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Episode Summary
You finally got the offer. The buyer feels right, the number feels right, and you’re so tired of the company that you’re ready to hand over the keys and exhale. That’s the exact moment Travis Steffen says you should slow down. I had Travis on to walk through seven exits before age thirty, and the one I kept pulling on was the engineering firm he sold on seller financing to a graphic arts shop in Manhattan, a buyer who asked him mid-deal if there were any online courses on running a software development company. The down payment cleared. The installments stopped. His income disappeared. We got into why he sold (he hated every day of it), what he should have done instead (escrow, stock in the buyer, actual diligence on the human writing the checks), and the bigger pattern underneath all seven deals: he was great at starting and average at finishing. We dug into the move from service to tech-enabled service to SaaS, why building the product with customers beats building it from your own head, and the line that landed hardest for me, that if you’re the one doing the work, you don’t have a business, you have a job, and jobs aren’t sellable.
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## Top 10 Takeaways- Wanting to be done is not a strategy. The exhaustion that pushes you to sell is the same thing that makes you sloppy on diligence.
- If you are still the person doing the work, you don’t have a company. You have a job. Jobs aren’t sellable.
- Seller financing without escrow gives a bad buyer a free license to stop paying you.
- Take stock in the acquiring company when you can. It ties their outcome to yours after the deal closes.
- Your spreadsheets are programs. Productizing what you already do for clients is the path from service to recurring revenue.
- Build the product with your customers, not for the customers in your head. Patterns across 20 conversations beat one good idea.
- Shiny object syndrome is the quiet killer. Pick one thing and become the best at it before you chase the next one.
- The buyer who actually shows up is almost never the buyer you imagined. It’s not Google. It’s someone with cash who wants a new revenue stream.
- Talk to your team before the deal closes. A revolt on the day of announcement breaks the earnout you just negotiated.
- Without a mission bigger than the money, the swings of ownership will break you. The higher you play, the bigger the swings get.
Sound Bites
“If you are that person, you don’t have business, you have a job. It’s difficult to sell your company if you have a job, because you’re not going to sell yourself.” (@TBD) — Travis Steffen
“You will not start a successful company using only your idea. When you start a company based on consumer need, and not because you just assume that consumers need it because it clicks with you, that’s when you can really cover the businesses that can grow really quickly.” (@TBD) — Travis Steffen
“The one thing that kills every company without fail, and some of mine have been included in that, is shiny object syndrome.” (@TBD) — Travis Steffen
“If you don’t have your purpose, if you don’t have your mission, it will break you.” (@TBD) — Travis Steffen
“We sold to a strategic buyer and the numbers work by gutting things, and that’s not, well, it was tough. Mentally very, very, very tough.” (@TBD) — Ryan Tansom
About This Episode
Travis Steffen is a serial entrepreneur with seven exits across fitness, e-commerce, fintech, and software. He’s the founder of Viral Hero, a growth consulting firm that helps software companies build virality and contagion mechanics into their products, and Bax, a fundraising consulting firm. At the time of recording he was head of growth at lottery.com. A former professional MMA fighter, online poker pro, and Division I athlete with a graduate degree in exercise physiology, Travis brings a builder’s lens to ownership and an honest accounting of what he’d do differently across the seven deals he’s already done.
Resources Mentioned
- Viral Hero — Travis’s growth consulting firm. — travis@viralhero.com
- Bax — Travis’s fundraising consulting firm. — travis@b.co
- lottery.com — Where Travis was head of growth at time of recording.
- FE International — Online business broker that handled one of Travis’s exits.
- Dane Maxwell’s Foundation — Referenced for the customer-extraction process behind a successful SaaS launch.
- The Lean Startup by Eric Ries — Referenced for minimum viable product framing.
- The Tapout show — The MMA brand that inspired Travis’s first company.
Connections
Phase + Module:
- Module 9 — Operator Transition — Selling, succession, and the trap of owning a job you can’t transfer.
Milestones:
- Milestone 6 — Transaction Value — Buyer types, deal structure, escrow, seller financing risk.
- Milestone 25 — Operator Transition Plan — Removing yourself from the work before the deal, not after.
Concepts referenced:
- The Owner-Operator Trap™ — When the company can’t run without you, it can’t sell without you either.
- Revenue Architecture — The service to tech-enabled service to SaaS progression Travis walks through.
- The One Thing — Shiny object syndrome as the structural opposite of focus.