Encompass Corporation

Wayne Johnson's journey to founding Encompass began with a painful lesson. After successful exits from previous ventures, he and his business partner invested their own millions into a property investment and financing deal. They lost it all—not because the deal was inherently bad, but because they lacked visibility into the people involved. "We just didn't have the detailed background of those people involved in different parts of the transaction," Wayne recalls. This gap in due diligence became the genesis of Encompass.

Rather than hire a sales team upfront, Wayne took a lean, validation-first approach. "We built a video, Nathan, and we took the video to people and said, would you buy this?" He iterated on the video based on feedback until people responded enthusiastically. The core insight was clear: lawyers, banks, and finance professionals needed a way to pull together information from scattered sources—government registers, property databases, bankruptcy records, valuation databases—into a single, visual view. Wayne built visualization technology that did exactly that.

Wayne's first major breakthrough came through a strategic partnership. He approached a data supplier already serving a large group of legal companies in Australia. They partnered together, revenue-sharing on top of sales, and launched the product. "That was the beginning of our success." This early channel strategy proved so effective that the partner eventually became an exclusive distributor in Australia, allowing Encompass to expand into other markets quickly.

Growth came from two places: direct sales and channel partnerships. By the time of this interview, Encompass had 20 sales staff in London, 70 total employees (including product, customer success, and development teams in Glasgow and Sydney), and 250 customers. Pricing ranged from $5k/month for mid-market legal firms to $25k-$150k/month for financial services companies. The company achieved remarkable unit economics: 3% annual revenue churn (extremely low for SaaS), net negative churn (expansion revenue exceeding churn), and $75k customer acquisition cost paid back in 15-21 months. A mid-market customer was worth roughly $400k+ in lifetime value, assuming a 7-8 year customer lifespan. Growth was driven 34% year-over-year, with the majority coming from new customer onboarding rather than expansion, though the company was shifting strategy to emphasize channel partnerships—currently contributing less than 10% of revenue but expected to become the primary growth driver.

By the time of this interview, Encompass was running at "south of a million bucks per month" in revenue and on track to cross $1M ARR in the following year. The company raised capital in stages (totaling just under £20M, approximately $28M), starting with family and friends in Australia, progressing to high-net-worth individuals and family offices, and eventually institutional investors. Wayne invested heavily in customer success from day one, which directly contributed to low churn. The company continued to expand its product with features like automated news research, creating upsell opportunities while reducing costs for customers—a win-win dynamic that fueled net negative churn.