690: (Solo) The Truth About Selling Your Business (From Someone Who Said No)

**Nathan Chan** (0:01)
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All right, another episode of the Foundr to Foundr Solo Pod. Just you and me, I share all the lessons that I've learned from building Foundr over the past 13 years. This is a good one. This one come up the other day. A Foundr in our community mentioned it. I thought I wanted to share with you guys. So a lot goes on behind the scenes. And when you're getting traction from your brand, you sometimes get interest of other companies or investors or private equity want to buy you. And they might be interested in investing in your company. They might be interested in buying a piece of your company. They might be interested in acquiring your company. And as you're building your DTC brand, you're scaling up, you will get emails. You're getting traction. You'll get LinkedIn messages. People will reach out.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:51)
Hear the stories, learn the proven methods and accelerate your growth and future through entrepreneurship. Welcome to The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan.

**Nathan Chan** (2:04)
I remember the first time that this happened to me with Foundr. We were barely 12 months in. I was working in my IT job, nine to five, trying to figure out how to build the magazine, interviewing founders and I had somebody get in touch with me.
And I remember I was just about getting ready to finish up working at Intrepid Travel. And I became friends with one of the founders, Daryl Wade, and I told him this company wanted to buy me. And he said, he really encouraged me. He thought it was a really good idea. And it turned out that this person, he was the person that I ended up buying the Foundr, foundr.com domain from for about 70, I think it was 72,000 or $75,000 a few years later. So he owned the Foundr domain. And what happened was, I was sued for trademark infringement. The brand was called Key to Success. And then basically, I changed the name to Foundr. Now, I saw that somebody else had the Foundr domain, and this isn't legal advice, but I was like, oh, but no one has the trademark. So I got the trademark for Foundr and then I created the website, and I used Foundr Mag, foundrmag.com. And then basically, he wrote to me and was like, hey man, I can see what you're building with Foundr, really cool. We own the domain foundr.com. And we were just like, oh my god, someone's building here, but we really love what you're doing. Would you be interested in selling? And anyways, it never ended up happening. There wasn't alignment there. And I was just about to go full time on growing the brand. And I thought, if I was to sell now, I would be robbing myself of the opportunity of going at it. And I remember my mentor at the time, Darryl, he was like, man, you could be really fun. You could learn a lot. And I remember he said to me, because he's bought and sold many companies, he said, Nathan, you got to go to fly to America, have a beer and actually get to know the person. And he even told me that once he went overseas to do a deal, they had a beer and after meeting that person, it just didn't align with him. And on the plane, he was reflecting on it and he didn't go ahead. And it was one of the best calls he ever made. And so for those of you that are listening right now, you will get people that come to you, aggregators, private equity firms, bigger competitors or competitors similar to your size. And do you take the call? Do you entertain the offer? Do you tell them to get lost? Do you sign an NDA? All these different things. I want to share my perspective and what I think you should do from my experience. First and foremost, you take the call. You always, always, always take the call. I never forget one of my other mentors, Mitch. He said to me one of the best things that he ever did was just like meet other investors. Meet potential acquirers because you get to learn and you get to learn so much. That's what I always do.