Can you actually thrive in an industry you don’t know much about? According to Erik Van Horn, former franchise owner of Sola Salon Studios, you sure can. Achieving his success as a franchise owner always looking for the next deal, Van Horn stumbled across the salon industry in 2014. Though a new-found territory, Van Horn and [...]
Kenan Hopkins founded his delivery food service company, Blue Ridge To Go, with no real management skills, no idea how to run a business, a lump of personal credit card debt, and the worst branding ever – all his words. Though off to a rough start, he was able to transform his messy company into a [...]
Ottawa-based phone company Versature was acquired by net2phone in the fall of last year. In this episode of Built to Sell Radio, you’ll hear Versature co-founder Jonathan Moody describe: The surprising downside of offering too many things The impact your geographic location can have on the value of your company How Moody and his partners survived [...]
According to Ross Buhrdorf on today’s Built to Sell Radio episode, “If you get disrupted by Airbnb, that means you must have been the leader.” And he’s right. Buhrdorf was a co-founder and CTO for HomeAway, a pioneer in the online vacation rental industry. While competitor Airbnb made their mark across urban areas, HomeAway focused on luxury [...]
Connie Fenyo started out as an employee at Dye & Durham, a company that makes software for lawyers. She rose to Executive Vice President when she learned her boss was looking to sell the 200-employee firm. Fenyo decided to make a bid. She scraped together all the money she could find, borrowed (in return for a [...]
Drew Kraemer founded Marketplace Strategy in 2016 and decided that they were going to be good at exactly one thing: helping businesses develop and implement marketing strategies for their Amazon e-commerce stores. As a brand new company, it might sound risky for Kraemer to focus so specifically. His approach meant turning down perfectly good work in [...]
Rob Daly and Paul Duvall co-founded Stelligent in 2007, a company that provides automated processes for building, testing and releasing software through Amazon Web Services (AWS). In their own words, the first five years were ‘a slog’ with spotty revenue, short-term employees and two burnt out co-founders. They decided to make one simple – and profoundly [...]
Can a small, 30 employee team make a successful transition to the corporate environment of one of the Big Four auditors (and stay on-board)? Find out what happens post-sale on today’s candid episode. Ann Bennett was founder of Applied Information Services (AIS) – a first-of-its-kind, PC-based software company that processed K-1s (internal tax forms given to investors [...]
Warren Buffett invests in companies with a “competitive moat” which he defines as a durable competitive advantage. Most founders start with a unique idea for their business which becomes diluted as the owner chases revenue at the expense of their original vision. Take Mitch Durfee for example. Durfee started Grunts Moves Junk, a junk removal and [...]
We know consumers have shifted their eyes from televisions to mobile devices, so how are companies raising upwards of $28 million to capitalize on this evolution? For Mitchell Reichgut, co-founder of Value Exchange Advertising (VEA) company Jun Group, he helped create a service that has multi-national and luxury brands running to them to reach their target customers. Jun [...]
