Exit Consulting with Andrea Steinbrenner

In this episode we are joined by Andrea Steinbrenner to discuss the process of planning for a sale and executing the ideal sale for a business owner. 

Andrea is the CEO at Exit Consulting Group, which provides consulting and brokerage services for businesses and owners preparing for and executing a sale or similar change in ownership. She shares how he partners with business owners to define success, develop specific goals, and establish a plan of action to achieve them. An experienced executive who has worked across a multitude of industries, Andrea’s objective is to leave businesses better than she finds them and works to provide clients with their best possible outcome. Andrea’s win is seeing people succeed and helping them find the best way to reach their goals.

Andrea emphasizes the importance of clear communication by listening to the wants, needs, goals, and priorities of each client before collaborating. She works with staff to find solutions that best meet their goals and maintain the company’s culture and values. Andrea describes the structure of a company as a rainforest. The executives and senior staff are in the canopy and see the over-arching “big picture” while there may be organized chaos on the ground. 

Andrea worked her way up the managerial ladder in the retail industry. She earned a bachelor’s in accounting. She then worked for TGG Accounting, a mid-sized, outsourced accounting firm, and became a fractional CFO working in several industries, including construction, manufacturing, retail, professional services, financial services, cannabis, hospitality, franchises, and e-commerce sectors, among others. Deciding to take her career in a slightly different direction, after receiving an EMBA, Andrea started Canopy Consulting, a business consulting firm. She was referred to Exit Consulting Group (ECG) as a consultant in 2019, became COO in July 2020, and CEO in October 2022. 

Selling a business is the American dream, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, the reward for years of hard work. Successful entrepreneurs make countless sacrifices in hopes that they would someday reap the benefits of their labor and live a new life of vacations, recreation, and prosperity.

You only exit your business once, so you should feel confident passing this milestone. A successful business exit reflects the preparation done beforehand. Failing to plan is planning to fail.

The owner of a privately held company has several alternatives on how to exit their business. In the absence of an exit strategy, events will inexorably dictate the final exit plan. A costly involuntary exit may be caused by death, disability, divorce, disagreement, or distress.

Selling Your Business with David King will help you take control of the sale process and make it positive one.

Transcript

 | Speaker 1: | Welcome back to Selling Your Business with David King. I am David King. I'm the author of Selling Your Business, Begin with the End in Mind. And today I'm joined by Andrea Steinbrenner. Andrea, welcome.  
 | Speaker 2: | Thank you. Thanks for having me.  
 | Speaker 1: | Andrea is an m and a advisor and she's the president, the CEO of Exit Consulting Group in Lovely Coronado, California. If anybody goes down to Coronado, you may remember seeing the Hotel Dell. It's a historic site down there. So why don't you start by telling us a little bit about yourself, about your background and how you got where you are today.  
 | Speaker 2: | Great. Well thanks again for having me. As David mentioned, I'm the CEO of Exit consulting group and we focus on supporting clients through an exit. Our name is pretty indicative of how we service the market. Our background as a company started because my partner John over who's still our acting president and working hand in hand with our third partner, Scott had his own company, a family held business, and he didn't end it well. It was not a good positive experience and he has a CPA background, he understands business. He ran his general contracting business for over a decade. He yet still, the exit didn't go well and it left a really bad taste in his mouth and it hurt his family. And so as he shared his story in his own networking groups, his peers said, well, help us not to do that. Don't let any of us go through that.  
 | Speaker 2: | So about 18 years ago, our company was formed and John started working with business owners to help prevent situations like that. Over the course of the last 18 years, what's really evolved is a clear methodology on how to approach situations like that. In business, it's a little bit different than an investment banking firm or a traditional brokerage firm. Though we can help through a transaction, we really identify with business owners and realize that the transaction is just one part of this bigger journey called the transition. And there's a lot of pre, during and post work that has to occur in order for business owners to feel like their transaction was successful and that they feel good about it for years to follow. I'm sure if you follow David, you've heard the scary staggering statistics of business owners who either don't make it through a transaction or they make it through and they don't feel good about it or years later they look back and they don't feel good about it.  
 | Speaker 2: | And being a fellow business owner and serving business owners for decades in my own career, that to me is devastating because we put so much of our blood, sweat and tears into our businesses and our business practice and the people we serve. So for us to not end the race with our arms in the air as we break the tape is sad and it's never the intent of what any of us are going for. So we're pretty passionate about how we show up for our clients in that capacity. A little bit more about myself. I come from an accounting background, so does our third partner Scott. So we're very much a numbers based firm. We kind of look at the books first to get an assessment of what's going on, but I also have a background in operations and both of those morphed together in my prior careers.  
 | Speaker 2: | Prior to this career, I was the VP of operations at an outsource accounting firm where we served every industry across the nation in some international really being those designated resources at different levels in order to help support the firm when they might not need a full-time position in their accounting firm or even a full-time accounting department. But everybody needs good accounting. So that's what I did first, and in that as working as A CFO before I moved into the VP role, I did work on transactions and in transactions, but strictly from a CFO point of view. So moving that into a consulting point of view and then working with our clients from the top down, we have the foundation for it. The other side we're very passionate about is not just helping the current business owner but helping that future business owner be proactive and successful in the transition because that's also where a lot of things can fail. And so we spend a lot of time working with those buyers, educating them on the business, educating them on what they're walking into, and then educating our sellers on who's actually buying the business and making sure there's alignment way at the beginning of the process so the process moves much faster and smoother along the way.  
 | Speaker 1: | It's funny keying off that accounting subject there. I'm a lawyer, but I was an accountant before I went to law school and it's amazing how often the accounting is a major obstacle to getting a deal done. And you may be too young to remember live aid, the concert, the benefit for Africa. In any case, Crosby Stills and NASH came back out, they hadn't been seen for decades and one of the announcers said, oh my God, if these people knew they'd be out there today, they had never let themselves look like this. And with companies, some of them never realized that anybody else is ever going to look at their books and it is a tragedy if they don't have their books in order in advance of a transaction. How much time do you need to work on books and to help the business owner get in shape for a buyer to start going through?  
 | Speaker 2: | Yeah, it's a great question. So I'm going to give a very CFO answer. It depends, and what I mean by that is it depends the age of the business and how long the bookkeeping or the accounting's been done. The way it has, it depends on the business model. So going into a professional service company like a law firm or a CPA firm is very different than walking into a manufacturing company or a construction company. So there's different levels of complexity in the more complex business models. And then it also depends on what needs to actually occur in order to get to the finish line and how fast. So it's hard to answer that in an aggregate answer because it is very specific to the business model, but it's kind of like going to the gym. So if you've never been to the gym before and you don't eat healthy and your body's never lifted a weight, you're going to have a very different timeline of getting in shape than someone who used to work at all the time and has taken a couple years off.  
 | Speaker 2: | And so it is very dependent on the client and what's happening, but what we do do as part of how we go and help is we do an assessment upfront to really level set expectations. So what that means is we'll take a look at the business from a buyer's perspective regardless of where a business owner is in their trajectory to exit, even if they're 10 years out, we'll still go in and say, based on current rate in the market and how people are approaching business acquisition, here's what people are going to be looking for. And depending on what's going on in the market, things can really change. And so we'll give them that assessment. We'll do a deep dive in their accounting and then we'll lay out a plan for them in order to get into a place where it will make a buyer's appetite better for them.  
 | Speaker 2: | With the accounting and certain operation metrics, we actually come in and can support them through it too. So we don't just say, here's what you need to do to fix it. We also can help 'em fix it. If there are skill sets outside of what our core competencies are, we'll refer them out and make sure that they get what they need. So if someone's just lacking an HR department but they have 30 employees in the state of California, we say, we got to fix this because a buyer can't touch that with a 10 foot pole. So we'll work with them and we actually will help the client execute to the roadmap we lay out, not just give them the plan and say, call us later. And I want to just make a point to your own listeners about accounting because you're right, there's a lot of times people just wing it or do it on their own or have family members do it, and it's because it's probably one of the most misunderstood but vulnerable places in a business as well.  
 | Speaker 2: | And so when we go in and we are assessing someone's accounting department, we're very straightforward, we're very honest and transparent, but we have a lot of empathy because that's essentially someone saying, come in and look under the hood and tell me what you see. And it's easy to hide things in that and it's easy to kind of just mush it over and blur your eyes and say the CPO figure it out and they found my tax returns, but it is really important to get it right, so you've got to be ready for it, and it's typically somewhat costly to get it fixed, but what I just was meeting with the client on Friday explained to them is if you pay for it once and then you pay to maintain it, you'll save yourself money than if you constantly pay to fix it along the way. And I've seen both.  
 | Speaker 1: | It can be very expensive in that it can be fatal to a sale. There can be legal issues that come up during a deal and that will just require some extra work. We go back and fix something paper over it, get a contract drafted here or there, but if there's counting issues that come along that arise while I'm working on a deal, I'm usually just told, shut this file, this deal is dead. Because once the buyer finds accounting issues, when they've put that much time and energy into it, they're not interested anymore. They built numbers based on what they were expecting, and when they find out that that's not the reality, it's fatal. It can be.  
 | Speaker 2: | Yeah. So some instances just for the listeners to think about what we're really talking about so they can start to apply, it would be say you are a business that takes a bunch of customer deposits upfront. So if you're booking that as revenue and not deferred revenue, but you haven't executed on the sales of it yet, you still have a big cost associated with executing on those sales. So if that's not booked correctly in your books, it can be misleading. If you are running a bunch of things through your credit card but you're not allocating 'em to the right expense account and things are just sitting on your balance sheet, then you can be misstating your p and l just because of not right accounting. If things aren't clearing off on your balance sheet correctly, for instance, you are withholding employee payroll taxes for a period of time before you remit them to the IRS, but they don't actually clear because there's a glitch in your system. Your balance sheet can look completely misd when it's actually not. So there are some very real applications for the listeners to start to think about and say, is that happening correctly? And if anything I said doesn't make sense, call your accountant, talk to them or call David or I. Yeah.  
 | Speaker 1: | Well, other than the lack of investment in the accounting, what would you say are some of the more typical mistakes that you see businesses make during their lives and that crop up during the sale and create problems?  
 | Speaker 2: | Yeah, couple things. One is having family members in the business is a wonderful thing. It's one of the benefits we can offer as privately held business owners, but not preparing them correctly for your exit can be really detrimental to the company because some of those family members may not actually have the skillset and wouldn't have been hired into those positions if it wasn't a family business. So either preparing them for what that change in ownership will look like and preparing for the new buyer if they're going to retain them or not is really important. A lot of our privately held businesses, whether it's a piece of the business or all of the business, are lifestyle businesses. So understanding what you're running through the business and then how you're going to continue to account for that post transaction is really important. It's a wonderful thing to have a lifestyle business.  
 | Speaker 2: | It's one of the benefits of being a privately held business owner. But if you're used to putting your cars, your medical expense, your vacations, all of that through the business and that business goes away, not only do you need to figure out how you're going to continue to pay for those things, but also there's a different tax implication involved because if you're running it through the business, you're using pre-tax dollars, so you're essentially getting 40 more cents to spend than if you have to use post-tax dollars to now pay for it. So those are things you want to think about. Other things to think about are if you have children in the business, one's in the business not. We hear a lot of business owners say, oh, don't worry, my child who's not in the business will be taken care of. We don't need to worry about it.  
 | Speaker 2: | Well, that may or may not be true because that child who's not in the business might be a 50 50 recipient of the estate, but they might say, if we took this business and sold it to a third party, we'd get a lot more out of the estate post the death of the parents versus letting my sibling get it as a gift or a discount and I get what's left. So there's things like that to think about that are pretty far down the road, but it's that rippling effect. More of the immediate things that we spend a lot of time with the business owners on are what's your life going to look like when it's not this?  
 | Speaker 2: | And that can take on a bunch of different versions and we don't see a lot of consultants talking about it and advising on it. So what are you going to do if you don't come into work every day or full-time? If you come to work every day and you don't have the corner office anymore, you're not the CEO, what are you going to do? You're used to having the front table at the annual benefit and the little league jerseys have your company's name on the back and all of a sudden it's not your company anymore. So it seems a little bit silly, but it's actually really, really important to think about what you want to do post being full-time in your business if you don't plan to stay. There's only so much golf people can play. There's only so much crafting people can do. There's only so much travel people want. Most business owners, I would say a lot, but I'd say most business owners find a lot of relevancy in being a business owner and going to work every day. And so they're not doing that. How are you going to continue to show up in your world and add value that's sustainable and feels good to you? And so we take a lot of exploring that with our clients as well.  
 | Speaker 1: | Yeah, I see business owners that were hugely successful in one area, we'll be able to do a successful sale, and then they come back with their latest and greatest and I'm like, whoa, this is an tough area to get into. You can't dabble in real estate development or this and that, and do you see a lot of serial entrepreneurs, they hit a home run on number one, but then they probably ought to just try to get on base with the next one.  
 | Speaker 2: | Yeah, I would say every once in a while we tend to help a lot of baby boomers, so a lot of them are Asian out of their business and they don't really have an appetite to go start a next thing. That being said, most of them think that they're going to when they exit, and then once they get through the transaction, they realize they don't want to do it. They just want to take a step back. And I would say the majority of our business owners don't just go into a retirement and don't do something. They just do something at a lesser degree and they take their chips off the table and they take the pressure off their back. They let it to the next generation to hold all of that. So yes, though there is the ability maybe sinkhole that some people can fall into thinking, Hey, this was great.  
 | Speaker 2: | I did this. I'm going to go do it again. I think the psychology behind it that is a misnomer is that when they started this the first time they were 20 years younger, they had that much more gas in the tank. They had that much more curiosity and appetite and they don't anymore. So we do work with clients to try to set them up in maybe advisory roles in their business for a period of time. A lot of business owners can offer a lot of support and guidance in board seats, which is really helpful to the community that they serve. So there's lots of opportunities for them to go out and still be valuable. It's just finding what makes sense for them and is fulfilling.  
 | Speaker 1: | That was consistent with my experience as well, that people could do an internal transfer or try to sell the business to their kids. You're not going to get as much money as if you find an independent third party buyer. Do work with clients to find the ideal buyer. Do you walk through the list of alternative buyers and then help position them to attract the right buyer?  
 | Speaker 2: | We do, and in order to accomplish that, what we first do is spend a lot of time with them really digging into three buckets of liquidity, relevancy, and legacy. And for the most part, you don't get all three. A lot of times you can get two. So bear with me here while I walk you through an analogy, but if your goal is to leave a legacy for your business, it probably means you need to take some of those distributions and reinvest them back into the company and create infrastructure that's not based on you. So that's great. You've created, you've now taken your money, you've invested it back in the company, you've created a legacy. The company might not be worth as much, it might be worth more, but your goal is to leave it to somebody else, which probably means you're not going to have a place to go to work for that much longer.  
 | Speaker 2: | So that relevancy thing needs to go somewhere else. Most of the time when we work with our clients to this exercise, what we find is liquidity is not the driver for a transaction. It's really legacy and relevancy. So if business owners feel like they can leave their company behind and it has a going concern and it can serve the next generation and they can still show up in the marketplace and somehow they can still show up as a mentor to their business, they can still be the guy that started X, Y, Z, they'll take what the market will offer in liquidity. The highest liquidity value people will get for their business is selling to a third party. So if you're in a family business, to your point, you're not going to get the highest liquidity, but a lot of times it's not the point. But we do flesh all that out very early on in the process because that then helps us trigger how we target the market for the ideal buyer if they're not already sitting in the family or in the business.  
 | Speaker 2: | And so it might be selling to a competitor that can carry on the widget in its form. It might be selling to somebody who's completely outside of the industry because they want to diversify their assets and they'll give you top dollar for it and a quick earnout because they want to take it and run with it and roll it up. So we do really focus on that because early on, even when I started, we weren't spending as much time in that and we were confusing the process and we would bring people to the table and it wasn't scratching the itch, and so it's because we weren't asking the right questions. And so now we try to be really cognizant and curious upfront, and then that way we're bringing the right answers and solutions to the table.  
 | Speaker 1: | How many years do you need to work with a client to really do this properly? If they've been running, if they've been doing say, a standard speed grade job of keeping things organized properly, how much time do you need?  
 | Speaker 2: | Yeah, I would say if a business has really been well kept and well organized, and a client came to us tomorrow and said, I want to go on the market, we could take 'em on the market. It would take us about three to six months to spin that up depending on what needs to happen and occur in the process, because there's different paths you can take, but we can get a client on the market relatively quickly if all the ducks are in a row. If a client comes and says, I want to exit down the road, that's a different story. And so we will work with them through a plan. Typically we'll do an assessment if they want to grow before they exit. We'll typically work with them through a strategic plan and then help them execute to that strategic plan. And three years is a good number for that. If somebody says, I want to exit tomorrow, and they come and they're not tied up and they're a little bit messy, we typically need about a year to clean that up and then we can take 'em to market, but getting them to market's fast because we've been in there for a year, so we have all the inputs ready to go and built out, and it's just a matter of flipping that switch and putting marketing collateral together  
 | Speaker 1: | From the moment a letter of intent is signed until closing. What's your typical timeline on that? What do you think?  
 | Speaker 2: | Yeah, that can be determinate. Don't you love all of my It depends. Yeah, sure. So let me walk quickly and I'm watching time here, but let me walk through kind of a deal flow process to help level set expectations. So once a client engages and says, I want to sell my company, and we're talking a third party, whether it's an identifier or a strategic buyer, the first step that we have to do is put together marketing collateral. And that typically takes about 60 days, and we take two different approaches. We can do the traditional paper sim where we put it on the web and people can shop all the sites. So think of that as walking down the street, seeing a house for sale and pulling a paper sim out of the box and reading about it. It's a little bit more in depth with the business, but that's the concept.  
 | Speaker 2: | We now also partner with a really cool platform called Exo, where they're actually putting sims in video format. So people are actually not only getting to see the business, but they get to spend some time with the business owners in a video setting, hearing q and a that we prep. That's like putting your house on Zillow, so think how much more robust your house looks on Zillow than a paper sim when you're walking down the street. That tends to flush out buyers quicker. We have a bigger pool, but we move through interested parties a lot faster. They get information upfront, and then there's obviously layers of NDAs we go through. Once we have a good pool of buyers, we actually ask them to submit what's called an IOI first an indication of interest. What that does is it allows us to line our buyers up side by side and see where we're falling in price and terms, and then we bring those offers to the client.  
 | Speaker 2: | Iis are so you can collect as many iis as you want and you can compare 'em and contrast from there. It gives our sellers very clear picture on who's at the table, and then they can make the determination on who looks like the best buyer for them. It's not always the highest price. Sometimes terms plays, sometimes contingency agreements plan. Once we identify the buyer, we then ask 'em to submit the LOI. The LOI becomes non-binding, but exclusive now we're not allowed to talk to anybody else once we're executed. And from there to close is dependent on a couple things. It's dependent on how thorough the buying team's going to go through due diligence. We typically ask for 60 days or less than a DD period. A third party kind of first time buyer or maybe couple time buyer or family office will usually spend about 30 to 60 days in due diligence.  
 | Speaker 2: | A PE firm might spend 90 days. So it just depends on who the buyer is. It also depends on if they have to go get bank financing or outside financing. Most of the time they can't even apply for underwriting until they have an LOI. So you're starting that financing process upon the execution of an LOI, and that can take anywhere between 90 and 120 days. And so that kind of sets the tone too, about halfway through the due diligence process. If everything's looking good, there's no red flags, there's no smoking guns, that's when we start to really spin up our legal teams and our CPAs. So they're already on the bench, they already know what's happening, but we don't actually turn them on until we know we're getting closed because we don't want to spend people's time and dollars and efforts on something that might not make it over the finish line.  
 | Speaker 2: | Then we start pretty hard pressed for about 45 days, making sure all the agreements are in place, whether it be purchase sale agreement, the stock transfer agreement, updated operating agreement, buy sell agreement, bylaws, employment agreement reps and warranties, you name it. We get all of those in place, a whole packet of papers and documents to go through. We make sure everyone's aligned, and then on date of closing, funds get transferred to an escrow account. Typically, documents are signed, they're exchanged, documents are signed by the other party, so everybody has a wet copy and you're closed. So all in all, realistically, clients should expect it takes about 12 months to sell their company if they're selling to a family member or a key employee. Usually we can cut that time down to about six to nine months, but there's still, there's actually a lot of gear up in those because we have to interview everybody and make sure everyone's actually saying what they're saying and not what they think each other want to hear. And that takes about 60 days of just getting to know and building trust to get there, and then we quickly move into that legal document phase because we don't have a bunch of due diligence to do.  
 | Speaker 1: | Yeah, I've seen several internal sales situations where the owner expects that he's going to pass a business along to someone, and you go to that member of management and they have no desire to take on the responsibilities of owning a business because it's different game altogether than  
 | Speaker 2: | Or they think it's worth very different amounts.  
 | Speaker 1: | Yes, that's another problem as well. Yeah,  
 | Speaker 2: | For sure. Well,  
 | Speaker 1: | Going back a couple of years, we've definitely been through some ups and downs. We had the covid, we've had major interest rate fluctuations and everything. It's not the white hot market that it was in 20, excuse me, 21, 22, but how would you rate this market today in 2024?  
 | Speaker 2: | Yeah, such a hot topic right now. So the way I'm describing it, people can have their opinion about, my opinion is really, I see the market, it's rebalancing right now. So we've been in a bull market for so long, and expectations on both the cost of financing and the options out there have been a little, they were getting a little bit unrealistic in terms of a maintenance standpoint. You have to have a stable interest rate for an economy to grow. That's just economics one-on-one, we can't have money at less than 1% and think the economy's going to grow, and so the interest rates had to get stabilized now in very human fashion and market fashion. It went from one side of the pendulum to the other, and now it's coming back to more of an equilibrium. So we're seeing that happening in terms of businesses for sale, that hasn't slowed down.  
 | Speaker 2: | You would think it would, but it hasn't because the fact of the matter is business owners are aging out. Their time clock hasn't stopped just because the world has shifted, their appetite for who the buyer has shifted a little bit. People are a little bit more open to things they might not have been when demand was high and supply was low. Now supply is high, and demand is low, lower, it's not low, and so there's more out there. Deals are taking a little bit longer, not so much because of a seller's appetite, honestly, because of the bank financing. It's just taking longer. Right now, they're doing a better job vetting people, just like when you saw the stock market crash during the mortgage failure back, they're looking harder at who they're lending to right now, and the banks are getting tighter on who they're securing.  
 | Speaker 2: | A lot of covid relief funds have dried up, so this excess cash that made it, maybe we don't have to look so hard. We know they're sitting on X, Y, Z on the balance sheet because of covid. Well, everyone's spent that money now. So we're back to a normalizing area. I wouldn't say we're totally normalized, but a normalizing area in the marketplace where banks are looking a little bit harder. Interest rates are coming up, sellers are being a little bit more wiser. Buyers are digging a little deeper, but it's all positive. None of it's negative out there. The other big shift that's happening, which I'm excited to see in here, and I think it's necessary, is there's a new conversation starting in the marketplace, and it's around this term, E-T-A-E-T-A means entrepreneurial through acquisition. Historically, everybody associated entrepreneurialship with being the founder, creating a widget, taking it to market, selling your widget, very much entrepreneurial.  
 | Speaker 2: | There's a whole other fleet of entrepreneurial out there who are people who don't want to start a company. They want to buy a company, and they're now actually starting to bring it into university education because it's becoming more and more prevalent as business owners age out. There's a lot of very good, well, both public and private companies that will be up for sale in the next decade. And there's a lot of people hungry to be business owners. So instead of going out and recreating the wheel in the marketplace, there's an operating company someone can buy. So we're seeing more of that happen too, which is very positive, very positive  
 | Speaker 1: | IT exit consulting group. Do you have a sweet spot in terms of the size of the businesses that you serve and any particular industries that you specialize in?  
 | Speaker 2: | Yeah, so we really try to stay away from Main Street. We've grown big enough now where there's other people servicing those companies better based on their  
 | Speaker 1: | Size. When you say, what do you refer to as Main Street  
 | Speaker 2: | Below a million dollars in top line, think walking down the traditional coffee shop or dry cleaner. Now, it's not to say we wouldn't help those, but just kind of the bigger size of those. So our sweet spots really anyone between 10 and 50 or 60 million top line, we'll help companies bigger than that, and we do have companies bigger than that, but typically they have an internal team, and so we're now an appendage to that with the overflow or we're directly working with the business owner, consulting them through this while their teams doing the heavy lift. We're privately held, so we focus on privately held and industry-wise. We really do service all industries because we're really passionate about business owners and less about the industry, but in particular the partners. And we all have pretty extensive backgrounds and construction, manufacturing, tech, software  
 | Speaker 1: | Distribution,  
 | Speaker 2: | More of those types of companies.  
 | Speaker 1: | So the transaction size, typically 5 million to 20 million. Is that kind of your ballpark?  
 | Speaker 2: | Yeah, that's our sweet spot in terms of the transaction size,  
 | Speaker 1: | And then something bigger than that is typically going to be handled by an investment banking firm  
 | Speaker 2: | Fully. Yeah. Normally we see that and we will defer if it gets to that size too. We want to make sure the clients have the support. Sometimes we'll work with investment banking firms actually play in different roles for the transaction. Yeah,  
 | Speaker 1: | Or do you handle mostly asset sales  
 | Speaker 2: | Most of the time asset sales? Yes. Usually if it's a stock sale, we'll partner with an investment banking firm for compliance reasons. Although as you know, there's all these new regulations coming out, which is making it more accessible. But yeah, we will, and then we help clients in other states, so if it's a stock sale in another state, we will align with the appropriate firm in those outside regions to support them in that.  
 | Speaker 1: | Well, and also if an asset sale, if attorney or accountant changes it to a stock sale while you're working on it, your license covers that. Correct?  
 | Speaker 2: | Correct.  
 | Speaker 1: | Yes. Yeah. Well, this market looking forward here, because it's just a natural part of the business life cycle, and like you're saying here, there's so many people aging out, it is not. The market doesn't shut down. The market just adjusts to market conditions. It  
 | Speaker 2: | Suggests,  
 | Speaker 1: | Yeah, it is a different market next year than it is today. What do you see coming forward here? I mean, there's obviously some anticipation about lowering of interest rates. There's obviously going to be some political changes in our country here. What's your forecast for the next year?  
 | Speaker 2: | My forecast for the next year is, let's see how accurate I am. Interview me in a year and see where we're at. My forecast for the next year is the mainstream businesses will be very stable, the US economy in particular, but the global economy too, it always has a need for those tried and true businesses. So even in situations, covid, you still needed gas stations, you still needed coin laundry, you still needed right? Trailer parks and campgrounds and just kind of that mainstream, that services almost any class, those are going to keep coming up and being more prevalent and more attractive to buyers. Frankly, tech is always going to be hot because tech is just hot. It's just interesting. So the successful tech companies are going to be the companies that get in front of the market fast and can get market share because they're going to have a quick competitor, follow them immediately.  
 | Speaker 2: | You have to be really good at tech and really passionate about it, but you can be really successful in that area. Healthcare is a growing need with our baby boomers aging, so is our healthcare demand aging, so anything that touches any type of healthcare is probably pretty stable. So it sounds kind of cliched because it's pretty obvious, but it's obvious because that's where the market always goes. We're not doing something new. We're not creating something new. So I think you're just going to see an ongoing of that kind of trajectory. I don't think there's going to be any major shifts or changes that are going to just blow our minds, but who knows? I could be wrong. Look what happened on Sunday with politics,  
 | Speaker 1: | So, oh, good lord. Yeah. Let's last win questions here. Two people walk into your office today. One of them is starting a business and one of them is just a hypothetical business. Generic business. One of them has been in business for 15 years and preparing to sell. What's the advice you give to the person that's just starting today and the one who's just starting the sale process today  
 | Speaker 2: | By his company?  
 | Speaker 1: | I love it. Yeah,  
 | Speaker 2: | That would be my first one, but my second.  
 | Speaker 1: | That's a good tip. Thank you. Reinvent the wheel. Yeah.  
 | Speaker 2: | My second tip would be you two go have a cup of coffee. You can teach each other a whole lot more than I can teach you. And my third tip would be to the ones starting a company would be do not cut corners at the beginning. They will haunt you. Pay for it upfront. It will pay for itself in the long run and get really good advisors around you that not only you've learned to know and trust, but the people you have trust and know, also trust and know them. For the one exiting, my advice would be kind of similar, but on the other side, right? So don't cut corners. If you're going to go through the exit process, go through the exit process. If you cut corners, you'll just prolong it.  
 | Speaker 2: | Get with service providers you really trust, and if you don't have the right people on your bench now, let us help you build that out because it's really dangerous to start the exit process without your bench built because it can take a lot of dips and turns and twists and different speeds, and you want to make sure you have the people there and you're not scrambling to find the person, because if you're scrambling to find the person, you might not pick the person you would pick if you had time. That would be my next advice. Then the last piece advice would be talk to your inner circle about what you're going through. It's a lot more emotional than it is logical. Bring them in early on and let them know because you're going to need their support.  
 | Speaker 1: | That's all sage advice. Well, and Andrea, thank you so much for your time today and sharing all your tremendous wisdom. There are definitely tidbits all throughout this that are going to be tremendously useful to business owners that are going to go through the sale process, and everyone should have that in mind as the whole time they're running a business. There's going to be the sale someday. We don't want to get to the end and not look like we should.  
 | Speaker 2: | Yeah, for sure.  
 | Speaker 1: | Well, enjoy the rest of your summer if you're taking any more vacations. Thank you. Stay safe. Don't get too hot. It's a roasting summer out there. It  
 | Speaker 2: | Is. It  
 | Speaker 1: | Is. Yeah. And for everyone, thank you for joining us and we'll see you next time on Selling Your Business with David King.