It’s wild how quickly things can change in business. Six months ago, I was running on fumes emotionally, financially, and mentally. We were trying to keep the lights on at EUX, carrying debt, juggling projects, and honestly, just trying to make it to the next month.
When DA came into the picture, the offer felt like a lifeline. Stability, salaries, working capital everything we’d been craving. But over time, the excitement faded and that gut feeling started to whisper: “This doesn’t feel right.”
The more the process dragged on the legal drafts, the slow replies, the constant waiting the more that whisper became a roar. It wasn’t that DA were bad people. It’s that it felt corporate, disconnected, and fundamentally misaligned with who we are. We’ve built EUX by being fast, hands-on, and deeply invested in every customer. That’s just not how they operate.
The funny thing about desperation is that it forces you to look for other paths.
When you feel cornered, your brain goes into survival mode and sometimes, that’s where clarity comes from.
For us, that clarity led to two things:
- Hercules, who might become a great strategic partner, and
- A $250K overdraft approval from CBA that gave us breathing room for the first time in years.
Those two moves both born from a place of “we need options” changed everything.
We didn’t sell 60% of the business.
We didn’t lose control of what we’ve built.
We found stability on our own terms.
Now, EUX is finally profitable again.
TopSMS is about to go to market properly.
And for the first time in a long time, we have both time and headspace to think long-term.
Looking back, I’m grateful for how it all played out. The desperation, the late-night calls, the second-guessing it all forced us to evolve.
If we’d taken the deal out of fear, I think we’d have lost what made this whole journey worth it in the first place: freedom.
Sometimes “no deal” is the best deal you’ll ever make.
