CPG Exit Strategy: How to Build a Consumer Brand That Strategics Will Actually Buy | Keith Levy Part 2

Keith Levy, Operating Partner at Sonoma Brands Capital

Keith has sat in that seat. As a strategic acquirer at Mars Wrigley he led the Kind acquisition. As an Operating Partner at Sonoma Brands Capital he has spent six years helping consumer brands position for exactly that outcome. He knows what the corp dev team sees when they look at your company, and more importantly, he knows how to get to the operators inside a strategic who actually need what you're building.

Part 2 picks up where the diligence conversation left off and goes into the operational side: what happens inside a CPG brand after the check is written, where capital gets wasted, what execution failure actually looks like, and what the investments that work have in common.

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What You'll Learn

• What revenue and EBITDA thresholds a consumer brand needs to attract a strategic acquirer.
• Why getting to corp dev is not enough, and how to reach the operators who actually need your brand.
• How capital gets wasted at each stage of a CPG brand's lifecycle.
• Why execution is where most investments fail, not the idea or the founder.
• What the celebrity founder model got wrong, and why copying a formula that worked once rarely works twice.
• What the investments that produced exits at Sonoma Brands had in common.

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If you missed Part 1, it covers Keith's five-pillar CPG diligence framework and the Touchland and Bachan's case studies. Start there.

The bonus conversation with Keith is live now for M&A Science members: boards, earnouts, and the hardest lessons from six years backing consumer brands.

If you're building a consumer brand toward exit or evaluating one for acquisition, DealPilot, powered by M&A Science, has the practitioner playbook for CPG exit positioning. Join at mascience.com/membership.