The short answer
Angela Mader shares her journey founding, growing, and exiting a fitness journal business, including what it takes to build something worth selling and what the transaction itself doesn't resolve.
Key takeaways
- The key characteristics great entrepreneurs share
- Angela’s approach to building a lean, but profitable team
- Separating your business from your identity
- How to overcome post-exit restlessness
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1 hr 3 minWatch the full interview
About this episode
After leaving a six-figure job after just three months to strike out on her own, Angela Mader’s mom thought she was crazy. But what entrepreneur isn’t?
In 2008, Angela created a passion-product called fitbook® that became one of the best-selling fitness products at Target and was found in over 16,000 other retail stores around the world. It launched her wellness business, fitlosophy, to over $2M in revenue before selling to a publicly traded company.
While on paper, it sounds easy, Angela shares the hard reality of being a young entrepreneur and building a business that was so central to her identity.
Chapters
- 4:00During her MBA, no one believed in Angela Mader’s project, fitbook®. Except Angela believed in it wholeheartedly. Little did she know, this would kickstart an internationally successful wellness company called fitlosophy
- 10:08Angela set out three goals when she started the business. 1) She wanted to be on Target. 2) She wanted to be in 24-Hour Fitness, and 3) She wanted to be on Oprah. She accomplished two out of three. Guess which two
- 26:45With only six employees, Angela ran a lean company while building relationships with Walmart, Walgreens, CWS, and other international players. In fact, fitbook® was in the top five fitness SKUs at Target and found in over 16,000 stores worldwide
- 33:56fitlosophy was Angela’s friends, social platform, how she stayed connected, and how she related to people. She never intended to sell. However, everyone exits eventually. Here’s how an event kickstarted her journey to exit
- 46:25Post-exit, Angela pivoted from FMCG to SaaS and is now a strategic advisor and mentor for startups, proving that entrepreneurs never really retire
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About Angela Mader
Angela Mader is a brand builder, a maker of things that matter. Creating products and bringing ideas to life is what she loves most.
Angela is a small-town girl, proudly born and raised in South-eastern Colorado. After getting her undergrad in Computer Science, she moved to Southern California where she worked for the next 7 years in high-tech marketing.
When Angela was 27, she left her first six-figure job to start a boutique marketing and branding agency servicing technology clients while also getting her MBA in entrepreneurship.
While marketing consulting paid the bills, Angela’s goal was to pursue what she felt was her calling. She created a passion-product in 2008 called fitbook®, the flagship product behind fitlosophy. This was birthed in response to her years-long battle with eating disorders that went on to sell millions of copies to achieve the mission of inspiring people to live life fit.
Over the next decade, that one-product-business scaled into a complete wellness brand with over 50 products created by Angela, many of which still grace the shelves of retailers in the United States. In 2018, the company was strategically acquired by a large consumer products company.
Connect with Angela Mader
About the show
Buy Grow Sell is hosted by Simon Bedard, founder and managing director of Exit Advisory Group, a boutique mergers and acquisitions advisory firm that helps Australian business owners value, prepare for and navigate a sale. Every conversation draws on real deals and the patterns behind them.
