Built to Sell Radio

Have you ever considered how you would tell your employees you've sold your business? It's one of the conversations most founders fear. You hope your employees will be happy for you, but you also worry some will view you as a sellout.   Dr. Michael Filosi experienced the entire spectrum of reactions when he told his 35 empl oyees he had sold his dental practice, the biggest in Adelaide, to private...

Lior Pozin started AutoDS to run his own eBay dropshipping stores. The software finds trending products to sell, tracks supplier price and stock changes, and fulfills orders automatically so a dropshipper never touches the inventory. He bootstrapped the company for eight years, keeping the bank balance at zero on purpose, and grew it to 200 employees and more than $20 million in annual recurring r...

Jim Fitzgerald bootstrapped  Taradel  from a spare bedroom into a $30 million direct mail company. In 2016 he took the business to market, and the five buyers who made it to  an indication  of interest all offered  roughly 4x  EBITDA, about half of what Jim had in mind. He had spent years reinvesting every dollar in growth, and the market told him growth alone  wasn't  enough.   So  Jim rebuilt hi...

Clean Energy Associates acted as the eyes and ears on the ground in China for solar and battery storage buyers, inspecting factories to make sure the products they ordered were built correctly before they shipped.   In 2016, a banker sat down with founder Andy Klump in Shanghai and asked him three questions. How would he triple his business in  a short period  of time? Who was on his executive tea...

Zac Smith was a mechanical engineer who wanted more flexibility and upside than a corporate career could offer. He bought an existing  CertaPro  Painters franchise in North Carolina with three employees and under $1 million in revenue. He put down about 10% in cash and financed the rest with an SBA loan and a small seller note, backed by a personal guarantee.   Three years later, the company was o...

Adam Spector co-founded LiftIgniter in 2014, which used machine learning to personalize websites the way YouTube does. Growth stalled, and with no way to prove the company was causing the results customers saw, it could never charge what the work was worth. The board brought in a new CEO to sell, and when Adam argued to keep building he was outvoted two to one. It sold in 2018, mostly for its engi...

Heath Adams bootstrapped TCM into a company with two revenue lines: hacking into companies' systems to expose  vulnerabilities, and  selling courses and certifications that trained others to do the same work. He owned every share, raised no outside capital, and never relied on outbound sales. Every lead came through a YouTube channel that grew to more than a million subscribers.   A competitor the...

Broadly speaking, there  are two ways to build a company. Some entrepreneurs swing for the fences, spending decades building one big business. Others play for singles, building a series of smaller companies they can sell and repeat.   Stuart Faught has made a career of the second approach.   He has started and sold 20 software businesses, making him the  number-one  seller on Acquire.com. His mode...

Garren Hilow bootstrapped  Abveris , an antibody discovery business doing $12 million in revenue, and sold it in 2021 for $150 million up front with another $40 million available in an earnout. His team came within one percent of the revenue target. The acquirer said they had missed it, refused to share the accounting behind that conclusion, and dared him to sue.   Rob Walling sold Drip with 40 pe...

Dane Pan and his  wife built  Monet Brands to $1.3 million in revenue with two employees, selling a $24.99 skincare tool that cost them $6.10.   When they took the company to market in 2025, nine buyers cleared the proof-of-funds screen and four of them wrote an LOI. The best offer came in close to four times SDE with a holdback attached. Dane countered for all cash at close, watched two of his fo...

One of the fastest growing groups of acquirers is the  self funded  searcher. A searcher is not a competitor nor a private equity group. A searcher is usually one person, often recently out of an MBA program, who puts ten to twenty percent down from personal savings, borrows the rest from a bank, often asks the owner to finance part of the purchase price, and signs a personal guarantee for the deb...

In 2016, Janessa White and her business partner started Simply Eloped, a marketplace that planned elopements and small weddings for couples in 35 cities across the United States. They also decided, before they had a single customer, which company they wanted to sell it to. The Knot Worldwide, the largest wedding platform in the world.   Over the next seven years, White told The Knot exactly that,...

There are four types of financial buyers who might make an offer on your business, and more often than any other type, the one approaching you is an independent sponsor. It is an unhelpful label for a group that raises the money for a deal only after the seller has signed an LOI, which is also when the seller's leverage is at its lowest.   Travis Jamison runs Capital Pad, where investors fund inde...

One day,  you're  going to sell your business, and when you do,  you'll  experience a step function increase in your net worth. Navigating that moment is something Adam Katz has spent his career helping owners do. He spent twenty years at Merrill Lynch as a Private Wealth Advisor to  ultra high  net worth families before he and his team left in 2018 to build KORE Private Wealth, an independent fir...

If you own a company, chances are  you're  its best salesperson. Put you in a room with a prospect and you rarely lose. But listen to your employees try to tell the same story and something gets lost.  You've  tried hiring salespeople.  You've  tried training them. The selling keeps landing back on your shoulders, and when it comes time to sell, an acquirer will see it too. Expect an earn-out or a...

Jeff Church co-founded Suja Juice in 2012 with $300,000 and a green juice that had a four-day shelf life. Within three years, the company hit $70 million in revenue, and Coca-Cola and Goldman Sachs invested $150 million at a $300 million valuation. Then, two weeks after Coke flew its entire North American management team to Suja's plant, they passed on the option to buy the rest of the business, l...

More owners than ever say they are simply tired. A look at 10,255  PREScore ™ assessments over six years found that 17.5% pointed to burnout, not retirement, as the number one reason they want out.   So  the question went to two people who spend their days on the buy side, valuing companies and deciding what to pay. Lee McCabe is a private equity veteran who advises PE firms on the businesses they...

What do you need to know before selling your business to an ETA buyer? Most owners have received the email. It usually starts with something flattering: "I love what you've built…" Then comes the ask: a quick call to learn more about your business. Increasingly, those emails are coming from ETA buyers — entrepreneurs using entrepreneurship through acquisition as their path into business ownership....

Knowing what kind of  seller  you are turns out to be one of the most important things you can figure out before you ever take a meeting with a potential acquirer. There are three: the transactional seller who wants the money and the door, the transitional seller who wants to land the plane, and the transformational seller who sells to go bigger.   Cameron Passmore built one of the largest indepen...

"When I sell the company, then I'll be happy." Psychotherapist Jo Swann says that one phrase is the most reliable predictor of a miserable exit. She would know. She made her money in the 90s, retired to an oceanfront apartment in Borneo, and fell straight into an existential crisis.   In this episode of Built to Sell Radio, part of our popular After the Deal series, Swann explains why the trap sur...

Every founder fixates on the multiple. Tim Hellebrand will tell you the (second) most important number on a letter of intent is the one almost nobody understands until it is too late: working capital.   When Tim and his four brothers took their $105 million family appliance business to market, six letters of intent came back, and the spread between the lowest and the highest was 60 percent. Most o...

A lot of owners are losing sleep over AI right now. They watch search traffic erode, they see competitors automating, and they wonder if the business they spent twenty years building is quietly becoming obsolete.   Jaryd Krause sees it differently.  He's  a buyer. And when he looks at a 20-year-old company run by an owner who is "scared of AI and selling because of it," he sees an acquisition oppo...

When Sean Kernan wanted out of the financial advisor support business he co-founded in Dallas, he  didn't   shop  it to outside acquirers, and he  didn't  wait for his five partners to make him an offer. He engineered the buyout himself. Three and a half months from the first conversation to the wire hitting his account, $500,000 in cash, no earn-out, no holdback.   In this episode, you discover h...

There's  an old idea in M&A called the Rembrandt in the attic. A company owns something valuable — a brand, a patent, a customer list, a data set — and nobody inside the business sees it for what it is. The right acquirer walks in, looks at the same asset through a different lens, and recognizes a masterpiece.   Dori Yona spent six years and raised $14 million building what he thought was a price...

Aaron Leibtag was one of the most popular guests in Built to Sell Radio history. He sold his 15-employee bootstrapped healthcare AI company,  Pentavere , for $15 million.   Pentavere  built AI to unlock patient data trapped inside PDFs and clinical notes years before large language models existed.   The headline number was $15 million. What it did not reveal was the structure underneath. Part of t...