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D2C Diaries
Join Olly Hudson and Loukas Hambi in a laid-back yet insightful podcast, where we dive into the heart of D2C and e-commerce. With a combined experience of managing over £150 million in ad spend across Meta and TikTok and helping scale over 200 brands, we bring you a digestible blend of performance, operational, and creative wisdom.
D2C Diaries
M&A Secrets for selling your DTC brand in 2026
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Most DTC founders have a number in their head. A valuation. An exit. A moment where the work pays off.
What nobody tells you is that the decisions killing that outcome are being made right now, long before you ever sit across from an acquirer.
In this episode, Olly and Loukas sit down with Paul Hanley from the Fortia Group, one of the UK's leading e-commerce M&A advisors, to pull back the curtain on what the exit process actually looks like from the other side of the table.
Paul and his team have seen hundreds of DTC businesses come through their doors — from £400K startups to £50M+ brands — and the same mistakes keep showing up. Paul breaks these down.
Plus Paul launches Beauty Value Labs — a new network built specifically for beauty founders who want to understand where their valuation stands today and what it could be.
About Beauty Value Lab: For beauty brands doing $10M+ in revenue, the most important exit decisions are already being made, without you realising it. Years before a banker gets hired, through operating choices and reporting discipline.
Beauty Value Lab is a pre-exit value engineering platform built by career investment bankers at the Fortia Group, working with founders 12 to 36 months ahead of a transaction. Membership includes quarterly Buyer-Grade Valuation Memos, ongoing decision support grounded in buyer logic, and direct access to active beauty acquirers through closed-door sessions.
This is not a founder community. It sits upstream of advisors and bankers, engineering the conditions under which future transactions succeed.
If you're a beauty founder building toward an exit in the next 1 to 3 years, find out more at the link below: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DfEGtuaRTYMsFYeVoK3CBQf8GH0GJ1dV/view
https://thefortiagroup.com/
Follow Paul: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-hanley-4ab64592/
Follow Olly: https://linktr.ee/ollyhudson
Follow Joe: https://linktr.ee/joe_marston
Follow Loukas: https://shorturl.at/TRI8B / https://x.com/LoukasHambi
Follow Liam: https://www.linkedin.com/in/liam-dean-a11a43152/
Follow D2C Diaries: https://www.tiktok.com/@d2c.diaries / https://www.instagram.com/d2c_diaries/
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