Juliet Barratt co-founded Grenade and sold it to Mondelez, but the exit wasn't the win every founder thinks it is. This is the real story.

Most founders building toward an exit picture the same scene: the wire hits, the celebration starts, and life finally rewards the years of grind. Juliet Barratt lived that exact moment in 2021 and what actually happened bears almost no resemblance to the fantasy.

In this episode of Built Not Born in Business, Juliet sits down with Chris and Helen to tell the full Grenade story. From a failed teaching career and a chance meeting in a Birmingham bar, to building a sports nutrition brand around a plastic grenade-shaped container that no one knew where to put on a supermarket shelf. From driving a tank down Oxford Street as guerrilla marketing, to landing the protein bar product that turned a niche sports brand into a household name. From bootstrapping with no investment to taking on private equity in 2014, again in 2017, and finally selling to Mondelez in 2021.

But the moment the deal closed is where the story gets honest. Juliet describes the lawyer ringing her the Monday morning after the sale to ask whether the money had hit her bank and she hadn't even looked. The sale was never about the money. It was about handing over a business she'd lived, breathed, slept, and built her entire identity around for eleven years. The week leading up to completion was, in her words, horrendous. She compares the due diligence process to someone kicking holes in your baby. And the months afterward forced her to confront something no founder plans for: who you are when the thing you built isn't yours anymore.

This is a conversation every founder thinking about an exit needs to hear before they get there. Juliet covers what really matters when choosing investors, why she and her husband co-founded the business without it killing the marriage, why she now turns down most second-business opportunities, and what she wishes someone had told her about life after the sale.

It is honest, unfiltered, and the kind of founder story that gets sanitised everywhere else.