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For M&A industry and sales professionals: Co by SongbirdSell
Introducing: SBGrowth service. For owners pursuing an exit in 4 to 36 months.
Grow now. Exit at a higher multiple.
SBGrowth is a new service launched as part of our 11th year anniversary, October 2026.
It’s born out of 23+ years of sales, marketing and growth work and 11 years of running M&A sales campaigns to exit clients for premium multiples.
SBGrowth engineers a bigger financial win for your exit.
We’ve seen the behind-the-curtains data and operations of 500+ businesses in media, memberships, e-learning and events. This means seeing first-hand, what actually moves the levers for growth.
Growth pays twice: now, and at your exit.
More revenue now, and a higher multiple on all of it at exit.
New boosted numbers and revenues are worth several times their value in your eventual sale. In addition, an uptrend commands a further premium.
Exit math gets interesting.
Every revenue dollar or bottom-line and EBITDA pays you more on its multiple. The below multiples are not specific to your business. And there is no such thing as a universal multiple, but for illustration purposes, it’s important that you understand how a $1 boosted today, turns into more value when you sell.
* Multiples presented are common but their inclusion here is for illustrative purposes only. Your own business sale’s multiple may grossly vary, up or down, from these. Real numbers require a formal Valuation and are impacted by a long mix of data points and considerations including your business model, market, scalability, margins, growth rate and many others. We include a simplified Valuation with all SBGrowth client engagements.
Exit math gets even more interesting.
The same assets and revenues will capture sharply different valuation multiples and quality of price and terms (offers) from acquirers depending on whether those numbers are:
What the business has today, or at time of exit, in terms of a full asset and financial performance valuation is heavily shaped by what can be expected from this business in the following 2, 4, 8 years post-acquisition.
A business that is downtrending will be treated as a depreciating asset that requires a turn-around, a more significant capital and resource investment post-acquisition and carries an inflated risk.
A business with those exact same revenue and asset value numbers though that has been growing for months or years, is viewed in favor. It’s seen as an appreciating asset that has proven itself, is expected to carry a reduced need of new capital deployment to grow it and is healthy. Further, and especially important to strategic acquirers that are often large entities with many stakeholders and partners, presenting the idea of acquiring a strong, uptrending business vs a declining asset is met with more enthusiasm. Price and terms greatly reflect this enthusiasm.
* Illustrative multiples, for demonstration only.
It’s important to know that there’s rarely a better ROI activity that you’d capture in your business than by (1) shifting to or increasing the business’ uptrend (2) adding more revenues to the bottom line pre-exit.
A working relationship means Growth, Valuation, Exit Advisory and Business Development Strategist, all-in-one.
Even if you decide never to sell, or choose not to sell with SBG, you capture a cross-section of fields of work and experience all under one work relationship. Unlike a third-party agency, we’re additionally financially motivated to lift your business performance and numbers as it can conversely and positively grow our own ROI from a future M&A contract.
The above reflect just some of the benefits beyond the scope of our done-for-you and done-with-you SBGrowth services (see below).
Campaigns are by custom proposals; built from our core strengths.
The below is not à la carte and certainly not a buffet. They are gears that we use to turn a growth engine. Which gears we action is based off of a plan we assemble that considers the highest upsides for your business, your own goals and our advisory of what will make the most positive impact from a valuation standpoint.
Highest Leverage Growth Gears
Tier-1 sales and business development
- Brand sponsors and partnerships
- Channel partnerships (through-selling)
- Affiliate and partner program launch or grow
- Press and media partnerships
- Direct-sold ad revenues
- Direct-sold annual memberships
- Licensing revenues: content, tech, IP
- Geo-license or geo-partnerships
- Founder-led personal brand development
- AI audit for systems and costs optimization
New assets built and GTM campaigns that grow the numbers
- Build or launch a membership
- Build or grow newsletters
- Build or grow events with brand sponsors
- Build crowd-funding, crowd-equity campaigns
- Membership users recruitment
- B2B lead generation
- Targeted outbound email
- LinkedIn growth campaigns
- YouTube ads
Ready to take a revenue relationship further?
Start a conversationNo contractual hand-cuffs. And fees count towards our M&A success fee.
To initiate SBGrowth services, you’ll see in our work agreement contract that this work does not bind you to (1) selling or (2) selling with us. If, when, how and with whom you sell stays entirely your decision, with no contractual ties to our SBGrowth work.
That said, we do intend to incentivize you.
Our campaign services and fees are custom as they are driven by, among other factors, your own budget goals. Much like any promotional, advertising, marketing or growth contract – the work can be aggressive and fast, resulting in a much higher cost, or it can be phased and budget sensitive.
What the services are and the expected fees require a conversation and our discovery process.
However, all contracts are engineered as Fee + Revenue Sharing, which mitigates the risk and costs for you while increasing the upside for us.
The fees portion paid to us during SBGrowth work is fully deducted from an eventual success fee, the commission from an exit. This does not apply to the revenue-sharing.
Plainly this means that any capital outlay, that further helps you grow business numbers and revenues, which then pays out as a multiple of the result upon your exit, the fees that build this result are “rebated” against the success fee.
Hypothetical. Just to play with the math:
Why? We turn a profit on the agency services but what we want is to build much more lucrative exits for our clients and, therefore, ourselves. This mechanism provides us both that mutual win.
Founder, Rob Toth’s comments
My comment might seem biased, I realize that but: for founders looking to exit who don’t need to sell today, this offer is just plain incredible.
I’ve personally handled sales where an exit was a must.
I’ve worked on a business with a co-founder couple going through a toxic divorce for a raw-foods and smoothie media (and landed that client 2x in 60 days what they were pursuing on their own for a year);
I worked on a business in the maternity space that had 60% of its revenue from one key relationship who passed away in a flight crash and that ended the revenue, crashed the client’s business from a healthy positive to losing 6 figures annually (we still sold it to a company chasing an IPO);
I worked on a very tragic listing for a beautiful 30+ year print media where the client, just a couple of months into our work, was diagnosed with aggressive cancer and passed away less than a month later, leaving his widow and team to pick up the pieces to still push for a rapid close even though none of them really knew much about the business.
I have more of these. Personal or market reasons why a close is urgent and necessary.
But in many cases, I wished the client would have contacted us 4, 6, 12 months out from their sale. And I wished that this SBGrowth service would have existed for them; to have an M&A team that is born out of sales and marketing help lift key metrics and optimize revenues before a sale would have meant even larger wins for them – and for us.
It took a bit to grow into this, but I’m personally happy to have SBGrowth now live for an even more rounded out value-add.
Let’s go push some bigger numbers together.
Rob TothFounder and CEO, Songbird Group M&A and SalesPS. We’ve seen the operations and growth hacks of probably 500 businesses. I take that math as we’re just shy of 100 business sales and often move ahead with 1 out of 5 we look into. Whatever the exact figure, we’ve been privy to what actually works for over a decade now. While the secret sauce stays secret to any client or business we look at, the knowledge still accumulates like crash-course training and builds a valuable institutional knowledge asset. So while my team and I would never say “here’s how that company X does it”, we have an aggregate understanding of how your peers and competitors operate. That’s not something many (any?) other agencies can say.
PPS. Please note, our SBGrowth services are exclusively for the same “community” and “audience” businesses we serve: digital memberships, peer networks, events, content publishers, newsletters, podcasts, e-learning, P2P marketplaces and similar. We, unfortunately, would have to decline any e-commerce, SaaS, manufacturing and the many other business models. We stay in our lane to better ensure success of our work.
Start a conversation with us.
Tell us a little about the business and what you want to grow. Everything stays confidential, and we share our NDA before any sensitive detail.
- Fill out the formTwo minutes. Tick “Grow it, then sell”.
- We reply within two workdaysUsually the next one.
- NDA and discovery callWe learn the business, the numbers and your goals.
- Your custom growth planWhere the upside is, what we’d build first, and the terms.
“Rob is basically a proxy between the very competitive market of business sales and the extremely focused world of ‘building’. He understands the builder mentality, and when to artfully push it aside to make way for the sales process.”
Frank West, Founder, EnglishForums.com“Rob treats clients almost like business partners… giving exact action steps that he personally would take if it were his own money on the line.”
Mike M., marketing industry publication seller“Rob is an innovator with his finger on the pulse of trends… I would recommend Rob for B2B Sales…”
Nikolas Oliver, CEO, Rufus Group LLC
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