Built to Sell Radio

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.

Garren Hilow bootstrapped Abveris, an antibody discovery business doing $12 million in revenue, and sold it in 2021 for $150 million up front with another $40 million available in an earnout. His team came within one percent of the revenue target. The acquirer said they had missed it, refused to share the accounting behind that conclusion, and dared him to sue. 

Rob Walling sold Drip with 40 percent of his purchase price tied to an earnout and collected all but a fraction of it. 

In this episode of Built to Sell Radio, John Warrillow puts the two founders side by side to work out what actually separated the two outcomes, and you discover how to negotiate an earnout you have a chance of collecting. 

You'll learn: 

Why a revenue-based earnout hands the acquirer the calculator, including the right to change how your revenue is recognized partway through the year 


Walling's ranking of earnout milestones from worst to best, and the one type he tells founders to refuse outright 


Why taking more cash at close makes an acquirer less likely to fight you over the back end 


What a private equity buyer admitted over dinner about how often his firm plans to replace the founder 


The reporting clause Hilow left out of his agreement, and what its absence cost him 


How old Slack messages and a verbal instruction to work from home became grounds for a termination with cause 


Why an acquirer who intends to fold your company into theirs should not be offering an earnout at all

Dane Pan and his wife built Monet Brands to $1.3 million in revenue with two employees, selling a $24.99 skincare tool that cost them $6.10. 

When they took the company to market in 2025, nine buyers cleared the proof-of-funds screen and four of them wrote an LOI. The best offer came in close to four times SDE with a holdback attached. Dane countered for all cash at close, watched two of his four offers disappear, and signed at 3.6

One of the fastest growing groups of acquirers is the self funded searcher. A searcher is not a competitor nor a private equity group. A searcher is usually one person, often recently out of an MBA program, who puts ten to twenty percent down from personal savings, borrows the rest from a bank, often asks the owner to finance part of the purchase price, and signs a personal guarantee for the debt. 

Owners find searchers appealing for good reasons. They may pay your asking price, and they promise to look after your employees rather than fold them into someone else's operation.