The Truth About Selling a Business

I’m coming up on two years since I exited majority of my business Closify

It was my first successful company, that I started as a 20 year old from my college dorm while a full time D1 student athlete

it was the company that allowed me to move to Miami and put my buddy on salary and finally begin to experience what life can be like

I spent 2 years of my life building that company, late nights, early mornings, ups and downs, and all I could ever think about was the sweet idea of the big exit one day

and this is why most people get into software, to get a big fat check some day, and my business partner and mentor has even always told me

“Alex you’ll never be TRULY rich until one day someone hands you a giant check to buy your company”

and so two years later, I’ve really had the time to look in hindsight now and share my learnings that I believe will be valuable to you

first, let’s discuss why I decided to exit majority of Closify (not 100%)

1. I started to feel like I built myself into golden handcuffs, I was making good money, but I really wasn’t remotely interested in the company

we were a hiring platform to hire sales reps, I was good at building sales teams and sales systems, but I absolutely hated talking about it, and content became the #1 thing I could do to move the needle (ironic right)

and so when I had to make videos and posts every day about a topic that bored me to death, I felt like I built myself into a career I wasn’t enjoying, which is why I avoided the finance route

2. I couldn’t see myself running that company for another 2-5 years, I knew I was too uninterested and also I didn’t feel confident in my ability to grow it much past the $1m/yr mark

3. I got an ideal offer, every PE company wanted to do a 2 year earnout, and again, I knew I didn’t have 2 more years in me, so I went to a strategic buyer that I could retain some equity that also had the solution to our main bottleneck (a ton of trained sales people)

now what made that business sellable? We got a TON of offers and even though it was my first business, we did do quite a few things right:

• recession proof, good sales reps are ALWAYS in demand

• sticky, if a business is growing they’re constantly coming back for new sales reps

• I was pretty removed, the business could run without me, we had a sales manager that managed entire sales operation, a project manager, standard operating procedures for everything, I wasn’t needed I really just focused on steering the ship towards growth

ultimately, I’m glad I sold it, it got me to where I am today, however, you’ll read online that most people post exit get depressed, and my stance on exiting a company has changed

your only goal shouldn’t be just thinking about the light at the end of the tunnel, because it may never come, or it may not be how you think it’ll be, or the light may not be as bright and as sweet as you’d hoped

you should build a business that you CAN sell but you should build a business that you can see yourself running for a decade

humans aren’t meant to “retire” we’re supposed to work on things, we’re supposed to have purpose, so this idea that once you sell a company for multi 7 to 8 figs and you can just “retire” and life will be perfect is a giant fallacy

I’m building Payd in a way so that it can be sold, but I’m not worried about that, I’m worried about enjoying the process of building it, building a solution to help creators and businesses, and building a business that enables a good life for me

that’s the beautiful part about software in my opinion, you can build a business that the software is the fulfillment that spits out cash every month and you can live a life of freeodm

you can play tennis midday, you can see your friends and family more often, and that’s why you do it

if you have a software or app idea that you want to build - I’d love to be a part of bringing it to life

my dev team can build it for you, and I can show you how to get full stadium levels of eye balls on your product

if that sounds cool and you’ve got 5-10k to build it, book a call below

click here to book

hope you enjoyed the read

alex

click here to book