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INNOVATION
& DESIGN Home Page Architecture Brand Equity Auto Design Game Room SMALLBIZ Smart Answers Success Stories Today's Tip INVESTING Investing: Europe Annual Reports BW 50 S&P Picks & Pans Stock Screeners Free S&P Stock Report SCOREBOARDS Hot Growth 100 Mutual Funds Info Tech 100 S&P 500 B-SCHOOLS Undergrad Programs MBA Blogs MBA Profiles MBA Rankings Who's Hiring Grads | | JUNE 25, 2003 ENTREPRENEUR'S BYLINE By Rosalind Resnick How I Sold My Company for $111 Million [Page 2 of 2]
Grunt work came next. Besides having a profitable company that is the market leader, your finances need to be in order. Ours weren't. I had been up to my eyeballs, acting as both CFO and CEO. So we brought in a professional CFO and Grant Thornton as our auditor. It took them nine months to tend to the necessary task of cleaning up our books. In November, 1999, we went public at $13 a share. Our stock closed that day at $20, and, over the course of the next several months, mirrored the dizzying upward spiral of its peers, touching the high $60s in early 2000. Our decision to go the IPO route had been a good one after all, for we had achieved liquidity -- fast. EYE OF THE HURRICANE. Cut to July 2000, when I saw the movie, A Perfect Storm, and thought in my gut that it was an apt metaphor for where I saw the Internet economy heading. I realized that I would have to find a safe harbor for our company – and fast. By that summer, our business was softening, even though we were doing everything we could to boost sales. The Internet market rally in May, 2000, which had followed the swoon in April, proved to be false. By September, we knew that, while we had exceeded earnings expectations for our second quarter, we would fall short in the third. Our day of reckoning came on Sept. 12. After alerting our board that we would miss our numbers, we put out a press release and broke the news at an investor conference in Washington, D.C. Then, we watched as our stock plummeted, shedding half its value by the end of trading. A few days later, I picked up the phone and called DoubleClick. Time now to "fold 'em" – and by early October we had gotten an all-stock offer valued at $191 million. OUT OF THE BLUE. This decision didn't put cash in our pockets, but it was good enough. It was time to put our egos on the shelf, and better to walk away with something than be left with a worthless company that we might not be able to sell. There the story would have ended, save for that networking I mentioned. In making the rounds, we had gotten to know a French direct marketer, Consodata, which had expressed interest in acquiring us. By that time, Consodata itself had sold a majority stake to a Turin-based conglomerate, SEAT Pagine Gialle, which publishes the Italian version of the Yellow Pages. It was SEAT Pagine Gialle that, much to our surprise and delight, stepped in with an unsolicited $111 million all-cash offer. We closed the deal in February 2001. At a time when many Internet companies were dust and their stockholders penniless, I walked away with about $40 million, my partner about $37 million, and our public shareholders more than $33 million. A SURVIVOR'S TALE. I've lived, in other words, to tell the tale. These days, I've launched another company, Axxess Business Centers, which provides affordable consulting services for startups and small businesses. And I've thought a lot about my experience at NetCreations. Partially a phenomenon of its era (surely we wouldn't be able to do that IPO today), NetCreations wasn't just a story about being in the right place at the right time. Its eventual sale for that sum at a time when Internet stocks were souring was more a matter of skillful negotiating -- and of seeing to it that the five factors that are the foundation of astute deal-making were firmly in place. Reread the statements in this article that I've highlighted in boldface type. Then connect the dots. You'll see what I mean – and you'll know what you have to do to make negotiating work for your company. Rosalind Resnick, founder, president and CEO of Axxess Business Centers, Inc., is a former business and computer journalist who built her Internet marketing company, NetCreations, Inc., from a two-person home-based startup to a public company that generated $58 million in sales.
 Entrepreneur's Byline comes to BusinessWeek Online readers courtesy of EntreWorld.org, a resource for entrepreneurs that is sponsored by the nonprofit Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. Get BusinessWeek directly on your desktop with our RSS feeds.  Add BusinessWeek news to your Web site with our headline feed. Click to buy an e-print or reprint of a BusinessWeek or BusinessWeek Online story or video. To subscribe online to BusinessWeek magazine, please click here. Learn more, go to the BusinessWeekOnline home page  | | JUNE |
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