Ep 130 – Peter Lang, Digital Agency Business – Buy, Don’t Build! Using M&A to Scale Your Agency
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Featuring: Peter Lang, Digital Agency Business
In episode 130, I sit down with Peter Lang—co-founder of Digital Agency Business and AVA, and longtime agency acquirer—to unpack how agency owners can use M&A as a growth superpower. Peter shares the seven-day deal that doubled his agency’s revenue, the due-diligence signals that actually matter (talent, client stickiness, and contracts), why most M&A fails on culture not math, and how AI is reshaping hiring and service models. We also get into founder identity after the sale, what “professional maturity” looks like, and why many owners are really capital allocators in the making.
Key Bytes
• M&A can compress years of organic growth into months—if you underwrite people, clients, and terms before the numbers.
• Culture fit and integration planning beat fancy spreadsheets; most failed deals are value misalignment, not valuation.
• AI is wiping out entry-level tasks first; the winners redeploy A-players and teach clients how to use AI, not hide from it.
• Founder-led sales can’t be the only engine; build repeatable sales capacity that survives distractions.
• You already “work for” whoever pays you—selling changes the customer, not your agency DNA.
• Treat time like capital: budget it, forecast it, and review it like an effective executive.Chapters
00:00 Cold open, quick re-intro
01:08 The seven-day deal that doubled revenue
03:32 Doing three deals in 90 days during COVID
06:36 Common seller misconceptions and Peter’s deal lens
09:19 Endurance mindset, calendars, and operating like an athlete
13:46 What buyers actually look for beyond the numbers
17:43 AI’s impact on talent, delivery, and survival to 2027
22:10 Life after the sale and “professional maturity”
24:51 Rapid fire: celebrating wins, the race that changed him, dream acquisition
27:45 Where to learn more (digitalagencybusiness.com)Resources Mentioned
• Effective Executive by Peter Drucker (time tracking and retrospective)
• GrowthHackers community (context on Peter’s portfolio)
• digitalagencybusiness.com (Peter’s M&A training and upcoming book)
Peter Lang is an entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist with over 15 years of experience building, buying, and selling companies across online publishing, media, advertising, e-commerce, and consulting. He’s the co-founder and Chief M&A Officer at AVA, a fast-growing digital agency holding company acquiring businesses in the $1–10 million range.
Peter also runs Digital Agency Business (DAB), an e-learning company that trains entrepreneurs to launch and scale their own agencies. A former CEO of Uhuru Network and advisor to multiple companies, Peter’s passion lies in using mergers and acquisitions to accelerate growth. An endurance athlete and family man, he lives by the belief that anything is achievable with hard work.
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Steve / Agency Outsight (00:01.154)
Welcome back to Agency Bites. I'm Steve Gooberman, your host, and I'm here from... Yeah, see, sometimes I do screw it up.
Peter Lang (00:06.906)
That's why I mine separate by the way.
Steve / Agency Outsight (00:11.214)
All right, we'll try again. Welcome to Agency Bites. I'm your host, Steve Guberman from Agency Outside, where I coach agency owners to build the business of their dreams. My guest today is Peter Lang. He's the co-founder and chief &A officer at Ava, where he's leading the charge in acquiring and scaling digital agencies. Spent 15 plus years starting building and selling companies and now helps entrepreneurs use &A as a growth superpower. Super.
Happy to have you here and I know I shortened the heck out of your bio, so we'll dig into what we missed.
Peter Lang (00:44.698)
We had to shorten it. This is gonna be a quick and efficient podcast and my bio takes most of it up.
Steve / Agency Outsight (00:52.782)
Ha
So let's back up, man. I wanna hear like your first foray into an acquisition. What was that like for you that got you so charged up that you said the rest of my career is gonna be all about &A?
Peter Lang (01:08.196)
So did a deal in seven days, which I don't recommend it. BBMD, the owner who had bought it from Barbara Brown, branding and design, committed suicide. And the business reverted up to his 82 year old parents. And the accounting firm that they worked with was my accounting firm as well. And so Al Martino gives me a phone call and says,
I know you're acquisitive, I know you've been doing some things in the space. If you don't jump in on this, everything's just gonna go away. Teams gonna leave, clients would leave. And so I hopped on a call on a Thursday with the mom and dad, a hard call, and told them about what I had, asked them what they knew, they didn't know much, they had a managing director who was there day to day, so I called her.
She was frazzled and I spent every day working on it. We had an office, was more traditional advertising and design and creative. We were fully remote and digital and did a deal in seven days. But in that one deal, I added a year's worth of revenue. So what we had in revenue, I added in seven days. I also added working capital to the business because it had a cash position. Also added great clients, great community, great.
domain with backlinks, it's been around for 39 years. And as some team member types that we did not have that we were actively looking for anyway. I thought, wow, I spent so much time solving sales problems, trying to grow the agency organically, the slow way. And I just doubled it in seven days. Can I do that again? Can I just, if I only did this, which is called inorganic growth.
Can I contribute more to the business than I could as a super involved CEO leader? And that was the case. I did another deal in November. I did another deal on December, February, not a great deal, a deal, COVID hit. And then I did three deals 90 days after I hosted a town hall to our 60 team members globally and said, I know this is COVID, I know it's crazy, but the number one response to turbulent times, strategic growth and investment, I'm gonna go out.
Peter Lang (03:32.629)
and try to get as many &A deals done to reinforce us, add more value to our clients. And so I sat in front of a Zoom taking seven calls a day with new owners of agencies, letting my beard grow. And I got three deals done in 90 days. And it just changed the paradigm shift. Solve every business problem with &A or at least approach it from that perspective and it's transformative.
Steve / Agency Outsight (03:51.319)
Wow.
Steve / Agency Outsight (04:00.184)
So prior to acquiring BBMD, was that even on your radar? Like if this accountant hadn't contacted you, you'd still be slogging through new organic new growth.
Peter Lang (04:10.136)
No, no, I have this problem, which is I was obsessed with M &A since high school. I studied international business and corporate finance. The reason why I became an accidental agency owner was I had a blog in 2008, 2009, 2010. I was a geek. I my first website was a Dragon Ball Z website, power website in the mid 90s. I built my So I was a tech kid, but I was going towards business and
Steve / Agency Outsight (04:18.21)
Okay.
Peter Lang (04:39.192)
My aunt runs the travel writer conference in San Francisco and she said, well, how do you get all this traffic to your website? And I was like, I have a blog. And they're like, well, it's a blog. And I said, well, you write content and people come and they can find it because it creates things that people are searching for. And so they said, well, can you teach us how to do that? So I was speaking, I was talking about using Twitter in the early days and everyone's like, I have to post pictures of my food and say what I'm doing today. It was like the early days of personal branding social media.
And it turned from me saying, here's what I'm doing and talking about it to people asking me to do it for them, helping them with it. And that's how I became an agency owner. I just turned into a natural progression. I had a business partner and my soon to be later wife was also joining the agency and we grew from there. None of us had agency experience. We all were straight out of university in business fraternity and just learned agency business.
from tapping into the industry in general, people who are teaching it, mentoring, coaching, learning sales, all the bits that everyone does in the early days. But we looked at &A as something we always wanted to get into, but you need to have enough experience to really be productive in it. So we wanted to do our work and work with clients. And what we found was a good precedent that agencies did &A, which is the case. The world's largest advertising business is WPP.
It's made up from Surmer and Sorrell's a deal every fortnight when he created it. He was doing a transaction every two weeks. It was covered very nicely in Strategy B. He stick a McKinsey publication. And we knew like the agency was just like our foothold into this next thing that we could potentially be doing. And again, it led to that, but I had that destination in mind since early on, even before I knew how to get there.
Steve / Agency Outsight (06:36.598)
So it wasn't a, if it was a when that first acquisition was going to happen and that snowballed to so many others. So since then you've, you've vetted and interviewed hundreds, if not thousands of agency owners who all think they've built something massive that they want to sell or something super valuable that want to sell. Talk about what some of those like biggest misconceptions that owners have about wanting to sell their business.
Peter Lang (07:01.335)
Well, it's an important distinction. So my company's Lang Acquisitions. Lang Acquisitions has a portfolio of assets. One of those assets is Ava, agents, ventures, aggregator. Ava owns a business called Top Right Partners as our primary asset. We bought that in 2022, which is around three million to beat Bitta. And so in order to gain perspective, like &A is the most transformative professional development tool in existence. Like if you think your career develops every time you're at a certain business and working in a job.
Imagine if you could have 10 jobs in one year and learn from that and extract value. Just the level of uptick that you gain in perspective, experience, knowledge is just considerable. So I've evaluated over 3,000 businesses. I've done due diligence, detailed due diligence in over 100 agency assets. Most of my assets are in the lower middle market, kind of mainstream. So let's call it 500,000 in profit to about 5 million in EBITDA.
And the neat thing about that is there's nothing that an agency does that is unique. Just like business. Most service businesses are reinventing the wheel and just trying to do it with their own lens and approach, depending on their perspective and their career. Most of it is already written on how to do it. They just don't know where to go to get it or they haven't put in enough time to earn it. And so,
At end of the day, business in itself is very predictable and &A helps kind of reveal that. It's also the number one R &D tool. So if you're an agency owner and you're two million in revenue and you've never knew what it's like to be two million in profit, well go to, they're listed for sale on the line. You can actually get the data room, you can get the SIM, you can actually raise money, maybe buy them. So you can actually accelerate. You could buy partial access to knowledge.
You could buy part of a business and be mentored by that transitioning founder. There's just so many things that it accelerates for people versus the startup, versus I'm launching something from scratch. And I'm against starting stuff from scratch, Steve. I'm not a fan.
Steve / Agency Outsight (09:14.541)
Interesting.
Steve / Agency Outsight (09:19.086)
So not into starting stuff from scratch, but and kind of not fully out of line, but like you're super into like the endurance athlete mindset and training and things like that. And to me, that's like, you're starting, everything is from you from within with nothing from the outside. So it kind of seems a little contrary from a business versus personal standpoint.
Peter Lang (09:41.415)
I'm just very competitive. athletics is an expression of competitiveness. But I approach athletics with, if I'm going to participate in the Olympics and I'm going to do the 100 meter dash, I know plus or minus what I need to run, whether or not people are breaking world records currently, where the fitness is at, where the science is at. And then I can deconstruct the training program for many, many years.
Steve / Agency Outsight (09:44.856)
Yeah, I love that.
Peter Lang (10:09.226)
to get to a certain level of performance expectation on the day, whether or not I can perform on that day. Christian Blumfeldt in the Paris Olympics is great example of that. Norwegian method and them being unsuccessful at being able to claim the gold medal again, even though they worked really hard, doesn't mean it always happens. Luck is a factor, timing's a factor, but you still can break everything down to its smallest component parts to be prepared. And the same thing goes with venture, same thing with support.
So most of my athletics is tailored around racing, so events, and then I just deconstruct workout blocks to get to that race and then build everything around that. And I approach business the same way. So my calendar is, I've always had an assistant since when I got an assistant in 2020 is when I finally said yes to a true assistant. I've kept an assistant even though I've sold businesses that they worked with me on.
Although we're divesting our final asset in AVA, then winding on AVA and launching the new project. I always have an assistant now because again, I need someone to help me incrementally manage my time allocation based upon the plan that I have and the commitments I've made.
Steve / Agency Outsight (11:21.742)
So they're not just a task taker, they understand what your vision and strategy are and they help you allocate how you shouldn't do more than X amount of whatever agency vetting meetings or podcast interviews or how you allocate your time throughout the week.
Peter Lang (11:36.11)
and then they do your administrative retrospective. So Peter Drucker, the creator of management consulting, had a great resource for founders called the Effective Executive. And the Effective Executive at its core is just about understanding how your time is being spent. And so most people don't understand where their time is being spent. And so I've, again, I've approached my whole professional life and even my personal life at that same level of examination and review.
I'm non-operator in any of my assets today. So I don't, sit as a non-exec board member of almost everything that I own, except for the training program that is the next version attached to the book and everything will launch you on that side, which does feel like a startup, I will say. But ultimately, I believe in partnering with people who want to be the CEO, who want to drive growth, and then putting together assets that do it.
Another one of my primary assets is growth hackers. I bought growth hackers a year and a half ago. It's the world's largest growth community. Sean Ellis founded it when he wrote the book on growth, hacking growth. We have a significant newsletter, 64,000, you know, open up daily to our emails. And then we have a 20,000 person membership site. And then I did an acquisition into growth hackers after I bought it. It had service capability, bringing in our chief strategy officer. And I just, again,
I think all agency owners become, at some point, capital allocators. usually they don't know it yet, but they're really well equipped to become private equity types. And there's great precedent for it. So I think it's always just a natural progression of people who are entrepreneurial, who like to impact growth, who like to build teams, who care about technology and the early stages of the bell curve, and then ultimately gets to certain levels of financial.
capability to execute that influence over more assets, more businesses. And so that's kind of where I'm framing towards my Gandalf ears, Steve, as my beard grows longer and gets more gray.
Steve / Agency Outsight (13:46.798)
Long way to go for that, my friend. So thinking back to kind of what agencies, you know, what you're looking for when you're evaluating agencies other than the numbers or beyond the numbers, what are some of those things that you look for?
Peter Lang (14:00.116)
So in general, and this goes for me, because I follow best practices and I believe in them, it's talent first. yes, AI is going to play a critical role moving forward as an AI first foundation to how we do aggregation and how we invest in businesses. But nothing still beats a talent and great clients. So you're usually looking for who's got the best people.
what percentage of the employee count and team count are made up of the best people. Then you look at the client types and the relationship. So you can typically see clients that stay with business for a long time. So LTV, lifetime value, it's a great predictor of longevity, service, and then team. So well compensated appropriately for their market and they've been with the company for many years and have had a progression in their role.
That's some of early things we look at. The other one is do they just, do they predict the future and actionize it? So a lot of businesses don't operate off of budgets and actuals. And so, they can't predict their own future. And so when you're selling something, and I'm the buyer, I'm paying you for something that's going to create value for me. And so you have to be able to project into the future, set an expectation that I need to realize that. If you can't do that.
I don't care how big you are, if you're 100,000 a year or 100 million a year, you can't predict your future. It's very hard for someone to really appreciate and get value from it. those are some of the core bits. I built an agency audit, it's pretty detailed. You can't buy something that's not culturally aligned with you. At the end of the day, you have to share core values. 70 % of M &A fails because of misalignment in core values.
who are the deal makers and the deal sponsors, don't spend enough time on due diligence and integration planning and cultural alignment and cultural fit. They just look at the numbers. And so how I've been able to circumvent that is you pay attention to the people. mean, our assets, Steve, in the space, they leave on Friday, right? Not even leave, they log off on Friday. They log back on on Monday. And you just hope that everybody shows back up. No one's buying.
Peter Lang (16:24.37)
to their jobs, no one's locked into desks. And then clients, how sticky are the clients, quality of the revenues. I put a disproportionate amount of energy into monthly reoccurring revenue. Of course, it's stronger quality of revenue. And then terms, so contracts, so how long them are guaranteed for securely. And those are the type of trappings that good businesses who grow and hit the next thresholds of opportunity, they all have those.
They also have outside. So the number one predictor of pushing through various ceilings of growth as you work with board advisors, strategic advisors who've been there, who help you get there and then outsourcing or having someone who does full time sales, who's not the founder. Anyone who says founder led sales and there's plenty who do. Yeah, it's founders can still do sales. They just need to have other people doing sales too.
because the founder gets pulled in when the lawsuit happens, when the employee quits, who's the key person. So you shouldn't have business drive, have the ability to be distracted and de-prioritized. And so those are the predictors.
Steve / Agency Outsight (17:43.768)
I'm glad that you mentioned that last part, but there's a lot of parts that are pretty vital. One thing you, one thing you kind of glossed over and I'm curious how you're seeing the impact of this, but AI, so talent is vital. It's one of the key indicators. Talent's being impacted by AI. Pipeline and revenue, everything is being impacted by AI. So how is that affecting how you're evaluating agencies for like, you know, whether they're not just valid for an acquisition, but at what.
validity they are.
Peter Lang (18:14.865)
As of July, 2025, AI is hurting entry level more so than anything else to start. So what we used to have entry level and develop young talent, you're having AI do. So it actually doesn't really bode well for an industry when you stop investing in young talent. They'll have to go elsewhere and we'll have less development there. When I define talent, an A player,
Steve / Agency Outsight (18:22.19)
Mm-hmm.
Peter Lang (18:41.297)
is someone who's done the job you're asking them to do for someone else and they're doing it for you. That's like the number one qualifier of an A player. Now there's cultural aspects, fit, personality, core values, there's a bunch of additional components to it. But then when I talk about A players and AI, I'm talking about the $225,000 a year client service lead. talking about people who have done it for other agencies.
who are career people who can then do the same thing for you. And if you're an accidental agency owner and all of this from scratch and reinventing the wheel, you want to be the dumbest person in the room. You rather pay people who have done it before to do it for you, period. And that's not how a lot of agencies are set up. They hire people who they have to train, who are not as good as them, and then they develop young talent. If you then expand a business model to the talent progression,
you're gonna spend a decade being small. Because those people are gonna leave you because you're still not big enough to then maximize how fast they got better. So again, the formula is just not really well known, although it's extremely defined. And that's just normal with entrepreneurship, especially in professional services or low buried entry. Now in regards to AI, no one can tell me what AI looks like three years out. But I'm a firm believer
that just like the internet, agencies, ad agencies, technology companies, which were MSPs, service providers, and then digital agencies, they were the stewards and the deliverers of tools to the market, is what I mean by that. Well, if before the web came on and everyone had a website, an agency went to the pizza shop and said, you need a website. I need a website, we're talking about we're in the phone book. So they pushed.
the market around them to leverage the technology to improve their businesses. They did that with the internet, they did that with web, they did that with social, then they did that with mobile, and then they're gonna continue to do that with the new variations of social, then they now do that with AI. And so a lot of the digital agencies are really, you're not gonna be around unless you don't service the market in an AI capacity. That's not just your fulfillment, that's just not you using AI.
Peter Lang (21:07.999)
efficient in delivery of value, you have to teach your clients how to use it. And all agencies get timid by that because they think they're gonna be replaced if they teach their clients how to do something. But you are, your job as an agency typically is to help the client do something to make that brand better. And they need you because you're at the forefront to help them do that. And so they're still a good place for the next five years because there's established economic systems to support it. And then of course,
I live in Austin, Texas. We have RoboTaxi, Waymo. We're gonna have robots walking around. Like the future seems like it's today. That's not the case in the mountain towns I'm in as I'm training for my long distance altitude. Like it's just, there's a different pace of adoption depending on where you are. And so we have some time, but yeah, unless you're thinking about AI, if you're not doing it today, you're hesitant. I predict you're not gonna be around in 2027. I'm confident to take that position.
It's just moving too quickly and you won't be able to compete.
Steve / Agency Outsight (22:10.306)
Yeah, agreed. So thinking about like what, when I sold my agency, I spent two years learning how to be an employee. And I don't know that that's terribly uncommon, but I'm curious like how you help founders see the upside of joining a larger holding company without feeling like they're giving up control or this is my baby or, you know, all that kind of emotional part of selling an agency.
Peter Lang (22:37.934)
Yeah, I it professional maturity, right? A business is not a baby. At the end of the day, it might be paying for livelihood. You might be giving it your all, but it's not a baby. Let's not dramatize it, professionals, right? At the end of the day, it's a business. You're allocating your life, your time to it. Whether or not you're getting a decent return on that investment, if you're small and you're beyond six years, probably not.
Most entrepreneurs aren't entrepreneurs. Let's be clear. They're individuals who have a certain experience or a certain life situation where running a small business gives them what they need, given those environmental constraints. The vast majority of entrepreneurs, I'll state this kind of loosely but a little recklessly.
If you're less than a million of revenue and you've been doing it for four years, you probably are an employee who's just running loose.
That you just don't, you're not a You're a contractor or glorified contractor. You're just freelancing with a little bit extra. And there's nothing wrong with that. And then there are also, you talk about loss of control. Well, again, that's where core values come in, strategic fit. If who buys you does align with you, that's less of an impediment. If they also pay you for that burdened
emotions and experience, that's another reason. You know, at the end of the day, you do work for whoever pays you. You just happen to work for 20 clients, 50 clients, 100 clients. You still work for someone. You still aren't in control. You just think you are. But whoever pays you, controls you. And so you're just changing who you're serving. You're serving a new master, but hopefully you got value for it. And again, if someone writes you a decent enough
Peter Lang (24:43.437)
I'm for that earn out and being an employee and making it work, right? That's the sacrifice
Steve / Agency Outsight (24:51.512)
Yeah, everybody's got a boss, that's for sure. All right, a couple quick rapid fires to wrap up. This is super helpful, very insightful from like the &A standpoint for agencies because a lot of agency owners are thinking about it, talking about it. I don't know they're executing on it. Certainly not on level you are and so I love that. But there's a lot of conversation about it and I want there to be more conversation about it. So the first is what's the most unusual thing that you've ever done to celebrate?
Peter Lang (24:54.38)
Yes.
Steve / Agency Outsight (25:21.134)
closing a deal.
Peter Lang (25:24.525)
Um, unusual thing. mean, most of the ways I celebrate pretty normal. I mean, I signed up for a race. Uh, most people don't do that. So, uh, I was like, Oh yeah, it's endorphin high. So for me, I think the next challenge, I signed up for a race. Uh, that was unusual. Um, no, most of us that's pretty standard Steve. I celebrate normally, uh, pop a bottle, uh, get a gift, put a mantle of the deal. Like there's traditional things that you do.
Steve / Agency Outsight (25:55.64)
Got you, awesome. Which endurance race taught you the biggest life lesson and what was it?
Peter Lang (26:03.597)
It was my first 70.3, so my first half Ironman. I went from not being able to swim one length of the pool, so 25 meters, without stopping, so I stood up in the middle of the pool, to a 1.2 mile open water swim four months later. And I didn't like it at all, but I still did it. And so most endurance is to a degree of doing something you don't wanna do, but that first one, when I got out of the water and I didn't die after I was...
till like I was gonna die in an open water swim. I mean, that gave me a different level of grit, a different level of relationship with challenges. It made me very confident to continue to do that as a demonstration to my family and to my daughters and to the people who look up to me as a mentor.
Steve / Agency Outsight (26:53.883)
I love that, super admirable. And then finally, if you could acquire any company in history just for fun, which one would it be and why?
Peter Lang (27:01.525)
Emakina. So Emakina was founded by a Frenchman, the group. So they formed an agency group and they were publicly traded on the London Stock Exchange. I was obsessed about them. I studied all their annual reports, all their disclosures, all their deals, all before I did my deals. And so part of it would just be going and buying them. They were purchased by EPM.
Steve / Agency Outsight (27:04.792)
What is that?
Peter Lang (27:31.23)
and delisted, they were taking private. And like I had in my mind this aspiration that I'd get to a certain point and I'd buy them, but I can't buy them now, unfortunately.
Steve / Agency Outsight (27:45.29)
Interesting, cool. Well, Peter, I appreciate your time. Folks, check out digitalagencybusiness.com. Peter's coaching people about &A and how they can get into it. And there's digital courses and a book coming soon. By the time this drops, maybe the book's out, we'll see. So Peter, thank you so much for joining me. I really am grateful for your time and your experience.
Peter Lang (28:07.99)
Thanks, Steve.