Are You Selling an Asset or Selling a Job?

Are You Selling an Asset or Selling a Job?

Author: Acquire.com February 27, 2025 Duration: 19:40

If Ian Fourie could give two pieces of advice to founders selling their SaaS startups, he’d say:


  1. Register your business in only one country
  2. Start pushing founder responsibilities to employees as soon as you can


Ian sold his online corporate training startup, Pluto LMS, on Acquire.com fast (in just two weeks). However, he thinks he would have been even quicker had he addressed these points.

Pluto LMS almost didn’t happen. It was a project started on a whim when Ian realized schools spent a lot more on their facilities than their material. He saw online education as inevitable and built an online platform for a client in the UK.

Pluto had customers but it didn’t seem like it was going anywhere. That all changed during Covid as schools and corporations raced to the internet to see how they could conduct business online.

Between 2020 and 2025 Ian grew his team to five employees and brought in a range of clients. Finally, he decided to sell on Acquire when his health started to worry him.

Now Ian is working as a consultant for his acquirer for a year while he finds his next project.

Tune into the Acquire podcast with Andrew Gazdecki and Ian and listen to them discuss:


  • How he found his first clients.
  • The advantages of selling alongside a professional advisor.
  • How you can make your business seem more like an asset and less like a job.


Ian is just getting started and you can follow him on his journey below:



Behind every successful startup acquisition, there's a story-a complex mix of strategy, emotion, and paperwork that rarely gets discussed openly. Startup Acquisition Stories, from the team at Acquire.com, pulls back the curtain on those real-world transactions. Each episode features founders and entrepreneurs who have personally navigated the process of selling or buying a business through their platform. You'll hear them recount the nuanced decisions that don't make it into press releases: the challenging conversations around valuation, the subtle art of vetting the opposite party, and the critical, often overlooked, steps after the handshake. This podcast digs into the practicalities of due diligence, structuring terms, and managing the transfer of assets, all the way through to escrow and the crucial post-deal transition. It’s a grounded, detail-oriented look at the mechanics of a business exit or expansion, straight from the people who’ve lived it. For anyone curious about the actual path to a deal, beyond the theory, this series offers a rare archive of lived experience and hard-won advice.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 100

Startup Acquisition Stories
Podcast Episodes
How to Build a Profitable SaaS in 6 Months and Sell it in 5 Days [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 20:49
Software businesses can be immensely profitable in very little time. But they can also die just as quickly. Software engineer Mark Jivko built Go index me!, a tool that speeds up Google page indexing, in six months for a…
Startup Acquisition Stories With Eric Pacifici of SMB Law Group [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 17:46
What are the three biggest mistakes SME buyers make when choosing an M&A lawyer? M&A professional Eric Pacifici says new buyers often pick lawyers who: Aren’t entrepreneurial Bill hourly rather than flat rate Don’t have…
Startup Acquisition Stories With Jeel Patel, Founder of InvoiceOwl [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 23:28
Jeel Patel and his father built InvoiceOwl, an online invoicing tool for tradesmen like plumbers after Jeel noticed his family’s landscaper using an inefficient paper invoicing system. Three years later, they sold the co…