Tracy DiNunzio
speaker
440 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Tracy DiNunzio’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Vast majority of deals fall through. In my business, we went through three separate sales processes. Each time we had what they call inbound, we had a buyer who came to us. And then it's incumbent upon you to go out and go to all the other buyers and say, hey, are you also interested? See if we can get higher bids. And we did that three times. The third time it culminated in a sale.
But the first two times I was sleeping under my coffee table.
It's kind of mind blowing.
Okay. For people who don't know what private equity is, can you sum it up in a nutshell?
And so when private equity works, it's amazing. You get all these smart new partners. They take a majority interest in your business. They help you grow it. And then you as the founder, you get some money, you keep some stock. And then in a few years, you guys sell it together again to another buyer. And you make even more money. And that's the good story of private equity.
The bad story of private equity and the reputation that private equity gets when it doesn't work among founders is that a bunch of guys in suits come in and they start squeezing the margins of your business and taking the heart and soul out of it. And instead of making it more valuable, they make it less valuable because they don't understand the founder mindset and growth mindset.
And you can end up then with an asset that's less valuable because And so you do see in some circles of founders, an eye roll happen when you talk about private equity. And when you see that, it's because people have had that experience.
Okay, I'll check that out. Because venture is, they know nine out of 10 businesses are going to fail.
They're gambling hard. Yes. Private equity is gambling a little less hard, but still hard, right? They can have... Agreed.
Okay, so you sold to private equity?
heart that they wanted to get into it? Or do they have a theory that like female led companies were going to outperform?
Totally.
Wow. When you said we should buy this business back, did it feel like something from your gut coming up and being like, get me my baby?
Yeah. So she's the CEO.
So Jacqueline, when you sold your business, can you tell us how much you sold it for? But not just that, can you tell us how much of it you owned when it was sold?
Do you hear? That's amazing. Congratulations. And it's interesting, right? Because $22 million is a lot of money. But you often hear about exits that are for like $200 million or $2 billion, but the founders don't make money.
So what's different about that versus what you did?
So my business was in a category that was very capital intensive. Like all of the competitors were raising hundreds of millions of dollars. I raised $150 million, which meant $22 million would have been a failure.
We had to sell for much more. But I also had a smaller single digit ownership in my business by the time we sold.
It's very, very different. So when you hear the headlines about how much someone sold a business for, is it really even related to how much the founder made?
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