After the Close

Patrick Dichter wasn't an accountant. He had an MBA, a finance minor, and seven years selling for a digital marketing agency. Then he heard you could just buy a business, so he did. In late 2021 he closed on Appletree Business Services at $1.2M in revenue, and over the next few years grew it roughly 4X through a mix of bolt-on acquisitions and organic growth. In this episode, Patrick and Dan get i...

What happens when a founder runs his own sale process, gets the deal done, and then writes a viral blog post titled "I Regret Selling My Startup"? Boris Berenberg spent six and a half years building Atlas Authority into one of the top Atlassian partner businesses in the world. Tens of millions in lifetime revenue, high single-digit millions in ARR, 10,000+ customers, fully bootstrapped. In 2022, h...

Jeff Archibald built Paper Leaf from a two-person design shop into a 30-person custom software firm doing $4M in revenue. Then he sold it, but not before a failed deal nearly cost him everything. In this episode, Jeff walks through both deals: the PE buyer who dragged him through five months of due diligence, ran up $50K in professional fees, and then rewrote the terms on closing day. He also brea...