Buy Grow Sell

From an early age, wherever Zain Hasan saw problems, he wondered how he could fix it. Entrepreneurship was in his DNA, from selling ready-made chicken sandwiches as a kid to growing three successful businesses – and disrupting the health insurance system in America along the way. After a botched acquisition, Zain knew there was much to be improved in the world of mergers and acquisitions, so he se...

While the rest of her MBA class were starting projects they thought would change the world, Angela Mader was developing a fitness journal. That journal, fitbook®, went on to challenge the status quo in the fitness industry with its strong branding around real people, realistic expectations, and healthy inspiration. What started out as a passion project ended up in over 16,000 retail stores around...

Stuart Crane spent 20 years developing his software company that digitised patient records for the healthcare industry. He and his business partner started out on floppy disks and ended up with $44M cash in their pockets twenty years later. This episode explores how they developed a winning idea, grew market share, and built a profitable business model within its first year of operations. Tune in...

Ken Burke is a serial entrepreneur, thought leader, sought-after speaker, mentor, and author. He joins us on the Buy Grow Sell podcast to discuss the growth and exit of his ecommerce software platform, MarketLive. Bootstrapped in 1995, Ken talks about how he pivoted to a fully operational SaaS business, managed challenging relationships with VC funders, and overcame all the usual roadblocks to bec...

Nicky Senyard never ran a tech company before, had no experience generating new markets, and didn’t know how she would fare as a CEO. Yet she sold her house in Australia, moved to Canada, bootstrapped her affiliate marketing company, Income Access, and broke even in just 9 months. From then, she grew her business from 3 employees to 90 over 14 years, servicing over 25,000 affiliates, and then secu...

JL Needham has bought, grown, and sold multiple businesses over the past few years with most of his career spent in big tech with Adobe, Google, and Amazon. From helping brands grow in Amazon’s marketplace ecosystem to renovating businesses he acquired to pass over to the next long-term owners, JL operates with a growth mindset. His journey has taken him from one side of the negotiation table to t...

Anson Sowby’s hard work and business acumen had created a successful creative agency that was churning out award-winning work for some of the biggest brands in the world. But the business hit a limit. He and his co-founder realised that in order to scale up to the next level and take on bigger clients with bigger budgets, they would need to access external capital. When they started working with t...

A successful business doesn’t always have to be the flashiest one. Take Jean-Eric’s farm clean-up business, which nailed the simple need that farmers had in the Prairies of Canada. They wanted scrap farm equipment off their property and Jean-Eric’s team was able to recycle it at scale. A true win-win for all parties involved. But as the business grew, new challenges arose, including a partnership...

Everyone will exit their business someday. While most business owners are looking to understand how to get the highest valuation and how to position themselves to get the best deal structure with the right buyer, Thomas Kereszti spent most of his career on the other side of those discussions, figuring out whether your business was worth the investment in the first place. Hear directly from a corpo...

There are two options for growth – organic or through business acquisition. Each one comes with its own set of challenges, but for Wendy Pease, growth through acquisition made more sense. She didn’t have a ‘business-worthy’ idea and instead, bought a small, zero-employee translation service that turned over around $100K in revenue. Eighteen years later, Wendy grew Rapport International to a global...

After leaving successful, high-paying jobs in the corporate world, Michael Spinosa decided to strike out on his own by founding Unleashed Technologies, a digital marketing agency that specialised in application development. However, there was one problem: No one in his life thought he had what it took. While he bootstrapped his business from the ground up, it was not all sunshine and lollipops. Mi...

Gabriela Isturiz did the impossible. She built a high-growth SaaS company and sold it to a Fortune 500 company for a huge multiple…twice! Her legal tech business, Bellefield Systems, grew to 45 employees over 7 years. Not to mention enjoyed 99% recurring revenue, 93% gross profit margins, an EBITDA margin of 38% as well as a whopping retention rate of 102%. All that is to say is that Gaby built a...

Nick Gray didn’t like museums. That dislike spurned the birth of ‘Museum Hack.’ A new way of touring museums led by scientists, actors, and comedians in an engaging and interactive way. Starting the business predominantly for his friends, Nick was able to grow ‘Museum Hack’ to a $3 million a year business. From a young age, he had the entrepreneurial drive after helping the family business in the...

Your business is your baby, so what happens when you must let someone else make the decisions? Whether you have a business partner or a range of investors, there is always going to be someone with a different opinion on what you should do with the business. The problem lies when you don’t hold enough clout and their opinions are what go ahead. This is the trap of a minority shareholder, and someth...

Businesses with purpose can create much bigger opportunities. This episode centres around an entrepreneur who managed to put community first, carve out a significant market differentiator, and because of this, grew his real estate business to $1B in annual turnover before selling to newer, younger agents for almost $10M dollars. Mark Deutschmann is a real estate entrepreneur who operated in a scan...

For Ryan Tansom, his professional life started at 19 when the family business came knocking. He put on a suit and hit the pavement to start selling, starting his 18-year journey of growing and eventually selling the business. After navigating tricky situations in dealing with his father in the family business, Ryan grew the company to new levels before his father decided that he wanted out. Sellin...

Landscaping is a tough, not-so-glamourous business, but it’s one that Tom Farinacci cracked early on with his entrepreneurial drive and penchant for hard work. After selling his first business, Tom completed a college degree, worked at national landscaping business with the sole purpose of learning their trade secrets, and then returned to what he does best. Building his own business and propellin...

As most marketers will tell you, Search Engine Optimisation is a long game. It requires hard work, patience, and most of all, a keen eye for the changes in the industry. In fact, SEO is much like owning a business. These parallels culminated in the journey of Eric Enge, a 20+ year veteran in Search Engine Marketing and a savvy business owner. Eric was the founder of the award-winning SEO agency, S...

Everyone can start a business, but few can make it a successful one. And even fewer entrepreneurs know when it’s time to step aside to bring in the big guns. Tina Youngblood is that big gun. With a PhD in accounting and over 20 years of experience in executive strategic leadership and results-oriented operational administration, Tina has developed a strategic approach to turning around businesses...

For an accidental entrepreneur, Jonathan Claydon did everything right in his affiliate marketing company, Streamline. Jon grew the business for 7 years from 1 employee to five to 35, servicing big names like Expedia, T-Mobile, and Microsoft right from the get-go. His industry expertise and market niche saw a client retention rate of 95%. This skyrocketed streamline to leaders in the industry, with...

From theory to application and beyond, marketing professor Peter Fader did what most academics fail to do: create a successful commercial business based on what you’re doing in the classroom. His work on consumer decision making led him to start Zodiac, a company that looked at consumer buying data to accurately predict future purchasing decisions. His data was a gold mine for entrepreneurs, but t...

Whether it’s eCommerce or Influencer Marketing, David Perry has advice for all businesses on how to best acquire, engage, and retain customers. A veteran of the gaming industry, he’s taking the lessons he learned creating #1 selling video and computer games, and translating them into successful business ventures. David has built and sold businesses acquired by Sony, Disney, and Atari. Now, he’s sh...

Successful entrepreneur, technologist, speaker, podcast host, and pilot, James Benham is a man of many talents, but one of his greatest gifts is his ability to build bootstrapped businesses. James took three years to develop enough cash flow to invest in building products he wanted to build, but the payoff was worth the wait. SmartBid, his construction bid management software, was first-to-market...

After growing her bootstrapped and self-funded alternative camping SaaS business to $100,000 in Annual Recurring Revenue, Anna Maste received a very respectable offer of 3.9 times ARR. Rather than accepting, Anna decided to focus on exponentially growing Boondockers Welcome, capitalising on a favourable market at the time. Two years, 2,800 hosts and 12,000 annual guest members later, she more than...

After Sandy Hansen-Wolff’s husband suddenly died, she was thrust into running their regional agriculture business. Rather than balking at the task, she grew the company to $8M before selling 18 years later. Sandy overcame a lot of challenges in this time period. From navigating her grief, to navigating being a woman in a male-dominated industry. She made a lot of mistakes along the way, but in the...