Why the Twelve Best Clients You Will Ever Have Live Within Forty Minutes of Your House and Have Never Heard Your Name A firm can publish at a rate that would embarrass a small newsroom, build an audience measured in tens of thousands, and still be a complete unknown to the twelve best-fit buyers within…
And what Really Happens After Somebody Buys Your Agency, Your Newspaper, or Your Doctor Everybody remembers Don Draper. He gets the pitch, the carousel, the cheekbones. Watch Mad Men a second time – and if you work in marketing, you will – and the character quietly right about almost everything is the old man in…
The client. A three-person, founder-led software company in a regulated professional-services niche. Bootstrapped, technically excellent, and quietly better than anything else in its category. The founder was licensed in the very profession he sold to – rare, credible, and worth a great deal – and he ran a second business in that same profession while…
A Q&A on passing an acquirer’s inspection before anybody schedules one. Run the business so it could survive due diligence, and you will own a better business whether or not a buyer ever knocks. Published by 1000Startups.com | Updated August 2026 | Reading time: about nine minutes Most owners think of a sale as an…
Published by 1000Startups.com. Reading time: about seven minutes. Cost of acting on it: ten phone calls. The reason field in your CRM says “price.” The reason in your CRM is almost never price. It is simply the kindest thing one human being can say to another human being’s face after deciding not to buy from…
A data-backed Q&A from 1000Startups.com on why only 30% of family businesses survive the handoff – and what actually fixes it Q: Why do most family businesses fail to survive the founder’s exit? Because the odds are worse than most owners think. Only 30% of family-owned U.S. businesses survive the handoff from the first generation…
Your deal is not dying in the pitch. It is dying six weeks later, in a spreadsheet, opened by somebody in Legal whose name you never learned. 1. The kill happens after the win. Gartner puts the share of a B2B purchase journey spent with all potential suppliers combined at roughly 17%, and about 5%…