Who’s helping us scale Baton

Small Business Week was last week and the theme was "Building on the Small Business Boom.” While we've made a lot of progress and started initiatives to help Americans start more small businesses, the process of buying and selling a small business has been broken. It’s even crazier when you think about how important small businesses are to the American economy:

• Small businesses make up 99.9% of U.S. businesses

• They provide jobs for 61.6 million workers or nearly 46% of the workforce

• Small businesses create two-thirds of all new jobs in the country

Imagine a world in which there’s not a reliable way for homeowners to understand the value of their home, list it, have buyers find it, or start shopping for their next place to live? But that’s exactly the problem for small business owners and buyers today. The mismatch between what owners and buyers (and the country) need and what exists is what drives us here at Baton. 

Last year I talked about how we were building Baton — our core values, vision, and progress. Since then we have scaled into a modern marketplace for small businesses and helped thousands of owners and buyers. But the most exciting development over the last year is that small business owners and buyers are 7X more likely to close their deal on Baton versus the industry average.¹ The best part is that we’re just getting started… 

Our incredible owners

We’ve supported thousands of owners in the last year and we’re only getting started. At the end of the day, we want to become THE place small business owners and buyers trust. Just two years out from our founding here are some of the things we’ve achieved towards that goal:

• 1,300+ free valuations to small businesses that help them decide what’s next

• 175+ owners listing their business on the platform

• 16 deals successfully sold.  We’re now closing a deal a week — see our dedicated case studies page!

• Getting our owners to the closing table 50% faster than the industry average 

We were still brand new when many of these small business owners turned to us for help selling their businesses and we’ll be forever grateful that they took a chance on us. We’ve helped sell small businesses ranging from a food stand in Colorado to landscaping companies in New York to a photo booth rental company in North Carolina and even named our conference rooms in their honor:

Baton's conference rooms named after some of the businesses we've sold

Owners we have worked with have ranged from younger entrepreneurs with eyes on their next ventures to true veterans of their fields — some who told us they wished they had retired years ago. Some reasons they turned to Baton:

• They had a buyer on the line but it fell through, resulting in months lost to the process

• Their business sat on BizBuySell for months without any traction

• They tried to sell their businesses themselves but it was too much effort while running their businesses

Thank you again to all of our owners and we’d love to have you if you haven’t signed up yet!

“The whole process was painless and actually not stressful. Why? Paul brought us through the process, giving us facts, and limited advice where it was our decision, and not a pressure sale. He always had our best interest in mind." — Hans Kuhn, Former Owner, ASAP Pharmacy

Our amazing (and growing!) team 

We’ve more than doubled the team since the last update in order to support even more owners and buyers. As I mentioned above, our vision is to build THE end-to-end platform to buy and sell a business online that brings human involvement and advice at all the right places. We’ve shipped a bunch of features for our customers in the last year that have gotten us closer to the vision:

• Improved Valuation Reports for owners to see sales comps and add-backs for their business built on our industry-leading data

• A new Listing Dashboard for owners to see the progress of their listing in real-time (leads, buyer meetings, LOIs, etc.)

• Industry-leading Sale Listings that let buyers underwrite potential opportunities quickly with verified financials, industry benchmarks, owner video interviews, and data room access

• A completely new Search experience to let buyers source the perfect deal 

"The simplicity and ease that things were available; the clean UI, the videos, the easily navigable financials. It's clear you do a lot of prep for the businesses before they go online. I love the idea of this business. Finding small businesses to buy is a logistical nightmare and this idea will crush it.” — Stuart Skeates, Buyer

I’ve detailed the changes in a separate changelog article here and check out Baton Beat for future updates. None of the features and improvements above would be possible without our incredible team!

We have a bunch of improvements shipping shortly:

• A Go-To-Market Dashboard for owners to get their listings live sooner

• A Buyer Interest Dashboard for buyers to manage multiple deals easier

• Messaging between Owners and Buyers on platform

"I am liking the experience with Baton! It feels like a modern twist on the business buying process. Please keep innovating and improving because it all matters to small businesses." — Andrew Berg, Design Manager, Tesla

Our new (and old!) investors

Last year we raised another round of funding and we’re thrilled to have partnered with some amazing new investors: Divergent Capital, wndrCo, Zeno, Trust Fund, Black Angel Group, Unpopular Ventures, Coho Deeptech, along with participation from our prior investors. Every single one of our investors believes in the transformational nature of what we are building and how impactful it can be in the world. Our growth has only just begun, but I’d like to thank our investors for their belief in our vision and team and for their support. 

Together, we’ll all succeed

One of my favorite proverbs is “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” I think it perfectly sums up what we are trying to accomplish at Baton — we’re building a solution that is sorely needed in the industry with a world-class team. We’re changing the world of selling and buying small businesses and on the road to making small business ownership attainable for everyone. If this sounds interesting, let us know!

"Baton’s customer experience is absolutely stellar! I am brand new to the acquisition space and it has been tough. Navigating brokers to get data, regardless of my financials, has been treacherous. Thank you for your platform, you have no idea how much it is helping.” — Amber Anderson, Buyer

¹ comparing BizBuySell data and internal Baton data