Built to Sell Radio

Wes Mathews built High Level Marketing, a digital advertising agency, to $6.5 million in annual revenue. The business was thriving, but when COVID hit, Mathews started to question the risk he was shouldering employing 49 people. It was around that time that Mathews received an email that would change his life forever.

This week on the show, we tried something a little different. Instead of interviewing an owner about their exit, we canvassed founders for their questions about building to sell and asked the host of Built to Sell Radio, John Warrillow, to answer them. In this episode, John draws on his experience interviewing more than 300 founders on Built to Sell Radio to answer five essential questions.

Ben Leonard is a fitness enthusiast who found himself in bed with a heart problem in his early 20's (he's fit and healthy now). His doctors told him to rest. Said not to go to the gym, he cleared out his bag and noticed some of the accessories he used had worn out prematurely.  The experience sparked an idea. Leonard decided to launch a brand of fitness accessories made to last longer and cost less than the alternatives. He named his fledging company Beast Gear.

James Prebble co-founded Palladium Digital, a consultancy helping companies think about their digital strategy. The company experimented with various business models until they landed on helping private equity groups get a return on their investments. Private equity groups hired Palladium to perform "digital due diligence" before they invested. Along with identifying any flaws in a target company's digital strategy, Prebble and his team were also asked to identify any untapped digital assets that, if adequately exploited, had the potential to transform the business being considered for investment. Discovering these so-called "Rembrandts in the attic" is what private equity groups often look for to jack up their return on investing in your business. 

Andrew Gazdecki was born in Detroit and lost his father as a young boy. He and his Mom grew up using food stamps. In College, Gazdecki created an online marketplace for freelancers (think a tiny version of UpWork). He sold his online marketplace for $50,000 and said it "felt like a trillion dollars" at the time. 

Back in 2013, on the heels of building a successful online dating application, Darrell Lerner decided to apply his experience in the dating industry to pet adoption. He built a website and mobile app called AllPaws which allows users to find a pet based on a variety of criteria important to people considering adopting an animal. 

Jim Estill is one of the most successful entrepreneurs you've probably never heard of.  In 1975, Estill started EMJ Data, a technology distribution company, from the trunk of his car and grew it to $350 million in sales before taking it public. 

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.

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. 

These days, you're just as likely to watch a football game on a mobile phone as you are on an old-school TV. The technology that enables you to watch your favorite show on whatever device you have handy was made possible by Jason Flick. Flick co-founded a company called You.i TV with a vision to "own the glass." He struck deals to provide the user interface, which enabled content to be viewed across devices with the likes of the NFL, NBA, and just about anyone else who produces original content.