They Got Acquired - She sold for $25M & took home $9M

May 21, 2024
​Read on web​

If you watch Sharon Gillenwater share her entrepreneurial story on TikTok, you can't help but be inspired.

She practices a radical transparency that's truly in the service of others.

And because of that honesty, she went viral, sharing how much money she took home after selling her business for $25 million.

Her company is an executive database called Boardroom Insiders. It sold in early 2022 for a 5x revenue multiple, when they were bringing in $5 million ARR.

Gillenwater launched the business in 2008 and brought on a co-founder, Lee Demby, two years later. They raised $200,000 from family and friends.

Beyond that, they relied on revenue to fuel growth. So the co-founders didn’t take salaries for years.

When they finally started paying themselves, they each earned $2,000 to $4,000 a month. They finally reached market-rate salaries about three years before they sold, when they’d grown the company to 28 full-time employees.

Here’s where that $25 million went when they sold 14 years after launch:

• $9.5 million went to Demby, investors and others who traded their labor for equity early on
• $1.035 million went to the bankers who helped them sell, $200,000 to her M&A lawyers and $51,000 to the accountants
• $800,000 went to 13 employees who had phantom equity

And Gillenwater? As the primary shareholder, she grossed $13 million from the sale.

After taxes, she took home about $9 million.

See our full story on the Boardroom Insiders acquisition:

​How she scaled a database to $5M ARR, sold for $25M and split the proceeds​

First Look: How we connect buyers with founders looking to sell 👀

Did you know we have another newsletter?

It's called First Look, and it features companies where the founder is considering selling, but hasn't listed the business yet.

Here’s how it works for BUYERS:

• First Look hits your inbox once or twice per month
• It includes descriptions of several companies whose founders are thinking about selling and have not yet listed with a broker or on a marketplace (the company and founder remain anonymous)
• If you want an introduction, you let us know
• We pass that along to the founder, and they have the option to accept or decline
• If the founder accepts, we’ll put you in touch, and you take it from there
• The cost is $99/month or $1,000/year

The cool part is, First Look also benefits the founders in our community!

Here’s how First Look works for FOUNDERS looking to sell:

• You share some basic information about your business with us
• We draft a description of your business and share it with you for approval
• When the description goes live in First Look, you and your business remain anonymous
• If buyers are interested, they ask us for an introduction, and you have the option to say yay or nay
• If you accept, we make the intro (and you're no longer anonymous)
• First Look is free for founders

Here's what one founder said about the experience:

Behind the business (of TGA)

Here's something simple I did recently that gave me a huge morale boost.

For months, I've been tracking one metric for our M&A intelligence platform: how many deals we've pushed live in the platform.
​
That's because we need a critical mass of deals for the platform to provide insights.
​
We've tracked thousands of deals (7,147 as of right now) over the last couple of years. These are all online businesses that have sold for 6, 7 or 8 figures. Now we're fleshing out and double-checking the metrics for each one, then publishing it in the platform.
​
So I've been digging into AirTable daily to check the count. But then I found a way to make this tracking way more fun and motivating:
​
​📊 I created a dashboard that tracks this metric automatically, shows us how many deals are live, and displays it prominently.
​
The dashboard also shows us dozens of other stats we're interested in, like how many buyers are live in the platform, how many deals we have sale price for, how many deals we've written stories about, etc.

But that high-level number — how many deals are live — is the most important, because it helps us measure when we're ready for users.
​
📈 I've always loved dashboards for sharing information with a team. But it didn't occur to me until now to create one for this project, because it's just me and our data editor tracking this.
​
Yet now that we have a visual tracker, I can't believe I didn't do it sooner.
​
​It's super motivating to see progress in a dashboard, and it helps me remember that even amongst all the opportunities each day, making this number climb is my top priority right now.
​
I keep the dashboard open on my second screen, so I can watch it climb every day. This alone has boosted my confidence; it reinforces the progress we're making.
​
Our data editor finds it motivating, too. And she now has visibility into all sorts of metrics that are important for our goals. Even for a small team like ours, this is helpful for staying aligned.
​
🚀 Don't underestimate the power of visualizing your core metrics on a dashboard everyone can see. Even if your everyone is just a team of two.

See you next time,

Lexi Grant
Founder & CEO
​They Got Acquired​
​