Built to Sell Radio

"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.