Lessons Learned from Selling a Business with Mindy Lauck

Speaker 1: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. Each day we welcome transformational executives to share their real world experiences and practical advice about scaling yourself, your team, and your business.

Matt Blumberg: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. I'm Matt Blumberg, co- founder and CEO of Bolster, and I'm here today with Mindy Lauck. Mindy is the former CEO of Broadly. Broadly was recently acquired by a Canadian company that also serves SMB is called Vendasta, and it's now an 800 person company that Mindy's on the senior team of. So Mindy, welcome to The Daily Bolster.

Mindy Lauck: Thanks. I'm thrilled to be here with you.

Matt Blumberg: Well, thank you for sharing some of your stories and advice with other founders and CEOs. My question for you today since you just went through an acquisition process, and I don't know if you've been through those before or not, but what are three things that you learned during the sale process that you wish you had known or done before the sale process?

Mindy Lauck: Yeah, that's great. This is my third exit, third transaction, but each of them have been so different and with years in between, so so much can change. So I would say the first thing with this particular transaction was timing. The process took much, much longer than I estimated it would and longer than my previous acquisition transactions. And longer than others in my circle also thought it would longer than investors and advisors and other folks believed really, truly in order of magnitude longer.

Matt Blumberg: Wow.

Mindy Lauck: I think that was due to talking to multiple parties takes a long time. There's the intro stage, there's moving through each stage after that, working with all the buyers' timelines when there's a lot going on in the larger market right now and all of these competing priorities across the board. So my expectations were really misaligned there. Getting to the letter of intent took much longer, much, much longer. And even from that LOI stage to the purchase agreement took a chunk of time. I went through the whole process twice when the first deal fell through during the due diligence stage. And timing is largely out of my control and it was something I needed to be mentally prepared for and I had to keep resetting my expectations there. There was some emotional and mental anguish that went along with it that I had to work through as well.

Matt Blumberg: I'm sure. And I'm sure the economic environment has a lot to do with that. When you get acquired and times are frothy and people are throwing money around, it can happen like that.

Mindy Lauck: That's right.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah. Okay, that's a good first lesson. What's number two?

Mindy Lauck: Number two is we'll call it two jobs. Running a business and running a process, it's basically like having two jobs. The job of running a business is a pretty big job already. So as if that wasn't enough, trying to run a process is just another huge job. And it's one that largely falls on the CEO, on the leader, because certainly in the earlier part of the process, not a lot of people are, as they say, under the tent. And even as you go through future stages, very few people get brought in typically because just how these things work. So a lot of it rests on your shoulder as a CEO. And there's really no playbook for running a business while also running a process.

Matt Blumberg: That's right.

Mindy Lauck: I did my best to run the business as usual. That was kind of my mantra, just do everything as usual as you normally would. But it's hard to think through decision making in this time because it's just there's this other timeline running in the back of your mind. And so every single decision... And decisions are hard already when you're just running the business, but running the business while running a process makes those decisions even harder. And suddenly, all these day- to- day things seem really complicated, like, " Should you make that key hire? Should you plan the team retreat? Should I change that one thing on the roadmap?" And of course all of this is more complicated by the number one thing I said, which is timing because you just have no idea how long it's going to take. So all of those decisions just get a lot harder. So it's an emotionally taxing state to be in. I felt like this was the hardest part for me of doing the two jobs. It's quite exhausting because you're kind of doing it alone for a large part. And this is a part where self- care was incredibly important to me and just checking them with myself like, " Where am I? How am I doing?" Sometimes it seemed like the end was near and then other times it felt like we went back to square one. And absolutely having folks outside the business that I could talk to who understood what the process was really critical for me.

Matt Blumberg: Oh, I'm sure. I'm getting anxious just hearing this. All right, so process takes longer than you want. You're doing two jobs, it's super complicated. Decision making is hard. What's the third lesson?

Mindy Lauck: The third I would say it's all about the data. There's just so much data required to go through each and every stage of the process. And I'm not even talking about due diligence. I think we all know due diligence is the data stage and you just share everything and you create a data room, but there's so much data that gets shared even before that point. And at the management presentation stage, there's a decent amount of data. And then my goal in those introductory meetings was to basically just get to the next meeting. And when you get to the next meeting, there's like that next level of data that needs to be shared, the next part of the narrative that needs to be told. You need to always provide the appropriate data for that moment as you kind of move with certain buyers down the path. And although we're swimming in so much data in all of our businesses, as we all know, it's incredibly important to really think about how is that data visualized, what's the narrative, what story are we trying to tell. Maybe it's slightly different for buyer A than for buyer B. And of course, each bit of data you provide to a buyer, it just leads to five more data requests. 10 more-

Matt Blumberg: That's an idea.

Mindy Lauck: Yeah, 10 more questions. And so the way the data is presented and provided is an art, truly. I think it's this balance where you want to answer the questions that are being asked, but you also don't want to invite endless other questions and requests because you just get stuck in this data loop. There were some situations I think where folks on the other side are just, they're excited. Maybe there's some competitive things or market data they're getting, and so they want to just kind of mine for data. It's for data's sake too. And so getting that balance is key. But yeah, I think the balance is keeping those conversations moving forward and also not getting crippled by the data request. And of course this is more complicated if you're working with multiple buyers at the same time, although much of the data can be reused it. There's always the bespoke requests. And then lastly, I would say the thing that tripped me up the most is that because that timeline took so long, everything comes back to number one. That data needs to be refreshed monthly. Because every month that you're still in the process, that data that you shared the previous month is now outdated and it needs to be refreshed. This is an entire set of data that lives outside the normal monthly data that I would report onto the board. And so now there's this package of data that again sits outside the normal running the business that I'm refreshing and checking on. And so at first I thought they were all like one- offs, and then I realized, " Hey, this is a thing. I need to get a system in place. I need to have a way to be refreshing this regularly. It needs to get built into the monthly cadence." It takes time. And it's important though, because you really need to get it right.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah, I think you just summed up so many great things for the founders listening to this. So the good news for you is you are on the other side of it now. So congratulations.

Mindy Lauck: Thank you so much.

Matt Blumberg: And thank you so much for being here and sharing today.

Mindy Lauck: Great to be here.