This Repeat Founder Sold Three Companies For Over $100 Million Each And Has Now Built A $2 Billion Valuation Company To Support SMBs With AI-Driven Business Solutions

Eric Remer’s entrepreneurial path is an inspiring story of reinvention, grit, and strategic vision. From selling roses in college to taking a vertical SaaS company public, he’s navigated every stage of startup building: founding, funding, scaling, exiting, and doing it all over again.

In this exciting interview, Eric discusses his experiences splitting a company to sell it in two $100M+ deals and selling a third for close to $150M. He also talks about building an incredible $2B company and now guiding aspiring entrepreneurs through his podcast, Business Underdogs.

Listen to the full podcast episode and review the transcript here.

Early Roots and an Unlikely Start in Banking

Born and raised in Michigan, Eric enjoyed a classic Midwestern upbringing filled with hockey, baseball, and strong family values. Despite having no background in finance and accounting, he landed in investment banking after college.

Eric recalls interviewing for jobs and landing an internship position at the World Bank. At the time, he was unaware that the interviewers were from an investment bank. However, he was impressed by their questions, considering it would be an excellent opportunity if he were to get the job.

Eventually, Eric got a job at Kidder, Peabody & Co., an American securities firm. This detour into finance provided him with a platform to get a crash course in business, laying the foundation for his entrepreneurial mindset.

Eric started his first company out of college, a flower-selling business. He imported flowers from Miami, partnering with a friend who went to the University of Miami. The idea was to bring in truckloads of flowers to sell on Valentine’s Day and make a profit by undercutting the market.

The venture involved sheer hard work, but it was a great first experience. It developed Eric’s understanding of how to build a business out of nothing.

Building the I-Behavior Database

After leaving the investment bank, Eric connected with a group of people at Abacus Direct, a company that was eventually sold to DoubleClick for a couple of billion dollars. Abacus Direct successfully consolidated the direct commerce marketplace.

Back in the early 1990s, before the advent of e-commerce, only 30% of the American population was willing to purchase merchandise sight unseen, or without a catalog to examine. Businesses also needed to target the right customer base, which is why they needed cooperative databases.

Abacus built these databases, which started to proliferate quickly. When Eric began I-Behavior, his focus was not only on the offline world, but also on the online sphere. At that time, e-commerce was beginning to take off.

Eric’s first major venture, I-Behavior, helped marketers better target consumers through data, with an online and offline division, which was a more traditional cooperative database. As online and offline commerce diverged, the company grew into two distinct lines of business.

First Exit: The Art of the Split Deal

Rather than pursue a traditional single-buyer acquisition, Eric and his team split the business and sold the online and offline divisions separately, each in approximately $100M deals. It was an unconventional strategy, but it maximized value and taught him the complexities of M&A firsthand.

Explaining the reasoning behind the move, Eric reveals that despite the challenges, the business had undergone significant evolution. Its online and offline divisions were serving different marketplaces. Thus, the online division was acquired by Akamai.

The process of splitting the company was complex and involved several tax complications. But after the acquisition, I-Behavior continued to own and operate the offline division. Eric and his team continued building on it, and a couple of years later, sold it to Young & Rubicam (Y&R).

As Eric points out, mergers and acquisitions deals may seem straightforward, but they involve several complexities. Although buyers approach the deal with good intentions, they also execute detailed due diligence. Transactions fall apart for several different reasons.

Going through the deals for the first time from the seller’s side taught Eric critical lessons about the many complications.

Building Apartment Moves and Leveraging Household Data

After exiting I-Behavior, Eric launched Apartment Moves under the Conclave Group LLC. Apartment Moves was a platform targeting apartment renters. When the model proved too limited in scale, he pivoted based on customer feedback.

Eric explains that when he left I-Behavior, they had 100 million households of data. However, marketers struggled to obtain reliable data to target apartment renters because they were a transient demographic.

This problem became the genesis of Apartment Moves, which distributed new mover guides to apartments nationwide. Eric estimated that their demographic in the 50 states comprised people who spoke English and Spanish.

So, they distributed $2 million in English and $0.5 million in Spanish. The core objective was to get advertisers access to the transient marketplace through 15,000 properties that the platform had compiled.

As Apartment Moves scaled, it became clear that the horizontal approach had limits despite being profitable. Since the audience’s spending was low, marketers couldn’t get enough advertisers to support the business. This factor planted the seed for what would become EverCommerce.

Eric realized that different industries needed tailored workflows that couldn’t be generalized. Interacting with users, he started to explore the key challenges they faced. The problem he identified was collecting rents. Users needed an automated way to execute that effectively.

Pivoting to PaySimple

When Eric started exploring the marketplace, he found that several companies were already offering early-stage automated rent collection services for apartments and other related properties.

Eric also found that apartments and renters were similar to other service-based businesses that were collecting money on a monthly or recurring basis. But there was a lack of the right tools for that marketplace. Thus, Apartment Moves transitioned into PaySimple.

Eric built PaySimple to help service-based businesses, such as plumbers and therapists, streamline payment collection and customer management. It enabled them to develop and grow their companies without signing up for an online collector like VeriSign or a credit card account.

PaySimple effectively integrated the workflows for that marketplace, soon adding up to an upward of $60M in revenues and becoming profitable. Eric identified the opportunity to consolidate some verticals since the market was becoming increasingly verticalized and even micro-verticalized.

A Make-or-Break Moment with American Express

At one point, 80% of PaySimple’s new business came through a white-labeled, integrated partnership with American Express. Eric and his team had created a product called AcceptPay to provide more value to AMEX’s small business customers. AMEX also invested in the company.

Over 5 million customers used AMEX credit cards and could receive additional perks. Eric recalls estimating that the company would eventually acquire PaySimple. However, with just a week’s notice, AMEX shifted gears and shut down the program.

Eric met with his team to devise a survival strategy. Until this point, they had focused entirely on the business they generated from AMEX and hadn’t worked on developing the core direct business.

Losing the AMEX partnership resulted in the layoff of 30% of the staff, and Eric had to make a significant pivot back to direct channels.

He and his team ultimately focused on customer dynamics, churn dynamics, return on investment (ROI), lifetime value (LTV), and customer acquisition costs (CAC) to achieve effectiveness. It took Erica and his team 18 months to rebuild the same business model in terms of new customers.

What seemed like a disaster became a turning point—refocusing the team, diversifying growth, and building long-term resilience. Eric transitioned from the partnership mindset to self-reliance, understanding that he had to deal with his problems himself.

The PaySimple Acquisition by Providence Strategic Growth

Eric recognized two main factors: the extent of fragmentation within the verticals in which they were working. Secondly, nobody was really consolidating the marketplaces to provide end-to-end solutions to service-based businesses in the vertical.

In 2016, Eric sold PaySimple to Providence Strategic Growth, which had a vision to consolidate the market through mergers and acquisitions. PSG was buying great vertical niche software within the sectors Eric wanted to pursue.

He called it the last-mile vertical software, or a system of action within HVAC, plumbing, landscaping, and similar industries. His objective was to provide businesses with exactly what they needed, tailored to the specific needs of their respective industries or verticals.

EverCommerce: Vertical SaaS at Scale

With backing from Providence Strategic Growth, Eric transitioned from a horizontal to a vertical SaaS model by launching EverCommerce. Initially, the company targeted specific verticals, such as home services (EverPro), health (EverHealth), and wellness (EverWell).

EverCommerce offers deeply integrated software solutions for small, service-based businesses. By acquiring over 50 companies, EverCommerce created a system that combined core SaaS offerings with embedded payments, marketing, and customer engagement tools.

All these tools were built around the unique workflows of each industry. The model unlocked enormous value in underserved, fragmented markets. When users utilize the core software, they get access to an integrated suite of tools.

The EverCommerce Business Model and Fundraising

EverCommerce is a vertical SaaS platform that focuses on helping service-based businesses. It enables the collection of monthly payments and their integration. The platform generates revenue through fees on the payments it facilitates, as well as the vertical SaaS solutions it provides.

EverCommerce also offers customer engagement and marketing services. Eric explains that more than 90% of their revenue is generated from pure SaaS payments.

Through the EverCommerce journey, Eric raised $650M, working with investment partners such as Susquehanna, Providence Strategic Growth, and Silver Lake. By the time Silver Lake joined in, the company had reached over $500M in revenue and was poised for its next stage of growth.

These investors not only brought capital but also strategic insight that helped the company enhance its growth trajectory and scale through mergers and acquisitions (M&A), ultimately leading to its initial public offering (IPO).

The IPO in mid-2021 was well-timed in a booming market, but it came with its own set of challenges. Despite achieving a multibillion-dollar valuation, the post-IPO phase was marked by liquidity constraints and market volatility, offering new lessons in public-company leadership.

Storytelling is everything that Eric Remer was able to master. The key is capturing the essence of what you are doing in 15 to 20 slides. For a winning deck, take a look at the pitch deck template created by Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley legend (see it here), where the most critical slides are highlighted.

Remember to unlock the pitch deck template that founders worldwide are using to raise millions below.

Lessons in Leadership and Longevity

Today, EverCommerce serves over 700,000 businesses and is valued at more than $2B. Looking back, Eric credits his success not to a single inflection point, but to the discipline of consistent execution, careful investor selection, and staying laser-focused on delivering customer value.

As the founder and CEO of EverCommerce, Eric has always centered his mission on simplifying and empowering the lives of small business owners, while also contributing to the broader business ecosystem. The company’s vision continues to evolve, particularly with the rise of artificial intelligence.

A Shift Toward an AI-First Future

According to Eric, the vision for EverCommerce has undergone significant transformation in the past 18 months. What began as a platform to streamline operations for service-based businesses has evolved into an AI-first organization.

Today, the company is integrating artificial intelligence into both its internal processes and directly into its product offerings.

This enables EverCommerce not only to operate more efficiently but also to provide customers, who are often small, service-driven businesses, with simpler and smarter tools to grow and manage their operations, whether they are solo entrepreneurs or a team of service professionals.

If given 12 uninterrupted months to fully realize the vision, Eric believes EverCommerce would deliver deeply integrated AI functionality across its suite, providing users with unmatched value and automation.

While the company is not far from that ideal, it represents a significant evolution from where they were even a year ago.

Staying True to the Original Mission

Despite this technological leap, the core mission has remained the same since day one: to serve those who serve us. EverCommerce now supports over 700,000 small businesses globally, and Eric acknowledges there is always room to improve service and value.

At the same time, he’s confident that the company is making good on its promise to support small business owners in meaningful ways. The focus has consistently been on delivering practical, integrated solutions that meet the unique needs of their customer base,

Advice to His Younger Self

Reflecting on his early entrepreneurial journey, Eric shared what he would tell his younger self before launching a business. First, he emphasized the importance of mindset: maintaining a positive outlook, remaining persistent, and believing in one’s ability to overcome challenges.

Eric explained that these qualities are deeply connected. Without optimism, persistence wanes, and without belief, obstacles can feel insurmountable. He also spoke candidly about the internal doubts that many founders experience, especially in the early days.

Even when others believed in him, there were moments when Eric questioned whether things would actually work. At that time, the energy and belief of the CEO became the driving force for the entire organization. If the founder can’t hold that vision, the company falters.

Another lesson Eric has carried with him comes from one of his earliest investors: success doesn’t come from one big partnership or transformative deal. Instead, it’s built through consistent, daily actions.

In hindsight, Eric realized he spent too much time early on searching for a single solution when the real growth came from solving problems internally, step by step.

Celebrating the Business Underdogs

Eric has also launched a podcast called Business Underdog, which focuses on the untold stories of small business owners. While many platforms spotlight billion-dollar unicorns, his podcast highlights everyday entrepreneurs.

Eric relates stories, such as the plumber who left a steady job to start his own company and now runs a multimillion-dollar operation with a fleet of trucks.

These underdog stories reflect the same grit and determination seen in larger ventures, but often unfold without the benefit of venture funding or media attention.

The podcast serves as a tribute to these business builders who overcome challenges, support their communities, and exemplify what entrepreneurship looks like on the ground.

Listen to the full podcast episode to know more, including:

• Eric Remer turned an early hustle selling roses in college into a career of founding, scaling, and exiting high-growth ventures.
• His first major win, I-Behavior, was strategically split and sold in two separate $100M deals, showcasing creative M&A thinking.
• Losing a major AMEX partnership nearly crippled PaySimple, but the setback catalyzed a shift to direct growth and long-term resilience.
• EverCommerce scaled through over 50 acquisitions, becoming a $2B+ vertical SaaS platform serving 700,000 small businesses.
• Eric emphasizes that consistent execution and investor alignment—not one big break—drive lasting success.
• EverCommerce is now an AI-first company, integrating intelligent tools across its platform to empower service-based entrepreneurs.
• Through his podcast Business Underdogs, Eric celebrates everyday founders who build impactful companies outside the spotlight.

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Keep in mind that storytelling is everything in fundraising. In this regard, for a winning pitch deck to help you, take a look at the template created by Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley legend (see it here), which I recently covered. Thiel was the first angel investor in Facebook with a $500K check that turned into more than $1 billion in cash. 

Remember to unlock for free the pitch deck template that founders worldwide are using to raise millions below.

 

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