Building Wealth By Buying Businesses And Creative Dealmaking with Carl Allen and Adam Markley

Welcome back to Bacon Wrapped Business. This is Brad Costanzo. And today I am welcoming back a previous guest who was one of my favorite interviews and very well received by all my listeners. And we're talking about a topic that, if you've been listening for a while, you know, I love to get into. And this is creative deal making acquisitions, buying businesses, and really shifting your mind to the possibilities of what can happen when you zoom out and you look at why we're really in business and why we are struggling and hustling so hard to, you know, to do this entrepreneurial adventure that we all signed up for. And there really is a question that I think a lot of people don't ask themselves, which is like, why am I in business? Am I in business just to make an impact? Am I in business for cash flow? Am I in business to make a living? And a lot of us think we have to build it from scratch. And a lot of us have realized that sometimes we don't. Sometimes we can buy one. And today I am very happy to welcome back Carl Allen and Adam Markley to the show from the Dealmaker Wealth Society. Gentlemen, welcome to Bacon Wrap Business. Welcome back. The banking business.

Good stuff. Glad to be here. Yeah, absolutely.

And I've also got one of my business partners and close friends, Adeel Harchoi on the phone. And Adeel is a partner of mine in a venture where we are personally doing deals and acquiring IT service businesses. And you, my podcast subscribers, are the first to really hear about this. I have not been really talking about it too much in public. So I've brought a deal in not only as a close friend, but as somebody who we are actively doing what we are talking with Carl and Adam about today. So I'm really looking forward to seeing where this will go. I know on the last episode, Carl, we talked a little bit about, you know, why buy, etc. And for all of my listeners who haven't had the privilege of listening to that yet, let's go into the. I want to go into some of the introductions and the basics about this and set it up, but then I want to kind of get into some more advanced topics and really talk to people who've kind of already thought about this and. And some of the resources that you guys provide for them.

Cool. Awesome.

Let's do it.

All right, so as opposed to reading off a giant bio of the two of you, I'll tell my listeners a little bit what I know about the both of you. So I know Carl has done well over 100 deals in his life. You came from the investment banking background, if I'm not mistaken.

Yeah.

And I'll let you kind of give a little overview of your business. But then, Adam, you recently acquired Carl's business, which I find also fascinating. You acquired Carl's information and education based business around this. And you guys have really partnered up and taking deal well maker society to the next level. But if you want to give a little bit more color on your histories just so that people know, like, oh, wow, I really do need to be paying close attention to this.

Okay. So I started my deal making career in 92, so. So almost 28 years next month. So I went through investment banking, then the corporate M and A and then I started dealmaking for myself in 2008. So I retired from corporate life, decided to become a business broker, but ended up acquiring the business I was hired to sell, which is my first deal, and kind of really figured that this market was all about more psychology than numbers. So I started buying and selling my own businesses, built a portfolio. And then about four years ago, I started coaching and mentoring entrepreneurs that wanted to either buy their first business or buy other businesses and wanted to learn. The proprietary system that I developed built that business, did really, really well. And then I saw in Adam and Agora a partner to really do two things to really exponentially scaled the business and really put a dent in the buying and selling marketplace of small businesses. And then I also saw in Adam a deal partner. So, like, you and Adeel are partnering. Adam and I are partnering as well. We co founded a private equity fund last year and we're having a lot of fun doing deals. So the cool thing about us is we're both teaching this stuff and doing this stuff in parallel.

That's kind of rare, I'm not gonna lie.

But that's good.

That's why I love having you guys on.

Yeah, absolutely. And what's cool is, you know, the advantage of still doing while teaching is you're staying up to speed with what's happening in the market and how it's changing. Because as with anything, buying a business is a matter of what the landscape actually dictates. Right. You and Adele Adeel are going into this for yourselves and kind of full force and you're going to see and live it and feel it as you try to navigate your own deal flow. In terms of my background, I've got kind of the opposite of Carl. Carl started Wall street, I started main street. So I started my career in accounting and Finance worked with a lot of small business clients and have pretty much touched it feels like every industry in some capacity. At this point in my career, I'm good at two things. I can generally walk into any business and make it more money and I can build teams to help execute whatever those ideas are. And from there it's just a matter of finding the right opportunities to plug in. When Carl and I got connected, it's hard to say it wasn't anything less than a match made in heaven to some degree. But again, good deal maker, good deal maker combined we've got good complementary skill sets that allow us to work together and grow together and build together. Not just the training side of the training business itself, which as you mentioned, I acquired from Carl, but for us to really partner up and launch our own private equity and begin to show and build what a scaled small business acquirer looks like in kind of a new way and in a new age. We're not the typical go raise $100 million fund and, and spend all your money on kind of bigger middle market companies. Our focus really is on the sub $10 million per year revenue range. And as Carl said, it's more a game of psychology than it is finances. But you got to have acumen in both to some degree. And ultimately that's what we work to provide for people who are in the network. And that's just important to us. As we're doing this, we don't want to be just teachers, we want to be doers because one of them is a mission and a passion. We want to directly change the lives of as many people as we can through entrepreneurship and business ownership. That's a heartfelt mission that both Carl and I share. But at the same time, we're looking to the private equity for our own wealth creation from a generational perspective. And we see the opportunity there to be the moneymaker in scale while we serve that dual purpose of, of really providing providing people the path and knowledge and opportunity to either acquire their first business or if they already own a business, to do a bolt on, to combine their business with another business, either competitor, another complementary business that's got a similar client base, or someone up and down the supply chain. And so we want to work with those people and try to help them expand and grow as much as we can.

Right. And I am personally a member of the dealmaker wealth society. I've got access to your materials and it's. I gotta, I gotta tell my listeners right now that if this is something as we're Talking that intrigues you. The training in there is absolutely world class. It's very, it's. It's organized in a way that somebody who's never really done deals, who's never really understood this mindset and the process, because it can be new, it can be intimidating. You guys have done a really good job of laying it back out. I know I refer back to it often and I go back and every time I kind of get out of my comfort zone. Because this is one of those things that, I mean, I don't care how astute the entrepreneur is. This is an out of the comfort zone experience. It's been very. It's made me feel very good to go back in and go, oh, wait a minute. These guys actually have an answer for that question in one of the training modules. So I want to thank you for putting that together. And there will be a link in the show, not notes, if folks want to check it out and maybe explore this as an option on their own. But for those entrepreneurs out there who are relatively new to this concept of buy versus build, I know you guys have some good foundational concepts and I'd love for you to share it with some people because I love watching. I know how it happened to me when the epiphany hit and everything changed. Like, once I saw the world this way, I couldn't not look at it this way. What do you typically tell people who are more of the builders in order to help them see this from another perspective? As far as an opportunity goes?

Yeah. So there's kind of three elements to this. And first, I'll give you some Data. So in 2019, over 7 million Americans started a brand new business from scratch. 96% of those businesses will fail inside of 10 years, according to a friend of mine, Michael Gerber, who wrote the E Myth. And there's kind of statistics in different places, but generally between 80 and 96% of those businesses are going to fail. And when you think about it, there's kind of. It's easy to understand, and it's what we call the no problem. So when you start a business from scratch, you don't have a lot of stuff with you. You have no customers, no employees, no products or services, no equipment, no premises, no cash, no cash flow, no credit, and more importantly, no kind of reputation. And depending on what you're doing, especially if you're in the B2B market, then having no reputation, it takes a lot for a company to trust a completely brand new supplier. So when you acquire an existing Business that somebody else has built, survived, but they don't want anymore, then you're inheriting all those different things. You have the customers, employees, products and services. And even if you want to innovate something new in the market, go and buy a business in a sector that's similar, then you can innovate from within. Because guess what, you'll have cash flow that you can enjoy whilst you're doing it. You'll have employees that will help you in premises with equipment. And once you've built something, you've already got a bunch of customers that you can sell it to. So it's a much quicker, safer and easier process. And we sum it up by buying a car. So if you wanted a Tesla, would you go to the Tesla dealership and buy one that they've built and finance it through Tesla, or would you go and YouTube and figure out how to build it? Go and buy the wheels, the tires, the engine, the battery, the glass, the panel, the steering wheel, and then put it all on the driveway and think, you know, how the heck do I build this thing? No, you don't. You go and buy one that somebody else has built and you finance it through Tesla. So that's kind of the analogy that we use. But yeah. And what's also really interesting about the numbers, there's over 2 million small businesses for sale in America today. And a lot of that's driven by the baby boomer problem. It's 10,000 retiring every single day. And a lot of them own small businesses. And a lot of entrepreneurs, they get bored and want to go onto something else and want to try and sell their businesses. Yet only 1 in 11, 1 in 12 of those businesses will actually ever sell. So what we're trying to do, Adam mentioned our mission, is we're trying to connect all these entrepreneurs that are going to risk their lives starting a business and connecting them to all of these businesses that are already for sale and go and buy one of those instead. And use other people's money to finance the purchase.

Yeah, to tack on to that. Yeah, to tack onto that. Right. You know, those are, that's primarily for people who are in that start or buy kind of decision making process. And most of them don't even realize they're facing a decision. Their focus is on, hey, I got to make money, say I got to go make money online, right? Brad, you know all about this world. And so the idea is, right, these people are just like, I got to go make money online or I got to go do this thing and so they're going to quickly slap together some research on how they can start their own little business, hang a little shingle up, whether it's literal or online, and try to figure that whole thing out. And the reality is they just never realize there's a completely different path and a completely different option that can allow them to see, generally speaking, even better kind of cash flows personally than they could if they tried to start with a lot less of the hassle and frustration. And don't get me wrong, buying a business isn't like going to the store and buying a bike or going to a dealership and buying a car.

It's.

It's slightly more complex than that. But the challenge is you're going to go through all this work, pain, strife, et cetera, to start a business. Long hours, limited rewards, until you happen to get some momentum. And at that point, your relationship's at risk, your friendships are at risk. So much of your personal life gets sacrificed because you're trying to ramp up in a way, because again, as Carl said, you've got nothing. You have no customers, no money, nothing. And so for the people who don't have a business and are looking to start one to kind of get where they want to go financially, they're missing the biggest opportunity in the world out there. That's to go buy and establish one that already has cash flows, that already has customers, that already has staff to do the work. And by buying that business, you're leapfrogging the really hard part, and you're leapfrogging the highest risk part, right, where you run out of cash. It's the. The simplest answer in the world to the question is why do most businesses fail? It's because they run out of money. And if you buy a business that's already generating cash, you're going to have a greatly reduced risk of running out of money. And then the second thing is, for people who aren't what we call them broadly wantrepreneurs, and it's not a negative term, these are people who want to be entrepreneurs, the people who are already business owners, right? They don't necessarily even think of a business acquisition as a way to grow their company. They think about, we got to go hustle. We got to go build a marketing funnel that's gonna drive leads in, and then we'll convert them with our sales process. Or, you know, think about your average small little company. They're putting little slips and value packs and mailers and coupon trying to get people, if they're Like a window cleaning company or a siding company or roofing company. We've all seen those in our life. And the idea is those people sweat and hustle and grind to try to grow their business and not once do they either go, well, if I just bought that other guy who's doing the same thing as me and we just combine our companies, I've just doubled the size of my business effectively in a day, the day I sign the deal. And I don't have to worry about trying to hustle and grind on the marketing front. I've got more people, I've got more customers. And if they go and buy a complementary business, if you're a landscaper and you go buy a hardscaping company, you have this similar client base but you're doing different work. So you can cross sell and create synergies from a cost perspective, from a labor perspective, and then increase the revenue just by having already a captive audience, if you will. That's the baked in customer list from those businesses. And so people who are already entrepreneurs and already business owners. And this is exactly the situation, Brad, you and Adeel find yourself in as you guys are both business owners already, why not leverage what you have already and put that to work in acquiring companies that fit synergistically into what you already have to grow and scale? And so ultimately what Carl and I really focus on there is, listen, it's a lot harder to start a business than it is to buy a business. For both business owners and people who aren't already business owners, it's the better path for most of them.

Absolutely. And that's. It's such a different way of looking at things, but then once your mind opens to that, it's kind of hard to look back at it. One of the things that I'd love to hear from Adeel here for a second because we've got this unique opportunity where Adil really hadn't been. He's a business owner of a profitable business and he really hadn't been thinking in terms terms of growth by acquisition until recently. And I've actually never asked you this question, Adeel, but when it comes to thinking about, well, Adil, why don't you go buy a business or buy a competitor? What are some of the either objections or like, well, but I don't know this or what about what are some of those things that kind of come to mind? Like top of your head. Well, what about this? What about that?

Yeah, for me it's awareness, not knowing. There's a Whole different process. That's the traditional one, which is basically you need to have a lot of money in the bank to be able to go do that. So for me, as somebody, even being in the marketing for a long time and being in tech for a long time, I had no idea that this, this whole process exists. So therefore that, that whole process of buying a business was very, it's very intimidating. So you're like, ah, we're going to buy a business. You have to come up with, you know, if it's a, if it's selling for a million, you need to come up with, I don't know, 20%, 30%, 40% whatnot. So we did not know all the options. And it just sounds like two too good to be true or just takes a massive amount of money to acquire. So that was the first thing that just the intimidation of the idea. But it makes perfect sense why you should buy something that's profitable, it's making money than starting from scratch. Knowing what I know now, I would have done that in beginning.

Yeah, I think seven years.

I think you've hit the nail on the head. I think it is like anything in life, it's a skill that you have to master. You know, it's not the easiest thing in the world, you know, to achieve, but with training and mentors who have done it hundreds and hundreds of times before, it becomes a lot easier. And, you know, one of the reasons why only 1 in 11 to 1 in 12 businesses, you know, don't sell is there's not a steady stream of buyers that, A, to your point, truly understand the process and B, have the access to the capital that you need to actually do these deals. So, you know, that's the big gap in the market that Adam and I are filling by empowering entrepreneurs to become business owners or to grow their businesses by acquisition and giving them the systems, the frameworks, the tools and the access to capital to be able to do it.

One of the things that I love is the fact that there's so many ways to actually finance the purchase of a business without using money out of your own pocket, out of your own savings from doing leverage buyouts and using the assets of a business to finance the purchase of it, to just doing creative terms with the seller and understanding the seller psychology and understanding that there's money out there even for the down payment, even for that. Like if you do structure a deal where it's 20% down, like Adil was saying, that doesn't mean that you have to go into your own savings account and write a check for 20%. There's a lot of different creative ways that you guys teach that. It's one of those things that until you're even aware that that exists, you don't know what you don't know. And then it becomes, oh, my God, I never thought about that. I never thought about that. But we're in a position. We're in a time right now. You know, this is. I'm recording this on May 26, 2020. And, you know, I think most people know what's going on in the world right now. Covid quarantine has created an entirely disrupted economy. And I would really love to kind of steer this now towards. What are you guys seeing in terms of ability to get financing and what are some of the new and unique challenges that we're all working through in terms of business acquisitions?

Yeah, I think, you know, I think it is a really unique time in general. It's filled with uncertainty. No one knows what tomorrow will bring or the next day or. Or let alone a month from now or two months from now. And I think what's important is you gotta step back and you gotta recognize what are the real fundamentals of, say, the company or the industry that you're looking for and targeting. Right. You guys are brought. You know, you guys are targeting the IT services space. Well, those folks have seen nothing but an increase in work as a result of this. Everyone has been working from home effectively, outside of other kind of physical services. They've been broadly working from home. That's driving a massive amount of demand from infrastructure and otherwise. Right. Just the technology we're using right now to record the podcast is one where they've themselves seen a big ramp up. Right. Video conferencing, remote work, Internet bandwidth related issues are all changing, but that's the.

Way I heard that. Real quick. I heard that Zoom went from 10 million users in, like, February to at the end of March or April, 200 million.

It spiked. Yeah, it spiked.

Happy campers.

A little bit. Anyway, I didn't want to interrupt you too much on that train of thought, Adam.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think the best part of the Zoom story, just to tie it off, though, is so Zoom's publicly traded and their stock has definitely seen a bit of an increase. It's gone up roughly 50% or maybe 150% somewhere in there. Not terrible gains. The best part of the story to me is there's another company, a really tiny little company named Zoom, and their stock went up over 1000% until the listing.

They thought it was the zoom, like videos.

Yeah. Because their stock, their stock was a single digit stock, sub $10 stock and just exploded because everyone was buying the wrong one, which is great. That wasn't very distinguished. So it absolutely skyrocketed until New York Stock Exchange or wherever they were listed pulled them off just because of the, the misleading. But you know, that stuff aside, right. It's definitely been a unique time and it's honed in. What's really critical things that we all still need, whether we're out socializing in public or not, are we're always going to need distribution and logistics. Right. Stuff has to get from A to B. Whether we're remote or not, we got to get it from A to B. And distribution broadly has never been more impacted, especially last mile distribution. Right. It's one thing if you're doing centralized distribution, but when we're all sitting at home, that last mile distribution's a very interesting space. And then for people who are transitioning from physical locations to an Internet distribution model, an E commerce model, they're coming up with a whole bunch of new problems. They've not had to figure out what is shipping efficiencies and, and any technology associated with that broadly is going to be positively impacted. And then you've got obviously people on the wrong side of things. For example, these are the restaurants and retail locations. They're in a tough spot if they haven't found a good way to pivot. Restaurants, for example, are mostly bent over the barrel. Even if they are doing carry out and takeout by the major providers who are doing delivery services. I won't name them or anything like that, but, but those guys aren't necessarily doing a whole lot of favors to the restaurant industry. That's already been mandated in the worst way possible. Right. So we see tons of opportunity. Right. And beyond that, construction projects are still happening, infrastructure development is still happening. The country by and large still has to remain standing in many capacities. So we're seeing a ton of opportunity in that space. And I think most of the challenges related to this is then kind of tie into the question you asked around, financing. The goal is to buy a business without dumping a bunch of your own money in it. Not all business acquisitions will allow for that method, but we're seeing a pretty big change on the traditional financing side. This is you going to your bank and getting a regular commercial loan. They're really slowed down. And banks just spent six, seven weeks slammed with paycheck protection program. Right. Where they just doled out loan volumes like many of these banks don't even do in 12 months, let alone two years. It was a big fee success for a lot of them, but it crushed them. Their ability to evaluate any loans was paused and then now coming out of it, they're not even sure what kind of deals they're willing to finance.

But go back to the psychology we mentioned before that these deals are more about psychology than they often are about numbers. What we're seeing in the market is a lot of sellers. And we saw this after 9, 11. We saw this after the global financial crisis. I've seen this probably 10 times through my career, coming out of different recessions and so on is often these scenarios become like the straw that's going to break the camel's back. And you have a business owner that's built a business, son or daughter, doesn't want to take it over, that they want to exit, they want to retire, or they want to do something else. There's not a lot of buyers there that are going to take this business on. And often they just think, you know what, I just don't want to own this business anymore. And the psychology changes. And for a lot of them, they're happy to sell the business over time. We can call it seller financing, vendor financing, deferred payments, lease to buy. There's lots of different terms, but often a small business owner that still needs the cash flow every month, but doesn't want to go in and run the business, that's a perfect seller financing deal because you can pay them a split of the cash flow every single month as the business continues to trade. And what we find with the mindset of those business owners is Adam mentioned the word pivoting. Some of them, they just don't have it in them to pivot. So, for example, really good friend of mine, he owns an engineering company in England, and he called me right at the start of this and said, dude, I don't know what I'm going to do. My automotive manufacturers that used to buy my components, they're not ordering anymore. What am I going to do? And I said, dude, how quick and easy is it for you to pivot into the medical supply chain? The whole world's crying out for medical equipment, ventilators, respirators, all these sorts of things. He said, well, I could tell that stuff in 24 hours. I'm like, dude, jump on that. And now he's killing it. He's making tons more money than he was making components for performance motorbikes it's crazy. There's distilleries in Scotland that have pivoted to making hand sanitizer. And I think what we're saying is go and find a business like that where the owner doesn't want to make those changes, doesn't want to think outside the box. And if they've got the right distressed seller mindset, there are ways you can creatively finance that deal where you might not need any financing externally. You can just buy it exclusively using the money in the business. A deal that Adam and I closed before COVID we bought a really good technology company in London. No financing. We just paid the guy the surplus cash that he'd been stockpiling in the business. That was his closing payment, if you will, and then we're just sharing the future profits with him over a period of time. So creativity in deal structuring is A, something we're very good at and B, something that's really, really important as a deal maker.

I love that. And one of the things you mentioned too is, and I've got experience with this, this is a deal that I almost closed. I walked away at the very last minute. But it was a. It was a profitable walk away still, because I ended up doing a consulting deal with him. But I was going to buy 80% of his business, which had seen a decrease over the past year or so in his. It was 100% owner financing was the original negotiation. And one of the things I noticed, and this was the way I positioned it to him, is, listen, your. Your business has started to. So, you know, you did like 4 million last year or the two years ago, and then last year you did like 3.3. I don't really want to kind of come in and any money I would put into this business, I would, I would want it to go to marketing if I'm going to put money in. But I noticed that you used to pay yourself like $40,000 a month, and for the past year or so, you've been paying yourself 20,000amonth. If I were to step in and just guarantee you 30,000amonth, like that would. That's in essence what your payment would be. You'd be making 50% more, still own 20% of the business. And I. And then you'll get to participate as I grow it, et cetera. But I'm not only stabilizing your monthly income, but I'm increasing it by 50%. Would you be willing to do that? And he immediately said yes, with no negotiation. So it just kind of shows that, yeah, by. He was already kind of worn out by this and by stabilizing his income using the cash in the business, that was what got the deal done, or almost did. As I said, I walked away for various reasons. I won't go into all the details right now, but. No, I think that's brilliant. I'd also, I'd love to know, I'd love to drill down you mentioned with this tech company you recently purchased and we don't have to go into like the exact details, but you said something about, you know, paying him the surplus cash in the business and then letting him grow on top of that. Can you, you know, what more can you explain on as far as those terms go? Like, how does that work? So he obviously had X amount in the bank in cash, which was his money no matter what. Explain a little bit more details there.

Yeah, you see that far more commonly in the UK than you do in the US in deals. And it comes down to the respective tax regimes. In the US you would see it more commonly prior to the last major tax bill that was, that was done by Congress, which changed the corporate tax rate in the us so in the us, ordinary income for a business in a C corporation used to be at high mid 30%. That's why most businesses are S Corps and LLCs, they knocked that down to 21%. So in the US you really don't see the situation in the UK, you do. So in the UK, pretty much every business is taxed at the entity level and they've got fairly onerous tax rates. And a business owner can take advantage of two things when they go to sell. One, they can take advantage of capital gains treatment for the proceeds of the sale. And so that tax rates already a very steep drop from the ordinary rates that they're going to pay. On top of that, they have something called entrepreneurs relief, which prior to March of this year, the first $10 million of proceeds from the sale of your company would be taxed at only 10%. Right. So that's a really favorable rate. So if you sold your business for $10 million, every single penny of your gain would be at 10%. And so companies were comparing and Carl can tell us the exact tax rate, what the gap is. I think it's in the, in the 30s, Carl. So you've got someone who's paying say 35% potentially on their income if they just store up cash in the business and take that cash out as a part of the sale instead of paying tax at a 35% rate, they're paying tax at a 10% rate. So all of a sudden they're getting a big kind of relief on their tax bill. And so in the UK it's very common for us to see these small little businesses, right, Say a business that's doing a million pounds a year in revenue, they might have 500,000 of cash in the bank that they've just stored up over time, anticipating at some point selling the business or exiting the business, be able to bring all that cash out in a very tax favorable manner. And that's exactly what happened with the deal we did where it was a smaller company around a million or so of revenue in pounds and he had 600,000 of cash in the bank. Well, we didn't need $600,000 of cash to trade the business, so we kept 100 grand and wrote him a check for 500,000. So yes, we paid him his own money that he earned, but he effectively got a 25% premium on the money. So it's a huge value to him. So he effectively made an extra £125,000 on his own money just by structuring it in this way. And that's a huge value.

That really is. And it also goes to show you the benefits of start of like as an entrepreneur of starting to learn stuff beyond just the how to generate sales and marketing, etc. Because when you start to understand little nuances like that, it opens the doors for really creative financing. And I mean, did he even know that? Did you guys bring that to him or was he already kind of aware that that would be a benefit to him with the tax?

It was part of the conversation during the negotiation process. We ended up it was going to be a deal where surplus cash, seller financing and then an earn out. He didn't want the lack of comfort with an earn out. So we actually reduced the value of the overall deal and then extended the terms on the seller financing to be more favorable to us, just providing him a full guarantee on what he was getting paid from the business. And there's no personal guarantees on either myself or Carl or anyone else who's involved in the ownership of the business. So if for some reason things don't work out in the way we want, we just hand the keys back and say thanks for playing the game.

A part of it. He's continuing to run the operational aspect.

He's. Yeah, for a transitional period. Yeah, yeah.

How long do you typically, if somebody, if you're buying somebody and they're transitioning out, is There kind of a general average or rule of thumb to think like, okay, over the next year, six months, three years. I mean, I know it kind of depends on every situation, but have you.

Yeah, I'll give. Yeah, it's the best worst answer in the world. It depends. Right. And the problem is three months handover.

It can take six months. It all depends on the requirements of the seller. I've bought businesses many years ago where that the seller's wife had cancer and he needed to leave very, very quickly to take care of her. So in those circumstances, then, you know, it's a short handover and you've got to plan for that in the deal. But generally you want at least 90 days. Because what you'll find, Brad, when you're buying a small business is if it's not really systematized like a deals businesses, then a lot of the processes, the sops, the customer relationships, it's all in the mind of the business owner. So, you know, and often they don't really have a business, they just have a job in their own business. So you need a period of time to mine all that stuff and make the business function without them technically being in it. And then you could bring in a GM if you don't want to run the business yourself, a general manager, you know, have them transition and get trained up. So you're right, every deal is different.

You know, the mental, I try to pay attention whenever I'm starting something new or doing something, as I said, a little out of my comfort zone and looking at bigger businesses and some of the mental, I guess, hurdles, challenges, roadblocks, doubts, beliefs or whatever that I have because, I mean, I think this is part of being in marketing. Like I always try to pay attention to what's going through my head so that I can use it later. But you know, some of the stuff that I wrote down, I thought I would share with you guys because I'm sure that a lot of people struggle with this as well. And I probably know more than the average bear does about this stuff compared to most entrepreneurs in my position because I've done small deals and I've studied this in depth, but I have yet to do like a big multimillion dollar deal. But I know some of those struggles are getting into momentum. Like there's the amount that you have to learn. It's not insignificant, it's not overwhelming, but it's not insignificant. Right, because you have to learn a new way of looking at this. You have to sometimes look, learn it, you know, understanding financials in a way that you've never looked at them before. Because a lot of entrepreneurs, we just kind of, especially small ones, we just kind of get things going. We look at the P and L, we looked out at the net income or how much cash we're taking home, and that's it. We ignore everything else as a smaller business. And then understanding the nuances of due diligence and understanding the, you know, all the different ways to potentially get a deal done. I know I've struggled sometimes with just get in momentum and figure it out. Like, start having conversations, get into it. You'll figure it out. You know, once you cross that bridge, which is, I think, the way a lot of us build a business. Like, you know, jump and what do they say? Build the plane on the way down. And then the other part is because this piece crept up when I did my LOI for that initial business, and this was the first multimillion dollar business I ever did an LOI for. And then there was that moment of, oh, crap, like, now what? Like, I don't know what I don't know. And I don't want to make a mistake. Like, I don't want to make a mistake buying something that could then end up costing me millions of dollars or hundreds of thousands or whatever. And I know that some of those butterflies in the stomach that kind of pop up. Granted, at the time, I don't even think I had, like, access to your, you know, resources, you know, et cetera, but specifically that first question, because I guarantee there's some listeners, and myself included, like, getting into momentum versus feeling like you need to learn everything. Like, you can go through your entire course and, you know, there's hours of material in there. Like, to what degree do I need to understand the specifics in there before most people feel comfortable in taking that action and getting on the phone with sellers and starting to analyze deals. What do you tell folks who are in that particular position?

I think there's two things people have to be committed to. One is to take action. You'll never even encounter what momentum feels like if you don't take step one. This was Brad. You and I are on the phone, I don't know, a month or so ago, and we were talking about that and going from being industry agnostic and having the skill set where you can work successfully in pretty much any industry, in any business. And the challenge is you're in the middle of the field, you have no direction, and you go in any direction. You can run anywhere. And the problem is when you're rudderless and you're directionless, you can do anything. And it's hard to actually take action, putting that first foot forward. So being able to take action doesn't necessarily mean running yet. It simply means making the decision of who do you want to be, why do you want to do this and what do you want to buy, right? So Carl and I talk about this all the time over in dealmaker wealth society. We always talk to people about know your why, why are you doing this? This is really, really important and that's going to drive the rest of it. And you can't take any other action until you know why you're even doing it. The second thing is we always focus. Stay in your lane, stay in your lane. So if you've got expertise in some area, stay in your lane. Right? Adeel's got an IT business. It would be really wise of him to focus on acquisitions that are in some way related to his core expertise. Because some of those butterflies and excitement you might feel, those can be mitigated by having a good network and a good team around you. But your ability to sit in front of the seller of a business and confidently talk about what their business is and how it works, have any kind of understanding of it, you've got to be able to stay in your lane a little bit. And then the final thing really of this kind of bigger two part thing is one is to be an action taker, you have to know your why and you have to really stay in your lane. And then the second thing is you've got to surround yourself with one, a good mentor or two, someone who's been there and done that. That's the only real way to escape that trapped circle of I only know what I know and, and I don't know what I don't know. And if you can't escape that, you won't be able to move forward. So finding a good mentor is important. And then that mentor is going to lead you to building out a team that ultimately supports what you do. Right. This is a really good CPA or accountant, really good attorney who knows what small business deals look like, right? You don't need the guy who's done 500 million, $1,010,000,000,000 deals. That guy is not going to be the great resource for you. You want someone who's done transactions, buy, sell transactions that are in that sub 20 million dollar range. They know what a small business deal looks like. They know how to right size their work and their fees and understanding for that small business owner, as you said, Brad, you're pretty much just seeing how much is the checking account or cash account going up every month. And there's. That's what I've made, right. There's a whole lot less nuance to what many of those businesses are, are doing.

So no one's expecting an entrepreneur to do every single part of buying a business. Your job really is to be the quarterback of the deal, you know, to even be the coach of the team. If you were buying a piece of real estate, you wouldn't be the legals yourself. You'd hire an attorney to say when you're buying a business, they're qualified to paper the transaction. When you're looking at the numbers of the business, that, that due diligence process, you're not going to do that yourself. Either the financier is going to do it for you if they're backing you in the deal, or you're going to have a CPA go through the numbers and make sure that what you're buying is what you think you're buying. And for me, there's three skills you need to master if you want to buy businesses. The first is you've got to really master your mindset. So Adam touched on it before. It's that different way of thinking. And it's really, once you know your why, it gives you the rocket fuel to kind of power you through when things get difficult. The second thing, the second skill you really need to master is the art of building relationships. This is a relationship business. The biggest mistake most business buyers make is only go to business brokers for deals like bizbysell.com or Empire Flippers. And the best deals that I've ever done, the best deals that Adam's ever done have come through our network and building relationships with the networks that we have. And then the third skill is we talked about negotiation. It's the art of listening. I think Chris Voss in his book Never Split the Difference, recommends you listen three times more than you speak. And it's so true, because when you listen, you'll elicit clues from a seller as to what they actually want. And in a lot of cases, this is going to sound crazy. About 80% of people that sell a business money is not their primary motivation. They want other things like protecting their legacy, safeguarding their employees, keeping the name of the business, keeping the logo of the business, how to deal with that happened to me. And once you understand what they really want and then you map your deal around that often, that can Take away from some of the financial elements inside of the deal.

Yeah, that's powerful. Adam, were you just about to add something to that?

No, I think Carl's touching on it perfectly there at the end. Where it comes down to relationship and being able to understand what the person across from you really wants and needs, building that rapport with them. Again, we're talking about so many different scenarios here, but if we use a specific, again, going back to IT services, where you guys are interested collectively and potentially making acquisitions, you've got the technical know how to be able to speak comfortably and confidently and present yourself as a credible buyer in the industry. So that, that's a big old check, checkbox. But then to really understand what the seller wants is exactly what Carl just said. You've got to learn to shut up after asking an open ended question and just letting them talk. And these people love to talk. It's their business. It's important to remember that most sellers, if their business has been around for 15 years plus, they've spent more time with their business than they have their own children. Think about that. They're working in the business at least 40 hours a week, more likely than not, potentially even 50 or 60. If they started it and grew it, and if it's a business that's been around 20, 30 years, this is no question the case. They've literally spent more time with their business and that environment than anything else in their life, kids included. And so when you go to buy that business, realize if any of you guys who are listening have kids, imagine selling your child. That's a pretty terrifying thought. If you have a child, imagine then as a business owner, you're selling something that they've put more heart and soul and work and effort into than they have potentially their own kids. And I'm not saying these are people who don't love their children. What I'm saying is just from a raw amount of emotional connectivity to their business, that's the power they have in connection with it. So for you to be able to sit there and listen and understand what their real motivation is and understand what's really driving them to sell. Right. Carl and I talk all the time about kind of three questions to ask a seller. And the first one is so critical. Why are you selling? Just ask that question and don't talk for a long period of time. And if there's that awkward pause, let it hang. Let them continue telling the story because they're going to unpack a massive amount of value for you as a potential Buyer, how you can serve their needs while protecting your needs as well. You know, for me, any deal, if I don't walk away a winner, the seller doesn't walk away a winner. And then any broker, intermediary, if there is any, if everyone doesn't walk away a winner of all those parties, it's a deal not worth doing. Right? And that's just really critical. Everyone has to walk away feeling like they got the right end of it. If anyone's burned, think about how you're going to struggle transitioning relationships, transitioning from an employee perspective or process perspective, right. If someone feels burned, they're not going to necessarily look to do it in a good faith way. And that creates a whole lot of problems. So, you know, as you've experienced where you walked away from a profitable deal, Brad, sometimes the right situation isn't the one where you buy the company. It's where you either continue helping them in some capacity or you just fully walk away. And it's just important to realize that there are literally millions of businesses for sale out there. If you miss one opportunity, it doesn't mean the end of the world. Keep looking, keep hunting. Absolutely.

Well, and as somebody, I would imagine that there are some other consultants and experts and agencies, et cetera, who listen to my show. But I know for me, one of the powerful combinations there is, I could either I have two great options. Well, three, I could walk away. I could not help you. I could buy your business or part of it, or I could just consult with you. So just by getting in the process of looking and having those conversations and trying to solve problems with Win Win solutions, it can turn into amazing opportunities and vice versa. I always give advice to other consultants and agency owners that if you're helping somebody with, for instance, with their marketing, you should also be at least asking the questions. So big picture here. Have you ever even thought about selling your business or what are your big plans there? Because it might, you know, consulting with somebody might end up becoming an acquisition or partnership opportunity and vice versa. I want to change gears a little bit. I want to take this a little more specifically to, you know, one, one of the things that Adeel and I are working on, I've got just a handful of specific questions, but these are also applicable to anybody who's doing this. So one of the things I know about you guys, for instance, you know, most of the businesses that you guys look for to acquire, they seem to be, I want to call them real businesses. I want to say non digital only businesses like either physical or real world main street businesses versus a lot of the folks who are just buying like E commerce or digital based businesses. Right, so that is correct that you guys tend to look for more non online only, is that right?

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Because a lot of online businesses. Yeah, go ahead Carl.

So I was gonna say when you online businesses there's this kind of two categories. There's this kind of ecom businesses like selling supplements or Amazon type stores. We don't tend to focus on those deals. But then there's online businesses that are providing services. So like SaaS businesses and those different types of things? Yeah, is that what you mean?

Yeah, typically. Because I know a lot of the people who in my circle that I work with are considered to some more digital marketers or digital entrepreneurs where I mean really most businesses have a degree of online presence and you can even be online almost primarily online. I mean to a degree a deals is, I mean he's got a tech that goes out and does the servicing things but a lot of the, you know, the business is generated from online methods, etc. He doesn't have a physical location, it's all virtualized.

Yeah, there's no issues with companies like that. I think speaking specifically to your network. Right. These are people who by and large are digital marketers. Again this is the, the classic situation. Whether you're that little landscaper who's got a million dollar a year business and you're trying to figure out how to grow to 5 million, if you're a digital marketer running a consulting group or an agency or anything like that, you're in the same boat as that landscaper. It's hard to acquire customers no matter what space you're in, whether it's online or otherwise. You know, typically for online things, what Carl and I stay away from is we stay away from any business where you don't control the customer experience. Right. So Carl mentioned Amazon businesses. They're great businesses for people who want to be in that space. For us we're just not necessarily interested in them because at the end of the day you don't actually control your customers experience and to do so puts your entire business at risk. Should Amazon jump into the middle of that and be unhappy with, you know, maybe you scraping your customer data or something like that. That's just not something we're interested in. Right. Businesses are so heavily leveraged on like a single offer or a single kind of product or service so singular that they don't have any way to truly sell it except hey, I'm going to take some cold traffic and run it through a funnel and then execute a sale and all that other stuff. Those are really risky businesses if you're dependent on one, maybe two offers. Because what are you losing by transitioning from the seller to the new owner? Is there a secret sauce? As you guys well know, copywriting in a digital marketing space is key. Are you losing some level of creativity or product knowledge or relationship with the customer base by making that transition? Those are just other different risks.

Right.

That said, I'm not afraid to buy those businesses. Bought Carl's.

Exactly.

I think there's, you know, I think there's, I think there's opportunity there. I would just encourage people to be critical in how they approach it and think of it.

And I want to, and I want to build on that question because I said that's one of the reasons that like I know that business very well. I know digital space from SAS to information to, you know, E commerce, et cetera. One of the things I don't like about it is there seems to be fewer moats. There seems to be fewer ways to defend yourself. Like versus if you have a service based businesses, you're working with other local businesses, there's a degree of, of not anybody can just come in and immediately take your place in the search engine rankings or whatnot.

Yeah, as I said, there's Big brother risk. Right. It just takes Google or Facebook to come in and smack you. If you're driving your traffic from either of them as sources and if they're 70% of your traffic into your customer acquisition funnel, then, well, whatever you just bought, the value just got decimated and there's a lot of risk there. And I think, again, I think it's different.

Right.

A way an online business builds a moat is recurring revenue. Recurring revenue is incredibly powerful. It completely changes the dynamic of the lifetime value of the customer and what that looks like. So it changes how you can acquire customers and what your sales cycle looks. But again, our core is like we traditionally prefer B2B businesses. B2B businesses don't have a ton of customer service expense in the same way a B2C business does. A B2C business can be like Facebook itself, right? Where you can go from nothing to 100 billion plus mega company to obviously even higher. If you think Apple and Microsoft, Apple's a great example. Trillion dollar company that's born out of a B2C environment. You can have unbelievably incredible exponential growth. However, those are very few and far between if you think about the number of companies out there that are selling B2C type products exclusively online, it's not to say you can't be successful. If you've got the right skill set, have at it. Understand how you set those deals up has to be different and has to take into account risk variables you're just not going to see in a more traditional B2B business.

Right.

Plus, I love the fact that a lot of the folks in our position, a lot of the folks who are listening to this show, if they do come from a digital marketing background, and I know, for instance, my skill set is tremendously valuable to a traditional business who hasn't been using things like this. So I think if folks are listening who have a digital marketing background, understanding that learning how to do this and taking those steps and then applying them to traditional businesses can create.

Amazing point, Brad. That is such a great point. Because what's really interesting, when you look at most small businesses in the United States, most of them do little to no marketing. You know, and Adam mentioned before, what's the first question we ask? Why are you selling? Second question we ask is, how do you make money? How do you scale? What's your business development process? And the two analysts say, you know, Carl, this is what's great about my business. We don't do any marketing. It's all repeat recurring customers and it's all word of mouth referrals. We've never done any marketing in our lives. So I love those businesses for two reasons. One, because you know, you've got a really solid, stable cash flow base. And it means that if people are referring them, they're more kind of raving fans than just customers. But then we know, we go into that business and we implement some marketing, you know, we're going to exponentially grow that business over and above that truly solid base and what we term that, having a horizontal skill set. So when Adam mentioned before about, you know, stay in your lane, especially for your first deal, buy businesses in areas that you know and you understand. But the one exception to that is where you've got a really solid horizontal skill set that can add massive value and quickly to pretty much any business. And marketing is one of those skill sets. And if you don't want to buy a business and do that to your earlier point, Brad, you can partner with that business owner and grow that business 50 50. So the consulting for equity type of approach, you can go in and rather than get fees for doing that work, you can get a share of the business. A share of the profits. And then when you scale a business because you're leveraging what your skill sets actually are, it's a win win because the seller is going to grow the business, they're going to make more money in the future. You're going to make money as you do that work and then ultimately you can both sell it together or you can buy the seller out at a future point in time. So yeah, I love it.

One of the, one of the directions that Adeel and I are taking right now, so this is more specific to what we're doing. I'd love your feedback. So last week Adil and I spent a couple hours on the phone and I basically did due diligence on his business because I don't, I didn't understand it. And I'm lucky enough to have the ability to, you know, in partnering with Adil, I get to do due diligence, which I've done some to kind of understand the business and the operations and the finances and the marketing, etc. From his angle. One of the next things we are doing is beginning a plan for reaching out and starting up conversations just with other people in that market. A more specific question I had was when reaching out to people, weather cold and not so much through a broker, but I mean maybe, maybe through a broker, but let's just say we've got people we're reaching out to. I have the ability because I have a company, Costanzo Capital, so I made everything from angel investments to acquisitions there. But it's completely agnostic towards the industry. I've got the ability to approach them as that kind of a professional investment group that is acquiring businesses. Got the ability to approach them as somebody else in that business. For instance a deals business looking to acquire. So almost like a competitive, like a consolidation or we have the ability to approach them as listen, looking to buy a company, like kind of a solo business owner aspect. I was curious if you guys had any insight. There's, there's no one perfect answer, but any insight on what might get the most doors and conversations opened. And one of the reasons I asked that is a deal is Forward me like 20 different emails. He gets emails all the time from people looking to buy a business. They're fishing, right? And I was kind of going through there and I was kind of like. And I've seen all of them, like all types. I'm like, huh, I wonder what feels the least. Oh, what do you call it? I can't think of the word right now. But what's like the easiest conversation starter versus the like. Somebody comes to me as like, oh, I'm an investment capital group, almost like a PE company. I kind of feel like that's colder and less personal versus somebody who's in.

The industry already in the small business space. The main thing you want is to be able to build a relationship. If you're coming in as just like a faceless equity group up front, you're gonna limit yourself to some degree, I believe. I think it'll carry a little bit more weight if you're going through a broker or some other intermediary in that path. But if you're directly reaching out to people, do so as you, the human, do so as you. Hey, my partner and I, we're familiar with this space. It's a space we've operated and run businesses before in. So you're building your credibility, your industry experience a little bit. And here's why we'd be interested in talking to you. And to do that, you want to know, do your research on who they are, what they are. You know, we've all seen those kind of cold emails soliciting some kind of response. It's like three lines, clearly form emailed, all templatized, nothing custom. You know, they clearly grabbed your name and one thing from your LinkedIn bio or something like that, and that's it. Yeah, we just all delete those. They're gonna do the same thing. And if you're sending the communication digitally, it's just like an email you would to an email marketing list or something like that. It's gotta have a subject line. It's gonna get them to open. And the content of the email has got to drive them to one action, and that's just to reply. So you've got to put enough. You've got to put enough of yourself in there for them to get a feel for who you are and why you're really there. And it can't look form, it can't look copied and paste. It has to be tailored. This is the kind of thing where you might spend an hour or two hours crafting an email and doing the right level of research on there.

I'm really old school, Brad. I write to people. I write to people. And my goal is to build high levels of rapport from that initial letter. And what I do in that letter is three things. So I tell them who I am and what I'm looking to do. The second thing that I do is I compliment them on their business, what they've achieved, so 27 years ago you couldn't do this, but today you can. You can go online and find out loads and different things about the business, Awards they've won, new clients they've signed up all these different things and get really granular with that. And then the third thing that I do is I find out something about the owner, whether it's on Facebook, LinkedIn, and I'll find kind of connections between my life and theirs and I'll drop those things into that communication. So then when I follow up with a phone call, they know who I am, they know why I'm writing. They like me because I've been really positive about their business and they feel a connection to me because there'll be things that I can talk about outside of business. And, you know, I never go into a call ever and start talking about business. I want to understand who they are, what, you know, what drives them, what motivates them. Do they have a family? How old are their children? And then I'll talk about my children. Do they play sport, do they watch sport, what kind of wine do they like? Those kind of crazy things. And you might think that's nuts, but it's all about building relationships and building rapport. And then once you've got that really dialed in, then it's a lot easier to have a meaningful kind of business and meaningful deal conversation. Right?

Adeel, I'd love for you to pipe in here because as I mentioned that you, you've shared with me a lot of the different emails that you've received. Now, granted, you weren't in the mindset of I want to sell my business. Right? So it wasn't like top of mind. I'm just going to reply. But you've replied to some of them. Did, did, did certain of them give you a feel more of like, I'm not going to take that guy seriously or I'm not, I'm not even interested versus other ones. That kind of maybe did pique your curiosity.

Well, I've seen the same template, like Adam was saying over and over and multiple times. And actually, in fact, I called out one time, one person, I said, hey, I know, I think it seems like you guys taking the exact same course. I think you guys should change this. And he got very, very defensive about it. And but like, hey, I'm in the marketing as well. So the idea, when I get those emails, they're very just like you met a chick at the bar and she's like, hey, let's go home right now. So it was nothing else. It was just literally super offensive. And some of them just go into details in the first email and that to me that's a complete turn off. And I just decided, you know what, I'm just not the only time actually that I considered opening and replying is when that idea of negotiate, when you don't have to, just to explore. So and I start just going back and forth with them just to see what it is until they get to the hey, send us and we're gonna send you a non disclosure. And then that's where my conversation stops. But other than that, I just feel like they're just very templatized. Just like Carl too said, there's not that personal touch. There's no, just generic, hey, let's go, let's go home. That's, let's go home right away versus let's build a relationship.

I love that, I love that. And that. See that's I'm fortunate to have that ability to be able to tap into a deal's perspective as the business owner and do this.

Yeah, I think the thing is, right, like as a business owner just feels like role play, but just role play. If I were to sell my company, who would I want to sell my company to? And think about things you would be concerned with, right? Write that list down and then realize that you as a buyer, you have to answer all of those things and be able to answer them cleanly and correctly. What would you be concerned about? Would you be concerned about your employees? Would you be concerned about, you know, what would you be concerned about? You know, what would you ask? Right? And everyone's got different, we'll have different lists there. And it's important you, you've got the capacity to understand that because you go to buy companies, that's exactly the kind of thing they're doing. That's the same exercise they're going to go through on the spot live. And that's why, as Carl said right from the beginning, you don't want to say hey, I'm going to buy your company. How much is it? No, that's not it at all. It's hey, who are you? Why? You know, how did you get here? Do you have a family? Do you have kids? What do you like doing in life? Do you like to travel? Great. Where have you been? Okay, cool. Both of you guys went to Columbia last year. Awesome. Tell me about that. Where'd you stay? What'd you do? You know who got drunk more than the other? Right? Like what's the story of life there, as Carl said, is there a sports affinity, something that's relatable? Right.

You want to be rapport.

Yeah. You want to be able to grab that and hold it. And then the next time you talk to them, call back to it. If there's something that's happened or if you see a news article that ties to something they're interested in just seeing, send it to them and say like, hey, saw this, made me think of you. Hope, hope this is going well. And be specific. If I ever get an email that just says, hi, Adam, hope you're doing well, and then they've moved on, it already tells me they don't care about who I am. And they haven't tied back to anything we've talked about. It's just very generic. Don't just say, hey, hope you're doing well. Hey, hope you're doing well. How are your kids doing with this thing? Last time we talked, they aren't, you know, and there's something specific. It's tied in. You know, Carl, since quarantine started, he's taken up a lot of cycling again since he's been home so long. Carl, how many miles did you ride last week? Any. Any crazy weather that impacted it and you're being hyper specific and then that person coming back to you is going to just really lock in on it.

Super important. I know that one of the next things that I was thinking about doing, unless you guys think that this is not even necessary, as we are both getting more familiar with the. Well, me, especially with the industry, is starting off with broker listings to just begin the taking a look at deals that are already out there, but also realizing that the best deals are not listed with brokers. Would you recommend that to some of your newer students or even people who are just trying to get more familiar? Start with the broker deals so you can look at their packages that they put together and then move on to the other ones. Or would you say you don't even need that and to skip that?

So there's kind of the big advantage about broker deals is, you know, the business is for sale because they've gone to a broker. What we tend to find with brokers is brokers are really in the business of selling businesses to other businesses, and they put huge premium valuations on there because they know that businesses can get leverage when they combine. So my golden rule is I'll only look at a broker deal if it's been listed for nine months. So if you want to go to brokers because it's the short path to getting some deal flow. Qualify the deals out that are kind of recent listings and then you complement that with doing some direct approaches. As we just talked about, building a list of companies, you like writing to them in a rapport building way. And then also leveraging social media again. In 1992, when I started my career, there was no Facebook, There was no LinkedIn, there was no Google, There weren't forums and blogs and groups and all these different things. You just called people up. And so social media is just making networking a lot more efficient, especially LinkedIn. It's a phenomenal tool. There's so many groups on there that you can tap into and really it's just covering the bases. As Adam quite often says. It's taking, you know, lots of great shots on goal. So, you know, don't focus on one particular method for doing deal origination. We teach tons of them inside of the program, but. And it's doing, it's doing dealer origination as well in areas where you're comfortable. Like some people are maybe a lot more introverted, so they might get a lot more success leveraging social media. A lot of people, like all four of us on the call, we're very extroverted. So we don't think anything of going to networking events and tapping people up. So it's all about what makes you comfortable, but it's diversifying yourself across lots of different ways.

Yeah.

And I think just one thing to remember about brokers or any other intermediaries, you're not just negotiating with the seller. You've got to keep a third party happy. Right. So you've just added to the complexity of the process. To me, it's a little bit of tortoise in the hare situation. Right. The hare is the broker deal. You can get a ton of listings really quick and as Carl said, you know, the company's for sale. And so that's a, it's a, it's a way to jumpstart into looking at listings. The challenge is you're now working through someone who controls the relationship with a seller in most cases. And you've lost the ability to really connect with them, understand what they want. Because now you've got someone who impacts the deal structure because they need to get paid. They're not doing that for free. And that's gonna happen.

I don't have any incentive for the creative deal making either. They want, they don't come in the checks.

Yeah. They want someone who's gonna write as big a cash Check as possible so they can hit the door. So.

Yeah, well, one of the things. I know that from this private message here, I know Carl's got a hard stop right now. I want to. I want to respect your time, Carl. If you need to jump off, sounds like you may even have something else. And then, Adam, if you want to stay on for a few more minutes, we can wrap up and you can talk about a handful of the other resources you've got. But, Carl, thanks so much for. It's always fun to see you and chat with you. I get so much out of our conversations and I can't tell you how much I appreciate you being on the show today.

Thank you. Thank you, buddy. Just a little quick story for you that the picture you and I took when we met in San Diego is my most liked Facebook pic of 2019.

That's because I went to Fiverr and I bought like tons of ads. That's why.

All right, guys. See you guys later.

Marketing 101. So.

Yeah, that's great, Adam. I appreciate that. Because my. My thought process there was not so much to look for deals there, but to familiarize myself with. Cause I know the one, the one good thing. Not only do you know they're for sale, but they've actually taken the time to put together the financials and the packages. Yeah, so you've got real familiar.

Yeah, so there's limitations to that. Right? Nothing. You see. And we call, you know, their information memorandums or. Yeah, they've got a bunch of different names for them, but all those packets. Never trust the numbers in them. Never trust the descriptions in them. You've got to ascertain everything on your own, directly with the seller in some capacity. For example, financial statements, they're all transcribed by and large. So that's someone messing with the numbers. It's not coming straight out of an accounting system. You need to verify that. I would never even put an offer in on something if I didn't have that ability to do.

So you're saying if you're going to do the work anyway, don't just waste time with those. Like, go to the ones.

And I'm not saying they're all bad. I just, you know, we see it a lot with our students. They're just like broker centric. They just want to break. Browse bizbysell.com and businessbrokers.net and just all the broker type sites. And it's like you're missing the biggest opportunity out there. And that is that this is a psychological game. Not A raw numbers game and just blitzing IMs means you're just wasting a ton of time on stuff that's going to be hard because how many of those people are you going to build a real relationship with and go to consummate a deal? Right? Like that's, you know, that's actually what you're looking for. You know, the, the end line isn't the number of leads you're dumping in your funnel. The end goal is to convert and actually buy the company. Right. You know, if I had a sales funnel. Speak digital marketing for a minute, right? What kind of sales funnel would I rather? Would I rather one that's going to take ten leads and get me one sale or a hundred leads and get me one sale?

Yeah, ten and one, obviously.

Ten and one, obviously, right. Because I can work on scaling that a little bit more appropriately and my acquisition cost is significantly less and people are like, well, I'm not buying anything. Right. If we're sticking with the marketing, you're not buying anything, but it's an opportunity cost. You're spending time on 90 deals you don't need to spend time on and that aren't necessarily going to come to any sort of real fruition. And, and so for me, less is more. That said, Carl already said one of my catchphrases. It's about number of quality shots on goal. You know, if you're, if you're really good at dealmaking, you might close 1 in 10, 1 in 15 opportunities, like real opportunities. The reality, it's like a 1 in 20 game and that's just normal. So you've got to be out there like really hustling and pushing and you know, it's limited scale, right. It's hard to get statistically significant on that in an individual basis. But I would always every single time prefer quality shots on goal than just any shot. And broker out gets people into that, any shot. Because you're just dealing with people who have other economic interests. You know, I'm not a big fan of buyer's agents, so people who go out because often they're just going and finding broker listings and bringing them to you. So now I've got four parties involved and that just gets even more complicated. Listen, build a relationship. As Carl was talking about, social media has made this incredibly easy. If you're willing to put yourself out there right again, you want to represent yourself to some degree. You guys are smart, savvy people speaking about you two, especially here, like leverage what you've got, you've got Great presence, you've got great communication skills, you've got great industry knowledge as a team of buyers. So leverage that. Poke around on LinkedIn, find people in your space, you know, both geographically and nationally who's doing what you're doing to some capacity. Start there and effectively create your look alike audience and go from there. Right? I mean, that's, you know, to me that's the easiest way. Build. Build a network, right? Carl and I are all about building a network with four types of people. Accountants and CPAs, wealth managers, financiers, so banks and lenders and attorneys. Right? Those four people. When someone wants to sell a business, they're going to tell those four people, right? They're going to tell their bank because, hey, things might be changing with the business relationship. They're going to tell their CPA because what am I going to have to pay taxes on? They're going to tell their attorney. So their attorney knows, like how am I legally protected and all that. And then their wealth manager is definitely going to know because that dude's looking for the big check getting deposited into the manager so he can make more fees on it. So those four people all have vested interest in business transactions and they're constantly talking to their own customers and clients. And so it's important to be able to network and to build that out. You'll get far better deal flow from that.

Have you done anything specific to build out? I mean, because it's easy to build a relationship with one of each, right? Because a lot of times we have, as entrepreneurs, we have a cpa, we have a financial advisor, we may have an attorney, et cetera. But as far as building a bigger network with those people, is there anything proactively you've done to expand that circle beyond.

Yeah. So every one of those four people has their own networks, right? So it's kind of that bigger network effect. So your CPA is going to know a bunch of banks, going to know a bunch of attorneys, and going to know a bunch of wealth managers. So you talk to your CPA and you tell your CPA, hey, here's what I'm looking to do. Do you have any recommendations of anyone else in these three categories that I can talk to and network with? Then you do the exact same thing with the next person. You talk to your attorney and say, hey, do you know any CPAs or wealth managers or banks? I should go talk to you. And you go to your wealth manager. And so like you've just taken your four direct connections and assuming they each Give you one more connection for the other three groups. Right. A CPA is giving you a bank, an attorney and a wealth manager. Right. So you've just added three times four. You've just added 12 more parties into your network, presuming there's no overlap. Right. So all of a sudden you went from 4 to 16 people in your network. Now you've got to do the work to reach out and build the relationships. And you're gonna find one path will be more successful for you than another and you'll tend to lean and start working in that way. But it's all about the conversation, you know? I know. So last Monday, generally every Monday, Carl and I do Mindset Monday for people in dealmaker wealth society. So we go live on Facebook and last week we challenged people. How many conversations can you have with either sellers or intermediaries? Which are those four groups we just talked about? And then brokers, etc. How many conversations can you have in a week? You know, the highest person who's in that group hit 22 conversations from Monday to Friday.

Nice.

So think about that. If you were even able to do a quarter of that, say you do five a week. Five conversations a week is 250 conversations a year. If you take two weeks off, that's a lot.

If you can't find some gold sifting through that filter.

Yeah. And. Exactly. And people say all the time, the time, the time. These aren't three hour conversations. These can be simple relationship building. 30, 45 minute conversations. Then the key for you to is follow up. Right. Again, I'd rather have 10 to 20 people who I'm their first call when something comes across their desk in that space than 150 people who don't really know who I am, except that I reached out to them once. You want real relationships. So like if you've got that network now of 16 people, you probably don't need that much more, provided you're constantly evaluating if they're the right network for you. Right. You're going to sub some people in and out. But the idea is like, build real meaningful relationships. Someone's like, man, I need a really smart guy for some consulting stuff. They might not even be able to talk to you about an acquisition, but now you've built a business development arm. If you're say a marketer like yourself, Brad, where they can plug in or they already know you've got an IT services company, they're going to have clients who are frustrated with their current providers. So boom, you've added business development to your existing platform already. So there's other interstitial, like, benefits from building these relationships because you're simply taking someone else's client base and turning it into your client base and your network. That's the power of that kind of network effect. It's a long.

That's so strong. One of the things I love about that is that that is one of my personal superpowers, is relationships access and relationship development. It's one of the things that I feel very comfortable with. This podcast is just an extension of what I kind of naturally do, which is, like, I love to have conversations with people about topics I'm interested in. So I, you know, made a business around it or a business feeder. But I love that. The fact that it's also. It's psychological. And, you know, when it comes down to the numbers, I've oftentimes let myself get a little bit. I mean, even though I have a financial finance background, it's. This is not. The spreadsheets and stuff are not my comfort zone.

And that's something you can outsource. Right? Like, it's all about building your team. If you know what you're good at. Great. Brad, you're a home run on the relationship side, but you're weak on the spreadsheet side, man. Rip backwards into, say, this is who I'm asking to be a part of my team to do this, and if that person's a good fit, you just bring them along with you. Right? This is a matter of, like, listen, let's build an ecosystem of a team. You know, Carl and I talk about this all the time. We see people get a little funny around it. I'd rather own a small piece of a company than 100% of no company. Right.

That was a Rockefeller quote, too. Like, I'd rather have, like, I think he said, I'd rather have 1% of 100 people's efforts than 100% of my own, or something like that.

The idea is that, like, you round out that team, you round out that support work, and everyone has their own networks. Everyone has their own network effect. And within the kind of core circle, you've got most of the relevant skill sets ticked off, ready to go. So you've got operations, you've got financing, you've got marketing, you've got kind of core skill sets all aligned and in the right direction. Then, boom, flip the switch, you're ready to go. Everyone's doing their thing, and as leads come in, you're evaluating it, and you're Running it through the mill, and everyone's in a better place for it, and you're off to the races of building your own kind of business empire.

Well, and quite literally, this is one of the benefits of, like, a deal. And I, like. So I've got more deal acumen and experience than he does, but he's got the operational experience and industry knowledge that I don't. So I'm starting personally to, you know, starting with a deal to utilize that. And then, you know, I've got advisors. I'm sure Adeel does, and we're in the process of doing that exact same thing. Is, you know, it's. It's a team. This is a team sport, right?

100%. It is. It is a massive team sport.

Yeah. Now, this is fantastic. Speaking of team sports and speak, you know, every team has a coach and has people who, you know, help the team get better. This goes back to some of the resources that you and Carl have put together in the beginning. I'd love for you to take this moment because, I mean, you guys have just absolutely crushed this interview and just being so transparent. And I don't think there's anybody who's still listening who thinks that these guys don't know what they're talking about. Right. So talk about dealmaker wealth society. As a member, I can say that I'm a big fan of the resources you guys have put together, but I know that there's some stuff that I haven't even seen from procs Capital and from the. From the online stuff. For anybody who's like, all right, I'm ready to. I'm ready to go down this path and begin this journey. What do you have for folks?

Yeah. So real quick, trainwithcarl.com Bacon appropriately tagged for you again, trainwithcarl.com bacon if you go there, you can download our free, free business blueprint. What that is is it simply walks you through the 10 steps of how to do this using other people's money. And happy to have people come involved, get involved with that. If you go to dealmakerwealthsociety.com, you can check out all our resources there as well. Certainly sign up to get on our email list. Carl and I effectively are just trying to teach as many people as possible. And whether we're on YouTube, live, Facebook live, or any of our kind of Facebook pages and things like that, our goal is to just educate. Beyond that, you know, we've got a couple of primary courses and, you know, there's ways we can connect with you if you want to, you know, download that guide. From there is the idea is, you know, DealMaker CEO. That is the core training system that Carl's put together. That is what you've gone through, Brad, and that's soup to nuts. Everything you need to know to be able to buy a business from how to find the deals, how to figure out what deals to find, putting offers together, figuring out financing, the closing process, negotiation process, all of that, all the way through the first hundred days post acquisition. And then beyond that, we do have group coaching that sits above that dealmaker academy. And that's all the dealmaker wealth society stuff. Our goal is to build an army of dealmakers that are buying small businesses. That's our goal. Right. It's a mission. Our real focus in terms of, again, wealth creation is what we're doing in our private equity group. That's Prox Capital Group. Carl and I, as you said, Brad, we co founded that last year. And we invite people, we call them deal originating partners. Someone just yesterday coined, coined them dops. So I guess I've got to call them dops from now on. But our deal originating partners, you know, what they do is they go and find deals, they leverage aspects of the dealmaker wealth society training to build those relationships and things like that. And behind the scenes, what we do is we do the heavy lifting, right? So what you were talking about, that person or group to actually analyze the financials, we have a whole deal analytics deal team where we're analyzing the company, structuring deals, putting offers together and working to help those partners close deals. And in exchange, we share equity in the company post acquisition and then post acquisition. Our goal and the team we're building is designed to then grow and down the road, exit every one of those acquisitions in some capacity. And you know, that's what we do in. And we're excited by it. You know, my dream is to grow that to where we can. We can be closing a couple hundred deals a year through Prox. We've got ways to scale that up since we've just started, but we're looking forward to it. It's, you know, we're leveraging the kind of model. There's people who want to do it themselves that's taking the training course and really digesting it. And really that's what they need and they've got the tools to do it. Then there's people who want to kind of do it with us. And the do it with us is the group coaching where you're watching how we analyze deals and do things like that. You're still going out and doing the deal on your own. You've just got that resource of kind of shared mentorship. And then beyond that to do it for you is effectively procs. Where procs sitting outside of dealmaker, well, society. That's where again you're plugging in deal flow and we're focused on really being the heavy lift in evaluating the deal, analyzing the deal and closing it and growing it.

I love that. And what's so strong about that is for as I mentioned early on in this where it can get overwhelming if you feel like you're, you have to learn all the nuances of acquiring a business, doing due diligence, the legal, the negotiation. I mean not to mention just to reach out and getting the fish on the hook, you know, reading them in is the. Is another thing. And it's super cool that it's not just an online program here. Do it yourself and learn etc. It's. Well learn enough to get something on the hook and bring them in and we'll do this thing together. We'll analyze the deal for you, we'll help close it and you can be a part of it. And it's such a great way to learn while you're earning and just realize, yeah, you've got a team built in. You don't have to build it all from scratch unless you want to. And I think that's really exactly.

It's buying the Tesla, not building it in that case. Right. We've done the hard part. It's kind of capturing the multi decades of experience that Carl and I have. And then ultimately the team beneath us that we've built out, I mean we've got an incredible team. I mean these are people who've done just hundreds of millions worth of deals and understand what it takes to appropriately analyze a deal. And again, it's frustrating and I know people who have gone through the acquisition process. It's very doable. It's something that you can go through the training program itself and absolutely go out and do it. We've had people who have done that. They've done nothing more than take the program and they've closed deals and been really successful. Others have elevated to group coaching and also been successful. We just had a student close a deal the first week of May. This is middle of COVID right? And $8 million a year company and closed it and put none of his own money in, was able to finance it appropriately and fabulous opportunity the guy's life is forever changed. He's a salesman making very low six figures, like 120k a year. And he more than 5x'd his income in one fell swoop. Right. That's a hell of a way to expand your. Your net worth. And you know, people think about, oh, that's great, he grew his income, but he bought an asset that's grown his income effectively in perpetuity up until when he sells. You can continue the business on the trend. It is. That's every year. Every single year.

And you know that that brings up a concept that I could talk with you forever. So we'll call this. I don't want to keep you on the phone forever, but I could continue down this path. But years ago, I read a book. Have you ever heard MJ DeMarco's book Millionaire fast Lane?

No.

It's a really good book and I think you would also.

I'll make a note.

Cool. But it's also really about this concept of, like, listen, if you. I'll pull apart a few of the concepts that I really liked. One of them, he goes, a lot of people think that get rich Quick doesn't exist, but they're confusing it with its evil cousin, Get Rich Easy. Get Rich Easy rarely exists, but get rich Quick does. But you have to sometimes redefine what the term quick means. So quick doesn't mean necessarily overnight. But if, for instance, you start a business and work on it for five years and get it up to a point where you can then exit it and sell it for $5 million or whatever, did you get rich quick compared to the person who worked for 40 years and saved Enslaved? Well, yeah, but then. So the first thing he talks about is the thing that allows you to get rich quick is usually an exit event. Like, it's that event where you're getting paid multiple years of income all at once. But then the other thing he does talk about is acquiring something where if you want to get rich quick, a redefine what the term quick means. Like, expand it out a little bit, be realistic. But yeah, if you can go buy something that automatically, like you just said, 5x is your. Your income, but then as an asset that can grow a lot in value that you then have the ability to exit for another 5x, it might not take five years, but even if it takes five years, that's pretty damn quick to get millions of dollars in the bank.

Yeah, absolutely. And you take someone in this particular situation who went from, again, 120k, earner to his consolidated income between his business and his day job still that he hasn't quit, he's probably going to be making somewhere in the 6 to 700k a year range. I mean, that's incredible. Not bad day at the office, so to speak. And he's only working for 1/5, 1/6 of that. Right. The rest of it's coming in off of the asset he owns. And the idea that if he just holds that company for that same five years you talked about, he's paid himself an extra $2.55 million or more, up to 3 million depending if he's grown it or anything like that. At that point, he owns the business completely free and clear, he's got no debts in it, he doesn't own the person who bought it from any money. If he then goes to sell it and if he's grown it at all, he's then talking about another multimillion dollar windfall. So if you say at the end, the last day of that five years, he sells it for $2 million, in a span of five years he's generated an extra $5 million of cash to him personally. And this is someone who in that same five year period of time, if he didn't buy the business, he would have made 600 grand. Right. So he added $5 million to his income in the same five year period that he would have only made 600 grand. That's a lot of money. You've 10 xed, you've 10 x'd your earnings in that period of time. And it's all about taking action, taking those steps, like starting the journey. And it's an incredible story. We've got someone who, he actually works with us as one of our coaches in Dealmaker Academy. This is a guy who's gone from not necessarily being able to feed his family because the business he did own, he owned a small little accounting consulting practice. A change in the regulations, he lost 70% of his clients overnight because of what happened. He's UK based and so he's pivoted. He now owns a portfolio of companies and he's elevated to where he's making nine figure consulting for equity deals and his personal takeaway is going to be in the eight figures. Right?

Wow.

I mean that's life changing stuff. Where four years ago this is a guy who was introduced to Carl through a Facebook ad and took the opportunity to actually, you know, learn and grow. He was actually just sending me messages. Today he's got a really interesting opportunity and wants to figure out how we can do it. It's a company that does $100 million a year in revenue, right? This is a guy who's gone from, you know, sitting on the tube in London wondering how he's going to move his life forward to now year, four years later. And he's having conversations around whether or not it's feasible to buy 100 million dollar a year company, right? Like that's a, that's a paradigm shift mentally and operationally. You know, this is the. He went to a resort in Africa. He's from Africa, went to a resort in Africa, loved it so much. He was there for a few weeks with his family. He bought it. He just bought the resort, right? So like these are people who take action, right? These are people who are willing to commit to learning the process and actually moving forward. And you know, I know we've talked before, Brad, about that kind of action element. It's like once you've got the commitment, you've got to put that one foot in front of the other and take action. And I couldn't stress that enough for anyone who's listening. If you think growth through business acquisition is important and relevant and will change your life, you've got to push forward with it and take action.

Yeah, you brought up something right there that I think really sums up the entire thing also with this guy. Because I see this, which really more than anything, at its foundation, it's just creative deal making, right? It's the ultimate evolution of the entrepreneur. Because as people we typically evolve from employees to sometimes like freelancers and solo entrepreneurs and then even a business owner. And then oftentimes as a business owner, we kind of stall out there because we're so busy running the business and we stop evolving. And entrepreneurs like evolution, learning new skill sets, pushing what's possible is what got us to where we're at. And granted, some will try to evolve just by scaling their existing business, but as we know, that's hard to do and there's not that many businesses that actually scale. In fact, if you look at the number of businesses that are doing more than $10 million a year, it is insanely small compared to the overall number of businesses, which means scaling is hard work, especially just taking one business and just scaling up customers. But this is really that next step which takes you out of your comfort zone, forces you to learn new things, which I believe causes you to also be a better business owner when you learn to look at a business to go, okay, if I come in here like this is how to look at numbers. This is how to look at financial statements. This is how to improve a business. If you have your own business, it just makes you better at that.

But just to interrupt there, it forces you to stop working in your business and start working on your business. Most business owners, you know, they come in, they build their business to, you know, a million, 2 million, 4 million, 5 million, right. Whatever that number is. And then they kind of pull, plateau and level off. It's because they've reached the limits of their own talents to some degree, because they're working in the business. The moment you elevate and work on the business, your mindset changes, your perception changes, the way you evaluate the vision and strategy for that business changes. Right? So something I tell people all the time, and this is specific to business owners. If you're not actively, and I would say employees as well, like high performers out there, like, this applies to you as well. If you're not actively every single day working to replace yourself in whatever you do, you will never move forward. And that can be hard, right? There's an emotional attachment. There's a fear of, like, well, if someone does all the stuff I do, what am I going to do? Trust me. The world has a way of rewarding you with more responsibility, whether you like it or not. And so you've got to approach it from a position of growth or abundance. And the idea is that if you've got that mindset of growth, you will always elevate. Literally write a list of everything you're doing and permanently scratch things off the list. Stuff you will never do again because you found someone in your team or who works with you or for you to do it for you. The only way you elevate is to aggressively grow in that way. And for people who have existing businesses, they'll cap out because they've reached the limit of their skill set and they're not necessarily bringing someone in to support the next step of the process. Right? Very few people can be like a Mark Zuckerberg, who has gone from coding Facebook at its origin to being a CEO and face of a massive, massive company like that is such a rare transition. You know, the more common analogy is the guy who's a mechanic, he starts in a trade school, learns how to fix cars, and then 20 years later, he owns his own mechanic shop. But he will generally only ever own that one shop. He's unlikely to own 10 of them because he doesn't necessarily have the capacity to think bigger and how to replace himself and scale out. So for anyone who's listening, if you've got a business, think bigger than what you're doing. That organic growth is hard, but if you're not looking strategically and how to roadmap a future where you're not running it, it's going to be very difficult to grow. And more importantly, going back to that get rich quick idea is that you're not going to see your own liquidity event maximized if you do go to sell your company because you're still working in the business. The multiple and the price I will pay for a business is much higher for apples to apples comparison if you, the owner, are not individually responsible for the life of that company. Super critical.

The second for me, I understood that concept of if you are too valuable for your business, your business is not valuable. Things change for me. I mean, then I start thinking like, okay, well if I die tomorrow, would this continue? Then I had to work for the last two years to make it to a point where I only work three hours a week and this business will continue no matter what, if I exist or not. So that's amazing.

It's all about your legacy in some capacity and your ability to create real wealth. And wealth translates to a lot of things, freedom, opportunity, etc. Etc. And for those who are employees, like people who are struggling, dealing with crappy bosses or anything like that, you don't have to put any of this stuff to the side and just say, well, I'll do it later. You can do it while you're still working. You have that opportunity to work on your life. You are the founder and CEO of YOU Incorporated. That's it. You Incorporated. You are the founder and CEO. And if you're not out there constantly working on the business of you how you're going to scale again, whether you're a business owner or you're an employee, you will struggle mightily into kind of achieving that next level trajectory. So super important that you want and think bigger for yourself than you believe you're capable of.

I couldn't agree more. And it is one of those areas that I find myself in. As I said, it's out of the comfort zone of oh, I've got this, but that's where I like. That's because I always know if I'm completely in my comfort zone, I'm not growing. And by learning these stuff and taking those steps and talking to sellers and moving things forward, I only grow not only as a business owner, but as an individual. And you know, the last piece on that is this kind of information, even if you're not. If you're just a business owner and you don't have the desire to go out and buy a business right now, this knowledge of how to do it just in case you stumble across, maybe it's a competitor who says, man, I'm just tired of this business. Like, you know, anybody who would buy it, if you have no idea what to say at that point, you may have just passed a multimillion dollar opportunity. But if you at least know that, like 20% of it, of how to structure a basic deal or what questions to ask or how to skin that cat without, you know, coming out of pocket on your own, you could be missing out on a tremendous opportunity. Which is why I think learning the basics of deal making and acquisitions is so critical. Just in case.

Well, and it's. It's just in case that opportunity comes across through the course of business. You know, your competitors, your network, your supply chain, all of those things. Right. It's good to have that knowledge. But if you're already a business owner, guess what? You're not going to still run that business when you die. So at some point between here and then, you're gonna exit that business. So if you're not thinking now about how to grow and position your company for sale, which is literally the exact same thing you were thinking as a buyer, you're just looking at it from the other perspective. If you're not thinking about that, again, working on instead of in the business, then you're limiting your own value down the road. And it's just super critical that you're looking at it from both sides. Knowing the skills of deal making helps increase the value of your own business by you positioning it for success down the road. And as those opportunities come in, you've got the opportunity to maximize them because you'll at least recognize them. And that's the critical part.

I think that.

And that is the most critical element right there. Adam, I cannot thank you enough for being a guest on the show today as well. And I love all of the materials you guys have put forth. You're making yourself available here to talk to myself. Deal. And obviously all of our listeners about just this concept, and then go deep on the what, the how, etc. As you mentioned, I cannot recommend highly enough, like the various resources that you've put together for everybody. And you guys have graciously set up a really cool link for folks. Train with Carl. That's Carl with a C.com bacon. And there will be a link in the show notes for everybody there. And also dealmakerwealthsociety.com is a nice jumping off point to just see everything you guys have got. I know that I'm looking forward to sharing with you guys all of the tremendous success that Adeel and I are going to be having.

Yeah, I'm looking forward to. Yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing how you guys do kind of take your next steps. And obviously, I'm here to always, always help in any way I can. For sure.

I appreciate that. And to all of my listeners listening in, if you have connections, maybe you own an IT service or security business, maybe you know somebody who does, and maybe you understand that there could be an opportunity here to make a connection. I am always just an email away@askbradakenrappedbusiness.com Love to have any conversations with you or anybody you know. And you can see we're approaching this from a very, you know, a very transparent way. I don't. I don't think there's any reason to hide anything. We're looking for good deals and good businesses to buy and ways that we can add value. Adil, thank you for joining in. And hopefully this has been a fun experience for you, getting to co host.

Absolutely. This was great. Thank you so much, Adam and Carla. It's been a lot of value.

I appreciate it. Yeah, absolutely. Really, our pleasure. Thanks.

For everybody else, listen to this once more. Go check out the links in the show notes and subscribe to the show if you have not already. And if you love this topic, there's a lot of other episodes I've done on this exact topic and each one of them, I try to approach it slightly differently so that you're always learning something new. And if you are in a business, you're not looking to necessarily exit or acquire, but you have hit a plateau and you're looking for maybe a second of opinion on what's working, what's not, feel free to hit me up at askbrad@baconwrappedbusiness.com. and Adam, I look forward to talking to you here real soon. And you as well, Adil. But thanks everybody for tuning into the show and I'll see you on the next episle.

Cheers.