Built to Sell Radio

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...

Boris Berenberg bootstrapped Atlas Authority, an Atlassian partner that resold Jira and Confluence to mid-market companies and built apps on top of the platform, to high seven figures in revenue with 18% net margins, then sold to private equity in May 2022.   A year later he wrote a blog post titled "I regret selling my startup" that went viral inside the exited founder community. 

Ret Taylor spent his entire adult life chasing a number.  First  it was $30 million. Then $10 million. Then $6 million. Then he sat in a tent at 18,000 feet on Denali with two Arctic storms closing in and realized the number was never the point.   He came down the mountain, sold Ned, his natural remedies company,  and now guides people through life transitions on multi-day vision quests in the mou...

At some point every founder needs to ask a simple question: is it better to own a big slice of a small pie, or a smaller slice of a bigger pie?   In this week's episode, we hear from someone who chose a smaller slice of a bigger pie. Simon Lorenz co-founded Klara, a patient communication platform for medical practices, and raised  roughly $32 million  across six rounds of outside capital before se...

Most founders think  they're  not great negotiators. John Richardson thinks  they're  wrong. Richardson has spent decades teaching negotiation at MIT's Sloan School of Management and before that at Harvard Law, where he was an associate at the Harvard Negotiation Project and  co-authored foundational texts with Roger Fisher and Howard  Raiffa . His new book is called  Never Settle . In this episod...

Murray Kent had no background in electrical conduit fittings when he paid $40,000 for a four-person business that, as he put it, looked like a bit of a crack den.  What he did have was Value Builder's 8 drivers -- pinned to the wall next to his desk as a literal road map for every decision he made.   In this episode of Built to Sell Radio, you discover how to negotiate a clean exit with no earn-ou...

Jay Richards spent five months deep in an acquisition process. He had a letter of intent. He had mentally checked out. He was planning what came next.   Then issues surfaced in  diligence  and the deal collapsed.   This week on Built to Sell Radio, Jay walks John  Warrillow  through the full story of selling Imagen Insights, a qualitative research platform with clients like Visa, Google, and Amazo...

David Sinkinson and his brother Chris built  AppArmor  over eleven years without taking a single dollar from outside investors. They bootstrapped it by running side businesses, plowing the profits back in, and staying lean through long sales cycles and compliance-heavy buyers. By the time they were ready to sell, they had over 250 universities on the platform and  roughly $6 million  in annual rec...

When Sharon Gillenwater built Boardroom Insiders, she was doing something nobody else wanted to  do:  manually researching the personal work styles, business initiatives, and habits of Fortune 500 executives so that enterprise sales teams could finally get a meeting with the C-suite. It was hard, painstaking work — and that was exactly the point.   After more than a decade of bootstrapping, consul...

Most founders approach a sale with one goal: get the highest price possible. But Mark Ferrer argues that focusing only on price can lead to the wrong deal, the wrong partner, and a painful transition after closing.   In this episode of Built to Sell Radio, John  Warrillow  talks with Ferrer about what he has learned after moving from founder to buyer, and why every owner needs to know whether they...

Most business owners assume their buyer will be a private equity group or a strategic acquirer. But if you run a smaller business in a niche category, the person most likely to buy you is an individual — someone who likes what you've built, can see a path to improve it, and is willing to put their own name on the line to finance the deal.   This week on Built to Sell Radio, Joe Soelberg joins the...

Andrew McConnell built a SaaS company that helped vacation rental managers price homes like airlines  using dynamic pricing based on demand . He eventually successfully exited, but not before learning the hard way that building a company and selling one  require  two entirely different skill sets.   In this episode of  Built to Sell Radio , Andrew walks through the pivot that saved his business, w...

This episode is part of our  Inside the Mind of an Acquirer  series, and it unpacks the ETA (Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition) wave now flooding the market.   For business owners, ETA is a double-edged sword. On the upside, more buyers courting you means more choice, more urgency, and more liquidity. On the downside, many ETA buyers are  first-timers  who lean on heavy leverage and seller fina...

We often think of a "successful exit" as handing over the keys to a perfectly oiled machine—a business that is growing, profitable, and operationally sound.   But what happens when the machine starts to sputter?   What if the margins are too thin, the operations are exhausting, and you are simply burned out?   It is easy to assume that a broken business model means a worthless company. But as this...

acasa  helps peop le ru n a shared ho me w ithout the usual friction. It started as a simple way for housemates to track and split rent, bills, and groceries, then added payments and utility setup so households could manage recurring bills in one place.   When Nick Katz tried to sell acasa on his own, the downside  wasn't  just a slow process. It created a setup where buyers had the leverage: they...

Nick Telson-Sillett and his co-founder built what you could call "OpenTable for bars and nightclubs" in the UK.   Instead of chasing the US (the move most founders are told to make), they went  big fish , small pond: dominate their home market first. That focus helped them build  DesignMyNight  into a business that sold for more than $40M.   In this episode of Built to Sell Radio, Nick shares what...