Keep grinding or sell up is a false choice. What an equity partnership actually is, who it suits, and the trade-offs nobody puts in the brochure.
In 2018, I was the third option.
Bodie was running Dilate and carrying most of it. I was the accountant on the other side of the desk. The pitch I took to him was simple: the goal of every good founder is to sack themselves, and if he let me buy in, I promised to sack him. In a loving way.
Then I put my own money where the pitch was. I took on serious debt to buy into his business. He told me later that he worked twice as hard from that day, because my family’s wellbeing was now riding on the thing he’d built. That’s what alignment actually feels like. Not a clause in a contract. Two people who lose together or win together.
Seven years and several transactions later, that business runs without either of us in it, and both of us did fine. So when we talk about a third option, it isn’t theory. It’s autobiography.
The false choice
Most founders believe they have two options. Keep grinding, or sell up.
Keep grinding means more of the same: the hours, the dependence, the slow burn. Sell up means a broker, an earn-out, and watching what you built get folded into someone else’s business.
The third option is selling a stake instead of the business.
Mechanically, it works like this. A partner buys in, which puts real money in your pocket for the work you’ve already done. You keep a meaningful share. The partner brings capital plus capability, and the whole point of the exercise is to make your remaining share worth multiples of what it was. Keep half of a business that becomes worth four times more and you’re 200 per cent ahead of where you started, with the load shared and the risk spread.
That’s not a hypothetical. It’s the exact shape of what happened at Dilate, more than once, for me and for the leaders who bought in after me.
What it is not
It’s not brokerage. A broker’s win is the transaction. Ours starts after it. If the business doesn’t grow for years following the deal, we lose alongside you, which changes how honest everyone is before signing.
It’s not passive private equity. Most private equity is money watching metrics. What we bring is better described as smart capital: the cheque, plus a full-funnel growth engine, plus relationships built across thousands of client businesses, plus the lived experience of having done the transitions ourselves. Sometimes the most valuable thing we do in year one has nothing to do with marketing. It might be introducing a trade business to four strong builder relationships that steady its whole pipeline.
It’s not a takeover. You stay in the driver’s seat on the day to day. You know the business better than we ever will and we don’t pretend otherwise. The big calls, debt, major spend, buying or selling, move to a board where we sit together.
The trade-offs nobody puts in the brochure
I’d rather you hear these from me than discover them in diligence.
You’ll have a partner, and in our case a majority one. The biggest decisions stop being yours alone. For some founders that’s the relief they’ve been looking for. For others it’s intolerable, and if that’s you, this is the wrong option, and we’d tell you so early.
Diligence is confronting. At some point you lift the bonnet: the banking, the ATO position, how the jobs actually run, whether the systems are software or a shoebox. It’s not to judge, it’s to understand, and it works both ways. You get to lift our bonnet too. But it takes trust, and it’s uncomfortable before it’s useful.
It’s slow, on purpose. We start with what we call the beer and burger test, because values fit decides everything downstream. Then multiple conversations, then diligence that can run weeks of half days, then paperwork. Some relationships run years before a deal makes sense. If someone offers you a fast version of this, ask who the speed serves.
What year one actually looks like
Boring, deliberately. Values locked down first, because they’re the compass for every later decision. Functions and accountabilities named, so everything lives with someone. A one-page plan: five-year picture, three-year, one-year, broken into quarterly sprints. A monthly check-in at board level, so the structural work stops losing to the day-to-day.
That rhythm is not glamorous. It’s also exactly what took one business from a home theatre room to a team of more than eighty, so we’re reluctant to improvise on it.
The third option existed for Bodie because someone knocked on his door with it. Now we’re on the other side of the table, holding it open. Whether it’s with us or not, know that it exists. Most founders make the biggest financial decision of their life having only ever heard of two.