Ep 519 How to Avoid the Unforced Errors That Can Wipe Out Your Equity
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.
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Ep 518 Growth Equity, Control, and When Rolling Equity Fails — John Ruffolo (Inside the Mind of an Acquirer)
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).
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Ep 517 The Surprising Truth of a 9-Figure Exit — and How Not to Lose $23 Million (After the Deal)
If you've ever noticed those ads inside a mobile game, you have Zain Jaffer to thank. He co-founded Vungle and helped popularize rewarded video ads—the ones that revive your character or hand you in-app currency after you watch. In this Built to Sell Radio episode, Zain explains how he rode the smartphone wave to a $780M all-cash exit to Blackstone—and why he personally took home more than $100M. Then he gets candid about what came next.
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Ep 516 How Joyride Fetched 7x Revenue for a Business Selling Abandoned Cars (Exit Story)
Most cities have a problem: what to do with cars that get towed and never picked up. They pile up in impound lots—taking up space and tying up cash. Stan Markuze helped solve that problem by co-founding Joyride Auto, an online auction platform where repair shops, scrap dealers, and car enthusiasts can buy those abandoned vehicles directly from the lot. In this episode, Stan shares how he and his co-founders built a cash-flow-positive business that turned a clunky, paper-based process into a digital marketplace—and sold it to a private-equity firm for seven times revenue in just two years.
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Ep 515 Inside the Mind of an Acquirer with Valtech's Randy Woods
After a 23-year journey building Non-Linear Creations into a marketing giant with more than 120 employees, Randy Woods sold it in 2017 to Valtech. Valtech is a distinguished digital agency offering marketing, digital technology, and business transformation consulting services. Post-sale, Woods now serves as the SVP of Strategic Growth Opportunity at Valtech, a role dedicated to identifying potential acquisitions for the business. In the latest installment of Built to Sell Radio's Inside the Mind of an Acquirer series, we sit down with Woods to discuss how to: Make your company irresistible to an acquirer. Leverage a "put option" to cover your downside. Understand the factors that influence how acquirers value businesses. Target potential acquirers who would see your company as a strategic addition. Avoid deal breakers during negotiations with potential acquirers.
Built to Sell Radio is a weekly podcast for business owners interested in selling a business. Each week, we ask an entrepreneur who has recently sold a business why they decided to sell their business, what they did right and what mistakes they made through the process of exiting their business. Built to Sell Radio is the ultimate insider's guide to approaching the most important financial transaction of your life.
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