In September 2025, Mike Begg started a LinkedIn conversation with a founder who wanted out. Reach Social, a TikTok Shop agency, had two partners. One wanted to sell their half. The other wanted to stay.
There was already a buyer. They had signed an LOI, let exclusivity lapse, and never turned up with the cash.
Mike's agency, AMZ Advisers, was doing about $3 million a year in revenue. Reach added roughly $1 million in recurring revenue and a capability his Amazon clients were asking for. He closed the deal in two weeks.
A second conversation was running in the background. Chief Media, an independent performance media agency Mike had met at a conference, had been trying to buy an Amazon agency, and that deal had fallen through. Mike floated an idea: make an offer like that to us, and we might consider it.
In July 2026, roughly ten months after the Reach deal, Chief Media acquired AMZ Advisers along with its stake in Reach Social.
"Getting acquired is kind of recognition of all the hard work that you've put in for so long... Most businesses never get bought. Most of them just end up dying."
This is how he went from buyer to bought, and what each side of the table taught him about the other.
Build Versus Buy
Before Reach, Mike's team had been weighing expansion in several directions: email marketing, paid social, Shopify and direct-to-consumer sites, Walmart, TikTok. TikTok wasn't the plan. It was the opportunity that showed up.
Underneath all of them sat the question most agency owners eventually face.
"Should I just hire people to build this service in-house or should I buy an existing business that can provide the service to my clients?"
For TikTok Shop, building looked expensive. Mike sees the platform today where Amazon was five or six years ago: plenty of brands want it, few people know how to deliver it. The salary asks reflected that. Building meant fronting cash for scarce talent with no guarantee of a return.
Buying looked different.
"There's existing revenue, there's existing client base, there's existing examples of results, all of that can help us get a better return or get our money back faster."
The fit helped. The two agencies weren't overlapping so much as adjacent, both in e-commerce, which made cross-selling between client rosters an easy early win. Creator content on TikTok was also driving visibility for brands on Amazon.
Competitors five or six times AMZ Advisers' size had been hunting for the same capability without success. Mike calls it luck and timing. He also names what makes that kind of luck possible.
"If you're not telling people what you want, if you're not out there asking, you're not going to find the deals."
When talent is scarce and salary asks are high, buying the capability can be the lower-risk path, because the results already exist.
Found on LinkedIn, Closed in Two Weeks
Mike's usual process is methodical. A 30 to 40 minute discovery call. If there's a fit, an NDA. Then balance sheets, P&Ls and anonymized client rosters, followed by a second call of an hour or more to work through his questions before anyone talks structure.
Reach didn't allow for any of that. The original buyer was still expected to close within two weeks, and the selling partner gave Mike the same deadline: match it, or they'd go with the other offer.
What followed was a two-week sprint through financials, legal documents and everything else he was buying into. Mike, who reviewed contracts for years in real estate, estimates he spent four to five full 24-hour periods just reading documents. All while still running AMZ Advisers.
Integration planning, which would normally come first, waited.
"It was more about let's get this deal done and then we'll figure everything else later."
It isn't a timeline anyone would recommend. The speed was only possible because the risks were legible. Reach was about a third of AMZ Advisers' size, the range he'd been targeting so he wouldn't bite off more than he could chew. The balance sheets were clean. The legal documents were clean. His one complaint was that it was a New York LLC, which they restructured after close.
"You have to assess what you're comfortable with or what you're not comfortable with, and that really determines how quickly you can move on something."
Speed comes from knowing which risks you can live with. A small, clean target lets you move fast without betting the business.
Pausing One Deal to Make the Other Worth More
The Chief Media conversation and the Reach opportunity surfaced at nearly the same moment. Mike made a call: pause Chief.
"This could be a good value add. This will increase our multiple, increase our EBITDA."
Once Reach closed, he went back to Chief. Q4 slowed things down, a busy season for e-commerce and media buying alike, so the early exchanges were high-level financials and performance. Mike suspects Chief was checking whether the Reach deal would break his business. It didn't.
Around February, the talks moved into deal structure. The LOI was signed in mid-March. Then came a meeting in New York and months of legal work on the LLC structure and operating agreements. Non-competes were the biggest sticking point. Mike has other businesses, and that negotiation alone took two to three months.
The original plan had been to exit in two to three years. It took ten months.
An acquisition made before your own sale can lift your multiple, as long as the buyer can see it strengthened the business rather than stretched it.
Selling the Vision, Openly
Off-market deals, in Mike's experience, turn on whether the seller believes you.
"You're selling a vision. And if the person on the other end doesn't believe in that vision or thinks you're making it up or thinks you can't execute on it, then the deal's gonna fall through."
That means explaining the alignment, the synergies and where the combined business is going. He describes it as storytelling in service of a relationship.
He also thinks the story has to include the exit. Being transparent about where he was headed gave him more ways to structure a deal the seller would find attractive.
"I'm acquiring these businesses because I have a very clear exit strategy and a very clear direction in where I'm trying to go with this."
He sees the same kind of alignment with Chief Media now: shared goals going forward, the thing he set out to create with Reach.
Telling a seller where you're headed, including your own exit, gives you more room to structure a deal they'll want.
Structure Follows What You're Buying
Mike's approach to deal structure starts with one question: what happens if the seller walks out the door?
With Reach, the answer was bad.
"If the partner that I'm buying leaves, then I'm screwed because I'm running a business that I don't know anything about."
So the structure had to give the remaining partner a reason to stay. Buying another Amazon agency would be different. Mike already knows Amazon. He could absorb the client book and team into his own organization without needing the founder long-term, and without something like rolled equity.
He applies the same logic to what the founder is good at. A founder strong in sales and marketing, which Mike finds rare among smaller agencies, brings relationships and visibility worth keeping. That deal leans on performance, tied to new business closed.
An operator without a lead engine gets the opposite. AMZ Advisers is already talking to one or two hundred brands a month, so the growth would come from Mike's side. That deal gets an equity roll and no EBITDA-based earnout.
"The EBITDA is coming from the work that I'm doing, it's not coming from the work that they're doing at the end of the day."
He also found sellers far more open to creative structures than he expected, whether that means getting paid over time or taking more upside on the next move.
Tie incentives to what the seller actually controls, and only pay to keep the people you can't replace.
The Founder Who Became Corporate Development
Part of what Chief Media bought was Mike himself.
Chief had done one deal about eight years earlier, then stepped away from acquisitions. Its CEO is focused on growing the core business. His son, who leads strategic partnerships, mostly sees deals brought in by brokers. Mike's work has been almost entirely off-market, and his pipeline currently holds 15 to 20 companies.
As Peter put it, Mike is a walking case study. He can describe the before and after to a founder because he just lived it.
Mike doesn't overstate the edge. A banker can build a better model or a sharper deck. What they don't have is both halves.
"I have the acquisition knowledge, I have the operator knowledge from running the business and scaling the business."
If the target is a third of his size, he can show its founder the steps to get where he is. That's a growth shortcut for them and a pipeline shortcut for Chief.
He also sees a gap between buyer types. Chief can pay for the best lawyers. A small buyer without that capital or sophistication is working against both, and Mike's own legal bill on the sale got substantial.
An operator who has bought and been bought speaks to founders in a way a banker can't, and acquirers who use that get more deals moving.
Listen to the Full Conversation
Hear Mike Begg explain how he found Reach Social through a LinkedIn conversation, why he paused his own sale to close a two-week acquisition first, how he matches deal structure to what a seller controls, and what Chief Media saw in bringing him into its acquisition strategy, on the Agency Acquisitions & Exits Podcast.
You can reach Mike on LinkedIn or at mike@amzadvisers.com.
