How Employer.com acquired Bench Accounting in under 48 Hours

When thousands of customers and hundreds of jobs were on the line Employer.com used speed, profitability, and their shared services model to close the deal.

Employer.com acquired Bench Accounting <48hrs after the company abruptly announced their closure — saving hundreds of jobs and thousands of customers.

The new owner, Jesse Tinsley, just shared how they pulled that off… here are my key takeaways:

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What Happened

The deal came together over the course of a weekend. Jesse initially reached out via LinkedIn on a Saturday, got connected with Bench’s team, and was in near-continuous talks for 24–48 hours to hammer out a “binding agreement.”

Speed was critical—both in structuring the deal quickly and in standing Bench back up to avoid losing thousands of customers and hundreds of employees. Employer.com’s existing “shared services” model (covering engineering, finance, corporate development, and operations) allows them to handle the acquisition like Bench at a pace that traditional private equity firms would have found challenging if not downright impossible.

Once they reached an agreement, the focus shifted to re-hiring Bench employees who had effectively lost their jobs when Bench shut down, restoring customer access, and reassuring everyone that Employer.com is profitable and therefore not reliant on securing additional external venture funding. They plan to honor all prepaid subscriptions and invest in regaining customer trust.

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What can founders learn + what’s coming

Speed

“Speed wins deals and the ability to execute on them. If it’s your first time buying a company, there’s no way. We’ve made quite a few offers in the last few years, closed on 10 now. It's not our first rodeo. Even then, it’s stressing the bounds of sanity to get something done in 24 hours and, more importantly, take care of hundreds of employees and thousands of customers.”

Why acquire Bench

“It fits our product roadmap. It was super serendipitous…I saw that news. I was like, ‘This is perfect.’ It checks a lot of boxes for us. It was just a really good synergistic opportunity, so we went for it.”

Maintaining Customer Trust

“If you haven't heard, we're honoring all prepaid Bench services even though we will not have the revenue from that directly ourselves.”

“Number one is making sure that the existing customers are taken care of…there’s a ton of panic across the ecosystem, and understandably so.”

Profitability and Stability for Customers

“We're profitable. We're not reliant on raising additional capital. We never have been, so it's just a very different calculus for us. There's not going to be some sudden shut-off again. So that's just something to be very clear about.”

Buy-versus-Build

“What used to take five years or six years and tens of millions of dollars in VC can be done in six months and very limited amount of money now with a very good team with all the open APIs and products you can plug into. There's a bit of a buy-versus-build inflection point in the last two years where tech valuations were very much inverted off of historical norms. So we could buy businesses (this isn't specific to Bench — just to be clear — this a thesis) at two to three times ARR, which I think is a very good fundamental decision, especially if it fits a larger product strategy and especially when the market turns.

That's been something we've been executing on pretty extensively. And I think if you looked at our full suite of products, we have product parity in less than 12 months with companies that spent hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital and are not profitable within six or seven years.”

“Post-close we’ll be under 500 employees, and we are projected to hit 100 million ARR in early 2025. You’ll see a lot more businesses have huge amounts of ARR in the future with very small teams.”

Shared Services and Integration

“We have a shared resource team across all of our different products and companies. They're able to dive in and run with these M&A integrations a lot quicker than your average acquisition.”

“Our CTO and COO will be jumping in to be full-time on Bench for the foreseeable future. I will be a pseudo-interim CEO and making decisions there that need to be done, but it definitely won’t be me in three to six months.”

(Please forgive any potential errors in my transcription — striving for accuracy of intended message)

Employer.com is actively rolling up and integrating multiple acquisitions (they have closed around 10 prior deals and have two more in progress) as part of a broader plan to build a comprehensive workforce and accounting product suite.

Thank you to Jesse for sharing in public after a crazy ~48 hours and @CoFoundersNik for hosting the call.

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