Secrets of a Business Broker with Mark Daoust

Well, I think people should always have selling somewhere in their back of the mind, but I don't necessarily think that means they should be selling their company.

How much more successful would you be.

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Hey everybody, Roland Frazier here with the business launch podcast. And I'm excited to have my guest Mark Doust today with Quiet Light. And what the heck is Quiet Light? Share that with us.

Well, we are an M and a firm for online based businesses. We've been around since 2007, 15 years. We work a lot with like Amazon, FBA businesses, content SaaS. If it's online, we've, we've worked with them and we help those owners prepare. We're sell side. Right. So we're helping those owners prepare and plan their exit. And then when it comes to executing that exit, we help them from preparation, execution to final closing. Cool, cool.

And where are you guys based out of?

We're all over the place. We're actually based out of North Carolina. That's our actual headquarters. My business partner lives there in North Carolina. I'm up in the Twin cities, but our CEOs in Georgia. The country, not the state. Okay. We're in the UK and just all over the country as well.

How does, how does that work as far as from a remote standpoint, keeping everybody together and in touch?

Well, first of all, I love it. Keeping people together. I mean, it can have its challenges, of course, especially as we grow. We're 35 large at this point and as we've grown past that 20, 25 person threshold, it definitely, you know, there are some struggles there to keep people cohesive, but it's been good. We have highly skilled entrepreneurs who are reviewing these deals before they go to market. And there's a lot of back and forth. I'll give you an example. We just closed on a business last spring that I first talked to 14 years ago. Oh, wow. Right. So this was a long process of us. You know, not really. We're not pushing anybody to the exits. It's a lot of just relationships. Right. So it's a relationship with that business owner. Talk to them about their business and how to, first of all, view it as an asset. A lot of business owners don't see their businesses as assets. They see them as cash flow machines, which, you know, that's not necessarily incorrect. But we also want to open them up to this idea that asset worth something in and of its own. Right. And you don't have to sell it. In fact, frankly, if you're making good money from it and you enjoy it and it's not stressful or anything else, probably it shouldn't sell it. Right. Have a good reason to sell. We want to awaken people to the idea that they do have something that's an asset, that's valuable and they should do what they can to maximize the value of that business. And we're there to just help them with that. Now we understand eventually a lot of these people will want to exit.

Sure.

And the payoff of that relationship, hopefully is that they come and choose us and we walk them that process.

So a lot of people now who have say, I know that Amazon in particular FBA businesses is kind of a darling of the M and A world in terms of there's a Thorasio and Perch and a bunch of these guys that are focusing on that niche in particular, they're kind of going direct like to. They're speaking at events for E commerce people and things like that. Why should somebody not just basically go and take an offer from somebody? Like they're just so excited that they get an offer like that and the offers are in a range that they're hoping for. Why use a broker instead of that?

Well, there's a number of questions in there. One is why use a broker? So let me just back out first. Why shouldn't you just take the offer that maybe you get in your inbox? Because I know if you own an FBA business, you've probably got the offer in your box. Right. The analogy we like to use is if you're selling something at an auction, do you want one paddle or 100 paddles in that room? I. I Want a hundred. Right, Right. So that's reason number one. Number two, when we analyze businesses, we get a lot of the people that have been approached by the Thrasios purchase heydays and all those companies, and then the people come to us to check on the valuation and what we find is that a, they are vastly undervaluing their own businesses, making some fundamental mistakes and those companies aren't telling them about it. They are more than happy to pay an ignorance discount. Right, right. And meanwhile, because this industry only talks in terms of multiples without any understanding what the multiple is, and particularly not understanding that multiples are not a universal measurement, depending what you throw into that multiple, that can mean different things. Right. So oftentimes these sellers are taking discounts and thinking they're getting slamming deals. And then we look at it and we say, we would have gotten you more. And we do have enough data internally to know we generally get people more. Now the question of why do you use a broker? Why do you use an advisor? You know what, if you can do it on your own, do it on your own. You're going to save a lot of money. Right. And we have a lot of resources to help people do that. The argument to use a broker is we should be getting you more money than you would on your own, first and foremost. And second of all, we should be relieving a lot of the stress that goes into it when selling a business. And you know all about this, but when selling or doing any transaction, first timers, second timers, fifth timers, we often think about what am I going to get for what are the basic terms. But along the way there are hundreds of little decisions that have to be made, hundreds of little negotiation points along the way that need to be made. And being able to step back and be somewhat unemotional about that is extraordinarily difficult to do. Right. It's really tough to do. It's very helpful to have somebody in your corner who's done that, been there and done that before, both individually, so that they can maybe, when you're being irrational, they can maybe talk to you about that and say, hey, maybe we should think about this another way. Or if the buyer's being irrational, say, no, this is. You are right. Your instincts are right, Mr. Seller. We should push back against this. So having somebody in your corner is just a nice thing to have. I would say the value prop. What is value prop? More money. We gotta justify our fee. Right. You can't be paying whatever you pay us for. Just somebody in Your corner. But two also significantly lower, faster deal, cleaner deal. All these things should be occurring.

So what are definitely a trend that I have seen for a lot more direct outreach and trying to avoid the negotiation. Just, you know, hey, we, we're here, we have an offer, we're ready to go. What are some of the things that you see that are points that people miss when they just basically come in and they. Somebody makes them an offer and maybe they go back and forth and they are negotiating on their own behalf and then they work out a deal versus having you guys involved.

Let me just back up real quick. We talked to one aggregator. We talked to obviously all the aggregators. Aggregators are the thrassi. Who's the purchase this, this hot industry. And we asked them about what their impression was of quiet light deals. And their response was, we don't look at your deals, so why not? They said, well, we know that once we see it, everybody and their grandmother's seen it. And I'm thinking, I love that, I love the fact that you're saying this because there's no competition, right? That's exactly what they're saying. And they all want, they all reach out to us and say, what's the chance we can get some early looks at your deals? Right? They don't want the competition. And I get it. I totally get that. Common mistakes. One of the most common mistakes is just getting the books wrong, right? The most common mistake we see, especially from people that may, may have started the company two years ago, three years ago, it explodes. They're seeing three, five, maybe seven, $8 million in revenue. They're still recording the books on cash basis. And you're in a quickly growing business. Cash basis accounting undervalues the business every single time by not a small margin. We can go down this hole.

It's a little likely down.

All right, Lightly down people. To have an understanding, I consider the difference between two dimensional and three dimensional. So cash basis accounting recognizes your money as it comes in and as it comes out. Accrual basis accounting says when I spend money on inventory, I'm not losing value in that business. I'm converting cash, it's an asset into another cash into another asset, which is inventory. Right. So it doesn't show up on your expenses. When you're growing quickly, you're constantly having to buy more inventory. And so this is. I know a lot of Amazon sellers feel this way. Phil Knight from Nike, he dealt with this, right? Nike was living on the float for a long time. They were growing.

He said he was like on the brink of bankruptcy right up until the day woke up and was worth $4 billion. Right to hilarious.

I read this book, I'm like, this is like every Amazon seller we deal with, right? They're growing like mad, but they can't get ahead of the growth. So they're buying all this inventory and they look at their profit and loss statement if it's on accrual basis. And like, I made how much and where's that money? Right? I'm not seeing that money anywhere. Right. And so now where does this come in their favor? Well, when you're going to sell your business, if you're seeing that P and L number, nice, big, fat and juicy, you're multiplying that by a factor of 3, 4, 5, 6, right? Not including your inventory or working capital tags. And so you look at that and you're like, this is great. If you do it on cash basis, that number's lower because you're expensing that inventory when you're buying it and totally ignoring the fact that you have this big asset, which is really future revenue for the business.

So in terms of inventory, a lot of people when they're acquiring businesses or selling, get confused as to Sometimes it seems like it's included, sometimes it's not included. Let's just talk about inventory first, then we'll talk about working capital. But when should somebody consider that that's included? When there's a multiple and sometimes it's not. How do they reconcile when, when to decide that?

Hopefully it just says if there's inventory included or not. We're pretty explicit about that. Right. And the way that we look at it being sell side, we want to work to the benefit of our clients. And so for our clients, including inventory into the number, it might sound real nice, but it doesn't represent that much for them. Right. They've already spent that money. For on the buy side, I would generally assume that it's not, but I would make my offer assuming that it was. Right. So if I'm on the buy side until I hear otherwise, it's not like.

An industry rule outside a certain valuation or something like that where that happens.

This is not even with valuation. And this is where I talk about the different measuring sticks. We get people that come in and they ask us what the multiple is and then I ask them, well, who have you talked to? Right. Okay. You should understand their multiples are different than our multiples, which is different than somebody else's multiple. Because other companies, when they're Quoting the multiple. Right. I want to hear. As a business owner, I want to hear six. That sounds great, right? But now all of a sudden I realize I have that inventory. Working capital peg is included in that. So really it's four or five, you know, and so. But I just heard six. Right. And usually when they talk to somebody giving them a valuation, they're not breaking this down into that level of detail. So they just go by that multiple not realizing the cash itself is the same. At the end of the day, we want to avoid that. We want to avoid that.

So one of the things that also I. It's probably, to me, the thing I see be the most contentious is getting to the working capital adjustment. How, like how much money? Because let's say there's half a million dollars cash in the company and the seller says, well, that's my cash. I want to take all that out. And the buyer says, well, you need that to run the company. You got to leave some gas in the tank. How do you guys approach that? And advising people with respect to.

Yeah, generally speaking, we don't see the working capital pegs come into play as much on sub $10 million deals. Right. So you start to see it 8, 9 million. It definitely starts to phase in quite a bit more above that. We definitely want to start having the calculations in place as to what is the working capital requirements. And typically, you know, that's going to be a balance sheet exercise. I don't get into that level of detail with them. We typically work with their bookkeepers or their CFOs to be able to work on that and we want to be able to justify it. I will say private equity, they will eat you with working capital pegs. Because of course. Right. We want to keep as much money in that business as possible in order to preserve the amount of money we're outlaying on the seal. So that's something that again is expected. We definitely would allow working capital pegs at larger sized deals, but we want to have a justification that's based on actual working capital calculations.

Is there a level at which it makes sense to have a broker or a investment banker advising you on the sale of a business?

Yeah, that's a really good question. Yes, I do.

One per interview? One good question per interview.

Yeah, that's it.

That's it. We can stop after that.

I would. No, I'm not going to say one level. I mean, I would definitely think anything above $1 million. I would, I would have. And I would too personally. Right. If I had A side property. I would of bringing somebody from my team to help advise me, but I just know the value of having that objective viewpoint below $1 million. Can you do it on your own? Absolutely. But if you've never done it before, I would at least the first time have somebody help you out with it. I just think it's. You don't know what you don't know. And again, going through it, there's a lot of things that you're going to be surprised about.

So what would the difference be between having an M and A attorney and a investment banker advisor?

So, you know, I will say that there is actually a little bit of a blending of the lines going on in the industry right now, and companies like Quiet Light are serving that purpose. Right. We started off very much as a brokerage and brokers that are just advising on the transactions. But we're going to be stepping out of a lot of the more complex stuff as we've scaled up in size for the transactions that we're doing. We did $225 million last year in closed transactions. And as we've stepped up in that, the competency in our ability to work on some of these more complex deals has come into play. And what we've seen is that there's not a substantial difference. There is a difference, but there is not a substantial difference from us in just a traditional investment bank and a lot of the work that we're doing. Sure. Right. And so where are we going to step out? Might be a question to ask. You know, when it comes to the actual legal advisement, we'll step out of that. We'll be in there to say what we see as normal, but not necessarily what is right from a legal standpoint. Right. And so when it comes to. If you're looking at a business enterprise value, 20, 30, 50, $60 million, you're not hiring one person. Right. You need to hire a team. Right. You should have somebody who's preparing and doing the negotiating for you. You need to have that legal arm on there. You need to have the mitigations of people on there as well. So you need a team. You don't need just one person for that.

Okay, and then how would you describe the difference in when it would be most appropriate to have, say, a business broker? And would you guys consider yourselves investment bankers? Is that the best?

We feel like we're straddling the line between investment broker, investment bankers and brokers.

Okay, so what would the like. Is there a. Is it a dollar line or is it A type of business line.

I think it's more the complexity of it. Okay, right. So we've worked with companies that are 50, 60 and even 75 million in enterprise value. But when you look at the structure of these companies, they're not that complex. Right. And so the, the number of machinations you have to do and the number of permutations you need to do to figure out, you know, how are we going to transition this to the new owner, and the amount that we need to advise on is not all that complex. Once you get into, let's say you had a company and you are manufacturing your own parts, right. And you have 250 employees, you know, multiple locations and retail arm and a distributed. Okay, now you're getting into the place where you need full teams of people to be able to start dissecting that in a full investment bank treatment for that type of business. So we're looking, you know, size isn't typically the barrier for us, and we have buyers that, you know, we were working on a transaction just last fall in the neighborhood of $350 million. We had things all lined up for that. That's not outside of what we're able to do if it has the right structure to it. So it's more of a structure question than size. Okay, cool.

And then in terms of the things that people should be thinking about to make their company more valuable before they come and talk to somebody like you guys, what are some of the things that you would tell the average entrepreneur that they're maybe not doing exactly perfectly yet?

Well, so I have a really simple heuristic that I apply to this, right? I call the four pillars. Value risk, growth, transferability, documentation. Right? And then you walk through each of four of those pillars and easily break them down. Right? So risk, do you have single points of failure? Do you have people in your business that are, you know, quote unquote, irreplaceable, that probably aren't irreplaceable, but maybe you made them irreplaceable, Right. Temporarily, Right. Do you have supply risk? Do you have SKU concentration risk? If you're a SaaS business, do you have one big whale of a customer? You know, so looking at that risk profile, the business, what could kill your business or severely damage it in the next, you know, six months, one year, if something changed, what would happen? The growth is just what are the realistic paths to growth? Do you have demonstration of that in the past? Do you have a growth plan in place? One of the most effective things we see people do in the sale of their business is list the five opportunities, five best opportunities for growth. And the difference here is this, and I'm sure you've heard this ton with the transactions you do, you know, you'll hear somebody who's selling say well if only. Right. And then fill in the blank and it's if only you had a magic wand and a million dollars or you know, gazillions and gilds of if only.

We had a credit line of 2 million, 5 million, 1 million, quite a few times.

Exactly. If only somebody put on why did.

You get the money? And then.

And it doesn't happen. Right. So what do I look for? I look for, are there specific like avenues towards growth that somebody can follow? How specific are they with that? Can they demonstrate numbers with that? That would be another thing that we look at. So growth would be the historical growth obviously is something we look at as well, transferability.

Let me go back to growth for just a second. So is there a compound annual growth rate or anything like that that you think is very helpful to aspire towards so that you can project forward and hopefully argue that the company is going to be more valuable later on and therefore you should be paid on forward looking.

So we'll often go through that sort of exercise with clients where we're seeing that historical growth or maybe we see some things that are about to hit national contracts side and then we'll, we'll start to project that sort of thing out. And I wouldn't say we, we get too far into the weeds of it because I don't think you really need to. Buyers have vivid imaginations on their own.

Right.

And they can, they can draw their own conclusions. And I think the more detailed you get with those, the more easy it is for somebody to poke holes in that.

I'm asking because. So there's like people might think about selling and they're trying to decide do I invest in growth or do I take some chips off the table before then or do I reinvest so that I can have a better growth rate? Is there some number that they should aspire to generally that you see buyers looking for? Like they want to see that it's kind of consistently done X percent CAGR over that time or yeah.

Trying to figure out how I can dissect this fairly easily for sub $10 million transactions. You generally, generally want to be profitable. Right. And so when you're looking at investing in growth, the short answer to your question is more growth is always better. Okay. All right. So let Me start it there. More growth is always better and it's going to make your business more valuable. If I can tell a buyer this thing is growing 300, 400% year over year, that's eye popping sort of growth. But there has to be the path to profitability. Let me give you an example. When we go into SaaS businesses and SaaS business valuations, because it's much more of an easy sort of thing to look at. If I have a SaaS business that's growing at a good rate, let's say it's growing 20, 25, 30% year over year, pretty steady over the last few years and we take a look at that churn rate on it. The churn rate is really low. Lifetime value is very high compared to the CAC of cost of acquisition for clients. That business doesn't have to be profitable. I can start looking at the revenue on that and multiply the revenue and it can be a pretty healthy revenue multiplier. Why? Why can I do that? Because when you start to work those numbers out, profitability is in the future. Necessarily. It's in the future, right. You keep doing what it's doing, it's going to be profitable. When you get to E Commerce, it's not as straightforward as that all the time. So we generally like to see businesses being profitable at that point. Right. The only thing that having large revenue and large growth at the expense of, of the earnings would be market adoption. And we want to be able to see market adoption or brand adoption for what, generally speaking, what I would say the market right now strongly prefers highly profitable businesses. So my advice is always this, invest in growth.

Lots of growth, lots of profitability.

Well, yeah, do both, absolutely. That's the easy thing.

Problem solved.

For me to say that, no, go into the growth and 12 to 18 months outside of exiting, if you have that option, start to pull back on some of that heavy reinvestment. Okay, right, cool.

Ryan here. And look, if you're an entrepreneur, you're busy, right? Whether it's replying to emails or scheduling meetings, whatever, there is a lot of work and a lot of hats that we need to wear as entrepreneurs. And that's why as entrepreneurs, especially if you're a visionary founder and you need help, right? And I don't know about you, but at one point for me I was getting so overwhelmed with all the little day to day tasks that let's face it, they got to get done, but they don't necessarily need to get done by you. And so when I came to this realization, I said, I got to get help. I need to get a virtual assistant. I got to get a social media manager. And that's when I called my friends at Belay Solutions. Belay Solutions are an incredible organization. Now, look, I don't know about you, but I tried to work with VAs in the past, if you. It was always a disaster. And so I was really, really suspicious of being able to make it work. But their process was fantastic. They found out the type of work that I need done, the type of people I like to work with, and they really did match me with a perfect virtual executive assistant. And this person's been with me now for three years and counting. So obviously it worked for me, and I think it's going to work for you. So here's what you need to do. All right? The good folks at Belay, they're actually giving listeners to this podcast $300 off the startup cost for their virtual assistant. So you'll pay less than I did. Here's what you need to do. Text lunch. All right? Text lunch. L U N C H to 55123. Again, that's text LUNCH to 55123. To talk to Belay about getting a virtual assistant of your own. You need it. You know you do, and they can make it happen.

And then we were going to Transferability, I believe, right?

Transferability. Sorry, you asked a complex question. So transferability, simple, right? How easy is it for somebody else to come into your business and run it from day one? And how many hiccups are they going to have along the way, transitioning that business, things that you want to look at SOPs. Have you taken the time to diagram out your business and what it looks like? Do you have an organization chart? Even if it's a simple business, like, do you have an organization chart? And then lastly, documentation, which also relates to SOPs. But my goodness, your books. Like, this is one area that people just fall short on all the time.

Just to have it all inside the shoebox. If it falls out of the shoebox, then that's bad, right?

That is bad, yes.

But you just want it all in one big box, lots of paper.

Well, no, no, I want to organize. Oh, okay. Any clean, clean financials. Right?

You know, what does that mean exactly?

Well, who do you have doing your books? When I ask that question, I often hear uncle. I have her uncle. I've heard mom. I had one guy paying his mom $200,000 per year to be the bookkeeper.

That is a good wage for that.

Nice Yeah, a little bit above market rate, but yeah, no, I, I find it remarkable the number of seven and eight figure businesses that don't have some professional level, CFO level, at least fractional CFO level person looking at those books. Yeah. You know, and I believe if you're over a million in revenue, you should at least have a fractional CFO. If you're over 10 million in revenue, you should probably have somebody in your house, in company.

And is there a level at think it's really good to have an audit done, like an actual audit.

I would say once you get above $10 million in revenue, I think you need to start looking at having an audit at those books.

And will that help with your valuation or with the risk abatement that, that a buyer is looking for and therefore help you get a higher.

Absolutely. The perception of risk is just as real as risk to a buyer. Right. I mean, they, they can't tell the difference between perceived and real. The other area where it's going to help you, especially if you're looking at 10 million plus in revenue, 15, 20, 25 million or a hundred million in revenue, you're going to have a Q of E done. And if you can go in first studying the flagpole there like we've had this essentially done, our books are audited. We know what this is going to look like. That gives less ammo in that negotiation process of. Well, the Q of A didn't come in as favorably as we want. Right. It just gives you a little bit more negotiation.

So let's talk about quality of earnings because that's just for those who are listening who don't know what it, what it is. Can you tell us a little bit about more maybe a brief definition and why it's important.

Private equity firms will. Private equity, some of the private buyers will hire an outside firm to do a quality of earnings. Honestly, I'll be honest. We look at the report and we kind of cross our fingers as to what's coming up from that. But it's looking at the earnings and looking at the sustainability and the growth in the future. Right. They want to know that the earnings under there are sustainable and growable for that company. So it's an audit of the, the everything but on steroids.

All right, so if you were going to say for everybody who's watching or listening, who's thinking about what's the next step? For me, I, I want, I want to know if I should be thinking about selling, what would you tell them?

Well, I think people should Always have selling somewhere in their back of the mind. But I don't necessarily think that means they should be selling their company. Okay, Right. As I said early in the conversation here, I think if you have a business, if it's treating you well, if you're happy with it, don't sell. Right. The very reason that businesses are sellable in the first place is because somebody else is looking at that and saying, I can make more money than I'm going to give you.

Right?

Right. Otherwise, why would you do that deal? And so, from just a pure money standpoint, you sell when you've reached the point of either promoting yourself to your own level of incompetence. Right. Or you're done with it or you want something else to do. Right. Those are all, I think, very valid reasons to do that. But I think what, what should people be doing? I think people need to plan to sell. Not necessarily so that they. They absolutely sell one day, but plan to sell. Because the worst thing that's going to happen, the absolute worst thing that's going to happen is you're going to end up with a very valuable business and very valuable asset. Right. And something that's super desirable to own.

Doing.

The process of planning for a sale tightens up the ship. It makes the business operate better. And again, that way, if you do decide one day to sell that, it'll be ready for you to do easy ways to do that. Start learning the principles behind evaluation. Right. What pull, you know, what drives the valuations of these businesses. Now, you can get free valuations from companies. We offer free valuations. Most companies will do a free valuation, take them with a little bit of grain of salt. Because a lot, a lot of companies out there, just what do they do? Right.

Yeah.

But they want you to sell through them. So they're gonna be like, oh, we can get you, you know, we can get you 10x on your business. Well, they probably can't. They're just telling you that right now. But try and dig into that to find out what would the market actually say to your business. And I think that's more important than just knowing the number. Right. When I'm doing a valuation for somebody, anybody can give them a number, right. They can go online and they can say, I'm probably a 4x, am I? You know, whatever the case may be, but where are buyers going to look at and say, I don't like that part. Right. Or, I'm super excited about this. Right. And then what other, you know, learn what is driving buyers interests what do they get excited about? And maybe look at ways that you can start rolling those things into your business. And again, the worst case scenario is you end up having a great business to own. Best case scenario is like so many people I've done before entrepreneurs, we're a fickle bunch, right. We wake up one day and we say, think I'm done. Yeah, Right. And then they want to sell and they're like, oh, wait, this is like a two year process.

Right.

If I really want to maximize the value. Right. So, yeah.

Do you guys represent the buy side as well?

No, not at all. I have looked into that. I cannot figure out how to do it without just a major conflict of interest.

Yeah.

And it's, it's tempting because there's like tons of revenue sitting out there for us and we wanted to go into it, but every time I go into it, it's just there's too big of a conflict of interest.

Why buy in that? So why did you choose sell and not buy? Is actually what I meant to say.

You know, because I went through the process myself early on and I felt like the person that helped me was amazing.

That's Lee. Not good.

That's probably not the word I would use. I thought, I felt as if here's a big lie. Right. And people listening. They're a smart bunch. I know. They already know this. Right. But what is a lie? Work on commission. I benefit as you benefit. Right. All right, well, here's a lie. You don't sell, I get nothing. Right? Yeah. Yeah. So what is a broker going to tell you at some point, you know, this is a great deal. You should take this even if it's a bad deal, because they've already invested 50 hours into that transaction and are they really all that motivated? Remember, best case scenario, like the most expensive brokerages in the space are charging 15%, most around 10%. So let's say that they can get you an additional million dollars on the business. Are they all that motivated? Because the person that's actually selling your business, they're not getting 10%. Some's going to the house, right? No, they want the deal done so they can move on to the next. They don't. They want to get the deal done as fast as possible. Most brokerage firms out there, so why did I get into this? I'm an entrepreneur. I felt as if the people that were helping me didn't understand online businesses at all. I also felt as if they weren't giving us, you know, give me like the real honest Sort of truth as to what was good for me and for my business. And so I looked at that and thought, well, I want to do that because I like, I want to actually help people and tell them the honest to goodness truth. Honestly. That's where our name comes from, right? Quiet Light. We're not the decision makers, Mr. Seller. You're the decision maker. It's your business. You built it. We're just going to show you what it's worth. And I'm going to trust you to wear your big boy pants, big girl pants, make your own decisions, and, you know, we'll be here for you whichever you decide.

So in terms of what it costs to have someone like you guys help, is that a 10, 15% across the board? Is it a Lehman scale? How do they work?

It's a modern Lehman scale, so it drops every million dollars by 1%. So 10% on the first million, 9% on the second million. So you can start doing the math from there. On larger transactions, when we're doing something, you know, 50, 60 million dollars, we typically negotiate a flat rate of 2. 2.5%. Okay, cool.

Nice.

Great.

So for people that would like to find out more, get a hold of you guys, what's the best way to do that?

Quiet Light dot com. We have a podcast as well. The Quiet Light Podcast.

And is it light. L I G H T L I.

G H T. Okay.

Dot com. And you have a podcast called Quiet Light Podcast. Quiet Light Podcast.

Okay.

And then books or anything like that.

We do. We have a couple books. So we have Buy Them Build by Walker Diable, which you're probably familiar with. And then my business partner just wrote a book called the Exitpreneur's Playbook. Okay.

Exitpreneurs.

The exitpreneurs Playbook. So buy them Builds kind of buy side sort of work. General overview there. The Exopreneur's Playbook is everything on the exit side. Right. And it's. It's literally like if you want to do it on your own, this will tell you how to do it on your own. We didn't really hold anything back. He didn't hold anything.

Maybe a really good way to get more familiar with how to get the most out of your advisor as well. Right. To read something like.

Well, you know, it's a great check to find out if your advisor is doing the right thing. Right, right. If. If they're not suggesting some of the things that Joe suggested in that book, you should be asking questions. And it doesn't matter if that's an investment bank that you're paying $100,000 retaining fee to. Or if it's just, you know, some belt business broker, they should be following the principles in that book. Awesome.

Cool.

Well, I really appreciate you taking the time to hang out with us today.

Appreciate you having me on here. Awesome.

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