This week on The Exit: Maria Hedengren shares her passion for financial analysis and exit preparation, including preparing for an IPO. When Maria was the CFO of iZettle, a fintech company, she was tasked with preparing the business for an IPO. But one week before the business was set to IPO, they were acquired by PayPal. Maria’s career has seen her continue to work in the tech space with small, start-up businesses where she thrives on pace, innovation and fast decision making. Maria did go on...

This week on The Exit: Tami Holzman started out in the entertainment industry, from talent agency to movie studios. It was during this time she cut her entrepreneurial teeth. Tami quickly learnt that with determination and perseverance, anything was possible in the world of film and television and this mindset has never left her. When she built her first business this philosophy played an integral role in it , leading her to great success, ultimately achieving a significant exit. . Since...

This week on The Exit: Stuart Prestedge is a seasoned software startup coach and founder of multiple successful businesses. Coming from a family of entrepreneurs, he founded his first business at 18 in the gaming world. His first real success came with a software suite in the productivity niche Stuart founded in early 2000 with his business partner Simon. The software suite quickly rose to prominence, becoming the #1 productivity app in over 20 countries. When it came time to exit, the...

This week on The Exit: When Sarah joined her father’s company straight out of high school she never expected she would go on to carve out a brand new niche: supply chain media. Starting in reception at her fathers supply chain company, she slowly worked her way up, working in operations for eight years, followed by eight years in sales, eventually becoming the Director of Sales and Marketing. It was in this position that she launched a podcast about the company's brand story and the supply...

This week on The Exit: Dean van Zyl was fired from his first three jobs, and in his own words, “wasn’t very hireable”. He turned to entrepreneurship out of necessity, which has led him to start multiple businesses and achieve numerous exits in three different countries. Dean’s first successful business grew to such an extent that he couldn’t get out. In his own words, he “was the business”, he was too involved in the day-to-day work, and the size of the business meant those who had the funds...

This week on The Exit: Rod Feuer shares his journey from the selfish pursuits of awards and accolades, to finding creative growth that ultimately resulted in a successful exit. After an unfulfilling career in Wall Street, Rod found his passion creating products to help businesses grow. He left Wall Street and co-founded Costello, a technology company to help sales professionals manage deals more effectively. After a $1 Million raise, building a small team and creating a prototype the company...

This week on The Exit: Andrew Christodoulides’s family immigrated to the US to pursue a better life. During his first year of college, a setback occurred when his father lost his job, compelling Andrew to find additional ways to support his family. Andrew was studying and working at the same time, and his boss at the time asked him to research call center outsourcing companies. Discovering the costs involved in the industry, Andrew had the idea to start his own company: Acena. As time passed,...

This week on the Exit: From selling lemonade to neighbors to figuring out ways to improve the economic models of tennis lessons, Matt Heiman always had an entrepreneurial mindset. In his twenties, he landed the dream job with an investment bank in Toronto. A few years later Matt found himself at a crossroads in his career, and that’s when he was approached by one of the UK’s largest mobile companies at the time. He decided to join the company, and this marked the beginning of his...

When he was graduating, his profile said Beau could have been either a marketer, a park ranger or a pastor. Despite his appreciation for the outdoors, destiny unfolded in favour of marketing. A Fortune 50 Marketer with an incredible career spanning over 14 years, Beau has overseen over $250M of ads, and has orchestrated some of the most viral marketing campaigns in early 2000s. Beau experienced an exit and merge as an employee, and that was the push he needed to become an entrepreneur. So he...

This week on the Exit: From politics to eggs, David Radlo has not only had big exits, but he’s also done business with big leaders like Fidel Castro. When David left college he had an interest in politics and ran for state representative. While he didn’t win that race, years later his business dealings with Fidel Castro would lead him back to politics when he found himself working on back channel diplomacy with the US Government. David has had an incredibly diverse entrepreneurial journey...

This week on the Exit: Wayne Slavitt has spent half of his career being an entrepreneur, starting and running companies, and the other half working as an advisor for companies. At 23, he started working as a corporate controller for five different companies on behalf of a holding company. Over five years in the role he helped merge three of the five companies into one, took over the VP of finance role, and prepared the entity for sale. After that, his career boomed and he worked on a myriad...

This week on the exit: Nathan Hirsch describes himself as a long-time entrepreneur. He started working at 15, and soon realized that he didn’t really enjoy responding to a boss, or adhering to a schedule. During college, his entrepreneurial spirit boomed: in 2008, Nathan had an Amazon account, and started experimenting with dropshipping even before it was a thing. Soon enough he was running a million dollar business out of his fraternity house. The business was growing so fast he needed to...

This week on the exit: Get the inside word from Flippa CEO, Blake Hutchison, who shares insights from the largest marketplace to buy and sell online businesses, including why Flippa is seeing huge growth in buyer registrations, what a multiple crunch means for business valuations, and the latest innovations from Flippa to help buyers and sellers get deals done. You’ll also learn about what buyers are hunting for and why more institutional buyers are turning to Flippa to acquire digital...

This week on The Exit: Nick’s very first exit came from a personal training business he started when he was 16 years old in the late 80s. He sold that business for $3K, and that was the very beginning of Nick’s entrepreneurial journey which eventually led to his latest exit for $2.3B. In between he worked for Rupert Murdoch in acquisitions and corporate structure, then negotiated over 40 acquisitions with Getty Images. This episode of The Exit is a masterclass in exits and acquisitions from...

This week on The Exit: Born in Tehran, Iran, Bobby Yazdani left the country at age 16 during the Iranian Revolution. Jumping forward, Bobby graduated from Berkeley and started work at Oracle. Back then you had to log into the internet and the concept of internet cookies didn’t exist. But Bobby could see the potential for a suite of technology and browser-based applications working with the internet. So together with a group of friends from Oracle, he left to start Saba. What followed was the...

This week on The Exit: When he was in college, Will Sacks and a bunch of friends raised enough money to turn their dream of a solar powered race car into a reality. The car raced from Chicago to LA, and that’s when Will realized his call was to create things. Out of college, he founded a lighting company, but that didn’t really take off. A few years later, Will and his former partner were debating birth control pills, vasectomies and other ways to not fall pregnant. That’s when they came up...

This week on The Exit: Don McLaughlin was working as an inhouse lawyer for a consulting firm that served the Fortune 500 when he saw an opportunity to better manage electronic data. Don left to build Falcon Discovery, entirely bootstrapped, within the first 12 months the business was generating more than $1M in annual revenue. The fast growth resulted in two acquisition offers being made, the first for $2.5M, the second for $5M. Don turned them down both, believing that the business had more...

This week on The Exit: Sometimes timing can change everything. John Knific and his business partners Kate Volzer and Kris Ciccarello started Wisr.io, a digital platform allowing colleges and universities to create private, university-branded networks for their students, in 2016. In early 2020, the business was doing well, but then Covid hit. Campuses started shutting down, and being one of the only virtual connectivity solutions available for students, Wisr.io saw astronomical growth. In 45...

This week on The Exit: When Heikki Haldre was at university, his brother gave him a computer and told him that it didn’t matter what he did as long as he did something. So he started a business. Living in Estonia, a newly developed country, Heikki worked with high net worth individuals who were looking to incorporate companies. Looking back, he acknowledges that this type of business was pretty horrible. In fact, out of the 10,000 companies discovered by the Panama Papers, about 1,000 were...

This week on The Exit: When Eddie Whittingham left the police force to become a lawyer, he never expected to eventually leave law to start his own cybersecurity business, and then sell that business to Proofpoint, one of the biggest SaaS-based cybersecurity companies in the world. After just one day of work as a lawyer, Eddie knew law was not right for him so he set to work building his own business with the goal of matching his salary at the time. The Defense Works was a fraud prevention...

This week on The Exit: Adam sits down with us to share his journey of exiting when the offer was too good to refuse. After a varied career from volleyball coach to starting an MBA, Adam eventually ended up in Major Gifts Fundraising, where he came up with the business Gavyty, an artificial intelligence company developing productivity and data security for fundraisers. Adam quickly realized users weren’t engaging with his product as he expected, but with a small nuanced shift to focus on email...

This week on The Exit: From a young age Marty Fahncke had an entrepreneurial drive, as a kid he started a bike refurbishment business. And this entrepreneurial spirit never left Marty, who now looks at businesses to acquire every day. Before he got into M&A Advisory, he was involved in a number of exits, and the knowledge he has gained from those exits is invaluable. Marty’s first exit was entirely unplanned and if he could do it again he might not have taken the first cash offer. The...

This week on The Exit: Lee Blaylock is a third generation entrepreneur: both his grandfather and father were real estate entrepreneurs, so Lee was bound to become one. He just needed to find a compelling idea at the right time. When his father sadly passed away, Lee found himself focusing on his studies, and he discovered his love for software and tech. This led him to work for Dell for a very long time, before he finally got recruited to work on his true passion — software — at Oracle. Two...

This week on The Exit: Bob remembers the very first time he logged into AOL and thinking “I’ve got to be a part of this internet thing”. After Bob cut his professional teeth at Procter & Gamble, one of the world’s largest consumer goods companies, he jumped head first into the startup space. He joined a digital marketing agency and after 6 years, experienced his first exit. The agreement was a five year earn out with 10% of the purchase price up front, something he would not recommend....