Jaclyn Johnson
speaker
489 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 27 Apr
Jaclyn Johnson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Now, what had happened was all the strategic buyers that were interested obviously had struggled during COVID or had lost a lot of money and were not in acquisition mode. But private equity was booming during that time. They were sitting on a ton of cash and were interested in buying companies that had done well during COVID. So we ended up doing a deal with private equity.
So private equity, essentially the goal of private equity is to find companies that are highly profitable, high revenue and have a lot of potential to grow to then do a secondary sale. So essentially the goal of private equity is to come in, provide infrastructure and expertise as well as cash to basically pour fuel on the fire of an already existing company that's doing well.
to then sell it for a higher price in two to five years. That's essentially the goal.
Yeah. And really similar to venture in a way is they're basically going to invest in 20 companies and hope one succeeds. Like that's their model. When they go into it, failure is not even failure for them. It's just like another write-off or write-down. Whereas you, the founder, is like, this is my company, this is my baby. Like, it's just a different mentality.
And there's actually a really good episode of Freakonomics on private equity that you should listen to if you haven't yet. It talks a lot about the breakdown of what it's doing, why it's not great for some businesses, but great for other businesses. And it's really interesting.
Exactly.
And also, venture is not as involved in your business, depending, obviously, but usually they're pretty hands-off or maybe a little bit involved on the board, whereas private equity is very much in your business.
Yes, sold to private equity. It was a really interesting time. It was end of 2020, 2021. Obviously, the world was recovering, trying to figure things out. At the time, obviously, we were making a hard push into digital and into membership. And so at the time, I was like, I'm not the right CEO to run a digital media business. I'm an experiential person. I obviously love community.
That's where I really thrive. I also had run the business for 10 plus years. I was exhausted. I was tired. And so it was well known amongst the private equity firm and the team that I was going to step down as CEO when we found a replacement. So we found a replacement. It was amazing. She came in. She had that exact experience in the digital media world.
And I took a step back for probably two years and was on the board, obviously retained a little bit of equity, but really was not involved in the company, which is, as you know, it can be very bizarro. What did you do? It was really odd. It's so weird to do something for so long and then to wake up one day and not do it. It's the strangest feeling in the world.
But I basically I bought a house in Napa. I started gardening. I started cooking. I started getting my sommelier accreditation. I started just doing hobbies. I think what normal people do, working out, just enjoying life for a little bit. And then I got a little antsy, as you do. And so I ended up going to run a $20 million fund for a family office.
wait can you explain what that means yes the family office family offices are typically high net worth individuals or families that create their own essentially like little mini venture fund where they invest in different companies and oftentimes are involved or their passion projects things like that so people who want to create more wealth amongst their family they'll create a family office and so this family office was based out of chicago and they really wanted to get into the female founder space which obviously is my jam was it out of
So I think it was a combo of both. I think they typically had been in less sexy industries, insurance industry, blah, blah, blah, blah, and technology done extremely well. But they wanted to tap into the consumer space a little bit more.
learn more about it and so for them this was perfect for me and so i was able to bring a lot of deal flow and also being on the venture side was really interesting i learned a ton about diligence because they obviously had a best-in-class team that was doing all their diligence for all their other projects got to work with really incredible analysts and really understand what it takes to diligence a deal and what to look for and all those things that was really fun so i did that for a little bit and then ended up launching the blueprint which is a mastermind with ali webb and marina middleton
after much convincing from Marina, because I was like, I don't know if I want to get back into coaching and events and things like that. And she basically convinced me to do it. And so that was what I was doing when things took a turn and changed. Yes. So end of last year, I'm doing the blueprint and Essentially, it comes to light that there's interest in selling, creating, cultivate again.
So this was way quicker than we had ever imagined. And it was a surprise, I think, to everyone on the team, on the board, et cetera. And so initially, my reaction was, OK, like, who can we sell this to? That makes sense. That's going to give it a good home that like, you know, obviously, I know a lot of amazing female media centric media companies have a lot of relationships there.
And also there was a lot of people interested in buying us. So that's where my brain went immediately. And then essentially, as things were happening, I went back to Marina, who was my partner on the Blueprint, who is very young, very hungry, did an amazing job with the Blueprint year one. We were able to do seven figures year one. It was amazing.
And I called her and I was like, this is what's happening. I want to throw this out to you and I this is this might be crazy, but what if we bought Create and Cultivate? She was like in a minute, like immediately. Yes. And I was like, no, no, no. I need you to think about this because I don't want to go back and be the CEO.
But I know there's so much value there and I think we could put our own spin on it. Looking at what we've done with the blueprint, I feel like there's like major opportunity for smaller, more intimate events. And she was like, no, 100% I'm in. At that point, I send this email out. Essentially, that's like I'm interested in buying it back.
which sparks like a lot of different emotions amongst the private equity firm. And then of course our lender and then the existing CEO. And so honestly, over two months of just like negotiations back and forth at falling through it, coming back at like all the things that happen when you're in the midst of an M&A kind of transaction.
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