worth $20 in four years, max. I don't work plans that are more than four years. In four years, we go to get to $100 million valuation, which is basically we have to multiply your EBDA by 5. What's the path to do that? Where is the growth? Is it MNA? Is it organic?

Is it new product? Et cetera. And how do we organize that? So that's going to take another like six, nine months depending. After that, I'm going to leave you alone. I'm going to let you execute your plan. We're going to touch this from time to time like once a month to be sure that your execution. I usually end up being in the board, in the board meeting.

so I can follow on a monthly base that we are on the plan. So that's the execute part. And then two years, three years, max four years later, we exit the company. Wow. And how many of those using that methodology, how many use cases do you have? At the moment, I have three, but not of them have exited yet. It's a brand new project for me. So it takes two, three years.

I have one that's very close. Now you retired for three years. Someone like yourself, a super high achiever. Like, what did you do to fill your time? Travel, midlife crisis, new country, new wife, new kids, new hobbies, golf, scuba diving, and making kids, basically. Nice. So some of your favorite hobbies is golfing, scuba diving.

Yeah, and I'm really, really pathetic at golfing. We're all getting golfing. It's terrible. It's the worst sport in the world. So I've been doing that for 20 years and not get any better. Pick a pickleball, you know, you'll see rapid improvement. Now, writing cash out meant distilling complex lessons. What personal experience did you wrestle with most when you were writing that book?

Sorry, can you repeat the question? Don't you understand. What are the personal experiences that you really had it, like, that really impacted you the most when you wrote the book cash out? 2008 crisis is a big one. Okay. having to fire half of my company the same day twice. So Switzerland has a strange law that if you fire more than 10% of the company, you have to do it in a certain fashion.

And the fashion is you have to tell them, to tell your whole staff that you're going to fire ex-employees, and you have to give them three weeks, and you're not allowed to tell them who you're firing. So basically you tell them, I'm going to fire half the company in three weeks, but I cannot tell you if you are in the list or not. And then on the actual day, you send people in a conference room and tell them you're out. And I had to do that twice.

And that's hard. That sounds hard. Now you're just, you're an advisor, you're a board member. What internal hurdles do you find with founders that you, that, what internal hurdles do you find founders usually face that mirrors ones that you overcame? I know you mentioned that you like to teach them. What are some like ones that you could think of off the top of your head that the founders usually deal with? Okay. In order.

First one, no plan. They don't know who they want to be personally, not the company. They don't want if they, they don't know if they want to exit. They don't know if they want to go the company. they don't know any of that. That's number one. Number two, they tend to confuse what's urgent with what's important. So like that's super, super common. I'm yet to meet a founder who didn't have this problem. You spend your time extinguishing fires instead of doing strategy. It's completely normal and there is a methodology to get out of that. Then war chest, you like I'm a war chest Nazi. like I the first thing I make with my client is I want nine months of your monthly burn rate in your bank account because 2008 will happen again it's not the question if it's the only question is when so you need to be prepared um

nine months enough for war chess for 2008 no nothing was enough for 2008 but I could have not mortgage my house if I had nine months of burn rate. So in nine months, you can fire a lot of people and reduce your cost considerably and not completely exhaust your war chest. So you can swing down a company pretty efficiently in nine months. I'm not saying like, oh, we don't are going to do anything and we're going to live on our war chest. It's just a question of how reactive could you can you be. So yeah, you have to scale down. Scaling down is a skill is very, very hard. It's way harder. on scaling up. And yeah, so the world chest is one.

And then is the one I'm helping the most to, to solve now is needing good people, not being able to afford good people. That's the one that's gonna actually, that keeps most companies in the 10 million range. It's a very hard one to over, to overstep. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, hard one to solve when you really need like you need a proper CFO but you cannot afford a

proper CFO. Yeah. Yeah. And it's hard to get top talent when they're already pretty happy wherever they are. Yeah. So my the way I did it is I have 12 people in my in my virtual C-suite in my company, which are people that I've been working with for for decades that are either retired which is a very good pool of people, like just retired and still very skillful, all that are in a job that are bored and will be able to work at night. I have lots of stuff like that. So the reason they do it is because they find it fun. They don't need the money, but they find it fun.

It's fun to help a company at that stage. So, yes, these people are hard to find. And to my knowledge, nobody does fractional C-level people, except for CFO. Lots of people pretend they do fractional CFO. A lot of them actually do bona fide accountants. But like, fractional CFO you find. And what we need at that point, and that's tricky is we need to send people who actually work together. And that's tricky.

That's a skill as well. Now, what believe about yourself or leadership in general did you have to really unlearn or purge from your mind to scale from founder to strategic advisor? I had to understand I'm not a manager. So that's the one thing nobody teach you is people confuse manager and leaders. Not only they are not the same, but the kind of opposite skills. very rarely do you meet somebody who's a leader and a manager and that's one of the main realization i had to have which i had way after i sold my company said why was that so bad and that stuff and it's because it's not my skill set i don't know how to manage i know how to lead

i'm a terrible manager like yeah whenever anyone i can't even manage one person yeah but when you when you know that then you you work on your skill and you hire people yeah do what you're not doing not only that but people like me and you we could probably easily be taken advantage of just because we can't manage them so they could just whatever all the time but if you if you're a good leader the people who work for you do not want to take advantage of you yeah that's one of like how you know you're a good leader yeah yeah because you serve um now how is your definition of freedom changed from your early hustle days

to now you're helping others exit on their own terms. Freedom is a number, right, in that universe. Freedom is how much money do you need your bank account to never have to work a single day in your life if you don't want to? That's freedom. Freedom is being sure, like, your kids will have a roof from their head and you'll be able to give them a good education

and your wife can have a nice car and you can have two nice houses. That's freedom. I'm not being political. That's like in our universe, that's freedom. It's what and one of like when I do client prospect interviews, that's one of the four or five questions. I always ask, what's your number?

What number do you think you need to be free? And that's my target for selling the company, minimum target. Yeah, but you know, once you're free, then what, you know? Founders always ask themselves, then what? You, you had that then what moment? Yeah, boo fucking who. You know what I mean? Like poor rich boy, now you have 40 million in your bank account and you are a little bit bored.

Get over it. Lots of people don't get that. And most people are struggling. So just leave me alone and go see a shrink you can afford. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Now, a couple last questions. Now, if you were to tell your younger self,

your 15-year-old Alexis could hear your story now, what would you be most proud of and what wisdom would you offer that 15-year-old Alexis? What I'd be the most proud of is the work I'm doing now, actually. It's pride comes from helping others, not from your own success. Everybody can be successful. I'm more proud of my book than of my exit. I'm more proud of the work I'm doing with my founder than of my exit. Wisdom, it's just always sound like supermarket wisdom, but like just know what you don't know.

Like know what you're good at, know what you're bad at. And have a plan. Try to have a plan. Now, I have a question about family because you got four kids. I got four kids. And you grew up, you know, not very wealthy. You definitely didn't grow up as wealthy as your kids. How are you instilling that same level of grit, mindset, hustle, and your children now as a father so that they could kind of emulate you?

How are you teaching him that? I'm not. I'm failing miserably. that point. I don't know how to do that. I literally don't know how to do that. I don't know how to explain to a kid that's been brought to school in a Bentley with a driver that you need to grind. I don't know. When you try, they laugh at me. My only chance is telling them, I'm still alive. You'll need to deal yourself on the time before I die. And so far, it seems to be working. The older one is just finish his master's in Quentin at Georgia Tech.

So he's doing good. The young one is in a hospitality school in Switzerland. So it's working. They're doing stuff with their life. But if you tell them life is going to be hard for you, they laugh. They know. They're smart. It's not working.

And the little ones are too young. So I'll be very, very old when this problem arise, so be my wife's problem. I mean, it's a struggle, you know, like we grew up not very wealthy, right? We had to really fight for success and then teaching kids how to be successful when they're brought up in a fluent world is not easy. What I'm trying to do is I know trying to tell them you're not going to have any money, he's not going to fly. So I'm trying to tell them that with money comes responsibility. So I'm, I'm Jewish and for us Jews, there is a terrible, terrible rule that we

have to give 10% of everything we make to charity. And I teach them that. I teach them like, you, you can be rich, you're not allowed to be an asshole. You never allowed to be an asshole. So you don't go in a restaurant and pay $1,000 for a bottle of wine. We don't do that. And that also they saw this example. I'm not at all a flashy person. I'm not at all like I don't wear $100,000 watches. And like I tell them, try to teach them that.

Like with money comes responsibility. Good lessons. Now, a couple last questions about goals. a personal goal you have for yourself, a family goal that you have for the family, and a business goal that you have for your firm now? So personal goal, that's a little bit personal, but I've been officially diagnosed with ADHD, like most founders, I think. Yeah, my personal regrets. You know, we're all, yeah, but it's starting to get annoying and it's all, especially starting to get annoying for my family and for my family and for my

friends because like I don't have time I don't listen I have 500 stuff and in my head I exhaust every one on me so my personal goal is to tackle that let me know what you're doing you know your first wife probably hated you for that as it mine well my first my first wife hated me in general so that's that was just one of the issues um For my family, my three-year-old daughter has ASD, so it's bringing her to a world that's comfortable for her. And professional goal, I don't care.

I want to have a few nice exits and meet nice founders and help them. I don't have like a set number of money or, I don't always do what I teach. And last question. When you're in front of the pearly gates of God, what do you think he's going to tell you? It's too soon. Go back. Alexis, you've been a pleasure to have on the show.

Thank you so much for joining today. Thank you for having me. Amazing. I look forward to chatting with you more. I hope you come back on again. If people want to connect with you, how do they find you? Just look for me on LinkedIn. I have a easy name to find on LinkedIn.

Alexis Sarkiski will leave the information in the show notes. Thank you so much for jumping on the show today. Guys, if you're not following Alexis, make sure you follow him. He's a brilliant leader. He's a brilliant founder. And he's going to guide many, many founders to financial freedom. God bless you. Thank you guys for joining.