‘We want to be great’: Liam Chennells on making Detected a success 

In the first of a two-part series of posts, we ask Detected’s Co-founders about their journey as the company celebrates its fourth anniversary.

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‍‘We want to be great’
Liam Chennells on making Detected a success 

After leaving school and with ambitions to play rugby, Liam Chennells went from sales and recruitment to big tech to launching a business during the pandemic. Now he’s on a mission to make Detected.co the gold standard in the Know Your Business (KYB) sector.

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What’s your background?

I started my career in sport, playing rugby all over the world in various international tournaments as well as living in New Zealand and playing there. 

But I had some bad injuries and then ended up working in recruitment which landed me with a focus in ecommerce, which in time gave me a passion for the sector. 

That’s how I met my co-founder Pete, who was running tech for a company I was leading sales for. I then worked at eBay for a while, then with a firm which was acquired by Zalando, then I went to work in San Francisco and after that I took a sabbatical, came home and didn’t really know what to do.

Then I had an idea, and here we are.

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Where did the idea for Detected come from?

It was during the pandemic. My aunt passed away from Covid and I wanted to do something to help others. I had picked up some good connections in logistics and I thought maybe I could use those to help move personal protective wear (PPE).

But one of the biggest problems I faced was validating legitimate PPE suppliers, because all of a sudden there were a lot of shysters trying to make money. So, I just phoned Pete and talked it over. That was May 2020; we registered the business by the end of July.

Initially we thought about creating a marketplace, but then realised the key element we were trying to solve was the verification of each seller. So, we switched to focus on creating a tool that could prove businesses were legit or not.

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How has it evolved since then?

I think one big mistake start-ups make is to stick rigidly to what they’re doing and not react to what people in the market tell them. We’ve changed our thinking a lot and run through various iterations; we didn’t fully crystallise the business until the tail-end of last year to be completely honest.

It took a little while to work out that we were a KYB business, but that’s exactly what we landed on and now we’re sticking to it because we’re winning major customers and investment with the solution we’ve been building for the last 4 years.

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What’s the problem with KYB that Detected solves?

It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, whether it’s fintech or supplier management in manufacturing, you’re always going to get two companies figuring out whether or not they should work together. 

KYB is the checks you run to help you make that decision. The problem is the KYB process is terrible: a crappy laborious form on a website, providing lots of different numbers and documents, lots of calls, emails and clarifications.

If the applicant gets to the end of the form, it goes into the recipient system and then is passed through a third-party background checker like Dun & Bradstreet and the profile is completed with additional information. 

An analyst then looks over the information and weighs it up, then emails the customer for recent copies of this or that document as needed, plus some additional details; before long you are caught in a project management death loop.

We have created a better system: a front-end, white-labelled customer portal that dynamically reacts to factors like where the customer is based and what product the customer is interested in. The applicants pass through a flow which requires only minimal information, specific to their use case.

There is an option to auto-approve the profile at this stage, say if the customer has a strong credit rating, the company is well established, and all directors have passed screening. We then of course monitor all those businesses on an ongoing basis.

KYB isn’t a data problem, it’s a data + process problem. The problem is, there has never been the fresh thinking needed in the industry to build an end to end solution.

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What’s the biggest challenge you have to overcome?

Without a doubt it’s communicating the benefits of Detected and convincing people who have used the same system for 10 years to switch. ‘Terry’ in compliance won’t get fired for renewing his D&B licence, but he might for switching to a service that harms the business, so he’ll take some convincing that the new service works.

We know his business would be better off with us, but – especially with people who work in compliance – there is a perception of risk when you try something new, even when it looks better than what you have now.

COOs and CFOs think differently. They care about revenue and spending, so we’re talking to a lot of those, demonstrating the low-risk, high reward offering. 

For example, we reduced the onboarding time for one of our clients from 92 days to 12. They generated £200,000 additional revenue from their clients during that time frame in which they used to be doing compliance. 

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Describe your experience of running Detected

I feel older, but I’ve loved it, mainly because we did it our way, not necessarily the way business books tell you to. There have been some really hard times, but I’ve loved it.

I just wake up every day and think let’s go again; I call that New Year’s Day energy, writing down my goals each morning like normal people do once a year and having the confidence that it is going to happen.

When people ask what the highlight has been, I just say it’s the fact that I’m here doing it. We’ve put a brilliant team together, raised millions of pounds and been lucky enough to have some success along the way – the whole thing is a life highlight for me.

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What does the future hold for the business?

We want to be the best at what we’re doing right now, I don’t want to stray from that focus. I think getting distracted is another thing that kills start-ups, launching too many product lines and delivering lots of things badly instead of one thing brilliantly.

So the focus is on being great, being profitable, and being a healthy business that serves our customers well. I also want to keep on enjoying it, because you do your best work when you’re happy.

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What advice do you have for someone wanting to start a business?

I don’t feel like I’m in a position to offer advice to other start-ups out there, having only just done it myself, but one thing I would say is this: get your head up and your chest out and be the best you can be. If you feel good in yourself then you give yourself a chance of your business reflecting that.