Ep 543 From $32M Valuation to Fire Sale — How Ret Taylor Sold Ned After an Apple Update Crushed His Margins and Re-Invented Himself as a Spiritual Guide
Built to Sell Radio
Ret Taylor spent his entire adult life chasing a number. First it was $30 million. Then $10 million. Then $6 million. Then he sat in a tent at 18,000 feet on Denali with two Arctic storms closing in and realized the number was never the point. He came down the mountain, sold Ned, his natural remedies company, and now guides people through life transitions on multi-day vision quests in the mountains of Colorado. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter: Curious what your business is worth?
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Ep 542 The 15X Multiple That Let Him Walk Away in 12 Months
Built to Sell Radio
At some point every founder needs to ask a simple question: is it better to own a big slice of a small pie, or a smaller slice of a bigger pie? In this week's episode, we hear from someone who chose a smaller slice of a bigger pie. Simon Lorenz co-founded Klara, a patient communication platform for medical practices, and raised roughly $32 million across six rounds of outside capital before selling to ModMed at 15 times forward revenue. The path there was not a clean one. Every funding round was painful. Most of them came down to a single term sheet, take...
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Ep 541 Mastering the Deal: 7-Figure Negotiation Mistakes Founders Make When Selling Their Business with MIT's John Richardson, Author of Never Settle
Built to Sell Radio
Most founders think they're not great negotiators. John Richardson thinks they're wrong. Richardson has spent decades teaching negotiation at MIT's Sloan School of Management and before that at Harvard Law, where he was an associate at the Harvard Negotiation Project and co-authored foundational texts with Roger Fisher and Howard Raiffa. His new book is called Never Settle. In this episode, you discover how to Subscribe to our weekly newsletter: Curious what your business is worth?
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Ep 540 From $40K to 8 Figures -- How Murray Kent Sold His Electrical Conduit Business for 6.2x EBITDA
Built to Sell Radio
Murray Kent had no background in electrical conduit fittings when he paid $40,000 for a four-person business that, as he put it, looked like a bit of a crack den. What he did have was Value Builder's 8 drivers -- pinned to the wall next to his desk as a literal road map for every decision he made. In this episode of Built to Sell Radio, you discover how to negotiate a clean exit with no earn-out complications and no equity rollover. You'll learn: Subscribe to our weekly newsletter: Curious what your business is worth?
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Ep 539 Deal Collapsed at LOI, Sold for 6x EBITDA Anyway
Built to Sell Radio
Jay Richards spent five months deep in an acquisition process. He had a letter of intent. He had mentally checked out. He was planning what came next. Then issues surfaced in diligence and the deal collapsed. This week on Built to Sell Radio, Jay walks John Warrillow through the full story of selling Imagen Insights, a qualitative research platform with clients like Visa, Google, and Amazon, and how you discover how to navigate two very different acquisition conversations and come out the other side with a deal you are genuinely happy with. ...
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Ep 538 How 2 Brothers Bootstrapped AppArmor to a $40M Exit — The Answer That Almost Cost Them $20M
Built to Sell Radio
David Sinkinson and his brother Chris built AppArmor over eleven years without taking a single dollar from outside investors. They bootstrapped it by running side businesses, plowing the profits back in, and staying lean through long sales cycles and compliance-heavy buyers. By the time they were ready to sell, they had over 250 universities on the platform and roughly $6 million in annual recurring revenue — profitable, with no cap table to split with anyone. Then an acquirer asked them a simple question, and they answered it. That answer nearly cost them $20...
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Ep 537 Why this $5M Business Sold for $25M
Built to Sell Radio
When Sharon Gillenwater built Boardroom Insiders, she was doing something nobody else wanted to do: manually researching the personal work styles, business initiatives, and habits of Fortune 500 executives so that enterprise sales teams could finally get a meeting with the C-suite. It was hard, painstaking work — and that was exactly the point. After more than a decade of bootstrapping, consulting on the side to fund payroll, and raising just $275,000 from three people she knew personally, Sharon sold Boardroom Insiders to London-based public...
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Ep 536 Mastering the Deal: 3 Types of Sellers, 3 Very Different Deals — Which One Are You?
Built to Sell Radio
Most founders approach a sale with one goal: get the highest price possible. But Mark Ferrer argues that focusing only on price can lead to the wrong deal, the wrong partner, and a painful transition after closing. In this episode of Built to Sell Radio, John Warrillow talks with Ferrer about what he has learned after moving from founder to buyer, and why every owner needs to know whether they are a transactional, transitional, or transformative seller before they go to market. In this episode, you discover how to identify your seller type before a buyer does it...
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Ep 535 Inside the Mind of an Acquirer: When Your Buyer Is Risking Their House
Built to Sell Radio
Most business owners assume their buyer will be a private equity group or a strategic acquirer. But if you run a smaller business in a niche category, the person most likely to buy you is an individual — someone who likes what you've built, can see a path to improve it, and is willing to put their own name on the line to finance the deal. This week on Built to Sell Radio, Joe Soelberg joins the Inside the Mind of an Acquirer series to pull back the curtain on what that kind of buyer actually looks like — and what it means for you as a seller. Listen and you discover how...
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Ep 534 Why a “short list” of acquirers may be a trap
Built to Sell Radio
Andrew McConnell built a SaaS company that helped vacation rental managers price homes like airlines using dynamic pricing based on demand. He eventually successfully exited, but not before learning the hard way that building a company and selling one require two entirely different skill sets. In this episode of Built to Sell Radio, Andrew walks through the pivot that saved his business, why his VC backers stayed on board, and the exact moment he realized that a "short buyer list" is a dangerous trap for founders. Listen in to discover how to: ...
info_outlineWe often think of a "successful exit" as handing over the keys to a perfectly oiled machine—a business that is growing, profitable, and operationally sound.
But what happens when the machine starts to sputter?
What if the margins are too thin, the operations are exhausting, and you are simply burned out?
It is easy to assume that a broken business model means a worthless company. But as this week’s guest on Built to Sell Radio proves, sometimes the individual parts are worth more than the whole.
Meet Jason Patel.
Jason built Transitions Education, a college counseling marketplace. On the surface, it looked great: upper six-figure revenue and a noble mission. But under the hood, customer acquisition costs were eating his margins, and he was carrying $250,000 in personal debt to keep it afloat.
He was ready to walk away. He assumed he had zero leverage.
Then, a "Micro Private Equity" firm reached out. They didn't want his headaches. They didn't want his operations. They didn't even want his business model.
They wanted his "parts."
Specifically, they wanted his SEO ranking, his blog traffic, and his 5-star reputation. They realized they could strip away the expensive service delivery and plug his high-performing marketing assets into their own portfolio.
In this episode, Jason breaks down how he structured an asset sale that allowed him to:
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Sell the high-value "parts" (marketing assets) without the operational baggage.
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Avoid a grueling earn-out (because the buyer didn't need him to run the company).
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Pay off his debt and fund his next venture.
If you feel like your business model is grinding you down, this episode will open your eyes to the hidden value sitting on your balance sheet right now.