Database of Hard-To-Find Info Sold For $25 Million

Check out Boardroom Insiders, a business that sold for $25 million in 2022 💰

Per a recent profile, Boardroom Insiders is…

a database of vetted executive profiles designed to help C-suite sellers and marketers access key decision makers and build stronger relationships — and ultimately close bigger deals faster. C-level recruiters could also use the dashboard to find the best C-level job candidates.

🚀 It was started by Sharon Gillenwater when she was consulting with tech companies back in 2008…

I started really listening to my consulting clients, which were some of the biggest tech companies in the world… 

I started noticing that they all have the same challenge… Salespeople didn’t know how to talk to senior executive customers. They didn’t know how to sell into the C-suite or what to say to those people or what the story should be.

So she began building…

Each executive profile was one to five pages and included insights into an executive’s background, business priorities, business challenges, social media profiles and even hobbies. 

Think of the database like a curated, searchable, up-to-date Rolodex that contains pages of notes for each contact.

So she basically curated hard-to-find info into an easy-to-use database.

Could you do something like that for another industry? 🤔

Sharon has a video on TikTok where she talks about a key turning point in her business. 

She was a couple of years in, already feeling burned out, and wanted to find a business partner to share the workload.

🧐 To find that person…

I made a commitment to myself that I was going to call one person every single day of August, one person who I thought could help me or needed to hear about my business or who could refer me to someone who could help me.

So I made all these phone calls and I kept getting introduced to more and more people, and that’s how I met my business partner.

What’s one thing you could do every day for the next month that would transform your business?

Lastly, let’s talk numbers 👇

By 2022…

The database had grown to more than 29,000 profiles.

Boardroom Insiders operated on an annual license model… Most deals fell within the $50,000 to $300,000 range depending on several factors, including the size of the company and number of users.

That’s a big price tag, which apparently their target customer was happy to pay.

To the point that the business was doing $5 million in annual revenue at the time of sale 🤑

But it was many years before Sharon saw the fruits of her labor…

For a long time, Gillenwater and [her co-founder] didn’t take salaries. When they finally started paying themselves, they each took around $2,000 to $4,000 a month. Over time, they scaled and finally reached market-rate salaries about two or three years before they sold.

💬 In the end she says…

I personally walked away with around $9 million on the $25 million sale of a company I founded back in 2008 and then ran for 14 years.

Sounds like it was a tough grind, but ultimately well worth it 💪

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