The fifth year with Brath – our annual report

Somewhere around one million more in revenue, roughly the same results but with a lot of invisible growth. That’s how year five turned out for Brath.

As is our custom, we want to be completely transparent about how things are going. The year 2016–2017 has in many ways been an extremely interesting year in Brath’s history, even if it doesn’t show that clearly in the numbers. The main reason for this is that we’ve worked on breadth rather than height—more on that later in this post. Two exciting things that happened during the year are that we bought Teveo and sold Doftljusbutiken.

Teveo – and our office in Gothenburg

One of the major events of the year, actually right at our fiscal year-end, is that we bought Teveo. The company has been active in SEO, SEM, and social media advertising but has struggled with profitability in recent years. The idea is that we should preserve what works well and fix the rest. I have personally spent quite a lot of the past few months working with Andreas and Christian, the founders of Teveo, to reach this acquisition. Now the deal is done and we’re in full swing working together as one company. The result is that we now have an office in Gothenburg.

Doftljusbutiken in new hands

Doftljusbutiken was part of our acquisition when we bought Gardenhome. The shop has worked as a complement to the garden store and has in itself been, well, somewhat profitable. It’s always good with extra sales when it doesn’t really increase costs much. It is now in the hands of Emila Group, who plan to quickly expand the assortment and build Doftljusbutiken into something that stands on its own. I’m personally convinced they’ll do a better job than us—the shop deserves to be its own thing and not just an appendage to a larger store.

This year’s numbers

This year it’s a bit trickier than in previous years to talk about the numbers. We’re not yet finished with the books, and once you get a bit bigger, like we are now, it’s hard to say exactly. As things stand, my best guess—a fairly well-informed guess—is that Brath’s revenue will increase by around one million. It may end up a little higher in the final accounts when things are moved into the right year. 17.8 million SEK compared to last year’s 16.8 is my cautious estimate. The profit should be about the same as last year, but I don’t dare speculate yet—there’s still a lot of work left before I know.

In the other companies in our little group, I would say Brath Distanshandel will land just under one million in revenue and Ehandel i Norr at 1.7 million SEK.

We’ve also, partly due to the Teveo acquisition, increased our number of employees significantly and at the time of writing have 25 employees in the parent company. Three more are in the subsidiaries. It may look like a lot, but it’s worth remembering that it’s a snapshot, while revenue reflects the whole year. We’re clearly generating more per month now than we were at the start of the year.

The story behind the numbers

As I said, a lot has happened that doesn’t show in this year’s results, and much of that is because we’ve changed the type of customers we have. Today, we don’t have that many large clients of the kind that caused so many problems last year. We’ve still been suffering somewhat from the aftereffects of that, but we’ve learned our lesson, even better this time. We now have a much broader client base and are nowhere near as dependent on individual players.

We’ve also invested heavily in structure. Automating what can be automated—where we previously worked with huge Excel sheets, we now have well-functioning systems in many cases. One of our investments is in a crawler that keeps track of the internet for us, something that has already saved us an enormous amount of time and will save even more in the future. We will continue to allocate resources to improve it.

Because of this, and thanks to the restructuring we’ve done, we are now more prepared for the future than we’ve ever been. Our goal for the coming year (which has already started for us) is to take a bigger step forward in the company’s development.

Exciting events during 2016–2017

Apart from the acquisition of Teveo, which of course overshadows many other events simply because of the amount of time and effort it required, some other fun things have happened too. For example, Maria and I got to go to the Grand Hotel in Stockholm when Maria was one of the nominees for CEO of the Year. It didn’t end in victory, but to be on such a shortlist is certainly an honor.

Most read on Brath.se, in terms of blog posts, was my interview with Anders Karlsson on dropshipping. In second place came last year’s annual report.

Brath in the search results

In search results, we’ve climbed for search engine optimization and currently hold fourth place, after Wikipedia, Getupdated, and Pineberry. Those sites have a few years’ head start on us, but we’re steadily catching up. For SEO, we’re still number one with our quick guide. What’s new is that this site has also started to appear in the top 10. A steady 3–4 position on AdWords with only Google (and sometimes Wikipedia) ahead of us is also something we can brag about—here we’ve left our competitors in the dust.

If you like our reporting

As usual, for those of you who’ve been following us for a while, I want to be transparent with our numbers, setbacks, and successes, in the hope that it may be useful for your own business. Sometimes it hurts to publish posts like this—last year especially. That’s why I ask for your feedback: if you like that we share this, please leave a comment. As long as the interest is there, we’ll continue.