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.

Built to Sell Radio is a business podcast hosted by John Warrillow, with 567 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 89. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

John Warrillow hosts Built to Sell Radio, a business show with 567 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

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  Built to Sell Radio

  Ep 559 The Good, Bad and Ugly of a $2.1M Searcher Deal | Built to Sell Radio

  Aug 14, 20261h 13m

  One of the fastest growing groups of acquirers is the self funded searcher. A searcher is not a competitor nor a private equity group. A searcher is usually one person, often recently out of an MBA program, who puts ten to twenty percent down from personal savings, borrows the rest from a bank, often asks the owner to finance part of the purchase price, and signs a personal guarantee for the debt. Owners find searchers appealing for good reasons. They may pay your asking price, and they promise to look after your employees rather than fold them into someone else's operation.

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  Built to Sell Radio

  Ep 558 $6M Wedding Marketplace Courted The Knot for 4 Years with Janessa White

  Aug 7, 202657 min

  In 2016, Janessa White and her business partner started Simply Eloped, a marketplace that planned elopements and small weddings for couples in 35 cities across the United States. They also decided, before they had a single customer, which company they wanted to sell it to. The Knot Worldwide, the largest wedding platform in the world. Over the next seven years, White told The Knot exactly that, met with their corporate development team every quarter for four years, and shared her revenue and margins with them along the way. When she finally emailed to say she was ready, the letter of intent arrived within a week.

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  Built to Sell Radio

  Ep 557 4 Types of Buyers Circling Your Business, and the One Now Doing 28% of Deals

  Jul 31, 202655 min

  There are four types of financial buyers who might make an offer on your business, and more often than any other type, the one approaching you is an independent sponsor. It is an unhelpful label for a group that raises the money for a deal only after the seller has signed an LOI, which is also when the seller's leverage is at its lowest. Travis Jamison runs Capital Pad, where investors fund independent sponsor deals. He sees dozens of them for every one he approves. Independent sponsors are now behind roughly 28% of lower middle market acquisitions, which is more than traditional private equity does.

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  Built to Sell Radio

  Ep 556 How Decamillionaires Think About Money. The 3 Digit Rule, Mistakes That Cause Founders to Walk Away From Life-Changing Offers, and Why the Best Thing About Selling Has Nothing to Do With What You Can Buy.

  Jul 24, 202651 min

  One day, you're going to sell your business, and when you do, you'll experience a step function increase in your net worth. Navigating that moment is something Adam Katz has spent his career helping owners do. He spent twenty years at Merrill Lynch as a Private Wealth Advisor to ultra high net worth families before he and his team left in 2018 to build KORE Private Wealth, an independent firm that grew to five billion dollars in assets. Just four years later, they sold. His new book, Making the Zeros Count: A Field Guide for Decamillionaires, Centimillionaires, and Billionaires, distills what he's learned into a playbook for owners who come into sudden wealth. Katz says the greatest benefit of wealth isn't what it buys. It's the freedom of never needing anyone again. Not your clients, not a boss, not a buyer. He argues that kind of independence is impossible to understand until you're on the other side of the deal, which is why, even after decades of coaching founders through liquidity events, he admits he is still adjusting to it himself.

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  Built to Sell Radio

  Ep 555 How to Get Your Employees to Sell Like You, and Why Positioning for Customers Fails With Acquirers, Featuring the World's Leading Positioning Expert, April Dunford

  Jul 17, 202657 min

  If you own a company, chances are you're its best salesperson. Put you in a room with a prospect and you rarely lose. But listen to your employees try to tell the same story and something gets lost. You've tried hiring salespeople. You've tried training them. The selling keeps landing back on your shoulders, and when it comes time to sell, an acquirer will see it too. Expect an earn-out or an equity rollover, golden handcuffs designed to keep the rainmaker locked in. Here's what most owners miss: you have a built-in advantage no salesperson can replicate. Your founder story defines the enemy, the problem, and why you built something better, and you tell it instinctively because you lived it. A new rep who tries to recite your story will sound like a fraud. The fix isn't better sales training. It's giving your team professional positioning, and nobody on the planet knows more about positioning than April Dunford. She spent 25 years as an executive at seven B2B technology startups, companies that were acquired for a combined total of more than two billion dollars, and her books, Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch , are the standard playbooks for explaining why customers should pick you over the competition.

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