Built to Sell Radio

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.