Worth Owning

In this conversation, we get into the specific moves every founder needs to start making 36 months before a sale. We break down normalized EBITDA, and the add-back game buyers play in diligence. We get into fully-loaded CAC, unit economics by channel, and the Grow–Ramp–Scale framework for knowing when to level up your finance function. And we get into why 75% of M&A deals fall apart - and why...

Most founders build profitable businesses. Very few build sellable ones. There's a massive difference, and it could cost you millions. In this first live recording of Inside M&A: Opening the Playbook, Krystyn Harrison (Co-Founder & CEO, Horizon Advisors) sits down with Jackie Dinsmore (Managing Partner, Caravel Law, 3x exited founder) and Brent Holliday (Founder & CEO, Garibaldi Capita...

AI is rewriting the rules of what makes a software company fundable. Switching costs are dissolving. Code is getting cheaper to write. And the SaaS metrics that used to guarantee a term sheet? They're not enough anymore. Josh Axler has deployed over $200 million into growth-stage companies as Managing Director at Flow Capital, a publicly traded alternative lender. He sits between venture capital a...

She didn't plan to be a founder. She was on mat leave with two kids when her future co-founder pitched her on what would become Borrowell — Canada's first free credit score platform with over 4 million members. In this episode of Worth Owning, Krystyn Harrison sits down with Eva Wong, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Borrowell, to talk about what it really takes to build a fintech from zero...

Wendy Brookhouse built a financial planning firm, co-owned a software company, and helped sell it. Then she turned around and started telling founders the thing nobody wants to hear: most of them don't actually have a sellable business. In this episode, Krystyn sits down with the founder and chief strategist at Black Star Wealth to talk about the gap between what founders think their business is w...

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang has spent years inside hundreds of organizations watching the same design failure play out: founders who built something real, then quietly became the single point of failure inside it. He's the author of Rest and The Distraction Addiction , and the founder of 4 Day Week Studio. He's worked with companies across financial services, tech, healthcare, and government — and his d...

Tim Ray sold his first company ten months after launching it. Two million dollars, a clean exit, and one nagging question: was that skill or just a lucky ride on the group-buying wave? Four ventures later, he has his answer. Tim bootstrapped Verifast—a renter verification platform—to over $1 million in monthly recurring revenue. In this episode, Tim walks through the real cost of chasing proof ins...

In this episode of Worth Owning, Krystyn Harrison talks with Brett Chang, co-founder and CEO of The Peak, who built one of Canada's most read business newsletters from three unemployed founders at home during COVID to $2.3 million in annual revenue with 30% net margins and 165,000 subscribers before selling to Zoomr Media for a reported $5 million in 2023. The remarkable part: he intentionally des...

Worth Owning is a podcast for founders who want to build real wealth- without burning out to get there. Hosted by Krystyn Harrison, cofounder of Horizon Advisors, the show features unfiltered conversations with entrepreneurs at every stage: the ones deep in the build, the ones who've exited, and the advisors who understand what it actually takes to win. We believe healthy founders build more valua...

In this episode of Getting to the Deal, Krystyn Harrison talks with Alan Wood, founder of Rally Beer Company, who built Canada's first electrolyte-rich functional beer from a $2,000 garage setup to $1 million in revenue in just 27 months before selling to Muskoka Brewery for approximately $2 million. The remarkable part: he raised only $920,000 while competitors were raising $20-100 million, and e...

In this episode of Getting to the Deal, host Krystyn Harrison sits down with Peter Hwang, a serial founder who has built and exited four companies across five industries, including the $263 million sale of Newstrike to Hexo and the private equity exit of Global Faces—two deals that closed within just 12 months of each other. But Peter's most defining moment wasn't an exit at all—it was the 2008 co...

In this episode of Getting to the Deal, host Krystyn Harrison sits down with Miranda Lievers, co-founder and former COO of Thinkific, who took her company public in one of the most compressed IPO timelines in Canadian tech history—five months instead of the typical 18 months, reaching a billion-dollar valuation with only $6 million raised. Miranda shares the unexpected reality of scaling from four...

Most founders discover the frameworks for successful exits too late. Julie Ellis, co-founder of Mabel's Labels, learned them the hard way—and she's sharing exactly what she wishes she'd known before selling to Avery Label after 10 years. The Story Four mom co-founders turned a basement operation into one of Canada's most celebrated women-led exits. They built Mabel's Labels from scratch, scaled to...

In this episode of Getting to the Deal, host Krystyn Harrison sits down with Narbe Alexandrian, founder and CEO of Define Capital, a permanent capital firm that's rewriting private equity rules by acquiring vertical SaaS businesses to hold forever through a 40-year fund, not flip in 3-5 years. Before founding Define, Narbe served as president and CEO of RIV Capital, raising over $150 million and s...

In this episode of Getting to the Deal, host Krystyn Harrison sits down with Marcus Mitchell, founder of Shire Capital Management and former CIO of Bonnefield, Canada's largest farmland manager. Marcus has overseen more than a billion dollars worth of farmland acquisitions and made the bold decision in 2021 to leave his institutional role to start his own firm focused on healthy food production. H...

In this episode of Getting to the Deal, host Krystyn Harrison sits down with Tyler Handley, co-founder of Inkbox, who transformed a jungle discovery into a $65 million acquisition by BIC in seven years. Tyler shares how a personal frustration with temporary tattoos led him to Panama's jungles, where tribes using fruit-based dyes inspired the breakthrough technology behind semi-permanent tattoos. H...

In this episode of Getting to the Deal, host Krystyn Harrison sits down with Jacqueline Dinsmore, a multi-exit entrepreneur who went from Bay Street lawyer to three successful exits in under a decade. Jackie shares her deeply personal journey from leaving Blake's law firm to care for her mother during cancer treatment, to co-founding FlapJackKids - a family business that scaled to thousands of sto...

In this episode of Getting to the Deal, co-hosts Krystyn and Matt Harrison pull back the curtain on their own entrepreneurial journey, sharing why they founded Exit Horizon and the painful lessons that led them there. Krystyn reveals the raw truth about her seven-figure deal that fell apart when she made the critical mistake of running her own exit process, while Matt draws from his M&A experi...

In this episode of Getting to the Deal, host Krystyn Harrison sits down with Andrea Matheson , former M&A leader at CGI turned fintech founder, to unpack what it really takes to build with an exit in mind. Andrea shares her journey from overseeing $850M in acquisitions to co-founding Proponix , a company that scaled to $175M ARR in just 24 months before exiting. She reveals why the biggest min...

Real conversations with Canadian business owners who've sold their companies, the advisors who guided them, and the buyers who made it happen. Host Krystyn Harrison breaks down what actually worked, what didn't, and what you can apply to your own exit—whether you're planning to sell in two years or just want to understand your options. From deal structure to life after the sale, we cover the pract...