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In this episode, Drew talks about his own personal experiences in buying and selling companies, and gives a brief intro to private equity, which he'll discuss in the next few episodes. Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Prefer to read rather than listen? the text transcribe from this episode. Highlights Insight on selling Drew's first company, DesignPublic Intro to Private Equity Links/ Resources: Robert Smith Kingswood Partners Bill D'Alessandro Turn/ River Capital Transcript Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you can and I will send it to you as a PDF. Read The Transcript: Drew: Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Nerd Marketing Podcast. This is Drew Sanocki, and I am podcasting from San Diego, where I've been working on AutoAnything. And for like the fifth time this winter, I am stranded in San Diego. So the New York airports are down, I can't go home. There are no flights in and out of there. So what better thing to do than podcast, right? I can probably think of a million better things. But seriously, what better things than to bang out a short series on buying and selling companies? We're going to call it buying and selling companies. I call it private equity, but I think most people don't know what the heck private equity is, so we're going to call it buying and selling companies. As you may or may not know, I just recently worked on a transaction to buy autoanything.com. It's a drop ship retailer based here in La Jolla. And as part of that I've podcasted about maybe one or two times. Some people are curious about private equity, how it happens, why they should care about it, why is there private equity. And it boils down to one thing, and I think it's ... these are probably the funds, or the groups of people that would buy you someday. If you are listening to this podcast, you're probably running a small direct-to-consumer brand, or SAS company perhaps, maybe an agency. Well, a lot of those things get bought by private equity funds, or small private investment groups. And so, why do you want to know about this stuff? Well, it's ultimately to fetch a higher valuation for your company, and to know about how to exit. That's probably 90% of you. But 10% of you, maybe you want to get in to private equity. Maybe you want to get into buying and selling your own company. And why would you want to do that? Well, for a number of reasons. I think it accelerates your growth. I think you can just get to where you want to go faster if you're working with some capital, or with other people's capital. So it's of interest to you too for that reason. So I want to spend three of four episodes doing a quick overview of buying and selling companies, at least my own experience with it. And I'm going to start with a story. And the story is of a young, handsome man, probably like 10% body fat. Am I painting you the picture of myself, maybe 15 years ago? Actually no, it was more like seven years ago when I sold my first company. But I'm walking through the West Village of New York, and in my hand I've got a FedEx package. And in the FedEx package is a bunch of signed documents to sell my company at the time, Design Public. And this was my baby. I bootstrap designed Public in 2003, we started the business, and now at the time it was like 2011. And we found a great buyer who we worked really well with, and they gave us an offer we liked. So at the end of months of work, of diligence of them going through our books and a lot of legal back and forth, in that FedEx pack was the signed purchase agreement. As soon as I got to the FedEx/Kinko's, I put that thing on the counter, and that was the point of no going back. It was my company up until that document was mailed. Once it gets mailed in, it triggered all sorts of things, like the money went in ... their money was already sitting in an escrow account,