Cantrell Grifffin Business Brokerage: How Business Brokers Help Owners Sell With Confidence

We sit down with Barry Graves and Stewart Nance to unpack how business brokerage works in Northwest Arkansas and why the baby boomer succession wave is creating both urgency and opportunity. We break down what drives real business value, how SBA and banks shape deals, and what owners can do now to avoid shutting down a company that could be sold and carried forward. 
• what a business brokerage does for buyers and sellers 
• why most owners are not actually ready to sell 
• succession planning gaps as baby boomers retire 
• clean books and higher reported profit driving valuation 
• how SDE, EBITDA, and legitimate addbacks get built 
• using SIC and NAICS comps to anchor market pricing 
• why SBA and commercial lenders drive deal structure 
• when seller financing and earnouts make sense 
• confidentiality tactics and NDAs for marketing a sale 
• the “value my business” readiness questionnaire and scoring 
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Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:09

All right, welcome back to another episode of NWA and Beyond. I'm your host, Russell King. And I'm Carter Clark. And today we're going to sit down with a couple of Northwest Arkansas powerhouses. Decades of experience in the unsexy but highly profitable world of Main Street and lower middle market business brokerage. We got Barry Graves and Stuart Nance. How are you guys?

SPEAKER_00 0:30

We're doing great. Thank you. Good morning. Thanks for having us.

What Business Brokers Actually Do

SPEAKER_03 0:32

All right. Well, uh, I want to get in and just explain. Will y'all tell everybody what is a business brokerage?

SPEAKER_01 0:39

Cantor Griffin Business Brokers has been around since 1983, facilitating buyers wanting to get into a business and sellers wanting to get out of a business.

SPEAKER_00 0:52

Yeah, that's it. A lot of times people don't have a plan, they don't have something to do after they get done working. Used to in the past, they'd have a son, uh son-in-law, someone else in the family they could transition the company to, but a lot of things have changed. Baby boomer generation, I think there's what, 10,000 people turning age 65 every day in America. And those are the people that built, own, and ran small businesses. And so they don't have a plan of succession. And so we come in and we help with that. Sometimes they're ready to sell right away, and sometimes they're three to five years out on a plan. We help get them from where they're at today to where their business is ready to sell to the next person later.

The Baby Boomer Succession Cliff

SPEAKER_02 1:32

Okay. Nice. So tell us a little bit about Cantor Griffin Business Brokers, like just story, the origin story, where we are today, how many brokers are there, all that sort of thing.

SPEAKER_01 1:43

We have four brokers on staff now. We've been in business since 1983. We're the oldest business brokerage firm in Northwest Arkansas. We have done over$2 billion worth of transactions. We're industry agnostic. We just try to sell profitable businesses, typically that are valued a half million dollars or greater. We've been doing it for a long time, and our staff is, I don't know how many years we got between us all, probably about 30, between Curtis, Barry, Mike, and me.

SPEAKER_00 2:13

Yep. And we enjoy it. It's fun. It's a very rewarding situation where you can help somebody who doesn't know what they're going to do other than the fact that they want to get out of their business for their retirement or their next business venture. And they've got great employees that they know needs to be taken care of. They've got great customer base and suppliers that rely on them. And so we help with that plan of succession about how to get them out of that position and get the next person in to continue and move that company along seamlessly and hopefully even with added growth.

SPEAKER_01 2:45

And that's a key point. Three out of four small businesses are owned by baby boomers. And three out of the three out of four. Three out of four. That's a statistic. That's not our opinion. And the other statistic that's just as telling, following what Barry said, is three out of four of them don't have a succession plan. Wow. They don't know what they're going to do.

Clean Books Drive Real Value

SPEAKER_02 3:06

So let's talk about that. If three out of four don't have a succession plan, three out of four are owned by baby boomers. So how does it look from y'all's perspective? Like how do you prepare somebody for the sale? Because most of the time when you're I mean, I know as an entrepreneur that day in and day out, I'm not thinking about what am I doing today to sell my business. I'm thinking about operating and running and trying to cash flow, trying to do all those things. Right. And so when you're doing that, you're not necessarily setting your business up for success to sell because you're just going, right?

SPEAKER_01 3:39

Oh, you're ready on a very key point. It's diametrically opposed motives because, like Barry said, business owners don't want to pay taxes. Well, to get your maximum value, you need to be paying taxes. If you want to have that business optimally prepared to sell, then you've got to have clean books, which is a rarity. You've got to be optimizing your profits, not minimizing your profits. You can't be running your family groceries, your boat dock, your every vacation, every car, insurance, all the things. Those things just they do decrease. You don't pay taxes now, but but you'll pay it later when we correct. Because what we'll do is we'll take your financial statements, restate them, and add those items back to come up with the true cash flow that that business is generating. And from that, we can go to industry reference material we have to get reference materials on what that business is worth. We do we value them by SIC code. SIC mean. Standard industrial code or N-A-I-C-S. There are two different ways the government tracks all business transactions, every business that's registered with the government and is taxed by the government. We track them and we have reference materials for businesses that sell in that particular code. So if you want to sell your business, we're going to take its data, compare it with its peers across the country, and come up with a market value based on comparable sales.

SPEAKER_02 5:09

Gotcha. So how do you coach somebody up on that? I think this is probably one of the more important topics from somebody that's thinking. First of all, there's not many real estate companies that have a business brokerage, right? Like this is not a common everyday occurrence. And I think sometimes people might go to a realtor and say, Hey, I want to sell my business, they go, huh? Like, what are you talking about? And so this is a whole different outside world than just, you know, listening and selling real estate. And so when somebody comes in and they go, hey, I'm thinking about selling my business, I'm sure it takes a year or two years to coach them up to get them. So this is a longer term play unless they come in with slick books clean, you know, everything's in order. So how do you coach somebody up on that? Well, that's just it.

SPEAKER_01 5:52

There is a whole cottage industry of succession plan advisors. We're not paid advisors, although we get drug into it. We're at the end of that process where they've been through a succession plan and we're the exit strategy. So that's what a business broker is. He's the end of the process. You know, how do I get out? But to get the business ready is sometimes takes years. Yeah. It's rare that they're ready the day they make a phone call to us. And our website, which is Arkansas Business Brokers, gets a lot of those kind of inquiries because somebody says, you know, I think I am ready to sell. I don't know what to do. Let's just Google how do I sell my business in Arkansas. Arkansas Business Brokers is going to come up, you know, top on the list. So we get a lot of calls from those kind of people who just aren't ready.

SPEAKER_00 6:40

And sometimes when you walk into a situation, you have to show up as the expert, and you have to convince this person your CPA that you've used for decades has given you great advice on how to minimize your taxes. Now, what I'm telling you to do is the exact opposite of what he says. So why is he going to listen to me as opposed to his 30-year experience CPA? So we've got to untrain them, educate, and then retrain them.

SPEAKER_04 7:06

Right.

SPEAKER_00 7:07

Sometimes it's an easy process, and sometimes it's you, we're dealing with somebody from five years ago.

SPEAKER_03 7:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 7:12

You plant the seed today for the harvest tomorrow, that's for sure.

Banks And SBA Set The Price

SPEAKER_03 7:15

I think it seems like a lot of people just call and say they go in one day, they had a hard Monday, and on Tuesday they say, I'm ready to sell this, I'm tired, I've been doing this too long, and they're not ready to sell their business, even though they're ready to turn loose of it. They're willing, but they're not ready. They're not ready. Right. So what happens with that?

SPEAKER_00 7:32

Oh, lots of different avenues to work with that right there. You know, again, sometimes you just got to do the consultation and you know see where they're at and you know, see if it's viable. One of the things that we do is we have to go into the appointment and look at what they've got, and it doesn't really matter how much they want for it. Right. And it doesn't even really matter what a buyer wants to pay for it. We have to look at it in our market, our segment here, what is a bank going to loan? So we have to educate ourselves what does an SBA loan look like within these parameters? How much assets, how much blue sky, you know, how much revenue. And then again, it's on a sliding scale. Is the revenue going up? Is the gross sales and the net profit going up? Is it going down? There's so many factors. You can't just say, hey, your company's worth this because another company sold for that, but your numbers are all different. It's like saying, hey, how much should I pay per pound for a pickup truck when I go buy one? You know, there's so many options and variables to that, and that's why we have to dig deep. Sometimes it takes us a month to decipher what their books say to actually figure out what is the real SDE, what is the real seller's discretionary earnings. Then we're able to go to the blue book, like Stuart was saying, you know, it's like an automotive blue book that tells you your value. Okay, now we go to that SIC code, and then he looks and says, okay, well, there were three others that have sold for that. We need those comps again because that SBA lender is gonna look at those same comps and say, hey, your loan valuation is within this target, not what the seller wants.

SPEAKER_01 9:04

And following what Barry said, the banks, SBA or your commercial lender are really driving the train on this. They have to have an independent appraisal. They won't take our appraisal. Right. Now we know we do the same appraisal. It's gonna come up with the same value, same comps, same comps, but it's got to come from an objective third party. Right. Just like when you buy a house, right? You've got to have an objective appraisal. That appraisal has to fit the criteria for that SIC code for the SBA or the bank to loan on it, never mind the creditworthiness of the buyer. So getting those books straight where they'll support the debt coverage that's required is really what drives the valuation.

What SBA Wants From Buyers

SPEAKER_02 9:44

How do most of the banks look at that? Let's talk about it from the other side. So I'm coming in now and I'm thinking about, man, this business looks awesome. I'm tired of working for somebody and I want to be an entrepreneur and I want to work for myself. What does it look like on some of these SBA loans to be able to actually make it happen? So if there's a$2 million business out there and I've been working a W-2 job for the last 20 years or 10 years, how do I prepare myself to switch to entrepreneurship? Like, what is the SBA loan looking for to buy XYZ business?

SPEAKER_01 10:17

Well, that's what business brokers do. We're gonna help the seller reconstitute his financials. We're gonna take what the CPA does on the tax return, we're gonna redo it in a manner that's acceptable to the SBA. Because it doesn't matter what we do, if it's not acceptable, we have to come up with legitimate adbacks. Now, most of them are pretty standard and recognized by banks and SBA. So net profit goes to EBIT DA, which is a common earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, which is a common bank term. But we go further than that because you've got all these personal things embedded in there in that eBIT da that need to be taken out. So we've got to justify those, we have to detail those to the SBA, to the bank, so they'll take EBITDA and increase the EBIT DA by the amount of those legitimate adbacks. Yeah. So that takes deep dive research on our part to we're learning things that the CPA doesn't know. Right. We're forensic accounting, and we're not accountants, but we're having to do forensic accounting.

SPEAKER_00 11:25

And sometimes the SBA will just tell you no. They like if you've been in that industry before.

SPEAKER_02 11:30

Gotcha.

SPEAKER_00 11:31

If you're a farmer and you want to start buying tech companies and you don't have a tech background, they're probably gonna deny you.

SPEAKER_02 11:37

All right, so let's pretend. I'm in the real estate business, and there's an HVAC business, so it's a similar thing. It's a million and a half dollar business. So what do I what would somebody have to do to go to SBA and qualify for something like that? Like what's the process look like for a buyer?

SPEAKER_01 11:55

SBA will loan anywhere from 80% to 95%, even sometimes 100%, depending on what Barry said, your involvement and experience in that industry. If you're a real estate guy wanting to buy an HVAC company, they're gonna want a lot more equity out of you. If they're talking to an HVAC company that's buying strategically, just buying a competitor, they'll own 95%. So very little equity is required in those situations. And the SBA really likes the seller to have some skin in the game still. They want that transition to be smooth, and the way that in their mind they think that we can make sure that goes smooth is that the seller finances five or ten or fifteen percent of that twenty percent that goes required for the equity.

SPEAKER_02 12:44

Is that common? Like is it for seller to be willing to do that? That's like the old days of buying real properties. Like those days are long gone in this world because you can't hardly get a loan that direction.

SPEAKER_01 12:56

I got an offer just now on a roofing company we've got listed for, what do we got listed for? A couple million. 2.9 million? 2.9. He offered 50% down, 50% earnout after one year, because revenues are irregular, but they're trending steep up. It's not uncommon in a business sale, especially with that kind of growth, to have an earnout or seller financing involved in completing the transaction.

SPEAKER_02 13:23

That's interesting. That's a cool way to keep everybody involved in the butt overall, you're talking about for most SBA opportunities, it's a 95% loan valuation on some of those. Are commercial lenders doing a similar thing? Or is that commercial loans there's gonna be a loan? 80% 80% or probably and it depends on your assets too.

SPEAKER_00 13:45

Is there real estate involved? Is there a fleet of trucks, or is it all just are you buying just cash flow? It just depends on what it is. There's so many variables there. Yeah.

Earnouts And Seller Financing Reality

SPEAKER_03 13:54

What all right? So two-part question, Barry. What's your favorite industry to sell and market?

SPEAKER_00 13:59

My favorite industry is the ones that close. And right now, I mean, you know, gas station convenience stores, there's more buyers than there are old gas stations. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 14:09

That's interesting with the new trend in the case, the big, huge.

SPEAKER_00 14:12

Yeah, I mean, used to people would put gas stations on a third-acre lot, you know, and now Casey's come ago come in, they want four acres. Yeah. And yeah, that that has changed. But that took out everybody in the middle, and that left all the small guys taking care of the big guys, but there's no really dominant group that's running all the small ones. So that leaves entrepreneurs the chance to buy multiple of the small ones.

SPEAKER_04 14:32

Gotcha.

SPEAKER_00 14:33

Yeah, and they can be in sometimes a better location, you know, that you can have them on a busier street where there's not the affordability to buy four-acre lot and have profit. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:43

All right, Stuart, what's your favorite industry to sell? Well, echoing him, Barry, the ones that are profitable. And I'll say this B2B, business-to-business service companies. I'm getting HVAC, fencing, security firms, anybody that's in the service industry in a growing demographic market, right, is going to get a lot of interest.

SPEAKER_03 15:07

All right, now how do you let's talk about the line between the confidentiality and the marketing? You know, how do you get the word out without getting the word out, so to speak?

Profitable Industries Buyers Chase

SPEAKER_00 15:15

Russell, we're like James Bond. Double O seven AB over here. We're agents, but we're secret agents. Yes, that's the key. You have to be secret agents. You always have to have that confidentiality. And we tell people when we list them, sometimes we'll tell them, hey, if you want this strictly confidential, I'm gonna write an ad that's gonna be so generic you may not even recognize that's your own company that's for sale. Right.

SPEAKER_03 15:39

But the guy looking for that business knows what it means.

SPEAKER_00 15:41

Keywords, you've got to have taglines, keywords. Not only that, I mean, thankfully with Cantrell Griffin business brokers and our decades of experience and exposure, we've got thousands of contacts. We have literally thousands of NDAs on file today of people that have reached out to us over the years and said, Hey, I need to buy another one of these, find me one of these, or hey, I'm looking for something in five years when I retire from Walmart or JB Hunter Tyson.

SPEAKER_03 16:06

Yeah, that's good. So the other thing is, on top of that, I think y'all go, you're kind of uh, you said a secret agent. You're kind of a double secret agent in the fact that you guys have closed billions of dollars and almost not really even gotten credit for it. I mean, how does that feel? It's almost like you guys close billions of dollars and nobody knows it.

SPEAKER_01 16:25

Well, it is a confidential-oriented business. So we do fly under the radar a lot. I tell clients when I talk to them initially, uh, on a one-to-tend spectrum, one being invisible to ten being we're gonna put a for sale sign in your window. So we start on one end of the spectrum to where they want to be, and they're all typically concerned about their employees. I don't want my employees to know or my customers to know, even though that really is an unfounded fear, typically. But you know, if it and they if they've got it priced right and we're not getting the leads we need, then we move up the spectrum of visibility because the just like buying a car or a house, you're looking at all the filters in the system that are size, demographic, area, where am I located? You know, what so you you people the more people can dial in, the more quality leads you get. So, and that's it's just like buying a house or a car.

SPEAKER_02 17:19

So it's interesting to think let's go back to the fact that three out of four people are baby boomers that own a small business. How do you think that trend's gonna evolve to where there's gonna be more younger entrepreneurs that will be in the business for a longer time? Or what's the reason? Is there a fear factor of jumping in? Like, why is there not more non-baby boomers owning businesses, do you think?

SPEAKER_00 17:50

Go ahead, well, I part of it is it's not sexy, you know. I mean, it's not sexy to own an oil change company or something.

SPEAKER_03 17:57

A day and twice on Sunday and all that.

SPEAKER_00 17:59

Yeah, exactly. Carter, what's the quote you always say that success is dressed up and shows up and drives a truck and wears overalls? Wears overalls. It's work. And everyone says, you know, I don't want to have a boss. Well, let me tell you, if you own a company, everybody's your boss.

SPEAKER_02 18:13

It's the exact opposite of the body.

Marketing Without Blowing Confidentiality

SPEAKER_01 18:18

So yeah, that that changes. But you know, the baby boomers, we've got 10 years left of us, and it's going to be the largest, what they say statistically, it's gonna be the largest transfer of wealth in the history of the world. These baby boomers aging out and finding the new Generation X buyers, the Walmart executive that wants to try his entrepreneurial skills, he's tired of the corporate race. That's probably the third of our buyers. A third is private equity guys that are rolling up these companies.

SPEAKER_02 18:45

I think a mentality shift in mindset between a lot of millennials that would be your real buyers right now for a lot of these businesses, and a baby boomer mindset. A lot of times a boomer mindset might have been this business they identified by owning this business. Like a lot of times the job was what they identified as, where a lot of millennials their job is a means, but it's not what they're identifying as as much. I think as millennials are getting older, that's changing a little bit, but I think for the longest period of time, it was like, you know, I do this to do this, but it's not I don't identify by my job, you know, and I think that shift is starting to change a little bit. It is.

SPEAKER_01 19:29

When people get tired of working for the man and they think, gosh, I wish I could do my own thing. Everybody's got that little fire. Just does it ever get lit and take off? If it does, those are the guys that we like. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 19:42

So how do you hunt down these people? Like, what are your marketing tactics to go find buyers and sellers? How do you go about the search process?

SPEAKER_00 19:50

Well, I would say, first off, we don't find buyers. The buyers find us. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:55

Gotcha.

SPEAKER_00 19:55

It's it's the sellers. The sellers are the ones that we need.

SPEAKER_01 19:58

Listings is is the key.

SPEAKER_00 20:00

If we have to go and try to find a buyer, then chances are that's not going to work out. We need the buyer that's ready and comes to us and has his mindset, okay, I'm ready to check out of there and check into here. All right. But we've got to get the listings, you've got to get the sellers. Not only that, we have a program that Stuart plugs them in and they take a test, and we score them on, hey, you walked in and said you are ready to sell. Answer how many questions on the 35 questions or something? 40 some odd questions, and it grades you and tells you, hey, in reality, this is where you're at, and you're not ready to sell yet, or you should have sold three days ago.

Why Younger Owners Wait To Buy

SPEAKER_02 20:37

So if somebody wants to come in and list their business, what's the best way for them to come in and take that test?

SPEAKER_01 20:42

I mean, if you Google, I'm I just had a brainstorm. I think I'm at that point, month, it's a month, bad Monday. I'm tired of this. I'm ready to sell.

SPEAKER_04 20:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 20:51

I'm gonna sell my business in Arkansas. Arkansas Business Brokers, click, you go to our website, home page, first button you see, big button right there, is value my business. Yeah, which is a critical first step. When you click that button, you go to this 40 questionnaire, and it grades you on essentially eight key variables. How important is the owner to the business? What's your customer concentration? Are you 90% of your business with Walmart? Uh or are you spread out and nobody's got more than 5%? You get a much higher grade on that. That second one.

SPEAKER_04 21:23

That's good.

How Listings And Readiness Scoring Work

SPEAKER_01 21:24

So it gives you eight scores, and it gives you a composite score. And it gives you reference material for addressing your weaknesses when you get identified as weak in any given area. So it's a very intuitive. There's 2,500 people that subscribe to this platform. Two-thirds of them are succession planners advisors. They get monthly retainers$500 a month,$1,000 a month,$5,000 a month, depending on size, to advise these businesses over the course of years, get their score up, and get them ready to sell. And that's when the exit. Tragedy, the business broker guys show up.

SPEAKER_03 22:03

That makes sense. All right. So, what's the funniest or strangest thing you've ever had to value?

SPEAKER_01 22:09

No question, dog patch. Dog patch. Yeah. Tell us about that. Oh my gosh. Billy, you're gonna have to help me remember. I had Michael Jackson's estate.

SPEAKER_00 22:18

So hang on. First off, Dog Patch is an abandoned amusement park in North Arkansas. Yeah. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 22:24

Yeah. It's really a real estate deal.

SPEAKER_00 22:25

Yeah. It was similar to Silver Dollar City. As a matter of fact, when it first founded, Stewart's dad was one of the founders of that too.

SPEAKER_02 22:32

That's true.

SPEAKER_00 22:32

It had higher daily attendance than Silver Dollar City did.

SPEAKER_02 22:35

Yes. That's wild.

SPEAKER_00 22:36

Several owners, and then it got shut down, and then Stewart's got it, and we're trying to sell it.

SPEAKER_03 22:42

Hey, I remember going there in the early 80s just thinking this is the magical kingdom. Oh, yeah. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 22:48

Yes. Yep. Yeah. And we hope Johnny Morse is going to bring it back to be just that again. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 22:52

So we've got it listed. It's all across the world, and we get oddball inquiries all the time.

SPEAKER_01 22:58

Yeah. The guy who bought it shows up. I meet him over there in a rusted-out Chevy blazer with a wolf in the backseat. I mean, I'm talking about a 150-pound wolf. Wolf. In the backseat, right behind me. He's got sheath on his seats. I mean, it's just a wore-out truck.

SPEAKER_03 23:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 23:15

And this wolf is breathing down my neck. While I show the property and tell him about it. And I'm thinking, do you really have the money? And he swears he does. And I ended up selling it to him because he had a financial backer that Don't judge a book, huh? I mean, he he was a salesman himself. He makes the buddy bolt, this spiltproof dog bolt. Oh, yeah. That everybody, I mean, I've got one now. He's patented it, and I don't even know if he's still alive, but because he paid 50% down, and I ended up having to take it back five years later or four years later, and sold it to Johnny Morse just before it went to the courthouse steps.

SPEAKER_00 23:49

If you remember, you also leased it to somebody else who was going to do something with it, and that guy actually had a bunch of puppets. He had some sort of a TV show thing, and I saw him on Pond Stars so he could have money to come out to Arkansas. No wage.

SPEAKER_01 24:05

I mean, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. I should have written a book on.

SPEAKER_00 24:08

But you did have the lady who said she represented Michael Jackson.

SPEAKER_01 24:11

Yeah. And I called as a lawyer down in Los Angeles, and they disowned, they said, you know, no. And don't ever call us with her name again. Yeah. She is not associated with us. Oh man, that's hilarious.

SPEAKER_00 24:25

It was a crazy one for sure.

SPEAKER_01 24:26

Very saying, you gotta write a book. You gotta write a book.

SPEAKER_00 24:29

But everybody else was wanting you to donate it or you know, owner finance it all with no payments for 10 years and just stupid stuff.

SPEAKER_02 24:36

What's the most fun thing about business brokerage?

SPEAKER_01 24:39

That's the craziest thing. Everybody wins.

SPEAKER_02 24:43

Yeah, that's great. I mean huge results.

Dogpatch And The Wildest Valuations

SPEAKER_01 24:46

I've been a serial entrepreneur or commercial lender. I've kind of been on all sides of deals, bought multiple companies, but you know, this deal, somebody wants out and somebody wants in, and you just try to make it a fair transaction and handle the personalities and the due diligence complications and the banks and all that. But at the end of the deal, everybody went. I just got a Christmas card last week that got lost in the mail from Whispering Woods owners that are in New York City. I sold it a year and a half ago. That's awesome. And they're just so happy and traveling the world and loving life. And the people that bought it love it.

SPEAKER_02 25:24

Yeah, that's awesome. That's a great one.

SPEAKER_01 25:26

Where somebody worked their whole life to build something, yeah, and they're enjoying the fruits or labor.

SPEAKER_04 25:31

The people behind them are happy too.

SPEAKER_01 25:32

They got a legacy they want to hand to somebody that can do something with it. Yeah, that's great.

SPEAKER_00 25:37

I had sold a company that does screening porches and sunrooms, and the owner, the seller had health problems. He had to get out. So the guy bought it, and it's been less than a year. He's doubled it twice. Wow. The seller came back, got his health problems fixed up, and said, Let me come back to work with you. Wow. And so the seller now works for the buyer who's doubled the volume twice, and they're more partners than anything. That's awesome. All happy. And yeah, that that's a success.

SPEAKER_01 26:08

That's not unusual. We just listed earlier this week a five million dollar TAC company outside of Branson who used to work for a guy and he decided I was going to shut it down. He's one of those baby boomers that didn't call a business broker. He just said, I'm going to shut it. Yeah. And this guy was an employee. He said, Well, I'm going to start my deal and I'll bring all the guys over. Well, he did that, and this guy, once he got sideways, once this guy got un unhinged from it, he hired him to come back to be the general manager.

SPEAKER_03 26:42

Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_01 26:43

So his boss is now the general manager, and he's inactive. The owner's inactive.

SPEAKER_02 26:48

So if there's buyers out there right now, so there's serial entrepreneurs out there right now. What are some of the things that y'all have currently available that somebody could? I know you got confidentiality situations and all that, but vaguely, what could somebody come and call you today and be looking at an NDA and looking at opportunity to buy a business in the next 60 to 90 days?

SPEAKER_00 27:10

And again, like Stuart said, this is all on our website, www.arkansabusinessbrokers.com. There is a sell tab. There's also a buy tab. We've got some generic teasers for the businesses. He's got like he's got the HVAC. We've got just sold a feed store, uh, gas station, roofing septic company.

SPEAKER_01 27:31

All growing, making money. Every one on the company.

SPEAKER_00 27:33

Lawn care company, smaller HVAC company, another convenience store in central Arkansas. Several things.

SPEAKER_02 27:41

You still have some resorts, too. Didn't you all have some resorts at one?

SPEAKER_01 27:44

We got a bunch.

SPEAKER_02 27:45

Got a bunch of those.

SPEAKER_01 27:46

You got two on the White River. Well, one's on Norfolk, one's on White. Awesome. And we're talking to them two marinas. Cool. One on Bullshells, one on Ufa, right?

SPEAKER_02 27:57

Yep. That's a wide variety of opportunities for people to get to the show.

SPEAKER_01 28:00

We haven't got a niche lately in resorts. We sold Whispering Woods, which is a great restaurant over there on Norfolk. But a lot of those river guys uh that have the neighboring resorts ate at this place and wanted to know who sold it for them. They gave him our name, and that's how we're and Curtis already had a niche from his previous employment in some of those river resorts. So we but collectively, between he and me, we've got a bunch of those relationships already. That's awesome.

SPEAKER_00 28:28

And those are the baby boomers that are definitely ready to retire. Yeah, you know.

SPEAKER_01 28:32

Guys in Dallas, the CPA in Dallas, but I've been going fishing on the White River for me, that's where I want to bring my kids. I want to raise my kids on the river. That's awesome.

unknown 28:40

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 28:41

So is there anything that you guys want to share as we close out of things that we didn't hit on, or anything that you would want to share to go over that might be of interest to somebody out there thinking about buying or selling?

SPEAKER_00 28:53

Whenever you get your DWI and you go down to your attorney, first consultation's free. So don't do something rash like shut your company down because you don't know any better. We will meet with you for free and tell you what direction we think we can help with the most. Again, I know there's a lot of people that have that mentality of no one will run this company as good as what I did, so I'm just going to shut it down.

SPEAKER_04 29:12

Right.

SPEAKER_00 29:12

Chances are someone just as good as you is out there and we can help. You can keep your employees employed and your customers satisfied.

SPEAKER_03 29:19

And you all find the guy that has the spark about to light that fire, right?

Why The Job Feels Worth It

SPEAKER_01 29:22

Just that legacy, continuing that legacy.

SPEAKER_00 29:24

Exactly. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 29:24

And not only will we meet with them for free, we'll do a free high-level. I mean, you can go on the website and click on it yourself and just it's going to kick out a report. Now it's what we call a high-level valuation. It's not the deep dive. Deep dive. But we're going to give you a free valuation. It gives you a starting point for the guy that's completely ignorant. You know, at least I know what my strengths and weaknesses are. If he's honest with the questionnaire, it's going to identify. Doesn't matter what industry you're in. That's good.

SPEAKER_03 29:54

Man, thank you all so much for sitting down. We're definitely going to do this again and go even deeper. So thank y'all for hanging out with us. Any last words? TGI. All right. Thank you for spending part of your day with NWA and beyond. Please follow, like, and share wherever you listen to podcasts.