Hello and welcome to the exit presented by Flip the world's largest marketplace to buy and sell online businesses and startups the exit is a 30-minute podcast featuring expert entrepreneurs who have been there and they have done it the exit talks to operators who's

bought and sold businesses of all different sizes you'll learn how they did it why they did it and get exposure to the world of exits so world occupied by a small few but accessible to many.

Now in this special episode I sit down with Satish Bala an awesome entrepreneur with three successful exits he walks us through all the different things that he did to prepare for exits he walks us through taking care of his team after an exit took place talks about joint venture kind of failing and going through an exit afterwards and really fantastic story here so without further ado let's sit down and talk through multiple successful exits with Satish Bala.

All right what is up everyone today I am joined by Satish Bala and he is the chief executive officer and founder of schoolio how's it going Satish fantastic thank you for having me on the call yeah I'm excited to get into the nitty gritty here but before we kind of dive into your multiple successes

over your career let's talk a little bit about your origin story how did you get into business and entrepreneurship yeah it's a great question.

And it was more of a poll into the ecosystem than wanting to push into it you know I was born in India grew up in Singapore at the age of 14 we basically left the country because I was a dumb student.

And we got something in the mail from the country saying his son is uneducatable and it's an embarrassed parents they were like we got to get on a plane and get out of here before the relatives find out and so the most part of my life I just didn't feel like because I wasn't smart in school that I was going to have a career so it's always been the guy thinking about a side home so thinking about how to win in this system when I can't fit into the system so naturally as I was graduating computer science I was paying attention to what I was doing.

I was paying attention to what's happening around the world and the web was just coming up and Y2K was coming up and there was a lot of need for technology but nobody really knew what they were doing.

So I started to think hey man you know this career path is good but I'm still nervous and imposter syndrome is there what if I don't get a job what if I don't get an interview so I decided to just see what I can do with the education I had.

I called call the bunch of different companies in Toronto and see if anybody needs a website nobody knew what it was but they were all interested so I started making websites and then that turned into my first venture called spider designs in year four which I eventually sold to my partners before I graduated but you know I started I went into it out of fear and the thing that I was most nervous about ended up being the best gift because I found out I'm really good at solving problems and I'm really good at building these little micro companies.

And things like that and so 25 years later I'd be lucky enough to build and exit a bunch of companies and along the way build a bunch of companies that you know taught me a bunch of stuff about life.

Yeah yeah I love that I kind of started with just the chip on the shoulder to say like all right I'm going to I'm going to go out and I'm going to grind I'm looking at all different types of businesses and then you started one and you know even before you'd graduated you kicked off the first business.

So you kind of got that taste of control and the sense of ownership which I think is such an empowering thing for for young people coming into like the workforce is like actually I think I'm going to take this route.

Yeah yeah you know if you follow the path of you know education is you know you go into the JK SK world and you don't really get a freedom to exercise what you're learning until end of high school or maybe you know university of college and so most of us that freedom to decide what to do with this toolkit happens so much later in life.

And I feel like everybody should start a business at some point to just figure out what they're made of no rules no you know no salary every two weeks no benefits you just have to figure out what am I made of and I think that's a great adventure everybody should be out at least once.

Yeah agreed 100% so we went from the you know grade year four to the exit you sold your partners that was the first kind of taste.

Of what an exit was like let's kind of shift years into the second one because I understand that there's multiple here so let's unpack the second one and what that was and how that started.

Yeah so the the second one was it was a built was a company called new age consulting which is built on the backs of white 2k so you know the by the time I sold the company in 1999 to my partners and I exit it white 2k was coming around and those tons of need for it.

So I got into the enterprise world really boring work to be honest wasn't life life changing wasn't fulfilling but you know I was 22 23 at that point and you get and pay to 300 dollars an hour to do programming and consulting work and was able to turn that into a bit of an enterprise support company.

Yeah it was SAP and a bunch of really you know interesting technology and what I learned in that period was that there's an abundance of money and I lost the fear of making money because I made a lot and in that six years I also lost a lot of money because I'm a new CEO I didn't know what I was doing.

Making back decisions with cash flow I never understood accounting a bookkeeping and so in those six years we've made a lot of money and I lost a lot of money and the fear of money left my system which I think is probably the greatest gift that I could receive from that business so much of entrepreneurship is this mental exhaustion around this emotion around money constantly thinking about it when we get to a certain level and so that business you know I sold in 2006 to a competitor who wanted to get into a customer base.

The customer base were working winners in the barge and some big banks at that time and personally I was at a point where my creative side was starting to blossom and the business didn't have a creative outlet and so these exit was really just a life choice for me because even though we're making a lot of money I was not happy anymore because it was a side of me that didn't have a space to exist.

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