Ep 455 William Brown on Turning a $50 Course into a Seven-Figure Exit, Navigating Diligence, and Creating a Million Dollar Webinar

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Hi there and welcome back to another edition of Built to Sell Radio, the podcast designed to help you punch above your weight in a negotiation to sell your company. I'm the executive producer Colin Morgan and today on the show we sit down with William Brown, who turned a Word document he initially sold for $50 into a multi million dollar online educational business. And in this episode you're going to hear how William navigated due diligence, structured his company for sale and secured a seven figure exit. Without further ado, here is William Brown. Enjoy.

William Brown, welcome to radio.

Thank you so much for having me. Pleasure to be here.

Yeah, I can't wait to get into this. Tell me about WB Trading. What was your business model?

Yeah, for sure. So the business in a way started itself kind of by accident. So I used to just trade financial markets. I had a Twitter with about, honestly about 300 followers. So tiny. And after about a year and a half of doing that and having that, someone reached out one day and just said, hey Will, I've been following you for a while, please could you help me with my own trading? So we.

So this is, sorry, this is trading like stocks and bonds, like proprietary trading, like day trading? Effectively.

Effectively, yes. Yeah.

Okay.

So that was to cut a long story short, my first ever paying customer and the elearning company started there. So this guy paid me $50, came to my house for a few hours. He made a Word document that he took away with him. Right. It was so bootstrapped. And then I kept a copy of the Word document and then started messaging my other Twitter followers to sell it to to them for the same $50. I made a few sales, 3, 3, 4, 5 sales. But then they started giving me feedback. So then they, they started saying, oh, this is not in there or oh, but how do I do this? And, but what broker do you use though? And then they actually helped me find product market fit very slowly over that year and that first year, from about April to the end of the year, I made about 24k from selling word document. That became an ebook, that became a Dropbox folder of videos with the ebook. And it kind of spiraled from there really. I started a YouTube channel because I realized the more people that see me and know me, the more people I can sell this education to. So I kind of started to understand driving traffic and then I slowly raised the price as it got bigger and better along with the client results and the client feedback. Year two, we ended up doing about a quarter of a million cash. And then December of That second year I found out about this guy called Alex Becker. I joined his mastermind and I learned all about paid ads and sales funnels. And then it was, it started to become less bootstrapped because I didn't know what cold outreach was, but I was doing it. I didn't know what product development was, but I was doing it. I didn't know how to do customer support, but I was figuring it out and he just snowballed from that.

So cool. I love the bootstrap nature of selling a word doc for 50 bucks. That's so good. I love it. And so again, to be clear, you are providing advice to.

You know, amateur stock and bond traders, options traders, day traders, so to speak, on, on, on how to.

You're not providing like you should buy Wells Fargo instead of bank of America. You're not providing like individual stock advice like how to, how to trade, get in and out of the market. That kind of, that kind of advice.

Yeah, just a standard info product, coaching product. Obviously it started without the coaching and then we added the group coaching and one to one later as the company grew and progressed. But essentially I was just saying, this is what I do. There you go. These are the markets I trade. There you go. This is my broker. There you go. And just sharing exactly what I was doing, essentially.

Yeah, yeah. And I know the pandemic had like an explosive effect on day trading. A lot of people obviously at home with time on their hands. Also some governments provided stimulus money, so there was excess money in the kind of economy. And from what I've heard, that just sort of fueled the day trading sort of phenomenon. What did you experience?

That was one of the wildest times of my entire life. When we went into Covid, we were doing about 20,000amonth, cash collected. When we came out of COVID we were doing about 320,000amonth cash collected. So we, we grew and it was, it was, it was instant and it was explosive. You know, I remember that year, it was just, it was, it was just insane. Absolutely insane.

Wow. And the product, how has it evolved at 320amonth? Is that recurring revenue? Are you doing one off stuff still? You're selling one off basis, is that right?

It was, it was wholly one off. We only had one product that we sold. So going into that third year we just had what we called our platinum program and it was an online course with group coaching and with one to one coaching. Literally.

Got it, Got it. And, and how did you. I know in the kind of e commerce Space. There's a lot of affiliate marketing that goes on. Did you get involved in affiliate marketing and maybe talk a little bit about how you marketed the product?

Yeah, we never went down the affiliate routes. The way that we marketed was for year one and year two, it was just organic. It was literally small Twitter, a small YouTube channel, and a very, very basic website. Okay. That's what got second year to a quarter million cash for the year. And then in year three, in January, we turned on YouTube ads into a webinar and then you could purchase the program for $2,000 at the end of the webinar. And that model is what took us from about 20k a month right up to about 320k month.

Really?

Yeah.

So YouTube channel to webinar, webinar to purchase. Yeah. How did you make people buy on a webinar? I'm fascinated by this.

Well, this is, yeah. So we, I, I. You wouldn't believe me if I told you how many hours me and various copywriters put into that webinar. You would not believe me if I told you. We wrote it, monitor the stats, rewrote it, monitored the stats on and on and on for like two and a half years straight. It was, wow.

So this is a webinar you were doing on a regular cadence, like a regular. How many times you do it in a given month?

Yeah, no, it actually wasn't, it was not live, it was pre recorded. Okay. So it was an on demand webinar. So any time of the day or night, if you saw one of our YouTube ads, you can click the ad, go and watch the webinar immediately. It was actually a three and a half hour webinar. Right.

Seriously?

Seriously. And the pitch for the program came in an hour and a half. And then the other, the rest of the time was like talking about the program, talking about client results, talking about just on and on and on. And this thing was just like a money printer. It was insane. I'll never forget, I moved to Dubai and I was out having dinner. And from the start of the dinner to the end of the dinner, we sold three units. And I was showing my friends my phone. I was like, I've just made six grand in 19 minutes by doing nothing on you. It was, it was just insane.

That's wild. So where did you get the, like, did you get help for creating the webinar? Like, is there a company out there that just creates webinars?

Yeah. So I learned all about the webinar model and the YouTube ads from one of my, my mentors, one of my first ever business mentors, Alex Becker, who's the founder of hi Ross, who exited hi Ross last year for, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars. And this was what first made Alex rich was running automated webinars and selling Ecom products. So he kind of done that and then he began teaching it just like I'd done trading and began teaching it. So that's where I learned it.

And did you believe in the product? Like, I guess I'm, you know, I don't mean that in a confrontational way, but, but I know from talking to other e commerce providers and information product providers, like so much of the work is put into the marketing that the product is. Oh yeah, the product's not bad, but like the marketing was really great. Like did you believe in it along the way or what? Like, how would you characterize the product they were buying?

Yeah, without a doubt. So there's two types of info entrepreneur in my mind. The ones that actually truly do what they teach and then they discover, oh, I can teach this. And then there's the ones that maybe sometimes don't even do anything of value. See that they can teach things and learn something to sell, basically. So it's usually those people that you want to avoid and the true experts that. And you're completely right, John. You know, a lot of these guys, they don't know about sales, they don't know about marketing. And that was kind of my story as well. Because when that first ever guy reached out, I wasn't selling anything. I had no intention of ever selling anything. I never even, I didn't even know what an E learning company was back then. And then my journey is more one of learning from customers along the way. So I think that's why we were able to scale so far because I truly believe back then that our product was by far one of the best in the industry. And all of our team, in fact almost all of our teams were paying customers as well. So I always hired from my customer base, which I think made a real difference.

You mentioned the team. Just walk me through how you had the team structured. Are these full time employees or contractors? How have you got it structured?

Yeah, they were all contractors. So towards the end of the company we had a coaching team of three, we had a sales team of nine, setting team of three. You could say general manager, but aside from the general manager, really they were all outside contractors.

Got it. Okay. And so you're 320amonth coming out of the pandemic. When did the specter of potentially selling the company first come into your vision? What was the trigger around that?

Yeah, so I would say towards the end of year three, I joined a financial literacy mastermind based in, in England with a guy called Dan Bradbury. And that was all about God, I mean, accounting and bookkeeping, knowing your numbers, preparing for sale, and this kind of thing, which is all new to me and I will never forget. On day one, we all went for lunch. I sat opposite Dan and Dan said to me, very matter of factly, so when are you going to sell? And I said, oh, I can't sell. It's an info business. It's an online course business. It's named after me. I can't sell the thing. And he said to me, well, yes you can. You've just got to structure it for sale and do this and do that. And he said, if you ever want to sell, I'll mentor you through the sale. And I was like, okay, great. Because I joined Dan's mastermind to just learn to build and grow, essentially. And then if we fast forward to, I think it was about year, maybe about five and a half years into the company, I was in Dubai, downstairs in the cafe of the building that I lived in. And I was writing in my journal. I can't remember what book I was reading, but there's a question, it said, ask yourself this question. If you had $10 million in cash in the bank right now and you never had to work again, what would you do with your days? If we didn't have to work, what would you do with your time? And I remember writing down, talking about business, helping people build businesses, and just learning about business. I just love it so much. And I thought, I'm not doing that, like barely at all. I'm running this company. I no longer traded at that stage either. And I just thought, I'm just running this for money. You know, I don't have a long term vision. I don't. We don't have some fantastic culture. I can't.

Like a mercenary in effect.

Yeah, yeah. And I couldn't see myself even owning the business in three, five, ten years. So I thought, right, well, the change has got to occur. And literally that same moment, I whatsapped Dan Bradbury and I said, I'm ready to sell. Please can you mentor me through the sale? And I began working with Dan and preparing for sale from that.

And, and what were the things that Dan emphasized in his advice to you? Like if you could isolate two or three pieces of advice that Dan gave you to make your business more sellable. What would you point to for sure?

Well, one thing I had no idea about multiples whatsoever. One of the first things that Dan said to me was, what do you want to sell for? And I said to him, if I can sell for one year's net profit, I'll be very happy. And obviously he laughed at me and he said, well, you should aim to get a hell of a lot more than 1x EBITDA. I didn't even know.

What were you, what were you netting at the time? Like on the three, like, so you're 320amonth. I'm guessing you're kind of three and a half million in revenue. What would you net on that?

We were quite a lot further ahead from, from there. So at this stage when I, when that day came that I just told you about, you're doing about 550amonth top line, and it will have been about 160amonth, something very close to those figures. So about 140. 150. 160amonth net profit USD. That is.

Yeah. Okay.

And sorry, close to.

Close to 2 million in. In. In profit on this. On the 6ish.

Yeah.

Per year. Okay. So you're like, if I can get one times, I'm happy.

Yeah, absolutely. So I thought to myself, the way that I had it in my head was if I can sell for one year's net, I'm kind of saving myself a year of time at work and then I can take that money and do what I want to do next. That's what I had in my head. And obviously Dan said to me, that's really stupid. You can sell for a hell of a lot more than that. So that was one thing that I learned is I just had no idea about multiples. Dan taught me about multiples. It got me a lot clearer. And when he taught me that, my focus was then on, right, well, how can we optimize net profit over the coming months? What expenses can we cut? How can we scale a little bit further and get that number up? So that was an action point for me for the, for the coming months, for sure. That really taught me a lot. That was one thing. Another he said to me, will book a vacation. Just go away for seven days. Try your hardest to leave everything alone and see what breaks. And that was. Was equally very valuable advice because it gave me a lot more confidence in certain areas and a lot. It revealed a lot of holes in the business as well, which Was things like optimizing the paid ads, managing the sales team, hiring, because I was the sole person that hired and fired as well. And again, these were action points that Dan helped me to work on over the coming months. And by the way, this was in November and we sold the following September. To give you an idea of the workload and the timeline.

Got it, Got it. So optimizing. But you're going to get a multiple on that. So it makes sense to optimize that. Go away on vacation for seven days, see what's broken. What other things did he kind of advise you to do for sure?

Well, one of the first things that he guided me on was who to even sell to. Because I had. This is my question to Dan, how do I find a buyer? Questions. And Dan said to me, well, there's three most likely buyers for a company. He said, your customers, your team, your competitors were the three. And in, I think it was customers, competitors. I think we went to the team first and just kind of softly said, no, I might be thinking about stepping away. Is there any interest? There was no interest. Then we went out to customers and we spent about two months going to customers, talking to customers. He was actually in a mastermind with a couple of my biggest. Sorry, competitors. Mastermind. Some of my biggest competitors. So we went out, had conversations with them. Some. We got two, three calls in. But essentially there was no bites from those guys. No competitors were ready or wanted to acquire us. And in the end, Dan ended up introducing me to my an M and A advisor guy called Dominic Sullivan. Very talented M and A advisor. And it was Dominic that taught me things like an im. I didn't even know what an IM was back then.

What's an IM for folks who may not be familiar with that acronym for sure.

Investor Memorandum. And I would describe it as basically a sales document with all of the crucial stuff in. And Dominic built that for me. Dominic actually helped me build that. And in hindsight, I wish I'd had that when we were going to competitors because I think if we could have showed that I've got one competitor in mind, if we could have showed them that im, things may have been different, to be honest. Nonetheless, we didn't have it. And when we did have it, we very quickly attracted through Dominic's book of buyers, a VC firm from Canada and a PE firm from America. And it was the PE firm from America that ended up buying us in the end.

Interesting. You may have heard the. My listeners may have heard the acronym A SIM Confidential Information Memorandum. Similar to an im, but same thing, kind of a marketing brochure for your business that puts your best foot forward. So Dominic took this to the marketplace, did. What was the. That experience like for you? Did you get kind of management meetings with the two potential acquirers? Did it get that far? What were those management meetings like?

Yeah, so with the VC firm who came to us first, we got about four calls in, and by call number four, they were mentioning, oh, we're looking at your competitors, essentially. And they ended up actually buying another competitor. So that fell apart after about six weeks, six to eight weeks. And then came Highview, Carl, the founder, and same thing again. So we had a call with Carl, then we had a call with Carl and his partner Josh, and then they went away to start looking at the bits and bobs, and then spoke to our general manager. And then it slowly became a bit more obvious that they were very, very interested, essentially, especially through Dominic as well. And then we went into DD after about six to eight weeks, and off we went.

Diligence. At what point did you get a letter of intent? Did that come about? Yeah. What was that like? What was that experience like? What was the reaction you had to that?

Yeah, for sure. So we got LOI from Highview in April, and Dominic stressed to me, he was like, look, it's not legally binding. You know, it's not the final contract. These are rough terms. So Dominic really helped me a lot because quite honestly, John, I did not have a clue what I was doing. And if it wasn't for Dan and Dominic, I honestly don't think that I would have been able to sell that company because I just. You don't know what you don't know.

So what was your reaction to the LOI?

Well, they'd offered us, so we were asking for 2.4. They'd actually offered 2.6 on strength of the financials and to get the thing bought. I think they saw a hell of a lot of value in it. And Carl said to me multiple times, this is the company we've been looking for. Really, really like this company. So they were quite friendly and open about that, actually, which surprised Romanick, for one. But I was. I was excited, you know, because it was a dream of mine to sell the company. I had it on my vision board. I had it on my. My plan and everything. And I just thought, wow, this is actually becoming real and becoming true, and it was just really exciting.

That's great. So, just to be clear, 2.6 times EBITDA got it. Okay. And. And so but Dominic's kind of coaching you saying, hey, this isn't the final thing. Did, did you guys. Was, was that to be paid cash at closing or was it sort of a structured payment over time or how did they structure the payment?

Cash at closing.

Wow. Wow. So 100% cash at closing. 2.6 times. And so where does it go from there? Did you try to negotiate at all on the loi or did you just sort of sign and move to diligence?

Yeah, well, it was, it was hard work. That was probably the most stressful period of my entire life, that due diligence. Number one, I wasn't prepared for it. Number two, there was loads of little holes in and the business that they found along the way. And like I say, we signed the LOI in April. We didn't close until the very end of September. September 30th was the day that we closed.

Right.

It was long and complex and stressful and all the documents and the tracking and give us this, give us that double interview every team member, then re interview them by their partner Joshua.

At one stage we had to completely rebuild our books and financials at like month three or four, which was a complete and utter nightmare. Then they wanted to re interview certain customers and then obviously go through the product. Look at all of our marketing. Another thing that threw a big spanner in the works was Hiview hired a SEC compliance lawyer to go through all of our paid ads, webinar, on and on, listen to our sales calls, all this stuff. And the compliance officer came back and said you were going to have to make quite a few changes here to Carl, which Carl then told us. And then we were like, oh my God, we're going to lose the sale. All this time wasted. And then Carl was like, it's okay, we're still going to go ahead, we're going to make changes, we're going to do this, going to do that. It was a, it was a bloody roller coaster for sure.

What makes you, as you look back on it now, are you surprised they closed? Because it sounds like once they got into it, there were a lot of things that they had to fix or were surprised by. Oftentimes deals fall apart when there's that much that gets sort of exposed during diligence. In retrospect, are you somewhat like, are you surprised they actually consummated the deal?

There is a bit of that in me and that's just because sometimes I doubt myself. I, you know, second guess myself and I just feel there's a Part of me that feels like I'm just a kid making this all up, who's just been lucky and learned from great people and done what I was told and I've kind of ended up here for sure. But it was a great business. I mean, we'd never ever, ever had a non profitable month from paid ads ever. So every single month we were printing money and open up and open up and up for years as well. Every single year ever. We made more money across the full six years. So I think we had an excellent track record of growth and profitability. Another thing that Carl and Josh said is they love the team as well. So because pretty much all the team were paying customers. The team was super, super invested in the customers, in the program, in the product, in me. We were all very good friends. We had team holidays. We all knew each other very, very, very well, knew each other's families even. So we were a very strong company. You know, we were, we were in a great place and I think it was the ideal time to sell and it was the ideal time to buy as well because there was a lot of growth still. We had.

And what was.

Hi view's reaction to when they learned that.

The employees were contractors as opposed to full time?

We didn't, as far as I remember it, don't think we really had a problem with that. Obviously they went over. This was actually another little hole. So for some of the contractors we didn't even have a contract. It was just like, you know, invoice me every month and I'll pay you for your hours. And again they were like, right, you need a contract, put a contract in place, send it to us to check. So it was just tidying up. You know, I think one thing that Carl said to me was, Will, you're very good at going 0 to 1, but you're not that good at going 1 to 2. And I am good at going 1 to 2, which is why I want the business. And I never forgot that when he said that because I'm good at bootstrapping things. I'm good at just going from zero to a few hundred thousand a month pretty quickly. I just know how to do that. But I'm not good at like staff contracts and deadly accurate bookkeeping and you know, all the admin stuff. And I think they saw a gap to take it further.

Yeah, I love this point for my listeners because, you know, we can all look at examples like Bill Gates or Elon Musk and think, oh, there are lots of celebrated examples of people that Go from zero to billions. But I think it's much. Personally my experience is much, much, much more common that people are, as you describe them, either 0 to 1 entrepreneurs or 1 to 2. Or as Peter Thiel says, I think it's 0 to 1 and I can't remember what his. His sort of play on that is. But effectively it's the idea that there are great. The people that are really good at that startup base where ideas are at a premium and then there are also people that are better at the kind of growth and stabilizing and structure and process. And for a lot of entrepreneurs, it's just very rare for those two things to come in the same place. Person.

Yeah, I. I'm not a one to two person at all.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, this is fascinating. So, okay, so the original LOI is at 2.6. I'm assuming that got shaved down a little bit during diligence. If as you're describing, there was. There were so many things, what was the final multiple at the end of diligence?

Yeah, so right at the end, and I'm talking literally, I mean in the end, it was about three weeks before we closed was. There was like just a few errors on. And Kyle, who, who bought the company was like the most. Probably the most diligent person I've ever met in my entire life. Nothing is getting past that guy. And. And he's awesome because of it. That's one of his talents. There was just a few errors in the P. Ls that brought down the net profit in certain months. Right. So we still sold for 2.6, but the profit was reduced essentially and we lost about.

It's like 300,000 was knocked off the closing price because of that. And also, I'll never forget, I've still got the recording of this. The last call that we had, I was in England staying with my parents. I call with Dominic and Carl and Carl basically said, look, we found these errors. I'm going to go back to Josh, give us about seven days. And we were either say yes or we'll say no. And he left us on that cliffhanger for a week. And Dominic said to me, I do not know which way this is going to go. And I was just like, please, please, please bloody close after all these months and all this work. And I said to my girlfriend, if this doesn't close, I'm just. I just, I just can't get back into the flow of building and growing the business. But thankfully it closed.

Yeah, yeah, it's. It's it's, it can be one of the most devastating parts of the entrepreneurial journey when the deal doesn't close. Trying to find the motivation to get back up on your feet and go back to this, like the slog of the day to day is like crushingly depressing.

Yeah, yeah.

But for you, it, it worked out. You, you closed and, and like, what was closing day? Like, what, what did, what, where were you? What, how did that all go down?

Yeah, so I was in my home office in, in Dubai, and when I got the wire, I remember I just called my lawyer, Poppy, and she was like, yeah, all right, it's sent now.

And it was just. I remember I called my girlfriend and I've got the recording of me calling my girlfriend and just saying, I've got the money, you know, it's, it's, it's done. And I remember I was just walking, just pacing back and forth across my office, just thinking, like, this is probably the best day of my life. You know, I just cannot believe that this is real. It was amazing, absolutely amazing.

What, what sort of impact did it have on your lifestyle? Because, you know, you were a profitable company leading up to the exit, you were generating hundreds of thousands of dollars of revenue per month, profitably every month. I mean, some would say, like, well, without putting words in your mouth, I'd be just curious, what impact did it have on your lifestyle?

Honestly, not a lot, to be honest. I mean, because we were making so much money, I already had massive cash reserves. I'd bought millions of dollars worth of real estate outright, cash as well. And I'd kind of put myself in the position that where kind of, whether it's sold or not, I would be okay financially. Obviously the sale money helped a hell of a lot, but, you know, when I sold, I just bought an apartment for one and a half million dollars cash, which was similar to mine in a different part of Dubai, moved into it, it was nice to stop paying rent and. But yeah, my lifestyle didn't really change much.

And so some might ask a follow up, which would be, okay, so, like, why was it so important for you to sell if. If it really materially didn't impact your lifestyle, why was that, that closing day, so emotionally impactful for you?

Yeah.

Do you know what I'm asking?

I do, I do, yeah. And a few people have said this, like, if you're printing cash, why even bother selling the company? Well, the way that I would describe it is one, for me at least, when I owned that company, it was, it was in My head, and I could never get it out of my head. So even on a. On a good month, on a bad month, when the team were good, when the team were not good, no matter what, every day I would still be thinking, how much have we made today? I hope the team are okay. I hope the support team are doing well. This new hire, I hope he's okay. What if this happens? What if that happens? What if the market shifts? Oh, we've got another competitor coming in, copying our ads. And I loved it for many years, and it was really fun to build it and grow it and make it real, but, man, I just wanted to have a empty brain. I wanted to have an empty head. I just wanted to start again fresh and just. Just wipe the slate clean, have the cash and just be able to stop and chill and think and have peace, because I did not have peace in that company.

Yeah. Well said. Well, I'm, you know, thrilled that you shared the story with us, and I'm. I'm super happy for you. Are you up for a quick lightning round of questions that only require a short answer, if you want.

Sure, no problem.

Okay. I know you talked to two acquirers. There must have been other people that you spoke with along the way. What was the slimiest trick that somebody tried to play to kind of prey on your naivete about exit, for sure.

So I think that first VC firm, they got a lot of info from us that I think because they were buying competitors, they wanted to know, oh, but how are these guys doing it? What's their team structure? So they could learn and maybe buy something cheaper and go and take over us, essentially. So I think we. We let them in and probably this is my fault, to be honest. I was too open with them, and I told them everything. And when they bought a competitor and then that competitor later maybe went on to move in our direction, I think. I wouldn't call it a slimy trick, but that kind of thing.

I would say, yeah, I think we've heard the emotional high of the sale, but what was the low? I would encourage you to think about your exit from, you know, the initial connection with Dominic all the way through to today, frankly. Like, I'd just be curious to know what you would say would be the hardest part emotionally for you as the whole journey has gone through.

So I would say, well.

Probably falling out. So basically, my old sales team manager in that company was my childhood best friend. Right. Which, in hindsight, was not a smart hiring decision.

Phenomenal sales expert. But don't hire your Childhood best friend and make him like the most important person in the bloody company. All right. Because when you sell the company, the dynamic shifts. Then they are still there. You were going off on holiday and buying.

You know, seven figure apartments and stuff and they're just still in the company and worse if, you know, if they don't get along with the new owner. So I would say just the bit of a fallout, bit of a transition period. They're now working for a competitor.

And that was messy, stressful, difficult and fairly personally impactful actually as well. And that's what I've always said. If I could go back, you know, do not hire your best friends.

Have you been able to reconcile or is it still kind of messy?

Oh, no, it's fine now. It's. It's absolutely fine now. But it was just diff. It was just a. I mean, that's a strange situation to have to handle. You come into all this money, but they've kind of helped you build it and now they're. They stuck over there. You were just setting off in, sailing off into the sunset kind of thing. Where do you stand? So it took a bit of digesting, but we're completely fine now. Still very good friends.

Yeah. Where did you land on this difficult question that I think is deeply personal for every entrepreneur, which is.

How, if at all, to share some of the proceeds of the sale with your employees? And while you think about that, I'll just give you.

You know, a little bit more color on the question. Clearly, if your employees have stock options or if you've promised them that you're going to share the proceeds with them, then you're both morally and I think to some extent legally, although I'm not a lawyer, you know, obligated to share the proceeds. Obviously, I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about a scenario where you've made, you know, they don't own stock options in the company, which I think is the case in your case.

Yeah. How did you sort of think through.

What, if any proceeds to share with the team?

Yeah, for sure. So there was just an amount that felt fair to distribute to the main coaches that have been with me since day one, my best friend Alex as well, and so on and so forth. And also I knew that the main team members that again, have been there since day one, Carl, actually gave them a profit share as well when I'd left and kind of made them me essentially and said to the top two or three people, right, you're basically will now, so take a Profit share. Let's make you a hell of a lot more money. Make you a lot more invested in the company moving forwards. And they're all still there to this day, still building and growing. So.

Yeah. And the amount that you felt was fair. And again, I'm asking this not to be nosy, but to give our listeners your perspective on sort of how you thought about the number when it came to what you chose to share with your key people.

Could you think about it or share what percentage of, say, an annual year's salary that would have been. Would have been 10% of a year's salary, 50%. Where did you guys land?

Yeah, for sure. So it just felt like this is my bootstrapped personality shining through here. Yeah, it just felt like a substantial amount. So it was just like, take, you know, six years. Sorry, four or five months of income in one go. There you go.

Got it.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That makes sense. For sure. And that was generous. You've already.

Shared Dan's name, which is great. And Dominic were both. It sounds like, instrumental in helping you think through your exit. Were there any resources that you relied on.

That you could point our listeners to? Any. Any courses, you know, books. We're always on the lookout for things we can sort of point our listeners to that would help them prepare for this journey that they're about to go on?

Yeah, for sure. So I'm not just saying this, but both of your books, John, really, really helped me and added a lot of value, as did this podcast as well. When I was going through this podcast, I was constantly listening. When I was going through the sale, I was constantly listening to the podcast.

Oh, great. That's super to hear. Anything else that you could point to, like any other voices that you. Other books that you've consumed?

For sure. So I think the two main things were just Dan. So Dan Bradbury still runs his Mastermind to this day. Highly recommend, kind of venturing into what Dan does and maybe attending the Mastermind as well. And Dominic Sullivan, there's so many things that I learned from Dominic. Again, just made the process doable. That was really it, quite honestly. It was your books, your podcast, and Dan and Dominic got it.

Got it. And they sound like incredible resources, for sure. Dominic, obviously, we're big believers in having a third party negotiate for you because. Because it obviously keeps you insulated to some extent from the emotional highs and lows of what is obviously an incredibly difficult process. You've already shared the apartment that you purchased. Congratulations, by the way. Were there any Other trophies that you bought yourself that sort of commemorate the win, allow you to remember this experience, a physical.

Thing that you point to.

A memento, just really the, the apartment. Yeah. So I mean, one of the first things I bought was the apartment, which I've wanted for a very long time. And then I'm a big fan of real estate. So I started buying more assets for the, for the portfolio over there. That's about it. I didn't buy any watches or cars or anything. I went on a very nice holiday. Sure. But that was about it. Yeah.

Fantastic. Well, the apartment in Dubai is, is hopefully the gift that keeps on giving because it'll presumably go up in value over time, for sure. I'm super grateful for you sharing the experience. Where can people connect with you? What, what's, what's going on now? Point us to a social media channel that, that's your favorite, that people can kind of follow you if they want.

Yeah, for sure. So the day that I got the Wire, I made a YouTube video and that YouTube video went on to get a hundred thousand views on YouTube so far. Which is insane. That, that's crazy. I honestly, when I made that video I had about 150 subscribers. I've now got something like 55,000 subscribers on, on YouTube. And that video started blowing up my YouTube. Then I started getting people asking me, you know, can you help me exit? Can you help me start an info business? Can you start help me grow my info business? And the company that I own now is called Build, Grow and Exit.com. and I just help people with those three things now in the, in the info space. So very fun, very fulfilling. Still allows me to travel. Of course. I'm here in Bali right now and that's what I've been doing since really is just making videos for fun. My book how to 10 million just came out a couple of months ago as well, which basically documents every single thing I've ever learned about what I've done from start to finish. But yeah, the main place to find me is, is YouTube.

Yeah, that's fantastic. And we'll put all William's channels in the show notes@builttocell.com so I'm really grateful for you sharing the story. Congratulations on the success and we'll look forward to round two where I'm sure there'll be another exit down the road. So thanks William for doing this.

Thank you so much for having me, buddy. Much appreciated.

And there you have it for today's episode between William and John. If you enjoyed today's podcast. Be sure you hit that subscrib subscribe button wherever you listen to today's show. And if you want to help support this podcast, I'd encourage you to leave a rating and review. And if you do leave a rating and review, take a screenshot of it and send it over to Colin at Built to Sell. And there I'm going to send you a free copy of John Warlow's latest book, the Art of Selling your Business. So again, take a screenshot of the review and send it to Colin at Built to Sell. Also, for show notes, including links to everything referenced in today's episode with William, be sure to visit his episode page, which you're going to be able to find over at Built to sell dot com. Also, a reminder to watch this full video interview, head over to our YouTube channel at Built to Sell. Special thanks to Dennis Labetagula for handling today's audio engineering. And again, thank you to our community of certified value builders who help us bring our message to you. Our advisors are experts in helping you build the value of your company. To get in touch with an advisor or learn how to to become one yourself, head over to valuebuilder.com I'm Colin Morgan and I'll talk to you again next week.