When Sam Shepler talks about M&A, he lights up.

Not the terminology of it, not the deal mechanics, but the part most founders overlook entirely: the relationships. The long-running check-ins with founders he wasn't sure he'd ever do a deal with. The curiosity about how other people were building similar businesses. The conversations that started without an agenda and, years later, turned into signed asset purchase agreements.

I sat down with Sam to unpack what he's built at Testimonial Hero and its parent company Storiesnap.com, how he approached his first two acquisitions, what he got right, what he got wrong, and what he'd tell a founder who's curious but hasn't yet made the move.

What came out of it was one of the more grounded, practical conversations I've had about small agency M&A. Because Sam didn't come from a finance background. He came from the work, built his instincts through trial and error, and went two for two on his first two deals. Here's how.

The Business, and the Backstory

Sam has been in B2B content and creative for over twelve years. He started his first agency, Skyscope Creative, right out of college with two business partners, a classic accidental entrepreneur story. They made all kinds of videos for all kinds of clients. It grew. They sold it in 2016.

He swore he'd never start another agency.

By 2018, he'd started another agency.

But this time, deliberately. Testimonial Hero was built with a different philosophy than Skyscope: specialization over breadth. Where Skyscope did anything for anyone, Testimonial Hero does one thing exceptionally well: customer testimonial videos for B2B tech companies. Productized. Scalable. Focused.

"We're going to be the absolute best in the world at one type of video, for one type of buyer," he told me. It's a decision that shaped everything that came after.

By the time he started thinking seriously about acquisitions, Testimonial Hero had the kind of foundation that makes M&A viable: a strong leadership team, a president running operations, and a VP of Revenue managing the pipeline. Sam could focus on deals precisely because other people were handling the business.

That's not a coincidence. That's a prerequisite.

Building Relationships Before You Need Them

Sam was thinking about M&A before he was really doing it. He'd heard about it, read about it, turned it over in his mind and decided that even if he didn't know when or how it would happen, he was going to start building relationships with potential targets now.

"Even if you don't end up doing a deal anytime soon, it's like the more relationships you have with potential target companies, or by the way, people who might acquire you, the better," he said.

This is how most good agency deals actually happen. Not through brokers or auction processes, but through relationships that warm over years until timing finally aligns.

Both of Sam's first two deals came from exactly that kind of cultivated connection. Not cold outreach. Not a marketplace listing. Long-standing conversations where both parties were thinking about the future and watching for the right moment.

The deals didn't come to him because he was hunting. They came to him because he was listening.

Deal One: A Carve-Out From Private Equity

The first acquisition is the kind of deal that shouldn't work, but did.

A software company that had been offering written case studies as a services division had just been acquired by private equity. The PE firm was there for the SaaS revenue. The services division, a small team doing B2B written case studies, was effectively an orphan.

Sam had built a prior relationship with the leader running that division. When the PE acquisition happened, the leader reached out: things looked uncertain, the new owners weren't interested in the services side, was there an opportunity here?

There was. But getting the deal done required negotiating a carve-out asset sale directly with the acquiring private equity company, which, as Sam put it, is "very weird" territory for a smaller agency buyer. The deal died multiple times. His first offer got rejected outright by their investment committee.

He went back with a better deal. And then he got it done.

The lesson he took wasn't just about persistence. It was about reading what the other side actually wanted. The PE firm wasn't trying to maximize valuation. They'd just acquired a hundred-person software company. They wanted the services division to go away, cleanly, with no ongoing reporting obligations, no earnout conversations, no headaches.

"They wanted it off their plate," he said.

Once Sam understood that, the structure changed. Full cash on close, a clean valuation they could stomach, no deferred consideration. Not his preferred deal structure — he'd have loved seller financing — but not every deal gives you that optionality. Sometimes reading the room and giving the seller what they need is how you get the deal done.

There was another nuance he reflected on. His initial offer had been so favorable to him that it put his internal champion, an operating partner at the PE firm, in a bad position with his own investment committee. It wasn't just that the offer was rejected. It was that presenting it made the champion look bad.

Once Sam understood the political dynamics at play, he adjusted. That's a deal lesson that doesn't show up in any textbook.

Deal Two: The Friendly Competitor

The second acquisition came together around the same time and this one was different in almost every way.

The seller was what Sam described as his largest direct competitor, roughly a quarter of Testimonial Hero's size. They'd been talking for years. Not urgently. Just the kind of ongoing conversation between founders in the same space who see each other at events, respect what the other is building, and loosely wonder if there might be something to explore someday.

Someday arrived. And because there was a real relationship underneath the deal, the structure could be much more collaborative.

Rather than cash on close, they built in deferred consideration: a percentage of revenue paid over time. Sam's preference is revenue-based earnouts over profit-based ones, and for good reason. Profit is manageable. A buyer running the business can make a dozen decisions that affect the P&L. Revenue is clean. Both parties can see the same number. There's no argument about manipulation.

"I just wanted something that was fair, black and white. We can all agree on it," he said.

The negotiation itself was mostly about definitions. Which clients went into which bucket. What counted as an active client. What happened to pipeline deals that were close to closing at the time of the transaction. These aren't sexy deal points, but they're where agreements actually get made.

Getting those definitions exactly right — and both parties believing they were fair — is what separates a deferred consideration structure that works from one that turns adversarial post-close.

Closing Two Deals in Under 60 Days (and What It Cost Him)

Here's the part of the story that gets lost in the highlight reel.

Sam closed both deals within months of each other. It worked. The strategic fit was obvious. The integration was smooth. His team ran with it. From the outside, it looked like a perfectly executed playbook.

Internally, he immediately started looking for the next deal.

"I went two for two and thought, this is easy, I'll just do more of this," he said. "And then I was pretty quickly disabused of that notion."

The deals were real, but they were also exceptional in how they came together. Motivated sellers, aligned timing, longstanding relationships, that combination doesn't repeat on demand. The funnel math of M&A is humbling. You need to talk to a lot of people to find the opportunities that are genuinely ready, genuinely strategic, and genuinely executable.

His first two deals spoiled his expectations. He knows that now.

The Integration Lesson He Keeps Having to Relearn

Sam is, by his own admission, not the right person to run an integration. His skillset is finding the deals, seeing the bigger picture, building the relationships. The detailed operational work of absorbing a new team into an existing business is a different muscle.

He has people for that. And that's the point.

"If there's no integration strategy, there is no deal thesis," he told me. It's the clearest thing he said in our whole conversation. The value you think you're acquiring on paper only materializes if someone executes the integration competently. And in most smaller agencies, the founder who does the deal is not the person who should be running the integration.

His president and leadership team handled the integration of both acquisitions almost entirely without him. He was the deal sponsor. They were the value creators. Knowing the difference, and having people on both sides of that line, is what made the deals work.

He also pointed out something worth sitting with. When you're asking your operations team to absorb two new business units while managing their existing responsibilities, you're asking a lot. The reason his team said yes enthusiastically wasn't just loyalty. It was that the strategic fit was so clear that everyone could see why it made sense. A great deal thesis makes integration easier because it makes the work feel worth doing.

Buying Capability, Not Just Revenue

If I had to reduce Sam's whole approach to one sentence, it would be the thing he told me he'd say to any first-time agency buyer:

"Buying revenue is cool, but buying capability is better."

The written case study acquisition didn't just add a revenue line. It added a competency that would have taken Testimonial Hero years to build organically: the knowledge, the processes, the people, the portfolio. The competitor acquisition didn't just add clients. It added a team and a client base that cross-sells naturally into Testimonial Hero's existing 500 B2B tech relationships.

Revenue can be grown other ways. You can hire salespeople. You can spend on marketing. You can expand the team. But you can't buy years of earned expertise in a new discipline without paying the real price of time — unless you make an acquisition.

"It's very hard in my experience to quickly move into a new capability in a matter of weeks or months," he said. "That can take years to do."

That's the actual arbitrage in tuck-in acquisitions. Not the multiple. Not the synergies on a spreadsheet. The time you don't have to spend figuring something out from scratch.

What He Learned Looking Under the Competitor's Hood

There's a particular conversation I don't want to skip over.

When you acquire a competitor, you get to see something most founders never see: how someone else in your space actually runs their business. The messy inside, not the polished outside.

What Sam found when he got under the hood of his largest competitor was instructive, and not in the way you might expect. It wasn't that the competitor was dramatically better or dramatically worse. It was that, like most project-based creative agencies, they were running on cash-basis accounting and cash-basis accounting doesn't tell you the truth about a project-heavy business.

If you bill a client $100K in January for work you'll deliver in March, April, and May, your January looks great and your spring looks inexplicably thin. Revenue and expenses don't match the actual work. You can't make good decisions about hiring, pricing, or capacity if the numbers you're looking at don't reflect the economics of the business.

Sam's own company had learned this lesson the hard way before the acquisition. Seeing it again in the target company reinforced it.

"I've never seen a company in project-based creative services do accrual accounting properly," he told me. For any buyer evaluating an agency in this category: look at how they recognize revenue. It's one of the fastest ways to understand whether the business's financial picture is real.

The Mindset That Makes M&A Possible

Sam mentioned a quote that stuck with him from something he'd read, or maybe heard from me, he said, he couldn't remember, about managing your emotions in a deal process.

"You don't want to be that guy that the seller thinks, I will sell my business to anyone but that guy."

It's a small thing, but it matters. Deal processes have real friction. There are moments when both sides are frustrated. There are terms that don't get resolved easily. The founders who build their reputation in the market as people who show up with integrity, keep their emotions managed, and respect the seller's perspective, even when they disagree, are the founders who get deals done.

Sellers choose their buyers. In small agency M&A especially, where founders have built businesses that reflect their values and their relationships, the deal going to the highest bidder is rarer than you'd think. The deal goes to the person the seller trusts.

That trust is built over time. Sam started building it years before he signed his first LOI.

What He's Looking For Next

Sam is still active. He's not announcing specific deals here, but his acquisition thesis has evolved from the early tuck-ins.

Storiesnap, the parent company, is building toward being the creative partner for B2B marketing teams, specifically mid-market B2B SaaS companies. The strategy has moved from "B2B video testimonials" to "B2B video" to now, something broader: anything that helps deliver high-quality content to their core buyer.

"We're becoming more agnostic about the medium," he told me, "and way more open to just anything that helps deliver value to our core ideal customer profile."

That breadth is earned. You can only expand the thesis once you've built the foundation. His team, his systems, and his track record of integration have created the conditions for more ambitious deals. And his cross-sell capability, Testimonial Hero working with nearly 500 B2B tech marketing clients, is a genuine strategic asset he can offer to smaller founders who want access to a bigger pond.

"They might have 50 B2B tech companies they work with. We have almost 500. If they want to grow, we can pour rocket fuel on that cross-sell through the trusted relationships we have."

That's a compelling acquirer value proposition. And it's the kind of thing that takes years of operating to be able to honestly say.

For Founders Who Are Curious But Haven't Started

Sam's journey into M&A wasn't a plan. It was a disposition.

He was curious about competitors. He stayed friendly with people he could have treated as adversaries. He kept conversations alive without attaching outcomes to them. He built a team capable of absorbing new companies before he had any companies to absorb. And when timing aligned, he was ready.

None of that required a background in finance. It required the willingness to show up consistently, to listen more than pitch, and to understand that in agency M&A, the relationship almost always precedes the deal by years.

If you're a founder who's been quietly wondering whether this is something you could do — the answer is probably yes. But the time to start building the relationships, the team, and the operational clarity is not when you've identified a target. It's now. Before you need it.

Sam started thinking about M&A long before he was ready to do it. That head start is exactly why he was ready when the opportunities arrived.

Sam Shepler is the founder of Storiesnap.com and Testimonial Hero. To reach him about potential acquisitions or partnerships, you can connect on LinkedIn.

Listen to the full conversation with Sam on the Agency Acquisitions & Exits Podcast.

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