How Does ExitMap Prepare Owners for Life After Exit John Dini

Welcome to the B2B Growth Blueprint podcast, where we talk with entrepreneurs, founders, and leaders at B2B services, tech, and SaaS companies to learn the systems and processes they've used to create success for their business. And we'll also learn from marketing and sales experts to provide insights to help you grow your business. I'm your host, Mark Osborne. And the podcast is brought to you by Modern Revenue Strategies and their 10x ROI B2B Growth Guarantee. Schedule a free diagnostic call to learn the fastest path to double your B2B revenues in just 90 days. Hello and welcome to another episode of the B2B Growth Blueprint Podcast. I'm your host, Mark Osborne, and today I'm very excited to welcome our guest, John Dini. Now, over the past 30 years, John has provided in excess of 25,000 hours of face-to-face guidance, direction, and leadership to more than 500 entrepreneurs. He's known for his practical business experience as an owner of multiple companies in manufacturing, distribution, and services. He created the Exit Map assessment of owner and company readiness in 2017 and the Exit Map Express coaching tools for advisors in 2019. He now divides his time between working directly with business owners and teaching advisors how to better coach their clients through business transitions. He's written books for business owners, including 11 Things You Absolutely Need to Know About Selling Your Business, the award-winning Hunting in a Farmer's World, and Your Exit Map. His latest book is for advisors, The Exit Planning Coach Handbook. And it was published in 2023. His blog, Awake at 2 O'Clock, has advised owners and their advisors since 2008. And he hosts the Exit Planning Coach Podcast, which you can find on Spotify, YouTube, and, and most of the sites. He's a graduate of both Rutgers and Pepperdine and the first person to hold all 3 major exit planning certifications, along with 6 other credentials in behavioral profiling, management, and coaching. So, John, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Marc. Thank you for having me. Appreciate you bringing me on.

Absolutely. I've been looking forward to this conversation. So, as you and I have been, you know, sort of chatting about stuff to talk about related to exit planning, we have a really unique sort of opportunity to talk about some new insights because you and your team put together a pretty in-depth research report every year, which surfaces some insights that aren't available everywhere about sort of the state of the state within the exit planning industry and within the, you know, sort of the cottage industry that's grown up around advisors to businesses preparing for exit. Why don't you give our audience a little bit of background of what that research report is so that they'll then, you know, kind of appreciate some of the things that we're gonna talk about coming from that?

Thank you, Mark. You know, the— it's called the National Exit Planner Survey. And when we looked at the marketplace back in 19— in 19— 2020, sorry, we, we realized that there are a number of really good surveys of business owners and their preparedness to exit and transition on. EPI does one every year. PricewaterhouseCoopers, PwC. Does a number of small business surveys together with universities. BEI has done one or two over the years, but nobody in a fast-growing industry, nobody was doing the advisors. Nobody was asking them how they practiced, what they did in their practices. Certainly one of the areas people are most interested in when we put it out is how much they charge. for their advice, where they get their customers from, you know, the things that, you know, look at advisory as a business rather than as just an adjunct to what the business owners get out of it. So in '21, we put out the first survey and we've done it every year since. Comes out February 1st. We collect information until the 28th or 29th, given the year. And then we usually get the report out about The end of April. We like to wait until after April 15th so that all the financial planners and CPAs can get, you know, the majority of their personal tax stuff out of the way. And then we put it— we put out the report.

So that's really interesting, not only because it fills a really unique, you know, sort of niche in the marketplace, but it also brings some sort of counterintuitive insights that come not necessarily from sort of an ivory tower perspective of, you know, what are macro trends, but really sort of frontline of what's actually happening in the space. Before we jump into some of the insights, you know, from that report and some of the things, I do want to give the audience a little bit more of kind of your personal story. You've owned businesses and been on that side of the transaction. You've spent a lot of time advising both the advisors as well as business owners in preparing for exit readiness. Give us a little bit of a background of your story and what that path looked like, what brought you into this space, and then we're going to get into that report and some of the insights from there.

Okay, sure. Well, on the flyleaf of my books, you know, there's always a little bio, right? And it says, people refer to me as a serial entrepreneur, but in reality, I'm just chronically unemployable. I have signed both sides of my paycheck for the last 35 years or so. I fear that the real issue is I don't work and play well with others.

Okay.

I've never been real good at taking direction. I'm highly attention deficit and move from one thing to the other. When I was in healthcare, which was one of my past careers, and I was running a network of primary care clinics in Southern California, I had some young MBA students that I had hired during a recession. They were cheap and willing to work very hard. And one of them came to me and asked me if I could describe my career path planning. She was working on hers and she wanted to know how I had planned out my career path. When I stopped laughing, I said my principal motivation was probably a need to eat. And so every time I did something that worked out well, I did it for as long as it worked out well. When it stopped working out well and I couldn't eat from it anymore, I looked for something else. Really just kind of bounced around. So I'd like to say it was a logical path. My undergraduate career, this is to encourage people who think that they might have missed the boat or they needed to have some superstructure. My undergraduate career path covered 3 decades.

Yeah.

I started in 1969 and finally got a degree in 1980. I got my MBA. My graduation day for my MBA was the same day as my 40th birthday.

Oh.

So I'm a slow learner, just not that bright. You know, it takes a while. You know, my family says that, you know, I must be the dumb one because I went to school for so long. So, you know, but, you know, that also gave me my grounding in small business. I used to say that I felt my career path was training to be a generalist. I have run companies from the CFO seat, from the COO seat, from the owner-operator seat, and had a lot of my My undergraduate degree is a Bachelor of Science in Accounting. Rutgers was very proud of that. It wasn't a Bachelor of Arts. I wasn't making it up. They had certain mathematical structures that one should follow as an accountant.

Cool.

And then I thought I was gonna go into accounting and I went to the firm. I was selling, I was a salesman at the time. And I went to the firm that was doing that company's accounting. And I said I wanted to become a CPA. And they said, great, we'd love to have you. We know you well from your business and we think you're a sharp young guy. And this is what we pay entry-level CPAs. And I said, oh, I already make 3 times that. So that was the end of my CPA career.

That certainly makes sense.

So did what came along, did it as well as I could, learned a lot each time. And probably the epitome of the old saying that experience is what you get when you don't get what you want.

Uh-huh.

So eventually I wound up exit planning. I probably need to speak about that for a bit. I was running peer groups. I had a very large peer group organization here in San Antonio. One of the facilitators that was running some groups for me was a business broker who bought his business and was looking for somebody to buy his business, the brokerage. I thought it looked interesting and it was something that I could do. And I began to find out very, very quickly that when an owner calls you up and says, I'm ready to sell my business, they're probably not.

Yeah.

And that's what got me started on exit planning. I started working on tools that I could use. I came across one of the exit planning organizations Went up and did their training, and their training included internal sales, management buyouts, and family succession. Up until that point, I had been a broker. When you're a hammer, everything's a nail.

That's right.

People would come and say, how can I get out of my business? And I would say, I can sell it for you. When I realized that there were many other ways of getting out of a business is when I really started to study exit planning. And the tools that I was developing for myself to assess these opportunities wound up being the suite of software that we now sell to other advisors around the country in ExitMap.

Well, and you've certainly sort of captured a lot of that expertise as early as 2012. So I guess that's almost 15 years ago now. You published those 11 Things You Absolutely Need to Know About Selling Your Business. You've captured a lot of that, you know, what you get when you don't get what you want expertise and experience in working with businesses. I'm curious just because you have such a unique perspective before, and I think maybe this is a good segue into some of the research. What have been some of the sort of surprising trends that you've seen in this space? And there's one that, you know, we talk about a lot. And, you know, we've had guests on the show from the exit planning and advisory, you know, kind of world. And a lot of them talk about this concept of the silver tsunami.

Mm-hmm.

And so, for the audience that may not be as familiar with it, it's this sort of macro trend in the marketplace that, well, there's a whole lot of baby boomers that, you know, they built a business and they grew it. Maybe even the next generation grew it further. And they're now sort of at retirement age where, you know, either through, you know, death or disease or disability, they, they kind of can't run it anymore. So they're sort of forced to have a transaction, and a lot of them just want to. Um, not all of them want to, uh, and there's some, uh, you know, research on that. But a whole lot of these businesses are gonna change hands, uh, and then a lot of Gen X, uh, business owners that aren't quite as old so that maybe they aren't sort of being forced to because of age. They're just sort of choosing to have a transition in their business. And so looking at these kind of macroeconomic factors, a lot of folks have said, wow, there's a whole lot of businesses, $16 trillion worth of value I've heard thrown around, gonna change hands. But that's been sort of talked about for a while. And your research kind of indicates that maybe that's not materializing in as sort of as much of a deluge as you might expect from a tsunami. Talk to us a little bit about that or other trends that have been interesting to you because you have, you know, a better kind of longitudinal point of view on the space.

Yeah, there's a couple of things with the tsunami. And what we were talking about 12, 15 years ago, and I spoke all over the country at that time, I had a presentation called Beating the Boomer Bust that I did for thousands of business owners around the country. And yes, we were predicting that at that time. Of the 6 million businesses within privately held businesses with employees in the United States, boomers were no less than 50 years old and they own 2/3 of them.

Okay.

Now the boomers are no less than 64 years old, I guess. Yeah, 65 years old this year, and they still own about 50% of them.

Wow.

So that number is fairly static. The number of entries— I've done a lot of research on the SBA stats.

Yeah.

A few hundred thousand come in every year, a few hundred thousand go away every year, but it's still 6 million seems to be about the number. And so you still have a lot of aged boomer owners. The, the, and a lot of this is in my book, Your Exit Map: Navigating the Boomer Bust. A lot of it is kind of nostalgic about, you know, when, when the boomer surge came through, it was a deluge. I mean, we opened in the, in the, from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, I think we opened something like 1,100 community colleges in the United States because the educational system couldn't hold them. You know, a lot of us, people my age, go back to the, you know, went to elementary school in the '50s and '60s to double sessions. I once, you know, they were using the school buildings twice each day. You know, there was an early session and a late session that filled the school both times because they just couldn't build enough bricks and mortar.

Right.

So, you know, College educations. From when the boomers turned 21, in the next 10 years, there was a 600% increase in bachelor's— bachelor-degreed people in the workforce. You know, so we were very, very competitive. That's where you got the workaholic boomers. You know, every time you went out to apply for a job, there were 25 other boomers just as qualified as you applying for the same job.

Right.

What saved us as business owners was franchising. And the same thing, talking about the stats, in a 10-year period, the United States went from selling 2,000 franchises a year to selling 20,000 franchises a year.

Wow.

So that is where a lot of boomers wound up as business owners, you know, in a turnkey thing where they could be trained to run a single-owner business. So some of that tsunami is coming or is here. Certainly the exit planning profession, our last survey showed, I think a 20— I have it here, 23% increase in one year in the number of people claiming exit planning as part of their profession.

Okay.

About a 70% increase in the last 3 years. And yet All of them are saying that their business is increasing. So there's a lot more of them out there and their practices are filling up. They are getting the candidates, the clients. So part of it is it is happening. Part of it is I misjudged and a lot of people misjudged the fact that business abhors a vacuum. Whenever there's an opportunity, something will fill it. So where back in, you know, when I was doing this lecture on the circuit, when, you know, in 2013, '14, '15, we were saying, well, when these boomers leave, there'll be no one to buy their businesses. There'll be no new generation of entrepreneurs because there was 78 million boomers. There's only 48 million Gen Xers. I mean, just numerically, it was a challenge.

Right.

But by the way, the Gen Y is just as big as the boomers. That's not a problem anymore. What we did not see is the oncoming of the search funders. Private equity was not a market in 2012. Private equity, nobody was even talking about it.

Right.

As private equity grew, it grew an offshoot called the search funders. These are people that go to school and it's called, what is it? E2O, Entrepreneurship to Ownership, I think.

Yeah.

Something like that. Originally, that was Harvard, Chicago Booth School of Business in Chicago, and Stanford started out. And I think Penn was one of the very early ones having a total program to show people how to go out, get investors, raise money, buy a company from a boomer, and take it over. Now there are at least 20 to 25 business school programs that offer that kind of training. And where the big— you started out private equity was the big professional firms, right? Blackstone.

Right.

KKR, you know, doing billion-dollar deals, you know, Barbarians at the Gate buying RJR Nabisco and things like that, you know.

Right.

And now, You have people with private equity backing looking at businesses with a cash flow of $400,000 or $500,000.

Yeah.

You know, they have come way down market and they're buying it for the purpose of running it hands-on. So they have done a lot to fill that gap where we thought a lot of businesses would go searching for a buyer. It turns out there's a new ready market of buyers for those kind of businesses, that size of businesses.

Interesting. And that's been largely a development, as you say, it didn't really exist 20 years ago, maybe not even kind of 10 or 15. It was still evolving. I'm curious again, because you have such a great perspective, where do you see that going? Like, what's the natural conclusion of that? Do you think that continues to go along or? Is there some sort of impending change or cliff ahead as, you know, once private equity buys up all of the this or all of the that, where do you see that heading?

Well, I think there's still going to be a substantial number of distressed sales.

Okay.

I mean, when you're talking about almost 50% of businesses owned by people 65 or older, you know, and we're talking about my peers age-wise, a lot of us are in denial. We think we're going to work forever. Again, that boomer work ethic, that boomer got to get ahead is, it's tough to shirk. It's tough to shrug off. Shirking isn't the right word. I am well past Medicare age, and I am still working now. We have very carefully, because of my background and because of what I see with other owners, we have very carefully charted out a work-life balance that we're very satisfied with. My business takes up about a little more of my time than I'd like it to, but, you know.

But you're not working yourself ragged like other folks are.

Right. But I just, I had a conversation today with an woman in her, oh, I'm guessing her early 40s, early to mid-40s, whose parents refused to plan, refused to, and they built a sizable company. And it was very, very dependent on their personal skills. And they have had an unexpected health issue and it's coming off the rails. And this is a company, this is a manufacturing company with employees, with a product, with distribution, with all kinds of things. And it's got some offspring trying to jump in and save this when they don't want to.

Yeah.

They're not particularly interested. And, you know, we had this conversation and, you know, I hope we will go forward because I'd love to be able to help them. But, you know, they have, They don't know step one. And I think you're going to see a lot more of that. This was an owner who was past his mid-70s and was signing 5-year agreements that were totally dependent on him to execute.

Wow.

And, you know, this, you know, we are healthier. The boomers are healthier, clearly. You know, we don't have the number of smokers. We don't have, you know, We don't eat red meat every single night anymore, but, but, you know, we're not that much healthier. Uh, we can probably extend, you know, I'm sure the life expectancy from as a generation compared to the World War II and the Silent Generation is probably 6 or 7 years more, but it's not infinite. But we like to pretend it is.

So what do you think is the You know, how does that play out? And I'm kind of asking you to just sort of hypothesize because you have so much background expertise. Do you think that it's a function of, well, there will be more of these sort of forced exits and there will be a wide diversity of ways that it'll play out? Some of them will sell to, you know, employees, some of them will sell to partners, some of them will sell to a strategic buyer, or Do you think there will be some kind of aggregation of, well, private equity's really gonna come in and roll 'em all up? Like that's, you know, the trend that you're seeing.

They're not. Yeah, you know, a good business, it's the same thing that, you know, when I was running more traditional businesses, you know, the distribution company or the manufacturing company. You know, you're talking to other small business owners and you're saying, gee, if I could just, you know, borrow some money, you know, and, you know, The truth is lending institutions are more than happy to lend money to good profitable businesses. You know, the reason you couldn't borrow money is because you didn't have a good profitable business. You know, so, but, you know, think about where you go to the supermarket. Okay. How long have you been going to the supermarket there?

I mean, since I moved.

Which is how many years, you think?

5 years ago in my current location.

5 years ago. Does it have a strip center around it? Does it have ancillary development? How many of those places have gone empty and become something different in the 5 years?

A lot. At least 30, 40%.

Sure. And it continues.

Yeah.

And it will continue. You look and you say, oh, that's empty.

Oh, or it used to be this and now it's that.

Yeah. Don't remember what that used to be, which is why it's empty. But you know, the turnover has always been there. It's you know, will franchising increase? Perhaps service franchises are are are big. Will independence go away? Probably. You know, I was— one of my clients was a commercial real estate developer.

Mm-hmm.

And he said, you know, he said, what we saw in San Antonio in the, in, you know, the expansion of the 20 aughts, which where we grew— oh, I came here in '94, it was 900,000 people. We're about 2.3 million now. So he said, if you look at the hard corners of the major streets, he said, there's a lot there that's been in the family for a generation. They decided to develop it into a little L-shaped strip center, right?

Right.

He said, but if you look, he said, there's a nail salon, there's a pet shop. He said, there, you know, there may be, some sort of retail or bicycle shop. He said, they're not national leases. He said, they're all owner-operated because they don't have— the owners of the center don't have the wherewithal to attract national leases.

Interesting.

And he said, they emptied out in every recession. They'll lose half their tenants. And the next time there's a boom, they'll fill it up again.

Interesting.

And that cycle just goes on and on.

That's super interesting. So we could probably talk about that for a lot longer, but I want to move to some of the other sort of interesting trends and things that you see within this research report. As you called out earlier, you know, this is one of the only, if not the only, you know, sort of source of information about the actual advisors and folks that are filling that advisory role. that has become, you know, a fairly large, you know, sort of industry, national conferences and all of those things. What are some of the interesting trends or some of the interesting, you know, sort of callouts that you've seen, you know, from that report either in, you know, a recent year? And I've got a few that sort of, you know, jumped out at me, but are there some that sort of jump out at you that you think might be particularly interesting for our audience of You know, people who may be fulfilling some of those roles?

I think one of the things that is of interest and consistently is the demographic.

Okay.

The advisory population is as old as the population they're serving.

Interesting.

You know, and it's becoming an issue in the financial planning industry, especially, you know, financial planning right now is fat. Okay. They're, you know, they're getting people knocking on their doors every day because the boomers have spent a lifetime saving and now they wanna protect it. And if they didn't have a wealth manager before, they're probably looking for one right now. But they're gray-haired too. In one of my books, I interviewed Tom James, who was the founder of Raymond James.

Right.

And he identified their biggest issue as getting a new generation of financial planners in.

Interesting.

Um, last— I just saw the stats for 2024, um, in one of the trade magazines. I think it was, it was either Financial Planning or Wealth Management. Those are the 2 dailies in that industry. And last year, for the first time in a long time, more advisors left the industry than came in.

Interesting.

And it's a concern. They don't know how to pass these practices along. They're very lucrative. And again, they've got boomer owners that are sticking around because they're very lucrative, but sooner or later it has to go. So that's one of the interesting things. Some of it is more traditional and not unexpected. I think one of the other things is all 3 of the organizations, and as you mentioned in my bio, I'm certified with all 3, so I follow both EPI, which is by far the largest, and IEPA and BEI. All 3 of them are very, very strong on the fact that exit planning requires a team, right? I mean, you know, you're a CEPA®, right?

Yeah.

You've been through the program. You know, you need legal, you need tax, you probably need appraisal, you need wealth management or wealth planning anyway, insurance, risk mitigation. And because of that, the number one marketing focus and referral source is other professionals, where I don't know there's another industry where you're really dependent on other professionals channeling you the majority of your new clients.

And so what is the implication of that, you know, from an industry perspective, if there is that unique dynamic?

Well, from the advisor's perspective, I think the numbers pretty plainly show that if you're spending all your marketing money doing networking and trying to find business owners, you're missing the boat. Yeah, you should be spending it on what the financial industry calls centers of influence, people that can refer to you. That's where all your efforts should be going.

Yeah.

And I just saw another study in the financial planning industry that said the efficacy of lead generation companies is dropping like a stone. People that just went out and, you know, sent emails for you or sent letters for you or made phone calls for you to find leads are becoming less and less effective every People are just too inundated with that kind of communication. They just shut it off.

Yeah. Yeah. I've seen some of that research too. And to me, my first thought was, well, partly it's just the growth of companies means that they'll be less effective just because there's more people fighting for limited attention. When there weren't that many folks aggregating leads, it was easier for those companies to be successful. And I think it's a really interesting insight around, you know, the interconnectedness of the space. And some of the stats that jumped out at me from the report was that for most of the folks that, you know, were surveyed and talked to as part of the report, exit planning is only a piece of what they do.

Yes.

They provide other services and they're not, you know, spending the bulk of their time actually in exit planning. It's sort of a tool in their toolbox, but they're providing a breadth of other services to their clients. And in fact, sometimes exit planning is sort of that door opener of maybe a way to differentiate. And I certainly talk about that from a marketing and sales perspective as a way of differentiating my marketing and sales expertise. It's differentiated that I understand the exit. industry. Do you see that continuing, or are there any, you know, sort of kind of long-term trends you see?

I, I not only do I see it continuing, I think it'll grow. I think it'll grow. Um, you, when before we got on, you referred to exoplaneting as a gateway drug, um, and it is, it is for the majority of people. They're using it to support their core skill, their core service offering, and That makes sense. I mean, I'm one of the few that specializes in exit planning and just does a lot of exit planning, but that's more a personal choice. If I was a couple of decades younger, I would certainly be using it to— I come from operations, so I would be doing EOS or scaling up or something like that. But, you know, financial planners are clearly using it because they want a piece of the liquidity event.

Right.

And there's a statistic there that I came across about 6 months ago that is fascinating, which is 80% of business owners, up to 80%, they said, of business owners that experience a liquidity event will change financial planners within the next 12 months.

I remember you telling me that about 6 months ago, and I've probably said it 20 times since then in conversations with folks in the industry.

Yeah, because people, people don't believe that the person that's managing $1 million for them is the person that should be managing $10 million for them.

That's right. Well, and especially if they sit on the sidelines during the sort of the exit transition.

Yeah, there's a UBS and CFA studies that say the number one reason for changing is I didn't have enough advice in advance of the event.

That's right. Yeah. Well, John, you're obviously an expert in a lot of really interesting topics that we could spend all day on, but I got to be mindful of your time. But before I let you go, you know, talk to us a little bit about, you know, where you spend the bulk of your time today at ExitMap and sort of who you help, how you help them.

Well, we, you know, we have advisors, obviously. We're a bit of a different program. Just about everybody else that has a SaaS company in this industry is in the value enhancement side, you know, how to help a business owner to make his company or her company be worth more than it is today.

Right.

That is a very valuable effort and very good. But coming from the coaching background that I have, I feel it's much more important to help business owners understand how dramatically their life is going to change when they don't have that company anymore. They won't have the activity that keeps them running all day long. They won't have the purpose that gets them out of bed in the morning with a list of things they have to And identity is another major factor. I had a I had an owner that I was working with a few months back, sold his company, went out to lunch with a friend, glorying in the fact that he could go out to lunch now. They met somebody who he was introduced to, and they said, and I'll just make up the names, you know. And he said, "I like to meet Bob Smith. He used to own Smith Manufacturing." And he said, "My stomach sank." He said, "I'm suddenly facing the rest of my life being somebody that used to be somebody. That's not who I was accustomed to being." So they're very important things, and you know because you've been through BEI's not BEI's I'm sorry EPI's program. They did it in 2013. PwC repeated a similar survey in 2022, and both of them said that 75% of owners. are very unhappy a year later.

Yeah.

And that is not the reason. The reason is not that they didn't get the money. I've never seen an owner sign a purchase agreement that didn't have a number on it. They were well aware of it. You know, it's because they didn't plan for idleness. And let's face it, entrepreneurs are not built to watch daytime television. That's not how they're going to spend the rest of their days. And so, so many of them wind up starting up another business and then finding out that they hate it because they have to do all the jobs again. And they had gotten beyond that. That's how they got something they could sell, you know, or they wind up buying into another company that's in trouble because they think they can straighten it out. You know, you see all these other things where they gravitate back to a business role. You know, or become consultants or become exit planners. So, you know, there's a lot of people in the exit planning industry that used to own companies.

That's right.

You know, but, you know, so we focus on that. ExitMap focuses on the front end, on getting the owner prepared, getting them to have a clear vision of where they're going and what they want to see happen and why. And then the other folks, of which there are half a dozen, who focus on increasing the value of the business, good. They should do that. They're better at that.

That's so interesting. And what's the best way for folks that have been listening and they're interested in learning more about ExitMap and the capability or even more about this research study, what's the best way to engage with you?

exitmap.com is obviously real easy. John F. Daney, johnfdaney.com is also there as far as my books and stuff go. There are opportunities to test things and communicate back and forth on both of those. And, you know, if you just John F. Dainey Google, I show up quite a bit. I've been, you know, I'm verbose as you have learned in the last half hour. And so a lot of stuff has spilled out over the years.

Well, John, thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. I really enjoyed the conversation. I'm sure our audience got a lot out of it.

Mark, thank you very much. It's a ball. And you can tell that I love this and I love the importance of it. And as I said to an owner yesterday who was like, I don't know if I should get started planning. Hey, it's only the most important financial transaction of your life.

That's right. That's right. Well, John, thanks again. We'll talk to you soon.

Thanks, Mark. Take care.

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