5 Years of Contractor Success: Lessons from the Forum's Founders [BONUS Episode!]

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ℹ ABOUT THIS EPISODE

Celebrating 5 years and 263 episodes! Wade Carpenter, Stephen Brown, and returning co-host Rob Williams share the most impactful episodes, business lessons, and evolution of the show. 

Rob reveals his new focus on exit planning and business valuations for contractors earning $10M-$1B. From Profit First to joint ventures to scaling up strategies, discover the episodes that changed how contractors think about their businesses. Plus: why 75% of business owners regret their sales and how to avoid that trap.

⌚️ Key moments in this episode:

• 00:00 Five Year Milestone
• 00:50 Rob Returns Update
• 01:11 Staging For Exit
• 04:39 Rembrandt In Attic
• 06:39 Favorite Episodes
• 09:49 Profit First Lessons
• 12:03 Cash Flow Drivers
• 14:42 Throughput And Constraints
• 16:58 Early Podcast Days
• 18:20 Behind The Scenes Amanda
• 18:35 Favorite Episodes Talk
• 19:16 Survival Trap Lessons
• 21:18 Coaching Contractors Better
• 22:35 Rob’s Business Shift
• 24:00 Exit Planning Purpose
• 26:06 AI and Tech Mindset
• 28:24 How to Reach Rob
• 30:15 Sell Smart Not Fast
• 32:00 Planned Exit Psychology
• 34:54 Five Year Wrap Up

The Contractor Profit Blueprint is a complete guide that breaks down exactly how to identify where your money's going and start keeping more of it. This isn't theory. It's the same framework I use with contractors I work with every single day.

Head to profitfirstconstruction.com/blueprint to download your free copy. 

Stop working for free. Let's get you keeping what you've earned.

Join the Profit First for Construction community!

Find all episodes and related links at ContractorSuccessForum.com.

Join the conversation on our LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/CarpenterCPAs
   
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Wade Carpenter, CPA, CGMA | CarpenterCPAs.com
Stephen Brown, Bonding Expert | SuretyAnswers.com

Transcript

[00:00:00] 

Wade Carpenter: Nothing in construction starts polished, and neither did this podcast. It started more like a conversation in a job trailer. Just a few guys talking shop, what's working, what's not, and what contractors actually need to hear. Fast forward five years, and somehow we turn that into a weekly show that hasn't missed a single episode, not one.

This is a five year anniversary bonus episode of the Contractor Success Forum. Today, we're taking a step back talking about how it all started, the episodes that mattered most, and what we learned along the way. And for this one, we had to bring back someone who helped build the whole foundation. Rob Williams is back with us. 

Rob Williams: Welcome to Contractor Success Forum. I don't know how many times we said that.

Stephen Brown: I miss that. I miss it. 

Wade Carpenter: This is the Contractor Success Forum. I'm on Wade Carpenter with Carpenter & Company CPAs, alongside Stephen Brown with McDaniel Whitley Bonding Insurance, and on this very special occasion, Rob, great to see you. How have you been? [00:01:00] What have you been doing?

Rob Williams: I've been working with contractors, construction industry. Not necessarily, I guess, well, they all are contractors. They're not necessarily GC, but it's been interesting. It's been great. You guys know I had a wealth management company and financial planning and did that with entrepreneurs and as we were looking, most of their assets are actually their company.

So it really occurred to me after a while and I actually saw some other coaches on some podcasts talking about how the biggest asset they have is their company, and we are working on their financial portfolios. It occurred to me I really should be working in their company.

I've now been working in exit strategies. We call it Finish Strong or Selling to Strategics. I'm certified with a few different investment banking companies that we work with. So we work with it just like a home stager does to a home. We are a home stager for your business. We're a business stager.

So we are not the real estate agent. That's the investment banker [00:02:00] that sell the company. We come in and prepare the company to increase the value. And it's not to sell the company necessarily. You don't have to want to sell the company. But it's just like we learned in the insurance industry, Stephen, you know that you should always be prepared because you never know when something's gonna happen.

So prepare your business as if you are going to sell it or as if you're going to not be there anymore because it might be one of the D's: Death, Divorce, whatever those five Ds are. But we prepare it and it takes years to prepare it.

And what we've also learned through Scaling Up, I used scaling up in my businesses for 20 something years. When I met Vern in the early two thousands, Vern Harnish who wrote Scaling Up. The tools, everything we use there, I learned that is how you prepare your business to be sold. I was like, wow, what a coincidence. We've already been doing this.

So really we work with that and we prepare them using those tools. The [00:03:00] best way to run your business is to run it as if you are an investor or as if you're going to sell your business. So really look at your business as an investor, not an operator. That's probably the number one message. 

Stephen Brown: Yeah. How many podcasts have we done about that, Wade? Just the whole idea, if you are running your business as if, number one, you don't have to be there, and that you're ready to sell it, you've maximized its value to sell it as an exit plan. It makes good sense to run your business that way.

And when we started off the podcast, when we were talking about, I'm so old school, you know, I'm the old man of the group, but going-- 

Rob Williams: Old man. You're old.

Stephen Brown: Oh, but you know, we were just talking about the basic concept of contractors never comprehending not only the value of the company but how to exit, how to retire, how to stop it, how to transition that company to the next generation, or to sell it, or to sell it to the [00:04:00] employees.

We've had ESOP attorneys, we've had every expert you can imagine, we've had discussions on Mergers and Acquisitions. Remember that was a great podcast we did once, Rob, with your buddy.

Rob Williams: Ratliff. Yeah, John Ratliff is the one that got me started in this.

Stephen Brown: Yeah. Where was he when he joined our podcast?

Rob Williams: He was the owner of Scaling Up Coaches at the time. He's since sold it. And actually it's funny I was talking about in that podcast, Richard Branson, so now he's doing all these big fancy things. He sold the company to our Rembrandt in the Attic example for that story that we told.

That was the-- 

Stephen Brown: Oh, yeah. 

Rob Williams: Actually bought Scaling Up Coaches. 

Stephen Brown: Hey remind our listeners real quick briefly what the Rembrandt in the attic meant. 

Rob Williams: Yeah. So if Stephen, you're selling your house, and Wade and I both are going to see your house and I'm just an idiot, non-artistic person, I walk in your house, this is pretty great. You're asking a million dollars. I might offer you 950. If I really like [00:05:00] it, I might offer you a million dollars.

Wade is much more sophisticated than I am. He knows about art. He goes up in the attic, he looks behind a sheet in the attic and he comes back down and he says, Stephen, is everything included in this house? You said, yes, this is my family's house, everything goes in it. I'm not taking anything.

You say, you sure? So Wade, doesn't tell us, but he saw there was a Rembrandt in that attic. It's a $14 million Rembrandt. So that house now comes with that. That house is worth at least 15 million. What is Wade gonna pay for that house? As much as he can.

The concept is every one of our businesses has a Rembrandt in the attic. It has something that is more than the net present value of the future cash flow is what we were all taught in school.

So that business may have a patent that you don't think it's worth. I've actually seen in construction in our construction related industries, they may have a software or a process that you as a small [00:06:00] $10 million business or something, may have something that is worth a hundred million dollars, which is exactly what happened to that friend of ours, to a big company that may buy it.

And that was the story of Bob Verdun who sold his company. He wanted maximum of 15 million and he ended up selling it for I guess, I don't know if the number's official, but about 90 million. It's a big story. So that's the Rembrandt in the attic, and that is what we do. We call that a strategic sale rather than a financial sale.

Wade Carpenter: A lot of times in construction, there are reasons that it's not just the equipment that's on the lot. We got the people in place, the processes, like you said. But what were some of the other favorite episodes of yours?

Rob Williams: I tell you it's so funny, I learned more from this podcast than I did from my MBA and any of my undergrad stuff, and I'm constantly going back to my customers and saying, oh, look up this one. I think probably the one that I refer back to the most is the joint venture, because [00:07:00] nobody really knows what a joint venture is.

We were talking about experts, we've got our own resident expert, Wade Carpenter for valuations and this thing, we've got our own expert right here on the show.

That joint venture, I point to a lot and obviously I do point to the John Ratliff episode a lot. That was a long one because it had that story is what influenced me to do what I'm doing now.

I think there were a lot of other ones though. So many of them just blend together. It's some of the messages and it is almost every episode. I said as the Contractor here, you guys are back office. You know what you're doing. We are building stuff and we're told, and we do stuff every other episode or maybe every episode. I was like, oh, that's why we did that. I didn't know why we were doing that. That's sort of a common theme.

But yeah, the joint venture is probably what I've referred to the most and so many other ones.

Wade Carpenter: We did a bunch of them on joint ventures. There's a lot of them, I think about the mergers and acquisitions and-- 

Rob Williams: Oh yeah. Yeah.

Wade Carpenter: Have you got some thoughts on [00:08:00] that?

Rob Williams: I do. The mergers and acquisitions, it's actually the contrast between a joint venture. See, I guess I didn't understand how that works. And I still probably not the expert at that at all. There's probably a lot that I don't know. And I didn't realize you could not do a mergers and acquisition and you do a joint venture, I thought it was a merger when you did a joint venture rather than the way it is.

Maybe you guys can explain the difference between that better than I can, but I didn't realize you didn't have to join your companies together. You can get together to do that. I didn't know what was happening. I'd actually done it before a few times, but I didn't necessarily realize what the attorneys had done on paperwork.

Stephen Brown: The thing that gets so stressful is the whole thing you're thinking about you're going to someone to broker to market your company for you, and then you're signing a commitment letter to them, and then you're absolutely laying your financials and everything bare in front of them to mine it, and then sell it.

Then you get an [00:09:00] EBITDA type offer, return. It sounds amazing. And then the process seems to be, I'm gonna beat that back down until you finally just close out of desperation.

And you know, the nice thing about us bringing this to our listeners is so many of our customers, when we've had customers die middle of jobs, many times. It's so hard for us to help them through that.

We have customers who say, I've had enough. And it's almost always because they're sick. Because contractors never stop working. Especially if it was a small shop. They're selling their equipment on a fire sale and trying to finish their projects and get rid of everything. And It's just so much stress to their family. We were thinking there's a lot of ways to get around exiting your company.

So we had so many episodes about that. And I was thinking when we first got together, I said, I really didn't understand, you know, how you and Wade were so excited about Profit First.

I got the concept. I [00:10:00] understood it being simple. It seemed to me like it was maybe, you know, borderline, this seems too simple and slick and somebody else is making money off of y'all like a pyramid scheme or I mean, I didn't know. I didn't understand it.

And then we had Michalowicz on, he was a hoot, who really came up with the concept. And then we realized that y'all were the specialist in construction as far as Profit First was concerned.

And then Wade wrote his book, and we're constantly trying to get that message out to all our listeners, no matter what size you are. The book makes sense. That's all. It just makes sense.

You buy a book on Amazon, you don't have to commit to anything. It either helps you or it doesn't. You either read it and you say, well, ah, that's hokey. I'm not interested. Or you say, wow, I've been in this business for 20 years. I just really hadn't thought of it that way.

The whole reason the three of us got in [00:11:00] this too is because we were so tired of our customers going under because of making the same dumb decisions. Not dumb to them, but to us. We see it all the time. All of us work with so many different contractors that we consider, after all these years, our advice to be reasonably good. You know, we're not perfect.

And so then we get into the podcast guys and we are constantly some of our podcasts, I'm sure there's people that are like unless they're like a CFO geek, they're just like, oh, y'all are killing me today. But we still try to at least bring one message. Every podcast you get something that you didn't know before that makes a lot of sense.

The whole thing we've been trying to do is just shine light on business practices that make sense and keep people from losing money. Everything's about cash flow, maintaining it, and finishing strong with those numbers in the most stressful possible way. There's [00:12:00] enough stress, just building stuff. 

Rob Williams: Yeah. You brought that up about the cash flow. One of the episodes I forgot I had written down some notes of some of my favorite ones, The Seven Drivers of Cash Flow that Wade actually brought up to me and that-- that's also from 

Wade Carpenter: Scaling Up too.

Rob Williams: It's the cash chapter in Scaling Up. We didn't have that when I did it, it was called Rockefeller Habits and the cash part didn't exist. So I heard it from Wade and now I used what we call Cash Flow Stories, the underlying software, and we use that all the time. And that is what Profit First did not have, was the working capital side of it.

I learned so much of that from you, Stephen, being my bonding agent and talking about that. And then from Wade and what really affects that. There's not one week that I go by without going over the working capital numbers, and what we call working capital.

I guess the banker's definition is a little bit different than the manager's definition. We're just looking at receivables, payables and inventory, work in process.

Actually, I have started coming up [00:13:00] with now the concept of an inventory of cash. Because you have cash, but then you need this inventory of cash to just have in your bank accounts for fluctuations. That's like another balance sheet thing because cash was not necessarily included. Anyway, that's a specific episode in itself.

Stephen Brown: We were all spark each other for ideas. I remember, Wade was explaining something, you remember the m and m's story, you know, that Wade was using, but Wade was explaining things and as I was getting what he was saying and understanding its importance, I was thinking wouldn't that be great if there's just some kind of dashboard like speedometer, gauges, just telling you how your company's doing? Running live all the time. Accurate data coming in, information from the job, everything.

And literally, we started coming up with that. And then Wade has now started Rob, in our latest podcast, we've got interrelated models where we can take any scenario and we can move a dial and we can [00:14:00] change the scenarios and see how it affects cash flow, profit just days not getting paid. We'll just add two days to you not getting paid and show how that affects all the other figures.

So we've been having a blast with that, and Wade has too, but what a great teaching tool that's been.

I miss also the fact that you two, so many years just geeked out about every business book that anyone could ever read. Y'all have read every single one of them. Usually you get excited, you read them two or three times, and you always get one really good point that sticks home with me and I get that out of it.

So all the work that you do, thanks for that. But I do miss you two geeking out about that.

Rob Williams: Yeah. 

Stephen Brown: Y'all really are business geeks. I'll tell you.

Wade Carpenter: That also reminds me of one of my favorite, well, a couple of favorite ones that we did on the Throughput and Constraint Theory from Eli Goldratt. That was really the business fable from The Goal was the structure of my book. Rob and his father worked with Eli Goldratt and their company. 

Rob Williams: Yeah, I did. He died kinda [00:15:00] right after I closed my plant. The last trailing years when we were trying to reinvent the plant we hired Eli and all his videos and his cool tools. We were teaching the whole plant the concepts of constraint. It was a lot of fun. It was interesting. It would've been more fun if the economy had not been tanking. 

Stephen Brown: Yeah.

Wade Carpenter: His throughput stuff, I sort of proved that you don't have to have the highest profit jobs to make the most money, so you can push that throughput. You can actually make more money and work less hard, you know? So that was part of the things that meant a lot to me.

Rob Williams: It's so interesting in my day to day with the contractors, people in the working world when we're out there, all the little things that come out of it and I see their perspective and I forget that they don't know this because as we've learned it, it becomes common sense.

But I remember that I didn't know it either when I was running my businesses half the time. There's so many things that as we do these and we repeat them [00:16:00] over and over again it becomes common sense.

And so for us, it's hard to realize what they do and they don't know. It's like, how are you doing that? Why would you do this? You're a smart person. But they haven't been through that training or they haven't had the idea of the constraint.

I was working on that this week. We had a job where they shut down one machine to work on the other one. The factory guy did. The owner came back, he said, why did you shut this down? We've gotta get the throughput. It's got to go. As many times as we've stressed it and they've been through the classes, it doesn't get in their heads.

And just having a podcast, having something that repeated, actually, I do miss this because having this every week was a very big learning experience. It just constantly kept us on our game. So that is a big thing. You get people should all be listening every week to every episode. Don't get slack. You gotta keep that thing going. 

Stephen Brown: And don't fall asleep. 

Rob Williams: Right? You guys are exciting. I did watch the old [00:17:00] ones when I was doing this and it's funny how we didn't know how to have energy and so in the beginning it's like we are just sort of on there and we're very still. 

Stephen Brown: I've gotta my hands. 

Rob Williams: Yeah we're talking to this little box and it wasn't like we were talking to a person. It's very interesting and watching some of your latest episodes, how natural people get.

Stephen Brown: Zoom was just brand new back then. I'm making us sound, you know, old.

Rob Williams: I remember, I thought I was the coolest kid in the lunch room when I had a microphone.

Stephen Brown: I know I was jealous. I didn't understand why, I didn't even have a laptop. I was trying to figure out how to do it. No lighting and everything. Now, you know, my laptop's down, so I'm podcasting from my office. But now Rob, I've got the whole shed, my hall in my backyard is what my friends call it.

Rob Williams: It looks like a fake background. It's like, hey, I've been there. That's real guys. Stephen's background is actually real. 

Stephen Brown: Oh yeah. Yeah. I've had possums, raccoons, my cat that's adopted me that I haven't adopted it, staring in the [00:18:00] window. But yeah, that's my shed I built. And now all the lights and everything are set up like a movie studio. I never thought in a billion years that would ever happened, and I can't honestly tell you that I wouldn't have bought all those flights if they weren't cheap. So it doesn't cost a lot to podcast, folks. 

Wade Carpenter: Yeah.

Stephen Brown: But a whole lot of effort. We need to shout out also to our beloved Amanda. Wow.

We should have her on here because she's the one that if we even remotely look professional, she's the brains behind it. 

Wade Carpenter: It is amazing what she can do.

Rob Williams: I did see her on that one episode when I was flipping through there. 

Stephen Brown: She did an episode on marketing. 

We've been through so much together and I've learned so much technology wise from the two of you. It's always something that blows my mind. Y'all are very patient. You explain it to me like Mr. Rogers just like I was an infant. Slowly. And then you get excited and you go a little bit too fast and I just smile and give you that dumb look because [00:19:00] you lost me. 

Rob Williams: Yeah, it's a beautiful day in the neighborhood. 

Stephen Brown: What is your favorite episode beside Throughput? 

Wade Carpenter: Well, there was another one I was gonna bring up with Rob that I was still remembering too, because I think you actually put that down with The Survival Trap, the fix-- 

Rob Williams: Oh, I had that written down too.

Wade Carpenter: Yeah. So many contractors always struggle. The teachings from that book, I think. It's not a hard book, but I think there's some great things that I look back, what did I do wrong when I was building my business? And I didn't know if you had any thoughts on Fix This Next, and that whole Survival Trap episode.

Rob Williams: It really is. It's actually, I had one of my customers bring up yesterday in a meeting, bring up the Fix This Next book.

First talking about the Survival Trap, when you're looking at where you're going, to me, that's really what Scaling Up does as well by how you have your picture out in the front.

So if you're at A, and you're supposed to get to B, you need to really remember where you're going, because you may make some decisions in the meantime, in the short run, if you don't have your long-term vision, that you [00:20:00] go the opposite direction. So you may make one decision, but if you don't think about it in the terms of your long range holistic plan, you're going to move backwards.

Because it might be a decent decision to do this thing that day. I can't think of an example, but it takes you further away from where you're going. So keep that in mind.

And when you talk about the Fix This Next, you can look at it and you can figure out what should you really be working on, because we tend to go to where the squeaky wheel is going.

As you work, you gotta get your sales and you gotta get profitable, and then you gotta get your systems in place to get it going, then you have more of the meaningful parts of your business like we're talking, about selling your business and then your purpose.

So those top parts of the pyramid. Keeping that in mind as you're going up that pyramid, and then you've gotta turn back around like I think a lot of people now with things are going back and forth. I guess they always are, but I'm seeing people having to jump back down to the bottom of the pyramid again and climb back up and go to the lowest part of your [00:21:00] foundation. That's a very construction oriented theme, is you gotta build your foundation to get it coming up, and then you constantly gotta keep rebuilding. That's different.

Hopefully we don't have to rebuild our foundation or your bonding agent's gonna be mad at you if your foundation collapses, but you keep having to go back down and circle and build back up. 

Stephen Brown: Well, I like the fact that we've evolved. Learning our specific craft, construction, accounting, bonding, and insurance. We've learned our specialty and we've shared the information that we know and observed.

But now all three of us have gotten better as coaches. That's just a whole nother level of helping people, you know, being a coach.

How do you do that? Everybody's different. I was telling a CPA friend who just could not understand why a bonding company was agreeing to bond something, because the numbers didn't support it.

I was explaining to him there's so many more moving parts than just the numbers to make a decision. Contractors just [00:22:00] don't get that. They're just frustrated. Ah, they're not letting me do it because of this, and this. But you know what? Contractors with good character can do amazing things.

We see the stress that they have every day. All three of us. So much stress running your business. And we just wanna help. I believe we've done that.

We did have a listener say, listening to the podcast was equivalent of a MBA in construction finance. That made my day. And you were saying the same thing.

So yeah, we've been through a lot together over the years. It's been a fun ride and we're going to keep doing it.

Wade Carpenter: Yeah, you know, Rob, before we go too, I think our listeners wanna know what you're doing. You are doing Profit First and now Scaling Up. What does your business look like now? I think you've gone changed the path a little bit since we've-- 

Rob Williams: --Yeah, it has. It's the same business with the different focus. The pieces have really just been moved around a little bit.

What the front tools are now the supporting tools. So the main tools, we still have Profit First [00:23:00] and The Pumpkin Plan and Fix This Next and the Michalowicz source.

But they're supporting tools, it's more of an overall, like we were talking about a minute ago, just, they keep the holistic thing. If we're scaling up, we want to have our long range plan that we do every quarter and every year and move that together. And so we work with companies.

And that's changed a little bit as I'm really targeting companies that are 10 million to about a billion. I've actually had some conversations recently with few hundred million. And it's interesting. It's not that different though. Ironically, they're not that different than the other companies. Now the valuation is dramatically different.

We work with them on getting everybody lined up. You make sure you've got that plan and you filter it down to everybody. We make sure that every person in the company knows his objective, and then we actually have a plan.

That's the biggest part, is our plan as contractors is get the work done. So changing that to actually have more, why are we getting this work done? What is our purpose? Where are [00:24:00] we going? Both meaning and financial, but really even more important, what we're finding in the Finish Strong, in the exit planning part is the most important thing is has not been the money. It's having a purpose of what you're gonna do with that when you sell it. And there's almost a hundred percent.

I think they say 75% of the sales of company have buyer's remorse saying they wish they had not done it this way. 75%, that's pretty shocking and it's usually comes by, as we've studied it, there've been a lot of studies. 2025 actually last year had a lot of formal studies happening that we reported on recently in a class that I teach about Finishing Strong. And those 75% are not there.

But what is the problem is that they didn't know what they were gonna do afterwards. Selling your company, It's not like going to the gas station and buying a Coke, you know, you just pay this and you get this back.

The deals are very complex. There's so many outcomes. How [00:25:00] long do you have to stay? Who has to stay there? Do your relatives have to stay? Are your key men gonna be there? Do you compete? Do you not compete? Do you have stock in the new company? Do you not?

So many things that affect your quality of life afterwards, and if you don't get those decisions the way that you want it and take care of your nest egg, you prepare before that deal comes, is knowing what the three pillars of your stool are. How much do you need to have? And then everything else is more purpose driven above that.

So you have to structure that deal to have the low risk, if you're talking about like a financial advisor, is putting that, that structure to have yourself taken care of financially for the rest of your life.

And then the other part is really a meaningful thing. There are a lot of deals. We had a specific example of a company that had a $75 million and a $90 million offer, and he took the $75 million offer because it just fit him a lot better. He didn't have to stay [00:26:00] there, and then it wasn't at risk, and there was a lot more purpose in it. So that's really what we're doing is we're working with that.

I also teach in AI as well. You we're talking about podcasts now, that's my new podcast. I probably watch five AI videos or podcasts every day. So really that's become part of our basic business.

I know you guys have had a couple of episodes on-- 

Stephen Brown: You explained AI to me, Rob. I used it all the time when we've talked about the future of construction and AI. It's funny, I mean, Georgia Surety Association and May's having a meeting and talking about how AI's affecting the surety industry.

It's always something and you've gotta understand it. And we've had fun talking about it, haven't we Wade? 

Wade Carpenter: Yeah, we've done a few and I've been playing with it too, so yeah, I think we all have. 

Rob Williams: Yeah. And whatever we're doing in one month, it's all gonna be changed. So it's like, I don't marry any software, but it's interesting just to have the concept. The pieces and the parts [00:27:00] don't really change but all the buttons do. 

Stephen Brown: Yeah, so funny. One of the young guys was showing me yesterday a video of Tesla car and how they had used AI through the Tesla platform to take every scenario that the cameras were seeing, and translate it in a certain dialect angry, and giving you constant feedback about what it was seeing. It was hilarious. I don't know how they did it, but it tickled me to no end.

If you're scared of technology, get over that. Protect yourself, get over that. I haven't got time to run my business. Well, then it's gonna run you into the ground, into your grave.

We've had episodes, everything about mental health issues, managing risk, what I do so much. Managing that risk same thing we were talking about, Throughput. So it seems like everything that three of us have been involved with since day one has come together, hadn't it? 

Rob Williams: It has. We're all scaling up construction. I guess that's what I should have said I [00:28:00] do. I'm scalingupconstruction.com. And--

Stephen Brown: Good pitch. 

Rob Williams: Yeah. 

Wade Carpenter: Well, it really is hard to believe it's been five years and we haven't missed an episode in five years, in one week. So, Rob, I really appreciate you coming on today. It's

Rob Williams: an honor to be back. I can't believe it's been three years since we did that last episode together. I would've guessed a year and a half if you had asked me.

Wade Carpenter: Tell our listeners how they can find you. Who you're really working for, who needs to call you? It's like they think they're gonna walk in one day and here's the keys and I'm just gonna sell it for, you know, $10 million and no problem. 

Rob Williams: Right. So as we said a minute ago, one of the best places to find me is LinkedIn. If you're on LinkedIn it's Rob Williams and Scaling Up Construction is my newsletter on there. And I have a website. It's actually pointed back to my newsletter right now because I'm redoing the website. It'll have all kinds of exciting things when it goes back live.

For me, I am really 10 million to a billion in revenue. We want to have a couple [00:29:00] million in EBITDA at least, because we don't really know what the multiple, we hope the sales will be.

We have two different investment bankers that we go down. One of them is say 30 million of value sailing up. And that's strictly selling to strategics. It's STS capital. And then we have Cornerstone, which is more of a diverse brokerage. Now they both just do the sell side. And I say we work on the sell side.

We don't work as much on the buying side. I can help people on the buying side because sometimes you need to grow, and we can do that by acquisition. But these guys are just representing the sell side and there's a reason for that.

You can watch some episodes of knowing where their loyalties lie and who they're loyal to, so you have somebody representing you and getting the most value and making sure you have multiple people bidding for you. That's the only way you're gonna get those larger values.

So, don't have that guy that's calling you on the phone, just wanted to offer. Don't. That's not the offer you probably wanna take. There's a study [00:30:00] this year on it. In the study, not one of them was that the best offer when they had it, when they looked at that first offer on the phone where it sounds pretty good. They were thinking maybe it'd be a low percentage, but not one ever in their study won those. So, watch out for those guys calling you.

You don't need to sell the company though, that's the thing. Well, first, if you're need to sell it right now, then you're too late. You need a few years. And I think as John Ratliff said on that episode with us, the second best time to prepare your company to be sold is now. The best time was three years ago.

So you start now. I think three to five year runway is really healthy. I think anywhere, one to three years. The one though, you might not get a strategic sell. You're not gonna be able to boost the company up. We do get people though, that are burned out, and ironically we're talking about the older people that are selling it, the baby boomers, they wanna work till they die, like you said a little while ago, and they wait too long, and [00:31:00] then the company's actually lost most of its value. Can it even sell anymore?

So you want to sell when you're at your peak. Not when it's too late. The younger people are actually the better ones that the investment bankers want. We thought they would want the older people.

We've gotta talk them into their-- you've gotta get your company good for these investment bankers to even take you as a client by the way, they won't take you. They don't just take anybody. It's not like a real estate agent, you know? I'm go put a sign in front because they gotta work. They're not gonna waste their time on a deal that's not good. So we have a qualification sheet that we have to fill out, and that's where their customers come by the way, is we are actually the gate.

They don't have a marketing salespeople. We are actually bringing the sales to them, and we have to apply for our client to be a customer of them, and all these standards to bring that.

It's all logical, and every single person in their business should be doing it. Whether you're doing it with something formal like me, everybody should be [00:32:00] doing it.

You should have life insurance and the exit planning that when we started, Stephen, I remember I taught one to a Vistage class. This was a long time ago, maybe 10 or 12 years ago, and it was just a life insurance sale, because that was the exit plan.

Well, yes, that is something if it's unexpected. But the better exit plan is a planned exit, not an emergency exit. Plan it. And you never know what's gonna happen. It gives you options. It gives you freedom.

When you do these you run the business that you want because you're trying to sell a business that somebody else will want and you want it. And what has actually happened when we prepared these, the guy said, well, I don't wanna leave now. It's fine. I don't wanna sell it. 

Stephen Brown: Yeah, it's fun now. 

Rob Williams: Yeah. But that's actually when you need to sell it. So that's where so much of the psychology on the exiting and the transition, and there's so much study right now in this exit industry about the person that's selling it, because the main thing is [00:33:00] not the money, it's the purpose and how happy do you want it to be there.

There are a lot of suicides after the sale of the company. And then some people, this may not be a suicide, but they're gone in a year or two. They don't have any purpose anymore. So it's more about that and we're beginning to develop some programs around the transition of life to a better purpose. 

Stephen Brown: Wow. Yeah. That's fantastic. And I wanna say this in your own defense that your beloved wife told me the other day, you know, all these years I've been married to Rob Williams, how many years has it been?

Rob Williams: A lot. 2001. 25 years. 

Stephen Brown: Yeah, she said I have honestly never heard him say something bad about anybody ever. And I start laughing, I say, yeah well, that's Rob Williams all right. That's you in a nutshell. So thank you for being here and thanks for that comment about after the sale. There's just so much emotion, you build up your baby, it's emotional.

You have headaches and stresses and you [00:34:00] wanna know, what do I do now? And you can't see the forest through the trees and we're just gonna keep plugging away to try to help people with that, huh? And then hopefully we can have you on for some more episodes and then do a 10 year anniversary. 

Rob Williams: Yeah. Hey, great. I'll bring my stroller.

Stephen Brown: Yeah. 

Rob Williams: My walker. 

Wade Carpenter: Well, Rob, we do appreciate you coming back to talk to us a little bit. We're scalingupconstruction.com it's where you can find-- 

Rob Williams: Yeah, that's great! And LinkedIn is the best place where I am. I've actually tried to focus and not be everywhere. Actually Amanda and I did so many great things together, but I looked up and I had this wall. I put every asset, I had 52 digital assets is what they were called, like something everywhere.

So it's like, okay, let's just be one place. I want a webpage and I want a LinkedIn profile. So that's where I'm trying to focus on narrowing it down. 

Stephen Brown: Good. 

Wade Carpenter: Well, we appreciate you being part of the journey and appreciate you coming back.

For all our listeners, we [00:35:00] appreciate it. If you've been listening for five years, we really appreciate all that. If you had just started, it's not too late. Like share, subscribe, we always appreciate that. We'll put Rob's contact information in the show notes below.

If you got any thoughts or wishes for our five year anniversary, stick them in the comments. We'd love to see them. Love to hear them. We do this every single week and we will see you on the next show.

Rob Williams: Thank you everybody. This is an honor to be back.

Stephen Brown: Thanks, Rob. Thanks, Wade.