Marc Held has started and sold multiple supply chain businesses. His first exit came from an unsolicited offer. Every one after that was more intentional.

On this week's Build a Business Worth Buying, Marc walked through the framework he's built over years of deals, investments, and conversations with corporate development teams: there are really only five reasons a company gets acquired.

Revenue and customers. Cost savings. Technology or assets. The team. And his favorite: strategic FOMO. The acquirer isn't buying because they love you. They're buying because they can't afford to let a competitor have you. Valuations in that last category are nonlinear, and the story you tell matters as much as the spreadsheet you send.

The harder point Marc made: venture investors and founders are not as aligned as they appear. Your current investors are optimizing for your next round. Your exit is their long game, not their near-term priority. For founders who've raised at high valuations and are looking at a clean exit, that misalignment can be the thing that gets in the way.

Most Common Demand Planning Problems

1. "We're Too Small for Demand Planning.": The argument that small brands don't need planning because they're small inverts the actual risk profile. The smaller the business, the less margin for error, and the more consequential each individual inventory decision. The $3M brand making a $200,000 buy is more exposed to a bad decision, not less, than the $30M brand making a $2M buy, because the $3M brand doesn't have the financial depth to absorb the mistake.

2. Inventory Compounding: Every season of overbuying in the wrong styles or wrong sizes ties up cash that could have funded better decisions next season. Every clearance event trains your customer to wait for the sale. Every markdown cycle compresses your realized margin a little further. Every season where cash is tight going into the buy forces you to be more conservative than you'd otherwise be — not because the market doesn't support a bigger bet, but because last season's inventory problem used up the capital.

   Over three or four seasons, the cumulative effect is significant. Not a single dramatic event. A steady erosion of margin and buying power that's hard to attribute to any one decision because it was never one decision. It was the absence of a process that would have made better decisions consistently.

3. Not Stress Testing Before a PO: When you're operating with a single buy and no replenishment, every unit is a locked bet placed months before the consumer weighs in. The decisions that determine your season's outcome, how much to buy, in which styles, in which sizes, at what price, are made long before you have any market signal to validate them.

   In this structure, the only real lever you have is the quality of the decision before the PO goes out. There's no fixing it mid-season. There's no responding to data that doesn't exist yet. The stress-test isn't a risk management exercise. It's the last checkpoint before you commit to a position you'll live with for the next six to twelve months.

4. Buying Too Many XLs: The problem is that customers don't buy in even distributions. They never have. The demand curve for most apparel categories is weighted toward the middle of the size range with mediums and larges typically representing a disproportionate share of total units sold. The exact shape varies by brand, category, and customer demographics, but the structural pattern is consistent: an even buy will always leave you with too much on the tails and not enough in the core.

   The first time most founders see this clearly is when someone pulls their actual sell-through data and lays it out visually: season over season, size by size. Seeing the pattern quantified across multiple seasons makes it undeniable in a way that gut feel never quite achieves. The founder already knew the XLs weren't moving. But seeing it in the data, consistently, across three years, is a different kind of knowing. That's usually the moment the conversation about size curves starts in earnest.

5. Planning for the Wrong Category: The planning horizon for most apparel and fashion brands runs nine to twelve months from design and buy to shelf. You're committing production budgets, locking in fabrication, and placing purchase orders based on a hypothesis about what customers will want nearly a year from now, before a single unit has been shown to a consumer, before any market signal exists to validate the call.

   That's not a forecasting problem you can solve with better data or a smarter model. It's a structural feature of the business. The question isn't how to eliminate the uncertainty, it's how to make decisions inside it that don't leave you overexposed when reality diverges from the plan.

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