Seven Deals in Twenty Years: How Jeff Hahn Built a $20M Agency Without Starting One
Jeff Hahn got himself invited to a federal bankruptcy court auction.
He had been looking for a web development capability for a while. His firm was a group of PR people, and clients kept asking for websites and social media. Rather than hire his way into it, he found a 10-person web shop doing about $1.4 million in revenue that was being sold out of bankruptcy, and he bought the clients and the cash flow for $165,000.
Then he learned what ten cents on the dollar actually buys. He had to put another quarter of a million dollars into the P&L to float the business back into operating mode. The ten employees who came with it were, in his words, pretty beat up, and needed a lot of reassurance that everything was going to be fine. Years later, five of the ten are still with him.
That was deal number three. Jeff is the principal of Hahn, an Austin-based marketing and communications agency, and across twenty years he has done seven deals, each one structured differently from the last. The firm he bought in 2008 was a 10-person PR shop doing two to two and a half million dollars. Today it's 43 people, and he expects to hit $20 million this year.
He Didn't Start an Agency. He Bought One.
Jeff spent fifteen years in corporate communications and PR in the semiconductor industry at Motorola. His last two years there included six rounds of layoffs, and a run of what he calls terrible bosses.
"I vowed: if I'm ever in charge, I'm never gonna treat people like that. And so I had a real desire to be in charge."
Starting from scratch, though, was too scary. Fifteen years inside a corporation doesn't leave you with a network you can turn into quick client wins. So he joined a 10-person PR firm in Austin with the intention of taking it over, and inheriting its client base in the process.
A year in, the owner gathered a few people and told them she had an offer from Edelman. The terms required her to grow revenue 10% a year for four straight years. It was 2007, and roughly 60% of the firm's book was real estate. Nobody knew what was coming, but Jeff made a different offer: all of her money up front, no earnout.
He had never financed a transaction before. In the nine months between the Edelman conversation and his close, he taught himself what a balance sheet is, how it needs to be structured, what the P&L shows, and what kinds of debt he could layer in. He and his wife brought a third of the money. A family member brought another third. Finding the last third took a roadshow to four different banks before one agreed.
"There's nothing like a roadshow to focus the mind and really get you to a place where you're talking the talk and understanding the rhythms of the financials of the business."
He never doubted the deal would close, because two-thirds of the capital was secure and he had fallbacks in mind: the SBA, or converting the final third into a seller's note. He didn't need them.
Then the housing bubble burst. In 2009, 60% of the firm's portfolio evaporated, with the acquisition debt still on his shoulders and ten employees to take care of. He got on the street, built a network he'd never needed in corporate, and landed two large, borderline crisis-communications projects that sustained the business through 2008 and 2009. Three years after closing, the firm was debt-free.
Working inside the firm for a year before buying it gave Jeff the diligence most outside buyers never get.
Ten Years of Organic Growth Was Too Slow
For the next decade, Hahn grew organically, and Jeff was cautious about deals. The 2008–2009 experience had left him with new debt, a wiped-out book, and a team to protect. It took years to build enough cash cushion to feel like he could make more plays.
By the ten-year mark he'd done the math on organic growth and didn't like the answer.
"This organic growth proposition is going to be 40 or 50 years before I get to a place where I'm really getting what I want out of the business."
The second deal was a merger, not an acquisition. Another Austin agency owner was ready to retire, so instead of buying her out, Jeff merged her three-person shop into Hahn. She spent the last three years of her career handing over the clients she cared about, who turned out to be a great fit, and then retired knowing they'd been looked after.
As Peter put it, that's the front half of M&A: the M.
If organic growth won't get you where you want to go in your working lifetime, the question isn't whether to do deals. It's which kind.
Buy the Capability You Don't Have
The realization that reshaped Jeff's approach came from his own clients. Hahn was limited by its capabilities. Clients wanted websites and social media, and the firm couldn't deliver them.
"You don't have to buy an entire company that looks exactly like yours. Buy a company that doesn't, and instead buy a company that brings you a unique capability set."
That was the bankruptcy auction deal, and the only distressed deal he's done. He's candid that he underestimated both parts of it: a bankruptcy drains everything out of a P&L, and he'd assumed the business would simply carry on once he owned it. And the people needed real care before they could believe the ground had stopped moving.
He didn't just stabilize that group. He kept pushing it forward, from web into what came next, and today that same team is doing AI work for the firm.
A capability acquisition is only cheap if you've budgeted for what it takes to make the capability work.
An Acqui-Hire Is a 20-Page Employment Agreement
With a web team in place, Jeff knew it needed to get to a new level, and he didn't know how to get it there himself. He did know a consultant who could: Tim Weinheimer, a solo practitioner running his own shop.
So he took Tim out for drinks. Many drinks. And eventually got him to agree to lead the digital group.
As Peter noted, if that role had been posted on the website, Tim would never have applied. It took approaching him with a specific intention: I have this thing, it needs your skill set and leadership, and I want you responsible for it.
The agreement turned out to be more complicated than Jeff expected. Tim wanted assurance there was cash in the business, so he wasn't operating without a net. Hahn demonstrated it on the balance sheet. Then came the employment agreement itself, around 20 pages of what-ifs: what happens if this goes wrong, what happens if we make a lot of money, how much of it do I get.
"We actually went through it one day in about seven minutes and signed it, figuring that the lawyers had punched themselves out on it. And they had."
In a cash purchase, the protections live in the purchase agreement. In an acqui-hire, they move into the employment agreement, bonuses included. Tim went on to pay the business back four times over in his seven years running it.
In an acqui-hire, the employment agreement is the deal.
The Deal That Made the Whole Firm Smarter
From 2020 to 2022, Hahn's revenue went hockey stick. The explanation was simple: one bell-ringer client that by itself took the firm to $100,000 a month in fee revenue, not pass-through.
Jeff's reaction to winning a client like that is telling. The first day you win them is the first day you start losing them. So what could he see ahead of them that they didn't know they needed yet?
The answer was a data science and analytics firm out of Houston, Statistical Vision, acquired in 2021 and now Hahn Stats. This one was traditional: cash at close, earnout, seller's notes, and a five-person team that stayed and contributed to the go-forward business.
"If the regular business is vertical, they're a horizontal cap over top of it and running across all the clients, adding in data analytics, data science for every account that we had."
Asked which acquisition made Hahn a better business than the deal alone would have suggested, Jeff didn't hesitate. Data science made the account managers smarter and better equipped. It also saved clients who no longer needed PR, because AI handles that for them, but who couldn't decipher their own data or turn it into a narrative. By his account it took the firm from $17.5 million to $19.5 million, and the same engineering and analytical talent pivoted straight into AI.
Two of the data analysts have since built the firm's own intelligent dashboard platform, replacing Power BI and TapClicks and adding margin to revenue Hahn was already billing. Without it, Jeff would have had to find a partner, and the account managers would be back to competing on creative.
"They can either sell insights and direction and strategy, or back to competing on creative design and pretty pictures. Our pictures are nicer than their pictures, aren't they?"
Buy the capability your clients will need next, before they know they need it.
The Niches Are Where You Find the Riches
The sixth deal came by referral in 2024: another owner looking to retire, with a two-year glide path, running a medical and health PR practice. Hahn already had a vibrant commodity-foods business. Combine food and health and you land on an orientation Jeff could build a practice area around: food is medicine.
"I'm very happy to be the seventh mover, to see what else has not worked and then create a new niche. The niches are where you find the riches."
The seventh came in 2025 from a lunch. A former client, an oil and gas specialist squarely in Hahn's category, had left her company to go solo. Jeff takes her to lunch once a year. At one of those lunches she said it would be nice not to do this by herself anymore, and they shook on the framework of the deal that day. He could do that because he already knew the framework.
None of this is as happenstance as it sounds. Twice a year, Jeff hosts agency owners from around Austin at his shop to talk about their businesses, and he always talks about acquisitions: that he's interested, how they work. Owners who might be interested want to talk about that most. He also belongs to an owner group of seven from across North America that meets twice a year. Hahn is now bigger than the other six combined, and he still says he gets more out of those conversations than he expects.
Deal flow comes from telling other owners, repeatedly and in person, that you're a buyer.
Why He Won't Pay Big Cash at Close
There's one thing sellers ask for that Jeff is reluctant to give: a large cash payment at close. It isn't that he can't get the money.
"If I give you that much money up front, you're no longer gonna be hungry. And in fact, I found that to be very true in two of my acquisitions."
Too much cash up front, and the seller's picture of staying on for years and helping the business grow turns into wanting to go on vacation and not chasing the next thing. Suddenly it's a management problem. So he strings terms out and keeps the people he acquires engaged.
Structure the deal so the seller still has a reason to show up.
The Systems Had to Catch Up to the Deals
Hahn ran without EOS for sixteen years. Jeff had been using McKinsey 7S, which he says is as good but built for much larger organizations, and in early 2024, with the firm now remote and no putting the COVID genie back in the bottle, he switched. EOS gave him more accessible tools, and more importantly a shared language for a layer of managers who didn't come from big corporate backgrounds the way he did.
Peter's closing challenge was the one he puts to every operator who's done this many deals: why not bigger? Jeff's answer is that he's ready now, and the reason he wasn't before had nothing to do with deals. What had to catch up was the systems: accounting that could scale, an HR platform, project management, EOS, each layered in and its cost absorbed over time.
"Today I think we are rigged to be a 120-person agency. We've got the systems and the management capability to do that. And so I feel much more confident that if I got a 50-person opportunity, I could very easily work the integration path."
Every deal adds complexity, and that complexity is the infrastructure for the next one.
Listen to the Full Conversation
Jeff Hahn has done the hardest deals first and come out with a more sophisticated business, not a Frankenstein. Hear the full episode for the Edelman offer he outbid, why Iowa nice beats corporate speak, and the deal he and Peter tried to do together last year that blew up like a Roman candle. That one, and the other deals that never landed, are coming in part two.
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