Shortly before he launched Splendies, Anthony Coombs had an unsettling job interview. It was 2013, the then-33year-old had just moved to Los Angeles, and a friend had arranged for him to meet with a partner at a prestigious tech incubator. Thirty minutes after the interview was supposed to begin, the man popped out into the reception area and asked Coombs why he was there, and then he made him wait another 30 minutes. Coombs was stunned, and even more so when he finally took a seat opposite the partner, who put his feet up, crossed his arms, and issued a challenge. “Impress me,” the man said.
When he got home, Coombs, still fuming, wrote the words Impress me on a piece of paper and stuck it to the wall of his apartment. He’d been considering the idea that would become Splendies but took the interview because he hadn’t yet committed himself to startup life again. Now he felt driven. “This is going to get done,” he said to himself.
Eight years later, in mid-2021, Splendies was on track to do nearly $16 million in annual revenue, and Coombs had bootstrapped his way there without a dollar of outside investment or even debt. The company had finished every year in the black. That fall, Splendies appeared on the Inc. 5000 as one of the fastest-growing companies in America. It had grown 347 percent over the previous three years, putting it firmly in the top third of the list, at No. 1,373.
Coombs started making the rounds of conferences and networking events, and everywhere he went, people were—there’s no better word for it—impressed. The reactions filled him with righteous affirmation. But he also couldn’t help asking himself, “Can someone make this bigger?” He had always entertained the goal of selling his company when it was ready, and suddenly the time felt right. He put together a plan: He’d have a polished sales deck by February. “And,” he hoped, “by March, we’re out.”
That’s what he said in January 2022, when he met with Inc. for the first of what would become a dozen meetings to document the sale of his company. Sitting in his living room, where Impress me was still hanging on the wall, Coombs was confident in his timetable.
But this story is not the one that he or Inc. expected to publish. As anyone who’s built a fast-growing company can attest, plans are one thing. How they turn out is another altogether.
In retrospect, Coombs’s career as an entrepreneur seems inevitable. He started negotiating prices at his grandparents’ Florida flea market stand as a child. As a high schooler, he watched his mother struggle to regain her footing after she’d been laid off, and he and vowed never
