Buy Well, Exit Better: A $67m Win in 4 Years

Yeah, I mean look, I think execution is everything. We hired some good people. One great salesperson, Suzanne Anderson James in particular, she was an absolute all star.

She deserves a ton of credit. But it was, it was an easier market to penetrate and grow than, than on the strict B2C side. If you could build a relationship with that, you know, somebody at a community center or church or synagogue or university, who, and gain their trust.

Then they're able to leverage their audience and, and they, they come back a few months later. Said, we have 40 people signed up for your trip.

Okay, Greg, so just before we turn to your decision to exit, did you, how long did you hold as you start contemplating exit? What year were you in and had and where had you gotten Top line two at that point?

So we, we ended up, you know, from start to finish. We held for four years at the, at the beginning of our fourth year. So end of third year, beginning of the fourth year, we received a couple unsolicited offers for the business.

And at that point we had, even though we were just entering our fourth year of operation because of the nature of the, of how people book people Booked far in advance. We knew that 2017 was going to be a very strong year and we'd be you know, just shy of 50 million of sales.

So you know, and we're able to, you know, not, not, not doubling or tripling but, but not you know, but a, but pretty healthy growth from you know, 30 or so when we bought the business. And we're able to, you know, we were looking at EBITDA around 7 and a half million despite having added a tremendous amount of, of, of OPEX to the business relative to when we bought it.

So you know, from 6 to 20 something employees with a lot of more software and marketing spend and so, you know, very different OPEX profile and really that spoke to the, you know, de risking away from the founder and professionalization point.

So but even still, you know, despite the fact that we had grown the business really nicely in the, in sort of the back half of that four year period, I, we still, you know, we still felt like we had a lot more work to do that we could continue scaling the B2B2C business line that you know, we were just scratching the surface on the direct mail side. And then we received a couple unsolicited…

It turns out they were both independent sponsors. Yeah, but they were, they were at values that, that seemed really compelling to us and were sort of surprisingly compelling to us.

So we decided to first talk to our, our board and just get their reaction and remember having a conversation with a board member, investor and, and mentor of mine and David's, a guy named Michael Klein who searched way back when, before I think it was even called search and now has had a great career and run in private equity and runs a firm called Little John. Wonderful guy.