E-Days

E-Days didn't start as a standalone company—it was born inside a web agency in 2007 when Steve Arnold joined his friend's business. "I joined him in order to grow that company. And then we started E-Days as a product within that company," Steve explains. The co-founders identified a clear pain point: most companies struggle with managing employee leave and absence tracking, and doing it compliantly across different regions is complex. E-Days was designed to solve this problem with a global, customizable solution.

For nearly a decade, E-Days remained tucked inside the parent web agency, organically funded and growing slowly. "It was quite slow to begin with because we were incubating E-Days within this other parent company and our focus really was on the other company at the time because that was the one that was making us the money," Steve recalls. The team took 9-10 years to reach 1,000 customers before accelerating growth.

The company's growth engine has always been digital marketing. Steve explains: "Our funnel is fueled by digital marketing. So we've got SEO, paper click strategies to get people to our website. We get about 100, 120 inquiries per month." The sales process is methodical—inquiries trigger immediate phone calls, followed by 40-minute online demos with HR managers or finance teams. The conversion rate from demo to trial is 50%, and after trial access (where customers can explore the system for about a week), the team closes deals. "We convert 25% of those to customers. That's our metric that we've kept pretty consistent," Steve says.

The metrics tell the story. E-Days has built a machine that acquires customers at $2,000 CAC with an 8.5-month payback period and a five-year LTV of $12,000. More impressively, they maintain 105% net revenue retention despite 8% annual logo churn—meaning expansion within existing customers more than offsets departures. The business is profitable at 45% EBITDA, taking $130,000 per month to the bottom line on $290,000 in MRR. A year ago they were doing roughly $230,000 MRR, representing about 30% YoY growth.

In November 2017, Steve and his CTO partner Chris executed a management buyout backed by private equity (raising $10 million to buy out two partners who owned 80% of the company). Today, PE owns ~60% while Steve and his team maintain control. The 30-person team is based in Nottingham, England, and just hired their first Chief Revenue Officer to scale the sales organization. They've also landed a major partnership with Cornerstone (a talent management platform with ~30 billion users) to distribute E-Days. US expansion is on the roadmap—they've already developed PTO functionality to handle US compliance requirements. Steve's philosophy remains unchanged: "believe in yourself, trust your instincts, keep reading, keep investing in yourself and your own learning."