Preparing Your Business for Sale: Strategies and Pitfalls

Looking to Sell Your Business?

Are you looking forward to selling your business, and doing it for top dollar? Learn how to maximize your business's value and achieve a smooth exit.

In this episode, we get into business valuations, exit planning, and the importance of financial readiness for a successful sale. Laurie Barkman, the Business Transition Sherpa™, shares insights on protecting your business, setting growth goals, and understanding the different perspectives of strategic and financial buyers.

Key Takeaways:

• Start Early and Plan Ahead: Begin your exit planning process at least 10 years before your desired sale date to maximize your return and avoid pitfalls.

• Focus on Financials: Showcase your business's growth potential by ensuring your financials are in order and demonstrating enterprise value.

• Understand Your Buyer: Identify potential buyers for your business and tailor your strategy accordingly, whether you're targeting strategic buyers, financial buyers, or related buyers.

• Identify potential buyers for your business and tailor your strategy accordingly.

Ready to start planning your exit strategy? Schedule a consultation with Laurie Barkman or visit her website - https://thebusinesstransitionsherpa.com/

Links:

• Buy Laurie's Book, "The Business Transition Handbook" - https://amzn.to/4biANs5

• Link to Laurie's Masterclass, "Endgame Entrepreneurship" -  thebusinesstransitionsherpa.com

Time Stamps

00:26 Guest Introduction: Laurie Barkman

01:49 The Importance of Business Valuation

03:43 Types of Buyers: Strategic, Financial, and Related

03:49 Strategic Buyers Explained

06:55 Financial Buyers and Private Equity

10:34 Related Buyers and Management Buyouts

12:18 When to Start Thinking About Selling Your Business

13:28 Preparing Your Business for Sale

24:53 Common Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

31:31 Conclusion and Resources

• Transcript

  Introduction to Me Financial Podcast

  Welcome to Me Financial, the podcast designed to inspire your financial life. Hello everyone. And welcome to the podcast. I am Michelle Moses, your host. And today we are going to be talking about valuing your business, how to do it. Uh, do you want to Sell it, absorb another company, or what do you want to do with it?

  
  Guest Introduction: Laurie Barkman

  And today to talk about that, we have Lori Barkman and she is the business transition Sherpa, and she's the former CEO of a 100 million revenue company that was sold to a fortune 50 as a business transition and M and a intermediary, Lori advises owners how to create more valuable businesses and find the right buyer when it's time to let go.

  Thank you for joining us. Oh, it's my pleasure. Thanks for having me. Yeah, I can't wait to talk about this. I have been wanting to talk about this, not just for my own reasons, but just, uh, it [00:01:00] has always been something that just fascinates me about how businesses get sold, why they get sold, you know, and then how people prepare for that, you know, as they're going forward, because I would imagine if you're doing it as you're growing it, it is a lot easier to do than When you realize, Oh, I have to do all this stuff and I'm ready to go, you know, uh, so I think that this will be a very great conversation.

  So thanks again. Um, and you have a book, a podcast and a course to talk about. And so we will kind of touch on that at the end, but she is very, very knowledgeable in all of this. And so why don't we just go ahead and get started and kind of explain what the different options are when you are a business owner.

  Yeah. And I think, thank you again for having me and thank you for teeing up this topic.

  
  The Importance of Business Valuation

  It's so important because let's just start with the reality check that a hundred percent of business owners are going to leave their company one day. And that could be horizontally or vertically. [00:02:00] We can kind of chuckle about that, but the reality is it's going to happen.

  And the other reality is that very, very few owners are prepared and we ask, have to ask ourselves, well, why not? You know, what does it take to be prepared? Here's the good news. Everything that you and I talk about on this show today is going to add value. It's not like the work you're going to do is be wasted.

  It's, it's, it's work. And we've got to roll up our sleeves and we have to have an intention. So one of the things I wanted to do is help maybe set an intention for the audience that folks listening today. Don't just listen. You know, let's try to take some action at, by the end of the episode, we'll, we'll kind of.

  summarize it and roll it all up. But I think this is about listening and learning and then doing right. Um, and so your question is, well, what can we do? How does this all work? And it's, and it's not an easy answer. There's a lot of things that we can do, you know, and there's a lot of ways to get started.

  But I think, uh, I think a reality check of, um, where are we, you know, and what's important to us as an [00:03:00] owner, everybody who has either founded a business, bought a business, inherited from family, or purchased from a, you know, if it's an inside transaction, all of those are potential. exits for you too. And as I think about, well, who might own my company after me when I'm gone, who, who should own this business after me?

  And that can set us on a little bit of a mind journey to think about fit. You know, fit is a lot of things, um, mostly to a seller, the fit starts with, with you, right. And what you think about, um, so we can talk about the different kinds of buyers just to, you know, have a starting point of different categories.

  
  Types of Buyers: Strategic, Financial, and Related

  There's three top level categories. Do you want to dive into that? Yes. Yes. Okay.

  
  Strategic Buyers Explained

  So the first category that we talk about are strategic buyers and strategic buyers are companies. They could be a [00:04:00] competitor to you. They could be a supplier. They could be a customer. Perhaps they're a company that's not in your industry exactly, but like in a related industry and kind of in this bigger picture ecosystem.

  So the way to think about strategics is it's a company and there's a general rule we call the five and 20 rule. And that, is saying, suggesting as a rule of thumb, that a strategic acquirer would be five times to 20 times the revenue of your company. Wow. So it's just, it's just a rule of thumb. Yeah. And cause if you kind of look at it on the extremes, it makes sense.

  Meaning if the, if the, Company that's acquiring you is your size or smaller, and something goes wrong with the acquisition, then it could really put a lot of risk onto the capital structure of the acquiring business, right? It has to be able to, if it doesn't have cash in the bank to buy the company, they're going to be taking out debt.

  And to be able to [00:05:00] absorb it and to be able to pay for your company. Yeah, they do. And the other thing about a strategic, you know, on the bigger side of that range would be, well, you know, you talk to big corporates and they have big corporate dev departments and the juice isn't worth the squeeze, right?

  They're not going to acquire a company for a million dollars and, and worry about that when they're looking to really, you know, find a creative value. More like in the billions, right? It's just not good. They're not going to spend their time on it And so that's just giving that heuristic of the five and twenty I think the other characteristic of strategics to note is is This idea that it's an existing company and they're acquiring your assets and they're going to stitch them in So when they're putting together their financial forecast of well, what will this?

  Acquisition do they are doing the math on You Well, what expenses can we take out because we're going to have cost synergies and the synergies is a real, real thing. I [00:06:00] know we hear that word and we kind of cringe, but it's a real thing when it comes to these deals and it's really important. And it's a reason why strategics out of the three characteristics I'm going to, I'm going to explain.

  Strategics is one, financial buyers is two, and related buyers is three. Strategics tend to Pay the highest amount. Oh, okay. That's why I start with them. And that's, and also, you know, the reason why is because I just, you know, talked about it from the cost synergy standpoint. And so you mean by synergy, it's as if, okay, we already have a marketing person and we could do the same thing and absorb that.

  So they're, they're thinking about the costs that you have and the things that they already have existing and what they could just absorb easily. Okay. Yes. Yeah, absolutely. That makes sense. They don't need to, they don't need two HR platforms. They don't need, you know, two IT departments, things like that.

  Okay.

  
  Financial Buyers and Private Equity

  So the next category is financial buyers. And most commonly we [00:07:00] think about private equity groups, private equity firms. Absolutely. There's a lot of dry powder in the U S there's a lot of money still to be invested. And there's a lot of interest. uh, the lower middle market. A lot of, um, deal sizes have been coming down and a reason why is because of there's two, there's two types of private equity investments.

  One is a platform deal and the other is a hybrid or a tuck in. or an add on. Okay. They're all synonymous. And just to explain that. So let's say your company is acquired as a platform, but that means is you're a standalone. You're large enough to stand alone in their portfolio. And then over time, what they'll probably want to do is acquire smaller, smaller companies to tuck in, right.

  Or as an add on. Into yours. Underneath you. Right. And now you say, wait a minute, that kind of sounds like strategic. [00:08:00] Yes, it does. Yes. on the add ons. So when it comes to what is a private equity group looking for, of course, they all have their investment thesis focus. Some of them are very specific by industry.

  Um, most often they want to buy low, sell high, right? And most often they have a five to seven year, you time horizon. In contrast with a strategic, there's no time horizon. This is what they're doing, right? They're looking at it in perpetuity. Um, whereas a private equity firm is looking to buy low, buy, you know, buy a good price and get out in five to seven years.

  Yeah. And then another contrast in this category is it's a group that's not so well known, but there's a lot of money out there. Um, and these are family offices. There's over 30, 000 family offices in the United States with like 3 trillion of, of, of investments. Now that doesn't mean that all of those family [00:09:00] offices are looking to do investing and acquire assets, but some of them are.

  And by family office, sorry, by family offices, do you mean just family businesses? No. Okay. So a family office. is the enterprise of the family. Let's say that we've had an exit and we got 100 million in the sale. What are we going to do as a family with 100 million? I see what you're saying. Okay. And so they may want to get into another business and then they might buy yours.

  Okay. They become investors. They have a you know, the, the investment pool is for the family and they are managing their investment strategy and they're choosing which asset classes to focus on. And the thing that's so interesting about family offices is just the contrast with PE groups on the time horizon.

  They have a, they, they're investing for the longterm, right? They're investing because they're investing for the sustainability of [00:10:00] the family portfolio. And what I said earlier, my comment was about fit for some owners. That's very appealing because they may have a family business, they think, Oh, wait, this is going to be really exciting to be part of family office because they will be part of their portfolio for the long term.

  I could see how that would be very attractive to somebody that had put their soul into their business and you know, they'd want it to continue like that. Yeah. Yeah. And then there's other types of financial buyers and ESOPs and things like that.

  
  Related Buyers and Management Buyouts

  But just to kind of, you know, keep it moving, the third category is related buyers.

  Related buyers essentially are the insiders. They can be family. They can be people who know all about your business. So management, if they're interested in being an owner, which not everybody is, by the way, they might be just as happy to get a paycheck. Um, but for people who, who are a good fit for ownership with the [00:11:00] capabilities and the interest and, and the risk profile, then that's most likely you're looking at a management buyout, um, where they were going to go secure some debt.

  But it could also be where the owner wants to gift shares to family or to, uh, management or create a mechanism for, um, for equity transfer over time. So related, the related buyers are very interesting because so many owners think that that's the natural answer. And what I, what I say across all of these op is options, right?

  These are all options. Um, think about which. of the three categories make the most sense to start with, and then vet it, you know, see if it makes sense. And if not have a plan B and have a plan C. Uh, there's an example of, um, the management side. One of my clients thought his second in command would want [00:12:00] to buy this company.

  And then that person kind of beat him to the punch in this conversation and said, Hey, I'm moving to Europe with my wife. And I was like, well, there goes that plan. So then he needed to go down the other routes. He had to figure it out. He's still figuring it out. But yeah, I mean, that's the thing. You just never know.

  
  When to Start Thinking About Selling Your Business

  So what time period do you normally start to think about this when you are thinking you want to sell your business? I mean, are you starting to think about this? You know, right when you're building it and adding anything, or is it just, you know, a couple of years out? Chances are, it's not right when you're building it, but I think there are people for sure who build with the exit in mind.

  Um, there's no doubt. They, maybe they've gone through an exit already and they've kind of learned the first time and they've said, Hey, you know what? The second time around, I'm going to do that. Um, most commonly people are just, sort of figuring it out by the seat of their pants. And that's not ideal for, for reasons that, you know, you, you mentioned earlier, you can't do exit planning when you're exiting.

  You just can't. [00:13:00] And it's going to be either, you know, you're out of time, you're out of money or something's giving up. So the, what's the benchmark? I, I don't have a hard and fast answer. I can just say from my own experience, it seems to be like 10 years is a good place. Oh, wow. Okay. So that early. Okay.

  Yeah. Things just take so much longer than you expect them to when you're being proactive, even. And, you know, so let's take it from the business readiness standpoint. Yeah.

  
  Preparing Your Business for Sale

  What are some things that kind of think about, I guess, or like what would take 10 years or not all of it to take 10 years, but what would you kind of start just, you know, You know, is it to get your computers ready or, you know, those kinds of things?

  What do you, what do you, I think the main thing is to shore up the business value, you know, and make sure the business is, is attractive and transferable to a buyer and, you know, attractiveness to a buyer is, is going to be in the eyes of the buyer, not to you, right. As the seller, it's just like having a house, you know, what's going to make your house worth more than your [00:14:00] neighbor.

  And that is in the eye of the buyer. If we baseline, like you're staging, like you stage a house, you're staging your business, but you're doing your business, you're getting your financials in order. And, you know, I think there's a lot of people out there who on their tax returns. don't show a profit because they're trying to have a tax minimization strategy.

  We might want to rethink that over time, right? To be able to show a profit is not necessarily, um, you know, just wave a wand. You are probably the 10th person I have had on my podcast that has said that, that, you know, that issue always arises when people try to not claim income. It's very, very interesting that it's in so many different ways.

  It's in, you know, You know, gaining financing and I just credit it goes down the gamut. So anyway, it's very, it's interesting that everybody says that. Yeah. And it's, and it's a catch 22, right? You're trying to minimize [00:15:00] taxes, but at the same time, what are you doing in your enterprise value if you can't show a profit?

  Um, Yeah. So with the financials is, is absolutely number one is the quality of your record keeping the consistency and of course the numbers that you're putting up on the board. Um, it's the industry you serve in. Um, that's one of the eight core drivers we start with is financials. And then from there it's growth potential, you know, what have you demonstrated for growth and what, what field is left to plow.

  If someone buys your company, um, What opportunities will they have? Some of them will be native to them and based on what their vision is and some of them will be native to you. What's that special sauce? You know, what is the thing that's going to make your company have that unique value proposition?

  When you think about a customer and why does a customer buy from you? It's because you're offering something of value and it solves some pain for them. Well, think about selling your company in the same way. What? Pain. What pain points does the buyer have and what are you solving for them? Because here's the thing.

  When [00:16:00] you're not in the room, you know what they're talking about? They're asking, well, could we build what they do? What would it cost us and how long would it take? Right. And do we really need to buy this? Right. That's a good point. You have to be bringing some value that it was either so hard and took so many years to get to and that you have such a saturation point maybe in your market that that is worthwhile to them or can they catch up to you in a year or two or however long the time frame might be?

  Oh, that's really interesting. That's a good way to think about it. Particularly for strategics, there's different reasons why strategics do acquisitions. One of them is talent. You know, aqua hire is the phrase and an aqua hire strategy. Let's say it's a development team or an engineering know how, and they can't go find that talent and ramp up as quickly as they would like to.

  And so that's one of the reasons why, especially in tech, you'll see these aqua hire type of deals. But it's also like the know how and, you know, time to market and [00:17:00] accelerating a position in the market if you can acquire a company or services or products that lets you leapfrog from where you are to where you want to be.

  So that's another thing just to really be able to articulate your story. And what's ideal, you know, I'd like to talk about reverse engineering your exit. If you can think forward to work backward, right, Stephen Covey, begin with the end in mind, that is ideal. But as we go along, we might learn that certain types of buyers have different motivations and are interested in different things in, in your business.

  So if we can match that up, And you have enough time on your side to affect change. Isn't that, isn't that magical, right? What if you can 10x your value with this information? I mean, it can be dramatic. For example, let's say you have a lot of one time revenue in your business. and it can be a service business or you could sell widgets.

  It doesn't really matter, but your customers come when they come and they spend what they spend. You don't know, it's not [00:18:00] predictable compared to, you know, a company like let Netflix, let's just use them as an example. They take our credit card, they bill us exactly. And so it's very predictable. The, the owners know with, with some fair certainty about future cashflow and the more our business can be trusted in terms of that predictability of future cashflow creates value for the buyer.

  So in this example of the business model, if we're able to shift project revenue, and if we're 100 percent project revenue, can we shift it? to a 60 40. I mean, that would be awesome. Not to say you're going to completely shift to a, uh, you know, 100 shifted over to a 100. That would be really, really challenging, but could you, over time shifted to a 60 40, where you can get 40 percent recurring revenue by shifting the business model.

  It's possible, but it's going to take a lot of work. It's going to take some pain, but it could be really worth it for your [00:19:00] company. If the exit is what you have in mind. And you found out that, yeah, the key to the exit value is having a recurring revenue model. Today we have zero. We're setting a goal. You know, that kind of mentality.

  Yeah. So back to your question of, well, how long does it take? I always say, well, really, it depends. Like let's say you want to be a fitness, you know, you want to be the most, you know, you bodybuilder like, okay, well, where are you starting from? Are you starting from, you know, Arnold Schwarzenegger in the seventies?

  And you're looking to just incrementally improve. Are you looking to, to start from scratch? Um, and it's, it's a reality check, right? I think it's important for owners to just look in the mirror. And that's what I do is I, you know, I try to help people look in the mirror and assess the business readiness, assess the attractiveness.

  Nobody likes to be told their baby's ugly, let's face it. Um, but I think once people understand the risks, and hey, you know what, it's not saying your baby's ugly, it's saying we have a risk and we can address it. But [00:20:00] if we ignore it, it's not going away and it's only going to make things worse. So you mean the risk is that you wouldn't be able to sell your business and it would be worthless?

  I'm saying if you were gone, if you were gone from it. Yeah. I mean, that's the meta risk is that you're, you won't have a business that a buyer wants to buy. That's the meta risk, right? And that eventually when you want to sell, there's no buyers or there's no buyers of the value you believe it should be worth.

  Okay. So when people, they come to you and just say, Hey, I'm thinking about selling my business. Can you, you know, do you do consulting and look at their financials and it kind of goes down that path? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we do a diagnostic on their financials, try to level set the last few years, look at pre COVID even in, you know, has recovery been after COVID and what are some things that we might red circle to address?

  And a lot of their expense area or on the revenues or taking a look at the balance sheet and seeing what the cap table looks like. And what [00:21:00] are some issues with ownership if there are any? Um, so, yeah, we kind of start there and business valuation methodology that we use is to, to, um. use market comps and use create a range of values so that people have a good baseline of where they are today.

  So will they pay you for this consultation and then they kind of go away and make the improvements and changes that you recommend and then they'll come back when they're ready or I mean, I obviously there might be a couple check ins in between. Well, I think there's a lot of value in this process and it's not just a 24 hour kind of thing.

  It takes a little bit to establish this dialogue and work through it. So one of the things that I've You know, noticed and when I've put together for clients as a result is a process. It's called the strategic transition process. And it business valuation is one of the things we do. There's a number of things that will do as diagnostics and also uncovering along the way.

  What. What goals are important to them? You know, why do certain [00:22:00] things matter to them? And then helping them see what, um, you know, what we could be doing and working on and creating a written plan, because if we write down our goals and we write down what we're going to our strategies and action plans, we're more than 40 percent likely to achieve them.

  So I'm just trying to get us to that starting point. And there's a lot of different pieces to this puzzle. So when I mentioned risk earlier, you know, risk is also about contingency planning for your business. It's kind of the lights out what happens if something, you know, happens to you, right? If you're not able to serve in your business, what would happen?

  And that's about protecting the business as well as, um, protecting your future. Yeah. Yeah. So it's comprehensive. I mean, I, I certainly work with folks on a, you know, this month to month basis to as, as needed, but I love to start out with this. with this program because they get a lot of value out of the learning process and the dialogue and it's just so [00:23:00] interesting to see their kind of the light bulbs go off like oh wow I see how these connect now and oh yeah you know I've been wondering about this for a long time and now I can see you know how these dots are connecting um I would imagine so because they're just doing their business and growing it and not looking at it from.

  Just the numbers and the logistics down, you know what I mean? All of, and how it all goes together. And I guess how it'd be packaged together for a buyer. Yeah, exactly. So I think in terms of like kind of the phases of work we're doing, you know, we're doing valuation, we're doing goal setting, we're doing an assessment of the business.

  We're helping them assess their own personal readiness. We are evaluating, um, the industry that they're in and what opportunities there are for growth. And so growth planning can be part of this if they think that organic growth is inherently the way that they're going to achieve their, their financial vision.

  Let's say, uh, part of this too, you know, is not only baselining where's the [00:24:00] business today, we're setting goals for where they think their magic number is if their magic number is, Hey, I need to sell this business for 10 million in five years. And we measure it now at 5 million. Well, we've got a two X this business in five years.

  How are we going to do that? Are we going to acquire other companies? Are we going to, you know, what's going to move the needle? And, and that's where the rubber starts to meet the road, because when you put an exit timeline together and you put some metrics on it, Ultimately, that becomes the owner scorecard.

  And that's really fun. And most owners do not have an owner scorecard. Well, I think that's where you'd really come of value because they don't probably know. I mean, they might have some ideas, but then you coming with all these other different ideas, just because of you're looking at everything. I'm sure that just supercharges everything.

  It does. It's really eye opening for them. Yeah.

  
  Common Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

  And so what are some of the mistakes that you see people make? Well, one is just not doing anything, right? There's [00:25:00] so many people that are in their 70s and 80s and they're like the boots, the boots on people, right? They're just, they're not going to stay.

  They're not ever going to change. They're not ever going to do anything. And there's not much we can probably do for them, right? But I think for people, depending on what age and stage you are, Um, just realizing that, look, we're all human and that succession isn't a taboo thing to talk about. And there's two types of succession.

  There's ownership succession and there's leadership succession. So I think the other mistake is assuming as we can assume, right, you know, the acronym makes an ASS out of you and me. Um, we can't assume that. the buyers are going to be there, whether it's family or management. For the reasons we talked about earlier, some people just aren't wired that way.

  Heavy is the head that wears the crown. They don't want the responsibility or they don't have the financial acumen to do it, whatever the reasons are. So we can't assume that we know, we have to talk about it. You have to give yourself some of that space and time to have dialogue with, with people. And if it starts with your [00:26:00] family, then that's excellent.

  You know, create, um, A way for a family to come into the company, create a way to discuss with management if they are interested and then see it through, you know, have, have the intention to see it through if it doesn't, if it doesn't come to fruition and then you want to consider third parties. Um, you know, I think the other thing with mistakes is that a lot of people think that selling your business is like selling your house and they'll just take care of it themselves.

  and you know, for sale by owners don't usually work out that well. And there's a reason. And it's even harder when you're running your business full, full, full bore. You cannot take your foot off the gas. You're not able to discuss it with anyone because you've got to keep it confidential. You don't want your customers and suppliers and your employees to figure it out that you're looking to sell.

  And so what happens is it's all in your head. It's just, it's very overwhelming. Um, so one of the things that I encourage people to do is to, put together a business owner advisory team that can be including someone like [00:27:00] myself, a financial advisor, tax advisor, M& A lawyer, lawyer, and we are, we are your deal team.

  You know, let us help you so that you can run your business and let us help you get, you know, maximize the value of your company, um, in a transaction. There's a lot of tripwires. There's a lot of things that can go wrong in a deal. So why put that at risk? Oh, I'm sure. And where do you find buyers? I mean, are there websites and brokers and things like that?

  Um, we have an outreach proprietary database and a proprietary outreach process. Buyers are in databases, absolutely, and so it depends on, um, you know, how we might find them. But as I mentioned earlier, it's not like we can find every family member. We're not really looking for that. Um, on the strategics, you know, that's, um, publicly traded companies or privately held companies, and that's by industry.

  So we have databases for that. Uh, and then on the financial side, if it's a private equity groups and, and other, um, you know, [00:28:00] other examples, then yeah, we, we do buyer outreach for them too. Interesting. So you'll kind of pair them with people that you think might be interested in their business. We'll do outreach and it's, it's anonymous.

  We'll say we're representing a company for sale. And if you are interested, this is what you need to do. Yeah, very interesting. Oh, this is very fascinating to me. I had no idea that the timeline would be that long. I thought, okay, a couple of years and then, you know, here, let's do this. And, uh, Well, let's, let's parse it out a bit.

  Cause if 10 years sounds overwhelming, let let's parse it out. Right. So, cause your question was, when should we start thinking about a transition? And I said 10, because I don't know where we're starting from. Well, yeah, you have no idea. It's different for every business. Exactly. But if someone comes to me and says, Hey, I want to sell tomorrow.

  I'm going to try to figure out, is there something wrong? Is there a health issue? Usually there's a health issue. There's something negative, right? And what I'm trying to do is help you avoid the situation when you're in [00:29:00] a situation, you have to sell, right? You're in that negative situation. There's this thing kind of forcing your doors.

  You're either going to do this or you're going to close your doors kind of thing. Cause the sharks tend to swirl. They smell. Um, Then we want to prevent that. It's very stressful too for you. And, um, so yeah, is it possible to sell your company at any time? Maybe, right. If you don't do any prep and then you try to put it on the market and you want to give yourself 12 months to sell, is it, is it doable?

  Yeah, it's doable. Maybe, but the, The but is because there's a lot of prep that goes into all the things we talked about. Oh, I can't even imagine. The attractiveness and the, uh, the risk mitigation and all of those things. And just, let's just start with the basics. Are your financials in order? And if they're not, then work on that, you know?

  Yeah, I, it's very fascinating. And it's a very, the, the world, it seems like its own world. That you would be, you know, at a [00:30:00] conference of knowing who was a buyer and who is a seller of businesses and, and, and all that. And that's what I always find fascinating is that there's these whole worlds that we don't even know are going on while we're just like living our life.

  It's true because it's almost like I have a bat phone to the, like to the oval office. If I call my client will answer the phone, you know, it's a very, cause we do, we operate in this whole little other orbit of important things in their day. They're trying to run their business, but if we're in an active sale process, they're texting me and they're picking up the phone because they know that delays, you know, delays are, you know, it can be a challenge.

  So. No, it's, it's kind of fun that way, I think, because it's very strategic. It's very meaningful for families and what this can mean for their legacy, uh, and means for what it can mean for employees. There's just a lot of impact, um, ways to maximize value and ways [00:31:00] to minimize exit regrets. I mean, essentially that's my mission is how do I help clients do both of those things.

  I think it's a wonderful mission because you don't want to build a business and then have all these regrets about how much it was sold for. Yeah, it's a shockingly big percentage of people that do. It's really shockingly high. Yeah, no, I don't doubt it because if they're not prepared and preparing as they're going along and wanting to employ someone like you, Uh, then yeah, there's a lot of things.

  There's a lot of cogs that could go missing and then, you know, kind of mess it up. So yeah, that makes sense.

  
  Conclusion and Resources

  Well, thank you so much for being, this is a lot of amazing information and you guys, um, as I mentioned at the beginning of the podcast, she has her own podcast of called Succession Stories, uh, and I.

  a book called The Business Transition Handbook, How to Avoid Succession Pitfalls and Create Valuable Exit Options. And she also has a course that you can take and is the course obviously for business owners and how they can prepare their business. Absolutely. It's called [00:32:00] End Game Entrepreneurship.

  building with the exit in mind. You've got some great names, really. I'm loving them. So I will have links to all of those in the show notes, you guys, and reach out to her. If you or someone, you know, is looking to, uh, sell the business or even just prepare it for that. And I appreciate you being on again and you guys, thank you so much for listening and share this with your friends or leave us a review or let us know if you have any questions.

Disclaimer: The information provided in this podcast is for general informational purposes only and should not be construed as professional financial advice. Always consult with a qualified financial advisor or professional before making any financial decisions. The hosts and guests of this podcast are not responsible for any actions taken based on the information presented.