NetSearch Direct’s sale to 919 Marketing closed in six months at a premium over market multiples. This was the result of a broad, disciplined process built on one thing Mike Meyer wasn’t sure he’d find in an M&A advisor: someone he could actually trust with the business he’d built.

NetSearch Direct built its name helping franchise brands, local and international, win the channels their franchisees depend on for leads: search, reviews, remarketing, social. Running a business other people trust with their day-to-day livelihood tends to make you particular about who you trust with your own. That was the standard Mike Meyer held his advisor to.

Trust doesn’t hold up on good intentions; it holds up in the work. Sequel put NetSearch in front of the widest possible field of financial and strategic buyers, not just the easiest one, and let real competition do what conversation alone can’t: turn interest into multiple strong bids, and those bids into a price above where deals like this one usually land. Six months from first conversation to close, Sequel carried the parts most founders never see — the diligence, the fine print, the back-and-forth — so Mike could keep running his business instead of running two jobs at once.

NetSearch Direct is now part of 919 Marketing, a data-driven national content marketing firm backed by GF Capital and Landon Capital Partners — giving 919 a deeper bench of digital and web development talent and NetSearch a bigger platform to keep serving the franchise brands it built its name on.