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PODCAST

Built to Sell Radio

Built to Sell Radio is a weekly podcast for business owners interested in selling a business. Each week, we ask an entrepreneur who has recently sold a business why they decided to sell their business, what they did right and what mistakes they made through the process of exiting their business. Built to Sell Radio is the ultimate insider"s guide to approaching the most important financial transaction of your life.

business entrepreneurship

All Episodes

48:01

Ep 518 Growth Equity, Control, and When Rolling...

Built to Sell Radio ·

2025/10/31

If you're considering your endgame, you're probably looking at private equity. Most PE firms use a familiar formula: buy a majority stake and ask the owner to "roll equity"—re-invest part of the proceeds—into the newco they're building. The downside: you become a minority shareholder in a business you no longer control. There's another path: growth equity, which lets you take chips off the table via a secondary while maintaining control. That's the business John Ruffolo is in as Founder &

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55:55

Ep 517 After the Deal: The Surprising Truth of a...

Built to Sell Radio ·

2025/10/24

If you’ve ever noticed those ads inside a mobile game, you have Zain Jaffer to thank. He co-founded Vungle and helped popularize rewarded video ads—the ones that revive your character or hand you in-app currency after you watch. In this Built to Sell Radio episode, Zain explains how he rode the smartphone wave to a $780M all-cash exit to Blackstone—and why he personally took home more than $100M. Then he gets candid about what came next.

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39:19

Ep 516 Exit Story: How Joyride Fetched 7× Revenue for...

Built to Sell Radio ·

2025/10/17

Most cities have a problem: what to do with cars that get towed and never picked up. They pile up in impound lots—taking up space and tying up cash. Stan Markuze helped solve that problem by co-founding Joyride Auto, an online auction platform where repair shops, scrap dealers, and car enthusiasts can buy those abandoned vehicles directly from the lot. In this episode, Stan shares how he and his co-founders built a cash-flow-positive business that turned a clunky, paper-based process into a

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01:01:34

Ep 515 Inside the Mind of an Acquirer with Valtech’s...

Built to Sell Radio ·

2025/10/10

After a 23-year journey building Non-Linear Creations into a marketing giant with more than 120 employees, Randy Woods sold it in 2017 to Valtech. Valtech is a distinguished digital agency offering marketing, digital technology, and business transformation consulting services. Post-sale, Woods now serves as the SVP of Strategic Growth Opportunity at Valtech, a role dedicated to identifying potential acquisitions for the business. In the latest installment of Built to Sell Radio’s Inside the Mind of

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46:55

Ep 514 Inside the Mind of an Acquirer: Lee McCabe on...

Built to Sell Radio ·

2025/10/03

Today’s episode of Built to Sell Radio is part of our Inside the Mind of an Acquirer series. John Warrillow interviews Lee McCabe, a former Meta and Alibaba executive turned private equity investor—now an advisor helping PE firms modernize how they create value. McCabe argues the old model of buying cheap, piling on debt, and hoping for multiple expansion is over. Interest rates are up, LPs are demanding more, and the firms that win will need to act more like operators than bankers. If you’re

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58:43

Ep 513 Exit Story: How Dave Sifry Lost $100 Million,...

Built to Sell Radio ·

2025/09/26

Dave Sifry has founded nine companies, including Technorati and Linuxcare, raising more than $170 million along the way. In this episode of Built to Sell Radio, he reveals how he went from being worth more than $100 million on paper to watching that value disappear — and what he’d do differently if he had the chance again. Despite those scars, Sifry has built an extraordinary career. He has founded nine companies and today is founder and CEO of Warmstart, a platform that helps entrepreneurs turn

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57:06

Ep 512 Exit Story: Selling iLab for 6× ARR, Choosing...

Built to Sell Radio ·

2025/09/19

In 2006, Tad Fallows and two friends spotted a problem inside Harvard’s cancer labs: researchers were spending more time managing freezers, fruit flies, and mice than actually doing research. They built iLab, a SaaS tool for universities and hospitals, bootstrapped it to high–7-figure ARR, and eventually sold to Agilent Technologies for roughly six times revenue. But the journey wasn’t smooth. Cash was often razor-thin with 75 employees on payroll, and an early inbound offer at 3× ARR forced Tad

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01:09:48

Ep 511 Exit Story: Why Ronan Berder Walked Away from...

Built to Sell Radio ·

2025/09/12

Ronan Berder built Wiredcraft to 140 people, then sold to Publicis for a reported 67 million euros. This Exit Story traces the moment he walked away from Techstars and a product dream to double down on services—and why that decision paid off.

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16:54

Ep 510 Mastering the Deal: Earn-outs, Equity Rolls &...

Built to Sell Radio ·

2025/09/05

Most owners want 100% cash at closing. Most acquirers want the opposite—they try to hold back as much as possible and tie it to future results. That tug-of-war defines the negotiation. In this week’s episode of Built to Sell Radio, you discover how to turn common transition structures from potential pitfalls into opportunities for upside.

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27:01

Ep 509 Mastering the Deal: 4 Buyer Types — Private...

Built to Sell Radio ·

2025/08/29

What happens when it’s time to sell? Every acquirer looks at your business differently. In this special episode of Built to Sell Radio, John Warrillow breaks down the four most common buyer profiles and explains how each thinks about acquiring a company. Along the way, you’ll hear clips from past guests from our Inside the Mind of an Acquirer series.

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49:48

Ep 508 Exit Story: The Surprising Math Behind a $100...

Built to Sell Radio ·

2025/08/22

Dan Berger built Social Tables into a SaaS success story with $20M in recurring revenue and more than 6,000 customers. He sold the business for $100 million. But after raising $27M in venture funding and navigating liquidation preferences, his personal payout was just under $20M. In this week’s episode of Built to Sell Radio, Dan reveals the surprising math behind his deal and shares the emotional highs and lows of walking away from his company.

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01:07:16

Ep 507 After the Deal: Why Adam Rossi Wanted to Undo...

Built to Sell Radio ·

2025/08/15

Adam Rossi built a 250-employee software company serving law enforcement and intelligence agencies. They routinely beat Lockheed Martin in head-to-head bids. Then a banker came back with five acquisition offers — each at the “absurd” number Adam and his wife had thrown out as a hypothetical. The winning bid came from SRA International, a publicly traded defense contractor, for a price that created generational wealth for his family. Adam took all cash and walked away with no earn-out. But as

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46:51

Ep 506 Exit Story: $50 Million Was His Number—Here’s...

Built to Sell Radio ·

2025/08/08

Unlike most tech founders, Josh Payne never dreamed of a billion-dollar valuation. His goal was simpler—and harder. He wanted his equity stake to be worth $50 million. To get there, he skipped the usual playbook. No blitzscaling. No VC treadmill. He raised a small seed round, built a profitable company, and avoided dilution. By the time he sold StackCommerce, Payne still owned 75%—and hit his number.

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57:08

Ep 505 Inside the Mind of an Acquirer: Why David...

Built to Sell Radio ·

2025/08/01

Most founders measure success by the price they get for their company. David Hauser did that—he built Grasshopper to $30M Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) and sold it for $175M – almost 6 times revenue. He and his partner owned the majority of the shares so the deal was life-changing for Hauser. But what makes this interview different is what Hauser did next: he crossed the table to become an investor and now acquires businesses through Durable Capital. It’s a study in contrasts. As a founder,

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01:11:29

Ep 504 Exit Story: One Founder’s War with Private...

Built to Sell Radio ·

2025/07/25

After selling When Rich Galgano was 25, he left a sales job in wire distribution to start Windy City Wire. Within nine months, he was doing over $1 million in sales—while fighting a lawsuit from his former employer. Fast forward 30 years, and Galgano had built the dominant low-voltage cable distributor in the U.S., sold it for just under half a billion dollars, and stayed on as CEO.

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53:02

Ep 503 How to Land an 8-Figure Deal Without Running...

Built to Sell Radio ·

2025/07/18

When Ryan Atkinson sold CORE Resources to 24 Seven, it wasn’t his first exit. After selling Redwood Global in 2014, Ryan played a different role in his next venture—injecting $2 million of his own capital while his partner ran the business day-to-day. The model worked. They grew CORE Resources into a go-to firm for specialized technology talent solutions and ultimately sold the company to 24 Seven—one of the largest privately held marketing, creative, and digital talent firms in North America—in

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48:55

Ep 502 The Body Language of a Deal with Christopher...

Built to Sell Radio ·

2025/07/11

Negotiating the sale of your company may be the highest-stakes conversation of your life. In this episode of Built to Sell Radio, part of our Mastering the Deal series, you'll learn how to stay composed when everything you’ve built is on the table. Christopher Hadnagy, author of Human Hacking, teaches elite military units and Fortune 500 companies how to negotiate using psychological insights. In this conversation, he shares how founders can use the same tools to level the playing field with

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01:01:32

Ep 501 Mastering the Deal: Andres Lares on Avoiding...

Built to Sell Radio ·

2025/07/04

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57:53

Ep 500 After the Deal: Ben Leonard on Watching His...

Built to Sell Radio ·

2025/06/27

When Ben Leonard sold Beast Gear—a strength and conditioning equipment brand he built from his spare room into a business generating $6 million in revenue—he thought he’d made the deal of a lifetime. He got 80% of the proceeds up front, agreed to a small earn-out, and became the face of Thrasio, the acquirer. Then things started to go sideways.

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49:54

Ep 499 After the Deal: The Hidden Cost of...

Built to Sell Radio ·

2025/06/20

You’ve built a valuable company. Maybe you’re even thinking about selling. But what happens after the wire hits? In this episode of Built to Sell Radio, Alex Bean, co-founder of Divvy, shares what it felt like to sell his company for $2.5 billion—and why the real challenges began after the deal closed. This conversation will help you think more strategically about what you’re really building—and how to avoid the regrets that often follow a big payday.

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529 results

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