Buy Grow Sell

Three-time start-up entrepreneur, Melissa Kwan has one piece of advice for those who want to start a tech company: Don’t! But jokes aside, Melissa’s advice is invaluable when it comes to the mindset you need to build a SaaS product, and she isn’t shy about sharing the cold hard truth. Her real estate software, Spacio grew to the industry’s #1 open house sign-in solution by applying data analytics...

Shannon Susko started, scaled, and sold two high-growth technology companies in the financial services industry just six years apart. This self-described ski bum from Whistler, Canada built a repeatable playbook that both she and her acquirers have used, as well as over 100 businesses worldwide. In her second business, it resulted in a 60x top line sale. If you’re looking to inject more predictabl...

Are you looking to scale your business? From team development to infrastructure to founder mindset, to just straight luck, there are so many components required to rapidly grow a business. Our guest, Greg Alexander unlocks many of the mysteries surrounding how to take your business to the next level. And he should know. Greg successfully built his sales consultancy firm, SBI, over 11 years, genera...

What started as a family business in Australia’s local pub scene turned into a multi-branded private equity firm with 250+ employees and a 7-venue portfolio. Stephen Hunt is the founder of Hunt Hospitality, and buying, flipping and selling pubs is his passion. Tune in and learn how he started with a $400K investment and turned that into $50M through a strategy of innovation and acquisition, includ...

Mindset is an often underrated and under-analysed component to starting a successful business. But this episode moves away from the traditional path of a business exit, and onto the one less travelled. Dave Gold is a lawyer, author, entrepreneur, transformational mentor, and energy master who helps entrepreneurs develop healthy mindsets towards starting, scaling, and exiting businesses. Tune in an...

From corporate slave to 7x EBITDA, James Prebble’s entrepreneurial journey was just as impressive as the businesses he helped grow. Palladium Digital found its niche in the market by delivering digital transformation for Private Equity backed businesses. By helping unlock value drivers using technology, James was able to drive a higher multiple while also scaling up his own business to over one mi...

Jodie Cook capitalised on the dawn of social media, starting her digital agency, JC Social Media, in 2011. With a stable base of recurring revenue and a growing team of passionate staff, Jodie was well on her way to developing a healthy business model. But after realising she was the bottleneck in her business, Jodie started to see how her future could look if she made herself redundant. While ini...

From picking up industrial waste in a truck to creating a mini bidding war for his business that resulted in a $51.5 million acquisition deal, Mike Malatesta has had quite the Cinderella story. His journey through surviving, scaling, acquiring for growth, before finally exiting involves a lot of knowing the market, understanding realistic timeframes, and most importantly, what you want out of the...

When Jon Morris came second for his business idea in a competition, he took that $10,000 investment and decided to run with it. That is how his digital marketing agency, Rise Interactive, was born. While the beginnings might have been humble, under Jon’s leadership, he helped Rise grow exponentially year-over-year, starting at $12,000 in sales in 2004 and ending in $24M+ before exiting in 2018. Jo...

From struggling to get a job out of university, to running multiple businesses across the world, Tim Burgess is an entrepreneur with a passion for people. This passion led him and his business partner to open Shield GEO, an established global Employer of Record (EoR) provider based in Hong Kong with entities in the U.K. and Australia, and a global remote team. After growing the company to service...

From knocking on doors trying to sell his food delivery service in 2004, to having his own employees knock on his door to buy the business in 2017, Cesar Quintero’s journey from a scrappy startup to a people-led, profitable business is one a lot of entrepreneurs will relate to. After eight years, the team surpassed $1M in revenue and quickly grew to $3 million with a 12% profit. That’s when Quinte...

What do a $2 billion dollar technology company, a $400 million dollar appliances company, and a rapid-growth courier service all have in common? One entrepreneur by the name of Jim Estill. A serial business starter, Jim has bought, grown, and exited numerous businesses, invested, advised, and sat on boards for hundreds more, and is not looking to slow down any time soon. Follow along on Jim’s jour...

From start up, to rapid growth. Building a company that stays ahead of the bell curve is a challenge in any sector, but especially in a market that is saturated with competitors. Being a reseller on Amazon means you’re a dime a dozen, but Eytan Wiener and his business partner built a unicorn. The two scaled Quantum Networks from $100,000 in one year, to $3M in the following, to $30M 18 months late...

Before Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet, there was teleconferencing. Frank Cianciulli saw an opportunity to do teleconferencing and do it well, offering a vastly different way of doing things from his competitors. Focusing strongly on the organisational culture of Enunciate Teleconferencing and the employees that made up the company, Frank grew the business to a $14.5 million revenue generati...

Low tech, low innovation, and low capital are all terms associated with the non-profit sector. Yet with non-profits spending more than $800B a year in the United States, Cheryl Contee saw an opportunity to service those making a difference. Her SaaS company, Attentive.ly provided social listening services for non-profits. While the tool was a success in the sector, the business was thirsty for cas...

Translations of business documents can make or break multi-million-dollar deals. And that’s exactly how Michèle Hecken carved out a niche for reliable, high-quality translations between Germany and the English-speaking world. As one of Canada’s first translators for German to English services, Michèle founded ‘Alpha Translations’ and never looked back. Focusing heavily on companies in the legal sp...

According to Kobi Simmat, business is a full contact sport. Australian entrepreneur, investor, and a successful business advisor, Kobi is the CEO and Founder of Best Practice. He’s conducted around 20K business performance reviews, giving him unique knowledge of the workplace and the analytical skills to make sure your business scores the winning goal. How do you get there and truly build your bus...

After dealing first-hand with how poorly digital marketing agencies were treating their customers, Wesley Mathews decided to act. He partnered with a developer whom he had previous dealings with and hit the ground running, starting his first agency called ‘High Level Marketing’. Beginning his entrepreneurial marketing journey in 2009, it took Wesley just over 11 years to grow ‘High Level Marketing...

Serial entrepreneur Michael Griffiths always has something on the go. Whether it’s a multi-city home tutoring business, a mineral make up brand, or a globally recognised marketing agency serving tens of thousands of clients across the world. Having left the school system where he was a teacher for 7 years, Michael started his first business in 2009. Since then, he has built 7 businesses, and then...

Andy Cabasso started his first company and sold it just three years later. Armed with a law degree and a vision to help legal businesses have a more professional digital marketing presence, Andy started JurisPage. After growing the business through an annual recurring revenue business model, and a reluctance to deviate from packaged offerings (including turning away potential clients who wanted be...

All roads lead to marketing. At least, they did for award-winning entrepreneur, marketer, and investor, Rachit Dayal. As Singapore’s first Google-certified advertising and analytics professional, Rachit founded Happy Marketer in 2005 and spent his career avoiding the traditional advertising landscape to focus on the “ignored” areas of marketing, including analytics, CRMs, and SEO. Through their pr...

Working with some of the biggest brands in the business, Greg Kihlstrom has authored books, started multiple businesses, and written for leading business publications like Forbes. At the age of 25, he started his first company to fill a niche in the early days of digital marketing. Greg’s newest book, The Center of Experience (2020) talks about how customer and employee experience can be operation...

Luke Hohmann is one of the good people in tech. Instead of building companies to flip, he builds companies that make the world better. A serial entrepreneur, Luke has left the boardroom for the schoolyard, and it’s all because of a concept called Participatory Budgeting. Participatory Budgeting is a global movement, endorsed by the UN, in which communities decide how to invest real money. His last...

Wally Akacha operates in absolutes. He knew from the age of five he wanted to be a civil engineer. He then entered into a civil engineering firm as Employee #1. With no plan to exit, Wally grew through the ranks from General Manager to Managing Director, successfully stabilising cashflow and growing the business 25% yearly. Twelve years later, turning over $25M in revenue, he sold it to a listed e...

COVID-19 has accelerated the shift of every aspect of our lives to be online. It is the standard for business owners now, not the expectation, that you must have a strong online presence. So as a business owner, how do you evolve your services to cater to a growing digital audience? Today’s guest is Ronnie Teja, a Canadian entrepreneur who’s deployed a successful growth via acquisition strategy to...