‘My balls are in the blender, but it’s the price I’ll pay for control’

Why John Whelan remortgaged his house to buy out his venture capital backer

Forgive the colourful language on today’s Rainmakers post, but now that we’ve got your attention, it’s definitely a story worth reading.

We get lots of press releases where someone does a deal and everyone is “thrilled” or “delighted”. This was no different, but the background is important.

It takes us from the playing fields of Stockport, to the world of Premier League football, to the dizzy heights of the stock market, and to the highest courts in the land.

It’s so much more than a management buyout of a tech company from Stockport and the performance of the Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund.

John Whelan, pictured above, holding the dog, says people should be entertaining, interesting and then informative, in that order. 

Our conversation was certainly all of those things.

The founder of Stockport and Chennai based tech business My Digital has taken the unusual step - by his own admission - of raising his own personal money by remortgaging his house, in order to take back control of the business he founded in 2015.

“My balls are in the blender on this, but it’s the price I’m willing to pay for control,” he tells me.

But he is confident that his decision to buy out Maven, who invested £1.2million in 2019, as managers of the Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund, is the right decision for him, even at the age of 57.