Peter Lang is a seasoned entrepreneur and M&A strategist who helps agencies and digital businesses grow through smart acquisitions and integration. He co-founded Uhuru Network in 2010, building it into a seven-figure digital sales and inbound marketing agency before exiting in December 2022. Peter is now Founder of Digital Agency Business, Owner of Digital Mastermind Group, and a board member at Lang Acquisitions, where he supports leaders and portfolio companies in driving growth through strategic M&A and collaboration.
Here’s a Glimpse of What You’ll Hear:
- [2:55] Peter Lang reflects on growing up between a liberal Marin County family and a conservative Central Valley family
- [7:20] How Peter’s passion for technology led to the creation of a Facebook tips blog
- [12:02] The challenges and successes of building Uhuru Network
- [14:43] How an eight-month honeymoon sabbatical sparked the idea to grow through M&A
- [18:04] The seven-day deal that doubled his agency’s revenue and capabilities
- [19:57] The impact of COVID-19 on Peter’s business
- [23:10] What is programmatic M&A?
- [27:40] How Peter uses the VC model of M&A to attract sellers
- [32:15] Can small agency owners succeed with M&A without a massive growth vision?
- [35:26] Peter shares his integration strategies, including the 30% employee count
In this episode…
Many agency owners struggle to break past growth plateaus using only organic methods. While expanding client rosters and service offerings can help, these paths are often slow, unpredictable, and resource-heavy. Could acquiring other agencies be a faster and more strategic way to expand capabilities, increase revenue, and build long-term value?
Peter Lang, an experienced entrepreneur and M&A strategist, explains how intentional acquisitions can unlock rapid growth and solve operational challenges. Peter shares how to identify opportunities, align a seller’s motivations with your vision, and integrate teams without losing cultural balance. He also emphasizes the importance of having a clear long-term objective, building deal flow systems, and treating integration as a professional discipline to maximize the value of each transaction.
Tune in to this episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast as John Corcoran interviews Peter Lang, Founder of Digital Agency Business and Owner of Digital Mastermind Group, about using M&A to grow agencies. Peter discusses sourcing and closing deals, creating a compelling vision for sellers, and best practices for integration. He also talks about cultural fit in acquisitions, avoiding common M&A pitfalls, and his journey from agency founder to advisor and dealmaker.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- John Corcoran on LinkedIn
- Rise25
- Peter Lang on LinkedIn
- Digital Agency Business
- Uhuru Network
- GrowthHackers
- Digital Mastermind Group
Quotable Moments:
- “You never sell something unless you’re done with it; so the vision you present has to be bigger.”
- “Integration is baptizing people into a new way of doing things, not just combining systems.”
- “Most deals fail because the numbers work, but the narrative doesn’t.”
- “If you want to be a casual athlete, don’t set Olympic expectations for your business.”
- “M&A solves all business problems; it also creates them, so plan accordingly.”
Action Steps:
- Develop a compelling vision for acquisitions: Sellers need to see how joining you benefits their future. A strong narrative can turn reluctant owners into eager partners.
- Start small with acquisitions: Follow the “30% employee count” rule to minimize cultural disruption during your first deals.
- Use outbound and inbound pipelines: Build a dedicated team to source acquisition opportunities, leveraging your agency’s marketing skills for outreach.
- Document and prioritize integration: Create detailed 30, 60, and 90-day onboarding plans to standardize the process and reduce post-deal friction.
- View M&A as a problem-solving tool: Identify operational bottlenecks and consider whether acquiring another business could be the fastest way to address them.
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Episode Transcript
John Corcoran: 00:00
All right. Today we’re talking about how to move from running an agency into actually leveraging M&A that is acquiring other companies to grow your agency. My guest today is Peter Lang. I’ll tell you more about him in a second. So stay tuned.
Intro: 00:16
Welcome to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast, where we feature top entrepreneurs, business leaders and thought leaders and ask them how they built key relationships to get where they are today. Now let’s get started with the show.
John Corcoran: 00:32
All right. Welcome, everyone. John Corcoran here. I’m the host of this show. And you, every week we have smart CEOs, founders and entrepreneurs from all kinds of companies.
And if you check out the archives, we’ve got Netflix and Grubhub, Redfin, Gusto, Kinko’s, YPO, EO, Activision Blizzard, lots of great episodes for you to check out. And of course, before we get into this, this episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25, we help businesses to give to and connect with their dream relationships and partnerships. How do we do that? We do that by helping you to run your podcast.
We are the easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast. We do three things: strategy, accountability, and full execution. In fact, we actually invented what some are calling the Wix of B2B podcasting. It’s our platform Podcast Co-Pilot. And you know, Peter, one of the gifts of my life has been being able to take people like you, who I may meet once, and then being able to bring them on the show and hear their story and share with others the interesting work that they are doing.
So you have a fascinating background, having built your agency and then leveraged M&A. And so we’re going to be sharing that here today. But if anyone wants to learn more about what we do at Rise25 and learn about Podcast Copilot, go to Rise25.com and email us at [email protected]. All right.
My guest here today is Peter Lang. He’s the Founder of digital agency business and Partner at Digital Mastermind Group. He began his career after graduating from business school and established. Sorry, I’m going to butcher it. Uhuru Network is a digital marketing agency that grew to seven figure revenues.
And then he later figured out that M&A, mergers and acquisitions, acquiring other agencies was really the path to accelerating growth. And so he got really deep into that. And now he’s done his own acquisitions, runs a portfolio of different agency companies. And so we’re going to be talking about that and some of the pitfalls and things you want to look out for. And you know Peter, it’s such a pleasure to have you here today.
And I always ask my guests about what they were like as a kid and what the context in which they grew up, grew up around. Some people grew up in entrepreneurial families. And you did you get the hippie side of the family, which is from Marin County, where I live. And then you had the ag side of the family, the Central Valley of California, the big ag area, more conservative than the more liberal coastal parts of California. And so you had those two extremes in your family that you grew up around and also a family business. So tell us a little bit about how that shaped you and who you are today.
Peter Lang: 02:55
Well, very fortunate, John, to tell the story. So I appreciate you for hosting me. Yeah. I’m bipolar. Yeah, that’s what that means. So when you grow up with a Marin liberal family and a conservative Republican family.
John Corcoran: 03:08
Then Thanksgiving dinners must be a blast. Yeah.
Peter Lang: 03:11
You have to be in Switzerland to survive. Yeah. I give a lot of credit to my parents for giving me the leeway to spend time with both sides. We ran a family business. My parents still have the business today.
That’s 40 plus years in operation. And that means, like many kids that grow up in the family business, you’re working, you’re you’re helping, whatever that may be. That could be cleaning the office, that could be running errands, that could be, you know, paging dad. That’s how long ago this was going to tell him something that was material about a client that he was about to go see. And my parents were also accidental entrepreneurs, which kind of feeds into my story. And they were theater majors, so they were this blend of.
John Corcoran: 03:57
Not a business background. That’s the kind of the opposite.
Peter Lang: 04:00
Basically, we decide to never learn the thing we want to be paid for. They crossed their fingers and said, well, business school would be good for him. And thankfully that aligned us. And the first signal to that was when I grew up, I wanted to be the kingpin. I’m not allowed to tell the story very much, but the whole Spider-Man villain, which is now becoming more familiar with all the things Netflix is doing.
But the school counselor called my mom when they were saying, what do you want to be when you grow up? And I said, kingpin from the Spider-Man comics. And instead of freaking out and thinking I wanted to be some, like, evil crime lord, she goes, oh, that must be the business side kicking in, because this is what we’re growing up in. It’s all in your life and your profession all in one. So that kind of led to who I am today. I did the business school route out. And yeah, thankfully I became an entrepreneur and quite by accident actually.
John Corcoran: 05:01
What did you learn from seeing your parents run the business that you take to what you do today? Is it caring for the clients? Is it getting, you know, involved? Is it delegation? You know, good and bad?
What are some of the good and bad lessons that you learned from seeing that? Because a lot of people a lot of times, frankly, it’s negative. A lot of people that I interview on this show grow up around a family business, and then they’re like, I don’t want to have any part of that. And then they eventually find their way back to it, and then they deliberately do it in a different way than their parents did.
Peter Lang: 05:32
Well, I didn’t want to do the family business, so that was a disappointment for them for sure. But definitely the lessons. I remember sitting in the office waiting for my parents to wrap up and, you know, my dad was out running the errands and working directly with clients. My mom was answering phones, and my mom would have long conversations with clients who had been with them for ten, 15, 20 years. And they’d be talking about all these things that weren’t work, just kind of this care for the client beyond just the work that you’re providing.
And that, I mean, that has a significant impact on me. It was, you know, at the end of the day, you work for the people who you serve. And I mean, now it’s called servant mind set. It’s, you know, service at its core. But at a young age, it’s just like, oh, all these people help take care of us. So we take care of them. And then at the end of the day, my dad. There’s no job. He wouldn’t, you know, do that. He would ask someone else to do that.
I mean, it’s constant professional, and there was no ego in that. You just do the job and get it done to the maximum capability that you have. And so that carried through to kind of like the way I see business and the way I go about life.
John Corcoran: 06:45
Yeah. So you end up going to business school, unlike your thespian parents, and you end up this is the heyday of blogging, I would say. I think that this is time. The best time. I mean, like, now no one starts a blog. But back then everyone was starting a blog. I started.
Peter Lang: 07:04
Blogger.
John Corcoran: 07:05
Yeah, yeah, I mean, this show started as a blog. And so you built up a blog to a million monthly visitors and that’s insane. So talk a little bit about how you got into that and how you ended up building such a big following.
Peter Lang: 07:20
Well, business school is interesting. And I did have a passion for, you know, understanding what it would mean for me financially and for my future, for sure. But I was a nerd. I built my first computer when I was ten, thanks to my uncle, who kind of brought the pieces and parts and said, let’s build a PC. And I was very curious about technology growing up.
And that meant, hey, building websites. That meant doing all this stuff as a hobby. No one was paying me to do it, and I built my own kind of blog, and I was seeing all the people who were talking about blogging and doing it, and I was, again, university Able to do it, able to build.
John Corcoran: 07:53
It was mid 2000. I’ll bet it’s even pre WordPress, right? Were you using something else?
Peter Lang: 07:58
WordPress came out. WordPress was three years in when I launched. Okay, so 2006 timeframe. It was a bear.
John Corcoran: 08:04
Yeah, because I think 2003 is when WordPress was launched.
Peter Lang: 08:08
Yeah, WordPress came on the scene. It was like a godsend of technology.
John Corcoran: 08:11
Oh, yeah.
Peter Lang: 08:12
To make everything so much easier. Yeah. And we created a blog and this was a counterpart of mine who I studied abroad with in Paris. It’s called Facebook and Italian Tricks. Facebook in English.
Trust me. A cease and desist order from Facebook came through after we started generating traffic, and it was about how to use Facebook and have fun with it. Personal branding, but also just tips and tricks. So people were googling things about how to use Facebook. They found us.
Okay. And so we’re kind of piggybacking off of that. The early days of Facebook, this was before ad platforms. So it was just like you wanted to do something that was kind of a trick or something you saw online that someone else did. You Google it and you found us, and it was kind of the how to days.
And people just started saying things like. How are you generating AdSense? You know, revenue from this and income, how are you generating this traffic? Which was essentially SEO, content marketing. And I said, we explained it well, could you just do it for us?
And that became kind of the accidental opportunity to build a company, which was, hey, I was doing it. Can I just do it for someone else as a service? Can I teach them? And that’s how we started an agency.
John Corcoran: 09:18
And you mentioned you got a cease and desist from Facebook. What was that moment like when you got that first cease and desist, either in the mail or email? Did your heart sink? You know, what was that moment like?
Peter Lang: 09:34
We could probably get away with ignoring it. It was the first thought, but we wondered how many of these it takes? So because I couldn’t track, I mean, we’re young kids just building this and and we had this different flavor and we weren’t doing anything malicious, and we weren’t teaching people to do things that were wrong. So we’re like, we’re on the right. They just didn’t like the fact that we had Facebook in the domain.
John Corcoran: 09:55
In the domain? Yeah.
Peter Lang: 09:56
Yeah. They didn’t mind the content. There’s plenty of people talking about similar things. Right. But the fact that we had Facebook in the domain, they didn’t enjoy that very much.
Yeah, we knew that our time in this business and kind of business, this time in this little blurb of making money and this, this website would be short. That’s the first thing we’re like, okay, well, this is fun, but this is not going to last. And again, we didn’t think of starting an agency. We didn’t come from agency worlds. I was going into business.
I was going into corporate finance. I was international business, corporate finance as a major, as a specificity, as a future. For myself. I was thinking M&A, I was thinking finance, but it was 2010 and we just came off 2008 and I was learning technical analysis when the whole market was just going down. And it was just like, okay, maybe it’s not the best time to try my hand in finance. Yeah. And people were offering to pay me to help them do the web thing.
John Corcoran: 10:49
So did you also get hit by one of these big Google updates, like a Panda or something like that? A lot of websites were affected in different time periods.
Peter Lang: 10:58
So we ranked really well because we created great content that solved the searchers problems. That’s it. So we didn’t have sophisticated backlinking and all that kind of gray hat type of tactics that had, you know, penalties applied to them. We just created good content. The general ethos is to provide value upfront with no obligation.
If you can do that consistently over time, you can generate traffic, you can generate value. So we did that. We never had really anything that disrupted traffic. We just grew as people. And then, you know, the opportunity to make money through an agency became, you know, high, high profit, fun service. We got better professionally. And you start hiring people and guess what? You grow up a bit from running a business from your computer.
John Corcoran: 11:42
So you switched to you . It sounds like maybe a gradual thing, but you switched your efforts to growing the Uhuru Network, which looks like it was maybe 12 years or so before we get to the phase where you started acquiring companies. What were some of the early days challenges of building that agency that you struggled with?
Peter Lang: 12:02
I mean, it’s a 0 to 1 problem. If you start a business that you’ve never worked in before, you spend a lot of time reinventing the wheel. And some of that’s really helpful from professional development, like getting better and getting denied. I remember the first time we sold A5K retainers and like I was like, they’re paying us 5000 a month for services to do social media marketing. And in the early days, it was just exciting.
Everything about the initial effort was exciting because we didn’t know what we didn’t know, but we also paid for advice. So we worked with thought leaders in the space who had done it before to just kind of lease or, you know, buy their knowledge to kind of compress time. I think one of the advantages I’ve had is I’ve failed way more than most in a short amount of time, and therefore I’ve had a lot of advancement and capability because also I was able to then bring in someone to help me fix or resolve it faster. And that goes from like Chet Holmes and the ultimate sales machine before he passed. Then also, you know, working with people from the agency, thought leadership space about what is the agency business, working with technology partners who support it, learn how these revenue models typically work.
Service models work, and it’s just fun. It’s just a pure fun lifestyle business. I was very fortunate to have my girlfriend and my wife in the future to be a business partner in that company. And, you know, we just wrote our own story and she became.
John Corcoran: 13:33
My business partner. Before you started dating, after you started dating, when.
Peter Lang: 13:38
We met in university, and then she was managing a marketing team as an intern. And then they gave her, like, the chief marketing role or director marketing role, and she had a team, and then the chairman of the board fired her aggressively because I decided to use my startup, Uhuru Network. The corporate address was her house.
John Corcoran: 13:58
So they fired her.
Peter Lang: 14:00
Because it looked like he had beef. And so he, in a very embarrassing way, terminated her. And I just like here’s a, here’s here’s a company. Come join me.
John Corcoran: 14:09
Yeah. They’re early days.
Peter Lang: 14:12
Yeah. It was fun but like emotionally turmoil time and. Yeah. But we got married in 2017 and then thankfully got the business to a point to where in 2018 we were able to step away. The business operated and grew without us. That’s at eight. We took an eight month sabbatical.
John Corcoran: 14:27
Yeah, I saw that. Tell me about that. How did you manage to travel for eight months and what was your involvement during that time period? Did you have them send in certain KPIs to you so you could oversee it, or did you just literally unplug and check back in eight months later and hope for the best?
Peter Lang: 14:44
I mean, it was probably a combination of reading, four Hour workweek and vagabonding. So Ralph Potts and I were like Tim Ferriss and Ralph Potts, okay. One was adventure and discovery of the world, and the other one is okay. How much time can you do? Do you really need to do certain things in the business?
And so we got it down to like the text message update level to where as long as we knew the primary numbers that were operating in the business, we knew it was going along fine. And again, we were already so many years in by the time we got married and took our honeymoon sabbatical.
John Corcoran: 15:14
Like eight years in eight, nine years in at that point.
Peter Lang: 15:17
We were very comfortable and confident with what we had built. And also it did help Vanessa, although she was the president of the agency, had a fashion blog. It was also the heyday of fashion blogging, and she had a million monthly visitors. So like she went above a million and did some crazy things in that space. So we were very comfortable with that lifestyle business we had built.
And that’s when our mindset shift really hit. We were traveling, we were in the Peloponnese and we were spending a month in Greece visiting friends, family, friends who kind of said, come down here, there’s no Americans down here. And I met a Emakina McKinsey consultant. So a McKinsey consultant worked with Emakina, which is a global group that was consolidating agencies through M&A and expanding and publicly listed. And he probably had too much octopus and ouzo at 11 p.m. at night.
And he was sharing all this interesting stuff about what they were doing for digital transformation. They were using Scrum and Agile, which we had a Scrum and Agile agency, and they were then having all this arbitrage of efficiency because they were leveraging their systems on everything that they acquired. And we’re like, oh, that’s smart. Got the edge, got the itch.
John Corcoran: 16:24
You got the itch to do that. So that was. So you were eight months. So you’re eight months in before. Had you not done an acquisition at that point?
Peter Lang: 16:31
We had done small little deals like aqua hiring, but nothing that we would deem like M&A. Okay. We came back this November 2018. We’re in Montreal, we did the Montreal Half Marathon and we said, okay, we’re going to go do M&A. And we came back to a mutiny like it’s been fine without you all. You’re coming back with all this growth and you’re going to do these things.
John Corcoran: 16:54
You come back with this idea, we’re.
Peter Lang: 16:55
Going to acquire.
John Corcoran: 16:56
Companies and we’re.
Peter Lang: 16:57
Going to go crazy and start.
Peter Lang: 17:01
The team is like, what? No we’re not. Where have you been?
John Corcoran: 17:02
Yeah.
Peter Lang: 17:03
What have you done for me lately? Kind of mentality. And so we ran a change management program for a year. That’s code for putting different butts in the seat. Okay.
We did an acquisition. This was an acqui hire team of a Serbian outbound team that we did that summer. That was like the first flavor. Kind of easy, like a lift seller finance type deal. And then one of my mentors, who’s the accountant that supported the agency.
He knew I was acquisitive and he was also servicing another agency based in Southern California, Ventura more specifically. And al said, hey, the owner committed suicide. The business has reverted to the 82 year old parents. They’re the same size as you. So you know, we’re about 3,000,000in revenue, so nothing massive, but, you know, decent size for a lifestyle business and pulling out good profits because you could double like if you were to swoop on this and you were willing and potentially.
John Corcoran: 18:02
They did similar things. Types of things as an agency.
Peter Lang: 18:04
They were different enough. They were different enough. That would give us expanded services, but they had some team resources that we didn’t have in the creative department, so they definitely fortified us in some capacity, and gave us a little bit more longevity. The brand had been around for 39 years. The guy that was running it bought it from the original founder, and it was just like, if you don’t move on this, clients are gone, team’s gone.
It’s pretty heavy. So it was a Thursday when he called me. He said the next day I got introduced to the parents and it got introduced to the operator, made an offer, closed seven days later.
John Corcoran: 18:41
Wow. Jeez.
Peter Lang: 18:42
So in seven days, I doubled the agency.
John Corcoran: 18:45
Wow. That should be the title of your book, by the way.
Peter Lang: 18:48
Well, I mean.
John Corcoran: 18:49
How to double your agency in seven days. Moment.
Peter Lang: 18:52
And al and al was like. Like, I believe you can make this happen. And I thought, why do I spend my time doing anything else? Like all of the organic, all of the sales expansion, all the things that I was doing as CEO, working in the business, why don’t I work on it from things that don’t exist that are outside of the business? And so I did another deal in November.
This was a content marketing agency focused on healthcare. And then all passed and his wife, Robin, was our HR side of the business. And that was a little bit that was a shocker for us. But I kind of cheered me on and said, you could continue to do this. Al believed in you. I did a terrible deal in February of 2020. Circumstances should tell you why. You know Covid hit right after, and then I held a town hall.
John Corcoran: 19:41
So it probably was the February 2021 expectations.
Peter Lang: 19:45
For financial performance. And then a month later, everything froze on that business.
John Corcoran: 19:49
So now a lot of agencies grew after Covid. Not initially like a lot of agencies went down and then went up. So what happened there?
Peter Lang: 19:58
It was too small. So the way to think about it, even though it was an e-com conversion rate optimization agency, the owner’s personal situation was completely disrupted because of Covid. And so I call it a bad deal, but it wasn’t because it was a bad business. And that’s true of a lot of deals. Deals are wrapped in narratives of the owners, not always in the business.
Got it. And so I showed up to the town hall. This was 2020. I did the presentation of, you know, response to turbulence time. And I said that the number one response we can do is scale and grow.
And within 90 days, I did three acquisitions fully remote through zoom. And that’s because I spent 80% of my time talking on zoom, letting my beard grow, talking to agency owners and saying, what are you seeing here? Is it time to come together and do something bigger? And that’s kind of when people got to know me a little bit and said, wow, you’re doing so many deals. And that was at 3 to 4 marks, which McKinsey identified as like programmatic M&A.
I put in ahead of M&A, head of integration at a back office team that was administering it because we had so much deal flow and we took it really seriously. And I knew that was like, okay, we’re going to build this to scale. I’m going to put the pieces together, we’re going to integrate it, and then we’re going to exit.
John Corcoran: 21:10
And how are you finding the agencies to acquire, especially since you’re newer to this field?
Peter Lang: 21:18
Well, the great thing about being an agency owner, you know how to get in front of people. So I find it interesting that there’s a lot of agency owners that have transitioned to private equity, or at least business buying from a portfolio or holdco perspective. It’s really simple. We know how to get in front of opportunities. We know how to get it. We know how to position ourselves to the market digitally. Really. And so that I kind of gave you the secret. In 2019, I acquired that outbound agency. And I built.
John Corcoran: 21:44
That.
Peter Lang: 21:45
I had a whole business development team within the agency that had as a service. I took two people and just ran our outbound services for myself, as me going out and saying, hey, what’s going on with you? This is what’s going on with us. Have you thought about selling being part of something bigger? Do you want to? Are you open to having a chat?
John Corcoran: 22:03
Yeah.
Peter Lang: 22:04
And it’s amazing how like, if you’re just human and you empathize with people’s situation and you come from them, you look like them. You’re running a business similar to them. People are open to talk.
John Corcoran: 22:13
Yeah. So. So let me interject our personal experience with this because we did something super similar where you’re right, it wasn’t hard at all to get these conversations. And I had probably 50 different conversations. Now, we were in a very narrow part of the market because we’re B2B podcasting, which is just a very specific little niche.
Yeah. The challenge we ran into was company. You know, most of the people that do what we do are on the younger side of things, and we’re also looking to acquire smaller agencies. So it wasn’t life changing money. So it was a combination of a problem of they weren’t getting life changing money.
They were younger, so they didn’t want to retire and walk away. They weren’t burnt out on it really, and they didn’t know what they were going to do next. So that was one of the challenges that we ran into.
Peter Lang: 22:59
So it’s a common one.
John Corcoran: 23:00
Yeah. So for you then, were you targeting agencies where they’d been doing it for a certain period of time or looking to walk away or retire or anything like that or. No.
Peter Lang: 23:10
So I if targeting is a very give me a lot of credit with that. In the beginning it was pure shotgun. It was instead of having a thesis and then going out and testing that by getting feedback from outreach, let me go find out what other people want. And that was the advantage. You know, as a beginner, I didn’t come from investment banking, even though I learned M&A and I learned transactions and corporate finance.
That wasn’t what I did as a profession. So I went into it with a very simple idea, which is my job is to give you whatever it is that you want in a way that I can quantify a multiple of return. And if I can’t quantify multiple returns, then obviously I’m going to pass on the deal. And most deals have two structures. They have a narrative which is the story about the deal and the owner and the opportunity and the numbers.
And you can’t do a deal without having both, but you definitely can’t do a deal if the narrative isn’t there. And the deals that fall apart are because the numbers work, but the narrative doesn’t. And so what I found, and I was building a vision. I was building Uhuru as a very strong platform. I had a very clear value proposition.
I had an integration plan. I mean, we ran, I call it top tier sophistication in M&A because we obsess about M&A. I’ve been obsessed with M&A since I was a kid. And so we ran the process not like most casual people do. So most businesses that are attempting to do it don’t run an acquisition process.
They just kind of dabble at conversations, and each type of seller has a certain reason to sell or a reason to join something else. And you just have to have your vision aligned with that reason. And then you have to talk to enough people to find, you know, the amount of people who will do a deal with you for that reason. And it’s a lot different than trying to do a minimum viable deal thesis and then go specifically to the market to buy something.
John Corcoran: 25:05
So then did you eventually get to a place where you only wanted to acquire companies, where the seller had a particular vision of what they wanted, or were you flexible in terms of the seller?
Peter Lang: 25:17
Well, I mean, where I am now is very different from those days. So Uhuru was built under what we call pods or hives. And so I knew from purely expanding the business, I needed more teams in order for us to handle the volume of opportunities that this outbound engine was creating for us in our inbound engine. And I was just always hampered by, you know, I just need more people. I just need more people to do the work because we have the ability to close these deals.
So I was doing acquisitions from how do we expand our ability to service this amount of volume that we have on the front end. And so I needed small teams. So I looked at every acquisition that I was going after on that day, as I got a whole team, instead of trying to hire and then expand and then migrate people within the organization, and I got revenue and clients that come with that. So I was essentially just bolting on more hive teams to the business and expanding the revenue and expanding the capabilities or reinforcing those capabilities. Very simple narrative.
If you’re an agency owner with six people, you look like one of my small teams. It was really easy. I can put you in. I know the back office, I know the support. I know the arbitrage gain that I can give to you within the deal.
I know how to incentivize you to what we’re building. Very simple vision to articulate. And so that fits a certain temperament, you know, will that range between 20 to 45 years olds? Yes. Was it the, you know, silver tsunami, gray hairs who wanted to retire, folks?
No, that’s not who we’re going after. But I got to, you know, a really aggressive amount of deals we sold. And then we started Agency Ventures aggregator in 2022. Welcome to my first daughter. And that thesis changed M&A.
And over the last few years, I was just doing my own thing. Now I’ve been able to extend that reach and then narrow specific thesis or minimum viable deal thesis that work for different types of owners who are trying to scale through M&A, which is what I do now. And I still own assets, and I have a minority stake in businesses as well. But I also sit as a board advisor to three rollups. And those rollups are actively former students of mine, mentees who are implementing, you know, programmatic M&A. And, you know, I guide them through that process. So I just now have had enough reps. Got it.
John Corcoran: 27:35
So we’re helping guide them, not make the mistakes that I probably did. After 50 conversations. Let’s talk about integration actually.
Peter Lang: 27:42
Well, let me point out one thing. If you don’t mind if I turn this on you.
John Corcoran: 27:45
Yeah, I don’t mind being a guinea pig.
Peter Lang: 27:47
So it’s really interesting. So I acquired a business called Growth Hackers. And what I found when trying to, you know, fail to recruit a friend of mine as CEO for all of seven months of last year was the VC model of M&A. And people don’t know the VC model of M&A.
John Corcoran: 28:05
Explain what that is.
Peter Lang: 28:06
The VC model of M&A is instead of raising capital for my startup, my SaaS, I’m going to go buy a service business that, you know, supports the SaaS model to fortify EBITDA and profits. Basically, what SaaS companies try to do is add service after the fact. Or SaaS companies try to build software, do that through a transaction, then go raise my rounds of financing or funding so I don’t have to dilute as much ownership and use M&A as a way to start the venture. Which means if you’ve ever raised money before, you know, people go, okay, this is how we’re going to make $100 million in revenue business. And then here’s the proforma model that gets us there.
And that’s why the pre-money valuation, when you come in for this amount of money, 2 million, 5 million, 10 million means you get five, ten, 15% of the company, but you’re pre-revenue. So all of this is a spreadsheet transaction, right? Spreadsheet value. Well, it’s interesting, the same thing exists in M&A, and I didn’t know that until recently. I was doing creative financing.
Sure. I was trading in the equities of the business as a form of consideration. I was also doing cash and debt as a way to give money to the ownership. But I was like, this is fascinating. And so what I found is the vast majority of people, at least, this is the common denominator who struggle at doing growth through M&A is because they don’t have this 20 million enterprise value.
50 million enterprise value, 100 million enterprise value version of our business we’re building. And here’s where you’re playing a role in that. Through this deal, the journey that you’re providing for the seller isn’t as exciting as I’m just getting you out of your current day. And when you don’t have the end in mind within the story that you’re sharing with the world around what you’re building, it’s very hard to get people excited to join you. So if I were to use you as a pure example, if you said, hey, rise is selling in five years, maybe we do, maybe we don’t.
We’re going to time the market, but we’re going to build this. We know the demands here. We know what we’ve been able to accumulate, both on our production side, our marketplace, our technology and also the service side. But we’re going to build a mini portfolio of services that we want to be a mini portfolio of businesses, and we’re going to sell this thing in the future. And here’s the model that shows that we’re going to exit for 150 million. When you’re interacting with someone who’s a small business to buy them, you can say, and we’re going to roll you into that or join us for that.
John Corcoran: 30:34
Then they get excited about it. Yeah.
Peter Lang: 30:35
That’s a different story. Yeah. Then I’m just exiting my business. People only sell a business if they’re done with it. Actually, that’s true with all things done.
You never sell something unless you’re done with it. So the fact that they’re showing up and discussing it means they’re done. Now, you didn’t convince them that the thing you’re building is better than the thing they’re done with. And that’s the vision. That’s the end.
And so the same way it works with fundraising and transacting in the, you know, future value of the business and consideration and equity today. It goes the same with getting deals done now. If your reason for them to take action is not big enough. That’s by the way, motivation is two words in Latin. It’s the reason for action.
So if the reason isn’t big enough for them to take action, why do a deal? And so the vast majority of time it’s just your proposition, your narrative to the marketplace isn’t big enough to compel them to join you or to be a contributor to it. And if you can solve for that, wow, it’s really easy to do deals. A good example is Erik Huberman of Hawk Media. His Hawk media obsession of what he wants to build and never sell is why he’s able to do, like a transaction a month now. Now he has a corporate business development team. But it’s because his whole storyline is joined to that vision, not this transaction.
John Corcoran: 31:52
So let me be the devil’s advocate for a second here. And let’s say that I’m listening to this. I’m an agency owner and I just want to do some small little deals. I don’t want to, you know, I don’t have this big vision. You know, they don’t want to build, you know, a $20 million company or something like that. Can it still work for them, and if so, how do they articulate this vision without having that massive vision?
Peter Lang: 32:15
So if you’re running a small business and you don’t have the ambition to sell it, you’re probably running a lifestyle business. And if you’re running a lifestyle business, you might not want to create too much complexity that could risk your lifestyle business. M&A is a risk. It is. It’s a professional career for, you know, people who go to Wharton and big financial education schools and Ivy League.
To say that you’re going to use M&A to grow is great, but you’re using a performance business approach on a lifestyle business. It’s just hard to say that the probability of that’s going to be very strong. So I don’t endorse that actually. Now I do say M&A solves all business problems, creates them as well. But it solves all business problems.
And I use that as a paradigm shift. So if you have something you’re trying to solve for in the business, ask yourself could an acquisition solve it? And just that exercise right is very useful. So a great example of this would be hey, a founder is involved in sales and it’s a bottleneck to expanding the business. That’s to remove selling as an option.
It’s just a bottleneck. The business can’t expand because the owner wears too many hats. And one of its business development, plus leadership, plus culture, plus all the other administrative hats that they have to wear in the business. So could I acquire a business and get someone else who will take that mantle from me? Yeah, you could probably find another owner who’s doing sales for their agency, for their podcast agency, and they’re just not growing.
And they were accidental entrepreneurs, and they’re actually a salesperson in your company, but they’re just out on their own today. Yeah. And figure out a deal to get there. So yeah, you could solve that problem. Again, I just really harp on the difference.
If you want to be a casual athlete, don’t set Olympic expectations. But if you want to be an Olympian, calibrate appropriately for that expectation. And so M&A does give you that type of Olympic level of performance improvements. It’s like training for something that’s material, but you have to have an end in mind. Like in four years.
I know I’m running the 100 at this pace in Paris, right? I know it’s 9.86, depending on who’s running that year. You know, a very measurable outcome in the future you need to get to. And you can work backwards from there. And M&A can get you there much faster. Inorganic gets you there consistently, much faster, proven, non-negotiable. But your business is very different versus the lifestyle.
John Corcoran: 34:51
Let me ask you about another important piece which is integration. So you did eight different acquisitions. And many people have said that sometimes integration is, you know, the hardest part. A lot of times it doesn’t work. Yeah. So talk a little bit about the secrets behind that and how you manage to make it work.
Peter Lang: 35:08
Make a lot of small problems and make a lot of small issues in the early transactions. So the first one is you never do your first acquisition. That’s more than 30% of your employee account. So first, like the first rule that I teach people is that
John Corcoran: 35:26
Case with yours, with your first acquisition? Yeah.
Peter Lang: 35:29
I didn’t know it was the case. Like, it’s like hindsight. I go, oh, that was really smart that I did that that way. The reason.
John Corcoran: 35:34
You were doubling your revenue from that first acquisition, that.
Peter Lang: 35:38
Employee account, employee employee count was actually still 30% of what we had. Okay. And so think about this for a moment. If you have a dinner party and you ask your friend to invite people, if they invite, if you have eight people over and they invite eight people you don’t know, that’s a very different energy than you planned. But if they only bring 30%.
So if you have ten people and they bring three people, well, it’s still going to be your energy. Those three people don’t. They don’t really change it that much. They contribute and it could disrupt it, but it could also be very positive. So it’s just a general rule.
The same thing goes with market caps. So if you look at it from an investment perspective, M&A is executed at 30% of market cap. So they don’t dilute the business unless it’s a fully integrated merger. But it’s just a general rule. The first way to protect yourself in integration is just not to go too big right away.
Unless you’re going to be the 30% in the bigger company. People don’t realize you can buy up you as an operator, or as the owner of the business who works above. It could buy something bigger and inject your business into it. So many people think I have to go buy someone and they’re going to be smaller, and I put them in. You can be the small one and be something bigger and you can transition to a chairman role. You can transition to M&A.
John Corcoran: 36:46
If.
Peter Lang: 36:47
You.
John Corcoran: 36:47
Did.
Peter Lang: 36:47
Do that.
John Corcoran: 36:49
Let’s use round numbers. So let’s say if you did do that. And you have 30 employees in the company you’re acquiring. Is that the right math? Like so you have.
Peter Lang: 36:58
So if you’re 30 people who went into that 100, you think your culture of 30 is going to be the dominant culture. No, it’s going to be the 100.
John Corcoran: 37:05
Right. So how can you pull off that type of integration or that type of acquisition without succumbing to the culture of the company that you’ve acquired?
Peter Lang: 37:16
Well, the assumption there is that you don’t want to succumb. Oh, Okay. Technically speaking. Right? Just because we do it over here doesn’t mean that’s the right way to do it.
Now there’s different cultural categorization. So there’s some cultures that are more inclined because of the constant change they’re used to. And agencies thankfully have that compared to a lot of the other M&A activities throughout, like more traditional businesses or HVAC or, you know, something that’s less used to all the variety of clients and topics all the time. But again, just the number one rule is integration is the assumption that two things come together and it’s going to be better than apart. And so the magnitude, the throttling of how much of that you do you control.
In Uhuru I was baptizing people to a new religion. John. I was transitioning them to scrum building super efficient humans. Efficient and effective. We have the E square Parthenon and then we explained how we built that foundation.
We had a whole methodology. You’re brainwashing people to do new things. So what you’re trying to do, you’re giving them swag. Day one branded them, branding them literally day one so everyone can be assimilated much faster. Right?
Think we are the Borg, right? That’s what you’re trying to build. And it’s interesting because integration has challenges. There’s a definition of integration. There’s just like there is HR finance and accounting.
Right. There’s a profession of integration. You’re just not treating it like a professional thing. You’re just doing it as secondary or third on the list because you’re a deal maker and you’re doing transactions. We made it first and we said, okay, what’s the primary focus on prioritizing integration?
We also made a lot of mistakes, which reinforced our onboarding plans. Detailed 30, 60, 96 months, all things that are in the calendar. We’re really well documented on how to execute it at scale, but that’s programmatic M&A. Programmatic M&A is not something I can buy from a company every two weeks. I can go buy and integrate and support a company at that clip.
And so it’s the same type of sophistication. Yeah. And again, that’s what I teach now. That’s what the book and everything I’m leading toward is going to be.
John Corcoran: 39:23
Well, this has been great. Really interesting. Peter. And I want to wrap up with my gratitude question. So I’m a big fan of gratitude and practicing gratitude and also giving our guests a little bit of space at the end here to acknowledge people. You mentioned al, your mentor, anyone you would want to just shout out and thanks for helping you in your journey.
Peter Lang: 39:44
It’s a long list. Al Martino had a significant impact. His passing probably fueled a lot of the aggressiveness that I had towards achieving what he thought I could do in it. I have unconditional, undying support for my parents, although I completely disappointed them by not going into a conservative, easy job. I went into entrepreneurship and I didn’t take over the family business.
They’re easily my biggest champions. And then I’m very fortunate. My wife is an integrator. So when you talk about the visionary and integrator, That’s why I’m married to. And we’ve done every business and every adventure, every investment.
We do everything together. And so I am co-dependent, but so positively committed to that codependency that it’s a benefit to me.
John Corcoran: 40:33
That’s great. Peter, where can people go to learn more about you and connect with you?
Peter Lang: 40:37
It seems like the only social media platform I still care about is LinkedIn. Yeah. So please use LinkedIn. I have a team that manages it, so if I don’t get back to you right away, the team will do their best to support that. You can find me through events growthhackers.com is. You’ll see my face a lot more there. If there’s something that you want to do in person. But of course, reach out through LinkedIn.
John Corcoran: 40:58
Awesome, Peter, thank you so much.
Peter Lang: 41:00
Appreciate you John.
Outro: 41:04
Thanks for listening to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast. We’ll see you again next time and be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.