To Sell or Not to Sell?
Would you rather have one million dollars in the bank today or a chance to have ten million a decade from now? It’s a philosophical question that comes down to the time value of money and your tolerance for risk.
Raising Money? Avoid This Sleazy Investor’s Trap
Barry Hinckley founded Bullhorn with his two partners. They raised three rounds of financing and went on to sell for $135MM in 2012. Hinckley and his team raised money from family, friends, and venture capitalists and have the scars to prove it.
The $20 Million Mistake
Rod Drury founded Xero, a cloud-based accounting platform. Drury got the capital from selling another company, AfterMail, for $15M plus $20M in a potential earn-out—not bad for a company with a little more than $2M in revenue.
How to negotiate an extra $1M in the sale of your business overnight
After building his business for twenty years, Stuart Crane sold it for $43M, which includes an extra million he got by using this one simple technique.
From Broke To A $1B Sale
Gorny built his first business- and lost it. He was determined not to let that happen again.
Why Hitting $10MM In Annual Revenue Matters
Jill Nelson built Ruby Receptionists, a call answering service, into an $11MM business when she met with an investment banker who told her the technology she had built to answer calls could be worth a mint.
How To Structure Your Earn-Out
Mark Stephenson and his partners grew Media Edge Communications, to north of $10MM when they agreed to sell. If Stephenson had a do over, he would change his earn-out structure to avoid leaving money on the table.
9 Lessons From An Acquisition Offer Gone Wrong
Back in 2007, Aric Bandy saw Google investing heavily to compete with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and so decided to pivot his company, Agosto. Instead of offering general IT consulting, Bandy focused on helping clients move their businesses online using something Alphabet calls the Google Cloud Platform.
A $30 Million Bird in Hand
Before Zoom, when you wanted to meet with a group of people remotely, you used a teleconferencing service. If you lived in Canada during the early 2000s, you probably used one of Frank Cianciulli's lines.
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.
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.
The Phantom Buyer
When negotiating to sell your company, the fastest way to spike your earnings is to introduce a competing offer. But you don’t always have that luxury. It may be better to simply fake it, which is exactly what Trent Dyrsmid did to boost his take.