You just cant keep a good man down!

Mal MacCallion used to run Rater Agent, which raised £150k on Crowdcube at the end of 2015. He was the main man in the Rater agent pitch. Then he left and worked for Callwell. Now he has rebirthed Growtion (nee Tramal).

Rater Agent are late with their accounts and Confirmation statement. We expect there are the usual reasons for this tardiness - projections showed a healthy profit.

We wrote about this before here and here

We expect Growtion to appear on an equity crowdfunding site near you very soon. They have a good list of customer reviews for a company that has only been trading for 12 months, including two from Callwell. They help you grow, apparently.

On the Growtion website, they have some case studies, along with a glowing account of Mal's business acumen and successes. It is hard not to laugh out loud.

One of the case studies is ......... Rater Agent. According to Mal, Rater Agent is profit making - obviously thanks very largely to his business skills.  The last set of accounts field at CH for YE April 2015 shows net assets of £1 balanced by Shareholder Funds of £1 - in fact £1 is the only figure on the balance sheet. Another case study is Zoopla. By dint of working at Zoopla at some stage (apparently), years before Growtion was incorporated, Growtion has helped Zoopla to its success. The final case study involves Callwell. Callwell is a tiny company making small losses. When we say tiny, it is really teensy.

So if you are willing to believe any of the above means that Mal has a clue about business, you really need to see someone. Why was he allowed to pitch on Crowdcube? I think we all know the answer to that.

Rateragent moots closing due to total shambles. We called it two years ago.

Yet another Crowdcube funded company comes off the rails within 24 months of funding. This Blog warned would be investors at the time that the claims made by the CEO were far from transparent.

To quote the email sent to shareholders - ' Unfortunately, due to the previous leadership the business has reached a precarious position.' IE it's insolvent.

It had spent all of the £134k it raised on Crowdcube in 2015 and more by the end of 2015. In 2016 it was due to be turning over £1.23m with profits of £294k. In fact it only achieved just over £80k in revenues, with a small loss of £8k,; cut back from the £150k it lost in 2015 when it received its lovely lolly from 133 investors.

The leadership that is roundly blamed for this shambles is one Mal McCallion, who is described in the Crowdcube pitch thus - 

Mal was involved in the launch of two very successful property technology start-ups, Zoopla & Primelocation. He has spent 15 years immersed in UK property tech.

and

Mal has extraordinary experience in this marketplace, having been on the launch team of Primelocation in 2000 - taking that all the way to exit in 5 years for £48m - and driving the re-launch of Zoopla, when it pivoted from a private sales platform to an estate agent subscription site from 2008. 

Having spent three years helping to build Zoopla from zero subscribing agent branches to a solid number two in the property portal market (behind Rightmove) by 2011, Mal was headhunted to join Brent Hoberman, co-Founder of lastminute.com, in an interactive floorplan business which let people build Computer Generated Images (CGI's) of their actual homes with up to 125,000 new furniture items in them. 

Having sold that to Floorplanner in 2013, in 2014 Mal went to run Fine & Country / Guild of Professional Estate Agents' technology company, PropertyLogic. The concept of a new start-up in raterAgent became too tempting in December 2014, however and, within a month, the 'beta' site was launched in January 2015.

Until he began to use every waking hour creating and nurturing raterAgent, Mal loved running, cycling and spending time with his family. He is a downtrodden Ipswich Town fan and knows more than anyone reasonably should about Simple Minds' back catalogue and Blackadder.

That hardly sounds like someone who would place the company in such a precarious position by accident. Mal resigned a while back and we wrote about this here and here whilst the pitch was live and in fact told investors that the claims made on the Crowdcube pitch were dubious...at best. 

Crowdcube must be held accountable for this misinformation - it was after all a prime part of the pitch they vetted and published under their FCA license. But of course they wont be. And so it goes on and on and on ......................................................................

Well that didnt last long. More bad news from a Crowdcube success Rater Agent

Rater Agent raised £150k on Crowdcube just over a year ago. Now its main man and founding wizard Mal McCallion has left.

In the Crowdcube pitch Mal was Rater Agent. Portrayed as a highly successful entrepreneur who was

 '' a veteran of property/technology start-ups Primelocation and Zoopla,'' and '' Mal was headhunted to join Brent Hoberman, co-Founder of lastminute.com, in an interactive floorplan business which let people build Computer Generated Images (CGI's) of their actual homes with up to 125,000 new furniture items in them. 

Having sold that to Floorplanner in 2013, in 2014 Mal went to run Fine & Country / Guild of Professional Estate Agents .........''

Now we think it is fair to assume from reading this text taken directly from the pitch, that Mal was part of the sale of this unnamed company to Floorplanner. A little research in the right places tells a different story.

MyDeco 3D ltd was founded by Hobberman in 2006 and Fox joined shortly afterwards. The controlling company was By Design (UK) Ltd. No mention at CH of Mal in this deal. He was never a director or shareholder in either company from the records. So we think this Crowdcube text is at best highly misleading.

To be honest the software never did much and although the deal to purchase it by Floorplanner was a share swop we dont think it valued MyDeco at much if anything.

So back to Mal - the driving force behind this Crowdcube funded Rater Agent. Well that was the case for a year post funding. Now he is pursuing other interests as MD of Callwell - maybe he just got bored? Now again he is not a director or shareholder in Callwell. How many entrepreneurs do you know who act as managers at other people's companies?

We were contacted by an irate shareholder, so decided to look into this. Its a bit of mess for 70 or so shareholders in Rater Agent who surely expected this entrepreneurial wizard to deliver a huge ROI for them. Then again maybe his departure is a good thing? We are expecting Callwell to be crowdfunding shortly.