101: From CEO to Trusted Mentor: Peter Lang’s Journey Through Agency Acquisitions

Episode Transcript – Peter Lang

 

Danny Gavin Host

00:05

Today, I’m thrilled to welcome Peter Lang, an accomplished entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist with over 15 years of experience building and scaling companies across online publishing, media, advertising, and more. 

He currently sits as the Owner and CEO of Lang Acquisitions, specializing in strategic acquisitions that drive rapid growth in the digital agency space. 

He’s also passionate about mentoring entrepreneurs through his e-learning platform, DAB (Digital Agency Business), and bringing innovative solutions from his diverse industry experience. 

Peter’s insights into business growth, mergers and acquisitions, and building high-performance teams are sure to make this a compelling episode. 

Today’s Main Topics Include: 

• How Peter’s mentors shaped him 
• Consulting experience with owners and founders preparing for a business exit or transition.
• All things Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A) in the agency, advertising, and training industries. 
  • Starting and building scalable companies 
  • Strategies used in companies to build and grow value 

How are you doing? 

Peter Lang Guest

01:05

I’m great, Danny. Thank you for having me. 

Danny Gavin Host

01:07

Yeah, it’s an absolute pleasure, so let’s jump right in. So where did you go to school and what did you do? 

Peter Lang Guest

01:10

I went to business school, California State, Fresno that’s where my parents are from and I studied at the Craig School of Business. International Business and Corporate Finance gave me a stint in studying abroad, so I did Erasmus in Paris, which had a significant influence on me, which we do not have time for, Danny Goodness, but I do highly recommend study abroad programs. International business gave me a global perspective and so I’m this rare breed of entrepreneur, international business, conglomerate guy and corporate finance. Although I was about to exit university, I decided to double down on corporate finance in 2008, which the market was very educational, not just the technical analysis classes and investing courses. So that’s what led me to not follow any of that education path and become an entrepreneur. 

Danny Gavin Host

02:10

So when you look back at college, obviously a lot of the financial studies that you had can make sense that you are where you are today. But is there anything else that you look back at where it’s like, ooh, because I witnessed this one thing or had this one class or had this one professor that it made a difference to where you are now? 

Peter Lang Guest

02:27

The opportunity for studying abroad was like the number one influence. There’s a lot of educators and relationships that are created in that. In Europe the program Erasmus is a European Union education program. So the universities of Spain, France, Italy it’s this hodgepodge, it’s like their melting pot program. What we have in the States, what they’re trying to create in the universities, was most informative. 

02:54

I also joined Delta Sigma, pi, which was a business fraternity, and I found that very useful. Many entrepreneurs don’t have their especially ones who go from university to entrepreneurship, their time in corporate America. I don’t have any, especially ones who go from university to entrepreneurship, their time in corporate America. I didn’t have to be in a professional fraternity with 100 chapters with regional events, hosting, you know, local events, nonprofit events, fundraising, social events. President of the pledge class. My wife was vice president of the pledge class. There’s a story, of course, around that and getting kind of a fast track education, both in the business community, giving therapy, travel, you name it really kind of informs where I’m at now. 

03:41

I was also a hacker. I also was doing a lot on the internet and part of the way I paid for college was working. So I worked and went to university and I worked in the engineering department doing IT and thankfully had a blog and some interest in social media at that time. That helped to afford my interest and things I wanted to do, and so I was too busy. Danny, I was doing a lot and working in my parents’ family business, which was a blue-collar business, which is one of the reasons why I went back to the Fresno region to support them and their building of a nonprofit on top of their business that they had for 40-plus years. So, yeah, I didn’t have much time for anything else. 

Danny Gavin Host

04:30

So how would you define a mentor? 

Peter Lang Guest

04:32

I’m a believer that there’s different levels to people getting support from others. A coach, for example, would be someone and I played basketball, so I also played one year of collegiate basketball before going back to Fresno, and so a coach is someone who monitors the game and gives direct intervention to the players. A mentor is not a coach. In my mind, a mentor is someone you seek to find an answer to something that is a problem in your life or an issue. And then there’s tiers to mentors. 

05:10

There’s mentors who are just around the corner. They’re a few steps ahead of you in the process. They just lived what you lived, and so they’re very tactile, they’re very specific and they can help you bridge things that are today’s problems. And then there’s aspirational mentors, people who you want to become, and I’ve had a variety of different influences from both. Being an accidental entrepreneur meant I had to hire a bunch of people to teach me how to do things correctly after screwing up many, many times over. So I’ve had a variety of mentors over the years and I’ve been fortunate to make a lot of mistakes in a short amount of time, which kind of accelerated my career path. 

Danny Gavin Host

05:48

So I think part of the fun is that we’re going to talk about those mentors today, and I love the fact that you look at different people. It doesn’t have to be someone who is necessarily someone you even know, right, but it could be aspirational and obviously there’s different types of people at different points in your life. So let’s first talk about, first and foremost, your business partner and wife. How is she your mentor? 

Peter Lang Guest

06:08

I was very fortunate to be in the student union, approaching my final periods of life in university, and this beautiful woman walks in and I slap the arm of the guy next to me, who’s also part of the fraternity, and go dibs. And then I tried to pursue her to no avail for months and that ended up being the vice president, with me being the president. When you have someone who has similar goals to you, so wants to accomplish similar things, but goes about it very differently, you have a choice, and that choice is to be more like them or to give complete control to them. I’m codependent proudly, and so I always take her level of detail, her analytical approach, her first no initiative to any idea and concept as something that I always wished I had, and I like to say I became a better person. 

07:01

She likes to say no, I’ve coined it, but she likes to say I became a great negotiator because my starting negotiation point with her was always no and so it’s always like no to yes. So sales were easy, ma was easy. All that’s easy compared to trying to convince my wife that we should go here for dinner or go to this place on vacation or make this investment in the business, on vacation or make this investment in the business. She is also so different from me. The yin and yang of having someone so different believe in what I was able to accomplish and the vision that I had for our life was just a different level of support. And I think mentorship, in its core, is supporting another person to accomplish something they’ve yet to accomplish, and so I get that with her every day. 

Danny Gavin Host

07:43

So I mean my parents work together in their business. I know my wife. Her parents used to work together in their business and there’s lots of pros and cons, there’s difficulties that arise. Can you tell us about your working relationship and how you’re able to operate effectively? 

Peter Lang Guest

07:58

It’s one of those things I don’t recommend other people do unless you come from it. So my parents also ran a family business and they started together and they met in university and so they’ve lived a lot of life together and that codependency is a productive thing, not an impediment on achieving goals. And I’ve met plenty of people and I’m friends with them who are like I could never work with my spouse and I go. I actually can’t imagine not working with my spouse. We already have a family business. It’s called a house and a life we want to live together and it’s really nice when the operating system of a business overlays into the home, because the home is just another type of business that you have to run and make decisions around and problem solve against. So I don’t recommend it and I don’t have a lot of advice for it, because I try not to set a standard that doesn’t fit people. 

08:48

At the end of the day. I was very fortunate to choose the cost of university, so the investment of doing that and the time and money that went into that to curate and find a good partner who I could spend the rest of my life with and have kids and run businesses with. That’s not always the case for everyone, given the statistics. So at the end of the day, I find what we do works really well. We run our life like a business. She’s very detail-oriented. We both run calendars. We’re both very specific. We like the description of done on almost everything that exists. We read similar things. We forward each other YouTube videos, books, resources that the other person was potentially going to forward us the next day anyway. So I don’t have a lot of advice and I’m very fortunate to find someone who’s a good fit. 

Danny Gavin Host

09:40

You also shared with us some names of a few legendary thinkers who have shaped how you view business, leadership and life. Can you expand a bit more about what you learned from these mentors and I’ll read them off to make it a bit easier. 

Peter Lang Guest

09:51

So number one, Peter Drucker. I was a wannabe business person. That’s what people who go into business school have as an aspiration Peter Drucker’s personification of management, consultant and business, great strategic thinker, the effective executive in many of the things that helped me orient myself as a professional, especially as an entrepreneur, helped me craft the type of CEO I wanted to be. And it’s all imposter syndrome. So you just see one of these old guys, gals, and you’re like, ah, they do it really well. How can I copy them? What can I learn from them? 

10:20

And again, it helps that there’s mentors in books. I’m a firm believer that wisdom is passed down and unfortunately we don’t get the opportunity to work with all of these people. So, a rapid consumer of books, everything that they have, a lot of use cases or business cases from Harvard have been done on Drucker. There’s a lot of resources, so I was able to expand on that, weave that into my leadership style and kind of mold. Who do I want to be as a professional? I think the next name you’re going to throw out there is Marcus Aurelius. 

Danny Gavin Host

10:51

I don’t have him, but we can talk about him. It would be Seneca, yeah. 

Peter Lang Guest

10:54

It’s along the vein of Seneca. I was really strange I was reading Shakespeare and I was reading philosophy in high school, and although I didn’t go in that direction academically, I still found a lot of solace in the life journey of the Stoics and of the individuals who laid the groundwork for philosophical approaches that could be transferable to business. At the end of the day, I still have a very commercial and business mind. I’m a firm believer that most of the successful CEOs in the world are people who are moderate, people who don’t ruffle a lot of feathers, who are really good about representing both sides, especially when you have a population of a business that is diverse and there’s opportunity there to do them wrong if you pick too aggressive of a side, and so a lot of my reading went that way. 

11:45

Ryan Holiday’s recent work when he started interpreting and expressing Marcus Aurelius Seneca stoicism in productive ways was really helpful, because running a dang small business is hard, being married to your business partners, servicing clients is hard, dealing with rapid disruption and evolution of technology and trying to make money and create a life for yourself. All these things are not easy, and now they’re still first world developing world problems relative to other things that exist before us. Having these works available to us is a nice balance, a nice North Star that when you get lost, you can reorient yourself to. 

Danny Gavin Host

12:34

So let’s go back to some of your early mentors Jim Rohn and Brian Tracy. You told us that they taught you a lot about discipline and mindset. Could you talk to us some more about this philosophy on success? 

Peter Lang Guest

12:44

Well, Dan, you might know this, so you had a family business. There was a cassette player in our car and my parents were listening to tapes and those tapes were like Jim Rohn, those early you know business coaches types right Preceding Tony Robbins, those put in the tape and listen to the stuff that helps you really get prepared for business. And I think a lot of the similar thread between them is what we have in America, which is this overall optimism that we can just create something out of nothing. And Brian Tracy has that about being clear about what you want and going and getting it. Jim Rohn which Jim Rohn is proclaimed as Tony Robbins’ mentor and kind of the direction around personal development in that category. 

13:32

But these are just individuals who helped me look at myself in the most optimistic lens possible so I could go do hard things, and I had that before I went to study abroad in Europe. And it’s not the same. In other places there’s tall poppy syndrome, there’s a different relationship or the risk in other places of the world have people amplifying it and coaching you and cheering you on after you fall down to do it again bigger and badder, and that’s not available everywhere. So I just had those as great support systems using their frameworks. It also taught me about simple principles and frameworks for complex problems or complex ideas, and it’s you know, brian Tracy’s seven steps, three steps, all these different things that help people consume and take action on something that could be holding them back. 

14:33

And that’s what they did for me. And then I get like I’d have fun, Danny, you might do this. Jim Rohn speaks with a little bit of a Southern twang to him and so, like, if you listen to him long enough with the audio tapes, you start talking like them. And I could do Jim Rohn and I would do like the alter ego Todd Herman’s book and he’s like you create an alter ego or the mamba mentality of Kobe. So I started to like it. When I started speaking on stage, I started talking like Jim Rohn. I got to pull that back. That’s probably a little bit too much. 

15:07

Because you just get into these people who helped influence you and when you feel like you’re not there yet and I don’t feel like, even at this stage of success, I’m there yet I still have a lot of goals I lean into. Okay, how did those people’s energy come through me and how can I amplify that? 

Danny Gavin Host

15:20

That’s awesome. So, due to the nature of your line of work, you’ve shared that you’ve mentored agency owners, CEOs and portfolio leaders who are scaling through acquisitions or preparing for exits. So obviously an acquisition, an exit, there’s so much that goes into it and the emotion and the decisions. So can you share more about how to best facilitate mentorship in that arena in dealing with some really life-changing, important topics that people are coming to you to discuss or to get your advice about? 

Peter Lang Guest

15:46

I’ll start with some context to it. I’m a firm believer that agency owners are disproportionately skilled to do M&A. I’ll give it as context. I believe an agency, the model of an agency service business, is to help a client solve unsolvable problems, and so a client goes. Well, I built this thing, or I can do this for someone else. I don’t know how to get in front of people. Where are these people? Who’s the best person to buy it? How should I price it? 

16:16

These are very challenging problems for the person who innovated the concept or the service that they’re providing. Whether or not it’s innovative, we can argue that bit, but if they’re just offering something they’ve never done before. And so you go to an agency, a marketing agency, a digital agency, or an advertising agency because you have a problem. You need people to go buy something. You need people to learn about your product, your service. Who doesn’t know about it today? And so when companies would knock on my door in 2010, when I first started, I was doing the same thing that I do in M&A, which is what’s the problem. Where are you at? What are we trying to solve for? And then can the things that I know how to do or the people I can bring in to help help create a solution for that, and that level of creative stimulus, strategic stimulus, is probably why we all get addicted to the agency game in some respect. To be the problem solver of a client really triggers a lot of endorphins and it’s challenging work because not all the solutions land in the same way, so you have to figure out how to make it work for clients and then to build a business out of that is more problem solving. Working for clients and then building a business out of that is more problem solving. And so, just for context for the listener, I was a CEO for 12 years of running my own show, and that was university to entrepreneurship, and in the last few years of my stint as owner, before selling, I did eight acquisitions. So that’s eight acquisitions from 2019 to my exit in the beginning of 2022. It’s a lot in a short amount of time and so that would be deemed roll-up level activity, which we call programmatic M&A, which is a M&A program within a company to proactively go and acquire businesses to grow inorganically, and usually means you’re buying about three to four businesses a year, by definition. So that gave me a lot of insights. 

18:08

I was on the journey from zero to one. I had a lifestyle business. I made all the mistakes that everyone makes. I tried to solve all the problems the way everyone recommended. I solved the problems and some of it worked, some of it didn’t. I helped clients make hundreds of millions of dollars off of campaigns. I worked with wonderful brands and even small businesses, nonprofits, all the like, in a time of social media and mobile that it was really easy to grow and build a business. 

18:35

And then, when I sold, there were things I didn’t know, that I should have known, even though I had bought, and I had bought really aggressively for a period of time. So there’s a lot of knowledge that was compressed and I was able to then extend that to other people. And in the space of agencies, when you start doing that volume and that level of impact, people pay attention to you. It was nice when no one knew who I was, Danny, and I was just running my own agency doing my own things. But then my energy shifted, which was? It was so transformational to me. Could it be transformational for other people? Then I had to train a head of M&A, teach him how to execute the roles and responsibilities with my integration department, my acquisition team and then we built a program out of that to educate, and so I’ve been very fortunate since 2021, although my professional responsibilities have expanded and our investments have expanded. I’ve created a personal brand, an education platform that really focuses on helping someone else recreate the success that I’ve had from doing M&A and how meaningful it is and understanding the use case in our sector and the best practices that exist within it, and doing it in a predictable and planned and measured way. 

19:43

And this comes with selling too, because buying Danny is selling in reverse. It’s not actually that different. And so now I’m very fortunate to have divested my own businesses within our portfolio. Not all of them. I still have my primary assets. I’m dividing one right now. That’s about our $3 million of EBITDA assets. 

20:07

I’ve helped my students and the companies I’ve mentored buy and sell at scale, and I have a community of agencies and business operators who want to transition from being a single agency owner to a holding company with multiple assets, maybe buy clients, and I’m very fortunate to know the dynamics of all the inner workings of that. I also sit as a board advisor to three active roll-ups. One we have I’m a partner in. We’ve aggregated about 15 million of EBITDA which we’re taking to market now and all the way down to 200,000 in profit that we sold for eight times EBITDA, which we’re taking to market now, and all the way down to, you know, 200,000 in profit that we sold for eight times EBITDA, which was a revenue multiple. So, Danny, I got a lot of insights on the buy and sell side. 

Danny Gavin Host

20:45

It’s interesting that you mentioned before, like now, that you’re famous. Oh goodness. 

Peter Lang Guest

20:50

no, dan, don’t even say that. 

Danny Gavin Host

20:51

No, no, no but what I meant where I’m getting to is that the first time I met you I actually had no clue who you are and if I would have done some research I would have known who you were. But the best part was that I approached you as if you were just some other guy at the conference with me and we had the best first conversation. So what I wanted to say is you were extremely approachable. I think that’s a good lesson for anyone. Sometimes you look at someone and all the success that they have and due to that fact, it’s hard to approach and they can’t speak with you. But really I’m not saying everyone’s this way, but at least with you I found it really easy to chat and to talk and just a normal guy who’s been in the agency world, just like me. So I just wanted to give that compliment. 

Peter Lang Guest

21:29

And it’s because we both came from family-run businesses, both went through the struggle. I like to say it’s a lot harder for investment bankers and people from private equity to come into agencies just because, unless you’ve done it, unless you’ve been an entrepreneur, it’s really hard to relate. I mean, we both have our beards to cover the battle scars. 

Danny Gavin Host

21:50

That is so true. I just wish I had a little less white. But it’s okay, I want the gray. 

Peter Lang Guest

21:58

I want the gray. 

21:59

I turned 40 this year, so I’m still relatively young. 

22:03

I’ve just been fortunate to screw up many, many, many, many times doing big, meaningful things, and I like to say I’m transitioning to my Gandalf stage of life, even though it’s supposed to be my 40s, my most productive, productive period. I have more board advisory roles now than I’ve never imagined I would have. I have a mentorship disposition to people who are just like five years younger than me, Danny and then 15 years older than me. It’s bananas and this all happened relatively quickly. I mean, it’s 2025 that we’re recording this and I sold at the beginning of 2022, welcomed my first daughter in 2022, launched our boutique private equity firm in 2022. And a lot of what advanced was just a rapid investment of me telling my story to the public, starting that same year. So I’m still relatively early in the journey of being a public figure on it and dealing with that, because I haven’t figured that part out comfortably yet, but doing things like this and meeting people like you who steward good information to people that need it brings me a lot of pride. 

Danny Gavin Host

23:06

That’s awesome, and I didn’t realize we’re the same age. I also turned 40 this year, so that’s kind of cool as well. 85 is the year man, Danny, you could go out. 

Peter Lang Guest

23:14

I have a lot of friends in their 85’s. The 85 years are dominating right now. The 39 to 40-year-olds are doing some really serious productive things, especially in the agency space, but just in general, it’s our world, Danny. The next decade’s us, yeah, and I’m excited for it. 

Danny Gavin Host

23:34

So let’s jump into companies that are looking to acquire being a leading expert in programmatic M&A for digital agencies. Can you explain what makes M&A such a powerful strategy for growth and expansion? 

Peter Lang Guest

23:45

I’ll give two sources of evidence. One that I highly recommend the listener read is Strategy Beyond the Hockey Stick. It’s a McKinsey publication. They follow WPP, so WPP is the world. The Hockey Stick it’s a McKinsey publication. They followed WPP, so WPP is the world’s largest advertising agency. It’s a digital agency and everything. Now Sir Martin Sorrell created WPP through an acquisition and then he went out and built a financial model that got him on pace to do an acquisition every two weeks and built this behemoth of a company through financial engineering. 

24:17

So we have precedent in the agency space of being successful in the roll-ups. The app is made up of almost 3,000 agencies, independent brands that are consolidated under an umbrella, and there’s a lot of networks, a lot of big holding companies. So there’s a lot of opinions about them, where AI is going and the evolution of agencies. But just to kind of set the playing stakes here, my agency space goes hand in hand. Now, because it’s so easy to start a service business, m&a isn’t obviously the first thing you learn Google ads and Facebook ads and then M&A no, that’s probably not the order of business in starting an agency. But the precedent is there for M&A Most businesses if they can go beyond their first three years, normalize to the competency of their owner. So we call it the owner bottleneck, the glass ceiling, whatever we want to label it. But if an agency started first year they can have outrageous growth percentages. Most agencies grow about 10% 20% a year a little bit less than that on average. If they’ve been around. You get into the 10-year, 15-, 20-year agency, they’re not still growing 10% a year every year for the last 20 years. Again, it gets that ceiling, that competency threshold. And so when you think about, okay, well, I work in the business I’ve created for myself let’s use that scenario I’m six years in, I just keep hitting the ceiling of growth. 

25:47

Well, imagine if we can go buy, go acquire a company 30% your size and add them to the business, call them an add-on. Well, what if you just do one of those a year and you know how to do that, sensitively and safely, and it’s not going to disrupt culture because you’re buying small enough to absorb them and change the culture and integrate, you can get what’s called inorganic growth. Organic is what you do in the business and if you’ve stalled, why wouldn’t you go out and buy because you’re not growing anymore? Now, that’s the example of a company that’s hit that ceiling. Well, why buy if you’re growing? Well, if you say you’re in year two, year three, and you’re like, oh, this is starting to work and we’re building momentum, we’re growing 20, 40% a year, well, dog, year growth would be great. What if it was 40% a year, 50% a year, 60% a year? So I’ll give you an example. 

26:34

There’s some private equity firms who invest in agencies. Mountain Gate is a good example, erie Capital, power Digital is backed by Court Square, another private equity firm. And when they step into an investment it’s usually around 5 million of profit, 5 million of EBITDA. They take it to 30 in five years, from 5 million to 30 million in five years. I don’t meet a lot of entrepreneurs who are taking their business from 5 million, getting it to 5 million of profit, then to take it to 30 million of profit. And you want to know how they get it to 30 million of profit. They go add on a bunch of other companies because organic growth in that way is challenging. So, at all levels of agency maturity. 

27:20

So even a startup like why start an agency? Just go buy one from someone who wants to retire, Julia and her husband, Grant, bought an SEO agency one million in SD, one million in seller discretionary earnings or profit, and she was a Bain consultant. She just went out and bought a million of EBITDA, a million profit business, and runs an SEO agency. So, rather than starting off from scratch, you can go acquire it, so even that zero to having an agency story can be solved. And then if you’re at the tail end of it and you’re trying to sell it and you’ve been stuck and let’s just say the valuation just isn’t quite there for you to make the decision to sell it, but the timing’s needed and it’s right, well, you can go add one more acquisition to the business, bolster up the profitability by adding it and then selling it. So it works at every stage. 

28:05

Danny, buying a company works at every stage. It’s proven. Now you should have a plan. You should have professionals in the room. If you get a leak in the roof, professionals in the room. If you get a leak in the roof, hire professionals to fix it. There’s professionals and there’s people who do this every single day and that’s one of the reasons why I created the course and the resources for people, so they can do it safely and have all the steps to do it properly. 

Danny Gavin Host

28:25

With that coming and disrupting everything, how do you see this change, the agency space and maybe the urgency? 

Peter Lang Guest

28:34

Sell now run Right, Something like that yeah, do you have any? 

28:37

opinion on that. I have many opinions on that. So I own a business called Growth Hackers growthhackers.com and we are the world’s largest community of growth marketers and we have over 70,000 people on our newsletter at really significant open rates and we write on AI and we teach on AI that business. I’m a firm believer that the digital agency the derivative of agency that’s focused on technology is the conduit of AI into small businesses, much like digital agencies and web agencies were the conduit of social media and mobile into small businesses and before that, it businesses and the early dot-coms were the conduit of internet into businesses. 

29:14

If most non-tech-savvy people still need someone who’s tech-savvy to help them, no matter how simplified something’s become. So, although AI is individually specified communication, it’s a language model that we can communicate with questions that are prompting it, creating its outcome. So it’s still helpful to have people who are trained and know how to use it better than you to deploy it on your behalf. The same way like can I go fix my roof? Sure, I want professionals doing that. Same thing goes here. 

29:49

I think the digital agency community will be the ones who are deploying AI agents, managing it, evolving it, helping consumers pick an AI, because there also are competitors in the landscape, and whenever there’s competitors in the landscape, you’re going to need someone who helps you pick which one is the right solution for what you need and how you’re going to deploy it. So I still think very optimistically for the next five to eight years. Agencies will play a hand in disseminating AI education adoption, especially in small-town America and the regions where you know it’s probably not. As I’ll say this, Danny, in Austin, I feel like AI robots are going to be walking around, like next year, like it feels like it’s coming. 

30:33

AI taxis are coming, and robots are walking around here. Soon. Then you go to other areas in the world. I was just in Mexico City. I’m like, hey, I’m not going to see an AI robot in Mexico City for a while, or at least in different areas. So there’s places that require an agency to bring it in. So, again, very optimistic there. If you don’t have AI in your agency today, I will pick a place for you at the cemetery. You are not going to be here very long. You need to have it in fulfillment and delivery and you need to be working on how you’re going to deliver it as a service to clients. 

31:11

It’s the same way I talked about when I came of age. I had a blog in 2006, 2007, 2008, and I was talking about Facebook. I was talking about people like why would I use Twitter? I had a shirt that said Twitter. I was speaking at writing conferences like why am I going to post photos of my food? You know, two decades later, it’s built into our entire life. There was no ad platform, so I was talking about using it for personal branding. Us, who are the intermediary between technology and the small business or the client, are the ones who can help our clients maximize it. So as long as we play that role, we’ll make some money in the short term. Now let me say this: If you are of a certain age, we have grays, but there’s people who have more grays and you are not as tech-inclined and this seems like a five to 10-year effort that you’re not ready to sign up for Sell before you become discounted considerably. 

Danny Gavin Host

32:08

That’s a good caveat. So, getting back to our topic, I appreciate you going into that. What are the most common challenges you see businesses face when pursuing M&A and how can they overcome them? 

Peter Lang Guest

32:23

There’s a lot of consumption in general without a lot of application of that knowledge in real world. So people read how to Buy a Small Business, which was a Harvard publication. Two professors who run the ETA track at Harvard wrote it. Cody Sanchez blew up in 2020 teaching how to buy small businesses, so people are becoming more aware of it. Eta entrepreneurship through acquisition has grown, so there’s more education online and, just like anything, you chat, to can teach you how to buy something, youtube videos can teach you how to buy something. 

32:48

But you need a mentor, you need comrades, you need people who are doing the journey, who you can interact with, and you need to follow a proven process that has been vetted and done by people you have access to. So what most of the time is, people just don’t know where to look to find it. It’s kind of hard. So part of my effort in investing in my back office is investing in amplifying my personal brand and my content and doing these podcasts so I can make it more known to people. That’s number one. So we’re having the right education and the right support. It’s who, not how often, will enable people to do it well, and that’s probably the number one issue. People just don’t know they can do it. 

Danny Gavin Host

33:22

So, when it comes to buyers, can you share a success story where M&A significantly transformed the trajectory? Is there a favorite story that you like? There’s so many. I’m sure there’s so many. 

Peter Lang Guest

33:33

I’m sure what I would give as probably more utility than a story or specific use cases. Teach people how to find more use cases, because publicly traded companies have SEC disclosures. You can actually go and read how those deals went down. You can read the annual reports before the acquisition, during the acquisition, after the acquisition. You can actually study it. There’s a few players, of course. You can look up Stagwell. You can look up WPP. There was a company that I really loved before they were taken off the capital market, which was E-Machina. They were sold to EPM. So there’s a lot of great stories that are available in the public markets that you can study up on. But I’ll use a company that I mentored, a former student of mine, as a use case example, because Mark’s and he’s on my podcast as well, so you can hear his story in greater detail if you were interested. 

34:26

Mark went to one of my events. He got introduced to me in the first five minutes, Danny, I was kind of like you in some respects. I was like wait, how big’s your agency? Let’s just say a little over seven figures, you know, not a million, more than a million, but not that much more. And I said but look at your career background, look at your experience, look how long you’ve been in this for 12 years, this is a long time and it was a law firm marketing space and Mark Homer story. You can hear about it and I said do you know that there’s a buyer who’s interested in law firm aggregation? Their name’s Scorpion. He goes have you ever heard of Scorpion? He’s like, yeah, they’re the enemy. Like yeah, but Scorpion raised $100 million in 2021 to aggregate and invest in technology. So they pay higher multiples because they have a different arbitrage of their tech platform. Why don’t you sell to them and then take the proceeds and go buy more EBITDA than you have revenue? So that’s how, the first five minutes of meeting him, when I pulled him aside at my event Well, last year Mark got an email from Scorpion and although he had two LOIs out and he was going to buy, he was following my program. 

35:31

He was going to buy two companies. Scorpion emailed them. They do that. Just buyers email everybody. We do it all the time just to see who says yes to a call, so they can learn how big you actually are and whether or not it’s a good opportunity. We got the LOI from Scorpion and whether or not it’s a good opportunity. We got the LOI from Scorpion and it was a healthy revenue, multiple MRR multiple, which is rare but it does happen in this space. It’s not just your profits for the right strategic buyer. And signed July 30th the LOI was signed, purchase agreement closed before September 1st, fully funded. 

36:07

Uh, deal done uh, for a significant reason we won’t call it life-changing um, but Mark’s in the process. By the time this publishes you’ll it’ll be announced Uh, he’s acquiring and closing on. I’m also advising the company that came to me, this agency and I introduced Mark. Uh, he’s buying almost equal partnership stake in an agency that’s running close to two million of EBITDA. So in a span before one year anniversary of his exit, in the two years he’s known me, he would have potentially bought two but didn’t end up selling and then bought more EBITDA than he had in revenue. So if you want an example of how transformative it can be in various stages of the life cycle, it can have a lot of significant impacts on how you approach your world from a business perspective and any levels of expectation you have for what’s normal. 

Danny Gavin Host

36:56

And just to let the listeners know that I’ve actually met Mark, so he’s a real person. Don’t worry he is. No, he’s awesome and I’m glad that you shared that story because it is pretty remarkable. 

Peter Lang Guest

37:07

I can give you. I got a lot of them actually, but both buy side and sell side. I’ll also state that it’s very important when you sell a business, I call it one of your last transactions. So when you’re a business owner, and especially if you do your own business development in the early days, you’re selling, you’re selling. Well, you don’t want the last thing you sell, which is your business, to be the thing that is the worst, so you want to sell it when it’s a good time to sell it, and that’s usually before you’re ready to sell it. The vast majority of the time, 80% of businesses that are listed for sale actively seeking a buyer don’t find the buyer Because it’s that timing when you’re ready doesn’t mean someone else is ready. So oftentimes it’s when you can use the asset to have a step-level function change in your life. That’s when you should take advantage of it. And even if you won’t get all the life-changing retirement, step away from the world and you’re a good exit. It doesn’t mean you can’t get a step-function change, increase. So go from one level to the next level and then reinvest capital to be at that new level as your ongoing state and then sell that a few years later. 

38:17

M&A is just a skill set, just like starting businesses. The difference is AI is not going to disrupt M&A. I can buy a fencing company tomorrow, lawn care business tomorrow, pest control, wood carving, the activity of doing M&A. So sourcing deals, knowing how to value the businesses, looking at underneath the hood, understanding how to help them grow. We’re agency owners. Isn’t that what we do? We look at businesses and say how do we generate more clients? How do we help them grow? How do I learn who the consumer is, the customer, the ICP, how do we create something? Agency owners are so well fit to do it. And if you do it, while you do it with an asset you own and know well, which is your own agency, you practice by buying other companies. You can just turn that into something that’s more macro and build a portfolio company and AI is not going to touch you. 

39:08

So if I’m an agency owner today, even if I’m AI savvy and I’m enthusiastic about my longevity, if you go out and learn to do three, four, five acquisitions and do it in an area where you have a lot of intervention, confidence, so usually your own business or things that are adjacent to your business you’re untouchable to AI, even if they wiped out the agency sector, you now have a skill set of how to go find these types of businesses and transact them because you’ve done it before. So it’s just like learning a skill set, like six years ago. Everyone’s like teaching kids how to code, teach grandma and grandpa how to code, and now we wiped it out. Yeah, pretty much the same thing’s going to go with learning how to service AI agents into businesses. So if we really want to be savvy Red Ventures my own experience Permanent Equity Brent B Shore said that these are all former agency owners. 

40:00

There’s a lot of former agency owners who then transition to private equity because we know how to look at a business, figure out why they’re not selling as well as they could, how could they do it more? That’s also because we’re good at strategic, creative problem solving and that goes in any business. So just learn the M&A muscle and it’s life-changing. And I’ve had this disposition because Lang Acquisitions is a hat tip to Crown Acquisitions. The Crown Acquisitions is from the Thomas Crown Affair. Thomas Crown Affair is about Thomas Crown who has a mergers and acquisitions firm which, when I was a kid, heavily influenced, kind of like the direction I thought I wanted to create with it before I even knew how to get there. 

Danny Gavin Host

40:41

So it’s time for our lightning round. Due to the fact that you travel, let’s say, six to eight months a year, you’ve done a lot of traveling, so I’d love to hear your top three places that you visited or to a shrine now than you did many decades ago. 

Peter Lang Guest

40:52

There’s a lot more Instagram tourists involved, but if I were to give people directions, I’m a big fan of the Mediterranean and you can’t go wrong with Valencia. Anything that the cruise ships don’t know about or are just getting to is where I’d recommend, although extremely well-known, I love Nice, but the Mediterranean especially if someone grew up in North America, is a really great place to orient yourself. The Peloponnese, which is not the islands in Greece, but it’s the peninsula of Greece, is also fairly untouched, so I always start there. Second would be Indonesia. Indonesia, although Australia has done a terrible thing, they’ve taken over in Bali but Indonesia is an amazing community of people and I’ve spent significant time there. 

41:55

I’m married to a first generation Mexican. Mexico is also, for us North Americans, very accessible. Indonesia is Mexico to Australia. The same respect Americans. North Americans should understand our southern border neighbor and there’s a lot of culture, a lot of great food. Mexico City I highly recommend to everybody. It’s one of the world’s largest cities. And then I studied in Paris, Danny, I don’t know if you know this. Wherever you studied university, they got your heart, and so Paris romanticized how I want to die. So I always recommend that people experience it. 

Danny Gavin Host

42:30

Yeah, when I was 15, I went on a six-week traveling camp in Europe and we spent two weeks right outside of Paris. So at 16, it was a lot of fun. Trust me, at 20, it was a lot of fun. I’m sure it just multiplied. So before we wrap up, what’s your next big project? What’s your next big thing? 

Peter Lang Guest

42:46

Turning 40 in September is my next big thing. I have Double Bypass, which is a 70-mile bike race through two mountain passes in Colorado. I will do it in a week and a half from now. 

43:00

My wife is doing an Olympic triathlon, so I decided to join her. So the Boulder Tri a week after I do the bike, by the way, and then I have a half marathon in Estes Park which is called the Rocky Mountain National Half Marathon. So that’s my schedule. We’re selling. I mentioned my primary asset in my private equity firm, which is exciting. We should close on that before this goes live to a private equity-backed strategy. So my CFO, my team, is working through those final definitive documents and then I’m flirting with starting a fund for the next. 

43:34

I call it the decade project. So a 10-year fund focused on going to 10 small-town Americas agencies, preferably around 2 million of EBITDA and buying one in 10 different markets and running an AI change management program for them to kind of lead as the example for owners who aren’t as motivated to do that independently but also take some chips off the table economically for themselves. Focus would be a $50 million fund, probably put another $50 million of debt on that. We estimate probably about $70 million in purchase price extracted from that. Do that in a 10 to 18-month schedule, but I’m waiting until I’m after 40 to even move forward with that. The firm’s locked in the law firm who would represent for the fundraise. I got all the components. I have a lot of fellow high net worth individuals who have exited businesses, who ran agencies, who would potentially come in on this. So that would be my next big thing while I’m still working on finishing the book of Programmatic M&A. 

Danny Gavin Host

44:35

That’s a lot, but I’m excited for all of it, and I didn’t know you were writing a book, so that’s really cool. 

Peter Lang Guest

44:40

Yes, the book is the Programmatic M&A Playbook Working Title. It’s pretty far along, actually, my own insecurities, around my own specific use cases. I wanted stories. I got a lot of my own in there, my own journey. I have a lot of the market, so it helps people understand how accessible it is. I also want it to be a manual, a true playbook on how to execute that which I’ve been teaching for so long. But when I say I do something, Danny, people go. I can’t do that, I don’t do what you do, and so my goal was to create an artifact that made it approachable and achievable for others, and in doing so it just takes a lot of work. Writing a book’s not easy. 

Danny Gavin Host

45:19

No, and also I’m not saying you’re a perfectionist, but when it is your life’s work, you want to make sure that it’s really represented correctly. So it takes time to say, okay, it’s ready. 

Peter Lang Guest

45:27

Yeah, I mean the M&A side of my life has been the entire encapsulation of everything that I’ve ever done professionally, and so now I’m very fortunate that the thing that I was most passionate and interested in as a kid I do every single day and I help others do it, and it happens to be something that is extremely financially lucrative to do as well. So there’s a lot that overlaps and if I can make that, if you could hear from my tone that I believe it’s achievable for a lot of the agency owners similar to myself, if I can make that even moderately available, the people who work within our industry you shouldn’t be fearful of. 

Danny Gavin Host

46:04

It’s an amazing circle of life and a wonderful way to end the podcast. But before we do, where can listeners learn more about you and your business? 

Peter Lang Guest

46:10

The number one place is LinkedIn. If you’re interested in our podcast, we have agency acquisitions and exits where we host roll-ups, individuals who sold their businesses ranging from 10 million to 300 million and plus to big networks, to small businesses and, I would say, email. But email is probably not the most productive. Danny, I haven’t gotten any notifications since 2016. All notifications have been non-existing on my cell phone, on my mobile email Slack. I funnel everything through my assistants and therefore I’ve been able to really be fortunate not to have the same level of distraction. If you want to hear from me or get to know me, reach out to LinkedIn and the people who manage my LinkedIn, respond on my behalf and then get us coordinated, always LinkedIn and then become a listener. I do social as well, all the social media, 

 

Danny Gavin Host

47:05

Well, Peter, thank you for being a guest on the Digital Marketing Mentor and for your inspirational words. I have a lot to think about myself and thank you, listeners, for tuning into the Digital Marketing Mentor. We’ll speak with you next time you.