Ep. 13 Free to Explore New Opportunity Featuring: Vince Vavrunek

Bob Roark: This is the Exit Series. I’m Bob Rourke. This is for founders, brokers, attorneys, and valuation professionals, the people who are in the room when the deal closed or before talking about what happens next. This is the conversation nobody else is having. On this episode, we have Vince Vavrunik. He is the founder of Rising Branch and Transworld Business Advisors of Jackson, Mississippi. Vince built a ServePro franchise from the ground up, ran it for over 12 years, and successfully sold it. Now it helps other business owners plan their exits and get to the closing table. Vince, welcome. Tell us a bit about your work and who you serve.

Vince Vavrunek: Well, thank you, Bob, for reaching out and inviting me on. It’s an honor. And hopefully this will be, you know, good information for your listeners and for business owners if they’re tuning in or even colleagues. I’m in Jackson, Mississippi, which is the central part of the state. It’s the capital. it’s the largest place in metro area. We’re not a big state, but we have a lot of small businesses here. And so my typical client is a business owner that is looking to transition, whether that’s selling, exiting, preparing to exit, legacy transition, that you know, there’s a lot of questions that come up. And so for me, it’s something I’ve walked through myself, and that’s how we’ll get into talking how I got into this industry, but That’s that’s mostly what I do. I also help them with valuation as well if they want to know what the business is worth. I partner with a certified valuation analyst that helps me prepare a standard valuation, run some industry comps, benchmark them to their NAICS code. And so that’s kind of you know, those are the two main buckets for business owners and then I also am a commercial real estate broker with a brokerage here. So if they have the real estate component that runs with the business, I can help them and make, you know, one stop shop, so to speak.

Bob Roark: All right. Well, you built SurfPro of Brandon, which is just outside of Jackson, correct? You you helped

Vince Vavrunek: That’s correct. that’s right.

Bob Roark: No, and and you built it from a startup into a 24-7 emergency restoration business over twelve and a half years. You know, walk me through what that business looked like at its peak and what your day-to-day looked like before you decided to sell.

Vince Vavrunek: So SurfPro was very good at developing processes and they always said follow the system. And you know that’s a a buzzword sometimes. People, what does that mean, follow the system? And well, SurfPro’s model was to develop a fully managed business. And what did that look like? Well, at the peak, if you were running a fully managed business. you would have all of the different divisions. that’s sales, office, production, and then you also had different service lines. So fire, water, mold, and then later on, into the end of you know my journey with them, we implemented construction, reconstruction, recon, people call it. And so at the peak, we were running a fully managed business. And that business had all of the components. They were very good at helping us visualize our org chart. They called it the stages model. And so if you were doing X and volume, you should have these people on the bus and they should be in this seat on the bus. And if you’re in between, then you need to add, you know, think about you’re gonna get to this point, you need to add. And so they had a really good system and they just said follow the system and so what did that look like inside so that’s like you know on in a in a manual a fully managed system but what it looked like on the inside of the business was you know I was managing the managers so you know like a lot of the business books out there that you might read the e Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber probably one of my favorites you know, working on the business instead of inning in the business. In SurvePro, they said you got to get off the truck. And in the eMyth, you got to stop baking the cookies. And you got to start working on the business. And so managing the managers, empowering those managers with decision making, and then also holding them accountable, but also rewarding them when they did really good things, recognizing them and retaining the team. And so at the peak, I would say, you know, that’s the bulk of it. And then something personally, and when I got, you know, when I really think about it, one of the things that you have to do in that business is you’re mostly paid by the insurance companies. So for property damage restoration, it’s usually an insurance claim. So you’re going to have to work through that process. And so not only is Mrs. Jones your client, but actually your Trying to collect your money from the insurance company. And so they might not necessarily be your client on paper, but they’re paying your bill. And so they usually don’t get in a hurry. so you have to develop a process to manage your accounts receivable. You’ve got to be prepared to float that. And so I developed an an AR accounts receivable collection process in my office. And at one time, according to our regional trainership, I was the fastest collecting franchise for three years running. And so they asked me to come and give a presentation to an owner’s conference about what I did and how I and I look I don’t have a magic wand and it wasn’t rocket science, but I or I found out very early on that a lot of people were producing the work and then just expecting the money to show up in the mailbox.

Bob Roark: Yeah, that that doesn’t generally happen with an insurance company. Not generally. So

Vince Vavrunek: No, I mean you’ve got adjusters, you’ve got desk adjusters, internal adjusters, you’ve got consultants, and depending on how large the loss is, if it’s large, you have multiple parties that are involved. And there’s audit, you know, there’s estimating scrubbing companies now, there’s TPAs, third party administrators. So you might be working through a lot of different stuff and expecting that money to just show up in your mailbox, well, you know, like Zig Ziggler used to say, you can’t hope your way to the top. And so I didn’t hope that that money was going to show up.

Bob Roark: What you know, was there a a moment when you decided, or was that something you’d been keeping an eye on just from the very beginning?

Vince Vavrunek: Well, and I don’t want to really d dive a whole lot into the previous career that got me into Surf Pro, but I was in furniture manufacturing. And I was a sales rep for a family office called Franklin Furniture. And we sold to the top one hundred retailers in the country. And Hassel Franklin was the founder. And I worked for him and I had the the the home territory. So I was a at the factory a lot. And then one of the things I learned about, a lot of people might not know what this is, is something called factoring. And so we factored all of our invoices through a company called CIT. And that’s a financial institution. And Mr. Franklin was very, very involved in the collection process and the credit monitoring of his clients, probably because he’s been burned before he’d been in business since 1967. And so very early on, he was in instilling in me and all the other reps, hey, it’s very important that our clients are credit worthy, that we’re monitoring their credit worthiness, that they’re passing the factoring through every invoice was factored, by the way, Bob. So like you could pay great today, and in a month I come back, you write another order and you’re slow in the trade. CIT might hold that order.

Bob Roark: Mm-hmm.

Vince Vavrunek: And so he was very adamant about collecting

Bob Roark: Good.

Vince Vavrunek: that money in a quick manner. And so that bled over into SurvePro. I was like, hey, wait a minute. I’m not getting paid as quick as I would like to. And I ran that AR aging summary report in QuickBooks, which I didn’t know I had such a love for financial reports. I’m not an accounting major or or or or a financial analyst, but when I got QuickBooks and I got my hands on those reports, I was like, okay, now I got some things I can work on and I can use them every day.

Bob Roark: You know, I I think a lot of folks arrive at that usually at a calamity and then they figure it out after that. But that’s really that’s it’s really insightful that you could bring it from the previous employer. You know, thing that’s kind of curious for me is, you know, after twelve years of building SurfPro, what made you decide that it was time? You know, was there a moment or an insight?

Vince Vavrunek: There was. So first of all, we were we were in a time where we were still owned by the family that founded SurfPro. Okay. And you know, I was a I was young, I’m I was a young owner, but I started to see some transitions. I started to see some older people come into the business. When I say older, they were older than me. They were kind of like what we call corporate refugees. Maybe they did some

Bob Roark: Mm-hmm.

Vince Vavrunek: stints at some pretty big Fortune 500 companies. They had a big Neste egg and a 401k. They were able to go through some creative financing like ROBs and different things. Roll I got to I got to witness that from my owner at new owners coming into the to the industry. And also it was becoming more expensive for people to buy a Surf Pro. versus when I bought it in two thousand and eight. So it was kind of like a progression as the business got bigger, as the enterprise got bigger, well obviously some people, you know, got squeezed out in a way. I don’t want not forcefully, but sometimes the sometimes you can either grow with the business or the business can outgrow you. And for some people they were just tired or maybe it wasn’t what they signed up for. Technology also w played a big factor. Like when I first started, we did everything on with a file and paper. Like we came to your house, we did everything, our monitoring reports, our sketches. Then it moved to an iPad. We developed our own app called DryBook and our it just it I think it really it catapulted so quickly into another generation of business processes and systems that some of the people couldn’t adapt. And I think the business outgrew them. So they got out. So I got to see that happen. And by me seeing that happen, and when I went to a conven we had a convention every year. Surfpro did. And

Bob Roark: Mm-hmm.

Vince Vavrunek: that’s another thing, real quick. I’ll tell you the reason why they got us to conventions, not not because we just love to go, you know, different places, which we did, but the founder gave ten percent of all your royalties paid back to you. When you came to convention. No matter how much you paid, 10%. You got half of it when you checked in, and you got the second check at the on the last day. So you couldn’t leave. It was brilliant. it was

Bob Roark: What was attendance idea? A hundred percent?

Vince Vavrunek: yeah, it was off the charts. If you want yeah, yeah, I mean, because it paid for your trip. Okay. And in some and in some cases, you made money. The the larger franchises, they made money. They got to bring their team. It’s it was really more about, hey, bring not just bring you and your wife, bring your team, bring your leadership team. Let’s let’s invest

Bob Roark: Mm-hmm.

Vince Vavrunek: in them. Let’s pour into them. Let’s recognize that next generation of leadership. Because they know that those people could be owners or those people could be, you know, in the top seats, running the business operation. And it was it was just it was just brilliant. And you know, every ten years they don’t do this anymore. But I got to experience the first trip to Hawaii in twenty ten. So I was only in the business two years. Probably shouldn’t even have gone to Hawaii. I don’t know if I could afford it, but I did get some royalties to help pay my way. And so we went to Kona for a week. I was only in business like a year and a half. I don’t know if that answers your question. We kind of got off on a tangent about the c a convention and the conferences. but I know what you’re asking. How did I know? Well, I had

Bob Roark: Yeah.

Vince Vavrunek: seen it done a couple of different times. I swam in some of the same waters as some business brokers that sold restoration companies. They came to some of our events, you know, they talked to us. We had some financial institutions that would help get some deals done. And so when the time came, I was off market. I didn’t I wasn’t on market, I wasn’t listed for sale. That one of those brokers who was in the restoration space approached me and asked me what I consider selling. And I was like, no, not really. I mean, we’re growing, you know, up and to the right, northeastern trend. We’re having great success. We’ve added the construction component. Now we’re a full service provider. I said, but let me do one more thing. I said, before I say no, let me ask my wife. And so I deferred to Melissa. And what she said stopped me in my tracks. And I said, Hey, got this random call today. You know, the broker that’s always at these conventions, you know, I’m talking, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I said, Well, he wanted to know if we would sell. What do you think? And she said, Well, if the Lord opens that door, we need to walk through it. And Bob, I’m telling you, I was just like frozen. And I said, okay. Well, what do you mean? And she goes, Well, 24 hour emergency service business is a tough business. And you know, I don’t know if this is a for everything, forever thing for us. It’s been good, it’s been a good platform, it’s done exactly what we would like it to do, but now would be a good time to reinvent yourself if that’s something you’re interested in. So that’s when I knew.

Bob Roark: You say the most expensive mistake a business owner can make is waiting too long to plan their exit. You know, and from what you said, do you think that you had planned al along the way to some extent, or were you making it up after you had the offer?

Vince Vavrunek: That’s a great question. We were planned almost inadvertently. We had been planning. You see, SurfPro hadn’t the the leadership was the second generation of the founder. And they knew that there was going to be a percentage that were going to sell. Not everybody’s going to sell. Some people were going to be lifers, right? So hand it down to the second generation. But they knew if they were going to grow the organization and attract quality buyers. take the business to another level, not that that owner wasn’t good enough to take it to the next level. They knew they had to prepare that business for sale. So at these conferences, we would have breakout sessions. And I remember like, you know, one of them was like exit planning or how to sell your franchise. And I was like, I’m not going to that. People think I’m selling. I don’t want my colleagues to see me in there. You know, and I it really wasn’t on my radar. But I’d know but it was always there. And then we would have these regional events, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and they would bring in speakers. And then they would also bring in owners that have sold before and talked about what they learned and what they should have done or what they didn’t do. And then every five years, I don’t know if they still do this or not, but every five years you had to go back to corporate Gallatin, Tennessee. And it was called FMC franchise management class. So you could have you could have been a franchise owner and you could be approaching year 30, and I could be a franchise owner approaching year five or six, and we would both be in the same class. There were like four to choose from, okay, throughout the year. And we’ll there would probably be like 40 or 50 owners in the room. And they the and basically the room would be, you know, all across the board, generational. How long they’ve owned it. Sometimes they were second generation franchise owners in there that were had been in there for 20 years. So that was a lot of experience. It was also a lot of wet behind the ears, you know, green owners. Well, I’ll never forget I had this guy behind me. And I got to talking to him one night and he was a little bit older, and he said, My advice to you is to build your business as if you’re selling it. And then Don’t sell it. And when it’s time, it’ll be you’ll be ready. And I’m like, well, what does that mean? Like that great advice. What does that mean? He said, follow the system. And I’m like, okay. Now like, you know, I feel like I’m being brainwashed, right? But like, Bob, I wasn’t supposed to reinvent the wheel. And I didn’t.

Bob Roark: Well, you know, some folks aren’t coachable and some are. And so that’s not a bad thing to be coachable. You know, thinking of, so for your sale, you were the seller, not the broker. What did that process feel like from the inside? And was there anything that surprised you about it?

Vince Vavrunek: you know, I would say Man, it was an emotional time. I mean, you know, obviously it wasn’t like I took over my dad’s business and you know I I had this obligation to carry on this family name or anything like that. But the emotional time was really I had built a kind of a second family. You know, it was a small business.

Bob Roark: Mm.

Vince Vavrunek: Yes, I had a team. But I had built some really close relationships. I had poured into s a couple of different people. And one of those was my general manager who had started as a sales rep. And I had taught him everything. You know, and I had learned how to empower him with and learned how to delegate some things to him. And so I’d watched him get married, watched him buy a house, watched him have children. watched him join a small group at church, get involved, get him plugged in, get involved in his children’s lives. I mean, like, I was close to him. I’m still close to him. You know, we went to lunch last last week, a week and half ago. And you know,

Bob Roark: Mm-hmm.

Vince Vavrunek: it’s been almost six years. And so I mean I was really cl I’m really close to him and I try to stay involved in his life. And we walked through a lot of seasons. He lost his mom working for us and just you know, experience life together. So my main concern was not necessarily about the legacy of serve pro Brandon or the brand name. It was about my people. And so emotionally I was like, What are they gonna feel? Are they gonna hate me? Are they gonna feel betrayed? I tried to put myself in their shoes. I know they’re not gonna understand. You know, like

Bob Roark: Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Vince Vavrunek: really I I don’t have an ulterior motive. And that’s another thing too. Like I didn’t have another plan because it kinda, you know, it caught me off guard. So I had to start processing that. And it did you know, obviously it didn’t happen overnight. You can’t just buy a business overnight either. It’s not like buying a used car with cash. Yeah.

Bob Roark: You y you know, you work both on the business brokerage and on the commercial real estate side. You know, a lot of business sales include property. You know, what happens to the deal when the business and the real estate are, you know, tangled together and how does that change what the seller goes through?

Vince Vavrunek: Well, the real estate

Bob Roark: sure.

Vince Vavrunek: can be good and it can also be a disadvantage. It’s also it’s a hard asset. So banks financing love real estate. The business side can be a, you know, you’re selling a business, you’re selling a business. Like you’ve got goodwill, you’ve got customer listing, you might have some intellectual property, you’ve got brand name, brand name recognition, whatever you want to call it. And then you’ve also got a non-compete, most likely, that’s going to hold some value. So when you’ve got kind of break it down allocation of purchase price, you’ve got all of those things for the business. And then over here you’ve got the property, the real estate. Well, in Mississippi, a lot of service businesses own their real estate or manufacturing or industrial services. So I knew it was important to be able to sell the real estate. And what the real estate can do for you is it can push a deal across the finish line, but it also can serve as a disadvantage. So I’ll kind of I’ll kind of walk through a couple examples. let’s say you’ve got a business and you’ve got eight acres and you’re on the interstate on a frontage road, you bought it 40 years ago and nothing was out there. And now some things are developing like a data center, maybe 10 miles down the road, and you think your real estate’s worth X. Okay. And you’re not using all your eight acres. You’re only using like four. But you got eight. And you got interstate road furniture. But your bus your real estate’s been paid off for twenty years. You haven’t and you’re not paying yourself rent. And so your cash flow on your business looks really, really good. But we also have to do what I call normalization of earnings. Cause if I’m gonna buy your business, I just I I put myself in the buyer’s shoes every time. Okay. I put myself in your shoes as a seller every time as well, but I also have to put my buyer hat on. Okay, well, if I’m gonna buy your business and I’m gonna buy your real estate, your shop, your eight acres, and you think your real estate’s worth a lot of money and you’re not paying yourself rent, well now I have to buy your business, now I have to buy your real estate. And now I’ve got new debt service that you’re not servicing. And so in our business, we

Bob Roark: Yeah.

Vince Vavrunek: say the deal’s got a pencil. Okay. And if the real estate prevents the deal from penciling, which means this, I can’t service the debt, or I can only service the debt and not pay myself a normal living wage. Well, in order for a deal to pencil, you got to service the debt. You got to pay yourself a normal living wage. I mean, you’ve got a The the w the way I like to put it is if you expect me to jump off a cliff, leave my corporate job or leave my job with my benefits and leverage everything I own, put a second mortgage on my house and personal guarantee everything when I buy your business, I have to at least pay myself too, not just service the debt. And I don’t really want to buy a job. Okay? But that’s what I’m gonna do for the first five years, right? So you know, I would say normalization of earnings reports is what I do. I’m gonna normalize the cash flow for a new owner to a market rate rent. I’m gonna normalize that’s probably the biggest normalization. And then also your salary. Let’s say you’re paying yourself a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year. Okay. Well, that’s great. But what if the new buyer, you know, is gonna that’s added to the cash flow. Well, we normalize that and the new buyer’s gonna pay themselves seventy five. Well, we can take seventy five of the one fifty, we can’t add all your one fifty back, right? ‘Cause seventy five is gonna flow over to that. New a lot of owners don’t understand that. A lot of owners think, well, I’m I’m printing money over here. Yeah, you are. But you’re pay your yourself your real estate’s been paid for for twenty years and you’re not paying yourself rent. Which you should be what you should be doing, and I’m not your wise counsel here, but you know, somebody should have advised you to put your real estate in an LLC and you yourself

Bob Roark: Yeah.

Vince Vavrunek: paying your entity or a market or some type of rent, something. Okay. And

Bob Roark: Mm-hmm.

Vince Vavrunek: then that LLC paying the insurance and property taxes, nice little profit every now and then. Now you got a real estate holding company charging rent to your company. And now we can show that to a buyer, say, hey, well, they’re been paying themselves five thousand dollars a month. It’s still it’s still cash flows. okay. No big deal. It’s a lot easier to get through that conversation. And it’s also a lot easier for you to understand if you’re the if you’re the seller. Does that make sense?

Bob Roark: Absolutely. So you sold SurfPro. What was that next morning after the sale? Like, you know, you ran it for over a decade and then the next morning it wasn’t yours anymore.

Vince Vavrunek: the word that comes to my mind I have two words. Relief, but the biggest word that comes to my mind is freedom. And you know, freedom to obviously have a weight lifted off of my shoulders. you know, as a business owner, you don’t want to go too far down the rabbit hole on risk. ‘Cause if you do, you can kind of get, you know, you can get so deep you can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel. so from a risk standpoint, I had freedom. I had zero risk. I didn’t have to make payroll every two weeks. I didn’t have thirteen trucks running up and down the road with my phone number on it. you know, I had A lot of different risks that I thought, you know, could have happened that didn’t happen, thank the Lord. But the freedom I call and I tell my I tell my sellers this, my clients is hey, I want you to experience the same freedom I experienced. I call it the door of freedom. And the door of freedom is if we still do closings at a closing attorney’s office, which most businesses people want to be there and shake the hand of the new owner. So we’re gonna be there. We’re gonna walk through the door of the closing attorney’s office when it’s all said and done. And that’s the door of freedom when you get in your car and you got your spouse next to you. You know, God willing, she’s there, or he’s there. And you look at them and you say, Wow, we really did it. This really happened. And you’re you’re you’re not necessarily, you know, you don’t really know. You’re kind of, yes, it’s gonna happen, but. Like they say, you know, until the money’s in the bank, it doesn’t matter. but you got a date. And that date will be with you for the rest of your life. You will remember that day no matter what. And for me it was ten five, twenty twenty. So ten five, you know, not ten four, ten five. So it’s really easy for me to remember, but also remember the day I bought my business too. It was August twenty fifth, two thousand and eight. So those are two like bookmarks, right? they’re two book ends, so to speak, beginning and end. You know, emotionally. another thing too I’ll say is I had to defragment my mind. when you’re in the twenty four hour emergency service business, the You’re always watching the weather. You’re always thinking about who’s gonna call. If you’re involved in your community, everybody, you know everybody. You’re gonna try to get to you, you’re gonna have to get to everybody at once, who’s gonna go on priority list, who’s on call, what trucks are ready. I hope the trucks have gas. I mean, you’re all these thoughts are going through your mind. And so I had to defragment and get out of emergency mode. That didn’t happen overnight either. That took about a year. You know, monitoring social media, whereas there’s a fire, scanner apps. I mean, yeah you’re j you’re listening to everything.

Bob Roark: Yeah. You know, y you didn’t retire. You became a business broker. You know, what were you looking for on the other side of your sale? And you know, and how did the business brokerage show up as the next thing you were gonna do?

Vince Vavrunek: Was looking to help others. You know, even at SurfPro, we helped people in a time of need, a time of desperation, a time of disaster. That’s what attracted me to them, to be honest with you. It was more of a mission. you know, we were showing up to be a hero. And so, you know, going into business brokerage, I felt like was a good segue for me because number one, I’ve sat on the other side of the table, I’ve sat in their chair. bit in their shoes. I know what it’s like to have a workers’ comp claim, unemployment claim, somebody hit a mailbox, you know, trucks break down. But I also know what it’s like to experience all those victories, like I was telling you about earlier. Not necessarily from a financial, but like, you know, my general manager and walking walking him walking with him through life and seeing him grow as a person. You know, that was more fulfilling than any financial moment I had. Because I was pouring into people. And so I wanted to help others experience that freedom. And I also wanted them to realize that I had been blessed by God to walk through that chapter of my life. And I wanted to help them walk through that chapter. And that’s not an easy process, Bob. Like, I mean. I didn’t know this, but I know it now because I’m on this side. You know, not all businesses sell. hate to say that, but like they don’t. You know? I thought they did. And I want to help people experience what I experience.

Bob Roark: You know, you you’ve you were alluding to it, you said you know, you’ve been on both sides of the table, you know, and now that you’re across from the business owner, or at least you’re not not the owner, what do you see in them that’s reminiscent of what you recognize from your from your own experience? And you know, what do you think they don’t know that’s coming on how they’re gonna feel? You know, like that unanticipated thing that you now recognize.

Vince Vavrunek: So I’d say What I recognize from most sellers when I’m sitting there and I’m learn you know, whether I’m just meeting them, learning about their business, I got one coming up this week, 70 year old founder. no children, or children have passed, wife has passed. You know, we’ve we we we’ve got to sell

Bob Roark: Yeah.

Vince Vavrunek: the business. I don’t know anything else about it. That’s all I know right now. But what I what I recognize in them. that I can relate to that I feel like I had was is building the Sweat X. You know, the sweat equity is what a lot of people don’t see. Mo well, most people don’t see sweat equity. Most buyers don’t want to pay for it, but most the public doesn’t see it. They don’t see the endless nights of working, you know, in the beginning, maybe your wife doing the payroll and you doing, you know, the marketing, the production, the selling, the collecting, the you know, the managing. I mean, they don’t see all of And so your life kind of flashes before your eyes, really, even in the initial conversations. And I can kind of recognize if they see the light at the end of the tunnel or not. And what I tell is the light’s there. Whether you see it or not, it’s there. My job is to help you get there. If that’s something you want to do. Okay. It it’s gotta be a total buy-in from them. The motivation

Bob Roark: Mm-hmm.

Vince Vavrunek: has to be theirs, not mine. Because I’m gonna help them walk through a season of life that is full of mountains and valleys. And I’m the one that’s kind of the buffer. So I recognize the sweat equity, and I recognize them kinda seeing their life flash before their eyes. You know, that’s That’s just one of those moments. You’re just like, okay, wow, I’m really gonna do this. Like right now I’ve got a I’ve got a situation right now where I’ve done the evaluation. We’re ready. I don’t know if seller’s ready. But you know what? If they’re not ready, it’s not the right time.

Bob Roark: Yeah.

Vince Vavrunek: You know, you said something to I th what was the second part of that question? I was trying to remember. You said, what is the thing they don’t see that they’re about to feel? They don’t know They don’t really know the true freedom that they’re gonna experience. When it’s over. When it’s really when it’s truly over. Now some people have transition moments, you know, like there’s earnouts and there’s you know, that like I’m talking about like you sold, somebody else owns the business, you’re helping them through a certain period of time transition wise, and then you’re you’re gone.

Bob Roark: Mm-hmm.

Vince Vavrunek: Okay, so not sticking around for three years or anything like that. Maybe three months. After the first month, they don’t want you there. After the first week, they don’t want you there. You know,

Bob Roark: Yeah. Yeah.

Vince Vavrunek: so I would say they don’t know they’re about to feel that. And you just kind of take a big exhale when you when you experience that. You also you you my well, my message to them is you you get if you get to experience that, you experience something that a lot of business owners will never experience for whatever reason. Whether it’s a family business, it’s got to be passed down, they can’t sell, you know, there’s a lot of different dynamics for there. you know, we used to tell people I know this is awful, but we used to tell people when they weren’t working out of the company, hey, you’re free to explore new career opportunities. That basically means you’re fired. But it was a nicer way

Bob Roark: Mm-hmm.

Vince Vavrunek: of saying, Hey, you’re free to explore new career opportunities. This isn’t the place for you. You know, we can agree to mutually depart here. That means you don’t work here anymore, but you know, we tried to deliver that in a nice way. That’s what the business owner is about to experience. They’re about to be free to explore a new opportunity in life.

Bob Roark: Yeah. Next chapter. You

Vince Vavrunek: Next chapter. Yeah.

Bob Roark: know, for for the owners that you’ve been involved with on the transaction, is there a pattern that you observe for the owners that do that post-transaction well and the ones that struggle?

Vince Vavrunek: Yes. I would say the owners that I’ve had own like so I’ve had owners meet with me one time and literally they’re in. I mean, like it is we’re we’re doing this. You’re gonna sell my business. I know this is gonna hap I mean, they are so confident and I’m just like, Whoa, yeah, okay. Yeah, I am. Yeah, absolutely. I’m with you one hundred percent. I I don’t know a whole lot about the business at this point, right? You know, I haven’t got the tax returns or anything. It’s kinda but And those owners most of the time, they have plan B. They have the next chapter not necessarily fully mapped out, but they have the next chapter outline. They kind of know what they’re wanting to do next. Whether it’s buy Lake House, RV across America, go spend a couple of months at my farm in Kansas, you know, I mean I could go down the laundry list. one of ’em’s plan right now is, hey, I wanna I wanna hang out with my grandchildren. I wanna take I talked to a seller the other day, I just sold a business for. A little follow-up, hey, how you doing? What’s going on? Tell me about some things you’re doing. He was like, you know what, I gotta take my granddaughter to tennis practice. She called me up at nine o’clock, wanted me to take her to tennis practices. ten o’clock. I’d never done that. He’s seventy three years old, I think. I think he’s about seven think he’s about seventy three. He’s never done that before. And he was like, you know what? I get to do that now. And that’s what he wants to do. Like he just wants to be present because he hasn’t been.

Bob Roark: Yeah. You know, we we’ve talked quite a bit before the this show and you describe yourself as a faith centered advisor. You founded Rising Branch around the idea that business is stewardship. How does that show up in the way that you work with a seller who is about to let go of that business they built?

Vince Vavrunek: Stewardship is you know, can lot of people think stewardship is monetary. They they associate stewardship with, well,

Bob Roark: Yeah.

Vince Vavrunek: how am I going to bless others financially? Or how am I going what am I doing with my money? And, you know, one of the things I ask is,

Bob Roark: Mm.

Vince Vavrunek: hey, one of the things I want you to be thinking about is what’s your true purpose here? What what do you think what do you think your true purpose here is with this blessing of this business and then now you’re about to sell it? And how can you be a good steward of that blessing? Okay, so that’s kind of like some people say peeling back the onion, you know? I mean there’s layers. There’s layers and layers and layers. Sometimes business owners are head down most of the time. They’re head down, they’re grinding, and you know, they very seldom look up. And so now they have an opportunity to kind of say, what’s my purpose? How am I going to use this blessing that God gave me to bless others? That’s what a stewardship is. That’s what steward is. A steward is to bless others with the blessing that you’ve received. So what is that? What are those blessings? Well, it can be your time. We just talked about just being present. That was more of a posterity blessing to he’s going to have for his grandchildren. So time is a is a blessing. You know, obviously money’s a blessing. but I would say time, money, your spiritual gifts. I encourage, I encourage all my sellers to take a spiritual gifts test. I mean, they can go on our pine lake.org, my church, and all I mean, you don’t have to be a member and they’re they have an app and you can take a spiritual gifts test and in five minutes literally kind of give you a outline of what God’s blessed you with spiritually. And then also there’s a

Bob Roark: Hello.

Vince Vavrunek: servant component to that. You know, like how do you want to give back to the to the community in a in a servant way? Do you have a nonprofit that you’re passionate about? that you might have supported financially, but you haven’t been able to give them your time and your wisdom. You know, business owners, in my opinion, have so much to give not only to just their employees and their vendors and their suppliers, but the community and then post sale, they are a walk in encyclopedia of

Bob Roark: Mm-hmm.

Vince Vavrunek: of how to run a good organization. And I think that b Bob, I think there’s a gap there. There’s a gap in how those organizations can use business owners as a resource. And the business owner doesn’t necessarily know how to tap into the organization. So there’s a white space.

Bob Roark: I I think a lot of the business owners discount that which they know and the value that that intellectual property has, you know, in the community. I just I just think it’s a gap. you know, we we talked earlier about the stewardship and leadership and delegation is developing the next leader and the fellow you had lunch with, you know, a week and a half ago. for a business owner has been the center of everything for the fifteen or twenty years, what does that really look like in your experience when they finally hand that over.

Vince Vavrunek: I think it really depends on how the next leader was developed. You know, it was it an internal, was it an external leader that was brought in? You know, if it’s if it if we’re just talking about, you know, transitioning the next generation of leaders, if it’s a new business owner, obviously, did they buy into your culture? Do they believe in some of the same passions that you had? You know, there’s a lot of different

Bob Roark: Mm.

Vince Vavrunek: variables there. It’s a slow transition normally. for someone that’s going to be develop someone that’s internal. And and that is that takes intentionality from the current leader to recognize the next generation of who could come up. And you know, I use the story of I reference the Bible a lot, but I I mean that’s just who I am, but I reference the story of David, the king of King David. You know, David was a shepherd. And he was not the one that you would have thought.

Bob Roark: Yeah.

Vince Vavrunek: But being a shepherd prepared him for a couple of things. You know, everybody knows David and Goliath. Story of him killing the giant. Well, how did he kill the giant? Well, the reason why he killed the giant the giant was because he had a slingshot. And why did he have a slingshot? Because he was a shepherd and he was guarding his flock. So he had wrestled bears and killed them and lions before. When he saw Goliath, he’s man, this is any this is nothing. I’ve handled the eyes like this before. Literally they would eat me. I didn’t kill him, you know, and then fast forward he becomes king and he kinda has to shepherd his people. And how did he prepare himself for that? So I mean, you know, it’s it’s intentionality of developing that if of developing that next leader. I hope that answers the question somewhat.

Bob Roark: Yes. You know, y you focus on Mississippi and the southeast market. You know, what do you think is specific about exit dynamics in in your market that perhaps somebody in Chicago or Denver might not understand?

Vince Vavrunek: You know, most buyers, even Mississippi buyers, they’re so eager. I’m talking to the buyers first. in Mississippi, if you can’t tell, we talk a little slower. Okay. We move a little slower. you know, we drive a little slower than everybody else. And so I tell people if you’re not from here or if you’re coming to buy a business here and you want to relocate here, by the way, it’s a great place to relocate. You know, if you can bear the relative humidity like we were talking about in the summer. You can play golf to about you can play golf till you’re about ten months old. not ten months old. Till you can play golf t for about ten months. Sorry. almost till December, depending on on when. So March to something like that. I would say the biggest thing is in Mississippi that’s different is you’ve gotta build the rapport. I know everybody wants the numbers and they wanna check the boxes. Yeah, well it’s gotta do this, it’s gotta do this, it’s gotta do this, gotta do this, or I’m not interested. You know, sometimes you gotta look beyond Just numbers and really hear somebody’s story. And I would say the biggest thing that people miss here, and I can’t speak for other areas, is they’re not asking the current owner or founder what are the potential things that you would do to this business or the things that you would like to add on if you had another, if you owned it for another 30 years, you know. Sometimes they’re just tired, they’re comfortable, it’s provided a great living for them, technology’s bypassed them like we talked about with SurfPro owners. And and that’s an easy question. You know, sometimes sometimes we ask the question as business brokers when we’re interviewing sellers, you know, with an unlimited amount of time and money, which nobody has, but everybody likes to think that they do, what are two to three things that you could do to double this business in the next five years? And they kind of look at you like, What do you what was that?

Bob Roark: Mm.

Vince Vavrunek: And so you just kind of s you know, break it down. What are two things, two or three things if you had an unlimited amount of time and money that you would do this business? Didn’t matter how long it takes, doesn’t matter how much money you got, it how much it cost, what would you do to double this business in five years? And they’re like, yeah, well that’s easy. I’d do this, I’d do that. Okay. That those are great value additions.

Bob Roark: Yeah. Yeah y I’m going like, yeah, that’s it’s so common sense that folks don’t do it. They don’t. You know go ahead.

Vince Vavrunek: No. They’re so we’re Bob, we’re we’re we’re in Mississippi, we’re more relational than transactional.

Bob Roark: Yeah. Well I I

Vince Vavrunek: You know, you could

Bob Roark: grew up down in that country too, so yeah.

Vince Vavrunek: Yeah, you know, Tennessee, you know, we’re the same. We’re just a neigh you know, a distant neighbor.

Bob Roark: Northerners, Tennessee for sure. You know, if someone’s lit you know in if somebody’s in Mississippi and they’ve been running the company for 10 or 15 years and they know they need to start thinking about what’s next, where do they find you and what does that first conversation look like?

Vince Vavrunek: Well, first of all, Vavernick is not a common name. So if you Google if you Google

Bob Roark: So

Vince Vavrunek: Vince Vavernick, you’re not gonna get ten of most likely.

Bob Roark: Yeah.

Vince Vavrunek: T last time I did that, by the way, Google yourself. You’ve have fun. But last time I did that I’m the only one. So I like to tell people that’s a good southern name and they look at me kind of

Bob Roark: Okay.

Vince Vavrunek: funny and I say, Well it’s Southern Czechoslovakian, but I’m in Mississippi. And then I would say LinkedIn, Bob, because I mean like that’s where I p that’s where I’m at the most. I’m on LinkedIn. I respond to all the inquiries. You know, I manage my own page. And so a lot I just a lot of business owners I connect with on LinkedIn. So I would be this the first thing, Google my name or ask chat GPT or whatever Vince Favernick, how to get touch with him.

Bob Roark: Okay.

Vince Vavrunek: And also if I’m on LinkedIn.

Bob Roark: That’s how we found each other.

Vince Vavrunek: That’s right. Yeah.

Bob Roark: So, you know, you’ve been on both sides of the table. You’ve been you’re the founder that built it and the seller who let it go and the broker watches people go through it all the time. Six years after you’re saying looking back, what do you now know that you wish you knew then?

Vince Vavrunek: Yeah, I think we I might have talked to you about this when we first got on a phone call. I wish I knew about some alternative ways to give to the kingdom through my proceeds prior to walking through that. you know, I’m not a financial advisor, I’m not a financial guru. but you know, here on this side of the table, I have watched a couple of different things happen and I’ve been able to see some really neat things that I’m like, ooh, I wish I would have known that. I wish I could have been able to do that. You know, so that was one. the other one would be we talked about head down. In SurfPro they called it the whirlwind. That’s Monday morning. When you walk into the office and, you know, three guys don’t show up and your office manager calls in sick and the phone’s ringing off the hook. And everything you thought you were gonna work on rolls out the window. And I’d sometimes I wish I would have just risen above to that sixty thousand foot view and got out of the whirlwind a little bit. the business owner has so much influence and I talk about kingdom first mindset, kingdom impact, and we just talked about that gap, that white space of the resources. You know, as a business owner, if you’re currently own a business, or even when you’re out and you’re not, you still have all the resources, you still have all the knowledge. But when you’re in the trenches, when you’re in the whirlwind, you your your potential impact is exponential. It’s infinite. The ripple effect, I call it. You know, because some people say business is mission. that is a real mission. That’s where people spend most of their time. You

Bob Roark: Mm-hmm.

Vince Vavrunek: know, that’s an ecosystem in itself. And so as I look back on it, I w you know, I know I’d

Bob Roark: No.

Vince Vavrunek: I know I participated and I know I poured into people, but sometimes I wish I would have just kind of like risen up, looked down. And just being like, okay. These are all the tentacles here. You know, this is what this is the impact that I’m making. And then this is the potential impact that I that I could have. so I would say I wish I would have n maybe known that then, but I don’t know if it was possible.

Bob Roark: Go. You know, it’s yeah, sometimes you just kinda gotta get there in order to be able to do an after action and say, you know, and recognize. But, you know, Vince, you and I’ve talked quite a bit, you know, before the episode and on the episode, you know, I really appreciate you taking the time and, you know, sharing your views and your insights. You know, th this episode for folks, I you know, incredibly valuable and useful. And you know, whether you’re the founder, you know, pre or post exit or the professional serving the business owner. You know, there’s wisdom and experience in here on both sides of the table. You know, with that being said, this is the Exit Series. If you know of a founder who’s sold or is about to, or a broker or an attorney, or a value accelerator who’s been across the table at the closing or about to, send them this episode and subscribe to wherever you listen. We’ll see you next time.