My Story, Part 3: 'We want to buy your company'
Grappling with the decision to sell my company, Bobsled Marketing
“We want to buy your company.”
I started getting emails asking if I would consider selling Bobsled earlier than I expected.
Initially, while the Amazon and retail marketplace ecosystem was still fairly nascent, the offers were laughable.
One notable memory was a very prominent figure in the agency ecosystem who wanted to invest in Bobsled. Wow! I thought. This is so exciting. Someone really believes in my company…. And in me.
This person, part of the ‘old guard’ of the big New York marketing agencies, saw the promise of Amazon as part of the next wave. Considering this was 2018, they were in fact quite correct. They promised access to their network, the pattern recognition of decades of experience in marketing agencies.
They also were preying on my naivety. They ended up offering me something like $40K for 20% of my business. Or maybe it was $20K for 40%. Either way, I was personally offended by this offer. I can’t even find the email now, I probably deleted it in a fit of rage.
Realizing the colossal waste of time and energy dealing with this shark, I resolved to never entertain the idea of selling my company or bringing in investors until it would be a truly worthwhile event. If the old guard hadn’t figured out Amazon yet and needed to buy their way in, that signaled something important. I was on the right path.
Screw those guys. I would bet on myself.
Note: This is part 3 of my ‘life story’ series on Substack, where I am detailing the beginning, middle, and eventual sale of my company Bobsled Marketing.
Here are links to Part 1 and Part 2 if you want to catch up first.
Catching a Wave (and realizing it)
By 2021, I was ready to entertain the idea again.
Bobsled was now larger and considered one of the top specialist agencies in the space. Business Insider included Bobsled in a listicle of Amazon solution providers in the space, and we were named a top 100 solution provider by Marketplace Pulse.
I had been fielding inbound inquiries for the past year that finally seemed more legitimate. The Amazon ecosystem had been heating up for a while. For a few years around 2017, it became the latest “get rich quick scheme” where everyday folks were promised they could import some widgets from Alibaba, slap a brand name on it, and become millionaires. (That bubble has since burst.)
Then the larger brands finally started taking the channel seriously. I shared in my prior Substack post how dismissive many of the CPG brands were about Amazon. They allowed their distributors to sell their products there, not realizing that distributors may not represent their products in the best way. They woke up to the fact that many entrepreneurs of the get-rich-quick era were starting to eat away at their market share, and a whole lot of sales were happening on Amazon and they weren’t directly part of the action.
This turmoil for brands meant that business was good for my agency.
After years of devoting my personal time and attention to creating educational content, Bobsled had a good reputation. Brands would research answers to their burning Amazon problems, find our content, and reach out to us to inquire how they could get a grasp on their Amazon sales channel. This focus on thought leadership was a key part of Bobsled’s ability to acquire new clients, and eventually would be a valuable attribute that would put Bobsled on the map in terms of M&A later.
(I will write more about my thought leadership & personal brand theories, so be sure to subscribe.)
Business wasn’t without its challenges at that time, but at least we had a steady stream of inbound interest from prospective clients.
This trend was not lost on the larger marketing agencies. Their own CPG clients were demanding more expertise and support around Amazon and other retail media opportunities. Large agencies move slowly. Their size is one factor that slows down innovation. The other is complacency. They lock their Fortune 500 clients into long-term contracts that prevent them from using other agencies for named marketing channels. In the early days, Amazon and retail media were not even named as marketing channels, so we could slide in through the back-door this way.
But eventually the big guys woke up to the fact they needed to build out a more sophisticated Amazon and retail marketplaces marketing functions -- and fast. So they started searching aggressively for potential acquisitions. And I started getting emails like these:
An inner battle
I flip-flopped between whether I wanted to sell my company in the early months of 2021.
I found myself walking a tightrope of indecision. On one hand, I finally had a profitable and growing business, with a great team in place who allowed me to mostly focus on my personal strengths.
On the other hand, the fun was starting to fizzle out. The problems of owning an agency, though manageable, had become monotonously familiar. An agency is a people business. Between clients and employees, there’s always some issue simmering. Competition was heating up. There was a war for talent. On good days, these challenges were invigorating and I enjoyed working with my management team to solve them. On bad days I was bored, stressed, and frustrated.
The bad days started to outpace the good days.
So I considered what other options I had, besides selling Bobsled.
To really take the company to the next level (or even to just survive in an increasingly competitive environment) would require a different version of me, or at least a different set of roles and responsibilities. Essentially, I’d have to grow up. I’d have to evolve as a CEO, and my general sense was that I wouldn’t really enjoy my work-life as much. My talents and interests didn’t align much with the role of a CEO of a larger agency.
The other option would be to hire a CEO and step back into a board-type role. There were a few problems with this approach:
The company wasn’t pulling in enough profit to make a A-player CEO excited. I’d have to tough it out at least a couple more years to get to the right level of cash flow.
A CEO is still temporary. You hope they will be around for a long time and take great care of your company, but it’s still not a lifetime job. I’d probably have to replace the CEO after a while. This felt like a prolongation rather than an evolution.
Chances are I’d have to kiss a few frogs before I found the right CEO. It might take years to bring the right person in, even once I had the cash flow for it.
Sell or grow up. Sell or grow up. I couldn’t decide.
There wasn’t a single event that tipped me over the edge. It emerged from a long process of reflection. Key to this was my ‘forum’ at Entrepreneur’s Organization (EO). This was a small group of entrepreneurs who met every month to discuss the highs and lows of their business and personal lives. These radically honest conversations helped me to process my journey so far and my hopes for the future.
Eventually my husband, who’d been so patient in entertaining my shilly-shallying for several months, had had enough. “S**t or get off the pot, Kiri.”
I decided to sell, and went in search of a banker.
Subscribe to my Substack to get the next part in this series where I share the process of selling Bobsled, the fleeting euphoria, and the depression that quickly followed.