David Fairley estimates he has sold more than 20 online properties but admits it was the sale of Hammocks.com—one of his first exits—that taught him the most.

Drew Goodmanson started Monk Development as a custom website development shop and evolved it into a product enabling churches to establish an online presence. With more than 300,000 churches in the United States, Goodmanson's company took off and he grew it to more than $3 million in recurring revenue per year, leveraging the Software as a Service (SaaS) business model

Cindy Whitehead started Sprout Pharmaceuticals and created the drug ADDYI, which has become known as the "female Viagra".

Anthony Lacavera has started 12 businesses, six of which he has exited. His exits have ranged in value from the $6 million he got for one of his recent start-ups to the $1.3 billion that Wind Mobile sold for.

Back in 2013, Dave Ripley became fascinated with Bitcoin. The cryptocurrency market was gaining notoriety and Ripley and a friend decided to start Glidera, a company focused on creating tools to help developers integrate cryptocurrency.

Chris Muench started C-Labs in 2008 to go after the burgeoning opportunities presented by the Internet-of-Things (IOT). He began by writing custom software applications that allowed one machine to talk to another. In 2014, he got the industrial giant TRUMPF International (no, not Trump) to acquire 30% of C-Labs, which gave him the cash to transform his service offering into a product.

Jim McManaman started his accounting firm in a small town of 3,000, so when he decided to sell, he had to figure out how to do it without tipping off his employees. McManaman is well known in town, so he relied on secret, out-of-town meetings with buyers and Sunday sessions in his board room to keep things quiet.

Etienne Borgeat co-founded PCO innovation, an IT consulting firm, in 2000. By 2016, the firm had 600 full-time employees and offices around the world, which is when Accenture knocked on their door.

Tom Franceski and his two partners built DocStar up to 45 employees when they decided to shop the business to some private equity (PE) investors. The PE guys offered four to six times Earnings Before Interest Taxes Depreciation and Amortization (EBITDA), which Franceski deemed low for a fast-growing software company.

Susan Hrib started an oil and gas industry consulting firm called Signum back in 1994. Recently Hrib received a call from an industry contact who said they would be interested in buying Signum. After more than 20 years in the same company, Hrib decided she was ready to move on.