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Rick Smith

Rick Smith

Five-time CFO and founder of Bonfire Advisory, author of "Six Months to the Sale" and "Demystifying the Role of the CFO in Venture and Growth Stage Companies"

Sep 17, 2026

23:40
Can you break down the differences of selling to strategics versus PE firms and running a sales process with both of those parties involved?
23:48
Yeah.
23:49
And I'm going to go in so many directions here that you're going to see the chaos of trying to get this to work.
23:54
The nuances are not small nuances and I am going to generalize here, but let's just start off with the fact that PE firms have plenty of deal focused staff who can move quickly.
24:05
Now strategics, there's going to be a wide range.
24:07
If they are a serial acquirer, which there are plenty of strategic serial acquirers out there, they might have a corp dev team.
24:14
They might have a lot of deal staffing that's available.

31 MINS LATER

Fat JoeSOUNDBITE_SPEAKER
55:09
I don't know how they do it.
13:41
for
13:41
rockstars.
13:42
And if you ask many VC firms or CEOs to describe that rockstar CFO that they want to hire, they'll gravitate towards the same generic description over and over again.
13:51
Number one, someone who has an elite academic pedigree.
13:54
Number two, somebody who scaled multiple businesses and grew their valuations by 10x.
13:58
Number three, somebody who's super polished in board meetings and can answer 100% of the detailed questions that are thrown at them on the fly.
14:06
Number four, somebody who can integrate a bunch of acquisitions.

49 MINS LATER

62:55
Out of all the leases that you've undertaken, how many of them do you actually get to move in on time?

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