‘I made two mistakes and ended up selling my company for a quarter of what I should’

In business, acquisitions can be tricky – just ask Bobby Healy.

The serial tech entrepreneur revealed this week that he learned a very expensive lesson when he sold his first company. Bobby set up travel software firm Eland Technologies in Mexico City in the late 1980s and ran it for 12 years before it was acquired by a global aviation IT firm in 2003. "Two huge mistakes I made – one was not actually leveraging the business because it was quite a profitable business, and two... was that I never took on external advice," he told this week's episode of All In. "Not because I was stupid and I didn’t believe in external advice, [but] because I didn’t know it existed and I didn’t know the world of options that I had. "I sold the business probably for a quarter of what I should have sold it for and that’s probably being conservative.

Listen to the full interview here.

"No regrets at all but I know very clearly looking back if I had taken advice, that advice would have led to better structures for the business as I took it forward. I would have probably grown it a lot more and sold it for a lot more." Offering his own advice to entrepreneurs looking for buyers or investors, Bobby said it was important to treat your company itself as a product. "It’s an asset that you’re building to sell or to float or to capitalise on in some way. You should always be telling the story of the business as much as telling the story of the product and you need professionals to help you with that." Bobby features on this week's episode of All In, JOE's new business show.

All In, backed by AIB, is available everywhere you get your podcasts and on YouTube every Wednesday