What Happened After I Bought an Agency: The Reach Social Deal

Most acquisition content is written by people selling advisory services. This one is a deal I actually did, with my own money, and it is the deal I point to when a seller asks the only question that really matters: what happens to my company after I sign?

I bought Reach Social Commerce at the start of Q4. Here is how it went, including the part that did not go well.

Why I bought it

I was building an Amazon agency and watching TikTok Shop turn into a real channel rather than an experiment. Brands were asking for both. We could either keep referring that work out or own it.

Owning it meant we could sell one thing instead of two. That is the whole thesis: a brand does not want an Amazon agency and a TikTok agency coordinating over email. It wants the two channels run by teams that talk to each other. The synergy was not theoretical, it was the thing clients kept asking us for and we kept saying no to.

How the deal came together

Outbound. I found it, it was not shopped to me.

I reached out on LinkedIn to one of the two co-founders. He introduced me to his partner, Jackie, and we started talking through details. They already had an offer on the table that had come out of exclusivity, so there was a real clock on it.

We evaluated fast, ran diligence, and closed within two weeks. That is the fastest close I have ever been part of.

I bought out one co-founder. Jackie stayed.

What happened to the people

This is the part sellers actually care about, so I will be specific.

No employees left at the acquisition. We kept the entire team through the end of Q4, which is the full quarter after we bought them.

At the end of that quarter we reviewed the team properly, and a few people were not performing. Jackie made those calls, not me. She had run that team, she knew who was carrying weight, and the decision was hers. We then brought in new people with stronger backgrounds who fit how the team worked.

Jackie is still President. She still owns a meaningful piece of the company, still runs day to day operations, and is still based in New York. I did not replace management, because replacing management is how you destroy the thing you just paid for.

For everyone who stayed, honestly, not much changed. We were not there to reorganize how they worked. What we did was improve the processes around them and give them more support and better resources than a small independent agency can fund on its own. By about month three the difference people actually felt was support. That is what showed up in the results the following year.

The numbers

Over roughly ten months:

• Revenue grew more than 125%, more than doubling monthly revenue
• Headcount grew by four
• The business now runs roughly 20 clients
• We launched multiple clients into serious run rates and integrated TikTok Shop into their wider marketing strategy rather than running it as a side channel

I am deliberately not publishing the raw revenue figures. The percentage is the honest part and the part that transfers.

One thing worth being straight about: this was a tuck-in, not a platform deal. Reach Social was smaller than the businesses I target now, which sit in the $500K to $5M EBITDA range. I am not putting it forward as proof of the size I buy at. I am putting it forward as proof of what I do after close, which is the thing a seller is actually trying to assess.

The hard part

Integration. All of it.

Getting two teams aligned, and rebuilding the sales process so it matched how we were selling, was harder and slower than the deal itself. Nothing dramatic went wrong in the first ninety days. There was no blowup, no exodus, no client revolt. It was just far more work than it needed to be, and a lot more brain damage than it should have taken.

What I would do differently

Have a go to market plan before signing.

Closing in two weeks won us the deal. It also meant we had almost no time to plan what we would do on day one. We were building the integration while running it, and that is why the first ninety days cost more effort than they should have.

This is the honest tension in how I buy. Moving fast is a real advantage for a seller: no broker, no six month process, no deal fatigue, and no financing contingency that collapses at week ten. I still move fast. But speed on the transaction is not the same as speed on the transition, and I now do the go to market planning during diligence rather than after signing. That change came directly out of this deal.

What this should tell you if you are thinking about selling

Look at what a buyer does after close, not at what they promise before it.

At Reach Social, the team stayed. The founder stayed, kept ownership, and kept authority, including over her own team. The business more than doubled. And the one thing that went wrong was my planning, not their business.

If you are weighing an exit, the 50-deal filter I run before responding to any listing is the same one I ran here, and the due diligence checklist is the one I would run on you. Both are free and neither requires talking to me.

If you want to talk about your business, here is how the process works.

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