Regret Selling Your Company? Buy It Back Like BroBible’s Founders [Full Q&A]

Finding a buyer for your business is the main goal of many entrepreneurs, but what if you disagree with the direction the buyer takes after the sale?

Whether you’re contracted to stick around for years or simply feel an emotional attachment to what you built, you could follow in the footsteps of Michael Dell and Charles Schwab. They both regained control of their companies. So did the founders of Skype, Rhone, Kona Bicycles, and many others — including the millennial sports and culture news brand BroBible.

When Woven Digital (now Uproxx Media) purchased BroBible in the early 2010s, the partnership felt like fitting a square peg into a round hole, according to BroBible publisher Brandon Wenerd. So the bros bought back their independence and rebranded as a content studio for brands such as Ninja, Braun, Red Bull, Gillette, Bose, and Old Spice.

Wenerd told b. how the move allowed them to play to their strengths and steer clear of trendy distractions.

b.: What prompted BroBible’s shift from “dude publication” to marketing agency?

Wenerd: BroBible is really good at getting information about sports and pop culture to a millennial male audience and contextualizing it in a quick and meme-able way. When we started BroBible in 2009, I was 24. The idea of marketing to millennial men who were in college, postgrad, or at the beginning of their careers was not widely embraced by the larger business community. There were channels where those ad spends went, but as the demographic has grown up — millennials are now midcareer — the marketing conversation around this audience has only grown more valuable.

I had always felt there was an opportunity for the brand to extend into doing cool, creative things with brands. But now it’s really front and center, very dialed in. Having a website with distribution makes it all the more powerful.

b.: How did BroBible’s transition reshape the company’s strategy?

Wenerd: The scale that Woven wanted [for advertisers] required a certain minimum deal size threshold. My light-bulb moment after we took the brand back was realizing we didn’t need a minimum anymore. We can now work with people on a number of different budgets and sizes. We can tier out what the options look like at various levels based on what you’re looking to do as an advertiser.

The marketing world has gravitated toward creators as a turnkey agency to handle these initiatives. Publishers are also creators at the end of the day — just groups of creators put together as a business.

Brands are often looking to do cool things to reach our demographic. [For example], I packed up the new Ninja FrostVault cooler and the Ninja Woodfire grill, loaded them into my Jeep, and went on a 6,500-mile road trip across the United States to some beautiful outdoor spots. I used the products in those environments, and that cooler — man, it kept my sandwiches cold with its drawer for cold and dry storage.

With a studio production partner, we made some really cool, creative videos about the idea of road-tripping with the product ahead of the summer road-trip season. Those lived on our social channels and our website, and now exist as ad assets to drive customers to the Ninja products. That’s the kind of project I pride myself on — taking creator-style initiatives and applying them to traditional digital media publishing, giving life to the product, and showing how it fits into a potential customer’s life.

b.: What advice do you have for entrepreneurs facing similar situations?

Wenerd: The most powerful thing in business is manifesting your destiny, which means saying “no” to a lot of things in order to do the things you want to do and grow the way you want to grow. It also means saying “yes” to the right things, of course. There is a lot of saying “no” and staying in your lane.

The other thing we’ve learned since becoming independent again is how to have a framework for dealing with “shiny object syndrome.” The way business and culture work now, compared to 10 or 20 years ago — there is always a shiny object. There’s always the new thing you have to be doing, all these different tentacles your business feels like it needs to have — like a gravitational pull.

You don’t necessarily need to say no to all of those things, but you need a framework of thinking that keeps you on track … without doubling down and losing sight of who you are, what your vision is, and what your core principles are. 

When TikTok started, people asked, “What’s your TikTok strategy?” We threw a lot of things at the wall with a lot of energy to eventually find our way … in line with what the BroBible news-information business is — and it’s working. Rather than bringing in a bunch of podcasts or all these other things, just stick to your lane and figure out how to bring those things into your lane without tripling down.

b.: It’s like when Apple tried to work on cars. You build good phones; you’re not a car manufacturer.

Wenerd: Right. We all need good phones. Keep making good phones! 

Podcasting is another good lane where we exemplify this. We’ve taken a number of shots to do the podcasting thing at BroBible, because people are like, “Oh, there’s lots of opportunity, blah, blah, blah.” I get it. There is all that opportunity. What we realized was the most valuable thing to come out of podcasting for us is the information that could be contextualized and put in a written format on BroBible, where we can serve ads around it, versus the inventory that comes with the podcast. Where the rubber meets the road of value is the information in the podcast more than the show itself.

This article first appeared in the b. Newsletter. Subscribe now!