Ep. 8 You Can’t Unring the Bell Featuring: Scott Bushkie

speaker-0: This is the Exit Series. I’m Bob Rourke. This is for founders, business brokers, MA attorneys, and business valuation professionals. The people are in the room when the deal closed or before, talking about what happens next. On this episode, we have Scott Bushke. He’s the founder of Cornerstone Business Services, the author of Finish Strong, Sell Your Business on Your Terms, and founder of the Cornerstone International Alliance in Green Bay, Wisconsin. He brokers transactions in the lower middle market and built an amazing alliance of firms, thirty-four now, right? Yeah, I think up to 36 now. ⁓ gotta catch up on what I read. 36. Firms that give him a view that most individual ⁓ brokers don’t have. Scott, thank you for your time and welcome. Tell us about your firm and who you serve. Thank you, Bob. Yeah, excited to be here. So, yeah, as you said, Cornerstone Business Services is my investment banking firm ⁓ focused on the low burning of market. When I started out 25 years ago now, I was just celebrating our 25th anniversary. We really looked and said, You know, where are the pockets? Where you know, where is the most need from business owners? And we saw that there’s a lot of people, if you said, who you who’s who can help me with a half million, million dollar transaction? Well, there’s a lot of business brokers and franchises like Sunbelt and VR and Trans World. And then if you looked at, you know, twenty five years ago, hey, you know, who could help me with a hundred, two hundred, three hundred million dollar deal or bigger? Well you go to New York and Chicago and the big the bigger investment banks that say, Yeah, I’ll work with you, Bob, but Our fee’s gotta be at least a five million dollar success fee or two million dollar success fee or something like that. But I looked around both locally, regionally, nationally, and said, Hey, if you had a a 10, 20, 30, 50, 70 million dollar deal, who would you go to? And everybody hesitated. They said, Well, the business broker would love to take on that ten million dollar deal because it’s maybe a bigger fee than all their other deals together because they’re smaller, but they don’t have the back office, the sophistication, the process and just the know how to handle a load in a market deal because it’s just a different process than a main street deal. And the bigger investment banks could do it with their eyes closed, but they’re like, Bob, sorry, I love you and your business, but I’m not getting out of bed for a million dollar or half million dollar fee. It’s just we gotta be two or five million. So I said, Well, not being the smartest guy in the room, what if I ⁓ take what the investment bankers do of bringing a high quality team, a team of five or six people versus one person running your deal, limited clientele. So we limit our c our clientele to, you know, two or three business owners typically per investment banker. And run a very proactive process, the set process we call ours the insurance 360 process, and create multiple offers, create a high closing ratio. Our closing, you where the national average is, they say 20 to 30 percent. Ours the last five, six years has been around around 85%. And bring all that together, but really focus on this, this underserved marketplace. So most of our clients are, you know, in just fairly industry agnostic all over the country, ⁓ but usually at least a million, two million in Ibata, up to probably twenty-five million, but there’s a lot more in the The bottom half of that, then there are the top half of that just from a number standpoint. You know, five, ten million in revenue up to two fifty. It’s kind of how we coined the lower market space. So we help them do three things do an RMA or a real market analysis to help them with that clarity moment to understand what is my business truly worth in today’s marketplace. It’s not just a formula journey or a put a couple numbers into a a formula or into a computer and and kick back a large range. It really gets you to a number. It’s about a process. Then we go through to really dial that in. We help companies grow through acquisition, which is what I was talking about with a client right before I got onto this call. ⁓ or where we spend most of our time is helping business owners sell their companies and maximize their life’s work and and hopefully to give them the peace of mind that they had multiple offers to choose from and and move on to the next best chapter of their of their life. So that’s what Cornerstone does. And then you mentioned the alliance. We started that eight years ago and ⁓ The pretense of that was ⁓ even though they they’re quote unquote competitors because we all focus on the same space, I’ve always had more of an abundance mindset than a scarcity mindset and said, What if and I’ve been the chair of the International Business Broker Association, I’ve been the chair of the MA Source, and you go to these conferences for two and a half days, three days, or whatever they might be, and going, Man, there were some good courses, some okay courses, and this and that, but you know, having a beer ⁓ you know around the bar or having dinner with Bob, I mean, that was where the best practice sharing because we were all Bob’s from here, I’m from there, we don’t compete very much or at all. And everybody goes, man, that was the best two and a half days of my life. And then we all go back and climb into our little silos, and nobody talks to anybody for six months or a year or two. And I said, What if we could create that experience on a regular basis? And not just with anybody that wrote a check, but with the best of the best in in in the marketplace. So that’s w where the whole pretense was we’re all better together than we are apart or separately. And ⁓ so it that gives us access to Boots on the ground. We’re in ⁓ you know thirty, yeah, I think we have thirty-six now, just picked up two more in the last week or two, but five continents. I don’t know how many countries, and ⁓ we have access to multiple ⁓ industry experts. Yeah, we have over 200 investment bankers in that. We did ⁓ over 2.5 billion in enterprise value last year and and over three hundred transactions. So it’s it’s a great way to your point that we get to see things on a ma and on on all the different stats and done deals and and sharing best practices that you just can’t see. in between your own four walls if you’re just the typical, you know, MA firm. ⁓ and so that’s that’s fun to to be able to do that and bring that additional h call it horsepower to our clients so they have a better experience at the end of the day. You know, that at some point, you know, you started cornerstone, I guess, either this broker brokerage or investment banking. And then at some point you looked around and says, I’m gonna take and adjust that approach or name and then build something different. And then you started looking at the best practice. What was that aha moment like or what was the you know, said I’m gonna take and proceed down this new road? What was that like? Yeah, it really was one we we w one we lost a deal. to be very honest, ⁓ I lost a thirty five million dollar deal and when I we they introduced nine different brokers and investment bankers, I’m many advisors, and we took second and it’s you know, never the fund second place. And I asked why. And they said the number one guy or firm had more dots on the map. And I said, Explain what dots on the map mean. And ⁓ it was literally that yeah, they had partners and relationships with dots all over the all over the country and world. And I said, Really? That’s what it was? Like, yeah, we loved you guys, but that’s what swung it for us. I said, okay, well, A, how do I get more dots on the map? But not just dots on the map that is somewhat artificial, but truly bringing people together. And I’ve always, like I said, I’ve always have an abundance mindset. I always love sharing. I always love learning, even though I’ve done this for 28 years now and still love learning today. And so I thought what again, bringing the best of the best together, we could create something special because this industry, this low-in-to-market, it’s so fragmented. When I was the chair of the MA Source, We did a study of just the size of the firms and fifty percent were one person shops, solopreneurs. Another forty percent were two to five person shops. And then that left only ten percent that was e ⁓ six people or more. And you know, Cornerstone’s around twenty people ⁓ now. We’re hiring a few more people in July that gets right around twenty. And we’re a big company, you know, one of the biggest in the world market, but yet we’re still a tiny company of twenty people. Yeah. And so I thought, can we can we help with some of that that fragmented marketplace and bring some of those people together? To create something that’s special and and to be able to offer a business owner the the the touch of a small investment bank, but yet the experience of a large investment bank with having str true strategic partners all over the world and be able to make a phone call to Japan, Germany, France, India, you know, wherever we thought the buyer would be and have people that could open up doors for us. So that was really ⁓ it to try to bring try to create something that wasn’t in the marketplace and and at 36 firms. We’re now the largest lower to market, exclusive lower to market alliance in the world. And we want to grow that to be, you know, well over 50 and probably closer to 80 firms over the next ⁓ two years. Small, a small goal, no big deal. Yeah, right, right. You know, in in the lower middle market, five to 150 million specific niche or area or lane. And, you know, a lot of brokers talk about it. You’ve built an entire alliance around it, like we were talking about. You know, what’s really different about the smaller twenty million dollar deal versus the five million dollar main street deal or two hundred million upper middle market? What do you see? Yeah, the biggest difference is probably between the twenty million dollar deal and the f sub five million dollar deal than the twenty million to hundred million dollar deal. ⁓ in the the main street deal or sub five million dollar deal, in many cases, not all, but in most cases, the buyer is gonna be an individual. And it’s so it it’s I’m you know, I’m Bob’s thinking about selling. I’m in corporate America. I’m in middle market middle management someplace. I’m sick of being the corporate America. I want to do my own thing. I’ve got the entrepreneurial bug. Bob’s thinking about retiring. I’m going to command by Bob’s company. Bob comes out, trains me. I go in. I run Bob’s company. And now it’s my business for the next 20, 30 years. But so in in Main Street, when you’re trying to find that buyer, it’s like finding a needle in a haystack, right? Because there’s no, there’s no strategic plan that you can put in place and say, well, Scott’s at ABC company and he’s been at that company for 10 years, and I bet you he’s ready to get out. You know, there’s it just doesn’t work like that. So it’s more of a real estate model, which is put together the book or the you the the overview of the company, put it up on a listing exchange, kind of like an MLS for real estate, but you know, like Biz by sell is is the biggest by far. And and ⁓ you know, now and then people that have that itch are gonna go to Biz by sell and kind of look and say, what’s well that’s in my marketplace, or I like that industry, or whatever it might be. And you’re playing matchmaker. So it’s a bit more of a shotgun approach and a reactive approach than a twenty or a hundred million dollar deal is gonna be much more of a rifle approach of we’re gonna put together a deeper ⁓ what we call a sim or a confidential information memor confidential information memorandum, that book on the company. We’re gonna it’s gonna be deeper. So if instead of ten, fifty pages might be thirty to fifty, you know, slide decks or ⁓ slides and ⁓ And we’re gonna probably spend 50 to 100 or more hours doing research on is this a private equity play? Is it a family office play? Is it a private company, public company, domestic, international with private equities? Is it a platform company, is an add-on company? And our analysts will do all the research to figure out who are the right companies that can buy this, not just where one plus one equals two, but hopefully one plus one equals four or five, that there’s some synergies there. So we’re trying to figure out who are the right buyers, who, you know, why should they buy the business? What are the synergies? And then who’s the right person at that company or firm to reach out to? And we’re proactively like a rifle approach, we’re going out to them in a certain order in a certain way. And then the goal is, again, with the Main Street company, you’re gonna have an asking price. Because if an individual comes out just like if the house, you know, your house is listed at $4.99, a business for an individual, they they might like it, but they have no idea what the value is. So if there’s no value on the price, they go, Man, I really like Bob’s company, but I don’t know if it’s worth a hundred thousand or a million and ⁓ I can’t figure out. I’m just gonna go somewhere else. They don’t want to screw up, but if there’s if it’s listed at 499, now I know okay, it’s listed at 499, I’ll come in at 450 or whatever else it is. So that sub five million dollar deals, there’s gonna be an asking price. It’s typically gonna be a business broker. ⁓ it it’s gonna be typically an individual. And our the market pulse survey that we ⁓ Lisa Riley and I started probably 13 years ago now. most times if it’s a sub-million dollar deal, the buyer is gonna come. ⁓ 70% of the time that buyer will come from with 20 or 50 mile radius. So someone from California is not moving to Green Bay to buy a sub shop. You know, now if it’s a 40 million dollar company, yeah, 70% of the time the buyer’s gonna come from 100 miles away or more. So it it’s it’s much more of a local approach, regional approach, reactive, asking price, and more of that real estate selling your house model, where once you get into the low middle market or middle market, it’s that process of putting together a good story. Put together, do all the research, client signs off and everything. You run a process with no asking price, and you’re trying to get all the buyers to come together at one time and and kind of hurting all the cats to get all the offers at once. Where again with a main street deal, I’m getting a buyer. If that buyer works out, I’m probably doing the deal with that buyer. If that buyer doesn’t work out, then I’ll find another one. But it’s kind of one at a time where this is a more of a process that brings everybody together. So that’s really the difference. The difference between a twenty million dollar deal and a hundred million dollar deal, it’s the day is really the fee that That the investment bank makes is much much bigger than the hundred million dollar deal and the twenty million dollar deal. Otherwise, it’s really a lot of the same, same process, and it’s a little more sophistication, of course, but ⁓ very much the same, same process. You know, you you’ve been doing this a long time. And you know, you take on a new client in the middle market range, and you know, you’re looking at the owner, not necessarily at the business. Of course, that comes. You look at the owner, and the first conversation, is there an indication that you’ve observed? That that seller’s gonna make it through the process cleanly. Do you get some kind of vibe in there? I do, absolutely. Yeah, you do this long enough. We’ve done over three hundred and fifty deals and talk to God knows how many more people ⁓ than that we didn’t work with end up working with. But ⁓ you know, they really understand why are they selling. You know, first of all, I do they can they clearly articulate why are they selling? ⁓ is this some kind of a planned exit? Is it they woke up one day and they’re tired, burnt out, sick and they don’t wanna do it anymore, which Unfortunately the second is is much more common than than the first. But is this a priority for them? You know, i if Bob goes, Well, yeah, if I can get some crazy number, I’ll sell. Or, no, I really want to sell. And in and when you when we do what we call RMA, yep, that that matches up with their expectations. So are they realistic in invaluation? ⁓ do they know what they want to sell? How organized are they? ⁓ do they know what’s important to them in a sale? You know, some people think about money, money, money, but sometimes it’s Our clients take the second or even third highest amount of money because it’s ⁓ more, you know, a better culture fit, or they’re gonna protect the employees or anything along that line. And what are they gonna do next? Too many people go again, they’re burnt out, tired, sick, they don’t wanna do it anymore. And then they get to the closing line, you closing table, and all of a sudden they go, Holy cow, this is real. I can’t give my baby up for adoption. I I I I I’m gonna pull her back and keep it, even though it’s probably not the best for the baby or for me. I it’s my baby, darn it. I can do whatever I want with this thing. And ⁓ you know, just to give you an idea, we had a client and ironically, one thing we found, and this is Nash, you know, with all of our alliance, that you would think the older someone gets, he or she would be more excited to sell, or ⁓ like I’ve got somebody in their nineties that they for sure want to sell. What we found is that when someone hits their low seventies, they will sabotage that deal. More times than not because maybe they aren’t just mobile, ⁓ or or they they don’t know what they’re gonna do after the fact, or this has been their life for so long, it’s like, what the heck? I’m just gonna keep doing this until I die. But they know they should sell. And we had a a company, two guys in their eighties, two brothers in the eighties, neither one even worked in the company. They had a professional management team. One lived in Florida, one lived in Iowa, the company was, and we had the benchmark at eighteen and a half million. We got twenty some offers on this thing. Very good, great company, nice company, great management team. And at the end of the day, we had four buyers between twenty-four and twenty-six. Now the benchmark was eighteen and a half. Again, we never put an asking price because you o you never know what the people are going to pay. We had four buyers between twenty-four and twenty-six and we were going up. And the sellers called me, happened to be on my birthday of all days and said, Hey Scott, really appreciate all you guys have done, but the numbers just aren’t gonna work. We’re not gonna sell. And like we’re not even done with the negotiations. We’re we’re well over the benchmark of what everybody clearly wanted to get. And what we found was that they just could not let go of their baby, that they didn’t know who they were without their baby. They didn’t know what they were going to talk about to their buddies, literally at the country club. And they decided to blow up the deal and said, We’re going to run this thing until we die. And, you know, going back to the study that you and I were talking about, that we did the national study we did, that was one of the biggest surprises. When we asked, What is your mindset around selling your business? And this was people between forty five and seventy five, and between five and a and a hundred million in revenue. And the number one answer, like at 43%, was I plan to run my business until I’m physically and or mentally unable to continue. And it’s so, you know, but when we know that, hey, they’re coachable, they kind of know what they want to do next or have an idea, they’re organized, this is a priority for them. They return a phone call right away, ⁓ within reason, and ⁓ and they know why they’re selling, those are the ones that are gonna make it make it through. The ones that think they know it all, the ones that think Well, I’m not gonna you know, if I get some crazy number I’ll sell. We just you know, some brokers will work with those people. You know, we don’t work with them. You know, we we wanna make sure that they’re that they’re serious about what they’re gonna do. But those are those are some of the key traits that we’ve seen from a business owner that when they’re really ready, they’re ready and ⁓ and they’re ready to listen, they’re ready to they do what they do well, we do what we do well, and everybody stays in their lane and ⁓ and and usually good things happen at the end of the day. You know, you you’ve probably seen the full range of behavior. ⁓ from the seller just before closing. What’s the range of typical versus atypical in in the you know in a few days before closing that you’ve seen? Yeah, we this is both buyer and seller. We always say no one gets any smarter or any more rational the closer you get to closing. It so you want to set clear expectations up front of what what makes sense and when they’re thinking objectively, because the closer you get, again, this is, you know, buyer’s gonna put millions upon millions of dollars on the table, but the seller It’s their life’s work. They get one chance to do this. It’s it’s their legacy. It’s they’re giving up their baby for adoption. So yeah, they’re gonna be emotional. They’re gonna be, you know, little things can you know, they can blow up over little things. And that’s why we try to try to eliminate as many ex surprises as possible by really setting clear expectations up front with our seller and also with the buyers we’re putting together the letter of intent and and everything else to try to get as much into the LOI as humanly possible. So it’s not a lot of negotiations, you know, as you get closer to the closing. yeah, people are excited, they’re nervous, they’re scared. ⁓ it it’s it’s not just, you know, moving like this. It’s it’s what it’s going, it’s the roller coaster ⁓ effect of ⁓ you know, the closer you get to closing. Yeah, the oscillator for sure. Yeah. Yeah. ⁓ you know it there’s I think an expectation of some description of, you know, what do you see in the cellar when they close? You know, and when you look at the cellar and the wire is there, What do you see visibly in that cellar? Yeah. Yeah. I I think the first the first wave of emotion is just this relief of stress that they’ve been carrying this burden, they’ve been carrying this bag, you know, they they’re holding the torch for usually decades. And they finally were able to say, not someone paid me for everything I built up, and they’ve got the money’s in the bank, and just this I can take a breath, I can relax. And In fact, just to give you a a story of of how real that really is, we had a gentleman ⁓ out in New Jersey that we were working with several years ago, and he his blood pressure was like double what it should have been. It was 200 over. I mean, it was not good. He was on all kinds of blood pressure medicine, and he had a successful company, extremely profitable, very good. It wasn’t like he was stressed out because the company wasn’t doing well, it was doing great. We sold the company, had multiple offers, and he He tried everything. He was taking multiple kinds of medication. Nothing was helping him. Couldn’t sleep at night. ⁓ and he he sold his company. And within six months, his blood pressure came down and he was off all of his medication. And it his own his doctor said, if you don’t sell this company, it’s gonna kill you. It’s absolutely gonna kill you. Because his he was just a type A personality. He was just driven hard. And so all of a sudden he he had his life back. He had a bunch of money in the back. He had his life back. He he’s he’s still alive today. I you know, af after you know 10 years later or so. And I so I think you first see this sense of relief, like, ⁓ my gosh, it it really happened. Because they’re they want it to happen, they want it to happen, but they’re still waiting for the other shoe to drop that something happens because they hear the stories, and it does happen where you’re right up to closing and then something falls apart. But it got done, and then I think it goes a little, you know, they’re excited, and then I think it goes into a little bit of a ⁓ Intrepidation of, okay, now now what am I gonna do? Yeah, like what’s next? And that’s why we talk about early with our clients about what what does that next chapter of your life look like? Where are you gonna find purpose? And I was able to interview ⁓ Bo Burlingham for a movie that we I I produced with it with another film director, and his whole book and and his whole talk was around people re even with even those that do sell have this you this you know, seventy percent had it and this seller remorse or regret. And so much of it came from, you know, they go to a cocktail party. Like the worst thing that could happen is they go to a cocktail party after they sold their company and go, Well, Bob, what do you do now? And they’re like, Well, I used to own Rourke Enterprises and I used to do this and I used to do that. And now I play golf every once in a while, you know, and they don’t know what they’re next. So it’s all about as business owners, we’re all about serving. We’re we’re so serving our customers, serving our employees, serving whoever, and we have that sense of purpose. And when you lose that sense of purpose, They gotta figure what that is. It could be for some, maybe starting a y you know, another company. We see that a lot with Gen X. They’re but they’re being kind of selling one in their forties, early fifties, and and taking a year or two off and then doing it again, kinda like a boomerang generation. The boomers are selling once and they’re and they’re retiring, you know, is is what we typically find. But I think you know, it it it’s some of those things that ⁓ they kinda go through this you know, nervousness, relief, excitement, and then intr in temperation. It’s it’s a it’s something that they really need to spend time on because if they don’t know what they’re gonna do next, like in you said you read my book and in the workbook we have a section just on, you know, what’s next. And so we have people do, you know, write out their bucket list of what are the top ten things that you want to do that you couldn’t do because you didn’t either have the time or the money and now and now you you have the gift of both. But that’ll get you through the first year or two. But after that, what’s really the purpose of of your life and and that’s where we have them write what do they want to be remembered for? You almost like writing their eulogy, like at the end of the day, what are people gonna say about Bob? You know, he was the best business owners, but his kids didn’t even know him for the last twenty years of his life, or he was the best grandpa and he did this and he gave to the little league and his church or what again there’s zero right or wrong. It’s just what do you want to be remembered for? Because people, a lot of entrepreneurs just get caught up they’re in that in the rat race and they’re in the hamster wheel and they’re just going around and round and round and like, Look how much money I’m making, I’m making more, I gotta grow, I gotta buy another company, I gotta keep growing. It’s like at one point, what are you doing it all for? And that’s what again, what the national study said. Why are they doing this? They when when they would sell is when they knew that they truly had financial freedom, that they could live their ideal lifestyle, but less than forty percent ever had got any kind of an RMA or or evaluation done ever in their life, let alone in the last year or two. So nobody knows when they could get out or when they can’t get out, and they just get stuck because they don’t know what they don’t know. And thirty two percent in this national study said, I don’t even know where to start or who to trust. And ⁓ so they’re just they’re just stuck. And that’s why we work with so many business coaches and financial advisors and other trusted advisors because if we can help educate them to have the conversation with the client and they start to bring us in earlier, someone like us in earlier, it just gives that business owner he or she such a much a better chance of of truly selling the company and going on on their terms versus as we talked earlier offline, you know, just getting that unsolicited offer when you’re burnt out and and going, ⁓ my gosh, somebody validated my you know, my life’s work. And you find out after you sold the business that they they stole your company for half of what it’s worth, or if if not even less. So yeah, I I I think those are some of the things that you see ⁓ you know, right after the sale, and and it’s ⁓ it it it’s very and I think we’ll talk about this later, but it’s so different. Those that truly plan and are ready for this and proactively moving through this process than those just wake up one day and it’s not funny more, burnt out, sick, tired. And they’re reactive through this whole process and they haven’t met with their team and they don’t know how much they need to live their ideal lifestyle a and and they just pray to God that maybe it sells and they pay full boat in taxes and pray to God that they can live off of what they what they have. And and it’s so sad because we’ve seen people that sell for millions of dollars, but they never take the time to sit down with a quality financial advisor and attack tax people and everybody else and they just ⁓ they live a very frugal lifestyle. Anytime they spend any kind of money they feel guilty about it. And then they die with millions of dollars in the bank. And they ⁓ man, my li they lived a life of a of a of a fifty, seventy-five thousand dollar wage when they could have lived a three hundred thousand dollar lifestyle and they just never really understood it. And and ⁓ you know, timing is so important. you know, I know this isn’t one of your questions, but it’s it’s so important with timing because most people hang on too long. They don’t sell too soon. Again, it’s because they don’t know what they don’t know. They don’t know what they’re gonna do next, they don’t know who they are without the company. You could see why. that would happen. But when they do figure it out, when they figure out their numbers, and even if they can get a couple years on their life, and in a story I I tell is it’s a personal one. And it’s my dad, ⁓ you know, he was not an entrepreneur. He he worked in ⁓ corporate America all his life. He worked for John Deere in Little Hawkon, Wisconsin, and for 28 years, ⁓ and everybody retires at 62 and he was 60, and and ⁓ but he saw an opportunity, he kind of found his value and working with HR said, Hey, I heard you want to get rid of some of the old guys and get some new guys in for less salaries and fresh blood. And what would you do for you know to get me out of the here? And he found out that he could get instead of twenty if he saw you know ended today, he would have got twenty years of pension. He was able to get thirty years of pension, so two years he would have otherwise got, got a year’s severance, and plus his vacation paid out, which was several weeks. So he basically got out two years early ⁓ for about a half a year’s worth of salary, you know, for real good trade. And he found out that he could live his ideal lifestyle two years earlier. Well, thank God he did, because in those two years he was able to go golf with his buddies, traveled, you know, all around where he wanted to go, come see the kids, the grandkids, do all the stuff that he wanted to do because he had worked literally from the age of ten on. My grandpa was not a very nice guy, went to the war, came back, was not a good guy. So from he was the youngest of five, from ten to sixteen, you know, through high school, college, everything else he worked his whole life. So he finally got done, fifty years of work at sixty, came home one day to my mom. She said, How was work? He’s ⁓ I retired today. She’s What? You’re thinking about retiring? He’s No, I’m done. I’m never going to work again. They never talked about it. My mom was quite surprised. and ⁓ he got to do all those things I talked about, and thank God he did because at 62, 10 days before my wedding, when he was supposed to retire, ⁓ he had a massive stroke on the golf course. ⁓ he he felt something on hole seven, by hole nine, he couldn’t get out of the golf cart. And ⁓ flight for life down to Madison, lived wasn’t supposed to live through it, lived through it, but his mind was never the same, his body was never the same. Took him a year learn how to walk again with a with a cane, where he was just a great athlete. He had coached and ref for 30, 40 years of his life. And ⁓ his mind, you know, his he was the master schedule. He’d do everybody’s taxes in Horkon and he couldn’t balance his own checkbook. He couldn’t dr if you said, here’s a circle, draw me two o’clock on his clock, he couldn’t do it, you know, the first year. That’s how messed up his mind was. So he lived for five more years, not happy, and then died of cancer. So if he would have gone down the path of wait till someone talks to me, or I’ll wait till I’m No longer able to do this, he would have worked from ten to sixty-two to have a major stroke, get cancer, and die. And that’s no way for any of us to go through life. You know, so at least he got two years, died way too early. But that’s where our what we talk about is that clarity moment, you know, with CPATs, that the this discovery gate with EPI of not just doing a wide range or doing a computer model, but sitting down with our RMA and figure out what is your company truly worth and what could you do to enhance the value? Well, get not only give you what it’s worth, but what are the two to three things you could do? The biggest levers to move that company forward and and get it to where you want to be. But once you understand, we said that we kind of like a three legged stool, you know, what’s your real number, your life, you know, and then what’s your net number? You want to get a net on after taxes and fees and debt. And then what’s your lifestyle number? What what what what do you need to fill that gap? And if if if the wealth gap is zero or or or you’ve you filled the wealth gap, well then why wait? But if there’s a wealth gap, well, you know, hey, my net number’s, you know, 10, I need, you know, my lifestyle number is 12, I a two million dollar life. you know, wealth gap. Well, I can either lower my lifestyle down to ten and know what that looks like ’cause I’m just done. Or I could say, ⁓ but now I a two million dollar wealth gap, I what to do, and then work with a business coach like Cultivator and Scaling Up or somebody to help grow the business. And then we update the evaluation and now they’re making a well informed decision to go into market. And that that really helps a lot of people because it it it can give them back maybe five years of their life. And you just unfortunately you never know when bad things are going to happen to you. You know and it just I just spoke To a national group last week over in Detroit. And the ⁓ the person that puts on the event, I was talking to her, she’s early late 40s, early 50s, and her husband, great shape, they’re both D1 athletes, ⁓ went to the doctor and came back with ⁓ brain cancer. He’s got two years to live. You know, and and you hear that story a lot more than you want to. And so that’s our our goal is to give give our clients, give these business owners that are are these creators, they burned these things out of nothing, created all these jobs. Help build up these communities to give them as much time to build, you know, make an impact and build memories with their family and friends as humanly possible. And and if they don’t have that clarity mode, if they don’t want that RMA is, they then they wait too long and then all of a sudden the business drops off or they don’t sell it at all. And now their legacy’s gone, all the employees lose their jobs and ⁓ and now they’re not and they’re not living their lifestyle. And so it’s it it it’s so important to have that ⁓ you know, that upfront conversation with your trusted advisor. Yeah, the legacy risk issues profound and you know, the the advent of concierge medicine, I think is a great way for some of these people to consider to offset that risk. And I don’t think it’s widely applied, but I think it would matter a lot. You know, and when you’re talking to that business owner, you know, and they’ve closed in the middle marketing area, you know, and you you talk to that business owner after the close and go, what surprised those sellers the most about that whole closing process, you think? Yeah, sometimes it’s it’s well the due diligence process is always ⁓ deeper than what they thought it was gonna be. I always say, you know, it’s not the most grammar’s image, but it’s you it’s like going to get the old colonoscopy. That’s about how deep they’re gonna they’re gonna go into into your business and everything about you and your company. Yeah. But it it’s ⁓ I think that’s one and then for us our average is six to eight months. So some people think it went faster than it thought. Some people think thought it took a lot longer than they they had thought that that was just gonna be kind of an event and it’s not, it’s a process.

speaker-1: I’m going to…

speaker-0: I think with you know with with our clients, the number of offers that they get, you know, the you know, be able to get eight or ten offers on their company and they got to choose who their success was, I think is good. And it it and one thing that I think is surprising to them, again, when they don’t know what that purpose is after the fact, is they go from this VIP, this very important person of people will call them all the time, asking them questions and taking them out for lunch to try to get their business or whatever it is, they go from a VIP. To what we call a PIP, which is a previously important person. And ⁓ and they’re not ready for, you know, like, why is my phone working? Well, it’s ten o’clock and no one’s called me yet. Why why this thing must be broke. I gotta go get my my phone fixed. So I think those are some things too that, you know, your phone stops ringing. And ⁓ in and that’s where it really comes down to understanding what that next chapter looks like. Because most ⁓ most just know that I wanna get out of this because I’m burnt out, tired, and don’t want to do this anymore, but they really don’t spend time Or they’ll say, I’m gonna golf. Well, I’m telling you right now, you can only gulf so many times a day before your shoulders start to ache or your arms are ready to fall off. So if gulf is their answer, they’ll they’ll usually ⁓ they won’t be happy in about a a year to two years later. You speak, I think, frequently in front of b business owner groups or industries. And so you have that cohort in the audience. So you’ve made your presentation and so on. What are the typical questions that come across from that audience after you take and make a point about pre-exit planning? Yeah, I I think, you know, some of the questions that get asked are, you know, if I could do one or two things, what would make the biggest difference in helping me, you know, sell my business and, you know, have l go out on my terms? And I I think that, you know, it’s very high level, but it’s it’s really we talked a little bit about them, but just to capture them is number one. is you’ve got to plan sooner. If you wake up one day and want to sell tomorrow, we get that all the time and we can do that, but you’re leaving so much money on the table, or you might not be saleable at all. So getting out even if it’s a year earlier, just taking a year to kind of get organized and plan a few things, ⁓ is helpful. And then two, it’s all about building the right deal team around you. ⁓ this is not something that you should be doing yourself. And I’m not saying that because obviously yes I’m I’m biased and and it’s it’s great if you call us, but I I can tell you, you know, I’ll give you an anal analogy, and then I’ll give you a case study or two that ⁓ and it’s not just ⁓ the investment bank or the MA advisor, but it’s also the MA attorney. It’s also the right tax people, it’s also the right financial advisor. It’s those people all coming together to help you maximize this one in a life once in a lifetime chance you have of maximizing your life’s work. And ⁓ people that do it themselves, and in in the national study, we found that, you know. The traits that make a business owner great. You if I ask people in a crowd like, what what traits make a business owner great? They’ll usually come up with grit, persistence, you know, I could do this myself, complex thinking, problem solver, be able to pivot, you know, in in and react to different situations. And it’s all of those personalities that make them a terrible seller. Because they’re like, well, geez, Bob, I, you I know my business better than anybody else. Why should I work with you? You know, ⁓ I I’m unique, I’m different than everybody else. I’ll call these buyers. Well, these buyers, you know, it it’s like I’m a really good tennis player. I might be a world class athlete, but I go out to your country club and I start, you know, after a couple of drinks, I start talking to your club pro. And he or she’s does maybe they never played tennis, but they play a lot of golf. And they know that course they played the hundreds, if not thousands of times. They know where how the greens lie, they know where all the water hazards are, all the bunkers, everything else. And I think because I’m a world class athlete in tennis, then I’m gonna beat your club pro in golf first time out, never picked up a club. And everybody’d be like, of course, there’s no way the club pro is going win every single time because you’ve never even touched a club, let alone, you know, played a bunch of times. ⁓ But that’s the same thing with business owners that you’re going up against someone that what they do for a living is buy companies. And they buy companies, their job is to buy for as little as possible. And the a and even on top of that, put as much risk back on back on you, the seller, that if the deal doesn’t work out, you’re taking even a bigger hit on value. And to give you an idea on that, I’ll give you two quick case studies. One was a cup deal we did a couple years ago, and it was ⁓ a family owned business regional market leader in the region. And they had come to us through their trusted advisor and said, Hey, you know, we’ve got two buyers interested in us. We we want to sell, we’re looking to retire and do something a little different, relax, and ⁓ been doing it for a long time. And so we met with them on a Friday. Well, then over the weekend, they’re like, you know what? I’ve got 40 years of experience in this space. I’ve sat on the national boards of my industry. I know the players. I’ve got the two biggest buyers already at the table knocking on my door, what saying, I want to buy your company. Why should I pay Cornerstone anything? Why why would that be why would I want to have a cost to me selling my company when I could do it myself? So they called me on Monday and said, Hey, you know what? Guess what? We’re gonna do it ourselves. We got this figured out, I we think. ⁓ but what I we still want you to do in RMA, we want you to do a real market analysis. So I think they could prove to me. That they could get more than what market was because they’re really smart people. And he was brilliant. They are smart as heck in their space. So it takes about three weeks to do the RMA. We expedite a little bit. ⁓ so the one first offer came in while we were doing the RMA. It came in at 31 million, ⁓ 26 at close and five in a seller note over five years. Next week we finished our RMA, it came in at forty three point three million dollars. And which was quite a jump from the thirty one and the twenty six at close. But they said, wait, wait, wait. That was the second biggest buyer. Now we’ve got the biggest buyer coming in. They’ve got the most money. They’ve backed by private equity. They’re they have a mandate to grow through acquisition. They’ve already come to our place twice and taken us up for two amazing dinners, talked about how great we are, how smart we are, how many synergies there are between our firms. And ⁓ they’re gonna come in with a huge number because they’re the biggest of the best. They love us. They came in the following week at twenty five million dollars. And we said, can we please run our process where we create Pomo, where we create the power of multiple offers, and we’re getting multiple buyers, you know, competing, getting that urgency and scarcity and competitive nature. And they finally said, Yeah, you got a short leash go. So we went, and in 10 days, this is not the normal, 10 days is quick, but in 10 days we had a signed letter of intent for 51.3 million dollars. Only because we created visible competition, we created urgency and scarcity. And it wasn’t one of those two buyers, a a different buyer that we brought to the table. And the ironic thing is is that that buyer came to them about ninety days earlier or nine months earlier, excuse me, and said, Hey Bob, we want to buy your company. They Hey, we’re actually thinking about selling, great. And they said, Great, we want to put an offer in and the market was kind of three and a half to five times EBADA. It wasn’t huge multiples on that particular industry. And they said we have a mandate with our private equity group that we legally can’t pay more than a five multiple, even if we wanted to. And Bob, you’ve got a great company. We love your company, but we can’t pay more than a five multiple. So that would have came out about $30 million. So without us, 25, 30, and 31, with an investment maker, with a team, but with an MA attorney, with the financial advisor, with the tax people, we all work together to create a $51.3 million deal for that client and close 45 days later. So that’s You know, that’s the the big piece. And then just another quick one we just did six months ago, ⁓ a little smaller deal, but again, same scenario where the the buyer was the owner was working with a buyer. They negotiated from five million up to like ten million dollars. ⁓ but from five million to ten, it was all earnout. And ⁓ the higher the number, the more unlikely the earnout was or the higher more growth they had to do. So she’s like, Look, it’s really probably a five, six million dollar deal. We’re we’re ready to sell, we want to retire. and ⁓ Their financial advisor just saw me speak at a national conference of theirs. So he’s like, Hey, can you come speak to this this coup this couple? The woman owns a great company and and I think they’re I I don’t th I don’t know if they’re getting full value. So we talked with them. We agreed to do an RMA ⁓ very quickly. We did the RMA, the real market analysis, came back at about ten million bucks. But we said, Look, we think we can get seventy-five to ninety percent cash at close, not fifty percent cash at close. And we think there’s a good chance we can get more than the ten million dollars, but ten million dollars is what other Your peers have sold for somewhere in that range. So she said, Hey, if I get 50% more cash of clothes, I’m in. Let’s let’s take the risk and go do that. So she’s like, Well, what I with this one buyer, I like them. They’re good people. I don’t want to lose them. And I said, look, they’re not going to go anywhere. They haven’t, they always threaten to leave. They don’t leave, ⁓ has our been our experience. But I said, just send them an email going, Hey, appreciate you guys who are like you guys, appreciate your time. ⁓ I get one chance to do this and do it right. My financial advisor and used me a cornerstone, I’m gonna bring them in. They’re gonna get contact you and they’re gonna run a process and ⁓ and you know they’ll be in touch. And in the last call before she sent that email, they said, Look, we went from five, we’re up to ten. Ten is the highest we can go. We cannot pay a penny over ten million. It kind of the walkway closed like, Hey Bob, if you don’t like this deal, we’re out of here. See ya, and hopefully they go, ⁓ no, no, no, wait, wait, wait, we’ll we’ll do ten million. Well, they sent she sent the email in five minutes that phone rings, and on the other end of the line is the buyer. And after they just said they can’t pay a penny more, the first thing they said was, What’s it gonna take for you not to sign with Cornerstone? How much more money do you want not to sign with Cornerstone? And she’s like, Thank God I signed with you guys. And we brought nine other offers to the table. They stayed at about 10, 10 and a half million. They upped their cash at clothes a little bit. But we end up doing the deal at 14 million and getting over nine million cash at close. So sh they got 40% more and almost a hundred per almost a hundred percent more cash at close. And that’s because we created this promo, the power of multiple offers. If it was just one buyer at a time, she probably would have sold for five or six million bucks. And ⁓ and so that’s you know, so the things that they people can do is because people are like, ⁓ I’ve I’m gonna spend all my effort on building up this thing and making it shiny, making it better and better and better. And you can do all those things, but if you run at the end of the day, if you run the wrong process or no process at all, you are gonna leave millions, if not tens of millions of dollars on the table. And that’s what people are surprised at that, that they’ll just I’ll do it myself or you know, I’ll wait for an unsolicited offer to come in. And anybody doing five or ten million in sales right now has probably got an unsolicited offer within the last week or two, at least the last month, from somebody looking to buy their company because they know that as a buyer, if they can get to you, the the business owner, before you get to someone like us, the investment maker, they are going to get a better deal. And it’s proven out six years in a row, every single time we’ve gotten a higher, better value than what the unsolicited offer has been. And so I think those things that they do so many things right, but just one mistake. Just one mistake of saying the wrong thing, putting an asking price out there, setting a ceiling, you know, just literally one sentence could cost them tens of millions of dollars. And they’re surprised that it’s such cutthroat. So again, going back to all the traits that make a business work great of pivoting and re reactive thinking and and solving problems, when you get one chance to sell your company and you’re going up someone that looks at three to five thousand deals a year and they buy five to six, you gotta have the team behind you because you’re otherwise you’re you’re gonna lose a hundred percent of the time. And that’s where I think that you know, a buyer will spend typically at a lower mid market deal, they’ll spend anywhere from two hundred and fifty thousand to a million dollars on diligence because they gotta make sure that they’re getting what they’re getting and they’re bringing bring people in to knock the price down even after they sign another intent or whatever else it might be. And and that’s that’s where the the team is so important that they have a good team of specialists around them at at the time of that sale. You know, across the alliance that you’ve built, the thirty-six and soon to be counting firms, you know, you’re probably seeing patterns that no single brokerage firm will ever have an opportunity to see during their timeframe. You know, what’s the that postclose pattern that’s of most concern for you? Does it repeat regularly and and regardless of how hard you guys work to try to remediate it? Yeah, I I think the biggest thing that you see is most people get out of business for a personal issue. You again, burnt out, tired, don’t want to do any more sick. And they don’t know so they’re getting away from something, but they don’t know what they’re going to. And they’re excited because they got stuff on their bucket list. But it’s it’s that it’s that there’s stuff that they want to do and fun they want to have, and they should have all the fun and take the time to do all those things. But after that, where’s the meaning in their life? Where’s the purpose in their life? Where’s the passion in their life? Because they, you know, some people think, ⁓ I’ve done that for so many years. I can turn off the passion of my life and I’m just gonna relax. Well, I can tell he’s an entrepreneur, that does not happen. That absolutely does not happen. You still have that energy and that excitement that’s gotta go somewhere. And that’s where when it doesn’t and people don’t know, they get super depressed. I mean, and and that’s where people can really, you know, it it almost caused themselves to get sick and die because there’s like, ⁓ there’s there’s nothing left for me. I’ve had the good life and I’ve done all the I’ve traveled the world in the last two years, and now I’m just gonna sit on my rocking chair until I die. A and that’s ⁓ and that’s scary. So I think That’s probably the biggest thing is just really helping the owner, whether you know whoever the trusted advisor is, or if you’re a business owner listening to this, is is really spend the time of thinking like what what do you want to be remembered for? You know, we we have that’s part of the exercises that we have in our workbook is is almost like writing your eulogy. When it’s all said and done, what what does Bob want people to say about Bob? You know, that was he the best business owner, but his kids didn’t like him, didn’t know him. ⁓ did he die too soon because he was, you know, way out of shape because all he did was focus on the business? Did he ⁓ you know, did he give back to the community? Did was he a great grandpa? You know, do you was he a great dad? You know, what again, there’s zero right or wrong. It’s just what’s what do you want people to say about you? Because everybody gets caught up in the money, money, money wheel. And I gotta be bigger, I gotta be more, I gotta be, you more, more, better, better, better. At the end of the day, why are you doing it? And I think that’s why d to peel back that you know, why am I doing this? What does success look like? What do I want to do next? And I think that’s why Bob, you know, asking these questions about People preparing psychologically and what are they gonna do next? And and getting some of these mistakes out on the table, I think, is absolutely amazing because I I do up almost a podcast a week, but so much of it is around how to build value, how you know how how to maximize the value and all those different things, which is super important. But it’s so much about what are you gonna do next that people don’t talk about. And it’s almost like, you know, you have someone ⁓ you have someone die that’s close to you, you know, during that time, you know, from dying to to to funeral. You got so many people going and the world’s going, it’s like, yeah, you’re you’re you’re caught up in the next week or two, people are calling you and saying they’re sorry and dropping off food. But a month from now, when nobody’s calling you anymore, they’re back to their normal life and the food’s not getting dropped off anymore, and you still lost your spouse or your brother, dad, what mother, whatever it is, that’s when you need to have that pre that purpose and and passion and and you know, the emotion that I have because I’ve I I obviously I’ve I’ve not sold my company yet, but the emotion that I’ve had That I think I it’s almost like the opposite, but is is is when I we had our first kid. And you know, you you prepare and you plan, you read books and everything else, you get the baby room all set up, and you have the baby and you’re you’re in there and you’re holding it, and then the nurse takes it back and you’re this and you’re that and you sleep and the nurse takes it. And then they say, Okay, it’s time to get the heck out of the hospital. And you take that baby for the first time and you put it in your your little thing and you put it in the back of the car and you’re driving home going, What in the hell do we do now? Yeah, we can’t just run and go here. We can’t go there. It’s like, what did we do? And I think it’s that opposite feeling of of maybe it’s maybe it’s the empty nester. And again, I’m not an empty nester yet, but it’s like that kid for the last time shut the door and they’re going off to college or they’re or they’re going to a different and it’s like, now what are we gonna do? And it’s such a life-changing thing because it was their identity, it was their their life, it was their business, it’s it’s their it’s their legacy, it’s their life’s work. And when that’s gone, it’s it’s not an easy transition, like, ⁓ yeah, I’m just gonna go play basketball at the you know at the Y. You know, it it really takes some time to really think about what you’re gonna do ⁓ next. And that’s why I applaud you for putting this podcast together. Because if if anybody can listen to this, this is the stuff that’s gonna help a business owner truly through the wholesale, versus just getting a number, but then you know, life not being fun for them after the ⁓ after the fact. The thought that comes to mind is like I mean, they’re so good at running the business and they have disciplines and they bring in specialists and so on. It’s almost like you need to have a pre retirement game plan or discipline. You know, like the client that says, I’m gonna go to Florida and play golf. They go, Well, you’ve been to Florida? No. Do you play golf? No. Or I recently talked to a guy, he said, Yeah, I wanna fly. And I said, You ever flown a plane before? No. You’ve taken a lesson to see if you like it flying with you. You know, and so a lot of that stuff I think it has to do with somewhere along the line, pre frame what you’re gonna do post exit and try to go do some of those things. I mean, if you you really think you’re gonna fish that much, y y you know, and I think there’s a gap there on what people are, you know, planning around. ⁓ do you see folks that you know, if you you’ve got the circumstance, you know, the owner’s ready to go and this and that and the other and you you know, they Done it for decades. What would be the role of the one person that would advise that particular retire or previous business owner? What would they do? Yeah, no, I think it’s a great question. And didn’t even know this existed. So I went to a I think it was an EPI summit and and saw them there and talked with them. Is it it it you know, people have when you run your business, ⁓ you have your operating system that you run your business on, you know, your business operating system, it’s really creating your life operating system. And it’s almost like a life coach or retirement coach of and they and they do a lot of what’s in my workbook, but they dive deeper is you know, what brings you joy, what brings you happy, what brings you passion and and really helping you peel back the onion of, you know, who are you without the business? And ideally you’re doing that before you sell the company. That’s our that’s our goal like at Cornerstone as part of our process. But most do not. You know, most of us makes all I care about is getting Bob the most money or whatever, you know, whatever’s important to him and I get a fee and We’re gone and you’re on your own. But we we try to step back earlier of making sure the lifestyle numbers make sense, making sure they understand what they’re gonna do next. And that’s really the difference between what we call a transaction of, yeah, I sold my company for something, probably left money on the table, yeah, have a woulda, shoulda, coulda, regret, and a in a in a a ⁓ legacy level deal where I got to you know, I I prepared for the sale. It was a proactive process. I knew I got multiple offers, I had a whole deal team around me, I limited my risk. I put the risk back on, the buyer not on me. I got I got to choose who my successor was, culture fit, whatever else it might be, and I know what I’m gonna do next. So that legacy level deal of excited going to that next best chapter versus reacting to everything. I’m reacting that it’s not fun anymore. I’m reacting to selling, I’m reacting to buyers. And it’s just two completely, completely different routes. And one’s gut wrenching with sleepless nights, and the other one’s I’m just initiating on this plan that I put together with it with some really good people around me that are that are looking out for my best interest. And it’s ⁓ it’s unfortunate that the majority at least start going down the path of reactive. Well I I’ll do this myself, I’ll call my competitor, I’ll I’ll give it to my kids. And many times that is not, you know, those two options might be the two worst options, you know, i in out of all the ten plus options that they’re out there and, you know, tens of tens when you multiply how you could kind of whi weave some of them together. But yeah, I would say it’s that life planner. You know, what the financial the financial planner is super important. ‘Cause you need to know what you c what kind of lifestyle you can live. Because once you sell the golden goose, once that bell is rung, you can’t unring the bell. So you gotta have your financial planner, your tax people truly understand what you what kind of lifestyle you can live. And then it’s really helping someone that can help you figure out what is that purpose gonna be in your second, you know, your next chapter of your life. Yeah, we we’ve we’ve covered a lot of the waterfront. You know, and you go w we could talk a while, I think. Yeah. ⁓ There’s probably a topic or a question that I didn’t touch on and didn’t ask you that I should have. That’s of concern or if you wanted to take in, pass on a piece of wisdom we haven’t covered yet. Is there anything on your mind that we should cover or talk about? We covered quite a bit. I I I guess maybe just driving home the point for for all the trusted advisors or the business owners watching this is if you are a business owner, if your client is a business owner and they get an unsolicited offer, do not sign the unsolicited offer. Because again, that buyer’s job is to get your company for as little as possible and put as much risk on your you the seller as as humanly possible. It is not to pay you fair market or above fair market or anything else that’s you know, because you’re a nice guy or a nice lady. So I I think, you know, if you get an unsolicited offer, if you start talking to a buyer then they have interest to reach out to someone like Cornerstone that can help understand, you know, what is the art what is the real market analysis. telling you what is that real value of your company. And I can tell you all I can tell from our experience is in six years, ⁓ the unsolicited offer has never been more than what the what the what we think the our the real market value is. And then typically when we bring multiple buyers together with Pomo, we’re getting even more than that. Our average is about 20% premium over the benchmark where other companies sell for because of bringing all those buyers together. So I just think it’s it and it happens every day. You know, like in our study Fifty-five percent of people in that study, and again, these are business owners from five to a hundred million in revenue, but you know, been a business for decades typically. Fifty-five percent said if they got an unsill suffer that they assumed was reasonable. Now, again, over sixty percent of those people have never, ever had any kind of evaluation done or RMA ever, so they have no idea what the heck their company’s worth. But they assumed, which we all know what that stands for, that their value was that value was reasonable. They would sell and not talk to anybody like us, not talk to anybody doing valuations, not talk to anybody. They just want to the deal done. And that’s scary because that’s again, this is your life’s work. And in the one deal I presented, it was a 20, you a double, 100% increase from the high the biggest company or over 20% or over 20 million dollars. Think of what you could do, the impact that you could have with $20 million to your family, friends, your church, your community. Any causes that you want to be a part of. And that’s it, it’s just insane. And that’s what we want to do. And and again, it’s not all about money, but to be able to go out on your terms, the only way you’re ever going to do that is if get multiple offers. You know, you tell the right story to a group of buyers that are the right buyers, you put no ASCII price, and you run a process to get all the offers at one time. And if if you don’t do that, you’re going to have regret. You’re going to have money on the table. The worst story I’ve ever heard, and now this was through a financial advisor. It was not, I was not first hand on this, but The most egregious story I’ve ever heard is a gentleman sold his ⁓ he had a digital marketing company and he was doing some really cool stuff and this big P firm came in and said, Hey, we’ll give you ten million dollars for your company. Went to his financial advisor and said, Hey, what do you think? And he’s like, I don’t know, go talk to an MA firm. He’s like, I don’t want to spend money with an MA firm. You know, just what do you think? It’s like, Well, it’s ten million dollars. You have about a hundred thousand dollars worth of assets and they’re giving you ten million dollars because it’s all goodwill. He goes, You know what? I think I think this I think I’m gonna get a good deal. I’m gonna I’m gonna do the deal. So he does the deal. He thinks he won. A year and one day later, and the only reason they waited a year and one day later was to get capital gains treatment on the sale, they sold the company for $150 million. Now I can tell you that in a year in 366 days, they did not create $140 million of value. That I can guarantee you. They stole that thing and knew they could plug it into something on a nationwide or international basis and just blew the thing up huge. And again, I I haven’t seen it that bad before, but I I multiple times have seen it double we we get double the value over a hundred percent more than what they offered. We just talked to a chemical company and we thought the you know they got offers at thirty-two million, I think was the one offer, and ⁓ our RMA came in at fifty-four million. And when they said they’re thinking about working with Cornerstone, guess what the buyer’s first words were? What’s it gonna take for you not to sign with Cornerstone? Exactly verbatim what the last one said. And Yeah, again, after they said this is their highest best offer. So I think they bumped it up several millions of dollars just with the threat of going to market. And after they said that was the highest and best deal they could do. So it’s the buyers play games, yeah, and some are ethical, some are unethical, just like everybody. There’s good and bad characters and actors in every space. But you get one chance to sell your company. One chance. And you want to make sure that you do it right. And that’s what we’re here for. And we might we’re definitely not the fit for everybody. And if we’re not the fit for you, we’ll help you find somebody that is. That’s that’s the the the the promise we give everybody is with our that’s why I built out the alliance so I could have another two hundred MA advisors to reach out to and and refer deals to. So you have the absolute best chance of success because after twenty-five years there’s no fee that’s worth a reputation. And that’s what we’re but but I wanna be able to leave the world better place and and my the t the thumbprint that I’m putting on is on this MA space of helping all these great business owners be able to not only sell their company but sell it on their terms and and go out ⁓ With with zero regrets. So that’s that’s why I’m I’m glad I’m on your podcast today, Bob. I ⁓ and ⁓ just want to continue to spread that message because people don’t know what they don’t know and they should because you get one chance to do something. What do you what are you good at anything, let alone you know that you never have done before, let alone something that’s your largest asset. Most people think of it like giving up a kid for adoption. ⁓ you don’t know what the thing’s worth, you’ve never been through it before, and you don’t know where to start or or or who to ⁓ talk to. So again, you can see why. People don’t do well on the end and and that’s where we’re here to kind of change those numbers up little bit. You know, and I I think about the effort that you put into writing your book. Anybody that’s attempted to do so can appreciate the journey. You know, and and so for the owner out there that’s going like, I don’t know if I should do this or not, you know, if they read your book, what do you think the key takeaway is going to be or the benefit to them of taking the time to read your book? Even if they’re on defense. What do you think? I would say the reading the book, but the key is to get the workbook as well. So on Amazon you can go to Fit a Strong, selling Business on Your Charms book and then type in the same thing and put workbook after it. Buy them the you can’t bundle them together for no reason. We’re actually doing a two point ⁓ version this year. That’s gonna put them both together with some other things. ⁓ that’ll come out next year sometime. But I would say is this is for someone who wants to sell, you know, tomorrow and try to figure out this is somebody that wants to sell ten years or more from now.

speaker-1: thing.

speaker-0: Because the book talks about it’s not just about how to build value. There’s plenty of books out there on how to build value and all the different things you can do to build value. And yes, we have some of that in there, but it’s all about when am I gonna sell my business? W you know, the importance of timing and when am I gonna sell? What’s important to me in a deal? What am I gonna do afterwards? What are all my options? We talk about nine or so different options of the pros and cons of all those options. So the majority of people might not even sell to a third party. That’s fine. As long as it works for you, I don’t care. I just want people to be educated. So it it really is a holistic approach. You’ll be educated on what are this what’s the process look like, what are the pros and cons of all the options. When does it make sense for you to get out? What’s important to you in a sale? Because there’s an assessment to take for that. ⁓ the the great things you can get or the terrible things that can happen if you s if you give it to your son or daughter, you transfer to your kids. ⁓ there’s some several different exercises on that. ⁓ because when you mix money and family it can get ⁓ pretty spicy pretty quick. And some people think that’s the easiest way. And I go, I guarantee you that will not be the easiest way because there’s there’s six people in your family. There’ll be six definitions of what fare looks like in your family. I can assure you that. Seen it too many times. But yeah, I think it’s just really the understanding their options, kind of when they’re when they’re gonna get out, what they’re gonna do afterwards. It it’s that holistic approach that most people just don’t know until it’s too late. So that’s what I hope they get out, but it’s It’s it’s the workbook that where the magic happened because now you’re you’re answering reflective questions, you’re taking assessments, you’re doing different things. It’s fifty pages worth of all kinds of cool stuff. And not every exercise will make sense to you, the owner, but there’ll be a lot of them in there that will. And ⁓ and again, we’re here as a resource. So if after the book and workbook or if you have any questions about what’s the market like now or what’s going on in my industry, you know, wear a phone call or email away. And everything’s confidential. We you know, we do this for a long time, we understand confidentiality. And that we’re just here to be a resource for you or if if you’re the trusted advisor for your for your client. You know, for the the business owner that’s intrigued and would like to reach out to your organization, ⁓ how do they find you? Yeah, our phone number, our corporate number is nine two zero four three six nine eight nine zero nine two zero four three six ninety eight ninety. Or our website is ⁓ you know www.cornerstone. And then a hyphen or dash business.com. So cornerstone dash business.com. Check us out there. They’ll talk about who we are, what our values are, what we do, what we don’t do, the size of companies we typically work with. And we have a whole resources page that has a white paper on this national study that we’ve talked about several times. You can download the white paper. There’s white papers on the unsociable offer versus multiple offers with multiple case studies. ⁓ there’s white paper on the RMA. There’s all kinds of different articles there for education purposes. ⁓ I write about two to three articles every single month just to help put out in the into the marketplace. So there should be a lot of information there that you can find. And whenever the right time is, we’re happy to have a phone call. And doesn’t mean just because we have a talk that we’re gonna you’re gonna do anything, there’s no obligation. It’s just a matter to help our goal is help educate every business owner the best we can. So whenever they make the decisions, they’re making well informed decisions. Well Scott, this has been a a joy. I appreciate you sharing your time and expertise with us. And ⁓ I just think the message is not out. enough and I hope this is a good step in that direction. So thanks very much. Thank you. Have a great day. We’ll do it. And for everybody else out there, this is the Exit Series. If you know of a founder who’s sold or is about to, or a broker who’s seen it, or an attorney who’s been across the table, make sure and send them this episode to ⁓ and subscribe wherever you listen. We’ll see you next time.