Explore every episode of the podcast Built to Sell Radio

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 so it couldn't be poured back in, and built a leadership team that could operate without him. When he went back to market, 120 teasers produced nine indications of interest, seven management presentations in two days, and a low eight-figure sale, all cash.

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? Andy had no investment plan and no leadership team beyond one salesperson, and one client made up 40 to 50% of his sales. The banker's verdict was that the company wasn't sellable and there was nothing he could do to help. 

Six years later, Intertek Group acquired Clean Energy Associates for $112 million, and the banker who had delivered that verdict ran the sale. In between, Andy survived six straight months of losses, heard from an executive coach that his team saw him as a micromanager, and went through five hires to find the right head of sales.

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 sold it for $1.5 million, all cash at closing.

Adam Spector co-founded LiftIgniter in 2014, which used machine learning to personalize websites the way YouTube does. Growth stalled, and with no way to prove the company was causing the results customers saw, it could never charge what the work was worth. The board brought in a new CEO to sell, and when Adam argued to keep building he was outvoted two to one. It sold in 2018, mostly for its engineers, and he left soon after. 

Like a lot of owners, he wanted to stay in the game. Keeping a hand in, backing people doing interesting work, staying near the part of the job he really enjoyed. For Adam that meant putting money into other people's startups. More than a decade in, that portfolio shows seven to eight times on paper. In cash, it is roughly break even.

Heath Adams bootstrapped TCM into a company with two revenue lines: hacking into companies' systems to expose vulnerabilities, and selling courses and certifications that trained others to do the same work. He owned every share, raised no outside capital, and never relied on outbound sales. Every lead came through a YouTube channel that grew to more than a million subscribers. 

A competitor then raised $50 million and began matching TCM on price and quality. On the advice of a friend who had sold his own company, Heath started answering the acquisition emails he had been deleting for years. One became a letter of intent for more money than he had ever seen. Half of it was an earnout, so he turned it down, hired a sell side firm, and put the company in front of 300 buyers. Four wrote letters of intent. The one he signed was worth more than double what he had turned down. In this week's episode of Built to Sell Radio, you discover how to 

• Turn the acquisition emails you've been ignoring into free valuations and a rehearsal for diligence 

• Tell the difference between the money in an offer and the promise attached to it 

• Pass on the highest offer and pick the buyer instead 

• Build a walk away number backwards from the life you want to fund rather than a multiple of earnings 

• Hold diligence at arm's length so it does not paralyze the company you are selling 

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 businesses, grow it to $50K to $100K in annual recurring revenue, sell it for four to five times that, and move on to the next one. 

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 but a fraction of it. 

In this episode of Built to Sell Radio, John Warrillow puts the two founders side by side to work out what actually separated the two outcomes, and you discover how to negotiate an earnout you have a chance of collecting. 

You'll learn: 

• Why a revenue-based earnout hands the acquirer the calculator, including the right to change how your revenue is recognized partway through the year 

• Walling's ranking of earnout milestones from worst to best, and the one type he tells founders to refuse outright 

• Why taking more cash at close makes an acquirer less likely to fight you over the back end 

• What a private equity buyer admitted over dinner about how often his firm plans to replace the founder 

• The reporting clause Hilow left out of his agreement, and what its absence cost him 

• How old Slack messages and a verbal instruction to work from home became grounds for a termination with cause 

• Why an acquirer who intends to fold your company into theirs should not be offering an earnout at all 

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

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 operation.

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 intent arrived within a week.

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 traditional private equity does. 

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, and Billionaires, distills what he's learned into a playbook for owners who come into sudden wealth. 

Katz says the greatest benefit of wealth isn't what it buys. It's the freedom of never needing anyone again. Not your clients, not a boss, not a buyer. He argues that kind of independence is impossible to understand until you're on the other side of the deal, which is why, even after decades of coaching founders through liquidity events, he admits he is still adjusting to it himself. 

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 can replicate. Your founder story defines the enemy, the problem, and why you built something better, and you tell it instinctively because you lived it. A new rep who tries to recite your story will sound like a fraud. The fix isn't better sales training. It's giving your team professional positioning, and nobody on the planet knows more about positioning than April Dunford. She spent 25 years as an executive at seven B2B technology startups, companies that were acquired for a combined total of more than two billion dollars, and her books, Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch, are the standard playbooks for explaining why customers should pick you over the competition.

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. 

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 worth fixing first, and how a buyer prices the difference either way.

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 Acquiring Minds, one of the leading podcasts covering entrepreneurship through acquisition. Will has interviewed hundreds of ETA buyers and brings rare insight into how they think, how they finance deals, and where deals fall apart.

Whether you're actively considering selling your business or just exploring your options, this conversation covers what every owner should understand before entertaining an offer from an ETA buyer:

• How to tell the difference between a funded searcher and a self-funded buyer — and why it matters for your deal structure
• Why some ETA buyers use heavy debt to acquire a business — and what that means for you as a seller
• How to spot the hidden risk in a seller note — a key piece of most ETA transactions
• How to evaluate whether a young buyer has the leadership experience to run your company after you exit
• How to protect your employees from a buyer who may not fit your culture
• Better questions to ask before signing a letter of intent (LOI) with an ETA buyer
• How to judge whether a buyer can actually close — not just sign

ETA buyers can be a great fit for owners of profitable niche businesses that may not attract private equity or a strategic acquirer. They're often motivated, passionate, and willing to pay fair value for the right business.

But they come with real risks. A buyer may need your financing — in the form of a seller note — to get the deal done. They may still need to raise money after you sign an LOI. And they may look great on paper but struggle to lead the team you've built over years.

That's why this conversation is worth your time. Before you take the next call from someone who says they "love what you've built," listen to this episode.

Will Smith is the host of Acquiring Minds, a podcast dedicated to entrepreneurship through acquisition. He has interviewed hundreds of search fund entrepreneurs and self-funded searchers, making him one of the most knowledgeable voices on the ETA buyer landscape.

Built to Sell Radio is hosted by John Warrillow, author of Built to Sell: Creating a Business That Can Thrive Without You. Each week, John interviews business owners who have navigated the process of selling their company — sharing what worked, what didn't, and what every owner should know before they sell.

Keywords: ETA buyer, entrepreneurship through acquisition, selling your business, search fund, seller note, business acquisition, how to sell a business, Built to Sell Radio, Will Smith Acquiring Minds, exit strategy, business exit planning

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. Cameron sold to OneDigital at 60, and has no intention of going anywhere. He rolled 40% of the deal into equity, and now uses OneDigital's capital, deal expertise, and acquisition currency to buy other firms. He has acquired five and roughly doubled the business in under two years.

"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

Every founder fixates on the multiple. Tim Hellebrand will tell you the (second) most important number on a letter of intent is the one almost nobody understands until it is too late: working capital. 

When Tim and his four brothers took their $105 million family appliance business to market, six letters of intent came back, and the spread between the lowest and the highest was 60 percent. Most of that gap had nothing to do with the multiple. Don's Appliances ran on a mountain of inventory, refrigerators and ranges and washers sitting across two distribution centers, and every buyer had a different view of how much of that had to stay locked in the company on closing day. Whatever stayed in was money the brothers did not get to take home. Tim assumed they would simply get their inventory money back. That is not how it works. 

A lot of owners are losing sleep over AI right now. They watch search traffic erode, they see competitors automating, and they wonder if the business they spent twenty years building is quietly becoming obsolete. 

Jaryd Krause sees it differently. He's a buyer. And when he looks at a 20-year-old company run by an owner who is "scared of AI and selling because of it," he sees an acquisition opportunity, not a write-off. 

Krause has been acquiring online businesses since 2014.

When Sean Kernan wanted out of the financial advisor support business he co-founded in Dallas, he didn't shop it to outside acquirers, and he didn't wait for his five partners to make him an offer. He engineered the buyout himself. Three and a half months from the first conversation to the wire hitting his account, $500,000 in cash, no earn-out, no holdback. 

In this episode, you discover how to: 

• Open the conversation with your partners without triggering a defensive reaction or a stall 

• Anchor your price to a prior valuation event so the number is hard to argue with 

• Use a deliberately low ask as leverage to get speed, certainty, and 100% cash upfront 

• Identify which one of your partners is most likely to write the check, and approach them first 

• Source the cash from a platform partner, franchisor, or custodian who holds the underlying assets 

• Negotiate a "ceasefire" non-compete that protects the buyers without trapping you 

• Read inbound acquirer silence as market signal before you push the group toward a full sale 

• Spot the partner who is too eager to buy, and what that eagerness usually means 

There's an old idea in M&A called the Rembrandt in the attic. A company owns something valuable — a brand, a patent, a customer list, a data set — and nobody inside the business sees it for what it is. The right acquirer walks in, looks at the same asset through a different lens, and recognizes a masterpiece. 

Dori Yona spent six years and raised $14 million building what he thought was a price protection company for consumers. Earny tracked everything its users bought online and automatically clawed back refunds whenever the price dropped within the retailer's protection window. 

The model never quite worked. After two rounds of layoffs, a shutdown plan presented to the board, and a move out of the Santa Monica office, Dori pivoted to selling the one thing the company had in abundance: SKU-level purchase data on 3.5 million users. 

That pivot found the acquirer. 

To a consumer packaged goods (CPG) giant trying to understand what shoppers were actually putting in their carts during COVID, the data was the prize. The consumer app was almost incidental. 

Aaron Leibtag was one of the most popular guests in Built to Sell Radio history. He sold his 15-employee bootstrapped healthcare AI company, Pentavere, for $15 million. 

Pentavere built AI to unlock patient data trapped inside PDFs and clinical notes years before large language models existed. 

The headline number was $15 million. What it did not reveal was the structure underneath. Part of the consideration was paid in the volatile stock of the acquirer. Aaron and his partners also rolled 49% of their equity into the new entity. Now Aaron returns, and you might be surprised to learn how it all played out. 

When it comes time to sell, most business owners want 100% cash at closing. Almost no one gets it. Most deals come with structure, and structure usually comes down to three levers: what currency the buyer pays you in (cash versus stock), how they keep you tied to the future after giving up control (earn-out versus equity roll), and what rights either side has to unwind the relationship later. 

Boris Berenberg bootstrapped Atlas Authority, an Atlassian partner that resold Jira and Confluence to mid-market companies and built apps on top of the platform, to high seven figures in revenue with 18% net margins, then sold to private equity in May 2022. 

A year later he wrote a blog post titled "I regret selling my startup" that went viral inside the exited founder community. 

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.

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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 it or leave it, because an early valuation had set an equity story Simon spent years chasing. He hired salespeople he later had to fire. He took on an apparatus he could not easily shut off. And when ModMed's CEO first reached out, Simon almost ignored the email because the company had finally started humming and he was preparing another round. 

What turned a distraction into a deal was Simon's willingness to act genuinely uninterested, which pulled ModMed up to a price that made his eyeballs pop out. What let him walk away twelve months after closing was a single clause his lawyer negotiated into the contract. 

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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 

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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: 

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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. 

You'll learn why: 

• an LOI means far less than you think, and how problems in your books can kill a deal 

• founders who shop their company can signal desperation, and what Jay did instead 

• the eventual buyer valued the business on EBITDA instead of revenue, and why that worked in Jay's favor 

• Jay accepted an earn-out worth more than half the deal, and why he was comfortable with it 

• handing out equity without vesting created a problem at the worst possible moment 

• a long-standing accountant relationship does not guarantee clean books, and how this nearly killed the deal 

• the moment the DocuSign came through did not bring relief, but a flood of new ideas

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 million. 

Recorded live at the Value Builder Summit, this is David Sinkinson's second appearance on Built to Sell Radio. This time he goes beyond the mechanics of the deal — into the surprising struggles he faced after the sale, and a take on employee equity that is going to challenge what most founders believe. 

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 company EuroMoney for $25 million — all cash at close, no earn-out. In this episode, you discover how to build and sell a business where customers love you so much they follow you from company to company. 

You'll learn: 

• Why a cold call from a PE firm offering $48 million was actually the worst thing that could have happened to Sharon — and what she did instead 

• The one overheard side conversation that changed her negotiation posture entirely and helped her push from a $17–20M offer to $25M 

• Why Sharon insisted on all cash at close — and why her angel investor told her a lower number in cash beats a higher number with strings attached 

• What convertible notes look like after a decade — and why her investors converted their notes just six months before the sale 

• Why Sharon cried on her birthday, the day she was quietly walked out of the company she had spent 13 years building 

• How she watched the acquirer run Boardroom Insiders into the ground, tried to buy it back — and then decided to rebuild from scratch anyway 

• The land-and-expand growth strategy that took Boardroom Insiders from zero to $5 million ARR without ever cracking the demand generation problem 

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 for you. 

You'll learn: 

• 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 

• What a buyer learns about you when they ask whether you would sell to your biggest competitor for the same price 

• 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 

• 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 

• Why pushing for agreement after a sale closes is the fastest way to destroy a partnership — and what to focus on instead 

• What working capital and normalized earnings actually mean, and why founders who gloss over both almost always regret it 

• How to clarify the role you want after closing before it becomes the source of tension no one saw coming 

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 to: 

• spot the tells of a real buyer versus "capital partners" theater 

• pressure-test proof of funds without turning it adversarial 

• use a seller note as a credibility filter, not just a concession 

• understand why individual buyers consistently misread the cash down, seller note, bank structure and how to use that to your advantage 

• ask questions that surface risk early, before lawyers get involved 

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: 

• Spot the "hidden ceiling" in a business that looks like it's doubling—right up until it isn't. 

• Move a cap table from a failed bet into a new one without lighting your professional relationships on fire. 

• Understand liquidation preference in plain English (and why it can erase a founder's take-home pay at exit). 

• See why a banker's real value isn't just managing the process—it's forcing pressure and widening the field of potential acquirers 

• Avoid the "I can sell this myself" mindset that often results in a year of free research for buyers and zero leverage for you. 

This episode is part of our Inside the Mind of an Acquirer series, and it unpacks the ETA (Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition) wave now flooding the market. 

For business owners, ETA is a double-edged sword. On the upside, more buyers courting you means more choice, more urgency, and more liquidity. On the downside, many ETA buyers are first-timers who lean on heavy leverage and seller financing. If they misread your business or hit a snag they can't handle, the part of the deal you financed can quickly become the part you never collect. 

We 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: 

• Sell the high-value "parts" (marketing assets) without the operational baggage. 

• Avoid a grueling earn-out (because the buyer didn't need him to run the company). 

• 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. 

acasa helps people run a shared home without the usual friction. It started as a simple way for housemates to track and split rent, bills, and groceries, then added payments and utility setup so households could manage recurring bills in one place. 

When Nick Katz tried to sell acasa on his own, the downside wasn't just a slow process. It created a setup where buyers had the leverage: they could keep asking for information, keep "exploring," and never commit to an LOI.

Nick Telson-Sillett and his co-founder built what you could call "OpenTable for bars and nightclubs" in the UK. 

Instead of chasing the US (the move most founders are told to make), they went big fish, small pond: dominate their home market first. That focus helped them build DesignMyNight into a business that sold for more than $40M. 

In this episode of Built to Sell Radio, Nick shares what happened, so you discover how to: 

• Turn one clear customer frustration into a business idea you can explain fast 

• Choose focus over hype when everyone tells you to chase the biggest market 

• Set a "financial freedom" number and use it to make cleaner decisions 

• Run a sale process without tipping off competitors too early 

• Negotiate an earn-out tied to revenue so the targets stay in your control 

• Plan for the morning after the deal, when your identity gets reset 

The fastest way to make a service company unsellable is building it around a personal brand. 

When clients hire you—because of your reputation, your name, and your specific expertise—you haven't built a business; you've built a high-paying job. 

And as Gavin Bell realized, you can't sell a reputation. 

Gavin was known as the "Facebook Ads Guy" in the UK. He was making good money, but he knew that to build a sellable asset, he had to fire himself as the face of the company. 

He rebranded his firm from "Gavin Bell" to "Yatter," productized his service, and systematically removed himself from sales and delivery. 

The result? He sold Yatter to a larger agency, Velstar, in a deal that closed just one minute before a major tax deadline. 

In this episode of Built to Sell Radio, Gavin breaks down exactly how he made the switch.

Some of the richest founders don't run trendy companies. They run dirty ones. The kind of work you'd never brag about at a dinner party, but that quietly throws off real money because it's hard, risky, and most people won't do it. 

This Built to Sell Radio episode follows Shenar Wood, who built an underground power business by taking on personal risk, earning trust job by job, and eventually selling when he hit a ceiling that had nothing to do with demand, you discover how to: 

• Recognize the hidden ceiling that has nothing to do with demand and everything to do with your balance sheet 

• Stop confusing "more revenue" with "more value" when margin and risk aren't improving 

• Build a reputation flywheel where customers feed you better work because they trust how you operate 

• Separate assets from value so you don't overestimate what a buyer will pay for "stuff" 

• Fix the financial story before a buyer forces an expensive cleanup under pressure 

• Negotiate earn-out terms so the buyer can't hit your results by moving costs onto your books 

• Decide when it's smarter to sell now than grind for years just to add a rounding error to valuation 

Most business owners hit a fork in the road. 

Stay "on the tools" and keep making great money. Or start feathering back your personal involvement so the business can grow beyond you. 

In this episode of Built to Sell Radio, Dr. Michael Filosi walks through how he made that shift in a dental practice, without jeopardizing cash flow. He didn't rip the band-aid off. He reduced his patient days one day at a time while the practice added clinicians and transitioned patients carefully. Over a few years, his billings went from roughly 43% of revenue to single digits, and he only went to zero once the business was already producing most of his take-home income. 

In this episode, you discover how to 

• Spot the "capped upside" moment when your time becomes the constraint
• Feather back from four days on the tools to three, then two, then zero
• Time each reduction using numbers, not hope
• Transition customers off the owner without breaking trust
• Remove key-person risk by ensuring no one producer dominates revenue
• Keep cash flow steady while you trade personal production for enterprise value 

The result: Filosi sold his practice and collected 100% of his cash at closing, which is almost unheard of in dentistry. 

Built to Sell Radio just dropped a year-end special that pulls the strongest moments from 2025 into one episode.

Across four formats (Exit Story, Inside the Mind of an Acquirer, Mastering the Deal, and After the Deal), you discover how to

• Choose exit value over lifestyle income before comfort caps valuation
• Spot the "founder-dependent" trap that scares off serious buyers
• See how buyers price risk, not just revenue and EBITDA
• Use imperfections as leverage instead of liabilities
• Build leverage before a first offer quietly sets your ceiling
• Create real alternatives so negotiations stop feeling one-sided
• Prepare for the identity shift that hits after the wire clears

If you're feeling a little queasy about the pace of change, you're not alone. AI is accelerating competition in almost every market, and it's making some business models feel irrelevant almost overnight. 

In this episode of Built to Sell Radio, John Warrillow talks with Ryan O'Leary, who saw a similar wave coming in payments when Shopify started bundling merchant processing into its plans. O'Leary chose to sell before the shift crushed margins, structuring a deal that put most of his cash in hand up front. In this episode, you discover how to 

• Decide whether to raise capital, hire a CEO, roll equity, or sell 
• Spot the early signals that a platform is about to "bundle" you into irrelevance 
• Run a tight sale process with a short target list and still generate multiple LOIs fast 
• Negotiate for deal structure that protects you, not just a higher multiple 
• Limit earnout risk by keeping the earnout short and the rules hard to game 
• Separate emotion from the numbers so you can negotiate clean 
• Keep your team aligned through the transition by sharing upside, including the earnout 

Most experts who start a practice or studio end up trapped by their own success. The schedule is packed, the waitlist is long, but every dollar still depends on them showing up. 

In this week's episode of Built to Sell Radio, John talks to a physical therapist who turned a fully booked, owner-dependent practice into a boutique fitness business with recurring revenue, a second-in-command, and a clean exit on her terms. After a first deal collapsed on closing day thanks to a last-minute bank clause, she went back to market with three non-negotiables and still got a seven-figure outcome. 

In this episode of Built to Sell Radio, John Warrillow sits down with Ujwal Arkalgud, who built the same company twice. Chapter one was a classic problem: a profitable, founder-heavy services firm with impressive EBITDA but a ceiling on valuation. Chapter two began when he turned that service into a productized offering, transformed how customers bought his work, and ultimately sold for more than 15x EBITDA — roughly three times the offer he received as a simple service provider. 

For many owners, private equity feels like a black box: a buyer shows up with a multiple, some debt, and a term sheet, and it is hard to tell whether you are getting a fair shake or being set up for a painful re-trade later. 

In this Inside the Mind of an Acquirer episode of Built to Sell Radio, John Warrillow sits down with Speyside Equity managing director Eric Wiklendt.

Andrew Roberts spent two decades turning a bootstrapped family company from Brisbane into one of the most widely used text editors on the web, then faced the hardest call of his career: keep a comfortable, profitable business or push for a bigger exit with venture capital and private equity in the mix. 

A strategic acquirer is a company buying to advance its own roadmap, distribution, or capabilities—unlike financial buyers (private equity, family offices) who buy primarily for cash flow. To a strategic, value may sit in what you've built, not what you've earned. 

Chris Hutchins' story makes the point. He co-founded Milk, acquired by Google, and later founded Grove, acquired by Wealthfront. Both saw assets they could plug in—product, team, IP—even when revenue and EBITDA weren't impressive. 

If you want a strategic acquirer to pay for what you've built rather than how much money you make, this episode of Built to Sell Radio is for you. You'll discover how to: 

• Define and prioritize the assets a strategic may value now (team, product, customer list, roadmap, even your lease) 
• Reframe your pitch so a distribution-rich buyer may see an immediate lift from your assets 
• Run a fast, momentum-led process that invites quick noes and surfaces real interest 
• Split assets across buyers when it improves the overall outcome 
• Protect employees and customers while you move quickly toward a decision 

If a strategic exit is on your radar, this playbook helps you create options when EBITDA won't carry the deal. 

Spencer Dennis was an elite golfer whose playing career ended with spine surgery in his teens. He became a tour-level coach, running high-performance programs for juniors, college players, and pros. Managing parents, trainers, and recruiters through texts and email was chaos, so he built CoachNow to guide athletes between sessions. 

CoachNow caught on quickly with busy coaches. Then a run of decisions—turning off revenue under "grow fast" advice, stacking convertibles and preferences, and accepting stock-for-stock deals—left Spencer with little to show for a product customers loved. This is a cautionary tale for any owner negotiating with "sophisticated" investors. 

If you're considering your endgame, you're probably looking at private equity. Most PE firms use a familiar formula: buy a majority stake and ask the owner to "roll equity"—re-invest part of the proceeds—into the newco they're building. The downside: you become a minority shareholder in a business you no longer control.  

There's another path: growth equity, which lets you take chips off the table via a secondary while maintaining control. That's the business John Ruffolo is in as Founder & Managing Partner at Maverix Private Equity (he also founded OMERS Ventures).