How Wisable helped owners who were trying to DIY their sale.

A strong business for a strategic buyer.

The business.

Robert and Ron are pharmaceutical industry veterans who started Founders Science Group in 2014. FSG provides services to pharmaceutical, cosmetics, and personal care companies. With more than 100 years of combined team experience, FSG had spent over a decade building a reputation for quality, regulatory rigor, and responsive client service. It was exactly the kind of clean, well-run business that serious acquirers look for.

The challenge: Chemists, not deal makers.

After being in business for nine years, Robert and Ron knew it was time to either sell or find an investor to help the business grow. The problem was they had no roadmap for how to do it. Over the next two years, they responded to two unsolicited acquisition approaches, went through full due diligence both times, and walked away with no deals and only frustration to show for either effort.

“After the second time we had provided all the due diligence to a potential investor, months of back and forth, and then nothing happened, that's when we said, you know what, let's see if we can't find professional advice. Myself and my business partner were chemists by trade. The business piece really is a specialized part of running a business.” The cost was not just wasted effort. Robert was effectively acting as COO of a small company, and the DIY sale process had consumed 70 to 80% of his working time across those two years. The business itself was at risk of suffering for it.

Wisable enters the process.

After the second deal fell through, Robert and Ron went looking for professional help. They found Wisable. Their biggest fear going in was a third failure. What they found instead was a team that understood what small business owners don't know about the deal process, and that Wisable's job is to fill the gap at every step. Wisable clarified and drove the process, starting with a professional valuation. The number came in higher than FSG's own estimate, reflecting a more sophisticated read of the business's market value. From there, the team developed marketing materials, ran targeted campaigns including Facebook ads, and listed the business across multiple channels. Robert's time spent on deals dropped to 25%. FSG went to market on June 2024. What followed was a volume of buyer interest neither Robert nor Ron could have generated on their own. Over 20 buyers expressed interest. Wisable screened them, prioritized those with the strongest likelihood of actually closing, and managed buyer communications during the process.

Wisable also connected the founders to a legal team to handle the transaction documents, removing yet another area where a founder without deal experience could have been left exposed.
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The outcome: FSG sold in 5 months

The deal closed in November 2024, less than five months after going to market. FSG sold for more than the unsolicited offers FSG had been chasing on its own. The buyer was a strategic acquirer already operating in the lab space, a fit FSG had asked for from the start: a buyer who would maintain the facility and keep the team intact. Ron stayed on as Chief Science Officer of FSG. Robert remained with FSG for over a year post-acquisition as a consultant and still provides occasional support today. After 35 years in the pharma and lab services industry, the exit gave him the freedom to pursue new challenges he previously didn't have the bandwidth to explore.

Since the sale, they have referred Wisable to other small business owners more than once. “Anytime we run into a small business owner who's in a situation we were in, we say: hey, we know this outfit, they're called Wisable, they've done really well by us. I think they'll do well by you.”