The Hidden Cost of Building a Business: What Every Founder Loses (But Nobody Talks About)

Bastian Grimm (0:02)

And we all do like put in tons of hours as founders, and like we spend crazy amounts of time, you know, at crazy times, sacrificing a lot. And I mean, at the same time, we do enjoy, but if you rationally think about the investment that founders do in building and scaling and even like operating a business over the course of the years, if you give this away in its entirety, there's something that you lose. And there's a lot of people are not prepared for that.

Kris Jones (0:41)

Welcome back to the Legacy Advisors Podcast, where we deep dive into what it really takes to build, scale and sell a company, from founders who've done it and those guiding the way. I'm your co-host, Kris Jones. Alongside me is my co-host, Ed Button. Today's guest is someone I'm proud to call a friend, and someone whose journey through entrepreneurship and M&A is nothing short of a masterclass material. Joining us is Bastian Grimm, founder of Peak Ace, Europe's largest independent performance marketing agency at the time of its acquisition by LBO France, one of Europe's leading private equity firms. Bastian is a globally respected voice in technical SEO and international performance marketing. In fact, he was named Search Personality of the Year at the European Search Awards in 2019 And if you know him, you know why. But this episode isn't just about SEO. It's about what it takes to scale a thriving agency, build an international team across 20-plus languages, and navigate the intense personal and professional roller coaster of selling your business. We're going to talk about how Bastian operationalized scale while staying lean. The power of financial and cultural readiness in M&A. What PE buyers are really looking for in agency roll ups, and why exit planning is just as much emotional as it is strategic. So whether you're a founder deep in the trenches, an investor looking for what makes a deal work, or someone just beginning the journey, this episode is going to deliver. Let's dive in. Episode 9 of the Legacy Advisors Podcast with Bastian Grimm. All right, guys, let's kick this off. Bastian, again, thanks for joining us. First question, let's start at the beginning. What was the original vision for Peak Ace?

Bastian Grimm (2:37)

So a bit of the back story on, I guess, Peak Ace is that actually I had a partner back when? Long time ago, 2012, if I recall correctly. I think for digital, that's quite a long time. So my partner time came from the paid search site, and I originally come from the organics, so the SEO side, and we met multiple times on different projects, and at some point we figured, well, why don't we just kind of put this together and at least make it easy on ourselves when it comes to like admin work and all these things that no one really enjoys doing. So there was no real vision at that point in time, I suppose. But what happens relatively quickly is obviously when you kind of start working together, like the, especially in the European landscape, what you see with agencies and their profiles, as I said, they're pretty strong in the home market. So in our case, like, the agency was founded in Germany, so we would naturally deal with German speaking clients, predominantly in Germany, but also Austria and Switzerland. But that's basically what most agencies in Europe do. They do cater to their home market and not beyond that. And we figured like if we want to differentiate ourselves, like we would need to become a much more international, a much more global player relatively quickly, because otherwise, it's just everyone fishing for the same clientele, if you will. And so I think the starting point for Peak Ace was that we understood the necessity that there are actually quite a lot of companies out there that require work to be done in more than one single language. But at the same time, we wanted to make their life as easy as possible by, I guess, reducing the complexity of having to deal with a ton of stakeholders, which brings in, obviously, management overhead, things get lost in communication, et cetera, et cetera. So yeah, I think you could say the initial vision when we started out was like, why can't we build or let's build a player that is serving, and at the time it was mainland Europe, basically, at the same quality for each and every market, no matter what, from one single location, and that was Berlin at the time.

Kris Jones (4:57)

We'll get into the idea of mergers and acquisitions and what you're doing in your career now post the sale of Peak Ace. But when you founded it as it evolved, was selling it something that was a goal or something that you had in mind, or at what point did you feel like, wow, I've built something that's created enough value that maybe I could sell it?