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If you’re preparing for a sale and want to avoid the money mistakes founders usually make in the first few years after an exit, listen now.

About this episode Have you ever considered how you would tell your employees you’ve sold your business? It’s one of the conversations most founders fear. You hope your employees will be happy for you, but you also worry some will view you as a sellout. Dr. Michael Filosi experienced the entire spectrum of reactions when he told his 35 employees he had sold his dental practice, the biggest in Adelaide, to private equity. While he had some congratulations, he also had one team

About this episode Lior Pozin started AutoDS to run his own eBay dropshipping stores. The software finds trending products to sell, tracks supplier price and stock changes, and fulfills orders automatically so a dropshipper never touches the inventory. He bootstrapped the company for eight years, keeping the bank balance at zero on purpose, and grew it to 200 employees and more than $20 million in annual recurring revenue. Along the way he turned down a $38 million private eq

About this episode Clean Energy Associates acted as the eyes and ears on the ground in China for solar and battery storage buyers, inspecting factories to make sure the products they ordered were built correctly before they shipped. In 2016, a banker sat down with founder Andy Klump in Shanghai and asked him three questions. How would he triple his business in a short period of time? Who was on his executive team? Did any single customer account for more than 20% of revenue?

About this episode Jim Fitzgerald bootstrapped Taradel from a spare bedroom into a $30 million direct mail company. In 2016 he took the business to market, and the five buyers who made it to an indication of interest all offered roughly 4x EBITDA, about half of what Jim had in mind. He had spent years reinvesting every dollar in growth, and the market told him growth alone wasn’t enough. So Jim rebuilt his company around profit. He started pulling cash out of the business s

About this episode Zac Smith was a mechanical engineer who wanted more flexibility and upside than a corporate career could offer. He bought an existing CertaPro Painters franchise in North Carolina with three employees and under $1 million in revenue. He put down about 10% in cash and financed the rest with an SBA loan and a small seller note, backed by a personal guarantee. Three years later, the company was on track for $3 million in revenue and $600,000 in profit. Smith

In this blog, you'll learn how Heath Adams turn those acquisition emails you've been ignoring into free valuations and a rehearsal for diligence. Click to read more!

In this blog, Adam Spector will teach you how to break even In cash and shares his Idea on how to stay in the game after a sale. Listen to learn more!

About This Episode Broadly speaking, there are two ways to build a company. Some entrepreneurs swing for the fences, spending decades building one big business. Others play for singles, building a series of smaller companies they can sell and repeat. Stuart Faught has made a career of the second approach. He has started and sold 20 software businesses, making him the number-one seller on Acquire.com. His model is deliberately small: build a simple tool for a niche of local

About This Episode Garren Hilow bootstrapped Abveris, an antibody discovery business doing $12 million in revenue, and sold it in 2021 for $150 million up front with another $40 million available in an earnout. His team came within one percent of the revenue target. The acquirer said they had missed it, refused to share the accounting behind that conclusion, and dared him to sue. Rob Walling sold Drip with 40 percent of his purchase price tied to an earnout and collected all

About This episode Dane Pan and his wife built Monet Brands to $1.3 million in revenue with two employees, selling a $24.99 skincare tool that cost them $6.10. When they took the company to market in 2025, nine buyers cleared the proof-of-funds screen and four of them wrote an LOI. The best offer came in close to four times SDE with a holdback attached. Dane countered for all cash at close, watched two of his four offers disappear, and signed at 3.6. In this week’s episode,

About This Episode 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

About This Episode 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 fou

About This Episode 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

In this article, Adam Katz shares confidently that the greatest benefit of wealth isn’t what it buys. It’s the freedom of never needing anyone again. Click this to learn more!

In this episode, you'll understand why an acquirer may ignore your revenue and 90 percent of your customers. Listen to learn more!

About this Episode 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 l

About This Episode 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 acqu

In this episode, Will Smith, host of Acquiring Minds, one of the leading podcasts covering entrepreneurship through acquisition and how to tell the difference between a funded searcher and a self-funded buyer — and why it matters for your deal structure.

About this episode 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 an