Meet Mastery Partner: Mark King - Part 1 (#250)

New Host Alert! Tune in to "The Maximize Business Value Podcast" this week as Dave Casey introduces the show’s new host, Mark King. This is Part 1 of a two-part introduction series, so don't miss next week's episode for the conclusion!

Learn more about Mark on LinkedIn and at masterypartners.com.

Tune in weekly to hear more from Mastery Partners and to receive relevant key content on your journey to maximizing your business value!

GET THE BOOKS: Start with Maximizing Business Value by Tom Bronson

Learn More about Dave Casey
Dave Casey is a seasoned business owner with deep expertise in all aspects of organizational behavior and a passion for helping entrepreneurs reap the full rewards of building their companies. He understands that a truly valuable business isn’t just profitable—it’s secure, scalable, and transferable. In addition to his work with Mastery Partners, Dave actively gives back to the entrepreneurial community through leadership roles with organizations like Business Navigators, Biz Owners Ed, and Liberty Ministry. Whether advising on strategic growth or mentoring the next generation of business leaders, Dave brings clarity, integrity, and decades of real-world experience to every interaction. His mission goes beyond exit planning—he’s committed to helping owners build lasting legacies.

Learn More about Mark King:
Mark King is a seasoned business leader and strategic advisor with more than 40 years of experience in corporate leadership, entrepreneurship, and board governance. He served as Chairman and CEO of Micropac Industries, where he increased the company’s valuation tenfold before its acquisition, and previously held senior leadership roles at Texas Instruments and Raytheon. An NACD Board Leadership Fellow and recipient of the “Outstanding Director of the Year” and “Tall Texan” Lifetime Achievement Award, Mark now advises executives and boards on growth strategies, governance, and operational excellence. He and his wife, Patti reside in Texas and enjoy time with their two children and seven grandchildren.

Mastery Partners

Elevating Businesses to Achieve The Business Owner’s Dream Exit
The unfortunate reality is that for every business that comes on the market (for whatever reason), only 17% of them achieve a successful exit. You read that right. 83% of attempted business transitions never reach the closing table. Mastery Partners is on a mission to change that. We ELEVATE businesses to achieve maximum value and reach that dream exit.

Our objectives are simple - understand where the business is today, identify opportunities for dramatic improvement, and offer solutions to enhance the business, making it more marketable and valuable. And that all starts with understanding the business owner’s definition of his or her dream exit.
Mastery has developed a 4-Step Process to help business owners achieve their dreams.

STEP 1: Transition Readiness Assessment
STEP 2: Roadmap for Value Acceleration
STEP 3: Relentless Execution
STEP 4: Decision: Now that desired results are achieved, the business is ready for the next step in the journey!

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Transcript

MAXIMIZE BUSINESS VALUE PODCAST - EPISODE 250 Transcript

Tom Bronson (1s):

Welcome to The Maximize Business Value Podcast, brought to you by Mastery Partners, where our mission is to equip business owners like you to maximize your business value and achieve the exit of your dreams, whatever that means to you. With insights gained from over a hundred business transactions, we share real-world strategies, lessons, and expert advice to help you build long-term sustainable value in your business. Each episode is hosted by one of our Mastery-certified partners, their seasoned experts who've helped countless business owners navigate the complexities of growth, scaling, and building value.

Tom Bronson (45s):

They bring firsthand experience, actionable insights, and a passion for helping you build a business that thrives. So, let's dive in.

Dave Casey (1m 2s):

Hello, this is Dave Casey, and welcome to The Maximize Business Value Podcast. So this is a podcast specifically for business owners who are serious about building long-term sustainable value in their business. And today we're excited to be joined by Mark King, who's one of our newest certified Mastery partners. So Mark, welcome, I guess, to the podcast and also to Mastery Partners.

Mark King (1m 29s):

Well, thank you, Dave. It's a, it's an honor and a pleasure, and I'm excited to be here. Thank you.

Dave Casey (1m 34s):

Yeah. Yeah. This'll, this'll be great. So, I know a little bit about your background, but if you can maybe share with our viewers, kind of your corporate background and your most recent company you were with, and then kind of what brought you to Mastery Partners.

Mark King (1m 50s):

Sure, I'd be glad to do that. It's not easy to talk about four decades and three minutes, but I will, I will do the best I can. Yeah. You know, I started with Texas Instruments, and I worked with Texas Instruments Defense Group for 22 years. In that timeframe, I was blessed to be and honored actually to have leadership positions in engineering, sales and operations across the board. In fact, I was the director of strategy, excuse me, director of technology in Washington dc which was, you know, where I learned a lot about working on Capitol Hill and in the Pentagon.

Mark King (2m 40s):

I ran a sales office. Yeah, I ran a sales office for them out of Ohio. Yeah. And then I was called back to headquarters when we, the defense group, decided to sell that portion of our business, which at the time was 3 billion. We sold it to Raytheon. And my job as a director of strategy was to build a business plan and prepare us, if you will, for that sale. So I had 60 managers get together to put together a business plan and describe our business. Much like you hear about in selling a business, it's often called A-A-C-I-M, you know, confidential information packet or briefing or document.

Mark King (3m 24s):

But in my case, it was more about just putting all of the strategies together and being able to articulate that to a potential seller, which turned out to be Raytheon. So that was a lot of fun. And then I worked for Raytheon during the transition on the strategic transition team for a couple of years. And after that, my roommate in college and I started our own small business where we created a way to digitize controls for power supplies. And this is unique in time, and I did that for a couple of years, grew that business, and I should say sustained it through nine 11 and the bubble and everything.

Mark King (4m 6s):

And we sold that business successfully to a foreign investor. And then I joined Micro PAC Industries, and that was one over 20 years of experience. There I am, I'm the Chief Chairman and CEO emeritus for Micro Pack Industries. We are a public manufacturing electronics company. I am also a board-certified fellow and serve on multiple boards. And now I'm doing consulting, including, you know, the Mastery Partnership to help small businesses increase their evaluation.

Mark King (4m 50s):

And that's what really excites me, because there are so many things that are left undone that need to be done. And it's an exciting time for me. And so, you know, my mission is really to help others and give back to other companies. And by helping small businesses to increase the valuation and prepare them for strategic opportunities in the future, I think it's very important that all business owners realize how important it is for them to do that preparation work. Yeah. And it's not easy, and it's very complicated, and it has a lot of moving parts. Yeah, definitely. So I also, I also am looking forward to that preparation and strategic opportunities.

Mark King (5m 37s):

It may or may not include a transaction to sell their company, but at least it puts them in a position with a valuation that is much more diversified and, and on an, on a, on a growth pattern that provides the intrinsic core capability of that company that adds value to everyone involved. So that's fun and exciting, and that's what I'm doing now. And thanks to Mastery Partners in the partnership as a certified partner with them, with us, I should say, Mastery Partners, I'm excited to give back in that and to support these small business owners to help them navigate, as I have some, and a lot of experience in many areas to help.

Dave Casey (6m 27s): 

Yeah, and it's interesting, you've got both large company and then of course, with the startup small company experience, and then, and in particular, I know with Micro Pac, that was a public company that you guys engineered a sale to another public company,

Mark King (6m 43s):

Correct.

Dave Casey (6m 44s):

Yeah. And that's, that's, that's a little different than most of the small business owners here, you know, and having that level of experience, I think, is a wonderful asset. So that, that's incredible. And I had forgotten about you and your brother doing the, doing a smaller company and selling it, and that's, that's a shared experience that a lot of our clients will have of, of, of founding a company, growing, and then, you know, to eventually exit it and do that. So in particular, with the public micro PAC transaction, this last transaction, what, what makes it, what makes it different when you're selling a public company to another public company?

Mark King (7m 30s):

Think we should start with the, with the terminology used. We have a public company and a private company. And I think in a, in a private sale, it is more private, you know, and the buyer and the seller are working together in a more private setting, meaning that a lot of the details are expressed, explained, coordinated, but they're coordinated within a tighter inner circle of insight and knowledge in a public company. It's a lot of public information. Remember that we have 10 Qs and 10 Ks of all of our financials. We address our risk. We've identified anything that's materially reported by the company, by either company in that matter.

Mark King (8m 14s):

So that the public awareness is much higher, and as a result, you end up in a public sale. I think you do all the things you need to do, but you do it with the diligence in legal advice and insurance that you are doing everything that you need to do to serve, serve the shareholders.

Dave Casey (8m 36s):

I was gonna say, shareholders would seem to be the key that you see, like Elliot management, for example, a well-known example of an activist shareholder group that will go into public companies and stir things up, and look for opportunities. And that would be, to me, that I would dread something like that if I were on the board or CEO of a public company

Mark King (9m 0s):

As an example, the day that we announced our letter of intent, which you publicly disclose, there was a, and I don't know if it was AI generated, but there was an email generated from a law firm out in New York trying to, you know, to solicit other shareholders to do, you know, create this class action claim. Yep. It's all automated, you know, and the information they have is all wrong anyway, so we didn't, you know, but that's what happens. Yeah. The wolves come for the, for the feast if you're not careful.

Dave Casey (9m 33s):

Well, anytime, anytime there's change, there's, there's, I think people want to get their nose in. It seems

Mark King (9m 39s):

The fundamentals of knowing the valuation of your company, whether or not you're private, if you're a private, small company, knowing that and why you have that valuation is an important negotiating tool to have in your toolbox when you start to talk about selling your company. Or even if you talk about investing, having investors come into your company Yeah. Or hiring people into your company. A lot of owners don't take the time to learn this. When you sell a public company, you're required to have, you know, a law firm and an investment banker, you're gonna do a quality of earnings detailed, you're gonna do all of the financials you could ever imagine.

Mark King (10m 26s):

And the due diligence process, just anticipate that anything you could think of that you should be disclosing or discussing, or contracts, or anything, has to be out there in a virtual data room that is anticipated. So that's what a, a public company does when you get into a private company, it's kinda wait and get asked by the buyer what that might be. Yeah. But it's typically the same type of information.

Dave Casey (10m 51s):

Yeah. And that's, you know, and I think one of the great values that, that you bring to Mastery Partners is the fact that you've been through this, I would say, probably a more extensive and deeper analysis that happens in the public company world. And, bringing that expertise down to the, the small to lower mid-market companies, I think, is gonna be invaluable. Because again, we, I've only been through three transactions myself now, our partner Tom has been through over a hundred. But, but, and some of those were public transactions, but most of them were private, you know, rolling up a, a large company where you're buying several small private companies.

Dave Casey (11m 34s):

And so yeah, I think that there's, there's things, you know, that we haven't even thought about. So that's, that's great to have you on the team, I'll tell you. And so one of the things that struck me, I, is that when I've seen, you know, know, and, and of course, I came from the technology side of the world as well, a lot of rollups, a lot of mergers and acquisitions in the technology space. But I've seen where companies will announce two public companies, say, yeah, we're gonna merge. There's gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna buy this company and roll it in, and it's like a six-month deal, start to finish.

Mark King (12m 15s):

And that, that tells me they must have done a lot of groundwork before that announcement

Mark King (12m 22s):

That's your experience. Absolutely. And I think you're fine. Yes. I think you're fine with micro Pac, you know, we probably a couple years in advance, actually, the whole duration of that was there 20 what? 22 years. But we knew that we would eventually want to sell the company. And so 10 years ago, easily, I put in place some fundamental things and strategies to prepare us for that journey. Mm. You know, one was of course the new facility and setting up work cells in a scalable structure, that's so important. And then have an operating system. And we talk about an operating system as, you know, like an ELS or some such, you know, entrepreneur operating system, some of these methods that are used to manage a business, but I'm also talking about the operating systems like an ERP, and manufacturing is so critical.

Mark King (13m 17s):

MRP having a CRM, you know, a customer resource management tool, all those data management tools that you need to run the business is so critical to have that platform to scale the business. So you have to put that in place. Yep. So we had the facility, we had the systems, and we had the culture and the people. And so I did a lot of work on hiring a leadership team, motivating them with stock options and the availability of having shared in the, in the escalation of the growth of the company. And, you know, they had, they had a lot of rules in, in, in each of those rules. Now, a public company, when you do this, you create a, you know, you create a code name, right?

Mark King (13m 59s):

Because you can't disclose it to anybody else. And that's the, that's kind of hard because we're all kind of grown up in an open environment of communications. Yeah. The code name of our program was Harrier because, you know, we were lifting off without flapping our wings or something. I know we had Oh, that's cool. We had a reason for the name, but you know, that's what you have to do. Those kinds of things. Yeah.

Dave Casey (14m 22s):

Yeah. Well, and it's, again, the disclosure of things I would imagine, you know, certainly, and there's two schools of thought here. I just talked yesterday to David Brown, one of our other fellow partners, and his last company that he was with, they adopted the, the great game of business as their, as their, you know, operating system, if you will. And the great game of business has been around for many years. Jack Stack up in Kansas City was actually the, the, the, the initiator or founder of that. And it, it, but it's, it's key is Open Books management where they have, essentially the entire team can really see the books, right.

Dave Casey (15m 7s):

And, and so when you're, when you're talking to someone that works on the loading dock, they've got visibility that not only are we doing well or are we struggling a little, but they can say, Hey, you know, last month we didn't make money. Two months before that, we made a lot of money. So they, they have a really, it's a different approach.

Narrator: 

Thank you for tuning in to The Maximize Business Value Podcast. This episode is the first of a two-part release. Part two will be posted next week.

Tom Bronson:

Thanks for joining us for another episode of The Maximize Business Value Podcast. I hope today's conversation sparked new ideas on how you can continue driving value in your business. But remember, it's not just about listening, it's about taking massive action. Visit our website masterypartners.com for more resources. Grab a copy of any of the books in the Maximize Business Value series on Amazon or via the links below. And don't hesitate to reach out if you want to know how to apply these concepts to your business.

Tom Bronson:

So until next time, I'm Tom Bronson, reminding you to relentlessly execute while you Maximize Business Value.