183: Part 1: How to Let Go of Your Business The Right Way When It's Time to Sell, with Denise Logan

Hello, everyone, this is Kathy Caprino and welcome to my podcast, Finding Brave. I've created this show for everyone who longs to create something bold and brave in their life. To rise up, speak up and stand up for who they are and to reach their highest and biggest visions. Each week I'll be speaking with inspiring guests from all walks of business, leadership, entertainment, the creative arts and the entrepreneurial world. And they'll be sharing their intimate stories of Finding Brave and offer their best strategies for building your most rewarding, joyful and meaningful life, business and career. I so appreciate you being here. And speaking of appreciation, I am so thrilled to share that Amazon Music is now a sponsor for Finding Brave. So if you feel, as I do, that music is an important, enriching part of your life and you would like unlimited access to safety. 70 million songs today. I hope you'll hop on our special link which is getamazonmusic.com finding brave and get our 30 day free trial offer. Again, unlimited access to 70 million songs. That's a whole lot of music and a lot of listening. Joy. Thank you again so much and enjoy the show. Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Finding Brave. It's never a dull moment over here in Stamford, Connecticut. And I am so excited today to have our amazing guest. And we're going to be talking about something you have not heard us me talk about, I think, for 180Blip episodes. So you're in for a real treat. And we are going to be talking about how to let go of your business the right way when it's time to sell. And we have Denise Logan here. Thank you for your time. Denise calling from Scottsdale, Arizona.

Yeah, yeah. I'm so glad to be with you, Kathy.

We are going to have so much fun. Thank you for taking time out of your crushingly busy schedule, which I know it is. And people, I want to tell you, Denise and I were just laughing. We met in a wonderfully serendipitous way, which is the best way to meet new people. And when Denise shared with me what she's doing, how she got into this work, and what are the biggest obstacles that potential sellers of businesses go through. Psychological, financial, all of it. I said, oh, we've got to have you on right now. And as someone who has a business, I'm listening keenly to all of this. When to know when it's time to part ways, which I'm not quite ready yet at all. But we're going to learn all of that. But let me tell you about Denise. It's pretty impressive. Denise Logan knows that to business owners, selling a business is more than a transaction. To them, it's an emotionally fraught period of transition, filled with unexpected highs and lows, with no clear vision of what waits at the end for them and their family. Denise's passion for this work is colored by her own experience of being an unprepared business owner. I love the vulnerability there and the honesty. Denise, thank you. Who made an abrupt and choppy exit from her company after ignoring the signs that it was time for several years. Denise is the author of the Seller's Journey, a business fable about navigating the emotional obstacles to selling your business, and has addressed more than 500 audiences on three continents about the psychology of business owners and how to make it easier when the time comes to let go. Denise also provides advanced training to advisors employed by some of the world's largest financial institutions, law firms and accounting firms, helping their clients successfully transition their businesses to new owners. And most importantly, without regret. Oh, man. Okay, Denise, we want a whole course here in a half hour, please, on everything we need to know. But can you start with what made you. You have a number of illustrious careers here. What made you do this work and focus on this right now?

So in my early life, I was a mental health professional. And then I. Yeah, and then I was a lawyer. And they always say, if I'd been a good mental health professional, wouldn't I have kept myself from becoming a lawyer? For heaven's sake.

The lawyers are chuckling. Who are listening. Oh, wow, that's a shift.

And I built a law firm in Washington, D.C. and then we reached a point where, you know, I would have rather put a stick in my eye than gone to work one more day.

And what was the law area, the focus that you were?

Yeah, so we represented condominium and homeowner associations.

How did you get to that?

Oh, you know, one of those, like, how did you land where you didn't know you were going to land? Truly? I had started with a small law firm that wanted to create an international trade practice. And I thought, oh, yippee, I'll, like, get in on the ground. We'll do all of that. And a couple of months in, I realized the only thing remotely resembling international trade was that we were collecting unpaid condo fees from people who didn't speak English.

Oh, dear.

And so there's that. What someone says they're going to do and what they really do. But what I recognized for myself was that I had an affinity to helping people understand what was going wrong. So if you think about condominiums and homeowners associations, lots of conflict, lots of chaos. People fight over things that are never about what it looks like it's about.

Wow.

So ultimately built my own firm, and we reach. We were, you know, a sizable boutique on the east coast, representing almost 1,000 homeowners associations on the eastern seaboard. And I realized several years before I actually exited that it was time to go. Your listeners are probably familiar with that experience where, you know, it's time to go do something else. And you might even be thinking, I don't know what that is. So we stay trying to figure it out and thinking, I'll get there. I'll know what that is. For me, the truth is, I had known for quite a long time, and it took, you know, here's where the vulnerability comes in. And I just knew I could not keep doing it.

Yikes.

I couldn't do it anymore. And so as I was building up to the time to let go, you know, I was in my middle 30s at the time. Wow. Yeah. And had built this machine that was. It was a hungry machine. It needed to be fed. And everyone who I talked to about being burned out was like, ah, just go on vacation or like, buy a new car. You'll work it out.

Please. No.

All of those things that are not what actually resolves the issue for us. And ultimately, I just realized to save my life, I needed to go.

I have so many questions right here. But I know that's the beginning of this new path, but can I ask this?

Of course.

You know, I teach courses. I just got off the phone with my amazing career project people, and one thing that just came out of it is that I think that a lot of us have a lot of skill, and we also have natural talents. And sometimes we end up using the skills that are not joyful, that are not fun, are not easy, but we're great at them. And sometimes we don't recognize the difference between those natural talents that are, like, truly, like, fun to use, which I think you have right now that you're, you know, leveraging. And so am I. But here's my question to you. You owned this business, right?

Yeah.

How do I ask this question? Any question I ask is because it's either I want to know or I know my audience wants to know. What would have stopped you from saying, I hate running this business, so I'm going to hire myself successor as the CEO, but then go do something else but still have the business. Can you answer that?

So we start to see that.

Why you should sell it, rather than that approach.

Ah. And maybe that would have been a good approach to bring in a successor and find another way.

Yeah.

The truth is, I wasn't having those kinds of conversations with.

With people who wanted to buy it.

You mean with anyone. I was burned out.

It didn't occur to you, you mean.

Right. I mean, I was burned out. And I just, like many people, kept working harder to work my way out of the burnout, which doesn't work, by the way. It just doesn't work. And anyone who I talked to about that, really, you know, the answer was double down. Right. Double down.

See, this is the wrong kind of advice, which I talk about all the time.

So are you going to have good people around you who are going to.

Tell, who are going to expand your vision, not give you what. But let me ask this. I coined this term the pendulum effect, which is you stay too long in a field, a job, an employer, and you break down in it, and instead of maybe a pivot or, you know, you throw the entire baby out with the bathwater, which I've done. Became a therapist after corporate life, and you go to the opposite ends of the earth. Is that what we had here, where you were broken down in it, and you said, let me just dump this.

Can I answer that question with a couple of different pieces?

Yeah, please.

So, you know, coming back to the part where you said, there are the things we're good at that other people value that are eating us alive. So I'm great at business development. I'm a relationship person. For me, it's really about being connected with people and helping them to see what's going on. I'm also a really good litigator. I seem like a nice girl, but I'm actually.

But you're really a barracuda.

No, really a very strident, aggressive litigator. The challenge is, it is not good for anyone to be living with me when I am litigating, because I could not turn that off.

Okay.

And so what I. I couldn't find. And there were plenty of other lawyers in the firm who were also doing litigation, who were also doing other things. I could. I didn't know how to balance those two things.

That you were a lovely person and a kind, caring, loving person, but you could be a fierce litigator after one thing. The results for your client. Is that what you mean? And so it was a clash.

And so eventually the time came where I said, I just need out.

Wow.

I need out. You Know, there were. Had I been getting the kind of advice that I suggest to business owners now that they get, I would have been talking to someone about how do I take a break. And I did take a break. I took seven weeks off and cycled across Italy on my bicycle. And yeah, it was lovely. And I thought, that will recharge me. I came back to the same mess.

And it sounds like you didn't want to be who you had to be to be successful in this role. Is that.

No. Can I tell you a piece about that? I mean, we're having a wide ranging conversation. I don't know all the pieces. You'll figure out where we go. So one of the things that had gone on for me a while earlier, so I was married to my business partner.

So challenging.

Yeah. I don't necessarily recommend that for folks.

That's hard.

And I was changing at a really rapid way. I have a lot of compassion for what he was likely experiencing at that time. He loved being a lawyer and I was not loving being a lawyer.

Yeah.

And as the lead partner for the firm, as the, you know, the front person, I wanted out. But we did. We were young. Right. We. We were in our 30s. We didn't know how to navigate that and didn't do the kind of work that would have been helpful for us to navigate it. Eventually we divorced and had to make a decision. Would I keep the firm? Would he keep the firm? Wow. And that. Right. Just really choppy. I mean, when I talk about this, excuse me, as a choppy, ugly exit, it was that. So ultimately. Right. Because I was the rainmaker for the firm and the face of the firm. The conversation that we had at one point was he would buy me out, but I would need to stay for five years for the transition. And I'll just tell you, I'm not that grown up. At least I wasn't at that point. And so I bought the firm from him. He went on to work at another firm. And I didn't truly want it, but we were at that stalemate. And so running the firm for several years beyond that, at a time when I really didn't want to be a lawyer anymore, created that buildup. So when the time came, I merged the firm with a Baltimore firm, got rid of my house and bought a motorhome.

Wow.

And I ran off. You shed, you know, for what I thought would be six months to clear my head and figure out what came next. Some of your listeners can probably imagine. You know, I'll say there's this part of me that right now is saying, oh, I'm telling you all of the hard part.

Yeah, we love that.

And all the things that didn't go well because at the time, no one's talking to you about in your 30s. Yeah. You're about to flush your business and go do what? Run off in a motorhome. So. But I had a skill set, right. So I knew I was a litigator. I was. I was a rainmaker. And I didn't want to just leave with nothing. And so I created a company at the time, which, by the way, I never actually ran, but it was my safety net, you know, that I can't just leave with nothing. So I created a company that. The acronym, you'll find this funny was C A L M. Wow.

It's what you needed in your life.

Right. And it stood for community association, lifestyle mediation. Because I saw there was a different way to do this. Why not mediate instead of litigate? I never, ever, ever came back to that business.

But do anything. Nothing. Nothing was served.

All right. No, no. Created the entity.

Okay.

Hanging out there. And then I took off in my motorhome, which was a 38 foot motorhome with two little dogs and a car that I towed behind.

Oh, my God.

That's a whole other test we could do.

I finding brave here.

And I thought it was going to be six months. It turned into several years where I traveled all over north and South America on my own.

I love it.

In this motorhome. And really reclaiming myself and identifying who was I. If I didn't own that business, who else could I be? Business owners, as they're preparing to exit their business, are struggling with that same issue. Who. Who am I if I'm not the owner of this business? So while I was out and about on my merry way. And this, you know, again, remember at the time I was in my middle 30s. So I back my motorhome into a campground. Of course, I did not look like the other people around me at the time. I did not have blue hair. Now I have some blue hair. And so people would be curious. They would automatically want to know, what did you do? Like, how is it that you're out here? And I chose to never answer that question. Instead of telling them I had been a lawyer, I asked, what do you think I did?

What'd they say?

And I left it open. I got lots of different answers to that question. I'm interested. Things I didn't see in myself. So I got things like, oh, I bet you were a gallery owner, or maybe you were a sculptor, Maybe you were a schoolteacher. It was fascinating. Not once did anyone ever guess lawyer, which I think is kind of cool. Even now in my life. If I didn't tell someone I was a lawyer, they would never, ever guess that. I use that time to really say I could be lots of things. I don't have to just use the very same skills that I used before, even though those are skills that other people think find valuable.

So important, Denise. So important. So let's. I could talk to you for hours.

And there's.

This is.

There's a lot of depth in how we get from there to here. Should I jump there for you?

Well, probably. Let's. Let's get to how. How we help sellers. How did you end up. Yeah, it's almost like you turned your mess into a message, didn't you?

I did, Absolutely. When I came off the road from my RV trip, I joined a friend's business, and he was preparing it for sale. We took that business to the market three times over the next decade, and he could not let go.

Did he know that he'd sabotage the deal unconsciously? He'd make a mess of it.

And so what I realized after 10 years is you could have been me and. And wait too long and be ready to give it away, or you could be him and go too early and not be prepared to let go what was going on. So I left and did a research study to try to figure out what goes on with business owners, what causes us to wait too long or go too early, and how to ease that. So I spent the last decade working with business owners and their advisors. Bankers, lawyers, wealth managers, CPAs who are all serving business owners to help them understand what their clients are struggling with so they can serve them better.

So is that your primary audience? Market the people that serve business. Business owners, not. I'm a business owner and I'm ready to sell, and I don't know what I'm doing. Do you serve that audience, too?

I typically speak at conferences that are either business owners or. Or their advisors.

Wow.

What a huge. To help bring that.

Like everybody. So everybody on the planet. Nice niche.

You know, the reality is, and certainly it is not everyone on the planet, but it's focused on owners as they prepare. Because the reality is every single owner will leave their business voluntarily or involuntarily. When I hear a business owner say, well, if I leave my business, I always say, oh, I'm sorry, that word.

Is when you mean if we don't act, take action. We die and we leave it.

Yeah, right. You don't get to not leave your business. So some of what gets business owners stuck is avoiding the mortality issue, pretending. If I don't think about ever having to leave my business, then maybe I won't have to. But you will leave your business at some point.

Is that a very active fear for many people? So I'm 61. Just so everyone, you all know that. But, you know, I do think about how long do I want this to be my living reality and a million other things, you know? And the answer is, you know, for quite a long time, for the foreseeable future. So let's do this. Let's. For people listening, either you're serving business owners or you are one or you're going to be. Be one. Can you walk us through? I didn't prep you for this. As. As we know. Can you give us. Like, the therapist in me wants to ask this question. When someone. Okay. When someone says, if I decide to leave, and you say the answer is when, not if, do you feel that mortality is a potent thing that business owners are trying not to grapple with or grappling with when they're thinking of the timing or. Or is it way latent in their subconscious?

It's typically very latent. But here are some of the things that are more forward in our mind.

Give us a list. What should we be looking at here?

So everywhere we go, someone asks us, so what do you do? And think about how irrelevant that question is. Most of the times when you're asked, I was getting my hair cut at one time. Covid ended, I'm in the hairdresser's chair, and the gal six feet away says, so what do you do? And I think, what the hell? Why does that even matter right now? We're getting our hair cut. So that question, what do you do? Is a terrifying question if you're not going to have an answer that seems socially acceptable.

Can I just challenge what you just said, though?

Yeah.

I want to say this. I raised. We raised our kids in a very affluent area. And, you know, some of my kids. I have two kids. And their friends would talk about when they were about to go to college. Everyone would ask, where are you going to college? And my kids would. My daughter in particular would be like, part of it was asking how affluent you are and how smart you are.

It absolutely is that.

But I do want to say this. Can I, Denise, when I ask. I'm a career coach. I ask everybody I Meet. What do you do? Not necessarily for a living, but what do you do with your time? And I want to tell you, I don't think it's irrelevant. I think it's fascinating what you spend your time doing to negotiate money, you know, and whether that's. Maybe you're a volunteer, too. I find it fascinating. And I'm not trying to suss out how much you make and how rich you are and what's your zip code. I find it fascinating. But do you generally feel like it's a meaningless question?

I don't think it's meaningless. I believe it is a social pegging.

Question, like what I'm talking about that most people ask.

And the answer to that question is, am I above you or am I below you? Should I be kissing up to you or should you be kissing up to me? If you think about. And. And here's a little challenge that I have. I love that we're having this fun, playful conversation around that question because we ask it as a default. Usually, if you don't think this is a social pegging question, answer it with something that is very different than how you would normally answer that question and see the reaction. So let's say you're a lawyer. I'm just going to use that. And now I answer the question. I'm a school teacher.

You mean make something up.

What is the. What is the response that comes from someone if I say I'm, I'm a housekeeper or I'm an artist, that makes me. Or I'm a professor or I'm a scientist or I'm a doctor. And so that question, the what do you do? Question, on an unconscious level, a business owner is aware that they are going to be asked that question. They may even be asked it now. What. How do you answer that question when you have just sold your business?

I get it. So can I answer it?

Yeah.

You know what? I'm run what's running through my mind, and it's exactly tied to. And I don't want you all to think I'm considering selling my business, but I don't want you to stop listening to the podcast. I'm not. But I want to say this. I hear from venture capital people and they say they give me numbers in the millions of what they're looking for companies that are worth and they think that's my business. I'm like, okay, that's interesting. But I, I have thought if I weren't to do this work, and I don't think of it as the business I think of it as the work career coach, speaker, writer, trainer, podcaster. What the heck would I do?

Oh, you are so good. You're, like, setting this up in such a fun way.

So that's how I see it. Less about. I'm.

Hello, I'm a business owner.

I say I'm a career coach, writer, speaker, trainer, dedicated to the advancement of women in business. And I'm guessing I would say still be that somehow after I sell my business. But, yes, thinking that there's nothing there to sink my teeth into, I think it's a terrifying thought.

For many, it's a terrifying thought. And so what happens is. Right. I personally challenge folks to ask a different question, because when someone asks me, what do you do? My answer is about what you are a lawyer.

You know, wow. I'd be like, oh, Lord. Okay, I'm gonna go walk over here, lady.

Because it shifts the conversation. Usually the person will then say, well, no. What do you do for a living? To which my answer is, wait, you want to know how I earn my money?

Oh, you're tough. Do you really do that?

I do.

If I met you and said at the pool or, you know, walking my dog and said, what do you do? I'm interested.

You would do that. And then usually the person will say, well, I just want to get to know you and relate to you. Relating to me through my profession is a very narrow, limiting perspective. So my suggestion is, what if you asked a different question? What if you asked, what are you fired up about right now? Or what's the book on your nightstand? What was the best place you went? What did you have for dinner last?

Would you ask a stranger that, though?

So why do we ask them? How do you earn your money?

I'm going to challenge it, and then we can let it go.

You know what?

That the therapist in me, and I don't mean to give you therapy, to me, that there's. There's emotion tied up in what you do for a living. There's emotion tied up for me. And when someone says, what do you do for a living? I'm proud of what I do. It doesn't say anything about how much money I make.

Yeah.

So I get to say career coach, writer, speaker, trainer. And to me, that fires me up. So I'm not immediately thinking they're trying to peg me. And if. And I'm going to say the truth, if you're trying to peg me F off, I don't need you to peg me. I don't care about your assessment about Where I am socially.

Yeah.

Like, my boundary is I'm going to go with the interpretation of the question that allows me to talk about what fires me up.

So come back. Right. If we come back to what happens if. Now the answer is not going to be that what we see business owners default to is they say what they used to do.

Oh, no, that's sad.

But. Because that's where their sense of identity and purpose and connection has been. So now here's what I want business owners to be thinking about. Right. You and I have had such fun around the what do you do? Question because we've got your audience thinking, huh? Why do I ask that question? What do I think? How do I want to answer it? So here's what's important. When you're thinking about selling your business or even if you're just thinking about changing jobs.

Yeah. Oh, yeah.

What does work provide for you other than the money?

Oh, I love it.

So other than the money, what, 10, 12, 15 things does work provide for you other than money and financial security? Take those out of the equation. Put them over here. So what does work provide for you?

You know why? Just to really support what you're saying.

Yeah.

When I had my breakdown after 18 years in corporate life and I was laid off in a brutal way that ended everything for me, corporate wise, I would have answered that question. My work gives me nothing but money and benefits. And that's why I want to poke my eye out with a stick and. Right. I'm sick and depressed. But also, when that was stripped away, I felt the way your business owners that you work with felt. Am I? I mean, for the next week, I would put on my suit and drive and so disturbed. But I didn't know who I was. So thank gosh, we both emerged out of this path that makes us real. But I can't support enough what you're saying, that first of all, I think if I push this a little farther, what we want is that our identity is above and beyond the title of our work.

And also realize that work provides us with a lot of things. So we can just list some of them to give listeners an opportunity to riff on this for themselves. It's a place to go. Right. During COVID everyone was like, I gotta get out of this house and away from my spouse and kids. I want to go to work. It's a place to go.

It's a place to go.

It's structure.

Yeah.

It is friendship for lots of our business owners. Their employees and customers and vendors are their friends.

Wow.

Who are your. I call them. Who are your Saturday friends? Because when you sell your business, who will you hang out with? And we see owners struggle with these things. Right. It is power at work. You say, I want this done. Generally it gets done. Not so much at home.

I live that too.

Right.

Being a high level professional. Then I come home and I'm talking to my husband like he's an employee. And I treated my employees well. But wait a minute. The power dynamic is not the same as you as a vice president.

Right. Take.

Get that out of the room. Yeah.

It is our place in the community. If you through your business have been a charitable or a philanthropist, where does that come from? There are lots of things we should be able to get 10, 12, 15 distinct answers other than money. The truth, Kathy, is that just because an owner gets a big sack of cash when they sell their business, these needs that work is meeting do not go away.

Wow, Denise, this is amazing.

They don't go away. And if all we focus on is the economics, what happens is an owner gets very close to the exit and suddenly these needs start coming up and they have nowhere to place them because generally all of the advisors around them and typically even their friends and family. Can I tell you the story of an owner to put it into context? And you know, the numbers don't really matter. The same things are happening for business owners, whether they have a $50,000 hair salon or. Or a $500 million manufacturing company. This fellow Michael was in his late 30s. He owned a software company. He was set to net $16 million on the other side of the sale. And one day he realized, who am I going to hang out with? All my buddies have jobs at my place or somewhere else. Right. His buddies were like, they all worked somewhere. And he realized, who am I going to hang out with? So he was shooting pool with a bud and he said that. To which his friend responded, boo hoo, dude, I wish I had your sad little $16 million problem. You and I both know that problem did not go away. It went underground and started acting out like mushrooms in the deal. Suddenly he. Other things were annoying to him. He didn't want to go through with the deal when we were able to actually deal with what's happening. Oh, of course. It makes total sense that he would struggle with that. And advisors too often stay focused on the economics and miss what's happening for their owners. And so when an owner raises something like that, if they haven't had someone to support them, the advisors will say, don't worry, you'll figure it out, man. You're going to have plenty of cash. It doesn't solve the problem.

Can I say something about this?

Yeah.

What you just shared is an epidemic of a problem in our country. And I think around the world there is so little empathy for people's challenges. Who are rich? Well, you know, his wife has cancer. Well, he has 20 million. He'll get over it. He'll figure it out. Or he'll have the best care for her.

Her.

I've heard it a million times that if you are rich, people can't feel compassion and empathy for you. Boo hoo. You 16 million dollar. Everyone is so jealous and feels so separate from wealthy people. Is this a theme in your work that you see?

It is. But I also think, you know this is happening even for anyone who has a job. Right. If you, if you come on to MSN, you'll see an article that'll be the top 12 things that the top 12 mistakes retirees make. Those 12 things are going to be about running out of money or some other ridiculous thing. It's not. Wait, you retired and you don't know who you are. You have no relationships to support you. So can I put this in the context of another story, please?

And then you got to tell us what to do. How do we address these things? Tell us. Oh. Keeping you long here?

So Marty had an $85 million business. Eight weeks from close, he suddenly announced he would not take a penny less. And nine times EBITDA. Never mind the letter of intent at 6.2.

How much more was that than $85 million?

How much more?

I mean, was it going to be triple that?

You know, here's the piece. Not about the money. It is not about the money.

No, I get that, but I mean.

But here's what was going on under the surface. So Marty's banker called me and said, I think my seller went crazy. I'm like, yeah, sounds like it. Figure out what scared him and what hidey hole he's in. So Marty's original plan was to sell the business, buy a sailboat and sail around the globe. You know, you can get a pretty good boat for 85 million. You don't really need a lot more for a better boat. So it was not about the money. What we learned was that two weeks before he asked for this unicorn, his wife had said, I'm not doing that. I do not want to be stuck in a boat with you far away from my grandkids. Hell no, that's not happening. Can we agree he is not coming back to the deal team to say the deal is off because his wife won't let him do what he wants to do. Instead, he asked for more money. It's never about the money. And what they were experiencing, you know, this was relational grief. They realized, wait, what we thought life would be like when we sell the business is not what it's going to be like. We prepare our children to launch. We don't wait until the day they turn 18 and say, so what are you going to do with yourself now? But we don't prepare business owners to launch. We assume that getting them the money is sufficient and it is not. Just like anyone who is preparing to leave their job and go to a new job or retire. It is not about, have you saved enough money? That's a small piece of what life is like and that's where death comes in. It is the piece. Why I think mortality is an element that is underlay blindness. It's because if who I am is what I do and I no longer do, do I not exist?

It's like if the tree falls and it doesn't make a sound. If I exist, but I don't do anything that I can wrap my head around, do I even exist?

I hear owners say, I'm not just going to sit around at home and do nothing. I'm like, aw, poor critter. Who told you that's what it would be like? One of the things I taught a session for a bank for their clients and it was called, is retirement a dirty word? Because we will hear people say, well, I'm never going to retire. That's because retirement for us will not be like retirement for our parents and grand grandparents. We are not going to be happy playing golf and waiting for Wheel of Fortune to come on and feel like we have had a satisfying life. So the more our parents.

Can I just say, my sweet dad, who was with GE 30 years, seven patents, it was his life. He loved it. Met Jack Welsh a few times. You know, he was given a. What do you call it? Silver.

What do you call it?

Silver handcuffs. And I was. He was 62, I think, so he was 40 years older than I, so I didn't recognize it. He was depressed afterwards. He didn't have these resources to understand. And he was an avid golfer and had an enormous life of golf, but that was a weekend thing. He wasn't Tuesday nights and scratch league and Saturday. I watched him be depressed and, you know, he finally got his groove after a few years. But I don't think he ever truly, when I think about it, was that vibrant person again, that he was contributing at General Electric.

And, you know, I don't want listeners to feel all bummed out, like, oh my gosh, if I retire, that's what life is like. No, we're saying, right? The answer is it doesn't have to be that way. And what has happened is far too many owners or even just as adults, we've watched people retire and their lives look miserable or, or dull. And so it behooves you to prepare long in advance for what will your life be other than this work? Which is why identifying so closely with your answer to the question what do you do? Is a trap. I'm like, let's broaden it. Let's find more things. Where will that vibrancy that you get? And Kathy, we see it in your face when you get to say what you do, where will that be met? So we come back to the list of what does work provide for me? Where will those needs get met outside of your work and beginning long before the sale of the business to get those needs met, Partly because it ensures a much more satisfying life on the other side. But also, we do not always get to choose when we leave. That's a myth. That is also as if we know the day we will die, as if we know the day that we will leave our company. We don't know that. And often it is not within our control. You know, only one third of the businesses that are. That go to market successfully sell. That is a tragedy.

Holy crap.

Almost all of. Almost all business owners expect to fund their retirement with the proceeds from the sale of their business. That is how most business owners, I shouldn't say most a lot. If you don't sell the business, you don't get those proceeds.

And are they mucking it up? They're sabotaging it or it's not worth what they thought or a lot of reasons.

A lot of reasons. So it might be right. The wealth manager has done a really great Monte Carlo simulation of how much money you need when the time comes for you to retire. It's great. But if you don't get the money, all of that was for naught. So what I say to advisors, bankers, lawyers, wealth managers, accountants, your clients, they're called trusted advisors. Be a trusted advisor. Help them navigate these most difficult aspects of preparing to let go of their business. The transactional pieces, for sure, but this is a transition. This is the single largest transition in our professional adult lives. When we leave our work. Whether we are retiring, whether we are selling a business, whether we no longer can work because of an illness or caring for a family member, we will all leave our work. So how are we preparing for this very same transition? Just like we prepare our children to transition into their careers, we need to prepare to transition out and to. I say my, I say owners are what's nexters what's next? Because if we haven't prepared them, they will sell their business or they'll just stay in it and die and leave it to a spouse, which is a horrible idea, by the way. Or they will leave their business and be so bored out of their minds, they will take all that money and pour it into another business, which is an equally dopey idea that happens to avoid the emotion of what we're talking about.

I have two things I want to ask, and then I'm aware of our time and I'm going to ask you for the most important takeaway. We need listener. I mean, I think I got it. But two things I want to ask quickly. Number one, you're a seller whisperer. We've talked about that. Oh, there's a million things. Quickly. I'd love to know. You know, when I hear someone come with a career challenge, there literally is nothing I've never heard in 16 years. And it falls into a bucket of issues. And in about five minutes, I can see what that bucket is. Is that what your seller whisperer gift is? I mean, we've heard it all over and over and over. And each of the challenges has its own hallmark. Even if it's way underground, it emerges and bubbles up in characteristic ways. Would you agree with that in your work?

Yeah, I think so. And it is also about preparing the advisors around them to be able to stop diverting to talk about the transaction when the person is terrified about something else.

But I want to talk about this, too. I'm going to say this right out loud. Of all the advisors I've ever met with on my business and all the advisors of the entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs, they're not equipped to have these conversations.

Part of why they're not equipped to have the conversation. They're scared.

They're vulnerable. They don't want to go there.

They haven't done this work for themselves.

No, I'm good at the number and I'm good at the numbers. What do you mean? What you're talking about is therapy. I can't do it.

It's so interesting.

Is that what they say or do? They really listen and Try, but I'm sorry, I don't think they're going to be that good at it.

Most of this is about choosing right. This is as a business owner, it is about choosing well. The advisor, right, the advisor who shepherds you through this transition and doesn't pretend.

This isn't the most important issue underlying all of it.

Of course they need to be technically proficient in what they're doing, but are they also dialed in and attuned to what you are going through? That makes sense, an ideal advisor to help you at this time. And that's important in making our choice as well. I did a training for a group of advisors recently where I took them through their own transition and asked them some very powerful questions. And then we toggled back and forth between. This is what you're feeling in thinking about leaving your business. Business. Oh, this is what your client is also feeling.

Beautiful.

This is what you are feeling. This is what your client is feeling to help dial up that empathy. Because for an advisor who has never gone through this process with their own business or has not even thought about it for their own, when their client diverts to a tactical element, they will get pulled along. They'll be like, oh, yeah, let's go over here, and you need more. More money. It's not about that. But if they have done that deeper work to connect with it for themselves, they will know how to address it, how to stay present with their client to help spot. That's why deals die and they don't have to.

Oh, I love it so much. All right, one more thing.

I'm having fun. Great conversation.

I love it. It's so rich and deep and I, you know, my pistons are firing. You said something else that I really want to highlight as a former marriage and family therapist. The wife says, no way in am I going on a boat with you. What I want to point out to everyone, whether you're leaving a corporate career and want, you know, it's transition. It's not necessarily selling as we know, your. Your business. Sometimes you grow apart. And what you. Your spouse and what you value and what matters to me, to you, Me. Interesting Freudian slip. And what you see as an ideal life is not any longer what your partner sees. And I would say, I would guess 60% of the time there's a relational issue. And I would see a marriage and family therapist when these things come up. What do you think?

Absolutely. And what happens, just like families struggle when the last child launches from the.

Nest about how they're going to Cope right about.

But we have language about that, right? We call it empty nest syndrome. We know what it is. When all of a sudden it's like, oh, my gosh, the kids are gone and who are you? I don't.

What am I doing?

I don't even know if I want to know you.

Right.

The business, in many ways, is like the last child. And so what will happen for lots of owners and their spouses is when that relational grief comes up. When we realize, oh, no, everything we've been putting off and saving for and want, like, when we retire, life will be like this. And we get a glass glimpse of it and we realize it's not going to be that one or both of those spouses will try to keep the business in place as a way to avoid dealing with or looking at the issue. So I have something that I call the oh, my syndrome. One more year. When I hear an owner say, just like one more year, what I know is there's a bigger issue going on under there that they don't know how to solve for. And it might sound like, I just need to do one more thing in the business. Nope, there's an emotional issue under that. And a wise advisor will hear it and catch it, and they don't have to solve it themselves. I'm not suggesting that bankers and lawyers and wealth managers become therapists, although that'd be great, but help your client get the support that they need. You. No one would say, oh, well, let's not look at the finances. We'll just pretend that's not a problem. Oh, no, we'd say, you need to get someone in here and deal with the finances. If your client is struggling with these things, be a trusted advisor. Be the person who is courageous and brave enough to bring it to the forefront and help them do what they need to do to be able to transition. Because it is not about the transaction. And if we keep coming back to that, it looks like owners are erratic and unpredictable and blow up their deals for no reason. And that's not true, because advisors have not focused on this piece of it. When they think owners are unpredictable, they start to chase more deals. They're like, I'll just run a whole bunch of deals and hope that some of them close. That's not the answer. The answer is not to run more deals in the hopes that a small percentage close. The answer is to come back to, what is my client truly struggling with and how do I show up as the caring professional who will help shepherd them across this dangerous shore? And put them safely on the other side, having exited their business. That's what you're doing with your clients. Clients. You are helping them cross the shore to something better. So when someone is unhappy in their career, unhappy in their business, and they're like, I'm just gonna go to another company and do the same thing because I'll pay me more. Oh, please. It's not about the money. It is about will you get what your needs are met on the other side? And if not, how do we prepare you to know what those needs. Needs are so they get met?

Oh, Denise, I absolutely love it. And there's. Gosh, there's so many parallels in terms of, like, anybody who's in any situation can get something from what we just discussed and what you shared. I mean, any transition. I want this job to be over. I want this employer to flush down the toilet. I want a new career. I want to start a bed and breakfast. What do you really want? What do you really need? I mean, it's so. And I think that you're so good at it that you make it sound pretty streamlined and you can assess pretty quickly. I think when you work with any human being, it's such a confluence of even their money relationship. And they're like, woo, from the childhood. But we won't go there. We're going to end here.

Where?

Because, my gosh, that's another two hours. Where do we learn about you? Where do we get your book? Where do people hire you to come speak at their events? Where do we go, Denise?

So the website is simple. It's deniselogan.com the book is called the Seller's Journey, and it's written as a business fable. It's the story of an owner. One year after he sells his business, he goes on a trip across Glacier national park with his banker, his lawyer, his wealth manager, and the private equity buyer who bought his firm.

What a story.

I always say they all come back alive. Don't be SC scared. But as they cross the glacier, they're relating the physical obstacles they're facing to the emotional obstacles he faced in letting go of his business. It's a he or she, a tool. Yes. I love it.

I love it.

And that book is available on the website. It's on Kindle and on Audible.

Thank you for joining. I so much to. You know, I know when I've had an amazing input of information to think about, I sometimes need to go take a nap, and that's what I feel like right now. Thank you. Wow. Anyone who works with you, is so gifted and blessed to have your expertise. Denise, thank you for sharing so much of it with us.

So much. My pleasure. I enjoyed it very much.

Thank you. All right, everybody. Wow. I hope that no matter what situation or state you're in, whether you have a business where you're thinking about a business where you're thinking about leaving your career or job, that you will find something here that will move you forward. We'd love to hear what you got out of this show, as you know that we love to hear from you. And just wherever you see this, whether that's LinkedIn, all of our social platforms in newsletters, please let us know what your situation is and what really spoke to you today. We'd love to hear. All right, everybody. Thanks again, Denise. Have a wonderful week, and we will see you next time. Time. Thanks so much for joining us today. And please don't forget to check out finding brave.org for more programs, resources, and tips. And tune in next time for your weekly dose of Finding Brave.