Ep 536 Mastering the Deal: 3 Types of Sellers, 3 Very Different Deals — Which One Are You?
Release Date: 03/06/2026
Ep 559 The Good, Bad and Ugly of a $2.1M Searcher Deal | Built to Sell Radio
Built to Sell Radio
One of the fastest growing groups of acquirers is the self funded searcher. A searcher is not a competitor nor a private equity group. A searcher is usually one person, often recently out of an MBA program, who puts ten to twenty percent down from personal savings, borrows the rest from a bank, often asks the owner to finance part of the purchase price, and signs a personal guarantee for the debt. Owners find searchers appealing for good reasons. They may pay your asking price, and they promise to look after your employees rather than fold them into someone else's...
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Ep 558 $6M Wedding Marketplace Courted The Knot for 4 Years with Janessa White
Built to Sell Radio
In 2016, Janessa White and her business partner started Simply Eloped, a marketplace that planned elopements and small weddings for couples in 35 cities across the United States. They also decided, before they had a single customer, which company they wanted to sell it to. The Knot Worldwide, the largest wedding platform in the world. Over the next seven years, White told The Knot exactly that, met with their corporate development team every quarter for four years, and shared her revenue and margins with them along the way. When she finally emailed to say she was ready, the letter of...
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Ep 557 4 Types of Buyers Circling Your Business, and the One Now Doing 28% of Deals
Built to Sell Radio
There are four types of financial buyers who might make an offer on your business, and more often than any other type, the one approaching you is an independent sponsor. It is an unhelpful label for a group that raises the money for a deal only after the seller has signed an LOI, which is also when the seller's leverage is at its lowest. Travis Jamison runs Capital Pad, where investors fund independent sponsor deals. He sees dozens of them for every one he approves. Independent sponsors are now behind roughly 28% of lower middle market acquisitions, which is more than...
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Ep 556 How Decamillionaires Think About Money. The 3 Digit Rule, Mistakes That Cause Founders to Walk Away From Life-Changing Offers, and Why the Best Thing About Selling Has Nothing to Do With What You Can Buy.
Built to Sell Radio
One day, you're going to sell your business, and when you do, you'll experience a step function increase in your net worth. Navigating that moment is something Adam Katz has spent his career helping owners do. He spent twenty years at Merrill Lynch as a Private Wealth Advisor to ultra high net worth families before he and his team left in 2018 to build KORE Private Wealth, an independent firm that grew to five billion dollars in assets. Just four years later, they sold. His new book, Making the Zeros Count: A Field Guide for Decamillionaires, Centimillionaires,...
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Ep 555 How to Avoid an Earn Out and Get Your Employees to Sell Like You, Featuring the World's Leading Positioning Expert, April Dunford
Built to Sell Radio
If you own a company, chances are you're its best salesperson. Put you in a room with a prospect and you rarely lose. But listen to your employees try to tell the same story and something gets lost. You've tried hiring salespeople. You've tried training them. The selling keeps landing back on your shoulders, and when it comes time to sell, an acquirer will see it too. Expect an earn-out or an equity rollover, golden handcuffs designed to keep the rainmaker locked in. Here's what most owners miss: you have a built-in advantage no salesperson...
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Ep 554 $325M Exit After Coke Walked Away From Suja Juice | Built to Sell Radio
Built to Sell Radio
Jeff Church co-founded Suja Juice in 2012 with $300,000 and a green juice that had a four-day shelf life. Within three years, the company hit $70 million in revenue, and Coca-Cola and Goldman Sachs invested $150 million at a $300 million valuation. Then, two weeks after Coke flew its entire North American management team to Suja's plant, they passed on the option to buy the rest of the business, leaving Jeff with $40 million in maturing debt and a company losing $9 million a year.
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Ep 553 Why 17.5% of Owners Are Burnt Out and Want to Sell
Built to Sell Radio
More owners than ever say they are simply tired. A look at 10,255 PREScore™ assessments over six years found that 17.5% pointed to burnout, not retirement, as the number one reason they want out. So the question went to two people who spend their days on the buy side, valuing companies and deciding what to pay. Lee McCabe is a private equity veteran who advises PE firms on the businesses they acquire. Jason Swenk built marketing agencies and spent time acquiring them. In this episode, you discover how to tell whether burnout is a signal to sell or a problem...
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Ep 552: What to Know Before Selling to an ETA Buyer | Built to Sell Radio
Built to Sell Radio
What do you need to know before selling your business to an ETA buyer? Most owners have received the email. It usually starts with something flattering: "I love what you've built…" Then comes the ask: a quick call to learn more about your business. Increasingly, those emails are coming from ETA buyers — entrepreneurs using entrepreneurship through acquisition as their path into business ownership. Instead of starting a company from scratch, they look to buy an existing business and run it themselves. In this episode of Built to Sell Radio, John Warrillow talks with Will Smith, host of...
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Ep 551 Cameron Passmore Sold Half an $8 Billion Firm—Then Acquired 5 More Businesses
Built to Sell Radio
Knowing what kind of seller you are turns out to be one of the most important things you can figure out before you ever take a meeting with a potential acquirer. There are three: the transactional seller who wants the money and the door, the transitional seller who wants to land the plane, and the transformational seller who sells to go bigger. Cameron Passmore built one of the largest independent wealth management firms in Canada, roughly 3,000 families and about $8 billion under management, and owned half of it. Most founders in that seat cash out and leave....
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Ep 550 The One Phrase That Can Ruin a $10 Million Business Sale
Built to Sell Radio
"When I sell the company, then I'll be happy." Psychotherapist Jo Swann says that one phrase is the most reliable predictor of a miserable exit. She would know. She made her money in the 90s, retired to an oceanfront apartment in Borneo, and fell straight into an existential crisis. In this episode of Built to Sell Radio, part of our popular After the Deal series, Swann explains why the trap survives the wire transfer
info_outlineMost 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 for you.
You'll learn:
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Why a transactional founder who insists they just want the money often turns out to be something else entirely — and why getting that wrong poisons the deal
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What a buyer learns about you when they ask whether you would sell to your biggest competitor for the same price
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Why the multiple is just the starting point, and how cash at closing, seller financing, and rolled equity can swing the real outcome by more than most founders expect
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How Mark lost 8 to 14 percent of his own deal proceeds not because of bad faith, but because he did not ask the right questions about his rolled equity
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Why pushing for agreement after a sale closes is the fastest way to destroy a partnership — and what to focus on instead
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What working capital and normalized earnings actually mean, and why founders who gloss over both almost always regret it
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How to clarify the role you want after closing before it becomes the source of tension no one saw coming