Built to Sell Radio

Aaron Houghton sold iContact in 2012 for $180 million. The first round of growth was financed by something called convertible debt, which Houghton recommends to any entrepreneur for its simplicity. To hear how Houghton parlayed an initial investment of $250,000 into a $180 million exit.

In eight years Ryan Born built Audio Micro, which began operations in his spare bedroom, into an Inc. 500 company. Born went on to sell his business for more than $20 million in 2014 – a deal that only happened because he had the foresight to put an expiry date on the "no shop” clause on his Letter of Intent.

Jeff Hoffman sold Competitive Technologies, a business intelligence company serving the travel industry, to American Express in a nine-figure exit. After the Letter of Intent (LOI) was signed, American Express proposed paying part of the acquisition in an earn-out, and you’ll never guess what Hoffman did next.

Most financial acquirers will arrive at an offer for your business by calculating the profit they expect you to make and deciding what they are willing to pay today, for your profit stream in the future. Because you are competing with lots of other places that the acquirer could invest their money, multiples are usually in the low to mid-single digits of your pre-tax profit.   A strategic acquisit...

Yvonne Tocquigny built her Austin-based advertising agency up over 35 years working with clients like Jeep, Dell, Hitachi, USAA and Caterpillar. Then in 2015, she got a call from New York wondering if she would consider selling. The problem was that her agency had become part of who she was. She had become something of a local celebrity and an inspiration for young female entrepreneurs in Austin....

Trevor McKendrick had created the best-selling Spanish-language Bible app when he was approached about an acquisition offer. Salem’s original offer was 3.5x revenue but Trevor got them up to 5x with a combination of chutzpah and a knack for reading the fine print.

Stephan Spencer went to sell his consulting business in the late 1990s but buyers all wanted him to sign up for a long, painful, and risky earnout. Keen for a clean exit, Spencer took the business off the market and set out to make it less dependent on him personally. In the episode, he details the three unique strategies he pursued for withdrawing from the day-to-day operations of his business. B...

Ian Schoen built Two Tree International, up to $4 million in revenue before he sold it in a multimillion dollar exit in 2015. Despite only working in the company for a handful of hours each week, Schoen was able to attract a number of buyers because he had created an operating manual employees could follow.

I loved watching David Price pitch for the Toronto Blue Jays in last year’s pennant race, so I was sad to see him sign a seven year, $217 million contract with The Boston Red Sox a few weeks back. Of course, it wasn’t Price himself sitting across the negotiating table from the Red Sox brass. He was represented by his agent, Bo McKinnis. Price—like just about every high stakes professional athlete—...

A shotgun deal is the most brutal form of capitalism. When you can’t stand your partner anymore, you offer them a price for their shares. They have two choices: accept your offer or buy you out for the same amount. Triggering a shotgun deal can have explosive results, as Kim Ades found when she offered to buy out her husband’s share of Upward Motion.

Usually a nine-figure exit takes more than a year to complete but when Blackberry found itself behind schedule on the launch of its tablet, RIM founder Mike Lazaridis saw Jakobsson’s business as a saviour. This led Blackberry to a $150 million acquisition in less than six weeks—that has to be the fastest nine-figure exit ever.

When you get an acquisition offer your eye will immediately go to the offer price. That’s only natural. But — there could be two other negotiating points that could have just as large an impact on your windfall of selling your business. Jack Groot discovered all three when he went to sell JP’s Coffee Shop — a business that USA TODAY® voted one of the top 10 coffee houses in America.

When negotiating to sell your company, the single fastest way to spike your earnings is to introduce a competing offer. But you don’t always have the luxury of multiple buyers. It may be better to simply fake it, which is exactly what Trent Dyrsmid did to boost his take for the sale of his company in 2008.

In this episode of Built to Sell Radio John Warrillow interviews New York Times best selling author and serial entrepreneur, Kevin Kruse. As Kruse went to exit Axiom, the ultimate buyer wanted to avoid competing with Kruse down the road…and that’s where the negotiation hit a giant snag.

When you start a business from nothing, it can be hard to place a value on your “sweat equity”. This is where Phil Carson found himself when he decided to get out of the diabetes testing supply company he and his partner had built from the ground up. He estimated his shares might be worth $250,000 but, through a fortunate sequence of events and some shrewd moves on his part, he was able to capture...

In this week’s episode of Built to Sell Radio, John Warrillow interviews Beate Chelette, the founder of a Beate Works, a creative company that she sold to Bill Gates for a significant premium in 2006. 

Would you rather have one million dollars in the bank today or a chance to have ten million a decade from now? It’s a philosophical question that comes down to the time value of money and your tolerance for risk.

After starting and exiting BabyCenter.com , Mark Selcow built Merced Systems into a profitable business after year one. Ten years later he sold Merced for $192 million, equating to over 3 times top line revenue.

In this episode of Built to Sell Radio you’re going to hear from Erik Huberman, who started Swag-of-the-month , a T-shirt business he quickly scaled from start-up to sale in 18 months.   Huberman considers the exit a success, but during negotiations there was one question the acquirer asked that Huberman wishes he had never answered  

Rick Day built Daycom Systems into a $26 million dollar business over a 17-year run. Daycom sold phone systems but the company had a problem: it had become too reliant on one supplier. Daycom sold phone systems but the company had a problem: it had become too reliant on one supplier in a business where the technology was changing fast. Motivated by the fear of becoming obsolete, Day decided to ass...

Mark Patey started Prodigy Engineering in 2010 to help companies leverage hybrid engine technology. Four short years later, Patey accepted a multi-million dollar offer to buy the company. Prodigy Engineering is the latest in Patey’s pattern of starting businesses for the purposes of scaling them and then quickly flipping them. Patey has flipped six companies, and his approach could be considered t...

Andrew Yang had built Manhattan GMAT into an $11 million business when Kaplan Test Prep, an 800-pound gorilla in the education business, threatened legal action against his company.   Rather than react defensively, Yang sought to build a relationship with Kaplan executives, who would eventually go on to buy Manhattan GMAT for more than 8 times EBITDA.   To see how Yang turned a potential crisis in...

Derek Sivers sold CD Baby for $22 million dollars and decided to do something interesting with the money. As an independent musician, Derek Sivers was blocked from selling his music through mainstream distribution channels, so he decided to start a company that would give his band, and other artists like him, a way to sell their music online. The business grew as Sivers entered into distribution d...

Small service-based businesses are typically not worth very much, but Walter Bergeron made one simple change to his business model that garnered a $10 M acquisition offer. Bergeron started a small company servicing circuit boards for large food processing plants. It was a “break/fix” business with lumpy demand and cash flow. Struggling to grow, Bergeron starting offering a membership model where i...

The first time David Phelps sold his dental practice, he ended up in a legal battle that cost him more than $100,000. Phelps eventually got his practice back and was determined to sell it the right way the second time around. David Phelps started his dental practice in 1986 and built it for 20 years before his daughter was diagnosed with Leukemia.  Fighting for his child’s life, Phelps decided to...