Planning Your Business Exit Strategy With Mike Malatesta

You know, this guy that gave me all this confidence, my best friend, all this stuff. Now he's gone, right? We started this business around his kitchen table with his wife and his kids, and now he went, you know, he gave up everything he had to go work with me. And here we are. Diane doesn't have a husband. The kids don't have a dad.

Welcome back to Innovate and Overcome. On today's special episode, I have an incredible guest with me who's been an entrepreneur since the age of 26. He's lived the roller coaster and experienced all the pain, the grit, the mistakes, and the joy that come with being a business owner. Now, he helped found, grow and sell two incredible companies in the waste, recycling and disposal space. These companies collectively generated more than $500 million in revenue while he was involved with them, and they sold for more than $180 million. He helps entrepreneurs who are stuck and helps them get unstuck so they can create the futures that they want. I'm really excited to have Mike Malatesta joining us today. Mike, thank you for being on the program.

Richard, thank you for having me. I've been looking forward to this. This is so cool to be on your TV show. So thank you very, very much.

Yeah, it's going to be great. I think you have had such an amazing breadth of experience over your entrepreneurial journey. Now, you and I haven't known each other for a long time, but what I do know of you is just how amazing the journey has been, the things that you've been able to do and accomplish, and also how you're showing up and helping entrepreneurs now, especially when it comes to them looking at planning an exit for their business, which is really a specialty of yours. Now that in mind, you didn't develop those skills overnight. You developed them over 30 plus years of being an entrepreneur and going through real world experiences. So I'd like to maybe rewind the tape a little bit and see if you can take us back to that point in time in your early 20s. What was happening, what was going on that, that caused this scenario for you to say, you know what? I gotta try my hand at being in business. So how did that materialize for you?

Yeah, well, thanks for the question. And I'm gonna. To answer that question, I'm gonna take, I'm gonna take us all back a little bit further to where the path that I was on at 26, how I got on that path, and then I'll tell you about what happened then. So when I was growing up I was 4 or 5 years old. My parents lived across the street from a construction company. And I remember in the summers I would sit on the curb outside of my parents house and kind of have my knees tucked up to my chest. And I would watch these guys bring their trucks and equipment and everything back to the yard.

And.

There was something about the noise, the sounds, the smells, and the guys and the equipment themselves, Richard, that just made me think, this is like the coolest thing ever. And these guys, some of them would come over and they would give me something that was left over from their lunch or they'd give me a quarter or something and tell me to be a good boy and do the things. And I was just like, oh man, this is so cool. And that experience kind of stuck with me. And from that time, all through grade school and into high school, I was just fascinated by trucks and people who operated trucks. And I would draw trucks with my name on it on my notebooks and you know, the covers that you used to put on the books. My mom would cover my books with grocery bags that she cut or whatever. And when I got into college, I got a job driving a truck for a fencing company. My buddies brother was like a foreman there, so he got us a job. And I was delivering fence up and down the east coast of. Of the US and during that summer doing that job, I thought, oh, this is pretty cool. I really like being out on my own and being responsible for myself and doing something that's not working at the fast food joint or, you know, things that the other people around me were doing. And. And I decided that summer that the next summer I didn't want to drive. I didn't want to drive a fence truck. I wanted to drive a trash truck. Why a trash truck? Have no idea. I just thought they were cool. And I passed a lot of them during my driving of the fence truck. And I just wanted to do that. So the next summer or spring break actually, I went and I knocked on a bunch of doors because I was only 20 at the time. And you usually, you don't get hired for that kind of a job unless you're older. So some people laughed me out of their office. Some people were very nice to me, but said no. And ultimately I came to this one place at Ace Service company is what it was called in downtown Philadelphia. And I knocked on the door. And the short story is they interviewed me on the spot. They gave me a driving test and I had no idea what I was this transmission in this truck. I Have no idea. But they hired me and I worked that summer at a service corp.

And.

I just loved the waste business. It was such a cool experience because like I had mentioned before, kids are working in different fast food or whatever they're working in. I'm working with men, I'm working with men with families. You know, I'm working with, I'm working with like serious equipment. I'm driving the streets of Philly, you know, putting, dropping off dumpsters and picking them up. I mean, this is big time for me. And that summer convinced me that I wanted to go into the waste business. It's, it was, it's, it's, you know, it's great work, great people, at least I thought they were great people. And we're doing meaning something meaningful, right? We're just, we're cleaning up the world. And I went to the owner and the owner said, well, you know, I got a family business here, so there's really not any place for a college kid. And he suggested I go to the big, the big guys and try to get a management trading job or a sales job. So that's exactly what I did. I went to the second. Well, I went to both. But I got hired by the second largest company in the industry at that time as a management trainee. And man, the next five years I basically had a say yes to every opportunity they give me mentality, Richard. And I ended up moving around five times in four years, just taking whatever position they wanted me to take. And they were showing me every, you know, everything. It was great. And you know, I convinced myself. Well, I ultimately ended up, ended up becoming, but at the time, the youngest general divi. District manager. That's what they called it in the company. I was 24 years old and I thought, I wasn't thinking about entrepreneurialism at all. I thought I'm going to be, I could probably be the CEO of this company at some point if I play my cards right and if I, you know, just keep performing and doing all these things, I could probably be moving.

Your way up that corporate ladder, right?

Yeah. Moving up that corporate ladder. It sounded good, right? And on, on. I'll never forget the day because it's St. Patrick's Day. On St. Patrick's Day, 1992, my boss came to my office and fired me. And I did not see that coming. And I'm looking around and I'm, I mean, obviously when something like that happens, you're questioning yourself. You're, you're, I, I, it really, it really hit me hard like what? It was a total surprise. And as I started to recover from that, which took a while, I started thinking about drawing those pictures on. Of the trucks on my notebooks and sitting on that curb when I was a kid. And I thought, well, I got nothing better going on. I mean, I. I had put my whole life, my whole future thinking into this opportunity. Now this opportunity is gone. And so I met a guy who became my partner. His name was Butch, Butch Weiss. And Butch and I sat around his kitchen table for a couple of months thinking about how to do something like this, how to start a company, which we had no idea how to do. And, you know, six months or so later, after. After I'd been fired, we. We started our first company. And. And then the learning really, you know, began now.

So that's really interesting. So was Butch also in the waste industry?

Or.

How did you guys. Was just a friend. How did you guys get connected? And. And I'm really curious, you know, when you started, you had to start with a piece of equipment. You needed a truck. So. Yeah, how did. Where did you get it? How did you guys figure that out? Was Butch the money guy and you're the. You're the guy who's driving? Is that kind of the arrangement? I'm curious, you know, to give our guys.

Yeah.

Listening.

What transpired? Yeah, perfect question. A very reasonable question. So I had met Butch at the last place I was working in Milwaukee. So before I'd been fired, I was working with Butcher for about a year. And I didn't know him. I mean, I knew him as a team member. I knew him as, you know, I knew him that way, but I didn't know him know him. But after I got let go, he threw another guy. I mean, he didn't even know how to reach me. He didn't even have my number or anything. But one of our managers, he went to one of our managers who knew where. Where I lived, my phone number, and said, hey, you know, I just want to pass along this message. I don't know what he's got in mind, but Butch said he wanted to talk to you. And I was like, wow, that's weird. So I talked to him, and he said some nice things about me. And then he said, look, I'm. You know, I. I've been. I've been going up and down in my life, you know, different owners of this company, different things in my life. He's like, I really. I really want to do something different. And if you are ever thinking about starting a business, I would like to be a partner with you. And that was really, really out of left field and, and, and so important, Richard, because at that time, like I said, I was really, I had, I had no idea what I was going to do. And him saying that to me. And even though I didn't know him well, I knew, I knew he was a serious guy. I knew he had a lot of talent. And that gave me confidence to say, okay, well maybe I can turn those drawings and those thoughts that I, that I mentioned before into something real. And so like I said, we talked about it around his kitchen table a few times. Then I was like, okay, I'm going to put a business plan together and let's see how much money we have between the two of us. And if I can go to a bank and I can get a loan, then we're going to do this. And so he kept working at, at the company and I worked on, on the business plan and worked on getting the funding and fortunately we were approved for a loan. And that's what gave us, you know, the money or the capital to, to get going. And so, yeah, and in, in November of that year, which was 1992, had the loan approved, started to buy the order the equipment we would need and which quit his job at the end of the year. And we started working on things before that actually, you know, like the equipment and stuff. But 2nd of January, 1993, we were open for our business.

Wow. Amazing. Being able to take a leap of faith, not even knowing that it was something you were able to do, could do, wanted to do. And having someone really invest in you as a human being based on the efforts that you displayed, so incredible. We're going to hear more about the growth of this incredible business when we come back after these important messages.

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Welcome back. We are here with Mike hearing about his incredible journey of beginning a brand new business that he didn't even know that he wanted. With an incredible partnership. And what an amazing story so far. Now, Mike, you've been building this business. Now you've been growing it with your business partner. Things are progressing. It's growing, growing, growing. Sounds like quite rapidly as you began to go through that period of time. Sooner or later something happens where now all of a sudden, you've got a major event that takes place in the business. Walk us through the next kind of major challenge. I know there was many along the way, but something kind of really transpired in your partnership. Walk our listeners through what happened for you and how momentous this was as you were growing the business.

Sure. Well, you know, for anybody who's listening, who is an entrepreneur or thinking about and thinking about becoming an entrepreneur, the one thing you really got to wrap your heads around is that there are always going to be challenges and problems that you think are more monumental than they are. And it takes going through those things and coming out on the other side to continue to give you the confidence to keep going. Because the life of an entrepreneur is a life of chipping away confidence. Like everything around you, whether it's employees who don't work out, vendors who don't work out, your banks on your butt, regulators are at the door. You know, just. Everything is just kind of eating away, chipping away at your confidence. And you have to continually rebuild that by getting to the other side of these problems and not being sidelined by them. But, you know, some things are easier to say than they. Than they are to do. So Butch and I and everyone else who joined our team, we got really good at overcoming challenges. We got really good at problem solving. We got really good at, I want. I don't want to say out thinking the competition, but we got really good at performing against the competition. And so we were growing and we were profitable, and people were paying attention to us, and we were doing things well enough to be considered to be doing things well. And about 10 years in it, I really needed a change because I was not getting my confidence rebuilt or repaired as frequently as I think I needed to. And one of the big reasons, Richard, was that the management style that I had that I thought was really crucial to our business was basically one that looked like this. Everything rolls up to, To. To. To me so that I can be involved in every decision or make the every decision. And that which was a system that I had designed, it was like a perfectly designed system by me, was giving me exactly the outcome that I didn't want.

So it was Perfectly designed to make your life increasingly more miserable. Is that what you're getting?

Yeah. Yes. Yes. But it's even worse because as I. As I had it designed in my mind, which is how it was being executed, I'm thinking to myself, why can't people see how I'm thinking inside, How I don't want this? Right? It's like, I call it leading by osmosis. Right? It's like if I'm thinking about something, you clearly should be thinking about it too, Rich. I mean, how can you not be seeing this? Right? So if anybody's out there, that resonates with. I'm sure there are, because. That is where reality and perception just go right off the rails. And so I was feeling this. I was feeling this, and I was frustrated and I didn't know what to do. And then on October 2nd in 2003, I got a call from one of our really great friend and someone who'd been with our company for a while, Jeff Dean. And he told me that Butch, my partner, Butch, had been burned in a fire. And Jeff and Butch and some other guys were working at one of our facilities a couple of miles from home or a couple hours from home. And they were basically redoing the plant. Richard. This was a plant that was processing wastewater. We were that plant. We were treating, recycling wastewater there. And so we had an antiquated process. And we were so excited because we were tearing out all the new. Our old, putting in all the new. And, you know, the short story is, which made him. Made a mistake, he went inside of a tank that he thought was empty and clean, and it was marked empty and clean. But he shouldn't have gone in the tank the way he did. He went in the tank with his torch. He fired up his torch. He cut into a pipe that was in the way of what he wanted to do. There was material left in that pipe that. That material ignited, and essentially the, the, the. The flame went up the pipe, it hit the ceiling, bounced off, kind of bounced off the ceiling and, you know, around the exterior of the tank. And the tank was basically heating up like an oven with him inside of it.

Oh, man. Wow, that's unbelievable.

Yeah. I mean, one of the guys, Rico Martinez, risked his life to get Butch out of the tank, and he was successful doing that. They got him outside, and, yeah, he was badly burned, but alive. And this is what Jeff was telling me. This was where we were in the process.

You're just learning this.

You're on the phone, I'm learning this. Jeff's telling me this. I'm learning this, and, you know, they're going to take Butch to the hospital and see, you know, see what happens. And. And I could hear in Jeff's voice that he was very concerned. But I have to admit to you, Richard, that even though it sounded horrible, I. And I was concerned, of course, this guy, which. This guy who gave me the confidence to start the business, he was like the strongest, toughest person I had ever met. And so no matter how it sounded, I felt reasonably sure that this was going to be okay. And I was wrong, because three days later, his body, his organs started shutting down and. And he died. And that was. You know, I mentioned I was already in this kind of. Where I had led myself to be, this perfectly designed system of frustration. And now my. My. My. My best friend, the person who had more confidence and support for me than anyone else in my life and who was a perfect compliment to me from a skill set standpoint, everything is gone. And I felt responsible for that. Even though I said he made a mistake. It took me a long time to be able to say that, because even so, he may have made a mistake. But if I had been more diligent in making sure that we don't permit those kinds of mistakes to be made, for example, and on and on, your head just starts going.

So I felt the spiral begins to go, and you're already in a state where you're thinking some of these things before the incident even happened, maybe to some degree. Right, right. And so with. With such an unbelievable circumstance taking place. I mean, you. You. You've. You've given Butch so many adjectives to describe what he meant to you, what he was to you.

What.

What was the thing that allowed, you know, at what point did you realize that you. You could pick up the pieces? How did you begin to find a way to progress forward after that? And. And how long did it take for you to even be able to do that?

It took me a couple of years. I call it being in the valley of uncertainty. And I dropped into this valley after his death and maybe even a little bit before, if I'm being honest with myself. And in that valley, I felt like I wanted to quit for sure. But I also felt like I deserve to have a pity party for myself because, you know, this is unfair, what's happened to me. What happened to Butch is unfair. And I just wanted somebody to come along and just stroke my ego, tell me, everything's going to be okay, Richard, and, you know, lift me up out of that valley and dust me off and say, okay, so everything's good. Well, that never happened. That person never came along, and I just slowly but surely climbed my way out of there. With a lot of help from. We. You know, we had strong team members like Jeff that I mentioned and Rico and some others, But I had just never given them the autonomy to be as strong as they could be. And so, over time, with some coaching and just, you know, giving in to the reality of this isn't working. I need to try something else. I. I came to understand that for me to be in this and lead this business further, I had to be a different kind of leader. And so that's the path that I started on after I got out of that valley, or it helped me get out of there. Wow.

This. This journey, your experience so far in business, I mean, we. We overshot 10 years worth of all the challenges you had to overcome to. To land on this unfortunate circumstance with your business partner. Now, when we come back after our break, I think we're gonna be able to really help people understand a little bit about what are some of the other key tools and things you had in place and that you would wish for business owners to have in place. So should an unfortunate incident like that occur for them, they can have some peace of mind. So we'll be right back with Mike after these incredible messages.

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We are back with Mike talking about his unbelievable story. We've just covered an unbelievable, crazy event that transpired. The loss of his business partner. And at this stage of the game, Mike, you're. You're rebounding, you're trying to recover. You're trying to bring yourself out of this valley that you. You spoke about to get onto the other side to continue the business moving forward. Hopefully the business isn't crashing around you. What were some of the things that allowed the business to maintain during that period? How were you able to even keep the business going with all that stuff happening? Was there some insurance involved? How did you, how are you able to keep the ship afloat?

Yeah, well, you can imagine, like, you know, this guy that gave me all this confidence, my best friend, all this stuff. Now he's gone, right? We started this business around his kitchen table with his wife and his kids, right? And now he went, you know, he gave up everything he had to go work with me, right? And here we are. He's. He's now, you know, Diane doesn't have a husband, the kids don't have a dad, and the connection between them. And this is me.

That's.

I'm thinking about this. And so you, when you, whenever you have an industrial accident like this or, or anything happen in business, it gets a lot of attention, right? OSHA in the US OSHA comes and comes calling. You got insurance issues to deal with. You've got permitting issues to deal with in our particular business. And, and those are the kind of things that you, you know, wouldn't. You might not necessarily expect it in this particular specific situation, but you expect that kind of stuff that comes with the territory. Having to talk to your partner's wife about what his shares are worth now that he's deceased and how to handle that is not something I was trained for and it's not something that I ever thought I would have to do. But I was trained to plan for the worst. And we, from the very beginning of our company, we planned for the worst and we bought. Well, it wasn't really key man life insurance. It was more like cross buy, sell type buy, sell arrangement with a funding mechanism of insurance in case something were to happen to either one of us or our other two partners. And so when you look at the tragedy that was Butch's passing away, we at least had the money through the insurance company to pay Diane for his, his shares. And imagine, you know, if you didn't have that, so now you've got this tragedy, all the energy that that is taking. And oh, by the way, you owe, you know, a spouse a couple million dollars or whatever the amount is for shares that you don't have. Now you think about where that puts your business, right? So we were very fortunate.

How many employees did you have at this point in time, Mike? Roughly how many responses?

We had about 50 at this time.

That's a lot of mouths to feed. And they had mouths to feed. And they're all, they're all expecting to be able to come to work the next day.

Yeah. And of course, none of them have any idea about this insurance thing going on in the background and how. So. Yeah. So anyway, fortunately we, we had put this in place from a very, from from the very beginning, and it worked the way that it was supposed to work. And it's a, it's something that is very easy for a lot of business owners to overlook. Right. They, especially when you get started young, you, you know, you, you think you're going to be invincible. Everybody around you is invincible. The likelihood of something happening is very small. And all that might be, that part might be true, but invincibility is not true. And things can happen at any time. And if you're not prepared for it, not only are you going to deal with the consequences personally, but your business can, well, it can go away. I mean, it can be something that you just can't get passed. And not just the insurance, Richard. I mean, what if you didn't have a buy, sell agreement? What if you didn't have a mechanism in place to value a business or an asset or whatever. If something were to go wrong, you're just inviting a worse situation, a lawsuit or whatever. And, you know, nothing good ever comes from that kind of stuff. So you, it pays to be proactive. And, you know, from an, from an insurance standpoint, it's so inexpensive on a relative basis to create this kind of protection for yourself and other shareholders and for your business that it's just, you know, nuts not to have something in.

Place like this, you know, in the type of work that you do now, helping companies, you know, grow in scale and plan for an exit. I imagine you have to look at a lot of balance sheets, a lot of income statements on different corporate financials. And one thing that at least in my experience I found is often missing on many of those documents is the business owner. The shareholders aren't often added to the balance sheet in a way that they should be. And for many, in many cases, without them, the business doesn't. It ceases to exist, or it certainly is in a position where it may not exist for much longer. And so when you can place people on the balance sheet by using a properly structured insurance program, not only can you create, depending on the design of it, maybe an emergency fund, a lot of other value in there, but you can create peace of mind so that, you know, you, you can be in a position to keep that business going despite what gets thrown at it. And you were. You and Butch, really, I suspect he was probably a leading edge on maybe pushing for initiating that to some degree. Maybe you guys got some great advice earlier on, but I mean, how tremendous that you had that in place. Again, the likelihood being low, but just because it's low doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Yeah, I love the way you put that, attaching that to the balance sheet because, yeah, you're thinking about, you know, the leader in a business or the top three leaders in the business. Right. They are arguably have, from a physical asset standpoint themselves to an intangible asset standpoint. Everything that they have up here, and it's, it's on the balance sheet. It's zero. There's nothing. There's, there's, there's. It's zero. It's not even on there. Right.

How do you quantify the human potential and the human. Yeah, the human resource. We talk about human resources.

Right.

How do you quantify the human resource that's in between our ears? That squishy mass, that powerful computer that helps us make problem solving decisions when you're growing a business.

Yeah, I love the way you put that. Yeah, I'm going to use that. Come on, this is smart. But, yeah, you gotta look any way that you can mitigate risk, particularly with a product that is monetizable in the event of a catastrophe like life insurance is, you just have to have it. Even if you think your business isn't worth anything because you lose a partner, even if your business isn't worth a ton of money, you still have to replace that partner, and you don't replace the partner. You know, in a business with zero money, right, it takes money to attract a new. A new person or, or hire, you know, consultants or temp help that you might need. And during the time that, you know, you're overcoming the, the loss or, you know, whatever it is, anything that you can mitigate risk with that's monetizable right away, like insurance is with. Insurance is so smart. And I know it sucks to pay the premiums. Everybody, everybody goes, oh, this sucks. Yeah, it does. But only up until you need it. And then it's like, that's the best deal that there ever was. And I'm so glad I did it and had it.

In your scenario, of course, you know, Diane, you know, Butch's wife and family, they have a right to go on living and they have the, they need the time. They need the grieving component and they don't need to be thinking about a lawsuit. This, where are we going to, where we. How are we going to fund our life? All the things that they would. That are additionally pressured upon them. The fact that you were able to create liquidity in, in. In. In very short period of time, to be able to give them the chance to go on with their life and to represent the value that Butch brought to the table while he was with the organization. I mean, what a blessing, what a gift that is to be able to give them that opportunity, that choice to make sure that it's fair and equitable and to be in a position where you have these 50 other people in the business that also have families and mouths to feed. They're not wondering if they're going to be able to get a paycheck next week.

Yeah. Yep, Very true, Very true. It was one of the smartest things that we had ever done, that's for sure.

Now we, we talk a little bit about innovation on this show and you know, one thing that it sounds to me, and we had a little discussion at the break, your key innovation for you during this period of time, the aftermath of what happened with Bush, was really having good coaching. Being in a position where not only you could be coachable, but you could have someone help you through, you know, through or really up, I should say crawling up, as you put it, this, this valley of darkness that you've been placed in after this event. So at what point did coaching enter the world and how did you know you were ready to receive it?

So I didn't know that I was ready to receive it. So I'll just say that. But I was desperate. I had had friends recommend a program called Strategic Coach to me before this had occurred with Butch and I, I mean, I just dismissed it. I like, oh, that's great for you guys, but I don't need that stuff. Right. Even though I've been feeling the way I expressed that I had been feeling and I was kind of overwhelmed and I didn't really know what to do. I just thought, I'm going to rip my way through this, Richard. I don't need this stuff. And then after what happened with Butch and me, you know, dropping myself into this valley of uncertainty, it became clear to me that I had to try something.

We'll be right back with Mike after these incredible messages.

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We are back with Mike Malfesta talking about his unbelievable story. At what point did coaching enter the world and how did you know you were ready to receive it?

I had to try something, and Strategic Coach is what I tried. It was. They had an office in Chicago. I was in Milwaukee. It was very close to do so that helped me take the chance. And so I went and I have to tell you that I wasn't. I didn't go because I was excited about going. I went because I thought I was punishing myself. Right. Okay, Now I got to get some coaching in order to get out of this because like I said, I was just a grit your way through stuff. And I always took a lot of pride in being able to grid my way through stuff. And when I got to coach, I was interested, but I was not engaged for a while. It took me a while to really get past this BS mentality. I had that you guys, you know, guys and gals who are in the room, you probably need this kind of help, but I don't, you know, I kind of like a chip on my shoulder. But I'll tell you what changed everything for me in coach. Well, two things. One, Dan Sullivan is the. I consider him the creator of Strategic Coach. He and his wife, I guess, technically created it, but it wouldn't. There wouldn't be a strategic coach without his ideas. I mean, that's just the way it is. And this isn't even something that he teaches in the program, but I was listening to a cd. Like, you would go to the things and you would get a book after. And there were. This is how long ago it was. There were CDs in there, right? And I would pop the CD in my. In my car on the way home and I would listen to it. And I got. That's where I was getting a lot of value. And Dan was telling a story about. It doesn't even matter what it was about. But he said these five words. He said, my future is my property. And when he said my future is my property, it was like a baseball bat to the head for me because I had been, as I described, thinking that my future was someone else's property. I was waiting for someone else to come along and tell me what my future was going to be. And when Dan said my future is my property, I said, God darn it, you're right. My future is my property. It's not butchers, it's not the governments, it's not the people on our team. It's not the frustration I'm feeling. The future is what I want it to be. And that changed my mentality in a way, in the most profound way that anything has, besides getting married. That just changed everything. And once I accepted that my future was my property, Richard, there was nothing. Washington. I was no longer going to take any BS from myself. I was no longer going to be the excuse for me not getting what I want or making progress towards what I want. And even today, that was almost 20 years ago when I heard that, give or take. And even today I say that all the time. My future is my property. I tell myself that all the time. Every time I'm feeling like I am not getting where I want to be and I want to blame somebody. Right. I see. No, no, no, no, no, no. My future is my property. So I know that that has made me very powerful. And, and I think that it would make anybody. If you believe that about yourself, if you believe that your future is your property. And then all of the things, the election and all this climate change and everything that some people want to put in front of their future as an obstacle, it just goes away. Now I'm not delusional, right? I mean, I can't predict everything in my future, which is why we have key man insurance or buy sellers. I can't predict all of that stuff, but I can sure as hell proactively work towards what I want to create. And I can make up what I want to create, I can admit, because the future is what it's a hundred percent made up, right? I mean, right. It's a made up thing. So I'm.

It doesn't exist until it becomes the past, right?

So why not? Why so why not will it into existence the way I want it instead of just waiting for it to come?

It sounds to me like those five words were one of the greatest innovations that occurred to you in your human existence. And I'm suspect and I could be wrong, but maybe you'll let me know. You've been able to take what you learned from Dan Sullivan in that moment on that cd and you've been able to start sparking that in other people around you. The people on your team, the people in different businesses. You sold a few businesses. You now help people put their business in a position to be sold. You know, you teach about creating a dream exit for people who are going through that entrepreneurial journey, something you yourself have done a few times. How important is it to you to be able to convey that value that you received 20 years ago while probably driving in your car to the other people that are around you and the entrepreneurs that you meet and. And you find that they're running through similar challenges and obstacles and feelings that you yourself have had over the last 30 years.

Yeah, it's. There's no greater impact I can have on someone's life than helping them see that their future is their property and helping them understand what they need to do to create a dream exit for themselves at some point down the road.

And.

And that doesn't even have to be a business owner, because everyone's got a dream exit of some sort in their future. I just happen to focus on entrepreneurs and business owners. But the thinking and the mentality is all the same. What do you want? Get very clear about what you want. Don't be embarrassed by it. Don't be ashamed of it. Don't think you don't deserve it. Just start with, what do you want? And then where are you? There's always a gut check. Where are you? All progress starts with the truth. Is another Sullivanism. Or at least he says it a lot. I don't know if he came up with it, but all progr. Progress starts with the truth. So what do you want? That's future state. Where are you today? All progress starts with the truth. So let's just get real about where we are today. And then let's start a plan to fill the gap. Right? And if you really believe that what you want is yours, then we can help you get there. Simple as that. It. And so, yeah, and I use that all the. All the time. And whenever someone is challenged with how to be like the next step towards getting there, you know, there's like one or one of two things. You do either one. Okay, the next step is too big. Break it down into a smaller step. Let's just figure out something that we can do today. We take a little step towards that. Or we say to ourselves, again, making things up. What if. What if achieving that next step was the only thing that we could possibly do today? How would we do it? And just like, just a conversation like that removes people's inhibitions. It just frees them up to do something that life is telling them they can't do do or their own memory or experience. Is telling them they can't do. Yeah.

Moving out of the I can'ts to the I cans and taking away the restrictions that we, we either externally or internally impose on our, on our own brain. And I love all the questions that I learned from Dan Sullivan, one of, and some other great teachers that I've had is what might I do?

What might it do?

What might I do specifically that I haven't already thought of yet? So sometimes you write down a list of things and you come up with a bunch of ideas, and then you get to a point where like, okay, I don't have any new fresh ideas. But then if you pause for a moment, you say, okay, what else might I do that I haven't even thought of yet? That's totally and completely different than that. It's like your brain accesses another part of itself it didn't even know existed.

Yeah. And I liked it. I like to putting, you know, doing, doing a, you know, if getting it done was, you know, if, if getting it done was the only option, there were no other options. Getting that next step done was the only option, what would you do? You're clearly going to come up with something, right? Like with your. What might you do? You might come up with five things. But, yeah, that's, that's how I like to. That's, that's how I like to think through things.

And I'm curious, you know, when you, because you're, you're working now, in the work that you're doing today, you're really focusing on helping entrepreneurs who are in a position where they've got a successful but profitable business. They are. They may not need or want to sell yet, but they know at some future point in time they want to be ready for it. They're getting into a proactive state versus a reactive state. I know for you, when you sold your first business, did you have an intention to sell or is it something that just sort of materialized for you?

It sort of materialized. However, the not having the intention at the time that it materialized is only one part of the equation. The other part of the equation is were you ready to have something materialize when it did? And the answer to that is yes. The answer, unfortunately, for too many business owners, is no. So when the opportunity materializes, they're not ready for it. And so more times than not, that leads to them getting an exit, perhaps, but not a dream exit. And I make a distinction between those two things.

So if we have entrepreneurs looking at this conversation today and we were to give them from your experience and all the people that you've served, what were, what would be the top 1, 2, 3 things that you might share with them about what they could do specifically in their world today to position themselves, to move them one step, one notch closer to the potential of creating a dream exit.

Yeah, so I like to, I, I'm, I like colors and, and I describe what you're asking me as red, gold, green. So red is where we are today. That's the reality check. Like, probably if you're like most business owners, you're doing nothing about this type of planning. Gold is this, what do you want? Gold is what do you want? Right. That's the future. That's taking someone into the future. Right. And trying to get really clear about what you want. And then green is taking that first step toward the goal. Right. So getting off of the red line, taking that first step toward. And that's what I would, that's what I tell everybody in order to get started. Because it's amazing to me, Richard, how many people will come to you and say out of frustration or tired or their age or whatever. I want to. They say, I want to sell. Now you say, okay, well, what do you want? They go, I don't know. I just want to sell. Okay. So, you know, they don't realize that if you don't know what you want, the likelihood that you're going to get it is what, probably zero. Right. You're going to figure out what you want after you get what you get. And that's not a, that's, that's, that's, that's too late.

It's kind of hard to hit a target if the target doesn't exist.

That's right. Yeah, good point. Yeah. That's a good way to put it.

You know, Mike, you've shared so much incredible value, a really powerful story about real world experience that you've had in life and in business. Because the two things aren't separate. They're connected. You can't. They are. You can't run a business without having a life. And often you can't have a life without coming up with an idea or a way to run a business. So these things overlap. And what you've shared with us is a lot about not only the strife that can exist, but the power to overcome and the fact that you can use not just tools, but resources, the resources of other people, coaches, individuals in your life. Inspiration that you can tap into. Hopefully our listeners have been able to get some of that inspiration from you today. And I'm so grateful for having you on the program. Thanks for joining us. And for our viewers, please tune in to next week's incredible episode on Innovate and Overcome.