We bought a digital agency on borrowed time. Then we built one someone else wanted to own.

In mid-July 2025 we put Fox & Lee on the market. Within 24 hours we'd booked around a dozen buyer appointments. Within 48 hours, one of them made an offer above asking — on terms that made the decision easy.

Settlement happened on 22 August 2025. We'd owned the business for just under 17 months. In that time revenue had almost doubled, profit had more than doubled, and recurring revenue was up 150 per cent. We sold for close to twice what we'd paid for it.

That sounds like a story about selling a business. It isn't, really. It's a story about building a business someone else would want to own — and knowing when to let them. It's also a story about an industry I think is living on borrowed time.

Why we bought a business on the way down

We get regular alerts from business brokers based on the kind of business we're looking to acquire. Fox & Lee showed up in one of those. At first we didn't take it seriously — it was based in Melbourne, we weren't — but it stayed on our radar, and a few months later we looked closer.

By most people's assessment, the agency was a shadow of its former self. The previous owner had already moved on mentally — his attention was on a landscaping business he was building, and Fox & Lee was just still going, technically. Revenue was declining. New work was getting harder to find. There was no real system for creating or converting demand.

But underneath the neglect were three things worth buying: a substantial history of past clients, an existing base of recurring revenue, and a capable development team in the Philippines who understood the work and could deliver it. The agency didn't need reinventing. It needed direction, demand, better communication and proper systems. That's a problem we knew how to solve.

We completed the acquisition on 1 April 2024.

You never fully understand a business from the outside. Due diligence tells you what it earned, what it owns, what it owes. It doesn't always show you how close an apparently functioning process is to falling over — and the lead flow at Fox & Lee was worse than it looked. The website no longer reflected what the business did best, search performance was poor, and there was no repeatable way to generate new work.

The client experience needed just as much attention. With the owner elsewhere, a Philippines-based VA and project manager was handling most of the client communication — the development capability was solid, the client-facing side wasn't. That's not a knock on offshore teams; the developers were one of the reasons we bought the business, and they stayed valuable the whole way through. The issue was that a critical customer-facing role had been handed to someone without enough consideration for what the role actually demanded. Good people, operating inside a structure that wasn't setting them — or the customers — up to win.

What we changed in the first two months

The first priority was demand. There's no point tightening a business's internal systems if no new work is coming through the door.

We rebuilt the website and its messaging around what Fox & Lee actually did well, not what it used to be known for — fixed the search foundations, made the next step obvious for anyone landing on it — then ran tightly targeted Google Ads to fill the gap while the organic side caught up.

The response came fast. Within about two months the lead problem had reversed so completely that we periodically had to pause the paid campaigns to stop taking on more than the team could comfortably deliver.

That distinction matters. We didn't grow revenue by pushing the team past its limits or landing one lucky contract. We rebuilt the mechanism that generated opportunities in the first place — which is what makes growth repeatable, and repeatable is what a buyer actually pays for.

We also put in a proper CRM and built workflows around the enquiry process. Leads got captured, acknowledged fast, assigned correctly and followed up instead of disappearing into an inbox. Nothing fancy — automation built to make sure valuable work actually happened, rather than automation for its own sake.

Fixing the client experience

More enquiries would have made things worse if delivery and communication hadn't improved too.

My daughter Ava joined as the Australian project manager — the dependable link between clients and the dev team, owning communication, expectations and the inevitable issues that come up on a digital project. The effect was immediate. Clients knew what was happening and who to ask. Developers got clearer information. Problems surfaced before they turned into frustrated emails.

Ava did a genuinely great job, but the real lesson wasn't "hire a better project manager." It was putting clear ownership around one of the most important functions in the business. "Everyone's responsible" usually means no one is. Give one capable person real ownership of an outcome — with the systems and authority to actually deliver it — and the whole customer experience can shift.

Turning it into something someone else could run

Once demand and service were sorted, we went through the rest of the operation. We reviewed the existing SOPs, kept what still worked, replaced what didn't, and built clearer workflows, dashboards and reporting.

Mostly we were hunting for the points where the business still depended on one person just knowing what to do. How does a lead get qualified? When should an opportunity get followed up? What has to be collected before a project starts? Who moves things forward when a client's late supplying content? Not glamorous questions — but they're the ones that decide whether you've got a business, or a demanding job wearing a business's clothes.

We weren't trying to produce a manual nobody would read. Just to make the important parts of the business visible, repeatable and accountable. By the time we sold, Fox & Lee still had a lean team of three — we hadn't padded headcount to manufacture growth — and all three stayed on after the sale. That continuity mattered to us, and it mattered to the buyer, who wanted an operation they could integrate and grow, not one they'd need to rebuild once the people and the knowledge walked out the door.

None of that came from a last-minute sale campaign. For most of the 16 months we weren't preparing Fox & Lee for sale at all — we were just running it the way we think a business should be run. The decision to sell only came about three months before the sale process started. That's the part of this story that actually matters: the work that made Fox & Lee sellable was done before we'd decided to sell it.

What we'd do differently

The turnaround worked, but we didn't get everything right.

Looking back, we probably held back too much. The lead engine was working, the team was capable, and there was room to push growth harder — we kept pulling back on demand to protect delivery quality when a bit more capacity and appetite could have taken the business further.

We also said yes to some clients we should have said no to. Every service business owner will recognise the type: unrealistic expectations, slow approvals, can't supply content on time, somehow expects the agency to absorb every delay that follows. We had a qualification process built to catch exactly that. We didn't always follow it firmly enough — because the revenue was tempting, and a system only protects you when you actually act on what it's telling you.

Why sell a business that was growing

Fox & Lee was performing well. Demand had recovered, recurring revenue was materially higher, the operation was stronger. So why sell?

Because I could see what AI was starting to do to the agency model.

It's not just making agency staff more productive — it's steadily moving capability out of agencies and into their customers' hands. With the right prompting and a clear process, I can now help a business owner produce a genuinely attractive, non-templated website using ChatGPT or Claude in about half an hour. A focused follow-up session can handle a good chunk of the technical SEO — schema, structured data, visibility in both traditional and AI-driven search. The same shift is happening in Google Ads, Meta, content and campaign design.

Not every owner can do all of that confidently today. That's not really the point. The question is how much easier this gets by next year — and how much of what clients currently pay an agency to do will still need an agency in a few years' time.

Digital agencies won't all disappear. The specialists — genuine technical depth, strong strategy, access to a real niche — will survive, and some will thrive. But they'll be competing for a smaller pool of work, against clients who now expect faster delivery and lower prices because they know AI is doing more of the execution. Some businesses will just do more of it themselves. And plenty of owners will dismiss the whole shift after one underwhelming chat with an AI tool and a forgettable logo — mistaking an early attempt for the ceiling of what the technology can do. The gap between a casual go and a capable one is already enormous, and it's only getting wider.

I didn't want to wait until that showed up in Fox & Lee's numbers. If you wait for an industry threat to appear in falling revenue and disappearing buyer interest, you've usually waited too long. The best time to sell isn't necessarily the theoretical peak — it's while the business is performing strongly, its future still looks credible, and the value you've built is obvious to a stranger.

Taking it to market

We put together a detailed Information Memorandum and listed Fox & Lee through LINK Business in mid-July 2025.

The response was immediate — around a dozen buyer appointments booked in the first 24 hours. One buyer moved fast: met with us and had an offer above asking on the table within 48 hours.

They were building a portfolio through bolt-on acquisitions — not looking for a neglected agency that needed a year of remedial work, but something they could plug in and grow straight away. We'd already done the remedial work. The offer had reasonable terms and the buyer intended to keep the whole team, including Ava's role. That made the decision easy.

An offer inside 48 hours looks like luck from the outside. It wasn't. It reflected the previous 16 months of work, the quality of the Information Memorandum, and the fact that the business could answer every question a serious buyer was always going to ask.

Due diligence was a different story. The buyer's process was extraordinarily thorough — more than we or the brokers expected, and more than our broker at LINK Business said they'd typically see. But exhaustive due diligence is only frightening when you don't know where your own information is. Because we'd kept the systems, the records and the operational data organised — and this was our third exit — most answers were either immediately at hand or not far off. Our broker at LINK Business told us we were among the most organised vendors they'd worked with through a due diligence process. That wasn't administrative theatre put on for the buyer. It was just a by-product of how we'd run the business.

A buyer isn't only paying for revenue or profit. They're paying for confidence — that the revenue's real, the recurring customers will stay, the team can run without the owner, there's nothing hiding in the records, and the systems you're describing actually exist. Every missing document is a reason to hesitate. Every unexplained number is another question. Every process that only lives in the owner's head is a risk — and risk gives a buyer a reason to drop the price, push harder on terms, or walk. Organisation does the opposite. Fox & Lee held up under unusually heavy scrutiny because it had become a business that could demonstrate its performance, not just describe it.

Settlement was completed on 22 August 2025.

What three exits have taught me

Fox & Lee was the third business I've built and sold, after Aftershock IT in 2012 and natiive Digital in 2020. Each one was different. The same principle has held through all three: a business becomes sellable long before it goes on the market.

Buyers don't pay a premium for what you tell them the business could become. They pay for evidence that it already works — that it can generate demand, serve customers, keep its people, produce reliable information, and keep running once the current owner's gone. That means:

• Reducing unnecessary owner dependence
• Documenting and continually improving the systems that matter
• Giving capable people real ownership of outcomes
• Strengthening how new opportunities get found and converted
• Growing recurring, repeatable revenue
• Cutting costs that aren't earning their place
• Keeping records that hold up under an outsider's scrutiny
• Knowing when something outside the business is starting to change the risk of holding it

That's not really an exit checklist. It's what a well-run business looks like. Becoming easier — and more valuable — to sell is just the consequence.

Don't wait until the market decides for you

More owners are going to face the decision we faced with Fox & Lee — their industry reshaped by AI, consolidation, new competitors or a business model that no longer commands what it used to.

Some will wait until the pressure's obvious, and start preparing to sell after revenue's already softened and margins have narrowed. Others will act while the business still looks strong — streamlining the operation, growing revenue, cutting the costs that don't earn their place, removing their own bottleneck, and building something whose value is obvious to a stranger. That's the work we did at Fox & Lee. It's also the thinking behind momentuum's 90-day approach: helping owners streamline their operations, grow revenue and reduce expenses so they end up with a stronger business — and more choices about what happens next.

You might not be selling this year, or for another five years. You should still be building a business someone else would want to own. Because the best exit is rarely the one the market forces on you. It's the one you're ready to make while the decision's still yours.