Ep 535 Inside the Mind of an Acquirer: When Your Buyer Is Risking Their House

**Colin Morgan** (0:07)
Hi there, and welcome back to another edition of Built to Sell Radio, the podcast designed to help you punch above your weight in a negotiation to sell your company. I'm the executive producer, Colin Morgan, and in today's episode, if you run a smaller business in a niche or quirky category, and private equity isn't knocking on your door, your most likely buyer may not be a fund or conglomerate. It may be one person, someone who genuinely likes what you've built, sees a path to develop it further, and is prepared to put a personal guarantee on the line to acquire it. That's what today's guest, Joe Soelberg, has done twice. Now, John Morillo is joined by Joe for an episode in our Inside the Mind of an Acquirer series. Joe shares why he chose a self-funded search over a traditional search fund, and how he financed two acquisitions personally with his own name on the guarantee, and why he would never attempt to build a business from scratch. That last point matters more than it might seem. The way Joe thinks about zero-to-one businesses reveals exactly how individual acquirers evaluate the companies they consider buying. If you want to understand what a real individual buyer looks like, how they make decisions, and how to determine whether they can actually close, this episode gives you a clear and honest lens. Without further ado, here is Jon and Joe. Enjoy.

**John Warrillow** (1:36)
Joe Soelberg, welcome to Built to Sell Radio.

**Joe Soelberg** (1:39)
Hello, John. Thank you very much. Good to be here.

**John Warrillow** (1:42)
Yeah, great to have you. You know, as we were talking offline, you're part of our Inside the Mind of an Acquirer series. I think a lot of entrepreneurs, you know, when they think about getting acquired, they probably think about, you know, some giant private equity group, or Google or Microsoft coming to buy them out. But realistically, the most likely, you know, buyer for most of our listeners is going to be an individual, right? Somebody who's making an investment. And so that's something you've done a couple of times, and I'm really curious to learn sort of how you think about it, what you've sort of learned from doing a small acquisition and a much larger acquisition. So I'm kind of keen to get into this. So I appreciate you taking a few minutes to share your story.

**Joe Soelberg** (2:28)
Oh, absolutely. Happy to do it. Love to give any information I can to you and your listeners, for sure.

**John Warrillow** (2:35)
So when we do Inside the Mind of an Acquirer, I'd love to know the backstory for an acquirer. Walk me through your kind of journey to acquiring businesses. I mean, talk to me about where you were at school and early career.

**Joe Soelberg** (2:51)
Oh, absolutely.
So real early grew up in Seattle. My dad owned a cabinet shop that I worked in many hours growing up. And so owning a small business always seemed like the most normal thing in the world to me. And when I went out to school at Brigham Young University, it came to looking for ways to make some money. And one of the things that I did was to start a marketing firm. We actually sold oil change cards door to door. I love it.

**Colin Morgan** (3:28)
Yeah.

**Joe Soelberg** (3:29)
At first, me and my partner basically doing that ourselves. And then eventually, they were selling really well. And so we started hiring a marketing team and folks that would go out and do this for us. And that helped me get through school without any debt. So that was nice. After graduating, BYU had did a short W-2 stint and then did sole proprietor slash kind of independent contractor work for... This was in medical equipment sales. And so did that for a bit. That lasted until I went to business school. So that was about between the short W-2 stint and the independent contractor, about six years of experience before I went back for an MBA. I did that at Indiana University. That was actually in state. We had been living in Indiana. And so I enjoyed my two years there. And I majored in entrepreneurship there. And also double major in marketing.
And so I had that thinking along those lines still, but I wasn't ready to just jump directly into our entrepreneurship out of schools. Went and did corporate for a while. Worked at General Electric for four years, a couple years corporate, a couple of years for their health care division. Back when GE was a little different than it is today. Yeah.

**John Warrillow** (5:09)