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Built to Sell Radio

Built to Sell Radio

By: John Warrillow
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About this listen

 Built to Sell Radio is a weekly podcast for business owners. Each week, we ask a recently cashed out entrepreneur why they decided to sell, 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 Inc. Economics Leadership Management & Leadership
Episodes
  • Ep 542 The 15X Multiple That Let Him Walk Away in 12 Months

    Ep 542 The 15X Multiple That Let Him Walk Away in 12 Months
    Apr 17 2026

    At some point every founder needs to ask a simple question: is it better to own a big slice of a small pie, or a smaller slice of a bigger pie?

    In this week's episode, we hear from someone who chose a smaller slice of a bigger pie. Simon Lorenz co-founded Klara, a patient communication platform for medical practices, and raised roughly $32 million across six rounds of outside capital before selling to ModMed at 15 times forward revenue.

    The path there was not a clean one. Every funding round was painful. Most of them came down to a single term sheet, take it or leave it, because an early valuation had set an equity story Simon spent years chasing. He hired salespeople he later had to fire. He took on an apparatus he could not easily shut off. And when ModMed's CEO first reached out, Simon almost ignored the email because the company had finally started humming and he was preparing another round.

    What turned a distraction into a deal was Simon's willingness to act genuinely uninterested, which pulled ModMed up to a price that made his eyeballs pop out. What let him walk away twelve months after closing was a single clause his lawyer negotiated into the contract.

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    1 hr and 8 mins
  • Ep 541 Mastering the Deal: 7-Figure Negotiation Mistakes Founders Make When Selling Their Business with MIT's John Richardson, Author of Never Settle

    Ep 541 Mastering the Deal: 7-Figure Negotiation Mistakes Founders Make When Selling Their Business with MIT's John Richardson, Author of Never Settle
    Apr 10 2026
    Most founders think they're not great negotiators. John Richardson thinks they're wrong. Richardson has spent decades teaching negotiation at MIT's Sloan School of Management and before that at Harvard Law, where he was an associate at the Harvard Negotiation Project and co-authored foundational texts with Roger Fisher and Howard Raiffa. His new book is called Never Settle. In this episode, you discover how to use a "best guess" about a buyer's motivations to get them talking, even when they're deliberately keeping their cards close reframe yourself as the first offer at the table, so you walk into every conversation with leverage you already own prepare for the emotional flood that hits founders in high-stakes negotiations, and the neuroscience-backed technique that short-circuits it tell the difference between a buyer who's genuinely nervous about AI disruption and one who's using uncertainty as a bargaining chip respond to a retrade without blowing up the deal, including the exact language Richardson recommends avoid the trap of stating a non-negotiable term too early, and why doing so often ends negotiations before they begin find out why the highest offer is not always the best deal, and how to build a personal scorecard that reflects what you actually want
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    54 mins
  • Ep 540 From $40K to 8 Figures -- How Murray Kent Sold His Electrical Conduit Business for 6.2x EBITDA

    Ep 540 From $40K to 8 Figures -- How Murray Kent Sold His Electrical Conduit Business for 6.2x EBITDA
    Apr 3 2026

    Murray Kent had no background in electrical conduit fittings when he paid $40,000 for a four-person business that, as he put it, looked like a bit of a crack den. What he did have was Value Builder's 8 drivers -- pinned to the wall next to his desk as a literal road map for every decision he made.

    In this episode of Built to Sell Radio, you discover how to negotiate a clean exit with no earn-out complications and no equity rollover.

    You'll learn:

    • Why posting the eight drivers next to your desk changes the decisions you make every day

    • How Murray reduced his biggest customer from 50% of revenue to the low 20s -- and why even that required extra meetings to satisfy the buyer

    • The counterintuitive reason a surprisingly high offer should make you more cautious, not less

    • How Murray turned a proposed earn-out into a simple 12-month warranty holdback worth less than 5% of the sale price

    • Why Murray broke the news to staff in small groups rather than a town hall -- and how he kept each group from spoiling it for the next

    • Why open-book management and profit sharing made his team part of the business, not just employees of it

    • What Murray wishes he had known going in: the one negotiation skill no podcast can fully prepare you for

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    53 mins
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