Our story. Reinventing a business.

Data, Services / By / September 15, 2021 / 1 minute of reading

Our story. Reinventing a business.

September 15, 2021
Data, Services

Spend Network exists because I almost lost everything.

Where we came from:

I’d built a consultancy with twenty staff and clients across the financial and government sectors.

It was a good little firm.

We knew our stuff and it was good to see Government and Banks collaborating.

The crash

Then the financial crisis hit.

Our clients withdrew from contracts and projects in droves.

In one week, we lost fifty per cent of our revenue and couldn’t get our invoices paid.

The following week I let half our staff go.

That pattern continued until there were just three of us.

In a matter of weeks, six years of work had been undone.

It was time to start again.

Spend Network

I spent my evenings and nights teaching myself how to build and run databases.

I taught myself how to write (bad) python scripts.

We kept the business alive, just.

Within two years we had launched our first product.

Now we run the world’s largest procurement database.

We have a social mission to make the data openly available to all.

We’re growing and we’re not done yet.

Onwards.

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