This Grasshopper Learned Well
David Hauser’s Grasshopper is a masterclass in building a business to sell. With no venture funding and fewer than 40 staff, Grasshopper was acquired 12 years after its founding for $165 million in cash and $8.6 in Citrix stock.
One Bold Move That Can Make Your Company More Valuable
Henry Hyder-Smith and Steve Denner started UK-based Adestra in 2004. Adestra is a digital marketing software that helps big companies handle email campaigns, among other things.
The company grew nicely. By 2016, it had around $9 million in revenue and a client list that featured some of the U.K.’s best companies. Hyder-Smith and Denner decided it was time to go beyond their borders and enter the U.S. and Asian markets. To fund the effort, they raised $7.2 million from the Business Growth Fund (BGF), one of the U.K.’s largest private equity groups. BGF’s investment valued Adestra at around $35 million — a little shy of four times revenue.
How Two Co-Founders Stopped One Thing To Change Everything
The two founders of Stelligent were burnt out running their consulting business until they agreed to stop doing one thing that changed just about everything.
The Second Most Important Thing to Negotiate When Selling Your Business
When you get an acquisition offer, your employment contract can be a key element. Just ask Eric Sit. Sit’s company was acquired by Detection and six months later, Detection was acquired. Sit lived to regret the employment contract he signed.
The success rate statistics on selling your business
John Arnott gives you the statistics on how many people he approached, the conversion rate for signing an NDA, the proportion of people under NDA who requested a face-to-face meeting and the number of offers received.
From Broke to Big Time Exit in Just 2 Years
In 2017, Justin Adams co-founded Digitize.AI to help hospitals get paid. They used artificial intelligence to get medical treatments pre-approved by insurance companies ensuring their patients could pay their medical bills.
The business was hungry for cash, and Adams and his wife put everything their young family had into the idea. At one point, Adams was so short of money that when their clothes dryer broke, the Adams family started hanging their laundry because they couldn’t afford the repair.
The Strategic
A strategic acquisition is a different animal. The strategic acquirer will place a value based on how much more of their product they can sell, which is exactly what Business Objects did when they bought Next Action Technologies, for 8X revenue.
The Strategic vs. The Financial Buyer
Tom Franceski and his two partners built DocStar up to 45 employees when they decided to shop the business to some private equity (PE) investors. The PE guys offered four to six times Earnings Before Interest Taxes Depreciation and Amortization (EBITDA), which Franceski deemed low for a fast-growing software company.
The Hunter vs. the Hunted
Drew Goodmanson started Monk Development as a custom website development shop and evolved it into a product enabling churches to establish an online presence. With more than 300,000 churches in the United States, Goodmanson’s company took off and he grew it to more than $3 million in recurring revenue per year, leveraging the Software as a Service (SaaS) business model.
Built to Sell vs. Planning to Sell
David Darmanin co-founded Hotjar, a software company that helps website developers and owners understand how their users interact with the sites they build.
Darmanin and his partners bootstrapped Hotjar to around $40 million in Annual Recurring Revenue before selling it in 2021.
Sociopaths & Impostors: How To Sell Your Baby To A Giant
Jonathan Evans was an air ambulance helicopter pilot when he started to think about how drones could safely navigate the sky around him. Commercial pilots had rules of the sky, but there were no guidelines for drones despite companies from Amazon to Walmart beginning to experiment with using drones.