This Founder Flipped His Business Model and Saw Revenue 15x Thanks to the Pivot

Baton listened to its customers—and shifted course to grow faster than ever.

BY ANNABEL BURBA, EDITORIAL ASSISTANT @ANNIEBURBA

Baton founder Chat Joglekar. Illustration: Inc; Photo: Baton, Getty Images

Back in 2020, Chat Joglekar was catching up over Zoom with a friend who was trying to pursue entrepreneurship through acquisition when they said something that stuck out to him: “What’s missing in this space is the Zillow for small business.”

As a buyer, the friend explained, it was difficult to approach business owners with quotes because more often than not, they had no clue how much their company was actually worth. They told Joglekar, a former Zillow executive, the experience felt similar “to knocking on someone’s door and offering them a price for a house” before Zillow launched its free home valuation tool in 2006.

Five days after that conversation, Joglekar reached back out, saying, “Hey, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the one comment you made. Can I ask you more questions?”

By late 2021, he and former sales executive Dylan Gans, digital product leader Jamie Roth, and serial entrepreneur Koda Wang co-founded Baton, a New York City-based company that aimed to create a Zillow-like marketplace for small business buyers and sellers. 

At first, the founders focused on serving buyers, releasing a product called Buyer Concierge to help them with prospecting. If the owner of a landscaping company in Long Island wanted to expand to Westchester, for example, Baton would track down eligible businesses in the area that might be interested in selling, offer their owners free business valuations, then provide that information to the prospective buyers through its platform for about $1,000 per month.

Joglekar, Baton’s CEO, says that while he and his co-founders got nearly 10 buyers to pay for this service, they were having difficulty convincing business owners interested in selling their companies to sign up for valuations. “It’s in some ways harder to sell ‘free’ than it is to sell something for a cost,” he says.

So the founders decided to instead ask these business owners what they needed help with—from accounting to digital marketing—then introduce them to vendors in that space while taking a 10 percent referral fee. This pivot helped “increase the velocity of the valuations,” according to Joglekar, because the business owners “understood the value prop a lot better when they understood that we had something to sell them.”

Then, in the fall of 2022, both Joglekar and Gans had several business owners ask them if Baton could take its services one step further by helping them through the actual process of selling their companies.

“In a startup and as a founder, you have to make hard choices,” Joglekar says. Knowing that his business would need to focus on either serving buyers or sellers, he decided to shut down Baton’s Buyers Concierge product and pivot again by launching a sell-side advisory service in May 2023.

At first, Baton assisted business owners in selling their companies by hiring a handful of contract business brokers. When demand grew bigger than the contractors could handle, it created an internal transactions team, starting with Gans, and then growing to eight brokers. Baton now has about 2,000 business valuations listed on its website, and Joglekar reports that it has so far successfully sold or is under contract to sell 100 businesses at a 6 percent commission.

After implementing these two pivots, Joglekar says Baton’s revenue increased 15x. The company, which declined to share total revenue, boasts a 70 percent close rate, which it claims is 10x higher than competitors, and 750 percent revenue growth from 2023 to 2024.

“Most founders are working on something that’s one of one,” Joglekar says. “By definition, it’s the first time you’ve tried something, or at least that flavor of something, and so there is no rule book.”

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