Zoe Townley

Zoe Townley writes every Confidential Business Review that leaves the firm.

When a seller signs with TNT, she is the first call. That conversation is about the business itself: how it runs day to day, who the customers are, what happens when the owner is not there, why they are selling. Within a day or two it is written up, listed, and handed to an account manager who becomes the seller’s point of contact from there.

She writes those documents by hand. TNT tested the AI tools built for this work and they invented things: claims about a business that nobody could substantiate and that a buyer would eventually check. That is not a risk worth taking with someone’s company, and it is not fair to the buyer either. The document a buyer reads is one a person wrote, from a conversation with the owner.

Sellers often arrive believing that what a broker offers is a database of buyers waiting to go. It is not, and if it were you could buy the list yourself. Buyers buy, and then they are gone. What you are hiring is the process that keeps bringing new ones in.

Before TNT she spent four years at ITEX, a business-to-business trade exchange, working with owner-operated companies and turning their excess inventory into new sales. That is where she learned what running a business actually costs a person. Most people underestimate it. The baker is up at four in the morning to start the ovens because it is his business and the buck stops with him. The owner of a successful three-state plumbing company takes calls on vacation because he is the name on the hook. She tries to remember that every owner she talks to has less time than she does.

She joined TNT in 2021 and spent two years as an account manager, handling incoming buyers across as many as forty listings at once. Today she handles listings and the systems behind them: what goes on the website and the advertising channels, and the automations that move a buyer from first inquiry to signed NDA to a conversation with the seller.

A sale only works when both sides come out even. She has watched a deal nearly come apart over an accidental inventory disparity of a few thousand dollars, not a meaningful fraction of the purchase price. The buyer did not care about the money. He did not want to feel he had been had. That is usually what is underneath, and if one side leaves the table feeling taken, the deal finds a way not to close.

Zoe holds a Bachelor of Science in Business from Judson College, summa cum laude.