We talk to Brian Bowman, founder of Consumer Acquisition. Brian tells us about the three shocks that instantly changed his business, why he valued his investment banker so much, how contract negotiation is like an ass whipping, how his deal led marriage counseling and how he ended up in the ER, and eventually emergency heart surgery days after he closed his sale.
Brian Bowman, founder of Consumer Acquisition, talks about the shocks that impacted his business and led him to sell it. He discusses the challenges faced due to changes in Facebook's Value Bidding, the impact of COVID-19 on the app business, and Apple's removal of their tracking ID called IDFA. Brian shares his decision-making process for selling the company and highlights the importance of working with an investment banker during this process. He also emphasizes the need for thorough preparation before putting a business up for sale and offers insights into contract negotiation, describing it as a challenging experience.
The process of finalizing the purchase agreement was complex and required constant communication and iterations between Brain Labs in the UK and the speaker's team in San Francisco. Both sides were motivated to complete the deal before the end of the year, but it involved an enormous amount of work. The speaker emphasizes the importance and value of hiring a law firm for such transactions, as they provide expertise in foreseeing potential issues and proposing solutions. The lawyers worked tirelessly, acting as litigators and fighting for their client's interests during tough negotiations. Despite being expensive, their services were considered worthwhile.
The transcript also reveals that while going through this process, the speaker faced personal challenges, including strain on his marriage that required therapy. He experienced exhaustion due to working long hours and pushing himself physically. Eventually, after successfully completing the sale, he suffered a health emergency requiring emergency open heart surgery.
Post-sale life was impacted by external factors like changes at Facebook and Apple affecting business performance. Additionally, health issues led to retirement from work to focus on recovery and personal well-being.
Throughout this journey, Brain Labs demonstrated supportiveness towards their executive team member facing health difficulties by providing assistance when needed.
Retirement was not an easy decision for the speaker because building up the business felt like raising a child. However, knowing that his team was taken care of made it easier to let go.
The speaker reflects on their retirement process and the challenges of starting a new business in a chaotic market. They mention the difficulty of leaving their role as the center of their industry and the belief that founders have in the value of their stock. The speaker emphasizes the importance of maintaining personal belief and focus to be successful as an entrepreneur. They compare retiring to losing control, similar to when a child goes off to college. The speaker acknowledges that selling a business can sometimes feel like sacrificing purpose for money. Their advice for founders considering a sale is to approach it with passion and energy while also ensuring someone capable runs the existing business during the process. The speaker shares their positive experience with selling a startup compared to one that failed, expressing gratitude for the opportunity and hoping their insights are helpful.
00:04
David Rodnitzky
In this episode of the Agentic Shift podcast, we talk to Brian Bowman. Brian founded the creative agency Consumer Acquisition in 2013 and sold it in 2022 to Brainlabs. Brian tells us about the three shocks that instantly changed his business, why he valued his investment banker so much, how contract negotiation is like an ass whipping, how his deal led marriage counseling and Howie ended up in the ER, and eventually emergency heart surgery days after he closed his sale.
00:32
David Rodnitzky
Enjoy the show. Brian, thanks for joining me on Agency Shift.
00:37
Brian Bowman
Oh, my pleasure. Appreciate the opportunity.
00:40
David Rodnitzky
Yeah, it's great to talk to you. You have a great story and I think it's going to be really valuable for people to listen to. I guess let's start out with maybe just give us an overview of Consumer Acquisition, the company that you founded and then sold.
00:54
Brian Bowman
Yeah, happy to. The company was founded in 2013 and it was designed to provide user acquisition services for Facebook, primarily advertisers who were focused on mobile app performance, which meant a heavy concentration in gaming. And then we expanded the capabilities to offer creative services. So we ended up working with most of the large mobile app advertisers across Facebook and Google, Disney, Bumble, Zynga, EA, Roblox, Rovio, that type of company. And overall, we managed just over three and a half billion in paid social spend.
01:41
David Rodnitzky
Wow, that's a lot. And those are blue chip names. So at what point did you start thinking about maybe selling the business?
01:51
Brian Bowman
Yeah, we had the benefit of generating tremendous EBITDA and it was very cash flow positive and the business was scaling really well until three major shocks happened. One, Facebook announced and then launched Value Biding, and the goal of that really was to level the playing field so that advertisers very small and very big were able to get the same capabilities without the need for hiring experts such as us. And they really delivered on that promise. It was actually quite an extraordinary change of enabling advertisers to generate high performance with a light touch. Shortly after that. And I think I'm getting the timing right here, COVID-19 obviously Hit, which was around March of 2020, which was a huge boost to our business and to the app business in general. People stayed at home, they had not a lot to do, so they played apps and games.
02:54
Brian Bowman
So the business took off. And it was about that time that Apple announced the removal of their tracking ID called IDFA. And this was a tectonic shift that really fundamentally dismantled the efficiency with which advertisers can buy and sell advertising efficiently. If there was a saving grace to that change, all advertisers in the ecosystem were biased the same, so there wasn't an advantage or a disadvantage if you were large or small. But basically, we and other agencies that service that ecosystem were powerless to fight the marketplace dynamics that were going on. And thankfully, were given about an 18 month window from the time they announced it to when it really, truly turned on, that it allowed us to plan accordingly. And it was over that period of time that we started the process of trying to sell the business.
03:58
David Rodnitzky
When you decided to sell, who did you talk to about it internally? And I assume you talked to your family, but how did you come to the decision to think about selling?
04:09
Brian Bowman
Yes, of course I discussed the changes with my wife, key members of our executive team, but I also blogged about the pending armageddon of the Apple changes very broadly and spoke about the impacts that I saw coming in an effort to share the knowledge and to solicit input from the industry. And as part of that, I spoke to all of our key clients, the directors or VP of User acquisition, CMOS at those firms. I even talked to CEOs of my competitors trying to get a lay of the land.
04:51
David Rodnitzky
Wow. I guess just as a quick question, if the IDFA change hadn't happened, would you have most likely continued running the business and not pursued a sale?
05:05
Brian Bowman
The what ifs are hard to answer on that, but yes, we would have continued to run the business. Yes, we would have continued to grow and scale. It really was a significant gut punch to not only us, but the entire mobile app advertising ecosystem. So whether you were Unity or Facebook or Applovin or any of the entities involved in iOS advertising, loss of efficiency was profound. And it took a lot of the margin that advertisers had grown accustomed to immediately off the table and made it much less efficient to advertise. So would we have continued? Yes, and we wouldn't have encountered such tremendous headwinds. We would have dealt with the Facebook value bidding and the other changes that they were rolling out as just another challenge to hop frog over.
06:04
David Rodnitzky
Yeah, I think it's rare for an agency or any business to have that much of a clear warning sign of problems ahead. I think mostly businesses are frogs in slowly boiling water and changes happen gradually. I find it very interesting that you clearly saw the problem and you actually blogged about it too, which I guess people saw you as an honest broker when you went into this potential transaction.
06:31
Brian Bowman
Yeah, that was the hope is to be perceived as an industry resource, as there's a lot of smart people in the ecosystem. And one of the challenges we frequently ran into was if were able to get better feedback from potential advertisers and current advertisers by sharing what we really saw going on, they obviously were encountering the same challenges both on the positive and the negative side. So creating an echo chamber where we could give feedback and get their feedback really benefited us in terms of building relationships.
07:08
David Rodnitzky
Absolutely makes sense. So you've decided the future is not bright and you don't need to wear shades, you're going to put yourself up for sale. Did you decide to work with an investment banker?
07:20
Brian Bowman
We did. The name of the firm is WY Partners. They're based out of the UK. They have extensive knowledge in Martech and Adtech and I cannot underemphasize how important that was in going through the process. The vernacular, the terms, the way in which revenue flows, the challenges in the business, all of those things are nuanced. They came to the table with that deep understanding and on a personal level, which surprised me, to be honest. They really acted as both a personal and professional kind of guidance counselor to me. There were some extremely stressful situations that I faced in the kind of ending months there and they had complete exposure to my personal life, my finances, my professional life. And honestly, I just was unable to be at the level of depth for every single decision and had to trust them. They were really a trusted partner in going through that process and something I deeply valued.
08:26
David Rodnitzky
I think a lot of people, when you hear how much the investment banker is charging, which in most deals is my experience, is at least $750,000, people get pretty freaked out. But I guess it sounds like you're a strong testimonial for they're worth every penny.
08:46
Brian Bowman
Not only are they worth every penny, unless you're a large enough firm with a corp dev infrastructure and a very strong financing team that isn't already overburdened by closing months and quarters and doing strat planning and financial planning for the next year, those guys really functioned as additive hands. And I think more importantly were strategic about the information that got exchanged. When, how to exchange it, the depth of the exchange. One of the overwhelming components in going through the process, which we ran twice, by the way, once failed and once worked, was there are an enormous list of questions that got thrown at us. Having gone through it the first time, were ill prepared for it, going through it the second time, we had some of that information already in the bucket. But it's hundreds of requests that are very deep. Running through those and responding to them at a level of granularity that helped the acquirer understand the business and also maintaining the business in its existing form and hitting numbers was really a lot of work.
10:02
David Rodnitzky
If you were talking to someone who's considering selling their agency, let's say in six months, what are the sort of two or three most time consuming parts of preparing to sell the business? Obviously there's a lot of documents that need to be collected, but generally, how would you describe the things that you can do in the six months before you put yourself on the market to be ready for it?
10:27
Brian Bowman
Yeah, I guess it depends a bit on the style of the business. But the things we bumped into that were difficult for us the first time easier. The second time was I hired PwC to help with financials and accounting so that we presented ourselves in a better light, including both forecasting and then the financials themselves. But also there's a lot more that needed to be done in terms of gathering employee feedback, implementing HR systems that can be ingested by another firm. We happen to use TriNet for benefits and Bamboo HR for employee management. Those things really made it easy for different teams on the acquiring company side to understand the approach were taking and to get access to key information.
11:22
David Rodnitzky
I think uncertainty and errors are two things that will kill a deal, especially when it comes to financials. If financials are not done professionally, then it raises a red flag, and red flags cause acquirers to be skittish.
11:38
Brian Bowman
Without question.
11:40
David Rodnitzky
Did you run a process, and for those of you who are not, who are listening, who haven't done this, a process in the investment banking world means that you send out teasers to anywhere between ten and 50 companies, and then you do management presentations. You send them a confidential information memorandum. You have all sorts of back and forth with multiple shooters before you end up getting bids and choosing a winner. Did you do that or did you do something less extensive?
12:09
Brian Bowman
No, we did exactly that. It's almost as you laid it out. We identified the top 50 to 75 companies. We bucketed them into tier one, tier two, tier three, very similar to what you said. We put together a quick management overview, then a detailed presentation. Most companies wanted to run through the detailed presentation, which took about an hour and a half of my time. You can imagine presenting something 25 times and then going back through that to another set of the management team at that same company. It often took two or three of those presentations to pique a potential acquirer's interest or to receive a final no. So it's a lengthy process and it required an awful lot of preparation and time.
12:59
David Rodnitzky
Yeah. Would you send it out to 50 to 75 people, or would you consider maybe ten or 15 of the highest prospects? Obviously, you never know who is going to be the winning bidder, but it sounds like when you send out to that many people, there's a lot of repetitive work involved. Kissing a lot of frogs, as they say.
13:21
Brian Bowman
Yeah. The answer really boiled down to timeframe. We knew that Apple had said that the IDFA removal date had been set for sometime in September, so were backing up from that to try and peak interest. So there was, in essence, a ticking time bomb around us that we had to get a response from potential interested parties, which made us go broader than we wanted to originally.
13:50
David Rodnitzky
Got it. Okay, you sent out the 75 teasers. It sounds like you had at least 25 conversations, which is a good hit rate, and then you got down to some finalists and what was it like at the end? When at the end of the initial process, where you had maybe three or five companies that were interested, how did you navigate that? How did you end up making a choice as to a winner?
14:19
Brian Bowman
It's never as clean as I would have liked. There were definitely pros and cons of each deal and each offer and we did our best. Some included stock, some of those companies were private, so the stock wasn't liquid. Other companies were higher on cash, others were higher on earn out. So it really is a bit of soup and you have to guess which components you're going to like the best. There's also the fundamentals there, which is how do our clients align or compete with each other? Meaning an agency is acquiring in an agency, are we in a similar market or a different market? Is it accretive or is it an expansion? Those things also came into account where were trying to understand how much I hate the word synergy, but easy upsells and cross sells of our services to their clients and vice versa. There was so there was some reverse analysis of their existing businesses, how stable they were, their growth rates, their client base.
15:25
Brian Bowman
So it really was not simple. It boiled down to our best guess on who the most appropriate acquirer was.
15:35
David Rodnitzky
Yeah, that makes sense. Not all deals are equal. It's not an apples to apples comparison, basically for many reasons. So eventually you assume you signed an LOI with the winning party, and I believe that was Brain Labs.
15:50
Brian Bowman
That's correct, yes.
15:51
David Rodnitzky
After the LOI was signed, then you get to the fund of having the lawyers come in and do a lot of the contract negotiation. Was there anything about the contract negotiation that surprised you or that you think is particularly important that founders should know about?
16:07
Brian Bowman
Yeah, it's a complete ass whipping. I think the document itself ended up being a few hundred pages and some of it is boilerplate that neither side really touched or the lawyers would argue over a bit. A lot of those hundreds of pages were really important and were iterated on constantly. Brain Labs was in the UK, were in San Francisco, so we would submit something to them, they would iterate on it and get it back to us the next day or a couple of days later. It was an enormous amount of reading back and forth and the subtleties and the detailed level of the explanations sometimes were complex and required hours of phone calls to get through. So there was nothing simple about the process. But by the time we got to the purchase agreement, you're in essence, were on the 1 YD line and it took an enormous amount of focus and energy to push that to the place of getting done.
17:16
Brian Bowman
And the good news, obviously, was both sides wanted to get it done. We were towards the end of the year, so there was some added motivation of getting it completed before the calendar year closed. But it was an awful lot of work.
17:30
David Rodnitzky
When you think about the expenses of a transaction, we mentioned the investment banker. You mentioned the accountant getting a quality of earnings report, probably, or something like that. And then we have the law firm. I guess I sometimes feel that people don't value the law firm as much, or they look at the expense of the law firm and they think, man, that cost me a lot of money. And I think that part of it is that investment bankers, it feels like they're making you money, but lawyers, it sometimes feels like it's costing them you money. I'm just curious to know what you would say about the importance of your law firm and whether you thought it was a worthwhile expenditure.
18:09
Brian Bowman
We ended up hiring Orick and they're obviously expensive. It was a few hundred thousand dollars in fees, and absolutely, positively worth it. You're not paying them for what goes well. You're paying them for how much they've thought about the potentials of what can go wrong and what they do in those edge cases. And as I'll share in a bit, some things did go wrong. And if it wasn't for careful positioning and extra time that went into the purchase agreement and the way things were defined, it wouldn't have turned out as equitably as it did. And it's not my area of expertise. I'm not a lawyer by training. There's no way I could have foreseen the issues or proposed solutions to them at the level that these guys did. They were absolute rock stars. They worked their ass off. They would work 18 hours, days, nights, weekends, holidays.
19:20
Brian Bowman
It didn't matter. They omni cranked through issues to meet the aggressive deadlines we had thrown at them.
19:29
David Rodnitzky
I think one of the things that I think is also unappreciated about lawyers in M&A deals is they almost act as litigators. They're almost in court trying to argue a point. And in some respects, they play the bad cop. And you can play dumb and say.
19:44
Brian Bowman
I'm not a lawyer.
19:45
David Rodnitzky
I don't know.
19:45
David Rodnitzky
This is something the lawyers, it's important to them, and they fight for you on tough points because they know that after the deal is done, you have to work with the people that you did the deal with, and they're okay being the bad cop. So I think that's another thing that people don't understand about the value of the M&A attorney.
20:03
Brian Bowman
Yeah. That's I think, a good way of saying it, the bad way of saying it was it became unclear the extent to which things were just being argued to argue them, or whether they were dropped dead. We're going to walk away if this thing doesn't get changed. There's hundreds of issues to get through, and they're complex, and they cross reference each other, giving on a point that was simple, turned out to not be simple because of implications later in the document. But you want to end up in a place which is both sides are mutually dissatisfied but not angry at each other so that it feels you've reached a difficult common ground. And that's where I felt were at the end, which was tired, but both sides felt it was fair in going through the process or equally unfair, whichever way you want to look at it, I guess.
20:56
David Rodnitzky
One other question I want to ask before we talk about some of the things that maybe didn't go as according to plan. How did you deal with this is a compound question which a lawyer will say you should never ask, but how did you deal with team members insofar as did you share information with them about the sale? And then secondly, to what degree do you feel like you were distracted during the process and how did that impact the company?
21:20
Brian Bowman
Compound question yeah, there was a member of the team that had enough equity that I needed to loop them in to the conversation, which I did, and that individual was critical anyway into filling out the due diligence questions would have required his participation. There was another member of the team in the human resources area that was required because of all of the personal information that needed to be shared. Other than that, I tried to limit the team's involvement because of the likelihood of failure was high and I didn't want to distract them from hitting the numbers. It wasn't as if the business had gotten easier or less difficult. Given the changes at Facebook, given the changes at Apple, there were significant headwinds that were working through and we needed to make sure that the team was focused at the point at which we felt it was going to come through.
22:21
Brian Bowman
For me, that was nearing the end of the purchase agreement negotiations. That's when I looped the entire team into the process, explained the time frame, and then went through the pros and cons if it happened or if it fell apart. Sorry, what was the second part of.
22:38
David Rodnitzky
The second part was to what degree was this a distraction to you running the business?
22:45
Brian Bowman
Yeah, it absolutely was a distraction in running the business. My advice to someone going through or considering to go through the process is if you can either bring in somebody in corp dev or an external consultant to help run the process so you can offload as much of it as possible because it's an exhaustive and massive amount of information being both compiled. So you got to find it, then you got to distill it into a way that makes sense and you want to put your best foot forward. It has to be accurate and truthful, but you want to make sure that you're presenting it in the right light. So it takes a lot of work. It was a huge distraction.
23:30
David Rodnitzky
Yeah. And I think that even if you have a corp dev person, I think it's inevitable that you're going to deal with distraction. Okay, you alluded to this earlier, but you talked about how you never know what's going to happen and not everything goes right. And so I know the answer to this question. I don't know where I'm going with this. I know the answer to this question, but what was life like post sale? And talk about some of the things that didn't go according to plan.
24:02
Brian Bowman
I'm going to give you a little bit before that, which was given the deep focus I had on the business and the process was very complicated. I had very little time for anything else in my life. And I found myself struggling in my marriage and needing marriage counseling. And so my wife and I went to therapy. And I kept explaining to therapist, I am not at a place where I can slow down my focus on work. I can't. I love my wife. I want to stay married. We've been married for 19 years. But I need help speeding up. I need help pushing this thing across the finish line so then I could focus onto work life balance and being healthy. And there were a couple of books that I have given to David. One of them is Max Out Your Life and the other is Winning by Tim Grover.
25:00
Brian Bowman
And he was the personal life coach to Michael Jordan. And what I found fascinating about reading the books at a time when I was working 20 hours a day for weeks, I was just physically and completely exhausted. Was the unbelievable focus that it took for a Kobe Bryant or a Michael Jordan or these elite performers day after day, week after week, regardless of whether they were exhausted. And I found some, in my opinion, some kindred souls, other people that were pushing to extremes in an effort to get to an outcome that they were looking for. And in all of those cases, they paid a personal price in doing it. Which leads me to my next part, which is what didn't go well. Ironically, the last month of that sales process was also a critical month in the business. Apple had rolled out compression on IDFA, which meant all of our clients started to suffer, though it wasn't broadcast very strongly in the ecosystem.
26:12
Brian Bowman
So they staggered the launch out, but it was clear all clients were feeling the pain. It was Q4 of 2021. So it was the end of the calendar year, and I literally was sleeping three or 4 hours a night. I ended up getting pretty sick and I thought it was pneumonia, but I was just going to push through. So the deal closed on December 15, 2021. And the very next day I found myself in the Er. And what I thought was pneumonia wasn't. It was pneumonia and heart failure. I had my mitral valve scaffolding collapse, and I ended up undergoing emergency open heart surgery. And if you can imagine, I went from signing a deal and feeling this exuberance to literally sitting on the surgery table thinking, man, I didn't even have a beer. Like, this just rolled from one crazy thing into the next, and I was just fully committed to making sure that I maximized the earn out value for our team.
27:24
Brian Bowman
And I went back to work five days after surgery, and I was putting in about 25 hours a week, and eventually I worked my way up to about 40 hours a week later that year. I ended up surrendering. In essence, I needed to focus on my health and my marriage and my kids, and I retired. So I retired in September 2022 after cranking on that business as hard as I could.
27:52
David Rodnitzky
That's an amazing story. So working those crazy 20 hours days, did your doctor say that was, like, directly the cause of this health emergency?
28:04
Brian Bowman
No, unrelated.
28:06
David Rodnitzky
Okay.
28:06
Brian Bowman
I'm sure I could have done more to take care of my health. It was something I was born with, was mitral valve prolapse. It just happened to all happen at the same time. Right. It collapsed simultaneously with being in this process, and I thought I was just exhausted from not sleeping. I had no idea the extent to which I was literally on a razor's edge, pushing my body to the physical limits.
28:33
David Rodnitzky
Wow. I'm sure that Brain Labs was as accommodating as they could be in this situation. Did the contract also help? Was there anything in the contract that sort of supported your ability to take time off for this reason?
28:51
Brian Bowman
Of course. Yeah. There's provisions called good leaver and bad leaver. Did you leave the business and had accomplished your goals, therefore, you are a good leaver. Meaning I've left the business on good terms, and then there's a bad leaver, and bad can mean I'm convicted of a crime or health issues, and there's a bunch of nuance in both of those definitions. Way before that was just the humanity of, I can't believe what happened. How can we help you? Their executive team parachuted in and really embraced the business. Embraced our team, took a tremendous amount of work off of my shoulders and helped us to thrive in a period of time where I physically wasn't able to do that.
29:40
David Rodnitzky
That's a great testament to their company culture. That's impressive. So you eventually left. It sounds like you worked hard to hit the numbers, and now you left, and now you're retired. Is that your official status still?
29:57
Brian Bowman
As of today, yes.
29:58
David Rodnitzky
Okay. Was it hard to leave? Was it hard to retire?
30:06
Brian Bowman
Of course, yeah. This is in every way, it's like a baby. I built this. I put in an enormous amount of personal focus and effort, and it was my primary thing that I was spending time with. So having turned that over to a much larger company, I felt good about I felt great that the team, my executive team and key members of the team were well taken care of. That all felt good. It's never easy to let go of something, but on a personal side, I took a year and a half off back in 2000, and I traveled around the world and I went through at that point the feeling of what it's like to go from an extremely intense environment to travel and relaxing. It took three or four months for me to get to the place where I was able to relax, and then I stayed there for a very long time.
31:06
Brian Bowman
So having gone through that one time, I knew I would be going through a similar process. This time it was actually much longer. It took a long time to understand what retirement means for me. I didn't want to jump into starting another business, which is hard because of all the generative AI and really cool things that are running around. And it reminds me so much of the web itself and then the transition to mobile. It's just utter chaos everywhere. And in that chaos is lots of opportunity. But I want to continue to take care of myself and I want to continue to take care of my health. And so I'm being very judicious about enjoying a brand new market versus jumping in and starting a business.
31:57
David Rodnitzky
I just say that you answered that question. You said, of course it was hard to leave. But I actually think a lot of founders don't think it's going to be hard. I think in their mind they have this idea of they leave and they buy a summer home in Hawaii and they're just on cloud nine. But I think for a lot of people, it is actually very hard to leave and to go from being the center of the ecosystem of your business or the industry and then having people johnny Carson said, three days after dying, fingernails and toenails stop growing and phone calls taper off. I think that's actually hard for a lot of people.
32:33
Brian Bowman
I think if you spend enough time with entrepreneurs and you try and wrestle some stock from them, either as an employee, as a consultant, as a board member, they really, truly believe that their stock holds tremendous value, whether it does or not. In some instances it does. But in the vast majority of cases, those companies will fail. You have to have that abstract belief that you're doing something important and unique to carry through the extreme, difficult times that it takes to build something that's successful. Rarely do you go into a firm and it takes off with exponential growth and you have tailwinds at your back the whole time. So it's that personal belief that you're doing something compelling that allows you to maintain. The high enough focus to be successful. Pulling back from that and handing that to somebody else is in many ways my daughter's about to go to college.
33:35
Brian Bowman
It feels a lot like that, like the loss of control of seeing her every day to she's an adult and I'll talk to her when I talk to her and it's a different relationship. It's unnerving.
33:48
David Rodnitzky
Yeah. I think in many cases it's a loss of purpose or you're selling your purpose for money, which is again, I think most founders find a way to find a lot of positives afterwards, but it sometimes can be challenging. If you could give one or two pieces of advice to a founder who's considering a sale today, what would that advice be?
34:17
Brian Bowman
It would be to sprint at it with all of your passion and focus and energy, because it's going to take that and then think of it like cloning yourself. You're going to need to be able to maintain the existing business or have a chief operating officer or someone who can competently run the business while you're focusing on trying to sell. It's an important kind of success to achieve unless you're curing cancer or setting up something that's uniquely helping other people. The purpose of business is to scale and to grow, and part of that growth is often through acquisition and being acquisitive or being acquired is hard. So I thoroughly enjoyed the process. I had a startup that failed and I had a startup that was successful. I would take this successful one all day long, though. The one that failed I learned an awful lot from.
35:18
David Rodnitzky
Yeah, Brian, this is great. Just tons of good information and amazing anecdotes. I congratulate you on the sale and the retirement and thank you again for talking to us today.
35:30
Brian Bowman
My pleasure. I appreciate the opportunity and hope this is helpful.
35:35
David Rodnitzky
Thanks for listening to the Agenticshift podcast. Make sure to check out our website, agenticshift.com, where you can access exclusive content. If you are considering a sale of your marketing agency, contact us at info@agenticshift.com.