AI Summary
5 min readThomas Smale started buying and selling websites from his college dorm room in 2008 with nothing but a credit card and a laptop. His first deal: buy a website for $100, get it generating a little monthly revenue, and sell it for $500 by the end of the month. That small flip turned into FE International, a firm that has now brokered over $1.1 billion in online business sales. The path from dorm-room flips to eight-figure M&A deals was not a straight line, but it was built on a repeatable process: learn to buy low and sell high at any scale, then apply that same skill to larger transactions.
The Accidental M&A Firm
Smale did not set out to build a brokerage. After graduating college in 2010, he wrote a book and course on buying and selling websites, thinking he would make a living selling educational content. But customers who went through his material kept asking him to sell their businesses for them. He had no formal M&A experience—"I had no idea what M&A was either"—but he understood the process from his own flipping, and selling someone else's business required no upfront capital. So he stumbled into a market that did not yet exist: no M&A firms or business brokers served online businesses at the time. "If you had a really big business, you couldn't call a big investment bank because they wouldn't return your phone call." FE International filled that gap.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (01:30) **From Dorm-Room Flipping to $1.1B in Sales** - Thomas introduces his journey from flipping websites for $100 to selling over $1 billion in online businesses.
- 2 (02:19) **Accidentally Stumbling into M&A** - How Thomas went from selling a course on flipping websites to founding an M&A firm.
- 3 (04:21) **The College Flipping Playbook** - How Thomas started with no money, using credit cards to fund deals.
- 4 (05:47) **First Hires and the Pareto Principle** - The critical shift from solo operator to building a team.
- 5 (08:06) **How to Find Your First Business to Buy** - Practical advice for beginners with limited capital.
- 6 (11:02) **What Makes a Great Business to Buy** - Thomas's framework for evaluating acquisition targets.
- 7 (12:44) **The First Eight-Figure Deal** - The inflection point that changed the firm's trajectory.
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Guests on this episode
Show Notes
Zero to $1.1B from Flipping Websites
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In this episode I talked to Thomas Smale in his New York City Office to get his story and some advice on how to buy and sell businesses. He's done over $1B dollars in sales without even knowing how to develop a website, and he shares his advice on how to flip businesses, how to negotiate, and how he would start again if he had $0 dollars. This is a perfect episode for anyone who is hesitant on starting a business, and would rather buy one and build it from there.
0:00 - Intro 0:49 - Getting into M&A 2:50 - Self-taught website flipper 4:17 - How he started an M&A firm 5:40 - Using the Pareto Principle to make more money 6:36 - How to buy a business 8:02 - How to spot good businesses 9:46 - Selling a $10M+ business 10:41 - How he got the 8-figure deal 11:23 - How much profit he makes per deal 11:56 - How to value a business 12:56 - Buying a business VS starting one 14:26 - How to negotiate 16:33 - How to buy a business from scratch
🔎 Find Thomas 🐦 Twitter - https://twitter.com/ThomasSmale 💼 Website - https://feinternational.com
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Disclaimer: This podcast is published by a viewer using content from Starter Story's YouTube channel with the goal of making his valuable insights more accessible to those who prefer audio formats, helping more people discover and learn from the insights shared in his videos. It is not an official production of Starter Story. For any requests from Starter Story, please don't hesitate to get in touch.
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------------- Keywords: startup journey, startup stories, passive income, startup founder, revenue stories, make money online, business podcast, bootstrap startup
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