If you’re feeling a little queasy about the pace of change, you’re not alone. AI is accelerating competition in almost every market, and it’s making some business models feel irrelevant almost overnight. 

In this episode of Built to Sell Radio, John Warrillow talks with Ryan O’Leary, who saw a similar wave coming in payments when Shopify started bundling merchant processing into its plans. O’Leary chose to sell before the shift crushed margins, structuring a deal that put most of his cash in hand up front. In this episode, you discover how to 

• Decide whether to raise capital, hire a CEO, roll equity, or sell 
• Spot the early signals that a platform is about to “bundle” you into irrelevance 
• Run a tight sale process with a short target list and still generate multiple LOIs fast 
• Negotiate for deal structure that protects you, not just a higher multiple 
• Limit earnout risk by keeping the earnout short and the rules hard to game 
• Separate emotion from the numbers so you can negotiate clean 
• Keep your team aligned through the transition by sharing upside, including the earnout 

Most experts who start a practice or studio end up trapped by their own success. The schedule is packed, the waitlist is long, but every dollar still depends on them showing up. 

In this week’s episode of Built to Sell Radio, John talks to a physical therapist who turned a fully booked, owner-dependent practice into a boutique fitness business with recurring revenue, a second-in-command, and a clean exit on her terms. After a first deal collapsed on closing day thanks to a last-minute bank clause, she went back to market with three non-negotiables and still got a seven-figure outcome.