In 2008, Gavin Hammar started Sendible, a platform that allows companies to manage all their social media accounts from one place. 

The company grew steadily until 2016, when Hammar hit a sales plateau. Challenged to combat a high churn rate, Hammar took several unique steps to humanize his business.

Becoming a more approachable brand worked. Sales increased by 30% year-over-year and by 2021, Sendible had 47 employees when they were approached by ASG with an acquisition offer Hammar couldn't refuse.

U.K.-based Nathan Winch started his career as a private equity investor after selling his first company, Winch Pharma, in 2017.

Since then, Winch has acquired over 20 businesses, with a focus on logistics and infrastructure companies. In the latest installment of Built to Sell Radio’s Inside the Mind of an Acquirer series, you’ll learn how to: 

• Understand how an investor structures an acquisition.
• Build your management team to avoid an earn-out.
• Dodge the most common blunder made during due diligence.
• Avoid turning off an acquirer during the selling process.  
• Prepare your company to be acquired.

In 2014 Tim Grassin founded Candy Banners, which designs ads that show up along the top, bottom, and sides of a website.  

Grassin built a remote team in the Philippines to minimize his costs. Hiring inexpensive developers allowed Grassin to charge lower rates to agency owners, resulting in rapid growth. 

The business had grown to over seven figures in revenue in 2020 when Grassin received an acquisition offer from one of his clients, Native Touch. The offer valued Candy Banners at around five times EBITDA, and the deal closed in 2021.

In 2015 Mike Winnet started U.K.-based Learning Heroes after recognizing that most e-learning programs were long and boring. Winnet saw an opportunity to transform the industry by creating short, engaging, animated training courses. 

Winnet started by trying to sell his courses to job seekers, but when his efforts failed, he pivoted to selling to companies. Instead of a few hundred dollars a year from job seekers, selling to companies meant he was getting a few thousand dollars a year.

The switch from B2C to B2B worked, and in less than three years, Winnet grew his company to around £2 million in annual recurring revenue, which was when he was approached by Litmos, a learning management software provider. Winnet sold Learning Heroes to Litmos for approximately four times revenue.

In 2013 South African entrepreneur Jason Bagley started Firing Squad, a lead generation company specializing in cold emails. 

In 2020 Firing Squad signed an agreement to be acquired by Southern Web and was later rebranded to SiteCare.

The deal was something Bagley would later come to regret.

In 2012, Patrick Campbell founded ProfitWell to help SaaS companies increase revenue and reduce churn by managing their data in a single place. 

After bootstrapping the business to 8-figures, Campbell decided it was time to raise money. While seeking a financial investor, Paddle approached him with an acquisition offer. Soon after, in 2022, Campbell sold ProfitWell to Paddle for over $200 million.

Ed Buckley started Peerfit, which allows companies to offer fitness classes as part of their employee benefits package. The company grew to more than 150 employees before receiving an acquisition offer for almost $100 million from a major fitness brand widely reported to be Peloton. As part of the deal, Buckley retained some of the IP, which, in a strange twist, he was able to sell in another eight-figure exit months later.

In 2012, Ryan Coon started Rentalutions, a platform to help landlords manage and communicate with their tenants more effectively. 

The business showed steady growth, but Coon wasn’t satisfied. 

Five years in, Coon rebranded the company to Avail and focused his marketing to target DIY landlords with under ten rental units to manage. The changes proved successful as Coon grew the business to around $7 million in revenue before selling to Realtor.com in 2020 for approximately five times revenue.

When Jodie Cook started her social media agency, nothing happened without her involvement.

Desperate to free herself up from the minutia of running her company, Cook started to systematize her business with Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). After a few missteps, Cook mastered the art of delegation. 

In 2016, Ryan Kulp launched Fomo because he saw marketers using aggressive popups on their websites.

Kulp reasoned that if he could show other people were shopping and interacting with a site, it would give new visitors confidence in the company.

Fomo allows businesses to show off real-time customer interactions (purchases, opt-ins, even pageviews) with a line of code the company installs on their site.

Kulp led Fomo to around $1 million in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) before deciding to step down as CEO in 2020. Two years later, an acquirer approached Kulp about acquiring Fomo. Initially, he wasn't interested, but after some soul-searching, Kulp decided to sell Fomo to Relay Commerce in a lucrative exit.