How to Exit At $5 Million And Above

Hello, this is Alex. In this short video, I'd like to share with you how to exit a $5 million and above. This is especially relevant if you're the founder of a SaaS, a software company, a B2B consulting company, or a digital agency and ideally, you should be out of the startup phase already.

When I work with a lot of clients, one of the things that we often get asked to help with is how to exit at the price that they want. So, in one case, we were helping a particular client, they wanted to exit at 10 million. When we dug into the numbers, we had to deliver the news that the most they are probably going to get for the business is probably 1.5 million, and it took them several years to even get to that enterprise value.

So then, when they sat down, we said, “If you want to exit at 10 million, at the rate you're growing, it’s probably going to take 7 to 10 years”, which doesn't fit their timeline. So, we asked them, "Well, what if we could shave out by several years and then hit the number you want?" They said, "What does that look like?"

So what we did is we showed them that one of the fastest ways to get there and really the only way to get there with the timeline that they want at the exit price that they want is to use acquisitions. I'm not talking about doing an acquisition in an isolated manner. I’m talking about strategic acquisitions that are used in the growth of enterprise value, which is the exit price of the current business that they're currently running.

So we sat down and we mapped out what it would look like, and also what kind of integration would have to happen with the acquisition so that way, the combined companies synergistically combine to increase enterprise value. So having worked with a number of founders, I found that a lot of founders never looked at this path to grow and to cut several years off of the exit timeline so they can exit at a price that they want. Because most founders I talked to, the way they want to grow is they usually try to get more customers one at a time, by using paid advertising, organic traffic, or even strategic partners.

While all of those venues work, I would say that the fastest way to get to the exit time that you want, more often than not, especially if you’ve passed the startup phase, is to look at using acquisition strategically.

So if this is something you'd like our help with, to use acquisitions to exit at $5 million, $10 million, and above, then definitely reach out. This is something we've helped a number of our clients do, and it has to be executed in the right way.

You have to be able to identify the right companies that you want to acquire and then also integrate them so that you can increase it the enterprise value versus just making an acquisition in a haphazard manner or just because the deals are good. You have to be able to do it strategically and integrate these companies that you're acquiring to be able to exit at $5 million or $10 million and above.

This is something we've helped a number of our clients do, and we would love to have an in-depth conversation with you about how to execute such a strategy.