Ep. 151 – How Mark Homer Buys & Sells Agencies Without a Pile of Cash
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Featuring: Mark Homer, Grandin Holdings
In episode 151, I sit down with Mark Homer, founder of Grandin Holdings and a serial technology and marketing entrepreneur who's scaled and exited multiple agencies over more than 30 years at the intersection of marketing and tech.
Mark and I demystify the world of M&A for agency owners — the headspace blockages, the myths about needing piles of cash, and the surprisingly creative ways deals actually get structured. We talk through his own exit in the legal marketing space, why your network is your richest source of deal flow, and how building real systems (including handing off sales) is what makes a business both sellable and worth keeping.
If you've ever assumed M&A is too expensive, too complex, or only for the people making headlines, this conversation will change how you think. Mark shows that most deals are quiet, creative, and life-changing in ways that have nothing to do with a Forbes cover.
Key Bytes
• Buying out a partner is an M&A transaction — most owners have already done a deal without realizing it.
• Your network is a bigger source of deal flow than any sourcing system; just tell people what you're looking for.
• A lot of owners want to sell for reasons that have nothing to do with how your business is running.
• Building systems and handing off sales is what makes a business both sellable and worth keeping.
• Optionality means a profitable, well-run business you can sell — or happily hold onto.
• Removing discount factors like client concentration and founder-led sales is how you capture maximum value.
• Most deals are creative structures with little cash down, not the headline-grabbing windfalls everyone trumpets.
• Time at your desk never equaled success — and now that everyone's virtual, the numbers are all that matter.
Chapters
00:00 Welcome and Mark's M&A journey
01:34 Why buying out a partner is already an M&A deal
03:48 Inside Mark's legal marketing agency exit
05:30 Two LOIs and how the deals took shape
07:00 Your network is your real source of deal flow
10:45 Why owners sell for reasons that surprise you
11:25 Handing off sales by building a real process
15:38 Optionality: building a business you can sell or keep
19:51 Demystifying the mindset walls around M&A
22:19 Creative deal structures and the acqui-hire
27:10 Rapid-fire questions and closing thoughts
Mark Homer is a Serial Technologist and Marketing Entrepreneur. He scaled and exited two agencies.
On top of my agency experience, I have been at the intersection of marketing and technology for over 30 years. I was fortunate enough to be a consultant at IBM in 1995 when this little thing called the “World Wide Web” was starting out. This put me on projects building not just basic websites, but full online applications connecting to back-end systems for some of the largest brands. From there, my career included running R&D for a VC-backed company in San Francisco, Product Marketing Manager for a software company(with an exit), to helping start a company that upended the event-based marketing industry by introducing technology that helped drive people from live events to online properties that has now become an industry standard. I also wrote a couple of books along the way. The last agency I sold was in the Legal Marketing industry.
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Steve Guberman (00:01.567)
Welcome to Agency Bites. I'm your host, Steve Guberman from Agency Outsite, where I help agency owners build the business of their dreams. This week on Agency Bites, I'm joined by Mark Homer, founder of Grandin Holdings. Mark's a serial technology and marketing entrepreneur who's scaled and exited multiple agencies. And I spent more than 30 years at the intersection of marketing and tech. From the early days of the worldwide web to VC backed startups, SaaS exits, and building category defining platforms. His most recent agency exit was in the legal marketing space.
And he brings a rare long view perspective on how agencies evolve, scale and sell. Mark, thanks for being here today.
Mark (00:36.418)
Hey, good to see you again, Steve.
Steve Guberman (00:38.349)
Great to see you also. So a little backstory, I met Mark in, I think, did I meet you in Austin? Anyway, I met you at an M &A exit lab through mutual contact, Peter Lang through digital agency business, and super impressed with what your journey in the M &A space has been in the agency space. And so I was really thrilled to get you on here so we can kind of tell some of those stories of what you experienced through.
&A mergers and acquisitions and buyouts and things like that. And hopefully like demystify some of the headspace blockages that agency owners have as they kind of enter into the curiosity phase of &A. And there are those things that pop up like I can't afford to buy or whatever those things are. so give kind of what your journey has been in the past X amount of years through &A in agency space.
Mark (01:34.656)
Awesome. Yeah, I love sharing. I think once you do enough things wrong and a couple things right, you are able to share a lot of knowledge over the years. Yeah, actually, that's pretty much what I do now. I get on the phone with agency owners all the time and always an open book to kind of like if anybody has questions, whatever, just provide some sounding board for things. &A is a big area that I've kind of fallen in love with.
Steve Guberman (01:51.671)
Mm-hmm.
Mark (02:02.094)
now. But I think you're right. Yeah, was was very, you know, like opaque and mysterious to me until, you know, like, I kind of got into it. And somebody explained to me, it's like, well, you know, you've bought out, you know, like, like, I've sold shares of something to to a former partner. I bought out two partners over the years at a previous agency. Like, that's an M &A transaction. Like, what do you mean? Like, yeah.
Steve Guberman (02:27.841)
Yeah. And typically buying out a partner is one of the like more hairy transactions you can do. So yeah.
Mark (02:33.366)
Yeah, correct. Because there's like a motion in there, right? Like this is a because a partner is, like it's it's kind like that business marriage, right. And and so then there's a lot of well, you know, we know it could be worth this. And it's like, but it's not worth that now. And so it's it's it was interesting. Both of those were it ended really well. I mean, I think very fortunate that I've heard some horror stories, but both of actually all three, like where I sold some shares.
and the two people I bought out. Yeah, we're all really good friends today, so that's that was that went well. But yeah, no, that's a that's an &A transaction, right? So you're going through your your bat. You're trying to get a value for something. You're negotiating on what what that looks like. You have a integration right that what is life after this partner? And now it's just one one partner here or one owner. So like all those steps you would go through other than going to find.
the agency. It's similar just in just that. And a lot of people have gone through that or, you know, like aren't scared of that for some reason. But yeah, like the idea of like going and talking to an agency owner about buying their business is does seem scary to us.
Steve Guberman (03:48.845)
Yeah. Your, I guess I don't want to say most recent exit, but like the bigger exit that you had from, your, your law firm marketing firm. You want to talk through what that process was like?
Mark (03:57.954)
Right. Yeah, that was interesting because I think like a lot of agency owners, know, like I was in the grind, right? So I bought a business partner out early on. There was two of us. We carried it for a few years. Then, you know, he kind of wanted to go do other things. And so I bought him out and was kind of like, you know, sole owner there for a while. Twelve, thirteen years, you know, of the grind of the agency owner life where.
a lot of time and you're looking at going, I'm spending too many hours, I'm doing all this stuff and step back and realize that, okay, I need to get a process in place, I need to do this, I need to bring in a salesperson and actually put some professionalism around the leadership team and the expectations and we are always gonna have profit, not like it suddenly disappears. And all those things we put in place which were critical and enabled me to kind of start stepping up and realize that
Wow, like there's other ways to grow a business. I had read some book. mean, think a lot of us get an AMR by M &A by buy then build. So I read that book, which then led me down the path. We both know Peter Lang. So a lot of his materials, through a lot of his coursework. There was a couple of guys in England I talked to who were doing this a lot. And so kind of educating myself and realized that
Well, I could probably do this for G and GF, like the law for marketing agency I had. And we could grow. Like I got my salesperson who, know, like Lee Jen is going in, he's selling, the account team is running, like I'm not doing any of that day to day stuff anymore, which took way too long to get to. But once I got there, it's like I could add as much revenue as like two years of sales or three years of sales, whatever, in one transaction.
So I started looking and talking to people. And then I found out that there are people looking to get rid of their agency. They're stuck, right? And so I went down the path, and I literally had two LOIs out. One was pretty far down the negotiation path. The other one, we had decided in due diligence to, it was with an offshore team, so we were doing a test of in due diligence. So these were deals, both of them probably, I think, would have happened. So as an LOI,
Mark (06:20.59)
Then I talked to the person who ultimately acquired me on one of the phone calls as well. But that process of looking and talking to agents, think the thing that shocked me was when I just started telling people. I know we're supposed to do all the sourcing. And I do some of that now. do your 20 calls and work through the sourcing system. mean, Walker talks about it in his book, By Them Build. Peter, obviously, is very big on programmatic sourcing.
Steve Guberman (06:37.335)
Mm-hmm.
Mark (06:49.774)
I just started talking to my network. I just told people, hey, I'm thinking about buying. Oh, you know, I know somebody. And I told the digital agency groups I was in on Slack or Zoom calls we would have and just put it out to my network. And I had a bunch of people come in that way. I watched some of the websites merge and things like that too. when I first got into this, I didn't even do all the things you're supposed to do to really get all the lead flow.
I just used our network. I think we have a bigger network than we realize. And once you tell people what you're looking for, one guy came across. basically was in the 70s. And he had built up these agencies, one he had had forever. Somewhere along the way, he got involved in a majority partner and a legal marketing agency. And so he had these two arms. And he's like, they don't really work together well.
I kind of need to sell this one, but I also need to sell this one and they probably can't sell them together. He actually promised his wife and daughter that he would sell the companies in the next. That was like the thing. It's like, need to sell this company so you can retire and enjoy your life. Right. You he's been working too hard and you want to do all these things. Seventy five. Right. You know. And so he's like, I got to sell them. I mean, this is, you know, yeah. And so the conversation was, you know, like just
Steve Guberman (08:08.715)
His wife was making him sell his businesses. I love it.
Mark (08:14.498)
you know, how do we value, how do we get whatever? And, you know, he had, I think, been trying to sell the other one long enough to know that, OK, here's the value range and stuff. so we got to some numbers pretty quick. But like those that was just a network. Right. Somebody got introduced me to that person. So there's people out there in that situation. And then the flip side, I on the other one we were talking to, it was a it was offshore. So they were doing essentially like white label paid media work.
And so which was interesting. I actually it gave me an idea. I was thinking about I'll come back to it. But they were doing this, you know, this great white label agency. know, agencies were their clients, white label work for agencies for paid media. I'm like, well, great, I can purchase this the white label business can kind of help fund the deal. And then I can use all these people on the paid media stuff that, you know, we're struggling to hire people, you know, in the states. And this was
you know, kind of like that, that just coming out of COVID when it was like suddenly like it was impossible to hire people and stuff, right? And so, so we were looking at that way. And that was somebody who was really young, had built this business kind of like out of college on an accident, and then wanted to go do some like app and some SaaS, you know, thing he had done on the side. And then he had, you know, some people who wanted to work on that. And so he's like, I just need to kind of get rid of this thing. I built it, it's generating revenue, right? So that's two totally opposite sides.
So it's amazing when you step back and kind of go, a lot of people are looking to sell for all different kinds of reasons. Not the reasons that you're running your business. They're all in different situations. And so if you just step back and talk to a lot of people and listen, you find a lot of opportunities.
Steve Guberman (09:59.189)
It's, it's a great point. I mean, I, I'm a big fan of like just manifesting and speaking into existence of like the things that you want to accomplish and the things that like you have on your, let's say vision board or your goals or whatever. And when I first started like really dipping my toe into and A, I started talking about it because I got really excited about it. And literally anybody that I spoke to was like, yeah, me too. Or I'm, I'm exploring this or I hadn't thought about that. so.
To your point, like the network that we have, the phrase your network is your net worth, there are people in your network who want to do what we're talking about. They just don't know how to get into it. And so the more we talk about it, the more it's like, yeah, I've got this, whatever, service business or this thing that's doing X amount of dollars, but I've never really thought how do I get there? And a lot of my clients work towards, wanna have a sellable business. Maybe they do or don't wanna sell it once they get there, but.
sellable business is just a really attractive thing. So yeah, I mean, you hit on a really a couple of really good points. One question I've got jumping back a few thoughts of yours, you put a salesperson in place and that's usually in my experience, one of the last things that an owner either has a hard time letting go of or just a hard time replacing themselves for. And so I'm curious about at what size were you when you did that and what were some of the key learning factors in being able to do that?
Mark (11:25.154)
Yeah, so I my the partner I had the last partner I bought out that was kind of a hat he wore. So we both could close a deal and by the way, neither of us were professional salespeople like like like there are professional salespeople people who get up in the morning. Agency owners are not correct, but we can close a deal because we get to make the rules when you're the agency owner, right? Like you know, like there's no, you know.
Steve Guberman (11:42.817)
Yeah, but not agency owners. Right.
Mark (11:55.438)
profit ranges and service line. It's just, that's what you need. Sure, I'll come up with some statement of work that gets that and I get your money every month and for the next so many years, that's great. But my team is now delivering a whole lot of custom things, right? So I had tried, it was actually the most successful person we had who when I sold the business was running things, you know, like he was probably adding.
you know, probably one and a half million a year in revenue just on just on his back with with lead flow and a little bit outreach. And he was doing something outreach to which is great. But he one of the things I did, I failed twice at it, by the way. So, you know, it's not like the first one was awesome. But what I realized was I didn't have a process. And again, it was that owner thing, right? It's like so I brought in a sales consultant to help me.
Steve Guberman (12:40.012)
Mm-hmm.
Mark (12:50.285)
figure out like what I was doing wrong and it really came down to that. It's like you don't like I have this, you know, this deck I use and then I go through this and he really walked me through it and so, you know, like, you know, he made me record calls and listen to them and he's like, yeah, like everything's different. There's no process, you know, you're not doing all these things, you know, that you should be doing. Like it's amazing. You've sold as much as you had, right? Like that was kind of the painful feedback I got. So then, you know, like he helped me build that process.
And then we actually took somebody in the company that didn't want to do this long term, but was willing to kind of step in and say, be the guinea pig of, OK, can you take this and go through the process? And so they improved it. And then it was to the point where it was running better and more effectively with that person who, and by the way, they came out of design world. They just kind of wanted to do more in business. Like, this is like an ex-designer, right? And I mean, she was amazing smart, you know, like more than, you know, like she was
Steve Guberman (13:37.901)
Wow.
Mark (13:47.757)
able to do way more than her initial, you know, what she came into the company for. But yeah, she started doing really well and he's like, okay, I think you're ready to go hire somebody now, right? So when we brought somebody in, he's like, okay, you already have processes. And then he improved things over time. I'd say we were probably, I was stuck in that, you know, we'd go from like 1 million to like one and a half to 1.2 to 1.8 to 1.5, you know, and it was always like in that range.
And it was, you you would have a consistent, you would lose a certain amount of clients, you know, like no matter how good you were doing, like we did law firms, right? Law firms would close, you know, like retire, right? They'd merge, you know, like you just lose clients for different reasons. Yeah, yeah. So like the, you know, the makeup of the sales was really the key predictability. But yeah, once we brought him in, just, you know, things were much, much more predictable.
Steve Guberman (14:30.551)
Yeah, natural attrition, there's a percentage you can bank on losing every year.
Steve Guberman (14:43.415)
Yeah, interesting. No, I think it's good to share that because again, so many founders are like, yeah, that's the last thing I'm holding on to, or I don't know how to get that off my plate. And, you know, I'm glad you kind of reaffirmed what I've been preaching is build a fricking system. And then it doesn't matter. You can plug pretty much anybody into that system. Follow this process, say these things. This is where our leads, this is our ICP. This is our positioning. This is our pricing. Stop making shit up on the fly and you can plug somebody into it. Like as long as they're fairly competent.
Mark (14:57.921)
Yeah. Yeah.
Mark (15:13.025)
Yeah, we were having SEO paid media. What we were selling, we had a creative team because it was necessary. Did some brand work early on with people, but like our creative director was essentially able to go in and run the sales system better than I was, you know, with the sales coach and stuff. so then, you know, like obviously we, she didn't want to do that long-term, it was a, was, it was a great test for our system. And then we brought somebody in, but yeah, like it, it systems really matter.
Steve Guberman (15:27.821)
That's surprising, yeah.
Steve Guberman (15:38.593)
Yeah. So before we hit record, we were talking about your current kind of, know, business structure, the hold co, the agencies you've got in place and you, you said a word that I think is a brilliant word. I'm going to probably steal it and use the shit out of it now. Optionality. And what that means for me is like I said, a lot of my clients come to me because, Steve, you sold your agency. want to also sell mine. And what we find is when we do the work to get them into a place where it's a sellable business.
Mark (15:52.801)
Yeah.
Steve Guberman (16:06.709)
It's just a really well run business and they want to keep doing it. They want to keep, you know, being involved or growing it or whatever. But talk about like what that mindset of optionality meant for you means for your CEO and like kind of the path forward for you.
Mark (16:21.665)
Yeah, just context for those listening. So once I sold G &GF, I took a lot of the capital. didn't, you I wasn't done, but I didn't want to like be operating. You know, I got out of the operations of an agency, right? But I was still, you know, owning and CEO and, you know, responsible for everything. So I said, OK, I want to come in as an investor, know, and, you know, investor advisor, like some people call smart money, right? It's like, you know, come in, invest in your agency.
provide some of my guidance and stuff and experience there. But also, I will focus on using the &A lever to grow your agency, and we'll get some scalability and predictability. So for optionality, when I come in and talk, I want the owner to be very transparent with their team about, we're looking to sell some day. And it's not because
that's an evil event that's going to happen and everybody's gonna lose their job and some big company is gonna come and whatever. It's because there is a next best step to meet our vision and mission that requires more resources, more money, bigger net and it's great for their careers. So you're gonna get to a point here where we're only growing it this much, but your next step is a step that is basically what the CEO is doing.
And so you move into a much bigger organization. Those steps now exist, right? So it from a transparency, we're like, let's do all the things in place in the business that provide predictable revenue, great culture, great customer satisfaction, systems and processes. Leaders are actually running the show. The CEO is kind of directing and visionary. Build that system. Then that is a that is all the things.
that reduce what we would call an M &A, reduce your discount factors to sell. So when somebody comes in to buy, they say, oh, OK, we'll buy you for this price. Here's about what the market is. Oh, but wait, you've got a big client concentration. Oh, but wait, your team is kind of like you had a lot of churn there. You had a lot of client churn. You don't have processes in place. You're doing all the sales, Mr. or Mrs. CEO. So if you can get rid of all those discount factors, you're getting the maximum value. So it gives you this option.
Mark (18:42.231)
But it also gives you probably a great happy team, profitable business that you can count on, predictable growth, options for the team to grow, service line expansion, because you can now invest in R &D, all those things that allow you to keep a business for a long term too. So it's that optionality for everybody in the business all around.
Steve Guberman (19:09.017)
Yeah, I can't preach that enough. Too many founders are just kind of stuck in it. And some of this, I guess, stuck in it mindset stuff is like, it's quicker, cheaper, easier for me to do it. Or like, I don't know, whatever that thing is. So I'm glad you talked about that. The other thing I really want to dig into because of your experience is kind of demystifying some of those like mindset walls that that current owners have in place as far as &A is concerned. Like I can't buy a
I don't have a million dollars in the bank or, I don't what are some of the, the, the challenges that you've seen founders talk about or express that are kind of just mythical, I guess.
Mark (19:51.469)
Yeah, mean, specific to agencies, especially, right? There's a assumption of, know, M &A is expensive, right? I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know how to value a company. And yes, there's a lot of that. You can learn that, you also can pretty quickly get some experts that love doing that. Don't have a network. Don't want to actually do a deal, but they love like working the deal, right? You know, like fractional CFOs, fractional M &A advisors.
So, you know, you can help yourself out there. But in terms of the cost, like it's really like let's go back to that example. It didn't close because I sold the company. But that one age, it was going to be a little bit of cash down, you know, kind of like a friendly here's 100 grand. So you can like tell everybody I got cash, you know, like I closed my business and I have a check in the bank. But, you know, the business was kind of like
pretty flat and there was a couple of down years and what do you know? So it's like I can't guarantee that I'm going to be able to pay you this much money all every month. So how about once a year? We'll write a big check to you for this much money. And if the business performs lower than a certain amount, you know, we have to adjust it. And so that, you know, like a deal like that, right? It's like, OK, I can scrape together 100K. You know, I'm probably you have a line of credit. Everybody's got a line of credit, probably for like at least 100.
50 or you can do a couple of credit cards and because by the way, you also get all their working capital on day one. Right. So now you have their bank account to pay back that hundred. Right. So there's these ways to kind of like play play with the numbers to kind of make it very little out of pocket. There's going to be out of pocket like the biggest fees to be honest. You're going to have legal fees. So you're going to have some some costs there. But, you know, a tough transaction could get to 50 or 60. But a regular asset purchase that you know, you're
Fractional advisors can guide you down or you can follow some of the books and courses. 25K in legal fees. That's probably, you know, and then you actually have now a template to use for the next one. So maybe it's cheaper, right? So like those deals exist every day and they're done. And the ones that you see like trumpeted, like, you know, this this sold for this value, whatever that was like, if everything went perfect, that's what the value was going to be. But because of an earn out, because, you know, all the things like
Mark (22:19.661)
the business had to be able to pay for itself. So you're buying businesses in a way that it pays for itself. And as an agency owner, trying to buy other agencies, especially once you get to that point, like you talked about, and you've got understand your numbers, you've got your systems and processes. If you've kind of gone through some of that homework, you can look at a P &L and a balance sheet for an agency and you know the business, right? Like you look at 24 months of a P &L,
I can tell you the questions we probably want to ask, right? And then you combine that with, me your client list and how much each client's paying you. They say they have recurring revenue and you realize like, well actually it's like, that's all project work. They just keep coming back for project work. That's not true recurring revenue. So let's play with the numbers a little bit. Let's understand how that looks. And so I'm talking about a of things that sound complex, but I don't have an &A background. I'm not a finance major or whatever, right? I was a developer and a marketer.
So yeah, it's not complex and it's not as expensive to do it. But you could do just one deal with what we call the term, you you've heard of Steve, right, of aquire, right? So you're running, let's say, let's say you're just a million dollar agency, not anything great. A lot of people can get to a million dollars almost at a freelance level. You can almost get there, right? We're in a million dollar agency. You find somebody.
that is just killing it in this service line that's not, and maybe they're running kind of something similar. They're one person with a couple of freelancers, but they've got some great clients. And man, if you had what they could serve to your current clients, you'd be able to sell at least 20 % of your clients on that thing. And you could talk to them and say, hey, you find out that they're kind of hating running the agency. They like doing the work, they would ever, and these people exist. Like you go out and talk to more agency owners, you realize there's people who are like,
I don't like running it. kind of accidentally ran it because I didn't like working for the big company. But if I could work in here and just do what I do really well, you buy them essentially on like a commission structure, right? You give them a nice little check in the beginning and then say, OK, all the deals that you work on for these for your current clients, we'll just keep paying you a small commission. Like these are the type of creative structures that are probably 70 percent of deals.
Mark (24:41.933)
The ones you always hear about the big dollars and this person made this much money. Those are the ones everybody trumpets. Those are the one everybody gets on the podcast and talk about. yeah, people don't get on online and say, I sold my company for essentially five grand in the hope for income and a commission check. But man, I don't have to run the company anymore. Right? Like you don't hear those people trumpeting on the podcast, but they're happy as can be.
Steve Guberman (25:03.095)
Yeah. Listen, my first, did an acquisition when I had my agency and there was no money out of pocket. It was a commission structure for the next two years to the person who just, she didn't want to run her agency anymore. So I got out of that, a book of business. got into a new vertical and I got one of my first employees out of it. It was a no-brainer. I, you know, and I've said this a million times, I kick myself for not understanding that that should have been a programmatic thing I could have done over and over and over again. In my mind, it was a one and done thing.
And my exit wasn't life-changing money. wasn't on the cover of Forbes or anything like that, but it was life-changing from a lifestyle standpoint. The money was good and it was, you know, a two-year earn out after that initial chunk. And I was super grateful to be able to do it. So yeah, not everything is millions of dollars, but you know, life-changing is different, you know, in different ways for different people. So.
Mark (25:51.095)
Yeah, if we get back together and chat another time on a podcast, think the other side of it is like, you know, like what I would tell people is, okay, now what are you trying to build toward and work back and like, because there's, there's the, can run my agency. It'll be a little bit bigger. I'll make more profit and stuff. And then there's what is that optionality that we talked about for like taking it to the next level and having somebody come now by you with real institutional type money.
which may actually have larger cash on close, slightly larger valuations and stuff, but your agency needs to be at a certain level, you know, like all the things we talked about. But that'd be interesting to talk about too, but that's a whole nother thing. And that's what I do every day, right? I get on the phone with agency owners. can open book to try to just chat with them and say, you know, like, how can I help? And then some of them, you know, they might be interested in, you know, having part of their...
agency purchased or invested in. They might be a good tuck in for something we're building, right? So you never know. That's why I love getting on the phone with everybody. But, you know, most of the time it's just a really good conversation and I add to my network and hopefully help people out.
Steve Guberman (26:59.565)
Yeah, I love that. I'm the same way. I probably speak to 20 agency owners a week and I just, love learning. I love getting my finger on the pulse of like, what is going on from biz dev from, you know, team creative development, things like that. And so I think we're very much aligned there as well. I want to wrap up, throw some random rapid fire questions at you. The first is early internet days or today's AI boom, which felt more wild in real time to you.
Mark (27:29.037)
Uh, well, yeah, I think I was in the thick of it on the early internet days. Uh, you know, VC back startup, you know, I've spent, you know, 20, 30, $40 million of somebody else's money and had nothing to show for it at the end of 2002. Um, so yeah, I was in the thick of it in San Francisco during that, that phase. uh, that was pretty crazy. Uh, I, yeah, I still think that was a bigger boom than what we're gonna, um, see with AI is going to change a lot, but, uh, it's a.
Steve Guberman (27:32.439)
Mm-hmm.
Mark (27:59.593)
a big growth on top of something that was already finally happened, right? Once we kind of decentralized control of things with the internet, it just opened up the playbooks for everybody.
Steve Guberman (28:10.061)
Yeah, I also think that was, you know, the earlier days were more bubbly than what we're doing now. So yeah. What's an agency habit that you had early in your career that kind of you look back and you laugh at it now.
Mark (28:22.465)
gosh. Having to the idea of like managing my team by just walking around and knowing what's going on instead of managing through numbers and having them report up to me like what they think is going right and wrong.
Steve Guberman (28:38.965)
Interesting, yeah. And then finally, what's a piece of advice that you confidently gave earlier in your career that you definitely would take back today?
Mark (28:47.277)
that's a good one. think I was given this advice, know, like at a college, yeah, I worked for like IBM and Ernst & Young and these kind of companies, but it was like, you should show up before the boss and leave after them because they are that, you know, like it's, it was very much a, you know, perception thing. But once I got into like numbers and metrics and stuff, like it was just clear who was crushing it, whether they showed up early or not.
Steve Guberman (29:11.937)
Yeah, interesting. So yeah, time at your desk doesn't really equate to the success of it. Yeah.
Mark (29:16.333)
Well, especially now these days, right? Like, I don't even know when people show up. all virtual.
Steve Guberman (29:20.828)
True. Mark, I am super grateful for our time together again today. Thank you for joining us, sharing your experience, super valuable M &A experience. We'll talk again soon, man. Thank you again. right, brother.
Mark (29:30.347)
Excellent. Thanks, Dean.