Joel Graber spent years doing things the hard way. Not because he had to, but because he believed in earning every step.
He left financial services with one goal: to build something of his own. In 2020, he founded Modern Outbound. No outside capital, no shortcuts. Just a service that worked and clients who kept coming back. It grew slowly at first, then steadily. And for a while, that was enough.
But growth has a way of revealing its own limits. The more Modern Outbound expanded into broader growth marketing, the more one problem kept showing up. Every client, at some point, had a design bottleneck. Joel could see the problem clearly; however, he just didn’t have a solution to offer.
For a long time, he referred clients out and hoped for the best. Then he started asking a different question: What if he bought a solution instead of building one from scratch?
That question led him to the Acquire.com marketplace. Within 24 hours of signing up, he was already talking to founders, and not long after, he successfully acquired GTM Design Club.
The Gap Every Agency Owner Knows, But Few Solve
Most B2B companies have a design problem, but they just learn to live with it. Some rely on an in-house team that works like an agency, where you submit a ticket, wait in line, and hope the output matches what you had in mind. Others hire freelancers. The quality changes from one project to the next, and you never quite know what you are going to get. And then there are the full-service marketing agencies that promise to do everything. In practice, doing ten things at once usually means doing most of them poorly.
Joel had watched this play out across dozens of clients. Modern Outbound was deep in growth marketing, and design kept coming up as the missing piece. It was a real bottleneck that slowed campaigns, weakened content, and made it harder for good work to land the way it should. He knew the problem well, but he still lacked the answer.
Building a design service from scratch meant hiring the right people, building systems, finding product-market fit, and waiting years for it all to come together. Joel had already done that once with Modern Outbound, and he respected how long it takes. So instead of starting over in a new discipline, he started looking for someone who had already done the work. That shift in thinking changed everything.
Building a Buy Box, Not Just a Wishlist
Most first-time buyers start looking before they know what they want. Joel took the opposite approach. Before he opened any marketplace or talked to any broker, he built a clear picture of exactly what he was looking for.
The criteria were specific: He wanted a specialist agency, not a generalist. It needed a recurring client base, at least two years in the market, and a minimum of around $300K in EBITDA. He also set a ceiling. Too much leverage on a first deal was a risk he was not willing to take, so he kept the target size deliberately manageable.
What he wanted to buy was just as important as what he wanted to avoid. Joel had seen the content online pushing founders to buy blue-collar businesses or industries they knew nothing about. He considered it briefly, then moved on. His expertise was in growth marketing and agency operations. Staying in that lane meant he could actually add value after the deal closed, not just hope the business ran itself.
Interestingly, design was not even on his radar at first. He was looking at paid media shops, content studios, and other outbound agencies. But he had a clear enough buy box that when the right opportunity appeared, he recognized it immediately, even though it came from an unexpected direction.
That clarity is what made the search efficient. He was not browsing. He was looking for something specific, and he knew it when he saw it.
The First Days on Acquire.com
Joel had been running LinkedIn campaigns and talking to a few brokers, but the conversations were slow, and the deal flow was thin. Then he registered at Acquire.com, signed up for the buyer’s annual plan, and logged in.
Within 24 hours, he was already in conversation with the founders. Not browsing listings passively, but having real discussions with real sellers. The speed surprised him, and the quality of the conversations surprised him even more. For someone who had spent months moving slowly through other channels, the contrast was hard to ignore.
Although design was not part of his original search, after a few days of browsing, a listing caught his eye. It was the GTM Design Club. He looked at the specs. The numbers made sense, the model was clean, and it fit almost everything in his buy box. But what stood out was not just the business itself; it was how quickly he could see the potential. A subscription design agency serving B2B companies was exactly the kind of specialized, recurring-revenue business he had been describing for months. He just had not thought to look in that direction.
By this time, there was only one way to know if the opportunity was as good as it looked on paper: talk to the founder behind it.
The Business Butterflies
Joel had talked to a lot of founders during his search. Some conversations were good, but something was missing. He had learned to be honest with himself about that. If the excitement was not there, no matter how great the business was or how clean the numbers looked, he moved on without overanalyzing it.
The call with Thomas was different. Thomas, the founder of GTM Design Club, had built something quietly impressive. No aggressive marketing, no outside capital, just a talented team delivering consistent design work to a loyal client base. Referrals and inbound had kept the business growing without any marketing spend. For Joel, that was a strong signal. It meant the product spoke for itself.
But what sealed it was not the metrics themselves; it was mostly the conversation. Thomas was self-aware in a way that Joel had not always seen in founders. He understood exactly what he had built, where his strengths were, and where the business needed someone else to take it further. He was “a creative genius”, in Joel’s own words, but he was not trying to be an operator. That honesty made everything easier.
Joel felt what he calls the business butterflies. That instinct that tells you the opportunity is real, the person is trustworthy, and the timing is right. It is not something you can manufacture or force, but when it shows up, it cuts through all the noise and makes the decision simple. From that point on, it was just a matter of getting to the terms.
From LOI to Closed Deal
Joel sent Thomas a draft LOI within seven to ten days of their first conversation. It was his first acquisition, and he was honest about that. He asked questions in M&A communities, leaned on advisors, and made sure he understood every step of the process rather than outsourcing his judgment to the people around him.
He brought in a quality of earnings specialist to make sure the financials were clean. He hired a lawyer and secured financing through the SBA. For a first deal, he checked every box he could think of, even when some of them turned out to be more costly than expected. He wanted to do it right, and he wanted to understand what he was doing so he could do it again.
That last part mattered as much as the deal itself. Joel was not treating this as a one-off. He was building a process. Every conversation with Thomas, every document reviewed, every term negotiated was also a lesson he was storing for the next acquisition. Due diligence took a few weeks, but he stayed involved throughout, meeting with Thomas regularly to understand the clients, the team, and how the business actually ran day to day. By the time the deal closed, Joel did not just own GTM Design Club; he truly understood it.
Day One With the Engine Running
Most buyers wait until the deal closes to start thinking about growth. Joel started before the ink was dry.
While due diligence was still underway, he was already buying domains, building email infrastructure, and warming up mailboxes for GTM Design Club. He mapped out which LinkedIn profiles to use for outreach, put a content plan in place, and figured out how to run ads from day one. By the time the acquisition closed, there was no guesswork left.
On day one, he put his Modern Outbound team on the case, treating GTM Design Club like any other client. The outbound engine was already moving. Cold email, LinkedIn outreach, organic content, and portfolio drops targeting CMOs, VPs of marketing, and go-to-market leaders who needed design work. Within three weeks, it was already paying off.
That preparation came from experience. Joel knew that integration is chaotic even under the best conditions. There are unknowns, systems to rebuild, and a team to get to know. Adding a growth problem on top of all that would have made everything harder. So he removed that variable entirely before the deal closed, and focused the early weeks on stabilizing what was already there.
Lessons From a First-Time Buyer
Joel is candid about what he learned. Some of it came from research. Most of it came from doing. For anyone considering a similar path, he distills it into four principles:
- Do the inner work first. Figure out what kind of business you actually want to build. If you want something with real scale, M&A is a muscle you need to start developing early.
- Build a buy box before you start looking. Define the EBITDA range, the type of business, and the size of deal you can handle. Clarity here saves months of unfocused searching.
- Start having conversations before you are ready. Reach out to founders to get comfortable with the process. Confidence comes from repetition, not preparation.
- Know the game before you buy into it. Especially for marketing agencies. Understand how to build one before you buy one. When you already know the game, an acquisition stops being a leap of faith and becomes a calculated next step.
Those principles shaped every decision Joel made along the way. And if the first deal is any indication, they will shape the next ones, too.
What’s Next For Joel and the GTM Design Club
For Joel, integration is the priority right now. There is a lot to manage, a team to get to know, and systems to stabilize. He is deliberate about the pace and honest about the fact that it is as much a mental game as an operational one.
With a successful acquisition and all the pieces in place, the next step is to let them compound, while the next acquisition is already on his mind.
Thinking about buying a startup? Explore vetted opportunities on Acquire.com.
Joel closed this chapter strongly and is already thinking about the next one. Listen to the full episode on YouTube and follow the guest: