American Dream Achieved
IBA, as a fifty-year old business brokerage firm serving the entrepreneurial community of the Pacific Northwest, has been uniquely positioned since before the American Bicentennial celebration of 1976 to witness and hear the stories of thousands of people who have lived the American dream through entrepreneurship creating beloved businesses by employees, customers, and communities while finding personal fulfillment and financial prosperity through execution of their ideas, hard work, perseverance, and ability. In an effort to share these stories heard throughout the years by our team of business brokers, who are commonly regarded as the “best listeners” in the M&A industry, IBA has retained highly regarded writer, Nesha Ruther, to tell their stories. It is our goal to share one story a month. It is our hope that you will find the stories as inspirational and motivational as they are to us and the buyers who bought the businesses in IBA facilitated transactions in Washington, Oregon, and Alaska. The following story comes from internal at IBA and features a senior member of our IBA team, Sally Bergesen. IBA is blessed to have many successful entrepreneurs among its team of business sale intermediaries and corporate management. Guidance that comes from a place of knowledge is valued. However, professional counsel from a party with relevant academic knowledge and field experience is superior.
The Story of Sally Bergesen – Senior M&A Intermediary Specializing in the Construction Sector and Female Owned Businesses
By Nesha Ruther
Growing up, Sally Bergesen had an unconventional childhood that left her fiercely independent. “I grew up in Berkeley, California in the 70s which was a pretty wild place to be,” she says. “It was the epicenter of counterculture, and it had a lot of positives to it but I also describe my childhood as kind of feral.”
The daughter of a civil rights attorney, Sally was raised among activists and grassroots organizers. This sense of community and philosophy would have a profound impact on her. “I was raised by my dad and he instilled in me his values, his desire to change the world and make it a better place. I carried that forward in my various career chapters,” Sally says.
While Sally’s father may not have been your typical entrepreneur, he did have an entrepreneurial attitude, and he encouraged her to take an experimental approach to her own career. “He was also an advocate for trying things out, seeing if it fits and if it doesn’t, moving on to the next thing. He set me up to have multiple career chapters and be okay with that.”
“He was a gate-crasher,” Sally recalls fondly. “He had this personality of like, you can go anywhere, do anything, be anybody, don’t let anyone tell you that you’re not allowed to have a place. I loved that. I idolized him.”
Naturally, Sally’s first career ambition was to be just like her dad, so she got a job as a paralegal. Sally planned to become an attorney like her father and worked towards it for six years before realizing it was not the right path for her. “I liked that the job had these analytical pieces to it, the aspects of putting a case together, interviewing witnesses, but I didn’t like that it didn’t have any creativity.”
Sally’s need for creativity led her to the advertising world, much to the chagrin of her father. “I remember telling my dad I was interested in advertising and he was like ‘Oh, that’s disappointing,’ she laughs. ‘You’re gonna go work for the Man.’” Sally may have been working for the Man, but she took a more artistic approach to it, spending five years working at a branding and design agency.
During that time, she and her husband got married and had children, and in 2001, she quit her day job and started a branding consulting firm so she could spend more time at home. This was her first foray into entrepreneurship. Her branding consultation proved successful, with Sally working with Microsoft and Starbucks among others. It was during this period that she achieved a significant claim to fame: coming up with the name for the emergency contraceptive product, Plan-B.
“I really enjoyed that work,” she says fondly of her consulting firm. “It was always fun. I loved the diversity of the projects and clients, I loved the freedom, and I loved that it was always changing,” This love of branding and design and the creative skill associated with it was a tremendous part of her life, but there was another part of her life yet to be incorporated into her business model.
Like her career, Sally encountered this other passion by way of her father. “My dad was a runner,” she says. “He was part of that 70s jogging boom.” As a teenager in Berkeley, Sally experienced her fair share of partying, but by the time she graduated college, she was itching to make some healthy changes in her life. “I got fully hooked on running and it became so foundational to my life and friendships,” she says.
When she moved to Seattle, she found a strong community there to support her. Sally’s husband is also an athlete, and together they participated in track and cross country races, 5Ks, and 8Ks, if people were running, they were there.
It was this hobby that led directly to the foundation of Sally’s business. “I had the entrepreneurial moment where you go looking for something and discover that it’s missing,” she says. For Sally, this lightbulb moment came in the absence of comfortable athletic wear for women.
“I had just had my second kid and none of my old running clothes fit the way they used to. I wasn’t that happy with my body and I was trying to figure it out,” she says. “So I’m power shopping like moms do, you know, you have 45 minutes to do 10 things. And I’m looking at the athletic clothes and I’m like ‘Why are running shorts so bad? The fit is bad, the fabrics are bad, the design is bad.’ I felt like my passion for the sport was at this very high level, but the product I was looking at was so mediocre.”
Sally began to do research on the athletic apparel brands on the market and came to a surprising realization. “The reason why athletic apparel was mediocre is because it was made by running shoe brands. Shoes are more profitable, and where they make their money. Apparel was always the afterthought,” Sally explains. Brands like Nike focused most of their resources on shoes. But they wanted the billboard opportunity that apparel represents, so they flooded the market with cheap garments and big logos.
Today, the idea that exercise apparel should be made of high-quality fabrics with intentional design is not an uncommon one, but back in 2007 when Sally began this journey, it was. “That was the genesis of Oiselle and the entire mission,” Sally says. “Everything was this balance of a beautiful product and the community of running.”
Oiselle (pronounced wa-zelle) is an antiquated word for bird, particularly a ladybird. The perfect name for a brand committed to helping women take flight. This idea of growing a community for women was critical to Oiselle’s mission from the very beginning. “It was always so much bigger and more important than apparel,” Sally says. “Yes, apparel is important. We want great fit, we want great fabrics, we want it to feel good, but it is also the bigger, more beautiful, more joyous aspect of running.”
For Sally, this bigger, more profound aspect of running is twofold. Firstly, it is inner empowerment. “I wanted to create a brand that understood the inner strength you discover through sport,” Sally says. “Learning to love your body, learning to feel confident, and taking that confidence out into other parts of your life.”
The second aspect is community. “There is so much research out there that shows what creates true happiness and fulfillment in people, and it’s actually pretty simple and has very little to do with the things we hear,” Sally says. “It comes down to moving your body, nutrition, some kind of spiritual foundation, and community. Relationships are, in fact, what makes people happy.”
For Sally, running had delivered her all the essential tools of happiness: physical movement, the desire to maintain a healthy diet, a philosophy that gave meaning to her life and work, and deep interpersonal relationships. Through Oiselle, she was off to deliver these things to as many women as possible.
“That’s why Oiselle celebrates community,” Sally explains. “Because it’s so powerful and so transformative. We also knew that in the sports community writ large, that was missing for women. God bless Nike, they’ve done a lot of good things for sports and for athletes, but their genesis is as a men’s brand. Women have always been second tier for them.”
This is something Sally believes in very strongly because as a female athlete who ran a company for female athletes, she is acutely aware of the need for a space exclusively for women. “Men have a lot of offerings. They’ve been catered to and provided for. This is not to discount men. I love them and have many of them in my life,” she laughs. “It’s not that they don’t deserve to have their own products, but the truth is they already do. There was a beauty and clarity to focusing on creating a place just for women.”
Sally understood that despite the tremendous strides in women’s rights and the collective movement towards gender equality, there is still a fundamental understanding that a woman’s primary value is in her appearance. This attitude becomes particularly fraught in the world of sports. “We live in a world where women still struggle to escape the ever-present objectification machine,” she says. “We don’t live in a world where there is not a constant visual pressure on women. So it was really important to me to create something where women felt they could be themselves and connect with themselves and with each other.”
For so many women, athletics are not only a physical outlet but a departure from a world that has taught them to think of their bodies purely in an aesthetic sense. When women run or lift weights or hike, they are tapping into a functional, utilitarian aspect of their bodies that is oft-neglected. For many women, sports are the first time they think of their bodies not in terms of what they look like, but in terms of what they can do.
This presented an interesting dilemma for the apparel brand: how do you make athletic wear for women that looks good, without it being about how it looks good? “There is a concept called enclothed cognition,” Sally says. “It’s basically the idea that what you wear plays a role in how you feel on a psychological level. There was research done on white lab coats. How people performed when they were wearing the coat or not, it showed that the coat changed people’s response, it made them level up. I believe that athletic apparel can play that role.”
Sally’s belief in the impact clothing can have on athletes is not purely philosophical, she has seen material indicators of it through Oiselle’s sponsored Olympic athletes. “We sponsored Olympians in multiple Olympics and they wore our kits,” Sally explains. “When we designed what we called Elite Kits, we really wanted to help the athletes get into that mental space and perform at peak level. Because when you’re talking about world-class athletes, the mental can really impact the physical.”
It may come as a surprise, but Olympic athletes, aside from the few who become very high-profile every four years, are actually chronically under-supported, especially female athletes. “People watch the Olympics and think ‘Oh my God, these athletes are phenomenal.’ And they are, they perform at the highest level in the world, but if you look under the hood of how the Olympic Development Program works in the U.S., you find that there is actually very little support for Olympic hopefuls,” Sally explains. “The top 3% of talent get big contracts, and everybody else gets next to nothing. You’d be shocked at how many Olympic athletes make $15,000-$20,000 a year.”
For Oiselle, this meant they could sponsor an athlete at a price that was feasible for a relatively small brand while still making a substantial impact in the life and career of that athlete. As a brand for women, this was a particular relief to female athletes who had long been treated like second-class citizens by their sponsors. “There has been a lot of publicity that has come out about major brands that have had horrible draconian contracts with their female athletes. Like if a pro athlete gets pregnant, they could cut her contract, stop paying her without even informing her, and just kick her to the curb,” Sally says.
“We realized we had an important role to play. We hired an attorney to rewrite contracts and created template contracts that women athletes could use to protect themselves,” Sally says. “We could shine a light on the athlete not just as a performance machine, but as a whole human, with a life and needs and family. It became about more than just sponsoring an Olympian but the whole journey that women athletes go through.”
While Sally was able to do incredible work at the helm of Oiselle, balancing the desire to do good work with keeping the company financially profitable was a challenge. “One thing I experienced as the leader of Oiselle is that there was a high desire from the community to take on a lot of causes and be the front women for social issues but of course that also comes with a financial burden,” she says. “There was an infinite desire for Oiselle’s capacity to change the world, but finite resources. Our community building did have to bring a fiscal return.”
While this balancing act was no doubt a challenge, it also revealed a valuable insight: a strong social stance can yield incredible devotion from customers. “Because we were so passionate about women in sports, many women wanted to be a part of what we were building and so they became loyal customers. They didn’t just want to be customers, they wanted to join a community; a big, boisterous, empowered, and unapologetic team!” Sally says.
This led to the creation of Volée, a membership-based community in which women could pay to be connected with local running communities, attend team running events, and get early access to new apparel. At its height, Oiselle’s Volée program had 4,000 members from around the country. Volée accomplished dual goals: building on the company’s mission of community building while also balancing the fiscal element of the business.
Sally Bergesen led Oiselle from 2007 to 2022, 15 years of running the company (in every sense of the word “running”). As the company grew, so too did the industry. Where once they were a pioneer of women’s athletic apparel, they became a smaller brand in a highly saturated field. “We were able to operate as a scrappy underdog for many years, but at a certain point we were competing against levels of investment that were a hundred times what we had,” Sally says.
For comparison, the brand Outdoor Voices had raised $50 million from Alphabet, the company that owns Google. An even larger amount, $500 million, would later be raised by the brand Vuori from SoftBank, the same entity that invested in WeWork. “We could make spend our money wisely, we could sponsor Olympians to some capacity, and I did like to think of these things as creative constraints, but comparatively our resources were quite limited,” Sally says.
While the COVID years actually saw a boom for Oiselle, with more people turning to running in place of going to the gym, the company struggled to meet the sudden increase in demand. “The years of 2020 to 2022 were some of the hardest of my life,” Sally says candidly. “COVID was happening and everybody was figuring out how to stay alive, and while we did well from a sales perspective, making that happen was a total zoo. Our warehouse was shut down, the company which used to be so lovely and in-person became remote, and as the leader of the company, I carried a lot of the weight of helping people through that.”
By the end of 2022, Sally had reached her limit. “I was not well. I was spiritually, emotionally, and physically broken and I ended up in the emergency room due to the stress.” She decided to take a sabbatical and during that time, began exploring the possibility of selling the business. Thankfully, they found a buyer who aligned with Sally’s social and philosophical values, and who would uphold the community aspect of the business as much as the apparel.
After 15 years of ownership, Sally exited Oiselle and began her next chapter. “I have a lot of mixed feelings, and while it was a positive in that we found a purchaser who was philosophically aligned, it was still very challenging,” she says.
It was the complex feelings of exiting the business that led Sally to her next adventure, becoming a business broker at IBA. “I have so much empathy for entrepreneurs and business owners. I get the mindset and the challenges and it can be very isolating.”
Sally sold Oiselle without having any representation, and while she stands by the outcome, it made her realize how essential a business broker can be in helping the owner find a suitable match and make a smooth exit. “Having representation in the exiting and selling of a business is incredibly important for so many reasons,” Sally says. “As a founder, it is almost impossible to be your own advocate. You’re very sensitive to the value of the business and having representation really can help you get the most value out of the company. It’s an incredible asset for entrepreneurs to be able to have an advocate like IBA.”
Since joining the IBA team herself, Sally has helped entrepreneurs like herself in these moments of challenging transition. “We’re in a very sacred space with an owner, where they’re sharing all of their business with us, it’s business intimacy if you will. So I love that piece of it and being able to counsel and encourage them,” Sally says.
She also appreciates the diversity of IBA and the multitude of specialties that Gregory has curated among his brokers. “I’m grateful to Gregory for welcoming somebody who has more of a branding and creative background. He’s done a great job of building a diverse team of people with different perspectives, I really respect that,” Sally says. “His coaching style is also the best fit for me. I’ve been an athlete my whole life. I know that no one can do the hard work for me; I have to do it myself. But we all need guidance from time to time. To get that from someone with 30+ years of experience is ideal!”
While Sally is still discovering her niche as a broker, she also enjoys the wide variety of businesses she has gotten to work with. “I’ve focused on home services and construction as well as professional services. But I also love working with women founders as well. The diversity of the clients is really exciting for me and regularly gives me new challenges,” she says.
From the very beginning, Sally has followed the lessons taught to her by her gate-crasher father. “He really instilled this classic version of the American dream, which is that if you apply yourself and are persistent, you will succeed,” she says. At the same time, Sally knows from the legacy of activists before her and her own activism through Oiselle, that it is not always so simple. “What I have learned, now in my 56th year, is that the American dream isn’t yet fully realized because it’s not available to enough people in this country. There are so many people who have been harmed by factors that have played out over generations but are still very much real. There are still people who exist in a world that doesn’t see them and accept them as people who can contribute and make a difference. For me, the American dream is both a fulfilled and unfulfilled promise.”
What Sally can say definitively, is that her business helped provide women athletes from across the country with the infrastructure needed to achieve their own American dreams. “That is the thing I feel the most proud of is that Oiselle created a community. “Today, everywhere I go, especially in the Pacific Northwest, I see all kinds of women wearing Oiselle. I call it ‘Oiselle in the wild,’ and it never gets old. It’s like the universe (and maybe my dad) winking at me: ‘the flight has just begun!’”
Nesha Ruther
Nesha Ruther is a writer and editor from Takoma Park, Maryland. She received her BA in English Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin Madison, where she received a full tuition scholarship through the First Wave program based on academic and creative merits. She was a 2016 Young Arts winner in spoken word, a 2016 winner of the DC Commission of the Arts Larry Neal Writing Award, a 2017 winner of the Mochila Review Writing Award, which was judged by Nikki Giovanni, a 2020 winner of the University of Wisconsin’s Eudora Welty Fiction Thesis Award, and a 2022 Tin House Winter Workshop Participant. She has been commissioned to write and perform for the National Education Association, and has had work published in NarrativeNortheast, Angles Literary Magazine, Beltway Quarterly and more. She currently lives in Cincinnati Ohio, is a Lead Writer at Bond & Grace, and a co-host for the podcast Lit Talk (https://www.bondandgrace.com/the-lit-talk-podcast).