They Got Acquired - Sustainability niche = an edge

October 29, 2024
​Read on web​

A new beginning can be exciting and rewarding, especially when you’re handed a big check for selling an established business to a larger company.

But it can also be bittersweet.

The day Bess Winston sold her Washington, D.C.-based public relations firm, the Winston Agency, to FINN Partners, a global marketing and communications company, she cried.

“For me, selling was really the Charles Dickens version of the best of times and the worst of times,” Winston said. “Nothing can prepare you for the day you close the deal.”

The upside of the October 2022 acquisition was the prospect of her company growing to a higher level than it could achieve independently.

“Alone, we could manage slow growth,” Winston said. “Selling would mean growing faster and demonstrating to clients that we had expanded capabilities.”

Here’s how she grew the business and found her buyer:

​How focusing on sustainability communications gave this PR firm an edge​

Sponsored by

Is now a good time to sell your agency?

I attended this webinar live, and they shared ideas all marketing agency owners should know. So I asked Punctuation to make it available for you on demand, and they agreed! — Lexi, founder of TGA

Punctuation, an M&A advisory that positions and sells creative and marketing agencies, is offering a free webinar on the state of the market.

You'll gain insight into:

• What the current M&A market is like for agencies
• Trends happening right now amongst sellers and buyers
• Practical things you can do now to prepare to sell your agency for top dollar later

Here's a slide from the webinar to give you a taste of what it covers:

Punctuation specializes in valuing and bringing to market marketing firms with $1M to $10M in revenue. They've facilitated 400+ transactions over the past two decades.

Small team, big marketplace

For about eight years, Janessa White ran her company, Simply Eloped, similar to how the couples she worked with approached their weddings: she kept it small.

White and her co-founder, Matt Dalley, started the business in 2016 to connect couples with venues and vendors for their elopements or micro-weddings.

They worked on the business alone for the first year and a half before assembling a small team.

By year three, they passed $1 million in revenue.

And in May 2024, Simply Eloped sold to The Knot Worldwide, a wedding industry and lifestyle brand behemoth.

Here’s how it all happened:

​While growing a marketplace, she kept her team small – then sold to a wedding-industry giant​

Behind the business (of TGA)

The original idea behind our M&A platform was to make it possible to pull comps for sub-$50M businesses... because that's what I wanted when I sold my business.

If you're not familiar with "comps," basically it means finding the sale price and other metrics for companies like yours. That insight can help you understand how to value your own business.

If you were selling your home, you'd want to see what other houses in the neighborhood sold for, right? This is a similar concept.

Big fish in the M&A space have access to lots of comps, because plenty of platforms offer this data for big companies.

But no one was really offering it for 6, 7 and low-8 figure sales. That's because most of those transactions are private. The info is hard to find.

So this was my original vision, and comps have certainly proven useful to our early users.

But something else grew out of the data we collected, something I didn't foresee. And this is turning out to be even more magical for our users:

Insight on buyers.

We don't anonymize our data like other platforms, so you can see who the buyer is on each deal. And when you aggregate all of that intel, you have an incredibly useful buyer profile that shows all the deals they've done.

Here's a 90-second look at what you get with our buyer profiles:

This kind of visualization is really powerful.

Knowing about each of these deals separately is useful (and we do that, too)... but seeing them all aggregated in one place gives you real insight into this buyer's deal history.

It also helps you personalize your outreach, whether you're a founder or an advisor working on behalf of a client.

When you pitch this buyer (using the contact info we provide), you can say, "I noticed you acquired Company X, so I'm curious whether you might also be interested in our business." A thoughtful, relevant message is always more effective than a generic one.

If this looks helpful and you'd like to see more...

See you next time,

Lexi Grant
Founder & CEO
​They Got Acquired​