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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

26:01

Ep 525 How to Know When to Get Out: What to do when...

Built to Sell Radio ·

2025/12/19

If you're feeling a little queasy about the pace of change, you're not alone. AI is accelerating competition in almost every market, and it's making some business models feel irrelevant almost overnight. In this episode of Built to Sell Radio, John Warrillow talks with Ryan O'Leary, who saw a similar wave coming in payments when Shopify started bundling merchant processing into its plans. O'Leary chose to sell before the shift crushed margins, structuring a deal that put most of his cash in hand

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01:14:44

Ep 524 3 Non-Negotiables to Walk Away Clean, Turn...

Built to Sell Radio ·

2025/12/12

Most experts who start a practice or studio end up trapped by their own success. The schedule is packed, the waitlist is long, but every dollar still depends on them showing up. In this week's episode of Built to Sell Radio, John talks to a physical therapist who turned a fully booked, owner-dependent practice into a boutique fitness business with recurring revenue, a second-in-command, and a clean exit on her terms. After a first deal collapsed on closing day thanks to a last-minute bank

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59:37

Ep 523 15 x EBITDA for a Service Firm

Built to Sell Radio ·

2025/12/05

In this episode of Built to Sell Radio, John Warrillow sits down with Ujwal Arkalgud, who built the same company twice. Chapter one was a classic problem: a profitable, founder-heavy services firm with impressive EBITDA but a ceiling on valuation. Chapter two began when he turned that service into a productized offering, transformed how customers bought his work, and ultimately sold for more than 15x EBITDA — roughly three times the offer he received as a simple service provider.

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01:14:06

Ep 522 The difference between 4x vs.8x EBITDA,...

Built to Sell Radio ·

2025/11/28

For many owners, private equity feels like a black box: a buyer shows up with a multiple, some debt, and a term sheet, and it is hard to tell whether you are getting a fair shake or being set up for a painful re-trade later. In this Inside the Mind of an Acquirer episode of Built to Sell Radio, John Warrillow sits down with Speyside Equity managing director Eric Wiklendt.

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01:00:47

Ep 521 10x Outcome Selling Tiny to Private Equity and...

Built to Sell Radio ·

2025/11/21

Andrew Roberts spent two decades turning a bootstrapped family company from Brisbane into one of the most widely used text editors on the web, then faced the hardest call of his career: keep a comfortable, profitable business or push for a bigger exit with venture capital and private equity in the mix.

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55:53

Ep 520 How Chris Hutchins convinced Google to buy...

Built to Sell Radio ·

2025/11/14

A strategic acquirer is a company buying to advance its own roadmap, distribution, or capabilities—unlike financial buyers (private equity, family offices) who buy primarily for cash flow. To a strategic, value may sit in what you've built, not what you've earned. Chris Hutchins' story makes the point. He co-founded Milk, acquired by Google, and later founded Grove, acquired by Wealthfront. Both saw assets they could plug in—product, team, IP—even when revenue and EBITDA weren't impressive.

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54:15

Ep 519 How to Avoid the Unforced Errors That Can Wipe...

Built to Sell Radio ·

2025/11/07

Spencer Dennis was an elite golfer whose playing career ended with spine surgery in his teens. He became a tour-level coach, running high-performance programs for juniors, college players, and pros. Managing parents, trainers, and recruiters through texts and email was chaos, so he built CoachNow to guide athletes between sessions. CoachNow caught on quickly with busy coaches. Then a run of decisions—turning off revenue under "grow fast" advice, stacking convertibles and preferences, and

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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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536 results

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