Hi Krish
This is such a question close to my heart and i could talk about it for hours, but I’ll just tell you what happened with us.
I think in total, the time from saying we were going to move full-time onto ScreenCloud and then finally concluding it was a couple of years. We’d spoken about that transition for a while, but actually making the commitment to get rid of the agency came a bit later (because we thought we could do both). For us we sold the agency and raised our seed round in the same month and I think if we hadn’t done it like that, it would have been tricky. At the same time, raising a seed round whilst also running another business wasn’t easy either. Investors were wary. So it’s a fine balancing act.
Because you can’t predict exactly how things will pan out, my advice would be to come up with a plan with your co-founder(s) and then execute that plan bit by bit. So long as you are making progress towards it, you will get there eventually. We’d decided that if we hadn’t sold the agency by the time we raised our seed round, we would just close it down. We had to have that deadline where we could all be 100% focused on our real future. As it turned out we were lucky enough to find a home for it in time.
On the staff question: most of the staff in the UK went with the agency to the new owner. They were, after all, agency people and a lot of them didn’t want to work on a single product. Our dev team, who were mainly based in Thailand (where Luke is based) were very happy not to have demanding clients any more and so they all moved over. We had enough time to hire people in London to plug any gaps left by Thailand.
In terms of incentives and salaries - everyone (apart from the founders) stayed on the same salary and we had stock options that we were able to give them. Not sure how easy it would have been to try and cut salaries for staff.