For podcast booking agency Podcast Ally, shutting down was a new beginning.
After founder Brigitte Lyons decided to close her agency, which matched clients with the right-fit podcasts and prepared them for guest appearances, she realized the company’s intellectual property and reputation still held value. She “softly” floated the idea of a sale with her network to Podcast Ally’s 3,500 newsletter subscribers and on LinkedIn.
“If you’ve ever closed a company, you understand why it’s been difficult for me to write this note,” she wrote. “The good news is that… Podcast Ally might come back under new ownership. I’ve been in talks with a few buyers, and if we come to a deal, I’ll be staying on for a transition period to make sure the new team can deliver the same level of care clients expect from us.”
Lyons heard from several different interested parties and got four concrete offers to buy the shuttered agency, all through her own network. She had not realized the worth of what she had built, and the level of interest was validating.
“That is a testament to the strength of our reputation and the [intellectual property] I created,” she wrote in a blog post about the sale.
The intellectual property included the company’s customer contacts, website, podcast and blog posts, but the most important asset was the codification of the Podcast Ally approach. Lyons had created a systematized way to do everything involved in their work, including a bespoke tool she called the Podcast Relationship Management database, which streamlined their process.
“Podcast Ally sold because I did the unglamorous, behind-the-scenes work to create and document workflows that someone else can easily manage,” she wrote, explaining that anything fundamental to the company’s work was documented, automated and scripted. “I created a cheat code for another company who wants to create a new line of revenue.”
The systematized operating procedure was part of what convinced Raleigh-based podcasting company Earfluence that Podcast Ally was a good investment, despite its inactive state.
“Bridgette and the Podcast Ally team had everything just laid out,” Earfluence CEO Jason Gillikin told WRAL News. “When I got deeper into those processes, it was like ‘Yeah, I really want to pursue this.’”
Before shutting down, Podcast Ally was bringing in 6 figures of annual revenue by working with clients whose year-long contracts averaged $24,000. By the time Lyons sold it to Earfluence in January 2024, the agency had been closed for six months and had no revenue or clients, save one who was finishing out a contract.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The Earfluence team had been planning to launch a podcast-booking arm, Lyons told They Got Acquired, so in valuing the shuttered Podcast Ally, they took into account how much it would cost them to start one from scratch.
Before deciding to sell, Lyons had lost sight of the value in what she had built, so the favorable acquisition was striking.
“That’s just amazing to me,” she said. “It drove home how much opportunity there is around us, if we think to look or ask.”
How Podcast Ally fared during the pandemic
Lyons started Podcast Ally in 2019, motivated by a dream of being a digital nomad. Her husband left his corporate job to join her company, and both worked minimal hours from a 21-foot fiberglass travel trailer they towed to national parks and other remote destinations around the United States.
She had decades of public relations experience, including her own full-service firm, before she decided to narrow her focus. Podcasts were growing in popularity, and Lyons saw the increasing public relations and marketing value for clients in the medium.
“I’ve never seen any media that has as much influence as podcast,” she shared on Podcast Ally’s own introductory podcast episode. “There’s something so special about the relationship between podcasters and their audience.”
Podcast Ally began picking up clients in the early months of 2020, but in March, the COVID-19 pandemic changed the landscape of society.
Lyons, knowing the sudden uncertainty facing many companies, decided to email her handful of clients to offer them an out.
“I’m definitely a bleeding heart type of person,” she shared on the podcast And She Spoke, explaining she told her clients, “If you’re experiencing extreme hardships, you can have out of your contracts, no questions asked.”
Her client list dwindled to two, and she decided she would give her agency until July to turn things around, keeping on the two employees she’d hired, one full time and one part time, using her business savings.
At that point, she stopped paying herself for a while.
Once the reality of a pandemic society settled in, companies realized they needed to start marketing again, and they needed to do so digitally. Podcasts were a logical and safely social-distanced option. It was an easy selling point for Lyons and Podcast Ally.
“I was heavily marketing this,” she said on the And She Spoke podcast. “We just happened to be offering that one thing you could do — you know, one out of five — that you could still do when things felt scary.”
By the second week of July, Podcast Ally’s client list began to grow. Running the company felt like “riding a wild stallion” for the rest of that year, but after struggling through those lean early COVID months, she was hesitant to add to her team. She and two team members worked to the point of burnout.
“I definitely made some fear-based mistakes in that time,” she said on the podcast, adding that once she felt the company had stabilized at the 20-client mark, things changed. “I was able to build up the team. But I never recovered, I think, from the burnout that I experienced going through those ups and downs.”
Closing her podcast agency… then selling it
In June 2022, after a few successful years running Podcast Ally from the road, Lyons began to hear murmurings of a coming recession. She understood from her public relations experience that in a financial downturn, PR was the first thing to cut, and she would have to market more aggressively to keep enough clients coming in. But her experience during the pandemic felt all too fresh.
“I know that I could ride out a recession,” she recounted telling her husband, on the And She Spoke podcast. “I know what it would take — I just don’t know if I want to.”
At the time, she was considering whether her database could be licensed, but she did not realize an acquisition of her agency as a whole was possible.
“I devalued what I had done until I found out there was interest,” she told They Got Acquired. “I didn’t see a path forward.”
Lyons took about 10 months to mull over whether to push forward or pull back, eventually pulling the plug on Podcast Ally in May 2023, leaving open avenues for past and potential clients to work with her employees on a freelance basis.
A conversation with her business coach changed everything. The coach knew someone who might be interested in acquiring an agency like Podcast Ally, and with that initial interest on the table, Lyons started to look differently at what she had built.
Making an inventory of all her agency’s assets grew her confidence and impressed other interested buyers drawn in by her newsletter and LinkedIn post, eventually leading to the post-mortem sale to Earfluence. Two former team members rejoined Podcast Ally through the acquisition.
In her soul searching, Lyons realized what she enjoyed most about running Podcast Ally was building her team and implementing systems, rather than the actual work of booking podcasts or public relations. It had been heartbreaking to say goodbye to the “dream team” she’d so enjoyed building and growing into a healthy working culture.
“PR was something I was good at,” Lyons wrote in a blog post about finding her calling. “A skill I could leverage to build an agency where I got to work more-or-less when I wanted, while I traveled the country with my tiny home office and paddleboard in tow.”
But building and leading teams was a skill, she discovered, “that I was as passionate about as I was good at it.”
Lyons and her husband, feeling their days in the trailer were complete, decided to settle in Sacramento, Calif. Her husband returned to corporate work, and she decided to pursue her newfound passion, founding The Ops Whisperer, which houses tips for founders on building healthy teams and workflows, while also offering operations coaching and fractional COO services.
She points to her experience with Podcast Ally as a beacon of hope for would-be entrepreneurs who want to enjoy their lives outside of work: She was able to work minimally from far-flung locations like Glacier National Park without being tied up on Zoom all day.
“It proves that you don’t have to hustle your way to an acquisition,” she told They Got Acquired. “There are paths for people who aren’t interested in that startup life.”
