Leona Watson started Cheeky Food Events, where they offered companies cooking lessons as a team-building activity.

Over 17 years, Watson produced 3,000 events for more than 85,000 people. Watson hit $3 million in sales when she realized it was time for her to start thinking differently about her business.

With Built to Sell Radio, you’ve grown accustomed to hearing entrepreneur exit stories from A to Z, but this week’s episode is a little different. We tease out four transferrable lessons from the latest batch of guests.

Arleen & Ted Taveras had been growing their insurance consultancy for twenty years when they received an unsolicited acquisition offer for 12.5 times EBITDA.

It was a tempting offer from an industry stalwart, but Arleen & Ted wondered if they might be leaving money on the table.

Back in 1998, siblings Pete and Alexa Ingram-Cauchi started iD Tech to offer summer camps for kids who wanted to learn about computers.

The business grew each year and by 2019, was generating $70 million in annual sales hosting camps from Stanford to MIT and beyond.

Jay Gould co-founded Yashi, a platform that helped advertisers buy ads on video content. Yashi grew to more than $25 million in revenue and more than $5 million in EBITDA when Gould received an offer of $33 million from Nexstar Broadcasting. The offer represented around 6 x EBITDA and Gould was conflicted. He knew he could probably get more, but he had also seen how quickly a successful company can go to zero.