[Speaker 2] (0:00 – 1:10)
Hello founder, you’ve built a successful business and now it’s time to think about that once-in-a-lifetime exit from your business. You’ve come to the right place. Here you will hear business exit professionals involved in the buying and selling of companies talk about what you should know before you exit.
If you’ve never sold a business before, this podcast can be super helpful to you. I’m Armando, host of the Founder’s Guidepost. Enjoy.
If you like this information, please subscribe and share. Let’s have a conversation about how you use your expertise and experience to help that business owner get to that next level. And maybe that’s right before an exit.
Maybe it’s building up towards an exit of the business, but let’s have a conversation about that. How does that sound?
[Speaker 1] (1:11 – 1:12)
Yeah, that sounds great, Armando. I appreciate it.
[Speaker 2] (1:13 – 1:57)
Perfect. So Michael, when you’re talking with companies and let’s say they’ve not worked with a coach or a guide like you before, what I really like about you is your experience that you had a part of, you grew the revenues, financial crisis hit the world and that didn’t help your business at all. And then you had to rebuild everything.
And so that experience I think is just so incredible for a business owner to help them because you’ve been there and done that. You’ve been through those emotional highs and lows. When you talk with a business owner for first time or a management team that is thinking of bringing you on board, what things normally come up in those conversations that you’d like to share?
[Speaker 1] (1:58 – 8:18)
I think one of the things is, it’s interesting because the world has become kind of overrun, I think, with business coaches lately. You look at them on LinkedIn, they’re everywhere. And we’ve entered this era of business operating systems and lots of entrepreneurs are becoming more and more aware of various systems that are out there.
But they also sometimes struggle to figure out which one’s the right one for them. And so what I try to do is just take a big step back in these conversations and focus really more on what’s the outcome that the entrepreneur or the entrepreneurial leaders, the executive team, what is it that they’re really looking for? And we’ve really kind of built our brand around this idea and it really stems from my own kind of just cause and purpose and convictions after my entrepreneurial career that we are focused on helping entrepreneurial leaders earn what we call a meaningful return on life.
Lots of entrepreneurs are able to achieve a return on their investment. But one of the things I have found over my career is I’ve spent time as a member of YPO, I’ve been in Vistage, I’ve been a member of EO for a number of years. And the majority of successful entrepreneurs I find are achieving that return on the investment at the expense of their physical health, their emotional health, their family life, the relationships with their spouse or their children.
And I just don’t think it has to be that way. And so what we’ve really discovered over a number of years is that if regardless of the systems or the tools or the approaches that someone uses, if they’ll focus on five specific obsessions to help really build an elite organization, everything can stem from that. And so they don’t have to worry about what system is the right system or things like that.
And really where a lot of this comes from, you mentioned kind of my journey and my background. I started out my career out of college taking over a family manufacturing business. We were in the hardwood veneer manufacturing business, we had a manufacturing facility in Virginia.
And I ended up taking that over in my mid 20s. My father was quite a bit older than me. And as I got out of college, he was kind of winding down.
And I was able to scale that business from 8 to 45 million from mid 90s until late 2000s. And as we were entering the financial collapse that happened with the housing market in 2008-2009, as part of that scaling, I had vertically integrated the business and I brought on a partner who specialized in timber trading and exporting lower grade timber. And so with that partnership, we had offices in six different continents.
We were shipping about 200 containers a month export. So we were a very significant export business. And he and I had become best friends.
I was a son’s godfather, we vacationed with our spouses often as partnerships, you get close and we become very, very dear friends. And I found out in late 2008, as revenues were contracting, and the housing market was kind of coming unwound, that not only had he embezzled half a million dollars in the prior 18 months, but he was committing bank fraud. He was signing borrowing-based certificates on the entity within our partnership that he ran.
And he was falsifying those borrowing-based calculations to fuel his embezzlement and maintain a certain balance in the line of credit. So when we found that out, we brought in a white collar crimes investigator, a retired FBI forensic accountant. And he spent about two days piecing everything together and validating what we thought we had uncovered.
So on the same day, we went to the US Attorney’s Office and to the and disclosed everything we had found. Unfortunately, both of the entities were banking with the same lending institution. So they immediately froze all of our credit.
I spent four years working with the US Attorney’s Office to finally see him prosecuted. He served two years in federal prison. I ended up losing both of the businesses.
I was able to do it outside of bankruptcy, fortunately. For those of you that remember 2008-2009, lots of companies in trouble were kind of throwing the keys at the bank and letting them know how to reach their attorney. My father had passed.
I had bought my mother out. We had finished that transfer, but she was hung on the guarantee. We had about two years earlier made a $6 million investment in capital expenditures, heavily financed through bank debt.
So she was stuck on the guarantee and I needed to figure out a way to protect her assets through that process. So I went to the special assets group or the workout group with the bank and was able to negotiate an 18-24 month window to go through more of an orderly liquidation than them just taking and auctioning everything. And in doing so, it was a very educational and difficult 18 months, but I was able to get the creditors made whole, got the bank made whole, and my wife and I were the ones who took the haircut.
But it allowed us to keep our credit intact and relocate, start over in the same industry and start building a new business, which is where I really started to learn and understand more about the power of business operating systems and putting structures and systems and people and things in place to prevent the kind of things from happening again that had kind of happened on my watch the first time around. And that’s really what led and became the impetus for what I do now is that second business that I built kind of out of the ashes of what happened and all of the things I learned and did differently to create a better business that didn’t really depend on me.
And for the last few years before I fully exited the business, I was able to exit the day-to-day operations of the business and leave a leadership team in place that was able to basically run the business for me.
[Speaker 2] (8:18 – 9:08)
Okay. Okay. Well, having gone through that, you’ve been through more emotional highs and lows than most when you have a close friend like that business partner, there’s a deep sense of betrayal that you went through, which is very hard to get over all by itself and going through all that.
But again, you came out of the ashes and given that you have that experience, I imagine that your clients get tremendous benefit from that because most guides, most people like you who are in that coaching space probably don’t have that kind of experience to draw on. And the people who benefit are your clients. So when you’re working with a company and they’ve not worked, Michael, with someone like you before, and you’re trying to help them, how does that roll out?
What does that typically look like to them as they’re beginning to work with you? And how does that work?
[Speaker 1] (9:09 – 12:08)
So we typically, we start with, you know, well, most of our business is referral based to begin with a referral or invitation. Because as right now, we have six total guides, myself included at Next Level Growth. So usually we start with a discovery meeting, we call it an audition with the executive teams of who we work with.
And rather than us kind of presenting a system and a set of tools that we’re going to teach them, it’s more conversational and more about an approach. And it goes back to that idea of really understanding what their issues and concerns are. And one of the things that I think is important to note is, so for people in my line of work, typically what happens is it becomes a lifestyle business because our calendars get full, and we stop growing.
But based on my history and background, I’ve always grown businesses. And so I’ve put together a firm, we’re based out of Phoenix, but we’ve got clients in 28 different states now. So we travel all over the country.
All of our guides have been former business owners or C-suite executives in businesses doing at least 10 million in revenue with 50 or more employees. So prior to becoming a guide, they have lived in that world, they’ve lived in the trenches, they’ve had the experiences. And what I find is that, and I mentioned earlier, kind of this explosion of people that are business coaches, and we’re very intentional to not refer to ourselves as coaches because typically a business coach, they’re attached to or connected to a system.
And most systems take a one-size-fits-all approach, which makes it more about the system than the user. And so what we do is we try to leverage our histories and our backgrounds and our experiences to be more like a Sherpa or a guide. So if you think about, right, if a team of people is going to go summit Mount Everest, they’re probably not going to read a book and set out on the journey.
Or if you’re going to select someone to help you up the mountain, you’re probably going to want a Sherpa who’s been up and down the mountain hundreds of times, knows where all the dangers are, and can help you kind of figure it out regardless of the conditions. And that’s really how we kind of look at ourselves. We like to think of growing a business as climbing a mountain.
And whatever’s at the summit, it might be for an entrepreneur, it might be a liquidity event, it might be a generational transition. It could be an evergreen business. But what we really want to understand is for the founders, for the owners, what is it that’s at the top of the mountain?
And then based on our experiences, we kind of rope in with them, we lock arms with them to help them figure out the best path there, with the least amount of danger and or trauma along the way.
[Speaker 2] (12:08 – 12:21)
Okay, so it sounds like it could have a variety of ways in how that rolls out. But like I said, starting with what are their, you know, what are their issues? What are their concerns?
And then that is going to help tell you where you want to focus your effort for them.
[Speaker 1] (12:22 – 22:35)
Right. And so really, one of the first things we do is we like to ask not just the point of contact or the owner, we like to ask the entire executive team to take our, we call it a business health checkup. But it’s on our website.
And it’s a series of questions that work through these five obsessions. And so I mentioned the five obsessions earlier, what we find is, in order to truly build an elite organization, the executives have to be laser focused and obsessed around number one, filling the organization with great people. And I think, you know, there’s lots of, and Jim Collins wrote about this in 2001 in Good to Great, where the right people, right seats and the bus analogy kind of comes from.
I feel like there’s a third leg to that stool, though. Most entrepreneurs understand right people, they share your core values, their behaviors align with your culture and core values, right seats, they have the skill sets and the experience to perform at a high level in the role for which they’re in. But I think kind of the third leg of that stool that’s never talked about is I think they also truly great people also have an emotional connection to your purpose as a company.
And I think, you know, I could go to work for a company and share their core values and have all the skills in the world to perform at a high level. If I don’t emotionally connect to their purpose and what they’re doing in the world, I’m never going to show up with the same energy and the same passion and drive and commitment that I will if they take it upon themselves to communicate to me an inspiring purpose that I can get excited about as an employee. And that leads to our second obsession, which is just that it’s an inspiring purpose.
We’re all storytellers, right? For thousands and thousands of years, we’ve shared information through stories. And so I think as an organization, you’ve got to obsess about understanding your purpose and understanding how to articulate that in a way that’s not just an inspiring marketing message for external consumption, but internally, how do you help people in the organization, regardless of the level at which they’re working, really understand how their role matters and how their role is part of something bigger. And I think when we can break that down and understand it and give that to our employees and be genuinely and authentically excited about it, it’s very powerful. It creates stickiness.
It creates cohesion within the organization. It creates alignment. So I think that inspiring purpose is kind of a second obsession is very important.
As we move to the third and the questions in the assessment on the very front end really allow us to get a feel for how the teams are actually performing before we start working in each of these. And this is what helps us kind of custom tailor how we want to approach the engagement and start working with them so we can maximize the value right out of the gate. But the third obsession is what I call optimized playbooks.
And so this is kind of the idea of process playbooks, checklists, workflows, and number one, making sure that we have these things documented so that when we onboard a new employee, they have a process playbook that they can pick up and look at and understand in various situations where predictable things in the business happen. This is the flow of steps that has to happen to get the right results. Think of a sports team.
You could take probably a college football team with playbooks who practices the plays and is constantly working on perfecting the plays, put them up against an NFL all-star team with no playbooks, and the college team probably beats them every time simply because they have the playbooks, right? Even though they don’t quite have the same skill levels. And so it’s the same thing in our organizations.
I think we’ve got to have optimized playbooks and training and recurring training and practice schedules to really systemize how we run the business. And a side point to that, when you think about founders or owners who are in the mode of now we’ve gotten into that window where it’s time to start preparing the business for a sale. One of the questions when it comes to playbooks, I love to ask prospects and I even challenge clients with it sometimes if I feel like they’re not really pushing as hard as they should on playbooks.
If you were to take your business to market today and you found a buyer who wanted to see your current state playbooks and they were going to value the business based on the quality of your playbooks, would you be able to negotiate a higher multiple because they’re so good or would they be able to devalue the business because they’re so bad, right? And usually people are like, yeah, okay, we’re not ready to sell. Because the problem, right, is if I have or if any of us have really good playbooks for our business, that’s what the buyer is buying.
But if you don’t have that, the buyer is buying the leadership team, right? And that’s worth less. So if I’m going to buy a business and I have to buy the owner and I have to buy the leadership team members, it’s not worth as much as if I’m buying something that’s essentially franchised in the way they’ve constructed the inner workings of the business.
So that’s part of the value in optimized playbooks. The fourth obsession is around a culture of performance. And that’s really about having the right data sets, making sure we’re looking at the right numbers and that we’re looking at data that allows us to take action and that we’re constantly focusing on improving performance.
If you think about right now the NBA playoffs recently started. If you watch a basketball game, whenever there’s a timeout called, one of the coaches goes to the statistician at the scorer’s table, grabs the stat sheet, brings it back into the huddle. And they’re literally looking at live data.
What are the statistics telling us? What do we need to make live changes, game time changes based on what’s happening statistically? And it’s kind of the same thing in our business.
We need to have live data. We need to be looking at our data and making decisions on how we modify what we’re doing to get the optimal outcomes on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. And so that obsession around a culture of performance.
And then the fifth and final one, which I think lots of people and organizations and even systems look at as a byproduct of everything else, which in theory probably makes sense, but I think in practice it doesn’t. And that’s an obsession around growing profits and net cashflow. Lots of people think, well, if we do everything else, the profits will come, the cashflow will be there.
And that’s not always the case. And so one of the things we really challenge and work with our clients to do is understand how to break down and analyze and improve cash conversion cycles. Don’t just spend time on the cost side of your P&L, spend time on pricing strategy.
And I had, it was interesting, there’s a large restaurant chain that I worked with as a client and they primarily sell kind of gourmet hamburgers, nice hamburgers, and average price is around $12. That industry is very, very price sensitive and they’re terrified of price increases and losing business. And I asked them if they raised their prices so that on average, it came out to a 1% price increase, what would that be per burger?
It’s 12 cents. Most people would not stop going there if a burger was 12 cents more. So then we took it to how many burgers a year do you average, do you sell on average across in this case, like 40 some locations, right?
It was an astronomical number. If they just raised their prices and were more strategic on certain items, but netted out a 1% price increase, it was worth millions of dollars to the bottom line. And they all immediately agreed it would not, they would not lose a customer over such a small, right?
But what happens is we tend to be so fear-driven around ever bringing up price that all we do is focus on the cost side. But when you think about your gross margins and you’re really your business exists to invest operating expenses to create gross profit dollars, you’ve got to be thinking about price strategy differently. And so there are a number of different things that affect net cashflow, that affect profits and margin.
And all of our clients we work with to understand, Jim Collins wrote about this in good to great, their profit per X, kind of that one most critical ratio of profit per something that drives their economic engine. So there are lots of things that based on our experiences, we just try to go much deeper with clients to really get them thinking that way. And when all of those obsessions are starting to bear fruit and you really do have great people through the organization, you could show potentially a buyer, the repository of all of our quarterly reviews, all of our quarterly conversations and how we’re assessing employees for culture and performance fits, clarity of expectations.
We’ve got a great story to tell. We can show them our playbooks and how strong they are and all of our data and how we’re performing against that data. And we can show great results in terms of profits and net cashflow and momentum and how those are growing.
That becomes something that’s very desirable in the marketplace. And so now, right? And so if I have that in my business, now I get to, I have all the leverage and what I’m going to sell for.
Any of these things that I don’t have really, really strong allows the buyer to have the leverage. And if I’m selling not to a strategic who’s taken a long-term view, but if I’m selling into the PE world, these are professional buyers, right? And most people that have been through quality of earnings know like that’s a place where most entrepreneurs get beat up.
And it’s usually because you don’t have all of these things really, really locked down in your organization that creates the openings for these professional buyers to come in and find places where they can negotiate value.
[Speaker 2] (22:35 – 22:59)
Yeah. So it sounds like as you described that, what came to mind for me is I’ve spoken with investment bankers on that. They’ve talked about the due diligence.
They’ve talked about having systems and processes documented so that they can show that to their prospective buyers. You’re building that internal infrastructure as you do your work with your clients. Exactly.
So that it’s already, it’s part of what you are doing.
[Speaker 1] (22:59 – 23:05)
Right. And it’s highly valuable in an exit. Thinking of exiting your business?
[Speaker 2] (23:06 – 23:23)
This may be your once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to preserve your American success story. I invite you to come to the Scottsdale Founders For a biannual live event for the founder considering exiting in the next five years. More information, it’s ScottsdaleFoundersForum.com.
[Speaker 1] (23:23 – 24:30)
But it’s not just for the purposes of an exit. Because if you think about it, the reason that a business that’s that buttoned up is more valuable to a buyer is because it’s a more fluid, issue-free, better performing business and an easier business for somebody from the outside to come in and understand and operate, which makes it significantly more valuable for the owner during the period of time that they’re owning it. Even if there’s not an intent to sell.
I mean, like I said, I’ve got, we have at Next Level Growth, we have a few clients whose companies are evergreen companies and there is no plan at any point in time to sell it. I’ve got a couple that have done ESOPs that the owners have exited that way. And we’ve had some people that have had some fantastic exits because that’s what they wanted.
But at the end of the day, it’s really about building an elite organization and whether that’s for you to keep and enjoy the fruits of that, or it’s to create something of significant value that you can have a generational wealth-building event that comes from a transaction.
[Speaker 2] (24:31 – 25:26)
It sounds like Michael, I really like what you just said that whatever that goal is, and it goes back to what you said in the beginning that you want to what are the issues and concerns for that owner of the company? What is he or she or they really trying to get to and how do you get there? And it sounds like with the work that you’re doing, you’re helping them to have the most options available to them.
Once they have that well-oiled machine where it’s documented, they know what they’re doing, they’ve got people trained, the right people in the right seats based on those types of obsessions, then they don’t have to sell if they don’t want to. They get a much better working business to hand off to the second generation if that’s the goal, or they can hire a professional CEO to run it for them and they become absentee owners, but it gives them the most options as they look down the road and decide what they want to do with the rest of their lives.
[Speaker 3] (25:26 – 25:28)
Right. Exactly. Exactly.
[Speaker 2] (25:31 – 25:49)
So you said not looking at yourself as a coach, so then you said more of a Sherpa, a guide. Right. And I think that that analogy is helpful as we’ve heard of Sherpas and we know them as going up and down Mount Everest back and forth, that’s just what they do.
[Speaker 4] (25:49 – 25:50)
Right.
[Speaker 2] (25:50 – 26:16)
So I can see how you want to use that analogy to help people understand that you are in fact their guide. And I like that you said also that you’re looking at not just getting the team together, getting the culture, but looking at the revenue model, looking at the pricing, looking at the cost structure and that. As you’re going through that work, Michael, that you do with the new client that comes on board with you, what are some of the surprises that you hear from them?
[Speaker 1] (26:17 – 30:45)
You know, it’s interesting. The more we’ve done this, the fewer surprises there are because what I’m realizing is most organizations that have not been through some really intentional focus on systemizing their businesses, there are only probably four or five issues that they really have. It tends to be the same things over and over again.
And I think one of the biggest and the reason for us great people is the first obsession is most of the problems in organizations aren’t how problems, they’re who problems. We don’t have the right people to really address the challenges we have. And so what I tend to find, and I tell every owner that we work with, if you work with us, this will lead to some turnover.
So far, I’ve never had anybody on the other side of the journey look back and say the turnover was wrong. It always smokes out and creates the right turnover. But almost always the biggest, I guess, surprise for them more than for us as guides is when we start building out what we call the next level accountability chart, which is like an org chart, but for every seat, we base it on functions, not titles.
And if you think about the workflow through an organization, kind of what are those major functions where we have to have single point accountability at an executive level? And then we start to clarify what’s the mission of every one of these seats. And it’s kind of a one sentence, very simple statement, but what’s the consistent deliverable someone has to have in that seat in order to succeed?
And then we work on what we call our most critical outcome. And the most critical outcome is the concept of for any, and this goes for every employee, but we start with the executive teams. The biggest expense most, or the biggest investment most companies are making is in their human capital.
And so if you take the fully burdened human capital cost of every seat you have in the organization. So again, we’re starting with the leadership team or an executive team. I’m asking them to think about if you were a director and not an employee in the company, and you had to go hire someone for this seat, how would you prove you were getting a return on investment for the human capital you’re investing in that person?
And what’s their most critical outcome? And so it tends to be at an executive level, it’s more financial based. It’s more numbers based.
As you get deeper in the organization, it’s more of an output based, but we actually create a most critical outcome in a number that’s measured, whether it’s monthly or quarterly, that by achieving or exceeding that number, we know that the company is getting a fair or an acceptable return on investment for what they’re spending to have someone in the seat. And that’s game changing because it creates a single metric for every seat in the company that you can look at to know yes or no, the person in this seat, good, bad, or indifferent, is performing and driving financial results based on what their specific skill set is or their specific role is. And then we focus on a handful of obsessions, kind of the daily obsessions that someone in that seat has to be focused on in order to be successful.
So we start in day one, kind of building that out at the executive team level. And when you start to create that kind of clarity around what people are accountable for and who they’re accountable to, that’s the biggest surprise a lot of times people will see because I’ll see leadership team members or owners sometimes kind of come to this aha moment of realization that for two years, we’ve been grinding on this person trying to get them to perform. And actually, now that we know this is the expectation of that seat, we just don’t have the right person in there.
We’ve been grinding on somebody who unfair to them, they’re just not going to be able to get there. So that’s not fair to them, it’s not fair to the organization. The person in that seat feels the burden of it.
And so when we start to see that, then we can start to think strategically, okay, if they’re a great cultural fit, is there a better place for them in the organization where they can be successful? Or do we need to free them up to go somewhere else where they could be more successful and backfill that seat with the right kind of person for what we need as an outcome?
[Speaker 2] (30:47 – 31:18)
Well, that makes sense. I had a conversation years ago with an HR executive. And he talked, I asked how he, you know, how did he let people go?
How was that? And he said, you know, when it came time to get to let somebody go, because they just weren’t the right person for the right job. He said they always felt better leaving my office than when they came in, because they knew it wasn’t the right fit for them.
Right. And they were now relieved of that responsibility to go do something that to find something that was the right fit for them.
[Speaker 1] (31:19 – 32:49)
I mean, that’s that’s fantastic. And it’s it’s rare to find people who are doing it well like that. And that’s a that’s a great testament to that individual really had a fantastic process in place to communicate expectations with with employees.
And I one of the things I love to say to clients is that the root of most frustrations lie in uncommunicated expectations. Right. And so if if an employee doesn’t really know what’s expected of them, that’s frustrating.
It’s frustrating for their boss. It’s frustrating for the employee. It’s difficult to be aligned and working together.
And I think to what you just described, any time someone is terminated and they didn’t see it coming, that’s their boss’s fault. Right. And so people should see it coming.
It’s like in this case, if if somebody’s been if my boss has been coming to me periodically or repeatedly and I understand where I’m coming up short, then I shouldn’t be surprised at all. And if nothing else, what I find is the the better we do managing people to expectations, the less often we have to terminate people because they typically tend to self-select out if they consistently aren’t able to meet those expectations. Nobody really likes the way that feels.
And if we create an environment where we’ve got a culture of performance, you can have a great, fun, loving, wonderful culture that is also a high performing culture. And that just tends to smoke out the people who aren’t who just don’t have it in the tank or who aren’t the right the right fits.
[Speaker 2] (32:50 – 33:08)
And so, Michael, within particular industries, it sounds like what you’re describing really could be within any type of business because it’s all it’s all it’s all people processes, systems and documentation. Does it really apply then to any type of pretty much any type of business?
[Speaker 1] (33:08 – 34:32)
It does. It’s interesting. We one of my clients is a nonprofit.
We work with Goodwill out of Dallas. We’re going to start working with Goodwill of Central Texas, both nonprofits. We work with this works with for profit industries, nonprofit industries.
One of the things that’s interesting with our with our group of guides, my background has been manufacturing. And so while I work with lots of different types of industries, I tend to really gravitate towards manufacturing companies, trades companies, things where we’re even restaurant companies where we’re making something that’s tangible. And that’s just kind of where I’ve spent a lot of my career.
So I enjoy that. But of our so there are six of us currently is guides. If I exclude myself, the other five guides, four of them are former clients who have exited their businesses and so enjoyed what we’ve done together.
They decided to join Next Level Growth and become guides to give back to other entrepreneurs. The one that’s not a former client was a CEO that was referred to me by a close friend and colleague, Cameron Herold. She’s been outstanding as well.
But having that kind of experience has really been important for us to to to have that kind of real world. They’ve used these tools. They understand what we do.
And so they come in and are able to provide great perspective as guides.
[Speaker 2] (34:34 – 34:44)
Okay. Is there when you’re when you’re looking for that ideal company that you can really help? What is that ideal company look like to you?
Or is it a variety?
[Speaker 1] (34:45 – 38:11)
You know, it’s it really is a variety. So when we when we think about our kind of our target market, privately held businesses, they are all privately held. They what’s really important, I think, is to think about the psychological or psychographic component of the target market.
And so what we’re really trying to understand when we’re talking to a prospect is, are they open to outside facilitation and guidance? Some some people just aren’t right there. There are lots of people out there who are very, very smart, who don’t think they need somebody to help them.
And if we if we start to sense that in the conversations, we just try to end the conversation as quickly as we can and not waste their time, not waste our time. They they don’t necessarily need to have a major like frustration or feel stuck. They just need to they need to believe that from where they are to where they want to go is going to be very challenging to figure out on their own and that they they’re open to and understand the value of bringing in outside experience, people with varied experiences to help them get there.
And they’ve got to believe that there’s value in really systemizing how they operate as a business. The reality is most of them come in with some frustrations, but it’s really more that openness, that curiosity. One of our core values is have a thirst for learning.
And we look for so one of the things we do is we we look for not just for employees to align with our core values, but that our clients align with our core values. And so that’s that’s an important thing we look for as well on the front end. But back to your to your comment about the industry fit.
It’s it’s really quite agnostic when it comes to industry, because what we’re really focused on, as you mentioned, is we’re focused on getting people right. And that’s in every industry, every organization. We’re focused on understanding your story.
Right. And so when you talk about an inspiring purpose, you know, if you’re if you’re making some technology product that’s going to change the world, that’s easy. Right.
That’s obvious. What’s what’s challenging is if you’re in a commoditized business, how do you come up with like a just cause or like what’s this? What’s this great thing you’re doing in the world?
And what I’ve found is oftentimes that’s if you take more of an internal focus and what is what is that founder, the entrepreneur really care about that they’re doing, whether it’s for, you know, people within their community, whether it’s for employees and their families. And I’ve through a series of questioning I’ve had one, for example, was a was an HVAC manufacturing or HVAC service company and very commoditized business. And as they started to really understand what their purpose was, it was very much focused on employees and their families and the people that they support to the extent that the owner was getting emotional talking about it.
And it’s like, OK, now now we’ve now we’ve put our finger on the purpose. Right. When it when it starts to feel emotional to the owner.
And I think it’s important to have that. And so playbooks, all of those things, they apply to any industry, any type of organization.
[Speaker 2] (38:11 – 38:28)
So it sounds like they just make sure that I’m understanding that the HVAC person, it sounds like they realize that the employees had families and that their family’s livelihoods were based on the success of that HVAC business. Right. And that’s what really tugged at his heart.
He was taking care of people and families.
[Speaker 1] (38:29 – 39:19)
Right. And so then you start to think about the gravity of the choices you make and your fiduciary stewardship of the business and its resources. And when you start to it’s got to be authentic.
Right. But when you really start to understand and believe in how you do something that changes lives and impacts people and you can get really excited about that, it changes things. Right.
It changes how you approach decisions. And you start to see, I mean, I think as human beings, we are primarily driven towards doing good. Right.
That’s something that feels good and feels rewarding. And so when we can start to understand how we’re doing that, even in what may feel like a high volume, low margin commoditized business, there’s a lot of joy that comes from that.
[Speaker 2] (39:20 – 39:43)
So how do how let’s say like the owner of that of that AC company dimension, the HVAC servicing company, once you identified or helped it come about that what was important to that owner, how do you then communicate that to all the other employees throughout the organization? How do you help him do that or her do that?
[Speaker 1] (39:43 – 41:00)
That’s a great idea. So we there’s a concept from a book that came out, I want to say about a year or two ago that was written by Simon Sinek called The Infinite Game. And in The Infinite Game, what he talks about is that we’ve evolved into this finite mindset where lots of companies focus on quarterly earnings, hitting numbers for the month, for the quarter, for the year, and they’ll make decisions for a short-term benefit that cause long-term harm to the brand or to the business.
And so he’s really talking about the importance of taking kind of an infinite mindset that your business as a business should go on forever, whether you exited or don’t. And that one of the things that businesses need to understand in order to really embrace that infinite mindset is what he calls their just cause. So this is where this conversation usually happens.
And so the just cause as Sinek defines it in the book is a vision of a future state that doesn’t currently exist and perhaps never will, but about which you are so inspired and passionate that you will devote the rest of your career to its advancement.
[Speaker 2] (41:01 – 41:03)
Even if it’s not attainable.
[Speaker 1] (41:03 – 42:47)
Correct. And one of the examples he gives is the U.S. Declaration of Independence, right? And this idea that all people are created equal.
And with that as a belief, think about what the founding fathers were leaving to come here and found this nation. And the thought that humans will one day truly get to that point, that’s an ideal state. And we probably are incapable of ever getting there as human beings.
But over the course of history, what has it led to? It’s led to the abolition of slavery. It’s led to women’s suffrage, the advancement of gay rights, like all of these different things that are steps along the way toward that future state or that ideal state.
And so when we start thinking about that, those statements usually end up reading, they complete the statement, we believe in a world where, or we believe that what, right? And so thinking about that. And so I’ve had companies like this HVAC company where it’s, we believe in a world where business is a force for good.
And what does that mean to them? What does that look like? And so they’ll start to expand on that.
And it becomes very much about the people in their care and their families. And if it’s every family is what, 4.2 people or whatever the statistic is, right? And you start to take, well, we got a hundred employees, well, we got 420 that depend upon us.
And how far does that reach? And so that starts to help them get to an emotional impact in terms of what they’re really doing. And they just happen to be in the HVAC business.
[Speaker 2] (42:49 – 43:01)
Okay. Okay. Well, I can see how that could get people to be a little more, maybe go that extra mile, maybe make that extra phone call or if they’re emotionally sick, maybe not really be sick, but…
[Speaker 1] (43:01 – 46:03)
Right. And you know, the other part of the question, going back to your initial question was how we kind of roll that out. And we encourage all of our clients, again, we use this mountain climbing analogy.
So what we like to do is after each of our quarterly meetings or quarterly strategic sessions with our clients is that they schedule kind of a town hall type meeting. That’s an all hands meeting. We like to call it the state of the climb.
And it’s just, it’s kind of a pause to reflect in front of the entire organization on here were the goals we set out for last quarter based on our journey as an organization. Here’s what got done. Here’s the current state of where we are and here’s the focus for the next quarter.
And so that’s kind of the tactical plan and how they communicate it out. But they also will start that presentation to that town hall by doing kind of a high level review every single quarter of talking through core values and giving some shout outs to people who’ve really gone above and beyond on certain core values, talking about their just cause and their purpose as an organization and what things, what wins have we had over the last quarter? What successes have we had that are small steps in advancing that?
And then we get into kind of the planning and the vision for where we’re going. And I say doing that as a town hall, because I usually view this as a 10 minute, 15 minute presentation from the executive team followed by as much time as needed for Q&A. And so if it’s a large organization, you got people on Zoom or if you have to, some of my clients do a roadshow and they’ll go to different locations to do this.
But letting the team members in the organization, then based on what they’ve heard, ask questions of the executive team or the leadership that’s giving them the presentation and giving them a platform and an opportunity to speak up and get their questions answered in that open forum environment, I think builds tremendous cohesion between team members and leaders. And it also creates significant alignment and it allows the leadership to show some vulnerability, because sometimes they’re going to ask you questions that you’re not sure what the answer is. And you have to take it and figure it out or it just, it allows employees to see the human side of the people that they report to.
Oftentimes when we do that and that consistent discussion around where we’re going, and especially the plans, right? You know, here’s what we set out to do last quarter. Here’s where we, what we got done.
Here’s where we are. Here’s where we’re going. Over time, as employees see their leaders, establish plans, execute plans and see the momentum that that’s building, they began to be much more trusting of decisions that their leadership is making.
And the more that starts to happen, the more alignment you get, the more momentum and performance and velocity you get as an organization.
[Speaker 2] (46:04 – 46:15)
Yeah. So it sounds like they see their leaders doing what they said they were going to do. Right.
And if they fail or don’t hit the mark, that’s human nature. It just doesn’t always happen.
[Speaker 1] (46:16 – 46:52)
Right. And I think if leaders, and that’s really where it starts is these were the projects that as leaders, we took on for the quarter. Here’s what got done.
Here’s what didn’t get done. You know, that’s showing that like, despite our best efforts, sometimes things come up short and the employees have the same issues. But if we’re constantly trying to get better, constantly trying to improve and, and, you know, we’re kind of playing the game against ourselves and our former selves, we’re not playing it against other people.
How do we continue to become more and more elite over time? That can become a very infectious, positive thing within the culture as well.
[Speaker 2] (46:53 – 47:38)
Okay. And Mike, you said, you said a few times, Michael, that your, your part of the goal or the goal is to help build elite organizations. And so when, when you come on board, you’re, you, you need to do your best to understand what are they, you know, what are they really trying to get to the ownership, leadership?
What are they really trying to get to? And then you’re helping them get there. I guess in terms of, I want to say symptoms, maybe that’s not the right word, but things that are happening.
I mean, the reason why they want to talk with you, something is, is, is there that either isn’t right. They want to fix, or they know they can do better. How do they know when they should be calling Michael a wrath?
[Speaker 1] (47:39 – 50:40)
You know, I think it’s, if they start feeling like what we’ve been doing, isn’t getting us what we want or what we know we’re capable of when we start feeling that gap. Right. And so the, that the idea of elite organizations comes from a little snippet of a speech I saw Nick Saban give.
And he talks about what he calls five choices. He says, we all have five choices in life and how we do things. It says, we can choose to be bad at what we do.
And that is actually a choice. We can choose to be average at what we do. We can choose to be good at what we do.
And he says, that’s probably about God’s expectation for whatever talent or gifts he gave us is that we would be good. But he said, you can also choose to be excellent or you can choose to be elite. But if you’re, if you’re going to choose to be excellent or elite, you’ve got to have a special discipline and passion and focus and drive and commitment to do things at a high level all of the time, or you probably never get past good.
And his whole focus is on how do we build elite football team? How do we build an elite college football program that’s consistently winning year over year over year? And so it’s this, this incredible drive around doing things at a high level all of the time.
That is how you build great organizations, how you build something that’s truly excellent or elite. And so I think part of it, as far as, as you know, if, if an organization, if an owner only wants to do enough to be good, there are other systems and other people that are probably just fine for them to work with, but it’s when they have that hunger to, you know, they say, I know we got a $50 million business here. We’re sitting on a gold mine and we can’t figure out how to get past eight.
Like we’re just stuck at this eight and nine or whatever, whatever the numbers are, that’s arbitrary, but kind of that feel like, I know we can get here and I know we can do this. And we just keep banging our heads against and we can’t get there when they’re that hungry for that kind of positive change and growth. Those are the kind of leaders that will come into an environment like we have and just thrive because they’re, they’re mentally, they’re kind of at a state where they’re ready for what we want to offer them.
And we actually, we fire clients. I’ve fired in my career now, I fired four clients for just kind of not doing the work. And, you know, we’ll give them time, but at the end of the day, we all have finite capacity based on our calendars.
And I feel like it’s a disservice for a company that can’t get on our schedule who wants to, if we’re consuming inventory of time with someone who’s doesn’t really want to be excellent or elite and isn’t willing to do the work.
[Speaker 2] (50:41 – 51:05)
Yeah. I guess that gets back to what you said a few moments ago that they, they want, they need to be curious. They need to be open and receptive to listen to you and, and, and be open to try those things you’re, you’re identifying for them to look at.
If they’re not receptive and curious and open, you’re not helping them and it’s just not going the direction it should be.
[Speaker 3] (51:06 – 51:06)
Right. Exactly.
[Speaker 2] (51:07 – 51:29)
Okay. And so Michael, what have we not touched on yet in this conversation that you think a business owner who’s, who’s listening to you and wondering if they might want to reach out to you and have a conversation? What have we not touched on that maybe in those first one, two or three conversations with a new client of yours that comes up that might be helpful to talk about now?
[Speaker 1] (51:30 – 54:45)
You know, the only things that come to mind, Roman, are, in 2017, I, at my wife’s encouragement, I ended up writing a book about my journey through kind of what we described at the very beginning., and going through my whole entrepreneurial rollercoaster, that book’s available on, through our website, but also on Amazon. there’s an audible, that I, I authored or I recorded.
You know, if somebody’s curious to, to dive a little deeper reading that and if that story resonates and if, if, if what’s in the book resonates, then for sure. you know, we’d love to have a conversation, but much faster and easier on our website at nextlevelgrowth.com. We’ve got a tab for our checkup.
And again, it takes eight to 10 minutes tops to go through and take the checkup, but it’s a series of questions around each of those five obsessions of elite organizations to allow you to kind of get an assessment on how you’re performing. And so if somebody wants to take that, at the, at the bottom, when you fill out the form, you can select me, as the guide, or you can select any one of our guides. and we’ll get an email with your results.
What I encourage people to do is have the entire executive team take it. If you’re really curious, select the same guide cause that way all the, the, the results will go to the same person. But what I do is I have one of our, one of our admins put together a spreadsheet of the results for the entire team.
And so what that allows us to do is we can look at, so if a, if a, if an executive team sends us their surveys, we can look at in each of these areas and each of the specific questions, what’s the average score of the team on a one to five scale, but we can also see how did everybody score. So sometimes I’ll get these results back and on the exact same executive team on a question about, you know, our, our profits are, you know, two to four times the industry average, right. As part of the growing profits and cashflow, like, have you really figured that out?
And you’re performing at that level. Somebody on the team’s a one, somebody’s a five, like, how the hell are you a five and a one? If that’s, those are the extremes, like, let’s talk about where’s the disconnect.
Why aren’t you guys aligned here? Right. And so sometimes even that conversation becomes really enlightening.
So we’re kind of looking for where, where is the team in agreement that there’s a weakness and how do we help there? or where’s the team just misaligned and how do we get them having the right conversation to, to get the alignment that they need? so those are, those are probably the only two things we didn’t mention.
You know, there’s no obligation or cost any of that stuff, but it’s a good opportunity to explore a little deeper. And I would just say, if you do take the check up, on the one to five scale for any questions that you don’t feel strongly, it’s a four or five, think about the value. If it were a four or five for you and your business on that specific question, those deltas and those gaps are where all the value that comes from working with us exists.
[Speaker 2] (54:47 – 55:03)
And so Michael, let’s say that, you, you get a new client on board, this is day one. Can you roll out what that looks like? How often are you meeting with them?
What are you having them do? Is that a 12 month process, 24 month process? What does that typically look like?
[Speaker 1] (55:03 – 55:32)
Sure. No, I appreciate that. so we, we divide the work that we do on our clients to two simple phases.
One we call base camp and phase two, we call the climb. And so in the base camp phase, typically it’s three days that we spend together with the executive team. And those three days are anywhere from three to six weeks apart.
So it it’s, they’re spread over the first two to three months.
[Speaker 4] (55:32 – 55:32)
Okay.
[Speaker 1] (55:33 – 59:01)
And we will in those days, we will help the client build out a full two page strategic plan, marketing strategy, accountability charts, scorecards, scoreboards, project planning, weekly and monthly meeting cadences to help them have better meetings, how to, how to prioritize and tackle and break down issues, in an efficient and effective manner and create accountabilities to the followup actions and just really get them, get them performing at a much higher level.
We focus those first three days in base camp on the executive team and getting them really understanding the system, the approach, where the weaknesses are and determining of the, I mean, we, we have about 83 different tools now in kind of our tool shed that we can deploy with clients based on what their needs are. So, you know, if, if you’re only tools, a hammer, every problem is a nail. Right.
And so our, our thought is we don’t want to have a little toolbox with a couple of tools in it. We want to have a tool shed where we can go dig through the tools and find people, whatever they need based on what they’re up against. so the, the goal there is that by the end of base camp, the executive team is at a level where they can start now teaching this to the next level of the organization.
And so they end up kind of, it’s kind of like a train the trainer specifically customized for their organization and their approach. So once we get out of base camp and, and those are, those are pretty much full day sessions, full day meetings. We then go into the climb phase where we meet every quarter, with the executive teams and based on the longer term strategic plan that’s in place, we just, we break off, you know, how did we do last quarter based on the goal set financially, as well as tactical things that needed to happen.
What were the lessons learned? Where are you performing? Well, you know, where are you underperforming?
If there are new tools we need to share, we share that we do a review of strategic vision, the strategic plan, we set the goals and the plan for the next quarter. And then we spend a couple of hours at the end of the day, just prioritizing and tackling issues based on what’s going on. we weave a little bit of team health, into each of those, each of those quarterly meetings, to help keep the team kind of growing together, and informing stronger bonds, to build a more trusting, healthy team.
And that cycle just repeats every quarter. we, we don’t do contracts, we don’t take deposits, we don’t do retainers or any of that. So we make it very easy to start.
We make it very easy to stop. If we feel like if someone feels like we’re not providing value, we want there to be no barriers to them being able to pull the plug and stop. there’s, there’s no penalty for that.
There’s no cost for that. and my longest term client has now been with me for eight years, and through one transaction. And now we’re on the other side of that transaction and the company’s continuing to work with us because they see the value.
We have some companies that do this for a year and a half, two years, and they decide they’ve gotten what they needed to out of it and they move on. And that’s perfectly fine. It’s, we try to make everything about the client and the user, not about the system and not about us.
[Speaker 2] (59:01 – 59:06)
All right. And those quarterly meetings are those half a day, a full day? What does that look like?
[Speaker 1] (59:06 – 59:53)
They’re depending on what the organization is going through. We, we block a full day for them. they’re usually more like five, six hour days.
They’re not eight, nine hour days. but there, there are some where, you know, sometimes we’ll get into, I had a, I had a client earlier this week where their entire business model is going to transition strategically. And so we ended up having about a three hour, kind of whiteboard session, just really breaking apart options for different types of strategic approaches to the business model to address challenges that have started to arise that didn’t exist 10 years ago when they started the business.
So that ended up being, that was a long day, just, it really depends.
[Speaker 2] (59:53 – 1:00:08)
And so, but it also gets to your adaptability to what you started out saying, you know, what are they really, what are they trying to get to? What are their, what are their concerns? What are their needs?
And then you focus your effort on that. That’s a good example of just what you start out the conversation with.
[Speaker 1] (1:00:09 – 1:01:16)
Yeah, exactly. And one of the things we do that I believe is, is a bit unique as well. And also I think this helps leverage our experience as, as business owners, former business owners of businesses at scale is our engagement.
So our, our clients basically, as long as they’re working with us, they’re just paying us on a monthly basis. the entire leadership team has access to their guide for anything they need throughout the quarter. There’s no additional cost for that.
So I have some of the leadership teams I work with. I hardly hear from them over the quarter. They’re autonomous.
They’re, they don’t, don’t need a lot. And I have others where, excuse me, every two or three weeks, someone calls with somebody on the team, helping them through issues. And it doesn’t, different people are going to need different things at different times.
And so we try to not create barriers for them to reach out and use us. We want to be considered part of the team the entire time we’re working together. And, you know, so whatever their needs are along the way, we’re, we’re available for that.
And we don’t, there’s no, there’s no cost or meter running on the time.
[Speaker 2] (1:01:16 – 1:03:35)
Okay. Okay, good. So let me just do a lot of areas.
You talked about, a lot of things here about, you know, making things meaningful. You said a meaningful return on life, not just a return on investment, but trying to get that, that team, that ownership to get more me out of life, not, not having a successful business at the price of, at the cost of the family or whatever else is important to the, to that ownership. you talked, which, which again, leads to, to balance.
You talked about five obsessions. You talked about having great people and getting an emotional connection, getting everybody who’s part of that organization, emotionally involved in understanding what the, what the outcome is for the customer or the client of that business. Well, you talked about having an inspiring purpose.
So they understand and they’re inspired to do more and do better and always be elite. You talked about the optimized playbooks. And I liked when you touched on that because the optimized playbooks really leads into giving that owner more options to exit if they want to exit.
So it prepares them for that. And it just gives them more choices, that they have, which is always good to have more choices. Another obsession was a culture of performance, having different, different, having, live data that you can look at and analyze and work with so that the culture performance is a constant, not at the end of the quarter, looking at historical information, but looking at live data now and how we can make a course correction now or double down if they need to.
And you talked about growing profits and cashflow as the other, as the other of the five obsessions. you mentioned being a Sherpa, not, not a, not a coach, but being a Sherpa, being a guide and really listening to them and what they’re trying to get to so that you can bring together your resource, go to your toolbox or your tool shed and bring the tools that are really going to help them as they’re trying to get to wherever they’re trying to get to. It’s up to them to decide, but you want to, you want to help them.
Of course, you mentioned that typically companies have about 10 million in revenue, maybe 50 employees. or was that your coaches?
[Speaker 1] (1:03:35 – 1:04:15)
That’s our coaches. Yeah. So we’ve, we work with companies as, as small as one and a half, 2 million.
It’s kind of an entry point depending on the guide you’re working with. different guides have different, different rates. but below about two or 3 million in revenue, sometimes working with someone like us, if you have a bad quarter can be a budget constraint.
And I prefer not to have people start and stop and start and stop. I think consistency is important. So from a, from a target market standpoint for a possible client, I typically say two, 3 million in revenue or more.
[Speaker 2] (1:04:15 – 1:08:02)
Okay, good. You also mentioned the business health checkup, which is available for free, no cost on your website. They can fill it out.
And if it’s, if it’s, the entire management team, you’d like to have them all do that and pick the same guide so that that all gets consolidated in your, in your company with one person, you’ll have an advert person summarize that so that then that guide can look at it and make better decisions based on what he or she has seen with the results of the business checkup. you also said, who problems that problems in a company are often people it’s the, who, you know, who, who is in the, in that seat? Are they the right person in that seat doing the right jobs?
I liked what you also said about, as you look at, as you look at people, you’re looking at functions, not titles. What is that person actually doing and what should they be held accountable for? Who are they responsible to, but looking at it functions and, and, I think you said checking ego at the door.
Let’s look at what you’re supposed to do regardless of your title. And let’s, let’s make this work for the benefit of the company and the stakeholders, et cetera. you talked about uncommunicated expectations that often when there’s a problem or, or, or someone isn’t really in the right, maybe in the right seat, maybe the boss hasn’t communicated the expectations clearly to the employee.
And so there’s a disconnect and that’s part of what you can help bring together is make sure that you’re minimizing that, or maybe addressing that in a way that people understand what’s expected of them and their check-in so that they can, they can know if they’re on track or not. I like what you said as well about the, the ownership, leadership needs to be open. They need to be receptive that, that, that when you walk in and you help them and you make your observations and suggestions and recommendations, they are open to those, they’re willing to try those and, and willing to listen and implement what you’re helping them to understand.
And then having the emotional tug quarterly meetings, core values, getting consistent wins. You touched on a lot of things. You also mentioned an elite organization that you can really, if you really want to be elite, it means consistently performing at a very high level consistently.
And that’s how you get to that elite organization. And that’s how you can help a company get there, but they’ve got to consistently try that. I like what you also touched on that having an, an, an aspiration, even though it’s, it might be unattainable, use the, the declaration of independence as an example of all men being created equal is that attainable.
We hope so. And we’ve gotten, we’ve gotten closer, not there yet, but having that aspirational, goal for the entire vision of the company can help bring those people together and to work as a team for the benefit of everyone. you also walked through the, you know, the base camp and the climb of how you actually roll out what you’re doing.
And it sounds like your, your, your perspective is, is as a Sherpa really is the more accurate way to describe it because you are looking at what, what are they really trying to get to? How do I go back to my, my tool shed and put things together and bring out the right things so that, so that you can really help them get there. And again, your experience with your, your family business, and then what it went through and rebuilding yourself.
I can see how that would just be super valuable to a business owner, you know, for you specifically, but then your other guides who have their own entrepreneurial experience that can help those, those other business owners and founders, Michael, anything that, that you want to add as we, as we get to closing up here, I think that’s great.
[Speaker 1] (1:08:02 – 1:08:08)
I really, really appreciate the time Armando. And, that was, that was everything that, that I had.
[Speaker 2] (1:08:09 – 1:08:18)
Good. And so Michael, if somebody really liked the conversation that we had and liked what they heard about you and next level growth, your company, what’s the best way for them to reach you or to reach out to you?
[Speaker 1] (1:08:18 – 1:08:35)
Either through the website or the, our contact email address is just start climbing at nextlevelgrowth.com. So they can just email, start climbing at nextlevelgrowth.com or go to the website. There’s a button to click to start a conversation.
And that’ll come right to me.
[Speaker 2] (1:08:36 – 1:08:47)
And it sounds like if they wanted to even get a little bit of a shortcut and that they could do your business health checkup, that way you’re seeing some information before you even have that first conversation with them.
[Speaker 1] (1:08:47 – 1:08:53)
Correct. Yep. That just allows us to do a little homework before we get on a call to make that first call more valuable.
[Speaker 2] (1:08:53 – 1:09:04)
Okay. Fantastic. Michael, thanks so much for the conversation and we’ll make sure to get your contact information in the notes below and, and, appreciate all the work you do for those out there who, who needs your help.
[Speaker 1] (1:09:05 – 1:09:06)
You as well. Appreciate it. Armando.
[Speaker 2] (1:09:06 – 1:09:34)
Thinking of exiting your business, you may have only one chance to get the sale, right? Your family depends on it. Come here.
Experts who plan and negotiate successful business exits for a living. Bring your questions, live panel discussion followed by Q and a join us at the next Scottsdale founders for a biannual live event for the founder considering exiting in the Scottsdale foundersforum.com.
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