LA woman spent $50K building a company that sold for $22M only to buy it back. What aspiring entrepreneurs should know

In the satellite of startups, the extremity for galore founders is not to turn their concern into a mature operation, but to standard rapidly and marque a large exit.

Famous examples see Facebook's multi-billion dollar acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, arsenic good arsenic Microsoft’s acquisition of Github, which made the founders of those startups instant billionaires.

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Even selling a comparatively tiny concern tin marque you an instant millionaire. That’s what happened to Jaclyn Johnson, the Los Angeles–based laminitis of the women’s concern level Create & Cultivate, who sold her institution for $22 cardinal successful 2021 (1).

After selling Create & Cultivate, Johnson walked distant from her relation arsenic CEO exhausted but financially secure. Yet, conscionable 2 years later, she did thing fewer entrepreneurs adjacent consider: she bought backmost her ain company.

How she got determination is an absorbing communicative that says a batch astir our existent obsession with overnight wealth, the motivations down entrepreneurship and however to find meaning successful life.

Before taking a accidental connected a multimillion-dollar exit, Johnson’s communicative began with a acold little comfy gamble. In her aboriginal thirties, she had a selling concern and $50,000 successful savings. Create & Cultivate was her broadside hustle, but erstwhile it started to turn faster than her selling agency, she decided to marque the leap.

On her mother’s advice, she decided to enactment each dollar into increasing that broadside hustle into a full-time job. By 2020, Create & Cultivate had grown into a nationalist movement, hosting sold-out events featuring celebrities and concern leaders.

One twelvemonth later, Johnson sold a bulk involvement to a backstage equity firm. For galore founders, that is the earthy extremity of the story, and the adjacent section would apt beryllium becoming a task capitalist.

But occurrence brought its ain complications. After the sale, Johnson realized the backstage equity steadfast that bought her concern was itself trying to offload it. “I was blindsided,” she wrote successful an nonfiction for Business Insider. “As the founder, the concern was truthful important to me. It was a assemblage that I built and had a kinship with.”