Built to Sell Radio

Anthony Amos and his brother started HydroDog, an Australian company offering a mobile dog washing and grooming service. For $10, the Amos brothers would show up at your door with a giant dog bath on the back of their trailer and wash your dog.

How many people will you have to approach about buying your business before you end up getting an offer? In this week's episode, you'll hear from John Arnott who gives you a breakdown of the statistics on how many people he approached, the conversion rate of those approached to those who signed a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA), what proportion of people under NDA requested a face-to-face meeting a...

Dan Lok packaged a set of table tennis video tutorials into a membership website and charged a subscription fee to join. Over eight years, Lok managed to build a five-figure recurring revenue stream from subscribers to Table Tennis Master. Table Tennis Master was one of 20 businesses Lok was developing simultaneously when tragedy struck his family. That's when he decided to simplify his life and s...

The Mortgage Reports publishes information about mortgages for home owners. Site founder Dan Green, capitalized on the internet traffic they generated by selling leads to mortgage lenders. Within three years, Green crested a million dollars a year in annual revenue. That's when he began to worry about new regulations and compliance as his business went from being a hobby to a major player in the m...

Laura Gisborne has started nine companies and sold six of them, including The Art of Wine, the subject of this week's episode. The Art of Wine is a tasting room with a subscription-based wine club division. With a little more than $1MM in annual revenue, The Art of Wine was still a relatively small business, but when the lease came up for renewal Gisborne reasoned it was the perfect time to look f...

Most sellers want to be paid all of their money up front, and most buyers want to avoid paying anything up front. Deals usually get done somewhere in the middle, where the seller agrees to accept some cash and to be paid some of their proceeds over time.  Eric Weiner, for example, started All Occasion Transportation in college and by the time he turned 35, his company was grossing more than $3MM a...

Have you ever noticed the ads that run before you watch an official online video clip from shows like Saturday Night Live or Jimmy Kimmel ? You can thank Nicholas Seet for that. Seet developed the video player that hosts both the content and the ads for some of the world's biggest media companies. His business, Auditude, was recently acquired by Adobe for more than $100 million according to UCLA's...

Ian Ippolito started Rent a Coder as an online marketplace for hiring technical talent. He quickly expanded to go beyond technical professionals and re-branded as vWorker. Ippolito built vWorker up to $11.5MM in annual revenue before he received an acquisition offer from Australia's Freelancer.com Freelancer.com had been courting Ippolito for months but their original offer was too low in Ippolito...

Peter Shankman started Help A Reporter Out (HARO) to connect experts with journalists who needed people to quote for stories. HARO sent a simple email three times a day to subscribers and because every email had the potential to be a reporter from a media outlet like The New York Times, the email open rates were close to 80%. Most days Shankman worked from his sofa with two employees helping him r...

Bobby Albert took over the family moving business when his father died unexpectedly. Determined to succeed, he transformed his father's five-person business into a fast growth company, eventually employing 150 people before The Albert Group of Companies was approached by a strategic acquirer. Rather than simply accept their first acquisition offer, Albert patiently negotiated the offer up by more...

Julie Pickens and her partner Mindee Hardin created Boogie Wipes, a moistened tissue Moms use so their sick kids can avoid a raw nose in cold season. They patented their formula and won orders from Rite Aid, Walmart and Target leading to annual revenue of $15 million. But all was not well in Boogie land—in fact, the partners' relationship became strained when Hardin announced she wanted out, forci...

Bert Martinez is a best-selling author and a national radio host who has sold a dozen businesses in his career. In this episode, you'll hear the story of Accelerator, a supplements company he sold for just under $1.6MM in 2014. Accelerator's main supplement was ephedra, a weight loss pill that was selling well despite a growing group of customers who were getting sick from misusing it. Martinez st...

Rajiv Kumar and Brad Weinberg started ShapeUp, a software company designed around getting people to improve their health. Instead of going direct to consumers, they decided to license the platform to large Fortune 500 companies looking to reduce their insurance expenses by getting employees to improve their health.  The partners sold 20% of the company for $300,000 in start-up capital and went on...

In 1992 Stephanie Breedlove started a payroll company to make it easier for parents to pay their nannies. It began small and she self-funded their growth, which averaged 20% per year. By 2012 they had hit $9 million in annual sales when she got a call from Sheila Marcelo, the CEO of venture-backed Care.com. Marcelo wanted to buy Breedlove's company and offered her almost $40 million—more than four...

When you get an acquisition offer for your business, it is natural to focus on the offer price, but your employment contract can be a key element of your remuneration. I know, you don't want to be an employee but, when you sell, you'll likely have to sign on for a transition period or earn-out where you will officially be an employee again. The terms of this employment contract are a key element o...

Barry Hinckley founded Bullhorn with his two partners Art Papas and Roger Colvin. The software company built an application recruiters used to manage candidates and clients. Bullhorn raised three rounds of financing and went on to sell for $135MM in 2012. Hinckley and his team raised money from family, friends, and venture capitalists and have the scars to prove it. In this interview you'll learn:...

The first book I ever read about entrepreneurship was The E-Myth by Michael Gerber. I loved it. Gerber's knack for simplifying the complex art of starting and growing a company resonated with me immediately. Although I've never met Michael, I consider him to be one of my very first teachers. I have not read his more recent books so when his publicist contacted me last week to see if I would interv...

Frank Cottle led an investor group to buy Hi-Mark Software for 10 times EBITDA. Cottle then sold a chunk for 15 times and ultimately sold his last tranche of equity for more than 16 times EBITDA to Lufthansa. In this interview, you'll get deep inside the mind of a private equity buyer and learn: three reasons acquisition deals fall apart. the difference between your reputation and your brand and w...

Most of our Built to Sell Radio episodes have been success stories but this week's show is a cautionary tale of what happens when you don't plan ahead. It features Dan Bradbury, a young entrepreneur who was growing a successful business right up until the day he had a cycling accident and ended up in a coma. Bradbury made a full recovery after seven months, but his business didn't make out as well...

Mark Stephenson and his partners grew their conference business, Media Edge Communications, to north of $10 million in annual revenue when they were approached by an acquirer. They agreed to a deal that was just shy of eight times EBITDA—85% of the deal was in cash with 15% in an earn-out. If Stephenson had the deal to do over again, he would change his earn-out structure to avoid leaving money on...

Steve Huey bought The Learning House, a company that creates online courses on behalf of colleges, for $2.7MM in 2007 because he saw the opportunity to professionalize the sales and account management of the business. Five years later, Huey sold the business to Weld North, a private equity company for $27.5 MM earning his shareholders an 8 to 1 return.  In this episode, you'll hear Huey's advice o...

Joe Saul Sehy is the host of Stacking Benjamins , a popular personal finance podcast on which he has interviewed everyone from Jean Chatzky to David Bach. Sehy's journey to becoming a podcasting sensation was a little unusual: he started as a financial advisor, building a firm with $65 million in assets under management. Then, on his 40 th birthday, Sehy received a letter from a friend which was t...

Doug Chapiewsky built CenterPoint Solutions Inc. into an Inc. 500 company with $5 million in revenue and more than $3 million in EBITDA before he sold it to Israeli-based Nice Systems. In this episode of Built to Sell Radio , Chapiewsky describes how to: scrutinize the various currencies used by acquirers (cash vs. stock vs. options). dress up your company to sell it. use an office manager to incr...

Manny Fernandez started HomeBuyingCenter.com in 2007, just as the real estate market started to wobble in the United States. As it turned out, his timing was perfect as his site helped underwater homeowners unload their real estate. In fact, Fernandez was generating so many opportunities for one real estate brokerage, that he received an unsolicited offer from them to purchase his business. He too...

Of course you want an all-cash offer at a beefy multiple with no strings attached, but what do you really need from the sale of your company? That's a question Dr. Frank Gibson thought a lot about. He had a successful healthcare business but had stumbled on a new opportunity in a related field. He wanted to sell his company to fund the new idea and, at the same time, needed to retain the rights to...