Ep 552: What to Know Before Selling to an ETA Buyer | Built to Sell Radio

**John Warrillow** (0:00)
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. Now, you've probably received the email. Starts with a compliment. I love what you built. Then comes the ask, a quick call to learn more about your company.
Increasingly, those emails are coming from ETA buyers, entrepreneurs using acquisition as their path into business ownership.
But how do you know if the buyer is serious? Can they actually close? And if they do, are they the right person to lead the company you've spent years building? In this episode, John talked with Will Smith, the host of Acquiring Minds, about how ETA buyers think, how they fund deals, and what you should know before signing a letter of intent. Without further ado, here is Will Smith. Enjoy.

**John Warrillow** (0:58)
Will Smith, welcome to Built to Sell Radio.

**Will Smith** (1:00)
Thank you, John. Great to be here.

**John Warrillow** (1:02)
Yeah, I know for sure. So your podcast, Acquiring Minds, is one of my favorites and one that is well known among our community. But for those who don't know it, maybe back us into how you got to the podcast. What was your journey?

**Will Smith** (1:17)
Sure. So Acquiring Minds, I'll just set the stage. Acquiring Minds is a twice weekly show that interviews entrepreneurs who have bought a business as their path to do entrepreneurship. I've been doing it since 2021, so over 450 episodes now. And the vast majority of those episodes are deep dive interviews covering the stories of people who've done this. And then there's some other episodes in there that are not stories, but talking about trends or themes in this world. The way I got into this was, I have always been an entrepreneur or entrepreneurial. I was at a moment in my career where I was trying to figure out what was next. The entrepreneurial itch and energy was as strong as ever, but I didn't have the idea that I wanted to sink my teeth into. I was 40 as well, so there was a little bit of a, I was weighing things differently and wanted to be more careful with my years than kind of shooting from the hip that I might have done in my mid-20s. But, and so I was trying to figure out what was next and it occurred to me, what if I bought an existing business and built that? But that was just my own kind of, just occurred to me kind of on my own. Did not know that this was a well-established path, did not know that this was a growing area of interest in entrepreneurship, but did some Googling and discovered those things, discovered that the top business schools were teaching this, that this was a growing and exciting flavor of entrepreneurship, that there was a path for somebody who wasn't already independently wealthy to go out and buy a business. I wasn't even sure that that would even be possible.
Like many of my guests report, my own experience of discovering, as we call it ETA, Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition, was like the clouds parting and it was like, this is the way, it was really, I was in love with the model immediately.
I decided that this is what I would do.
I knew I would spend months or some long amount of time learning how to do this, talking to people doing this. And I have a track record in building media businesses. So I thought, what if I build some sort of media something as I'm going through my own learning process and learn publicly? And I iterated on a few things that landed on a podcast as a model to do that. And so my own learning journey became the podcast. The podcast became its own small media business, and it has grown from there. And probably in the first 12, 18 months, crowded out my own ability to do a search and buy a business. So now, as I joke, I live with the irony that I'm the guy who talks about buying a business for the last five years, but never actually has done it. Wow.

**John Warrillow** (4:12)
So you never actually bought one?

**Will Smith** (4:15)
No.

**John Warrillow** (4:16)
You've looked at them to buy, but you've never actually hit the trigger. Isn't that interesting?

**Will Smith** (4:20)
Yeah. And I lead with that. Otherwise, people will think I'm an imposter. So I'm not trying to hide that fact.

**John Warrillow** (4:26)
Yeah. No, I get it for sure. It's, I'm glad you brought up ETA and you hit the nail on the head. Our listeners are entrepreneurs who are getting calls, it seems like in some cases almost weekly, from an ETA buyer.