Five years after my co-founder and I launched our A.I. marketing firm, Retention Science, we made the Inc. 5000 for the first time, in 2018, and offers began rolling in to purchase our business. We weren’t ready to sell-more and more brands were turning to us to develop and deploy marketing insights from big dives into their sales data-but it was clear even more offers would be coming our way. A few months after we made the Inc. 5000 for a second time, in 2019, we started discussing an offer in earnest, from Constant Contact, in January 2020.
Of course, the world closed down around us months later as the pandemic raged, complicating the sale and giving our buyer a temporary case of cold feet.
At the time, something I heard often from bankers was that companies aren’t sold, they’re bought. Meaning, when you sell
