Kevin Simonson has now sold two agencies. And the second time around, his advice on how to evaluate a deal has gotten refreshingly blunt: stop asking about the multiple. Ask if it was good or bad (meaning the experience).
We caught Kevin on the In/Organic Podcast Live on Friday June 5th, days after Interluxe Group, the luxury marketing platform backed by Mountaingate announced it had acquired adMixt. He joined us fresh off Monday’s announcement for a candid conversation about how the deal came together, why a buyer with no overlapping capability turned out to be the better home, and how deal structures have shifted between his 2020 exit and now.
Background
Kevin’s path is a useful one for anyone early in their career. He started as a search intern at iProspect, founded an agency called Metric Digital around 2015, and sold it to Wpromote in 2020. He stayed on for about nine months post-acquisition, took some genuinely restorative time off, then consulted for private equity firms, brands on the growth side, and agencies on more or less everything before stepping in as CEO of adMixt just under two years ago.
That last move is worth flagging. Coming in as a CEO of a 12-13 year old company is a very different experience from founding and running your own. adMixt wasn’t his to build from scratch. It was his to reposition.
What adMixt Does
Kevin’s own one-liner: “We get people to buy things and sign up for stuff on the internet.” Paid media across Meta, Google, YouTube, TikTok, plus Reddit, Pinterest, Snap, AppLovin, and more, with post-production as an additional offering.
But the differentiator is structural. adMixt doesn’t use the ad platforms’ native tools to buy and optimize media. They do it through software they built themselves. That makes them more of a tech-enabled agency than a traditional one and made adMixt a genuinely different experience for Kevin, who’d run the same scope at Metric Digital without any proprietary technology. Same job, fundamentally different way of doing it, and in his view, a better one.
Who Is Interluxe Group?
Kevin’s honest admission: six months ago, he’d never heard of Interluxe. But he knew their brands it’s hard not to know Four Seasons or Ferrari. Interluxe operates across three buckets: experiential marketing (in-real-life events), media (they own properties including Kingdom Golf, Remodelista, and Gardenista), and strategic communications/PR.
What they didn’t have was any meaningful history running paid media. Which is precisely the point. adMixt isn’t a redundancy inside Interluxe — it’s an entirely new service line.
How the Deal Came Together
The deal started with a text. Kevin is friends with Nii Henney, co-founder of CPC Strategy, which sold to Elite SEM (now Tenuity) back when Mountain Gate backed it. Nii sits on several Mountain Gate boards and made the original introduction — a simple “I want to intro you to Mountain Gate and Interluxe.” Kevin pulled them up, didn’t recognize the name, but recognized the brands.
From there, Mountaingate and Interluxe worked hand-in-hand throughout — Nick, the CEO at Interluxe Group, and Brandon Hall from Mountaingate were on essentially every call together. And when Kevin did his “reverse due diligence” — asking people in his network who’d worked with Mountaingate — the feedback was uniformly positive. That mattered. It built a level of trust going in that meaningfully helped the deal, because Kevin didn’t have to worry about who he was getting into business with.
The process that wasn’t a process: adMixt didn’t run a formal auction. Because of Kevin’s history with Metric Digital, he already knew bankers and the strategic-side M&A people. When he joined adMixt, several of them reached out asking what he was up to. His answer: someday we might sell this. So he kept them updated quarterly — and every quarter, the email got a little better. Eventually adMixt hit the inflection point where a serious conversation made sense. That was the not-quite-two-year arc.
The banker came from the buyer: In a nice twist, when it became clear who was seriously interested, Kevin asked the buyer who they preferred to work with. The answer: Palazzo. They’d done multiple deals together, knew Eric Neihaus there too. So Kevin’s sell-side advisor recommendation came from the acquirer, a reflection of how relationship-driven and un-adversarial this particular deal was.
Why Interluxe?
Kevin was clear that other buyers could have produced a good outcome. But Interluxe was the more interesting one, specifically because they didn’t already offer his service line.
Compare it to Wpromote, which already did heavy paid social and search with much bigger teams. Joining an organization that already does what you do means meeting an existing team, mapping titles, and integrating into established structures. Kevin would do the Wpromote deal again and still talks to those people,but inherently more complicated.
At Interluxe, there’s no title mapping. His team keeps their titles going in. No email handle changes. The integration is a deliberate slow roll, with the bigger structural questions pushed out to maybe 2027. Both Mountain Gate and Nick at Interluxe were explicit from the start: we don’t want to fix you. There’s nothing to fix. We want to support you and keep you growing.
There’s an immediate upside too — adMixt can integrate with Interluxe’s owned media properties more or less right away, which changes how they run strategy for the brands they serve.
Deal Structure: What’s Changed Since 2020
Kevin couldn’t get into the specifics of his own deal and was careful to note he’s not a lawyer but he offered genuinely useful color on how agency deal structures have evolved between 2020 and 2026.
A law change around 2022 altered how rollover and cash can be treated, which affects how certain aspects of the payout get structured. Mechanisms like equity loans have become more popular than they were in 2020. There’s variation in how phantom equity converts to real equity, and how real equity is treated moving from the existing entity to the new one. And the legal steps to the waterfall differ depending on whether a deal is an asset purchase (as his Metric Digital exit was), a stock purchase, or — as Ayelet noted a membership interest purchase.
Ayelet’s practical guidance for agency owners: you don’t need to know every legal mechanic going in. Get educated on the basics, then lean on your legal team and tax specialists to handle the restructuring once you’re in the deal how the rollover gets treated, how it moves up, and so on. That’s what they’re there for.
Why the Multiple Lies
The most quotable insight of the conversation, and the one worth internalizing if you’re an agency owner:
People always want to know the multiple. Kevin’s view, after two exits: it’s a quick way to get to an answer, but the reality is that two deals can carry the same headline number and be structured completely differently. The cash, the equity, the rollover, the kickers, the bonuses — all of it varies wildly.
So now, when a friend tells Kevin they sold a company, he doesn’t ask about the multiple. He asks: was it good or bad? That cuts to the chase and gives him far more useful information.
It’s the same point Ayelet makes constantly on this show: ask about the structure of the deal, not the headline EV. Companies are often incented to publish a lower headline number even when there are significant kickers and bonuses that don’t get priced into the announced value. The headline is marketing. The structure is the truth.
Credit Where It’s Due
Kevin was quick to direct the credit to Zach Greenberger, adMixt’s founder, who built the company from scratch over roughly 13 years and is now CTO. An engineer who genuinely doesn’t seek the limelight, Zach built what Kevin described as one of the main reasons he took the job: a company that did good work with low churn and a strong operational foundation. The problem to solve wasn’t quality it was positioning and communicating what adMixt does and to whom. A far easier problem than fixing bad work.
Kevin Simonson is President of Performance Marketing at Interluxe Group, following its acquisition of adMixt. He previously founded Metric Digital (acquired by Wpromote in 2020).
