Gene Townley

Gene Townley knows what it is to be on the seller’s side of the table, because he spent thirty years there.

He and his wife Wyndee started or acquired fifty-one businesses over three decades and sold thirty-three of them: vacuum distribution, mortgage brokerage in two states, community newspapers, festival concessions, rental real estate, guided hunting. For most of those years he did not know business brokers existed. He closed businesses he could have sold. Then a broker got him nearly $175,000 for a newspaper he would have walked away from for $20,000, and he never forgot it.

The last of those ventures was the one that taught him the trade. Gene and Wyndee bought the smallest territory ITEX had ever franchised and built it, through twenty-four acquisitions, into the largest franchise in that company’s history, serving more than 3,000 member businesses and processing over $25 million in trade transactions. They sold it in 2020. Ten years of buying, integrating, and selling companies turned out to be an apprenticeship.

He got licensed and founded TNT in 2021. Since then the firm has sold 113 businesses worth $104 million in 37 states and across the Caribbean. Since 2024, 74% of the listings TNT has taken have sold, which is roughly double the industry norm. The IBBA has awarded Gene its Deal Maker Award every year since 2022, placed him in the Platinum Chairman’s Circle since 2023, named him among the top 1% of brokers worldwide in 2024 and 2025, and ranked him fourteenth in the world by businesses sold in 2025. He is the most-awarded business broker in Alabama.

The firm works the way it does because Gene remembers being the client. There is no fee of any kind until closing. Valuations are free. A seller’s tax returns stay private until there is a signed offer to purchase. Buyers sign a strict NDA before they learn the company’s name, and in 98% of TNT’s closings not even the general manager knew until the seller walked back in with the new owner.

Pricing is built on what a lender will actually finance rather than what a seller hopes to hear, which is the reason the listings sell. And when the honest answer is that an owner should wait a year and take more money, that is the answer they get.

TNT is a family firm of six, and that is deliberate. Confidential work runs on trust, and trust does not scale the way headcount does. Gene’s daughter Zoe runs listing operations. Wyndee, his business partner across nearly every venture the two of them have built, is co-owner and principal broker.

Gene hosts The Exit Strategy, a weekly segment on The Price of Business, the second-longest-running syndicated business radio program in the country. He and Wyndee live in Orange Beach with their five children.