How COVID Saved My Life and Inspired My Mission to Help Entrepreneurs with Marc Adams- Ep-523

So now we're, you know, what we're helping people see is how they can step through this process to exit their business. It might not be $100 million, it might be $30 million, but who cares? You can change your life.

Welcome to Streams to Impact and be inspired to engage passionately in the work of your calling while achieving financial prosperity through multiple streams of high-yield returns on investment to bring your dream of making a meaningful impact to reality. I'm your host, Dr. Allen, and I am delighted that you are joining us today. If you haven't yet, get a complimentary copy of our exclusive guide, High Yield Investment Blueprint: Secure 18%+ Returns in 60 Days. Go to our website, highyieldblueprint.com. That is www. highyieldblueprint.com. Just provide your email address and we'll send you a copy today. Welcome, enlightened investors, to another episode of Streams to Impact. So delighted that you are with us today. With us today, we are going to have a very interesting conversation. From billion-dollar boardrooms to a stage 4 cancer diagnosis, Mark Adams has built empires, defied death, and discovered life's greatest return on investment. So buckle your seatbelts and let's get ready to uncover the real secrets behind legacy impact and tax-free freedom. So Mark, what inspired you to focus on helping entrepreneurs maximize their business value and achieve tax-free exits? And how has your journey shaped your approach to this mission?

Wow, what a great question, and thank you for asking that. But, um, before I get to that, thanks so much for having me on the show. It's, it's an honor and a privilege to be here, um, and, um, to— for more reasons than one, which I think will unfold in our, in our chat. But you asked me, um, you know, why is this, um, what— why is this important, and how did I get into it? And It was, it was by accident. And my desire and reason to want to help business owners— I frame it slightly differently now. I talk a lot about $0 to $100 million in 7 years or less, exiting tax-free, which you can't always do, sometimes tax-minimized, and increasingly rinse and repeat, do it again. And it can apply for anybody in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, and beyond. But it started innocently enough. If I take you back to 2020 in the pandemic, not that I want to remind anybody of that, but just if you can just imagine for a moment in January 2020, this thing that we turned out that we, that we eventually called COVID was on its way, but it hadn't hit anybody yet. It was coming from China. It was in Europe, it was in America, but it hadn't spread like wildfire at that stage. And I'm looking out over— I think it was either the 8th or the 10th floor— I'm looking out over the runway at LAX from the Hilton Hotel, which has got a view from there. And of course, it never rains in LA, right? Um, and so it's always sunny. And, and so lovely view. And I'm in the luxury of air conditioning inside. Everybody's burning on the outside, of course. And it kind of, it kind of hit me that so many companies that come to market, typically from people that might be retiring, never get sold for the sticker price that they want. And there's so many reasons for it. But one of the key things that happens is they— you may have spent 20 or 30 years building a brand. And we're talking about this in this room, which is the relevance of the, of the scene over LAX. And people ask, why is it? And everybody says, well, it's, you know, brokers. And I'm talking in $75 million in revenue or less. And they say, brokers, they're greedy. They put it on for too much money. I say, well, what do you mean by that? And they treat them like estate agents. And basically, if you're selling a house and you put it on the market and you've sold it tomorrow, it was probably underpriced. Now, if you sell that same house and it's on the market and you've sold it in 3 months, you've probably got it about right. But if it's been out there for a year, you've got some choices. First and foremost, if it's out there for a year, it's probably overpriced compared to what the market says it's worth. So you've got some choices. You can just leave it and hope that eventually somebody comes along and buys it at the price that you want. You can drop the price, which so many people do, so that you can get it sold. Or you can maybe think about What could I do to improve that property so that it gets closer to that sticker price that I wanted? Or you can take it off the market. Now, business is not that different. If it's been out there for a year, it's one of those 9 out of 10 companies that don't sell. And so the problem with business owners is they need that cash for part of their retirement. When you're looking at that end of the scale, you know, we're not in your 20s, but in your 60s and 70s, they need that for their retirement. And Too many people realize too late that if you live in somewhere like California, you could lose up to half the sticker price when you sell in taxes and fees and distribution. So state and federal in California and New York would be about 40%, but you've got other people's fees coming in as well. If you're working with a broker, there might be 8, 9, 10, 11, 12% there. Um, if you've got legal advice, accounting advice, there'll be other fees coming in there. So it's hardly surprising that when business owners start to realize this, that they increase the price to compensate for it. But of course, that tips it beyond where the market might be. So the relevance going back to LAX and January 2020 is COVID was coming. And roll forward a year, um, I— when we, we'd done a year of lockdown, all of us, and all we saw around the world was the league tables on how many people had died and how many new infections there were. And we'd been through Europe and the terrible situation in Italy, and it was hitting America hard and the UK hard and everywhere else. But we'd gotten into this window in the States and in the UK where you could go out in small groups in around November, December, January of that— of 2020 coming into '21. And for no reason other than I hadn't had a medical for a while, I went off, being a man of a certain age, to get some checks just because I had that opportunity. And I remember walking into my consultant's office in Windsor. Now, most people think of Windsor in England, they think of Windsor Castle where the Queen lived and the King now visits, doesn't spend as much time there as the Queen did. And just down the hill from there, there is this similarly styled hospital. And my consultant, also called Mark, practices from there. So I went to meet him because he'd run some tests for me. And I walk into his office and he's been in— he's been doing what he's been doing for 20, 30 years. So he's got all these awards on one side of his office, you know, it's, um, very in keeping with a man of his stature. And out of the other side of this prestigious office in this very old dingy building, um, full of the hospital smells of disinfectant that you'd get on wards, they just carry through to these offices. And I look out over his single-paned window into this glorious view of a car park, which is not that glorious at all, right? And I sit down and say, Mark, it's nice to see you. And he said, Mark, it's nice to see you too. And I said, how are things? And he said, very well, how are things with you? And I said, well, you're probably about to tell me. He said, ah, yes. And he wears spectacles just like yours, except His are— I don't know what yours are for, but his are for reading. So close up he's reading, but to see me, he doesn't move. He just moves them down a little and looks over the top. Um, and, um, he hasn't got a lot of hair, and he— and he— every time I see him, he's in a white official white coat. He's never in a suit or a t-shirt. He's always got this white coat on, but he's really good at what he does. And so I said, well, tell me, how am I doing? He said, well, he said, Mark, I've got I've got some bad news for you. Unfortunately, the tests have come back and you've got cancer. And I went, okay. And he said, unfortunately, it's stage 4. And I went, not okay. And he said, um, and he— on the backdrop of that, unfortunately, it's— we don't think you're going to get any more than 6 months. So the reason I share that was because it was a pivotal moment that I hadn't realized we were in. And so we A decision was made to remove the primary. I'd have to wait 6 or 8 weeks to see what was going to happen and if I could get any more time than 6 months. Life wasn't back so, you know, life is good now, but it wasn't so good at that moment. And so we scheduled for me to have an operation in January '21. Now, January '21 was about the time that Donald Trump, in his previous inauguration or previous term, had gotten COVID as well. And he'd got this experimental thing which Ergo, code for saying vaccines were not yet in. They were in for— they were coming for the key workers, but they weren't in for the likes of you and me, Alan, and most of the people listening to your show. So I'm in having the cancer removed at the same hospital in central London, a much more modern hospital that Prince, or now King Charles, has also been using, if you've been seeing it on the news. So I feel that I'm in exalted company, given I was able to go in that hospital. But sadly, while I was there, I got COVID too. And I got the original strain of COVID pre-vaccine. So your kind of six months feels like it's been robbed because at that point before the vaccines, we all went through this 28-day window. None of us knew whether we were going to come out of it or not, but you knew by day 12 you were getting better or you weren't kind of thing. It was going to be a long time or you were going to start to recover. And so in that window, I'm recovering at home, and in my you know, and of course we're in isolation, so I'm in our bedroom. And our bedroom is completely white. And I love the view of the bedroom. I don't know whether any of your listeners will resonate with this, but I've got a theory. And I've got a theory that is that, you know, for married couples that, um, in the bedroom, it always seems to be the case that the lady of the house has the closest position to the bathroom. As us guys, we're furthest away. Now, for me, that's great because I'm looking out over rolling hills through our window. And then my wife is closer to the bathroom on her side of the bed. She's looking towards the dressing area and the bathroom. And then in the corner, the door opens to the bedroom. It's quite a big bedroom. And the only non-white things I'd ever been able to negotiate into that bedroom were the bed, which is black, and the big screen on the TV, which is also black. That's it. Well, I'm recovering now from the cancer and the COVID And my 10-year-old son Thomas would come in at 7. 11, lunchtime, afternoon, evening, and tea time. And he'd want to know how his dad was doing and love him. Um, he's 14 now. Of course, they— at 14, they speak this teenage language that none of us understand. But, but I'm trying to share— you've got to— given where my mindset was then, and I potentially had somewhere up to 28 days, let alone 6 months, and you do anything to get an extra hour with your family and you're in that situation, to God no one is. Um, but you can give the kids the fish or you can teach them to fish. And one of the things I said to him was, 9 out of 10 companies, when they come to market to be sold, Thomas, never get sold. And, you know, by all these mums and dads that might be wanting to retire. And we went through why was that and had the conversation with him that you and I have just had. And he immediately said to me, so what happens to the one? I said, well, everybody competes for that one. I should say, at that time I was more private equity than helping people in a different way that I do today. And he said, do you get all of those? I said, no, we get probably 1 out of 5, 1 out of 6 of them. He said, what happens to the 9? I said, nothing. He said, Dad, he said, you need to help the 9 out of 10 companies. And I went, why? He said, what happens, Dad, if the people that own those businesses, the mums and dads, they get COVID and die and they didn't sell their companies, who's going to take care of their families? Which was quite a profound moment. And so the— it took a bit of time to register because what you do in private equity is you acquire a company, you build a value into it over a long period of time, and then you sell it. But the people that sold you the company don't often get any benefit of that unless they've got some kind of rollover into it. And in my case, it made me start to think, and it took me a while. So I went back to Post-surgery, eight weeks later, and I sat down with Mark in the same room with the same spectacles and the same white coat. And he said, "I've got good news and bad news." And I said, "What's the good news?" He said, "We can't find your cancer." And I said, "What's the bad news? We have no idea why." And I said, "Well, why do you think?" Long story short, they think COVID was what cured me because COVID, they think, was driving the immune system into overdrive, and I was in pretty good shape, and it helped me clear the residual cancers, the secondary cancers they believe but cannot prove. And I'm hardly going to say, "Give me COVID again," and Put the cancer back in and let's run again, right? But then I was on the hook to my son because I'd promised that I'd try and find a way to help the 9 out of 10 owners. And the best— and this is a problem that happens all over the world, Alan. So that's why I wrote the book, Secrets to 10x-ing Your Business and Cashing Out Tax-Free. Now subsequently, it's grown legs. And what I mean— what do I mean by that? It means that I started doing, um, um, Shorts, YouTube Shorts and videos on all channels about this to get the message out. Um, and the, and the, um, the book, by the way, launched almost a year ago, but 2 weeks ago it became a number one international bestseller, um, which was a complete surprise. And I'm very proud of it because people are picking it up, because what I put into the book was stuff that people could think about and implement on their own if they wanted to. They didn't have to work with me. And let's, you know, we're a, um, sort of a mentoring consulting business, and we do work with clients on this, but we're limited. There are 20 people in the business now. And so each one of us has a limitation of maybe 6 to 10 clients that we could work with. So there's thousands of companies out there that are in this position all over the world. And so Amazon banned the book. Now, they never said why they banned it. But eventually, I went back to them and said, look, I'm sharing with, with the world the kind of things that Bezos is doing, given that he's the Founder of Amazon, Zuckerberg is doing, Trump is doing, Elon Musk is doing. This is all completely legit and above board. But the people, people like you and I don't think it's available to us. And I'm just sharing with other people that maybe it is. Amazon eventually relisted it, but they never said that that was the reason why they just relisted it. So, but when Stripe took a look at it, they just felt that the terminology was a bit aggressive and they did ban it and they did ban it for those reasons. So, you know, you're onto something. And what you're looking— and basically the problem that you're solving is either you can reduce the price of a business if you own it, or you can do something to improve the value of it. And there are lots of things that you can do to improve the value of a business. And I now group this into 6 stages of wealth creation, $0 to $100 million. You can be anywhere on the journey. But the first 4 stages, or 3 to 4 stages, if you are starting out, take you through, you know, up to $10 million in growth. So $0 to $100 million— $0 to $100,000 is just get money in the door, pay some bills. $100,000 to $500,000, you're starting to build a bit of EBITDA. $500,000 to $2 million, more EBITDA. Now you can start to plan a bit of budgeting for more growth organically. And, and $2 million to $10 million, you can start to partner with other companies to drive more growth. But at $10 million and beyond, and certainly between $2 and $10 million, if you've got a Once you get to half a million, three-quarters of a million in EBITDA, you want— you can start to think about acquisitions, which precious few business owners, entrepreneurs do. It's something other people do, but not they do. They're too caught up in running their business, right? So your next stages of growth, like 10 to 50, are going to definitely tilt towards more acquisitions because it's the fastest way, way to double the size of your business in a day that I know of, and it could exponentially change the valuation multiples, the EBITDA multiples on your business. And then part of that wealth creation is, let's say you go, um, and roughly speaking, at less than a million in EBITDA, you're going to be worth 1 times your EBITDA in most circumstances and most industries. But what you want is a 5x multiple or a 10x multiple or a 20x multiple. Now to do that, you've got to move the dial for people that would potentially buy you. And then if you— and you do that, if you get to $1.5 million in EBITDA, which is not as hard to do as you would think, then you're going to be worth 5, 6, or 7 times that, that EBITDA profit. So $1.5 million business in EBITDA becomes worth $9 million or $10 million. And if you can get it to $3 million in EBITDA, it becomes worth $14 million, $15 million, $16 million or more. And if you're selling to a trade buyer who's a publicly quoted organization, then they'll probably pay more than a privately quoted company will. And then the trick is that you get to this point, and now you're going to lose half of that wealth. Now, that's— it's not always half. If you're in the UK, it will be up to 30% taxes, fees, distributions, and everything else. In some states, that don't charge state taxes, um, then obviously you'll save 10% then, so it will be less. But you're still giving away— you know, you sell the business, and on the way, when the money's on its way to the bank, up to half of it deviates, you know, goes left to other people, um, tax included, right? So half of the, um, creation of wealth is making it, the other half is bloody well keeping it. And people just don't know this. So I've been trying to share this information with with people through the book. Um, not everybody wants to read a book or even spend $10 buying it, and that's absolutely fine. We've made it— we've made it available on as a PDF download chapter by chapter, as an email delivery with an Audible chapter and a 2-minute summary, just to get people thinking about this and at the right time start to do something about it. So now we're, you know, what we're, um, helping people see is how they can step through this process to exit their business. It might not be $100 million, it might be $30 million, but who cares? You can change your life and make your— I had some 20-somethings talking to me recently. I said, look, if you go on this journey in your video production business, by the time you're 30, you could be cashing out with your school fees paid and you haven't even got any kids, let alone a wife, your mortgage paid, And whereas you're just about starting to think about how do you get one, and you've got a few toys, let's call those assets. And now you go again in your, in your 30s and your 40s, but you don't go and start another business. You take what you've learned with some of the cash you've made, and you come back in and help other people through this scenario. Because that opportunity to create wealth in 7 years, and it might take you 9, but the second time through, it might only take you 5, is there for all of us. if they only had a map that showed them the way and the things that they could do. And it started with trying to solve a problem, um, out of, uh, you know, an adverse situation of having cancer and being told you've got 6 months to live, and then getting COVID and going through— you know, it's the mind of a 10-year-old that made me start to think about this. Um, and but for Thomas pointing me in a different direction, this would never have happened because I wasn't thinking in the right way. And then the book has come out and now it's become a bestseller. Originally a podcast picked it up and said, hey, come and have a chat, sounds quite interesting. And that's led to a lot more. And now I proactively look to see if, you know, I'm worthy enough to be on, um, on, um, you know, great shows like yours with other— on other people's podcasts to try and share the message. And I even make the book available for free to any of your readers that might be interested in it. I can send you a link and they can get a copy of that for, you know, for themselves and him and self-implement. Now, not everybody does want to do self-implementation, so, you know, people want to reach out and ask questions, I'm happy for them to do that. But I'm sick to death of people working their lives to build legacy and value, to lose half of it, um, to, um, to everybody else that wants to dip their hands into it. They paid enough taxes along the way. So it's not always the case that you can come out tax-free. If you structure it in the right way, You can, but not always. If you're in Canada, that could be very difficult to do. If you're in the United States, you can do it. If you're in the United Kingdom, you can do it. If you're in Germany, that's much harder to do. But actually, in nearly every case, you can structure your path to wealth in a way that you can be so tax advantaged, if not tax-free. And that scenario is very dependent on the personal circumstance of the people that own the business, the stakeholders in the business, and where that business is. So it's difficult to sort of say do this because it won't apply to everybody because everybody's situation is slightly different. But too many people give up too much of their wealth having spent too many years building it, and I'm sick to death of it. It doesn't have to be that way. I would rather they created that wealth and came back and other— helped other people do the same, because it's not like they're going to hoard it and sit on it. They're going to spend it in their economies and put it back into the system. So it contributes. It's just going to contribute in a different way. This is just something that nobody really talks about and more people should. So I'm on a campaign to get that message out and help as many people as I can.

Mark, it's been a very informative and very fascinating conversation. And if we had the time, we could delve much deeper into the strategies That you have put in place here. But we have run out of time. So, uh, viewers and listeners, you can find Mark's free copy of his book at markadams.io. Scroll to the bottom of the page, and there's a QR code there, and you can download the book for free. And Mark is By the way, it is spelled with a C rather than a K, so that is marcadams.io. Marc, thank you so much for being with us today. Very enlivening conversation and enlightening conversation, and glad to have you with us. To enlighten us. And all of you business owners out there, I hope you take note of what Mark has been sharing today because I don't want to see any of you in that 90% who end up losing everything you put together throughout a lifetime. So thank you so much for being with us. Thank you for having me. You're so welcome. And viewers and listeners, thank you.

Thank you for tuning into Streams to Impact, brought to you by Steed Talker Capital, a company empowering passionate professionals like you to develop multiple streams of passive income built on solid passive real estate investments. As a significant part of our endeavors to make a cosmic and meaningful impact for this world, Steed Talker Capital contributes significant portions of our profits to activities and organizations committed to better understanding the equine. These endeavors attempt to enhance the treatment of horses worldwide. Steed Talker Capital, working for a world where all creatures great and small flourish abundantly. If you are ready to learn how our passive investors have earned an average 33% annual return on their investments, schedule your complimentary Passive Income to Prideful Impact consultation. Obviously, we cannot continue indefinitely to offer these valuable consultations for free, so grab your passive income to prideful impact consultation while you still can. Go to steedtalker.com/passive.