Just before the pandemic, Merrilee Kick, founder and CEO of BuzzBallz, put her popular and potent ready-to-drink cocktail company up for sale. After all, the company has doubled in size every year as far back as she can remember. She started to ask herself the many questions she feels all owners should ask when debating a sale: Am I selling to private equity or a strategic buyer? Am I looking for an acquiring company that is bureaucratic? Or casual? Do I mind having a boss now? Will the new company keep my people or replace them? And where does my family play a part in this sale? Kick’s husband, Tim, is the CFO, and her sons, Alex and Andrew, are part of the ownership group—so this sale was quite the household matter.
Those, and many other questions, mixed about in her head as Kick began sifting through potential suitors. After a four-year process, Sazerac, the largest privately owned alcohol company in the United States, emerged as an ideal buyer and the deal was agreed to in March. “I told them, ‘We plan to grow by 50 percent this year on our own,’” Kick says. “And they countered with, ‘We think we could grow you by four times that this next year.’” Kick was sold.
After the acquisition closes, Kick will stay on with BuzzBallz as CEO for the next four years. During that time, Sazerac will slowly assume control over BuzzBallz, which employs more than 1,000 people in its 750,000-square-foot Carrollton manufacturing facility, until it is wholly owned by the alcohol giant.
Another wildly successful Dallas entrepreneur, Jamie O’Banion, founder and CEO of skincare giant BeautyBio, sold her company to Rhyz Inc., the investment arm of publicly traded Nu Skin Enterprises, in August 2023 for the simple reason that it would have been “selfish to continue to hold on,” she says. “We had grown to a spot where we were in more than 10,000 stores but having a massive R&D team and access to massive manufacturing facilities would increase our speed to market. It almost feels like sending your kid off to college.” (A moment she will have when her oldest son heads to school this fall.)
O’Banion knows a conversation about her long-term role is imminent, but right now, she’s still serving as CEO and playing point in the integration process.
For entrepreneurs who plan to sell their companies, Kick says it’s important to have the enterprise ready for a sale—whether a search is imminent or not. She also advises owners to decide between a private equity sale or a strategic sale.
“PE is in it to make money and sell your business five years later,” she says. “PE loves you when things are good but makes your life a living hell when the business doesn’t perform the way you said it would. PE companies want you to run it but with their financial oversight. Strategic buyers, however, want to buy you because you fill a needed area where they are weak, or you are a main competitor, and it gives them an edge in the market. Strategic buyers are in your industry or seek to be in your industry, to augment their own companies. You normally work together with them to create a business plan going forward and ways of working together, and you both sign off on it.”
What’s next for both leaders? O’Banion is unsure about whether she wants to build another company from the ground up—and it’s a definite no in the beauty space. Her chief passion is mentoring young entrepreneurs and helping them build their brands. “I feel I was just in those shoes yesterday,” she says.
Kick wants to travel the world. She wants to write a book—and maybe some screenplays. After that, perhaps it will be time to “develop more innovative products,” she says. “My mind is always thinking about the next cool thing I could invent.”
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