Lowell Ricklefs

Lowell Ricklefs is the Founder of Traction Advising M&A, a boutique advisory firm focused on helping B2B SaaS founders sell their companies. Traction’s team page describes him as Founder, Partner, North America, and says he has experience selling or buying more than 30 businesses. The firm says it specializes in helping B2B SaaS companies with more than $5M ARR get acquired.

Ricklefs started in technical sales at Rockwell Automation after undergraduate studies in computer science / electrical engineering. In a 2023 Burkland Startup Success transcript, he said he spent 15 years at Rockwell Automation, rising from salesperson to Global Vice President of sales on the channel side. He then joined an online market-research data-collection company at under $1M revenue, helped scale it to $50M, and the company was acquired by WPP.

He later served as Chief Operating Officer at Toluna, where he said the business scaled from $10M to $120M and was acquired by private equity. He then co-founded healthcare fintech company FlexMinder and served as CEO for about six years; Startup Grind notes FlexMinder was sold to Jellyvision. His LinkedIn profile lists education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

His investor role appears to be primarily angel/startup ecosystem work rather than a dedicated venture fund. He has described himself as an angel investor and part of seed funds for roughly twelve years, and public profiles list investor/mentor roles with Techstars, Founders Co-op, Graham & Walker, and board involvement with Alliance of Angels. Alliance of Angels’ leadership page lists him as a Board Member and Education Committee Chair.

• Ricklefs’ publicly stated investing/advising focus is small B2B SaaS companies where buyer fit, strategic positioning, retention, growth, and clean metrics can create exit value.
• He has said Traction’s “sweet spot” is companies around $5M-$10M ARR, while the broader range where the firm plays is roughly $3M-$20M ARR.
• He emphasizes growth and retention as the biggest value drivers in SaaS, saying in the Burkland transcript: “Growth and retention… are the biggest drivers of value.”
• He looks for companies that can make a credible strategic case to an acquirer: same customer, geographic expansion, product-line gap, scalable architecture, low tech debt, and a believable path from current ARR to much larger revenue under the right buyer.
• He warns founders to prepare before a sale process: clean up IP assignments, financial records, investor expectations, employee issues, customer concentration, retention definitions, and profitability or burn.
• He describes selling a small SaaS company as “more like selling an enterprise software product than it is selling a financial instrument,” because the buyer needs to believe the acquisition helps improve its business.