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In this episode, Adam Torres interviews Cameron Bishop, Managing Director at Raincatcher, about how business owners can get the most value when selling their company.
Cameron shares insights from his experience leading PE-backed firms and acquiring over 50 companies. He explains why the lower middle market is often underserved, how to prepare a business for sale, and why expert guidance makes all the difference.
Topics:
- Common mistakes sellers make
- Real-life exit success and failure stories
- Why deal structure and financials matter
Watch Full Interview:
About Cameron Bishop
Cameron Bishop is a seasoned media and business executive with a distinguished track record in scaling companies, strategic leadership, and operational excellence.
He began his career as a copywriter at Intertec, a $7 million revenue company with 90 employees. Over the span of 23 years, he played a pivotal role in its transformation into a global enterprise with 2,000 employees, 23 U.S. offices, and international presence. As CEO in his final year, Intertec achieved $400 million in revenue and $100 million in EBITDA. The company’s success was driven by a diversified media portfolio including 100 trade journals, 300 technical book titles, and a $40 million trade show division—all under the direction of five different ownership groups.
Following Intertec, Bishop co-founded Ascend Media, a private equity-backed startup, literally from his kitchen table. With a $100 million investment from JP Morgan Chase PE, he led the development of infrastructure, strategy, and talent acquisition that resulted in a $120 million company employing 500 people in just three years. Ascend Media was later recognized as one of the top 15 media companies to work for in the U.S.
Bishop further expanded his expertise in niche agency work—delivering services across custom content, marketing strategy, event sponsorship, and thought leadership. At Capitus, he served as a strategic advisor to private company owners (valued between $2 million to $100 million), guiding exit and transition strategies, and often managing the marketing and sale of those businesses. Most recently, as CEO of SkillPath Seminars, one of the country’s largest leadership training organizations, Bishop implemented a bold transformation strategy. His initiatives included rebranding, cost restructuring, talent acquisition, process improvement, and the integration of cutting-edge technologies—ranging from data science to enhanced web functionality. He also led the development of a strong social media and thought leadership presence.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres. And if you’d to apply to be a guest on the show, just head on over to missionmatters.com and click on Be Our Guest to Apply. All right, so today’s guest is Cameron Bishop. He’s managing director and a partner over at Rain Catcher. Cameron, welcome to the show. Thank you so much, Adam, for having me on.
All right, so we got a lot to talk about today. So we’re going to get into how to get the most value when selling your business. We have a lot of business owners, entrepreneurs, executives that listen to this show. And I know one of the things that you’re doing over at Rain Catcher is really helping individuals as well. So we’ll get into that. We’ll get into how you’re helping individuals. But before we do, I’d like to start this episode the way that we start them all with what we like to call our mission matters minute.
So Cameron, at Mission Matters, our aim and our goal is to amplify stories for entrepreneurs, executives, and experts. That’s what we do. Cameron, what mission matters to you? Yeah, thank you for asking. Raid Catcher is a lower middle market investment banking firm. And I and all of my fellow partners have a true passion for helping privately owned company and family owned business owners when it comes times to sell their company.
Most of them don’t have children that are interested in running the company anymore. And this is their primary source of generational wealth. And we want to help them get a deal across the finish line and meet their financial goals. Awesome. Love bringing mission based individuals on the line to share why they do what they do and you know, how they’re doing it. Just to get us kicked off here, Cameron, how did you get into the investment banking game? Like take us a little bit further back. Like where’d all this start for you?
Yeah, well, I am. ⁓ I’ve had an unusual journey to become an investment banker. I actually started my career as an advertising copywriter and a technical magazine publishing company. And we were sold off to a new company who said, Hey, we like this business. We want you to grow it. Go buy companies. It was very much like dropping the six month old baby into the pool and saying, Swift, we just went out and started doing it. So we got
PhD in deal acquisition through the school of hard knocks. So over the years we built a company from seven million dollars when I started to 400 million when I left as the CEO. I started a new company with JP Morgan Chase Bank on my kitchen table and we built that one to 120 million. So I bought about 50 companies, spent over half a billion dollars of private equity money doing so. But that led me to my current passion.
I saw so many business owners who didn’t extract the maximum value out of their business when they sold to us. It became my mission to help them find out and lead them through the process to maximize the value for their company.
I want to stay in the early days, just a little bit longer. Like humor here, me here for a minute, Hamer, like what was it like to be out there to be like acquiring companies? like, what was that even like for you? Sure. Well, I’ll tell you for most of us, the things we learn the best are when we make mistakes. And I had the both good fortune and misfortune to do the first deal for our company.
when we started the acquisition process. Thankfully, it was a small deal. But frankly, I blew it. Within a year, we shut that small property down. The big mistake I made was not really understanding, listening to, and learning how to read people. It wasn’t actually about the dollars and cents or the value or the contracts. Yeah, it was dependent That’s surprising to me that that would be your answer. Interesting. Go ahead, please.
Well, I made the mistake that so many company owners do when they acquire another business. say, Hey, I’m buying you therefore I’m right. you’re wrong. But I learned from a master who was chairman of Macmillan publishing, who was our boss, ⁓ you know, if you’re acquiring a business, you’re doing so because they’re doing something right. First, you need to figure out what they’re doing right and protect them. But you also need to read to people and.
honor certain elements of their corporate culture and adopt best practices versus just say, hey, you’re going to do everything our way. So again, once you’ve done enough of those, we have an extremely high success rate of ⁓ integration success post-closing of these deals. So I try to share that with business owners as well today. ⁓
So looking at your career progressing, like when you get into the investment banking side after doing this for other companies, like what kept you going down that path? Like was it obvious? Like you’re like, okay, this is the next step or was there like something that’s specifically like calling or pulling you in that direction? It’s a great question. So I ran companies, all private equity backed for well over 35 years. And that’s a very demanding.
and high pressure environment to be in. So I finally decided, dude, I don’t think I want to run companies anymore. So I spent five years as a partner in a boutique consulting firm, helping business owners through an accident transition planning process. I was called away to do a very complicated ⁓ turnaround on a $60 million 501 C3 under a management contract. And that ended during COVID. And I’m unusual. I’m fortunate.
don’t have to work if I don’t want to. I happen to love to work and I got bored very quickly and I said, what am I going to do next? I said, well, I like buying and selling companies. So I did research, found my current firm that I’m with Rain Catcher. We were very well aligned on mission, vision, values, ethical standards, and a passion to help these business owners to properly represent them and sell their company. So we joined up.
And I’ve been doing that for going on the last five years. And frankly, I love it. Go, go a little further into that, ⁓ into that process and how you landed on rain catcher. Cause I find that super interesting, like a lot of different paths you could go a lot of different, obviously companies like what stuck out, like what was like, okay, this is where, this is where I should be. Yeah. Well, there are a few factors. actually took about three months doing my research and evaluating different firms. It wasn’t an overnight thing.
It was still during COVID and actually my wife and I climbed in our car in Kansas City and masked up and packed our own food and drove out to Denver where our firm Rain Catcher and we met at an outdoor cafe to see if we liked each other personally because that was a very important part of it. the cultural fit, again, mission, vision, values and ethical standards. But I was attracted to the firm because it’s a very digitally sophisticated business.
And they are focused, we are all focused on the market sector, which has traditionally been extremely underserved by either the business brokerage or the investment banking world. And that’s the sector called the lower middle market. These are companies that are generating roughly a million dollars in EBITDA profit, usually 2 million or more up to 10, 15 million. The big investment banks
aren’t interested in those companies because they’re too small. Many business brokers aren’t equipped to handle ⁓ companies with that level of financial complexity. So it was our decision to bring the big investment banking tactics and techniques and skill levels and financial analysis down to serve this market because it’s a very underserved business sector and we’ve had tremendous success there.
as business owners age out now, don’t have children that want to run their companies anymore. So they decide they need to sell outright. And what type of a thank you for sharing that. And as I’m looking at that particular market, where do you see the value now? What I mean by that is just in the overall market, like a lot of people retiring, a lot of people like transitioning. You mentioned like
kids don’t wanna take over, like can you paint a little bit more of a picture of like what’s taking place in the market and why this is such a really a fruitful space? Yeah, it’s an interesting time because I think the generally cited statistic is something like 10,000 baby boomer age generation folks turn age 65 every single day. And many of them are long-term, some are even second or third generation.
privately held businesses or family owned companies. And for most of these business owners, it’s their company is their single greatest source of potential wealth, which we often call generational wealth. And again, without children who want to move into the business, they’re left with the option of selling outright. And that’s a very complex process. The vast majority of them have no idea how to do that.
or even how really complex and critical it can be to be represented properly. So we try to shepherd them through that process, both on the technical side of it, whether it’s contracts, dollars, cents, percentages, or negotiations, but it’s a very ⁓ emotional process and can be very tense. So a lot of what we do is what I kind of refer to as Dr. Phil work.
where we sort of help them, sometimes talk them down off of the ledge because it can be very high pressure for them going through the uncertainties and all of the factors that they just don’t have any experience with. I often find the people side of our business far more satisfying in helping them attain their financial goals, sometimes and even the general technical part where we’re in whatever it is,
contract negotiations or pricing conversations, et cetera. Yeah. And when we think about things like getting value, because what you’ve described and correct me if I’m wrong, I just want to make sure I’m saying this right. So these are family businesses. So these are not business owners. I the profitable, they’re varying sizes, but these aren’t individuals that are, you know, buying and selling businesses often. If it’s, especially if it’s a multi-generational business. this might be the first time
that they’re going through this business, this process of selling a business and they’re doing it with their most valuable asset. And you know, if it’s a family business through generations, like that’s, you know, they’re one of the most valuable assets. So they’re not professionals in this space. Am I off on that? I just want to make sure first off that I’m setting that up right. You are absolutely correct. The vast majority of clients that we represent have zero experience in any kind of M &A type
environment. They may have acquired a small competitor or local company and those are usually kind of a handshake one off kind of a thing. But when, you know, when you get into the range where your company has true generational wealth meaning, most of our clients companies sell for in the range of 5 million to 50 million. The real sweet spot is kind of 15 to 30 million. That’s a lot of money for most folks. So it would be for me. And ⁓
They don’t know how to do that. And they’re of a size where most of the time they’re not going to sell to just a local buyer in their market. a firm like ours gives them the advantage of being marketed on a national basis to all different profiles and types of potential buyers. so, let’s just say it’s like real estate.
Let’s say if we’re trying to compare this to maybe real estate, it’s like you’re buying, you bought, you’re trying to sell your first home. Like, are you going to get help for that? But in this case, it’s way bigger. It’s way bigger than selling a home or anything of that nature, because this isn’t like, you know, the difference in value and what you actually get for the sale and the packaging and the complexity of all of that. Like all that matters. And I’m guessing, do you have any stories around?
Like going with somebody versus not or versus like, know, like give me a story on this. Cause I’m trying to wrap my head around it. What it look like to go through and just like sell without using somebody. Yeah. Well, selling without using somebody, ⁓ that generally occurs when a business owner is contacted by somebody who says, Hey, I’d like to buy your business. I’ll give you, you know, a lot of money for it.
The challenge there is, and the rule of thumb is if there’s one interested buyer for a company, there’s almost always many more. And the downside of just going with that first offer that comes in is you don’t really know if you’re maximizing your value. And on any deal, we do a lot of research for our clients before we ever take them to market to educate them by giving them data on
what we think the low end of the range would be for the sale of the company, the midpoint, which we think is the most likely price range they’re gonna get, and then sort of a high end we call the knock the cover off the ball. But the market at the end of the day for any business sets the price. And unless you’re in a competitive bidding environment, you don’t really know what the maximum price is.
And that’s further complicated because it’s not always just the price. We’d like to say the price isn’t necessarily the price because there are deal terms, deal structures, complexities around factors on the balance sheet that are called networking capital, which even for the best of us can often be an extremely complex calculation and a separate negotiation of its own. So what may it appear to be the price if
You don’t know how to negotiate networking capital. It’s not the price. It’s usually going to net dollars that are less than what appears to be the case on the surface. So there’s a lot of risk and that’s part of our message here at Raincatcher is obviously we’d love if ⁓ business owners wanted to have us represent them. at the very least, my old theory running companies know what you know how to do and do it well. Know what you don’t know how to do.
well and hire experts to do it for you. So you are always best served with a professional ⁓ &A, experienced investment banker for these business owners because they will more than pay for themselves every single time. Do you find that sometimes when you start going through this process, maybe a business isn’t ready to sell, like they have some things they need to take care of to make the property more
to maximize the value of the cell, like whether it’s accounting, whether it’s books, whether it’s systems, whether it’s upgrades, like do you find that happens? Yeah, so I’ll tell you two quick stories. I’ll start with a happy story. So we had a road construction based business in the Southwest. There were four owners, three of them were employees in the company and one was an outside owner of the business and they had a very buttoned up operation.
Their accounting was very well organized. They had succession planning in place for the business. They have forward looking contracts or what we call the pipeline for the future of the business. And they had strong referrals and long-term clients. And they didn’t have what we call customer concentration. So the litmus test for most buyers of businesses is they don’t want to see a company have more than 20 %
of their revenue dependent on any one client. And this company checked all the boxes. So we did evaluation range for them, and they even went outside and had a separate one done on their own. And they were very marketable for all of these criteria and characteristics, which I’ve mentioned here. So we took them to market. thought they might. The low end of our range was $17 million.
We thought the midpoint or most likely offer was going to be around 19 million. And if we could really kill it, they might get 21 million. But we had multiple bids. We had, think, 15 or 20 indication of interest letters. We had about a dozen letters of intent. And we ultimately got that particular client about $28 million for the company. So needless to say, they were happy. Now that doesn’t happen every time. But again, if you have a
an efficient, well-run, organized company. That adds to the credibility the buyers see reduced risk or risk mitigation in the deal, and they’re often willing to pay more. And in this case, the deal terms and structure were also very favorable. ⁓ a quick story in the inverse. I had a really cool company, had seven patents in the automotive technology aftermarket testing space.
And they approached us and said, hey, it was a husband-wife business. Said, hey, we’d like to sell. Our first question is always why. They had good rationale for that. The husband was an engineer, brilliant engineer. As I say, he had seven patents, and he wanted to focus on engineering, not being a company owner. So we say, all right, tell us about your financials. They told us they were doing $6 million in revenue and about $1.4 million in EBITDA.
Sadly, they didn’t really have their accounting properly structured, weren’t tracking inventory or work in progress properly. One of my partners in the firm is a licensed CPA and 15 years in the auto practice with KPMG. He went through their numbers with a fine tooth comb. And what we ended up finding out is not only were they not making 1.4 million, but they were actually technically under gap accounting principles and practices, a breakeven company.
They’re still trying to recover. So they were not a sellable business. So we see a fair amount of that in our work where we have to give folks some really unhappy news that unless they make a lot of pretty significant changes in the business, they’re not going to be sellable. But when they do, we have great experiences, like I mentioned with the construction company.
Yeah, I can see that. And for both, mean, ultimately, it’s like it’s two different paths. So for the other company, and obviously, that’s just one case scenario, like it doesn’t. Now, what would somebody like that do? And that’s one company. But what they do now, like they have to obviously just go through and start. ⁓ And that can be, I’m guessing, a multi year process. So like, what does that look like for a company when they need to then, you know, get over that hurdle? Yeah, you’re exactly right, Adam. ⁓
They had to go out and hire a professional accounting firm to, you know, historically straighten out their accounting and help them run it properly going forward. But the challenge there is it is a multi-year process for a lot of these business owners. And what makes it more difficult for them when they, when they contact us, they’re ready to sell. They’re testing the waters by the time they hit your door.
And even when they are ⁓ prepared to sell and properly structured, ⁓ the kind of national average is pretty much not regarding what size a company is or even what industry. ⁓ From the start of the process, signing an engagement letter to closing a deal and a wire transfer, hitting their bank account, it’s about a nine month time frame.
And so they’re already going to be impatient just going through the nine month period. They usually want it done yesterday. But if they’re going to be another two or three years out while they fix things or structure properly to be sellable, then once they’re ready, they’re going to have another nine months on top of that. That’s very difficult for a lot of these owners to kind of get their minds around.
Especially considering that if the, if the, example, in your case, example, the accounting side is often that just may not be a strong suit for that particular management team or it would have been like that in the first place to a certain extent. Right. Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. Yeah. There’s kind of a general rule of thumb that, uh, most business owners run their companies, uh, for revenue and tax avoidance and distributions, uh, or income or taking the profits at the year end.
They spend very little of their time focused on creating value, which is a different set of management practices than running a business on a day-to-day basis. So they spend about 95 % of their time working in their business and only about 5 % at best working on their business. And to properly tee up a company for effective sale and maximum valuation.
They have to spend some time preparing the company for sale. Sometimes that means they have to invest into the future. Yeah. Well, Cameron, man, this has been great having you on the show. I learned a lot. I’m sure the audience did as well. What’s next? I mean, what’s next for you? What’s next for your role at Raincatcher? Well, it’s a busy time, as I mentioned, as these owners age out. So we’re contacted on a regular basis and some we give some advice on.
what they need to do to kind of fix things up a bit. Others were ready to go and we take them to market. It’s a great business. It’s very rewarding. So we’d love to have them contact us here at Raincatcher. We’re happy to talk with them and give them guidance and then hopefully represent them. Perfect. How do people connect? Do they go to the website or give us some more on that? How do people connect? So they can contact us at our Raincatcher website, www.raincatcher.com.
They can contact me by email, cameron.bishop at raincatcher.com, or they can easily find me on LinkedIn. Fantastic. And for everybody watching, just so you know, we’ll definitely put the links in the show notes so you could just click on them and head right on over. And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with Mission Matters and you haven’t done it yet, hit that subscribe or follow button. This is a daily show. Each and every day we’re bringing you new content, new ideas.
and hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way in your journey as well. So again, hit that subscribe or follow button and Cameron, thanks again for coming on the show. You betcha. Evan, thank you. It’s a privilege and a pleasure to be here.