She recorded a 3-hour course to help nurses pass their NP exams. Within 7 months, she’d made $1M in revenue

Sarah Michelle Boes needed a dental implant.

In 2020, the Kentucky-based nurse experienced such intense anxiety while studying for her nurse practitioner (NP) exam that she broke a tooth from grinding her teeth in her sleep, she shared with Entrepreneur.

The exam, which she took in May, turned out to be easier than expected — Boes completed all 175 questions in under an hour and passed — but she had to figure out how to afford a $7,000 implant.

Looking to make extra money, Boes recorded a three-hour crash course on Zoom to help aspiring nurse practitioners pass their board exams. If she could make just $500, she told herself, it would be a game-changer.

She didn’t expect what happened next. Within two years, Sarah Michelle NP Reviews helped more than 40,000 students pass their NP exams with a 99% pass rate.

That’s when she began exploring the idea of selling the business.

A $500 goal turns into $1 million with Sarah Michelle NP Reviews

Boes, who had prior tutoring and teaching experience, recognized a gap in existing nurse practitioner study materials. For her, confidence was the biggest barrier to success.

“I started to think about how [reviews] could be done differently — how it could be less like someone lecturing you and more like studying with a friend,” she said. “So, I came up with a Q&A approach, which I’d used as a tutor in nursing school and when I taught nursing students at the collegiate level.”

To test her idea, she gave free access to 30 classmates and asked them to spread the word. The first 100 students received the course for free via Facebook Messenger, then she started charging $25 for lifetime access, accepting payments via Venmo or Cashapp.

Word spread quickly. Just three months after launch, she made $100,000 in sales. Recognizing the potential, she moved the course to a subscription-based model on a dedicated website.

The most popular bundle cost $260 a month, according to the first archived version of the site from April 2021. This included access to all courses, a crash course study guide and more.

Within seven months, Sarah Michelle NP Reviews hit $1 million in revenue, purely from referrals through her Facebook group, she told They Got Acquired. When her students passed their exam, they would post a “passing picture” and share how much the courses helped them — all unprompted. The excitement and success stories got others on board.

“It was all about showing up as an authentic and transparent brand and consistently growing our community of nurse practitioners who were anxious about passing their exams,” Boes said. “As the community grew, so did our sales and reach.”

Boes grew Sarah Michelle NP Reviews without outside funding, relying on revenue to hire a team of four full-time employees, plus a small team of contractors.

But with rapid success came growing pains.

“We outgrew every last bit of software we touched,” she told us.

For over a year, she relied on a third-party software to host her courses, but it often crashed, she said. She invested $100,000 in a custom app, but the project fell apart.

Boes also realized that, to continue to grow, she would need to expand into other verticals for test prep — like law or medical school. But her passion was solely with nursing.

“Selling seemed like the best way to continue growing the company in a way that would allow me to do what I love,” she told us.

Finding a “magic selling number” and other steps to prepare to sell her business

Boes’ business coach warned her it’d be “nearly impossible” to sell Sarah Michelle Reviews NP because it had such “key woman syndrome,” meaning it relied heavily on Boes’ name, image and expertise.

With this feedback, she hired a growth strategist to learn how to build up the company’s infrastructure and scale herself out of the brand for an eventual sale.

Before beginning this overhaul and to better understand the valuation of Sarah Michelle Reviews NP, her growth strategist recommended putting the business up for sale to test the waters and see how potential buyers would react to the brand in its current state. Her growth strategist said he could double as her broker.

At this point, Boes decided on what she called her “magic selling number” just in case this process turned into a sale. This number represented the value of the company in her eyes and what she needed to feel good about selling. She told us landing on this magic number was the most challenging part of the process — but it helped her stay focused on her north star goal.

“My husband and I took what we were making in the business at that time and ran a lot of models together,” Boes explained. They examined best- and worst-case scenarios to determine a price that made selling worthwhile.

While it’s smart to know how much you’d need to earn to go through with a sale, an exercise like this can sometimes put business owners at a stalemate, if their perceived value of the business does not match what the market will pay or isn’t backed by financial performance. In this case, while it wasn’t obvious immediately, Boes’ calculations and instincts were right on.

Through this process, Boes also identified a few potential buyers, including Blueprint Prep. Blueprint, owned by New Harbor Capital, offered test prep courses and had just recently acquired Rosh Review, which sold online exam prep for medical students.

“That acquisition had seemed to go really well,” she told They Got Acquired. “I heard supremely good things… and I felt like we were going to get a real valuation out of them.”

Blueprint Prep didn’t yet have any nursing test prep materials available, and Boes appreciated the company’s values.

“For example, they had an executive team that was half female at the time,” she said.

She also liked that the CEO was the founder of their LSAT portion of Blueprint.

“They were very learner focused… and there were a lot of opportunities to just talk founder-to-founder, which was a nice reprieve,” she said.

Through this process of gauging her company’s valuation through offers, Boes said: “We received wildly different offers, but luckily we had decided what our ‘magic selling number’ was before we ever truly entered into conversations with potential buyers. That made looking through offers much easier and with much less emotion attached.”

Why Boes decided to break up with her broker

On the other hand, Boes realized her strategist/broker was emotionally attached to her company.

When Blueprint made an initial offer to buy Sarah Michelle NP Reviews, the offer wasn’t close to her “magic selling number,” so Boes turned it down.

“At that point, we just realized our broker was completely not ready to do a deal with us because he was so emotionally attached to us turning down Blueprint’s offer,” she said. “He was angry, he was upset, he was like, ‘You’re going to ruin and sour this relationship forever. This is going to ruin you in the market.’”

Boes didn’t agree — people turn down deals all the time, and she knew this offer wasn’t in her best interest — and she decided to part ways with the advisor.

Navigating an 8-figure acquisition — without a broker

Several months after the break-up with her M&A advisor, Blueprint unexpectedly returned with an 8-figure offer — within Boes’ magic selling number range — and she agreed to move forward.

“I ended up negotiating my own deal without a broker, and I am very proud of that,” she said. “The process of selling is a whirlwind in many ways, and navigating that process on your own is a feat.”

To help navigate, Boes and her husband read a lot of books (like “Built to Sell”) and listened to a ton of podcasts (like “My First Million”). Boes also leaned on a female founder friend who exited “a literal unicorn” for gut checks throughout the process. Their M&A lawyer was also extremely helpful.

For Blueprint, this was its fifth acquisition in partnership with New Harbor, according to the press release — and its fourth in 18 months.

On LinkedIn, Blueprint co-founder and CEO Matt Riley said: “The community that Sarah and her team have built is truly inspiring. It is supportive and caring and embraces accountability and hard work. … For years, the training and resources provided to them has been subpar. Sarah Michelle NP Reviews has changed that.”

As for selling the business when it still relied heavily on her brand, Boes thought it would be more complicated.

“One of my main focuses in the deal was getting carve-outs for my name, image and likeness to protect myself in the future,” she said. For example, she owns the trademark to her full name, while Blueprint owns the trademark to the business name.

She also agreed to an earn-out, whereby she would work for the company post-acquisition to support the transition. She joined Blueprint as the chief nursing officer.

“The end goal will obviously be for it to be under the Blueprint name and brand, but that is a long-term migration so as to not lose any value along the way from the reputation I have built,” she said.

A life-changing, 8-figure outcome

The deal closed in June 2022, around two years after Boes first launched her course with the goal of paying for her dental implant.

Boes worked for Blueprint until December 2024. Then she turned her focus to advocacy work for congenital heart disease.

Shortly after she began looking for a buyer back in 2022, Boes found out she was pregnant. At 36 weeks, she and her husband learned their daughter would be born with a life-threatening congenital heart defect.

Selling Sarah Michelle NP Reviews gave them the financial freedom and flexibility they needed to be with their daughter through six surgeries in the first five months of her life.

They’ve also been able to give back to the Norton Children’s Heart Institute in Louisville, Kentucky, where their daughter got treatment immediately after she was born. They left a $15 million legacy gift to the hospital’s foundation, which will help enhance heart care, expand research, and recruit and train doctors and other specialists.

“That money [from the sale] has been life-changing,” she said. “The money gives us a lot of freedom and flexibility — my husband’s also starting up his own business — but our work with the children’s hospital is the most meaningful and impactful accomplishment.”