Every agency owner eventually wonders what happens when it's time to sell. On an episode of Agency Best Practice on MerchantSpring's Marketplace Masters, Corey Brown, founder of the Amazon and Walmart agency BuffaBrand, which recently joined a larger group, walked through the whole arc with unusual candour: building the business, deciding to sell, running the process, and the lessons six months on. What makes his account worth reading is that almost none of it went the way the textbook says it should.
Built Without a Sale in Mind
Brown started BuffaBrand during COVID, pushed by a mentor and by a return-to-office policy he felt was unsafe with a second child on the way. He and his wife each put money in a separate account and each started a business, two swings, his riskier and hers steadier, both self-funded and expected to be profitable from day one. The family alignment mattered as much as the business plan; with few relatives who'd owned a business and no playbook to follow, agreeing to give it a real go was itself the hard part. The one-year plan was blunt: say yes to everything, grow, and get to where he could hire his night-shift contractors full-time. Six years later, the two businesses employ fifteen or sixteen people, all without outside investment.
Crucially, he had no exit plan. There was no 'run it three years and flip it' timeline, just a loose sense that if the agency reached somewhere north of half a million and headed toward a million, interest might follow. He built to grow and sustain, not to sell, which is exactly why the eventual sale caught him underprepared.
Why He Decided to Sell (and It Wasn't the Money)
The usual reasons to sell- burnout, taking money off the table, a softer lifestyle- weren't his. The catalyst was going to industry events after years head-down in Buffalo. At dinners and late nights, he realised how much talent, capital and experience sat in those rooms, and that it would be irresponsible to keep building alone when the right partners could accelerate his vision faster than he could. He came home and within a week contacted an M&A firm.
His framing is refreshing: if you're too often the smartest person in the room, you stop learning, and he wanted to be the student again, not the teacher. Building in a smaller city without a dense e-commerce community had capped his own growth, and in his mid-thirties he decided it was time for the next chapter. Money was necessary but not the point; he is, notably, still in the business today. Selling to grow rather than to escape takes a maturity most exit stories don't show, and it shaped every decision that followed.
Running the Process, Behind Closed Doors
Brown engaged a boutique M&A firm led by someone he'd met at an event a year earlier and genuinely trusted, and they handled everything: attracting buyers, setting up meetings, and running documentation from start to finish. One of the hardest parts, he notes, is that it all happens privately; you generally can't tell your team or your peers while it's underway. The timeline was aggressive: live the first week of January, closed by Memorial Day, hitting his goal of six months or fewer almost to the day.
The shape of the work surprised him. The first six to eight weeks were quiet on his end, the firm circulating the opportunity while he kept operating and occasionally pulled a document or built out the numbers book. Interested parties requested information, met the firm, and only if both sides were keen did they meet him, so a lot of sifting happened before he was pulled in. Then came the buyer meetings, and they were staggered rather than a single speed-dating day: a meeting one Monday, nothing for two weeks, then three in a week, with first and second meetings overlapping. He ran a standing team huddle every Wednesday to digest them. All told, it cost him five to eight hours a week for most of the process, squeezed around running the agency, family and calls timed for buyers in Europe. As an elite marathoner, he compares it to race prep: everything non-essential gets back-burnered until the day itself. Even with a firm doing the heavy lifting, he wasn't prepared for how much he'd personally have to do.
Choosing a Buyer: Fit Over Price
Because he was selling to grow, Brown evaluated buyers on three things, and money wasn't first. He wanted a strategic buyer who could offer mentorship, synergy with their leadership teams, tech and genuine investment. He wanted a personal relationship he could trust, describing himself as a handshake guy who needed to look a partner in the eye before signing his 'baby' away. And he wanted a safe landing place for himself, his clients and the team who had all helped build the business, not one of the buyers who cut everything to make a dollar.
What surprised him was how many prospective buyers opened by devaluing what he'd built, listing flaws on the first call to talk the price down before any relationship existed. He cut those people immediately, and some of those relationships never recovered. Treating the first meeting as the opening move of a negotiation, rather than a conversation about whether a genuine partnership was even possible, told him everything he needed to know.
Structuring the Deal: Simplicity as a Signal
On structure, Brown wanted a decent amount up front plus an earn-out, and above all he wanted it simple: a clear statement of what you get now and what you get if you hit defined targets over the next year or two. The headline number was movable depending on the earn-out's parameters, but the structure wasn't negotiable. Several offers came in around what he expected on the number, yet some were so convoluted he'd have needed AI just to work out how his earn-out would pay. That was a red flag in itself: if the first offer is this complicated, how complicated will the relationship be when something goes wrong?
The deal he signed was deliberately plain: an amount up front, a portion converted to an earn-out at the end of year one against a single clear metric with the qualifiers spelled out, and the rest an employment agreement defining his role and how it would evolve as the group hired and added services. Because both sides were, in his words, handshake humans, diligence took a couple of weeks rather than the months it drags out to for others. Trust, built fast and genuinely, did the work that paperwork does in a colder deal.
The Two Lessons: Know Your Books, and Have a Plan
Six months on, Brown's advice reduces to two things, and the first is his single biggest regret. Build every business as though it will end somehow, whether sold, wound down or handed on, and keep the books clean and the profitability tight so you're ready. He did his own accounting for five years, isn't an accountant, and believes he left real money on the table and lost conversations because his books weren't tight enough. Giving himself a year to professionalise the accounting, cut the business that didn't make sense and maximise profitability would have changed the outcome. This is the part MerchantSpring's own analysis of the KPIs that define agency M&A underlines: buyers price what they can measure.
The second lesson only became clear after closing: get the plan for the first year or more written into the contract. Whatever is paramount to your success and the business's planned investment, the roles you'll need, the direction, negotiate it in while you still have leverage. Founders get so consumed by 'deal, deal, deal' that once it closes, if things don't line up, there's no recourse and no going back, because you're no longer the owner. Know your books and have a plan is how he sums up a sale he'd otherwise call a success.
Know Your Books Before You Ever Need to
Brown's biggest regret was that his numbers weren't tight enough when it mattered, and clean, defensible profitability is exactly what a buyer, or your own business, runs on. MerchantSpring gives agencies channel-level profitability and portfolio reporting across every client and marketplace in one governed foundation, so you always know your numbers, not just at exit but every month. It is, in MerchantSpring's own phrase, how you think like a business owner. See how agencies use MerchantSpring, or book a walkthrough of your own client portfolio.
