Meet Michelle Regner
The Founder Who's Been in Your Shoes
When Michelle Regner sold her first tech company, she expected the process to be hard. What she didn’t expect was to feel completely alone in it.
There was no roadmap. No trusted advisor sitting across the table saying, here’s what your business is worth, here’s how to protect it, here’s what comes next. Just a lot of noise, a few well-meaning but disconnected advisors, and the quiet realization that the system designed to help entrepreneurs exit their life’s work — was failing them.
That experience never left her.
Years later, after co-founding and selling two SaaS startups in the Bay Area, raising three boys, moving her family from California to Utah, and watching an entirely new market of business owners face the exact same confusion she had — Michelle did what founders do. She identified the gap, built the solution, and went to work.
That’s how Business Brokers of America was born.
From Startup Founder to Business Broker: The Full Story
Michelle’s career didn’t begin in brokerage. It began in tech.
She co-founded her first company in the Bay Area, a SaaS marketplace platform that would eventually serve enterprise brands like Intel, Microsoft, and Hallmark, all the way down to scrappy startups building peer-to-peer marketplaces for everything from boats to farm equipment. She served as CEO for seven years before stepping down to the board and eventually exiting the business. That company, originally called Near Me Marketplaces, still operates today under the name Platform OS.
She repeated the process with a second startup building, scaling, and successfully exiting once more.
By any measure, she was a seasoned entrepreneur. But when it came time to exit her own businesses, something was missing.
“If you haven’t raised venture capital or aren’t in the private equity arena, you’re pretty much left out to fend for yourself. There wasn’t a good avenue or even awareness that there were other ways to sell your business.”
She figured it out, the hard way. And she promised herself that if she ever had the opportunity, she’d make sure other business owners didn’t have to.
The Seven-Year Pause That Changed Everything
Between her startup exits, Michelle made a deliberate choice: she stepped away from her career to raise her three boys. Her sons are now 12, 10, and 8 — born roughly 18 months apart, each one arriving in the middle of one of the most professionally demanding stretches of her life.
She doesn’t describe that chapter as a break. She describes it as a reset.
“I had time to actually think — about what I wanted to build next, what kind of company I wanted to lead, and what kind of problem actually mattered to me.”
When her family relocated from the Bay Area to Utah and the kids headed back to school, the itch to build returned. And the problem she kept seeing both in Utah and, as she began to meet business owners across the country, everywhere was the same one she’d experienced herself.
Small business owners approaching the sale of their companies had no real advocate. The market was fragmented, inconsistent, and often indifferent to the emotional weight of what sellers were going through.
“This isn’t just a transaction for them. It’s someone’s legacy. Often a once-in-a-lifetime event. The stakes couldn’t be higher and the support available was nowhere near what it should be.”
Building Business Brokers of America
Michelle launched Business Brokers of America with a clear thesis: small business owners deserve the same caliber of guidance, strategy, and advocacy that larger companies get from investment banks and private equity firms. And they deserve a team, not just a single broker who disappears after the listing goes live.
She started in Utah. Within the first year, she had closed deals in Texas, California, and Idaho. The geographic flexibility, combined with her tech background and process-driven approach, proved that the model could scale.
Today, BBA operates nationally with a team of 12, including brokers, account managers, and a dedicated marketing team. Rather than siloing each deal with a single individual contributor, the standard model in brokerage, BBA works as a coordinated team. Every listing gets premium placement on over seven platforms. Every qualified buyer signs an NDA before seeing a single page of financials. Every seller receives a custom Confidential Information Memorandum built with the same rigor a private equity firm would expect.
And every client gets the one thing Michelle wished she’d had: someone in their corner, from first valuation to final wire.
The Numbers Behind the Mission
92%
Success Rate
11,000+
Qualified Buyers
~9 Months
Avg. Time to Close
50 States
National Reach
What Michelle Believes About Selling a Business
Ask Michelle what she tells every new client, and she doesn’t hesitate.
“Sell when things are up, not when you’re burned out or in decline.”
She’s seen too many owners wait until exhaustion, health challenges, or outside pressure forces their hand. By that point, the leverage is gone. Buyers can sense desperation. And the business that could have commanded a premium instead settles for a discount.
“The sellers who do best are the ones who treated the sale like a project, not an emergency. They started planning two or three years out. They cleaned up their books. They built a team that could run without them. And when the time came, they walked into the process with everything in their favor.”
She’s also clear-eyed about what sellers deserve from a broker. ‘I never heard from my broker’ is one of the most common phrases she hears from clients who came to BBA after a failed engagement elsewhere. She built her firm, its processes, its technology, its team structure, specifically to make sure that never happens.
What Drives Her Every Day
Michelle talks about the baby boomers selling their businesses right now with a kind of urgency that’s hard to manufacture.
We are in the middle of the largest generational transfer of privately owned small businesses in American history. Baby boomers own more than half of the small businesses in this country.
Many have spent decades building something real, a company that employs people, serves a community, and holds the weight of their financial future. And many of them are reaching retirement age without a clear plan for what comes next.
“The backbone of America is small business. And for too long, no one has been truly serving them.”
That’s the gap she woke up every day to close.
What Drives Her Every Day
Michelle talks about the baby boomers selling their businesses right now with a kind of urgency that’s hard to manufacture.
We are in the middle of the largest generational transfer of privately owned small businesses in
American history. Baby boomers own more than half of the small businesses in this country. Many have spent decades building something real, a company that employs people, serves a community, and holds the weight of their financial future. And many of them are reaching retirement age without a clear plan for what comes next.
“The backbone of America is small business. And for too long,no one has been truly serving them.“
That’s the gap she woke up every day to close.
Work With Michelle and the BBA Team
Business Brokers of America offers free, no-obligation business valuations to help you understand what your company is worth and what it would take to maximize that value before you go to market.
Whether you’re two years out from selling or ready to move now, the best time to start the conversation is before you need to.
Business Brokers of America offers free, no-obligation business valuations to help you understand what your company is worth and what it would take to maximize that value before you go to market.
Whether you’re two years out from selling or ready to move now, the best time to start the conversation is before you need to.
Business Brokers of America is a full-service brokerage firm helping entrepreneurs buy and sell businesses across all
50 states. Headquartered in Utah, BBA is led by founder and president Michelle Regner