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Why This Shaker Bottle Deal Matters To You
If you run a seven or eight figure company, the owner investor strategy is not a theory for billion-dollar CEOs. It is the difference between building a business that quietly dies when you step away and an asset that compounds, throws off cash, and sells on your terms. Most founders never make this shift. They assume mergers and acquisitions belong to private equity, big corporations, and people in suits who say “capital markets” a lot.
The data punishes that mindset. Only a small fraction of businesses ever sell, and of those that do, most owners regret the outcome because they gave up their income but never built real assets. The owner investor strategy exists to break that pattern. Instead of squeezing a little more revenue from the same operation, you deliberately buy cash flow, capabilities, and new markets the way professional investors do.
A recent move from Yeti shows this perfectly.
What Yeti Really Bought For $38 Million
Yeti is a public company with an enterprise value around $3 billion. Recently, it acquired a tiny, private shaker bottle brand for $38 million in cash. Estimates suggest that company may only have been doing about $1 million a year in revenue.
No sane operator pays 38 times revenue for a small product line. A smart owner investor does.
Yeti was not buying “a small business.” It was executing an owner investor strategy move: buying intellectual property and a beachhead into a new market. The target brand had engineered a helix-style bottle that creates a tornado effect when shaken, mixing powders without the usual metal ball. Yeti paid up to own that IP, kill the brand name, and roll the technology into its own product ecosystem under the Yeti banner.
This is what it looks like when someone stops asking, “How do we build this?” and starts asking, “Who already built this and will sell it to us?”
The Three Motives Behind Smart Acquisitions
When serious investors buy companies, they are rarely just chasing top-line vanity. A mature owner investor strategy usually revolves around three motives:
- More cash flow. Buy stable profit instead of grinding for years to grow it.
- New market. Enter a space your current brand cannot easily reach.
- New capability. Acquire technology, systems, or talent that would take years to build.
Yeti’s move checks two boxes. It bought a new capability in the helix IP and a new market in fitness and performance nutrition. It shortcut years of R&D, testing, and failed product launches with a single wire transfer.
You may not be Yeti, but the playbook scales down better than you think.
How A 7–8 Figure Founder Uses The Same Owner Investor Strategy
Most seven and eight figure founders try to solve every growth problem the hard way. Need a new service line? Build it. Want to move into a neighboring city? Open from scratch. Want new tech or process? Design it in-house and hope it works.
An owner investor strategy asks a different question:
- Who already has the customers I want?
- Who already built the capability I’m missing?
- Who already created the brand beachhead in the market I want to enter?
Instead of spending ten years and millions of marketing dollars to add $400,000 of EBITDA, you can often buy that same EBITDA in a year by acquiring a smaller operator. Instead of hiring a dev team to build proprietary tools, you buy a tiny software company with the tech already proven. Instead of “trying a new niche,” you acquire a local player who has already survived the learning curve.
You are not too small for this. You are just thinking like an operator. The owner investor strategy is what turns your current company into the platform that buys others.
Your Next Move
You do not need a billion-dollar balance sheet to act like an investor. You need a simple, deliberate owner investor strategy:
- Define what you actually want more of: cash flow, new market, or new capability.
- List three to five businesses in your space that already have what you want.
- Start a basic deal pipeline: conversations with owners, brokers, and advisors, reviewed weekly.
Yeti paying $38 million for a shaker bottle is not a stunt. It is a signal. The real wealth goes to the people who stop trying to build everything themselves and start buying the pieces they need.
You can keep grinding as an operator, or you can start behaving like the kind of person who might one day buy a company like yours. That decision is the real beginning of your owner investor strategy.