Sourching small agency deals

searcher profile

April 15, 2022

by a searcher from Northwestern University - Kellogg School of Management in Chicago, IL, USA

I’m kicking off a self-funded search to buy a small digital service business. I’m looking for marketing agencies doing ~$1mm in revenue. My goal is to extract the founder and grow it by cross-selling from my current business’ client base.

Are there any good deal sources for this kind of small marketing agencies? Or should I just plan on doing a lot of cold-calling to catch a founder at the right time?

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Reply by a searcher
from Harvard University in San Juan, Puerto Rico
Most agencies never reach $1 million in revenue, so if you're going to do cold outreach may just want to tune to see how to minimize the amount of unqualified leads you're reaching out to.

WeAreBarney is a broker that specializes in marketing agencies, so you'll want to keep an eye out on their listings. Another great source are the agency accelerators and masterminds. There's a bunch of those around. From my limited experience, almost every agency owner I've seen gets burned out after a few years, so finding willing sellers shouldn't be too much of a problem once you plug into some deal flow.

I bought a smaller digital marketing agency doing 6 figures, happy to chat and share my thoughts if you would find it helpful.
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Reply by a searcher
from California State University, Long Beach in Huntington Beach, CA, USA
Hello Walid and Karl, I'm actually looking for the same, digital marketing agency.
If those contacts don't work out for Karl, I'd be interested in working something out with you Walid.

Please email me if we can this is something we can collaborate redacted
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