This video details Eric Remer's entrepreneurial journey, including founding, funding, scaling, and exiting multiple ventures.
This video details Eric Remer's entrepreneurial journey, including founding, funding, scaling, and exiting multiple ventures. He discusses strategies for selling companies in parts and scaling through numerous acquisitions, culminating in a $2B+ valuation for EverCommerce.
If you have a positive mindset and you're focused on what's going to happen, it allows you to be persistent because you really believe it's going to happen. If you aren't positive and you don't believe it's going to ultimately happen, it's never going to happen. The lonely journey of the CEO is really realized on this early stage of the businesses. [Music] All righty. Hello everyone and welcome to the deal maker show. So today we have a really awesome founder, you know, a founder that, you know, it's unbelievable, you know, the amount of times that he's done it, you know, like the the latest, you know, company, a rocket ship, you know, he's taken public, uh, and really remarkable journey. So again, all the good stuff on the building, scaling, financing, uh, and exiting tool because he's had a previous exit tool that we're going to be discussing. But I find that you should all brace
yourself for a very inspiring conversation. So without further ado, let's welcome our guest today, Eric Remer. Welcome to the show. >> Well, appreciate you for having me today. Looking forward to it. >> So, originally born in Michigan. So, give us a walk through memory lane. How was life growing up over there? >> Life was good. You know, grew up on, you know, grew up on the lakes, you know, played played hockey, played uh baseball, and, you know, had a had a really great childhood. um you know was uh good family, great brother and sister and uh you know was was was kind of blessed with a really really nice childhood. >> How do you how do you go from because obviously you know there you uh studied too in the University of Michigan but from there you go into investment banking before entering the venture world. So why investment banking out of all things? >>
Uh pretty random. Uh I was a history major with no finance and accounting uh background and you know started interviewing for uh for jobs out of school and and kind of a little bit little bit random the the year prior uh in the summer I ended up getting an internship at the World Bank and so I kind of popped into the investment banking screens and I started getting interviews and and Alejandra I couldn't know less. I was so damn clueless. I didn't even know what an investment bank was when I started interviewing with them. And through the process, what I realized was I was talking to a lot of smart people. They were they were asking good questions. And as I kind of figured out the game that they were playing, I thought it'd be a really great opportunity if I was able to get in. And so got a job at Kderpbody, which no longer exists, but at the time was a nice size uh investment bank. And
it really became a business 101 for me. you know my father was a you know physician you know mother was kind of a kind of small little entrepreneur but we I had no business background or no business sophistication. So it really started as a um a platform to learn about business and and uh you know allowed my entrepreneur kind of mindset to grow with some real base of knowledge. >> So what was that moment like where you were like okay you know it's a it's time let's go and you got started with I behavior. >> Yeah. Um, well, prior to that, I had a little entrepreneurial bug in college. I started my first company. I started a uh a flower selling company. We imported flowers from uh Miami. We thought it was an amazing idea. We had a buddy who went to the University of Miami sent, you know, truckloads of uh flowers to us uh for Valentine's Day. And we thought would sell, you know,
undercut the market and sell it really well. And it was um my first entrepreneurial opportunity to realize that shit's harder than you think it is. And uh we we did sell, you know, 300 dozen roses um made zero dollars and uh worked our ass off. So it was it was kind of my entry into understanding that you can build something out of nothing. So when I was at, you know, right after I had uh left the investment bank, I had gotten together with a group of people that were focused on there was there was a company called Abacus Direct out there and Abacus Direct was ultimately sold to Doubleclick for a couple billion dollars. And what Abacus Direct had done was, you know, consolidate the the marketplace of kind of direct marketers because we we laugh now about e-commerce. Everyone buys something online. I literally bought, you know, this morning something on Amazon. It's it's a it's a normal
thing. But in early 90s, you know, only 30% of the US population was willing to buy something sight unseen, meaning, you know, in a catalog or something of that nature. So you might be the right demographic. You may fit exactly perfect into that buying you know uh the person that should buy from this catalog but if you were willing to buy weren't willing to buy sight on scene you were going to be a wasted catalog to that group. So these these businesses called cooperative databases which abacus built started to proliferate and we started I behavior to really focus on helping um not only the offline world but really online world as well because at that time ecom was starting to really explode. So we started I behavior. I met with a group of people. They were focused on this kind of you know direct marketing for you know online players. I just spent some time in that online space and as we
came together we started I behavior and um I behavior ultimately you know grew to we we had an online division focused on that kind of ecom space and offline division which is more of a traditional cooperative database helping direct marketers target consumers more effectively. So then let's talk about the I behavior you know uh ultimately you know quite the quite the successful outcome you know you guys basically broke that into two pieces you know and it ended up being two transactions you know I believe for 100 million a pop I mean how do you how do you grow a business you know to a level where instead of doing the typical acquisition you know process with a whole entity you end up breaking it into two pieces and selling it to two reputable companies you know how did that work out >> yeah you know like everything in life, you know, it's it's rarely a direct line. Uh it's
definitely not up and to the right. We had many of uh many challenges along the way. But as the business kind of evolved, the the offline the online divisions were really serving different marketplaces. And we had we went to market to sell the whole thing and one of the buyers um which ended up being AAI who wanted the online division was much more interested and they really only wanted the online piece of the business and the price they were paying was almost very close to what other companies were were asking for the you know we're going to pay for the whole company. So we went through the kind of process um which was some tax complic complications and stuff of breaking up the business soldi that online division um I think it was for you know just under $100 million and then uh we we still own the offline vision. So a couple years later we built that up and then sold that separately to
uh um at the time was an ad agency called Young and Rubicon who had a uh kind of data group within that within that entity. Now what kind of visibility do you think that gave you into deal making you know because obviously here you got you know the full cycle you know visibility and not only in one transaction but in two so that's pretty amazing. Yeah, you know, I mean, I had a little bit of dabble that investment banking. So, I kind of saw the world of uh you know, M&A and deal making a little bit, but you know, being on the on the seller side when you're when you're selling a company and, you know, everyone sees deals that get closed, you know, nobody sees the process of actually going through the deal. And and I know we'll get to it, but at Evercommerce, my current business, you know, we we've acquired 53 companies over the last 10 years. And you know, knowing what I know now
based on buying 53 companies versus what I didn't know then, you know, you think these transactions are going to be pretty straightforward and and they rarely are. You know, the buyers go in with good intentions. Um, they rarely go in with full conviction. So, there's a lot of diligence is real, you know, and deals break up all the time for a variety of reasons. And and they go, you know, it's it's not a straight line. They go through, you know, twists and turns to get to the end. and and and I think it was for me going through that for the first time I think it was more complicated than I thought it was going to be. Um but getting to the end of it is you know is always a real real nice thing. >> Now in your case you know what happened after that is you got started with apartment moves you know under Conclave Group and and that ended up kind of like evolving all the way into what
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