From strangers to a 50-person agency, with RevWise co-founders Jamie Brusey and Gary Winter

RevWise is an affiliate and influencer agency founded in January 2023 by two people who had known each other for about a month. In this final Lessons from Losing episode, recorded at Awin's ThinkTank UK, Awin regional agency lead Jessica Smith asks co-founders Jamie Brusey and Gary Winter about their early setbacks, rapid hiring and the day they found their numbers were wrong.

In this episode

• The pair met a month before incorporating; Winter says he had been pushed out of a previous consultancy with no equity, and the lesson was to get legal protection and not dwell on setbacks (2:01, 5:30, 7:30).

• Brusey says they grew their first client's programme from 30K to 300K within three months, helped by Winter treating publisher recruitment like a sales pipeline (9:30).

• The first six months brought one good client; they say it moved to Awin, and splitting sales from client delivery in spring 2023 helped them end the year as a million-pound business (10:31, 12:30).

• They never chased other services such as Amazon, PPC or Meta, and say sticking to affiliate and influencer work explains their success (14:02, 14:31).

• The team reached about 50 people; they hired for will over skill, and describe needing pioneers early and people who build repeatable processes later (15:31, 16:01).

• A new fractional CFO showed their margins were far weaker than assumed, with Bulgarian payroll tax off by a third; they now stress cash flow and credit control, after writing off £28,000 from one client (17:32, 18:31, 26:00).

Interview from Lessons from Losing by Awin, published on YouTube.