Why I Built Enjoy Life Foods to Be Sold From Day One
I want to tell you something that most founders don’t say out loud.
From the very beginning of Enjoy Life Foods, I was building a business I intended to sell.
Not because I didn’t love it. I loved it deeply. Not because I had a specific buyer in mind or a fixed timeline. I didn’t. But from the day I incorporated the company in March 2001, I made decisions as if a sophisticated buyer would one day scrutinize everything I built.
That orientation — building with the exit in mind from day one — is, I believe, one of the most important reasons we were able to sell Enjoy Life Foods to Mondelez International in February 2015 for $81 million, 13 years after our first product sale.
Here is how that thinking shaped the decisions I made, and what I believe it means for founders who are building companies today.
It Started With an Advisory Board on Day One
I had no food industry experience. No manufacturing experience. I was a former commercial banker with an MBA, a business plan, and a mission I believed in deeply — creating food products free of all major allergens, for kids and families who had almost nothing good to eat.
The first thing I did was build an advisory board.
Not because someone told me to. But because I understood something from my years as a banker: credibility is a prerequisite. Investors, partners, and eventually buyers want to see that the founder has surrounded themselves with people who know things the founder doesn’t.
That advisory board gave me credibility in an industry I was new to. They became investors. They introduced me to other investors. They challenged my thinking and created accountability I reported to. Eventually, that advisory board became a formal board of directors. And one of those board members later became our CMO — bringing his entire marketing team with him — and was a central reason we crossed the finish line.
Buyers look at the bench, not just the CEO. If your business only works because of you, that’s a risk — not an asset.
I Treated the Financials Like We Were Already Public
From early on, I made a deliberate choice to upgrade our financial reporting over time. We went from a compilation to a review to a full audit — not because we were required to, but because I knew that when the time came to sell, buyers and their diligence teams would expect audited financials.
Getting to that level of financial rigor takes years. You cannot manufacture audited credibility in a six-month sale process. I started early, which meant we were ready when we needed to be.
I also kept the cap table clean and communicated regularly with shareholders. Some of our investors had put money in 10 or 12 years before the sale. I made sure they were never in the dark. That discipline of shareholder communication matters more than most founders realize — it builds trust, reduces friction at closing, and reflects the kind of management maturity that buyers pay attention to.
I Built Relationships Before I Needed Them
Throughout the life of the business, I developed ongoing relationships with investment bankers, private equity firms, and venture capital groups. Not because I needed capital at any given moment, but because I knew I would eventually need to navigate a transaction — and I wanted to know the landscape before I was in the middle of it.
When we were ready to hire an investment bank in 2013, I was not starting from scratch. I had relationships. I had a sense of who the right firms were for a business like ours. That made the process of selecting the right advisor faster and more informed.
We actually hired one firm, lost confidence in them, and moved to our second choice — who turned out to be exceptional. That second firm suggested something that, in retrospect, may have been the single most important piece of advice we received during the entire process.
The Video That Got Us Into the Room
Mondelez was not originally at the top of our buyer list. They were not who we thought was going to acquire us.
But our investment bank recommended that we create a video about the business — not a pitch deck, not a financial model. A video that showed the heart and soul of Enjoy Life Foods. We included mothers of children with food allergies talking about what the brand meant to their families. Distributors and brokers who believed in what we were doing. Our own team. Our manufacturing process. Our allergen testing protocols. The ‘why’ behind every decision we had made for 13 years.
When we walked into Mondelez for the first time, their team told us: “If it weren’t for that video, we would not be sitting here right now.”
Numbers get you considered. Story gets you chosen.
We had built something with genuine emotional resonance — a brand that meant something to real people, a mission that was larger than any single product or quarter. That story was compelling to a strategic buyer in a way that a financial summary alone never could have been.
We Never Took Our Eye Off the Business
The sale process took approximately six to eight months from the time we engaged our bankers to closing. It was exhausting. The volume of diligence requests, the legal review, the management presentations, the negotiations — all of it happening while we were still running a growing company.
I made a deliberate decision early in the process: normal business hours were for running the business. Sale work happened after hours, into the early morning if necessary.
This discipline paid off. The business kept performing through the entire process. That sustained performance gave Mondelez the confidence to close — and protected us from the valuation cuts that often come when a business drifts during a transaction.
The Morning After
The day after we closed was the best day of my professional life.
Not because of the wire transfer. Because of the phone calls.
I spent that morning calling every investor who had believed in us — some of them 12 or 13 years earlier, when Enjoy Life Foods was nothing but a business plan from an MBA class. Some of them had probably long since stopped thinking about the investment.
Telling them what they were going to receive — the return on the trust they had placed in me when we had nothing but an idea and a mission — that was the moment. That was what all of it was for.
Building a business to sell is not a betrayal of the mission. It is the fullest expression of it — the moment when everything you built becomes real for everyone who believed in you.
What This Means for You
I am not suggesting that every founder needs to build with a sale in mind. Some businesses are built to last across generations, and that is a legitimate and admirable goal.
But if you believe there is a chapter beyond the one you are in — if you think that someday, somehow, you will want to step back, cash out, or pass the baton — then the decisions you make today about your team, your financials, your systems, and your strategy are not just operational decisions.
They are exit decisions.
Start making them that way.
Scott Mandell is a certified Scaling Up coach and the founder of Mandell Strategic Growth. He founded and scaled Enjoy Life Foods from startup to acquisition by Mondelez International in 2015. He works with founder-led and privately held middle market companies in the $10M–$150M range to help them scale smarter and exit stronger. He is hosting a free virtual Scaling Up To Finish Strong Workshop on June 24, 2026 — Click here to register