I'd take a $4M cash offer for my startup over a complicated $5M offer any day of the week. Here's why. Buyer #1 offers you $4M in cash at closing. Buyer #2 offers you $5M. Sounds like an easy decision, right? Except buyer #2 wants to pay you $3M upfront, $1M over the next two years, and another $1M if the business hits certain revenue targets. Oh and they want you to stick around for three years. Suddenly that extra $1M doesn't sound quite as exciting. Haha. I've seen founders get so focused on the headline acquisition price that they overlook how much money they're actually guaranteed to receive. And who wants to spend 3 years working for someone else just to hopefully collect the rest of their exit? Obviously every deal is different. Sometimes earnouts and seller financing make a ton of sense. But if you've spent the last five years building a startup and someone offers you $4M in cash to buy it, that's a pretty incredible outcome. The amount you actually get paid matters a whole lot more than the number in the press release. P.S. thinking about selling your startup? Our team will help you understand what your business is worth, prepare it for buyers, and guide you through the entire acquisition process. Meet the team here: acquire.com/guided-by-acquir…

Turning down a $6M offer for your startup is basically making a $6M bet on yourself... and that's a pretty big bet. Imagine you've spent 5 years building a SaaS company. It's doing $1M a year in profit. Business is growing 20% a year. Then someone offers you $6M to buy the whole thing. You think you can double the business over the next three years and sell it for $12M. Maybe you can. But here's something I'd ask myself. If someone wired you $6M today, would you turn around and spend all of it buying your own startup? Because that's essentially the decision you're making. I love founders who believe in what they're building. I've turned down acquisition offers myself. But there's a difference between believing your company can be worth $12M someday and having someone willing to pay you $6M for it today. Both are pretty incredible outcomes. And sometimes taking the money, celebrating the win, and going after your next idea is a perfectly good decision. P.S. thinking about selling your startup? Our team will help you understand what your business is worth, prepare it for buyers, and guide you through the entire acquisition process. Meet the team here: acquire.com/guided-by-acquir…

Some founders make $1M in profit and somehow manage to take home almost nothing. Every dollar goes right back into the startup. Another engineer. Another marketing campaign. Another feature nobody asked for. I get it. I've been there. When you're building something it's easy to convince yourself that every dollar should go toward growth. But at some point you should probably start enjoying the financial rewards of what you've built. If your startup makes $500K a year in profit, taking $200K off the table and reinvesting the other $300K is a perfectly reasonable decision. Do that for five years and you've taken $1M out of the business before taxes. And you still own the company. You might even sell it for $3M or $4M someday. I think more founders should think about building personal wealth alongside growing their startups. Because you can build an incredible business, sell it for millions, and still wish you'd taken a little more money off the table along the way. There's no trophy for reinvesting every dollar you've ever made. P.S. thinking about selling your startup? Our team will help you understand what your business is worth, prepare it for buyers, and guide you through the entire acquisition process. Meet the team here: acquire.com/guided-by-acquir…