Hello and welcome to the exit presented by flippa.com the number one platform to buy and sell online businesses flippa manages over a billion in deal value annually and combines expert buy and sell side advisory with its market leading valuation tool deal room off market offering market insights and AI based deal by deal matching engine now for the exit the exit is a 30 minute podcast featuring amazing entrepreneurs who have been there and they have done it.

The exit talks to operators who have bought and sold businesses of all different sizes you learn how they did it why they did it and get exposure to the world of exits it's a world occupied by a small few but accessible to many now this episode I sit down with Eddie waiting him he was the founder of a company called the defense works and it was about fraud prevention he talks about how he initially wanted to just for places salary at the law firm he was currently at and he does some really great job

on packing how his trajectory moved into entrepreneurship where he started at this law firm decided he wanted to fill a hole in what they were paying to do and initially he was doing you know a different type of business and pivoted into the defense works it's a really great story of how effectively he didn't think it was going to go through an acquisition as fast as it did but proof point stepped in company based in the US and acquired them it was a team about

10 I believe during the acquisition and Eddie talks about his earn out how he stuck around there for a couple of years while that earn out happened and he is just a very happy guy at this point in his life he has two kids we talked about that how you know in between the time where he initiated the conversation with this person who actually reached out from reviews which is the first that I've heard where they were doubling tripling down on getting customers

to do reviews for their business and that triggered multiple large players in his fraud prevention space and is such a cool concept of just rely on your customers to give you great reviews and craze and get out there and eventually that triggers more sales and triggers eventually acquiring companies to reach out and say hey who are these people we're just going to acquire them and roll them up into our offering so

is such a great story about not only you know going through the process of pivoting but ultimately relying on your customers to get you in front of the eventual acquiring company and he talks a lot about that process with you know the earn out going through the deal and the time that it took to go through it so really great conversation but without further ado let's dive into my interview here with Eddie winning him the current founder of go founder

and let's jump right into it here on the exit

all right everyone I am here with Eddie winning him and he's the founder of go founder how's it going Eddie

hey Steve yeah good well good thanks my how you i'm doing great i'm doing great i'm excited to unpack your exit but before we do let's get into your background how did you get started in business and entrepreneurship

um i was probably late to the party really i um i originally enjoyed the police i was a police officer first of and just shy of ten years i enjoyed the police when i was eighteen and kind of realized after a few years that wasn't necessarily what i wanted to do forever

and then i um i went into law so i studied and and sort of dropped my hours of the police a little bit

studied full-time alongside my job which was pretty intense and and then qualified as a lawyer but

literally day one of that realized well that was a mistake um i probably i probably don't want to do that

for the rest of my life and then that's when my gears really started to turn terms of thinking of

starting a business i had and i didn't really know what to do at that point but i sort of was

trying to be a bit more aware of what was going on so i've seen what sort of things that the law

firm now was working at the time we're paying for where my skills cuts could originally match

and it kind of grew organically from there i got an idea the original idea was simply sell some

like basically like debt collection reports to law firms so it was like private investigation

corporate investigation work not particularly glamorous and but i figured i could i could probably

make my own wage back doing that and set off doing that and then quickly within the space of about

six months pivoted into what eventually became the business i sold which was which was a security

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