When Joel Graber tells you he had an epiphany in a movie theater, he's not being dramatic.
He was sitting in the dark watching Zootopia with his kids—October, somewhere in the middle of the film—and his mind wandered to where it always goes: growth, scale, what's next. He'd been vaguely aware of M&A as a concept. He'd read the books. He'd heard people talk about it. But in that moment, something clicked.
He pulled out his phone, opened Spotify, and searched "agency acquisitions." He didn't know who Peter Lang was. He didn't know the community existed. He just started listening.
By the time the credits rolled, the direction was set.
The Business He Was Running Before This
Joel has been running Modern Outbound since late 2019, right at what he now calls the golden age of outbound lead generation, before email deliverability became a war of attrition.
Six years in, the agency has about ten people across operations, account management, writing, and back office. It's boutique by design. And somewhere around the ninth and tenth hire, Joel noticed something: he'd started working on the business instead of in it. He had a strong COO, great account managers, and pod structures that could run without him pushing every button.
That created capacity. And when you're a zero-to-one founder type with capacity, something fills it.
"I kind of woke up one day and realized I was a couple of steps away from the deep client work," he said. "And it totally freed up my mind to think about something else."
The question was: think about what?
Why M&A, and Why an Agency
Joel's first instinct was to diversify entirely, go buy an HVAC business, an electrical company, something with physical infrastructure and a different risk profile. But he walked himself out of it quickly.
"I'd have to really hire people and trust they knew what they were doing. I'd be more of a capital allocator, not someone who could come in and roll their sleeves up. That felt wrong."
Once he narrowed the search to agencies, everything accelerated. He consumed episodes on his way to and from his kids' activities. He joined the community. He signed up for Acquire.com.
And then, critically, he moved.
That pace matters. Joel is self-aware about what happens when he doesn't act fast. "If I don't do it right away, it probably won't happen. Life gets in the way. I've got kids." So he didn't wait for the perfect moment. He found a direction and started taking steps.
What He Found: GTM Design Club
Joel had conversations with seven or eight sellers on Acquire before he landed on GTM Design Club.
The business was a subscription design agency delivering ongoing marketing creative for B2B clients across the United States. The founder, Thomas, was based in Prague, ran a lean team of designers mostly in Europe, and had built something with exceptional client feedback and a tight delivery operation.
The numbers at the time of close: $531K in annual revenue, $377K in SDE, margins north of 70%. The asking price was just over 1.2x profit, priced that way, Joel believed, because Thomas was a founder who had exited once before and understood how buyers actually think.
What made Joel stop scrolling wasn't the financials. It was the portfolio.
"You see somebody's portfolio, they can't bullshit that," he said. "I knew the delivery was on lock."
The Problem He Was Buying Into
Joel doesn't do design. He'll be the first to tell you he "can barely put a one-pager together on Canva." He had no domain expertise in what GTM Design Club actually produced.
That gave him pause, genuine buyer's remorse during diligence, but he worked through it the same way he works through most things: honestly.
His bet wasn't that he'd become a creative director. His bet was that he could sell this service aggressively, and that Thomas and the design team could deliver it. He had clients at Modern Outbound who had been asking about design work for years. GTM Design Club was the answer he didn't have yet.
"I knew I had clients that wanted it," he said. "I was kind of salivating at it."
The calculus was simple: strong founder, proven team, solid client outcomes, and a service category he could go-to-market with on day one. He could sell what he couldn't build.
The Seller Situation
Thomas had been down this road before. A previous deal had gone into diligence and then fallen apart: wasted time, emotional drain, disruption to a business that needed his focus. He was ready to sell, clear on his number, and impatient with friction.
He was also a young, ambitious founder who loved the creative work but didn't particularly love scaling a business. He wanted a partner who could do what he couldn't, and who would let him stay close to the craft.
Joel saw that immediately. "He wanted someone who could plug in an outbound machine on day one. To him, that was exciting."
That alignment made the early conversations feel less like a transaction and more like a partnership discussion. Before LOI was signed, they were already mapping out what the first year could look like.
The Deal Structure
The seller's original ask: roughly 55–60% cash at close, the rest in seller financing.
What Joel came back with: 35% cash at close, the balance as a seller note, plus Thomas retaining 10% equity in the business.
It was a counter that Joel genuinely wasn't sure would be accepted. Thomas had been burned by a failed deal before. He was firm. But Joel came back with the structure that made sense for the risk profile: newer business, heavy founder involvement, international team he'd never met in person, and delivered it with the willingness to walk away.
"When I remove that intense desire and detach from the outcome, that's usually when the good stuff happens," he said.
Thomas came back within minutes. He was in.
For the cash at close, Joel went to the SBA rather than liquidating assets tied up in Modern Outbound. A working capital loan through Live Oak Bank covered the down payment. The rest was seller note. The deal got done without upending his personal financial life.
The Team He Pulled Together
Joel had never done a deal. He knew it. So he didn't try to fake expertise he didn't have.
Quality of Earnings was handled by Centurica, a recommendation from the community. The report came back clean: nothing ambiguous, nothing shady, the numbers Thomas had presented were exactly what they were.
The lender experience was mixed. His first bank moved like a DMV with a full waiting room. He switched to Live Oak, which he describes as genuinely great. They moved fast, asked the right questions, and helped close the loop.
Legal was straightforward. The community had an APA template. Joel gave his attorney his terms, they marked it up, and nothing dramatic surfaced.
"You don't have to know how to do a deal if you're surrounded and supported by people who have done it," he said. "And hire functional experts who do the work with you in real time."
The International Wrinkle
Thomas is in Prague. The client success lead is in Italy. The designers are spread across Europe, with a couple in the U.S. Joel had never met any of them in person before closing.
People in the community raised an eyebrow. Joel shrugged it off—thoughtfully.
"We have clients all over the world I've never met in person. We have team members all over the world. It wasn't as scary for me as maybe it should have been."
What mattered was the Q of E report, the conversations, the client feedback he had access to through Slack, and the feel of Thomas as a person: straightforward, no withholding, consistent across every interaction. The numbers aligned. The relationship felt right. He closed.
The First Thirty Days
Joel will tell you the first thirty days were chaos. Good chaos, but chaos.
Every initiative he'd thought through during diligence suddenly needed to happen at once: more structure for the design team, better client communication, a stronger operations layer, the outbound engine stood up and running on day one. He wanted all of it immediately.
What he actually did was sit on his hands. Not entirely, he gave the client success lead a raise, started building trust, set up regular team check-ins. But he deliberately resisted the urge to shake things up before anyone trusted him.
"Your team needs to trust you. You're coming into a new situation—'hi, I'm Joel, I just bought your business.' They're thinking, who the hell are you? Is my job safe? All the things."
By weeks four through six, the trust had started to build. The changes that needed to happen started happening faster. The designers began communicating more directly with clients. Processes tightened. The outbound engine was generating replies within the first few days of being turned on.
"When you're literally invested, and they can see you're emotionally invested, by the time you hit week five or six, they trust you. And then change happens fast."
What the Deal Did to His Thinking
Joel went into this as an entrepreneur who had always grown linearly: one client at a time, building a team, grinding through the ups and downs. He understood that game well.
Buying GTM Design Club introduced him to a different game entirely.
"I wanted to figure out another paradigm—a paradigm shift on how to actually grow an enterprise."
Now he has two companies. They operate separately, but they feed each other. Modern Outbound clients use GTM Design Club. Design clients ask about outbound. The portfolio creates cross-sell opportunities without either brand becoming a diluted generalist.
His thesis for the next deal is sharper for having done this one. He knows he wants to stay close to agency-adjacent services. He knows he can sell before he can build. He knows off-market is probably the right sourcing channel. And he knows that the first deal, whatever it is, needs to be something where he can add immediate, demonstrable value on day one.
"I want a portfolio of specialist agencies that talk to each other. Not a do-it-all shop. I've always been opposed to that."
What He'd Tell Someone Starting Where He Started
Don't consume your way to readiness. At some point, the content stops being empowerment and starts being a stall.
"If you're excitedly pouring over the content, that's a good sign. Make that first phase a few weeks. Then move into: I'm just going to start talking to sellers. Life is short."
He also says this: the fear doesn't go away when you sign. It just changes shape. There were moments during diligence, and more after close, where doubt showed up. The right response isn't to resolve the doubt before moving. It's to have your team around you—Q of E, lender, attorney, community—so that when doubt arrives, you're not alone with it.
"The more we went into diligence, the better I felt. If you're feeling fear and a little anxiety about something, it probably means it's a good move."
Joel closed his first acquisition in March. He's already thinking about the second.
Listen to the Full Conversation
Hear how Joel Graber went from a Zootopia epiphany to wiring money on his first agency acquisition—while running Modern Outbound, renovating his house, and preparing for his third kid—on the Agency Acquisitions & Exits Podcast.
