Empowering Healthy Business: The Podcast for Small Business Owners

#1 - Preparing Your Business for a Successful Sale

• Glenn Grant • Episode 1

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Explore what needs to be done to prepare your business for a successful sale with Glenn Grant.

Connect with Glenn at:
glenn@selfassembled.com
LinkedIn

Sponsored by SmartBooks. To schedule a free consultation, visit smartbooks.com.

Thanks for listening!

Host Cal Wilder can be reached at:
cal@empoweringhealthybusiness.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/calvinwilder/


Moderator:

Welcome to the empowering healthy Business Podcast, the podcast for small business owners, your host, Cal Wilder has built and sold businesses of his own. And he has helped hundreds of other small businesses, whether it is improving sales, profitability and cash flow, building a sustainable, scalable and saleable business, reducing your stress level, achieving work life balance, or improving physical and emotional fitness, Carl and his guests are here to help you run a healthier business, and in turn, have a healthier life.

Cal Wilder:

Welcome small business owners. Today our conversation will focus around how to prepare your business for a successful sale. And joining me today is Glen grant, I realized Glen and I had been working together in one capacity or another for over 20 years at this point he's started out is one of the smartest it guys I know. But he's a lot more than that now, when he's done a great job at figuring out how to translate his knowledge into what really matters for small business owners. So today, we're going to talk about how to prepare your business for a successful sale. So without further ado, welcome, Glen. What do you have to these days?

Glenn Grant:

Cal, thanks for having me. It's great to be here. And, well, I'm up to a lot, you know, I'm still a tech entrepreneur. But I'm also a business coach and leadership team facilitator, and I'm helping other small business owners increase the value of their business so that one day they can ultimately sell that asset, and not just have a, you know, a job that they're the bosses.

Cal Wilder:

Right. And so I'm interested in understanding, you know, how to how small business owners can prepare their business for a successful sale, and the key word there is successful. And I would often say, you know, the market kind of tells you whether or not you can sell your business. But how do we how should we think about whether a sale of a business is successful? How do we define success?

Glenn Grant:

That is a great question. I think, you know, everybody defines it a little bit differently. I certainly have my my core definitions, which, you know, my coaching is sort of built upon. And that's, you know, I want to help a business owner, get the maximum value for their business, and avoid an earn out at all costs. And earn out being a scenario where you sell your business and a large portion of the purchase price is tied to you continuing to work at the business, and achieving certain metrics, while you no longer control the business. And essentially, it's a job and most entrepreneurs I know, are clinically unemployable. And that's why we are entrepreneurs. So I would argue that a an exit that involves a big earnout is not necessarily a successful exit, because there's a lot still at risk. And it can also be very stressful to be working for somebody else for an extended period of time with, you know, that much money and livelihood on the line.

Cal Wilder:

Right, right. So you and I have been through directly a couple of business sales and indirectly more than a couple. And so I know your focus, you know, when you're talking about the nitty gritty of, you know, the whole process of selling your business over the course of six to 12 months or so, but I know your current focus is really more on preparing businesses to be sold. And so my interest is largely for this episode to understand, how do you help clients build that enterprise value where they, they don't just own a job, they have a business that's worth something to somebody else that's not tied to the founder. So tell tell me about how you go about working with business owners to help them kind of build a business that's worth something that could actually be sold?

Glenn Grant:

Well, that's great question and you, you kind of split it right into the two main categories. You know, it's a company, a business that's worth something, but it's also not tied to the founder, and that has value of its own to a prospective buyer. And what I always bring it back to, for folks to think about in its simplest form is that a buyer is really purchasing your future stream of profits. So if you think about your future stream of profits, there's a lot of factors there, you know, how much how much revenue you're doing? For for starters, you know, are you doing a million dollars in revenue $10 million dollars in revenue, $20 million in revenue, obviously, doing more revenue is a good thing. Profitability comes into play right after that, how profitable is that revenue? Are you breaking even Are you losing a little bit more? You're making a lot of money. And then, you know, those are the very basics entrepreneur one on one, right? We want to sell a bunch of service or product and hopefully have it cost less than what we sold it for, and we get to keep the money. But there are different factors beyond that, with how that revenue comes in. You know, a very big one is reoccurring revenue, monthly reoccurring revenue or annual reoccurring revenue, thinking about the buyer buying the future stream of profits, if your revenue is based off of sales that you have to continually make over and over again, whether they be projects are individual orders for products, there's more risk there. And then if you have some sort of service model, where someone signs up, and every month, they make a payment to you, and you deliver this product or service. And that's called reoccurring revenue. And that means the stream keeps on flowing, with less effort to keep it flowing, you don't have to go out and resell it all the time. Another factor that we help people look at is essentially cashflow, you know, as your as your, you know, business, a cash generator or cash suck. Do you get paid up front? Where do you get paid in the rears. So if you have a model where you get paid at the beginning of the month for that month, that's fantastic, you have good positive cash flow, if you are in a different business where potentially your customers don't pay you for 90 to 180 days, and you've already had to pay all those expenses. That's, you know, risk to a buyer because they potentially have to float that money as part of the operating this enterprise in the future. And it's just not as desirable of having the company essentially fund its own existence and potentially its own growth.

Cal Wilder:

Yeah, that makes sense. So when when do you typically engage with a client who's thinking about trying to sell the business? Are you working with somebody for a year, are you working with somebody for 10 years, like when when is the when did the time they need to really start figuring out how to prepare their business to be successfully sold.

Glenn Grant:

So I have all different types of folks reaching out to me, some people want to sell tomorrow, some people haven't really thought about it, just know that one day they want to sell, I would say that the best time to start thinking about the things that I work with folks on are probably three years out from an exit, or more. These things take time, they just take time, you can't do them overnight. There are some things you can do that are low hanging fruit if you're on a more of like a one year timeline. But I when folks come to me and they want to sell quicker than a year, I tell them, there's not much that I can do to help them I can give some pointers. But at that point, you really want to be talking to an m&a adviser about actually getting ready to market your your company for sale as opposed to putting in the effort to increase the value of it.

Cal Wilder:

That makes sense. So I know we there are different business frameworks out there like EOS OKR, scaling up value builders. Do you have a particular framework? How do you get clients to think about how do they organize what they need to do to manage their business? Yeah, so

Glenn Grant:

I've worked with all of those systems that you've talked about. And they're all different in different ways and bring different value to the table. When I'm talking about building business value, I use the value Builder System, which was created by the author of the book Built to Sell John Warrillow. And that is a system around really evaluating the business on the eight key drivers of business value. And then working towards increasing your score in those areas. And those eight key drivers of business value are things that a buyer is going to look at your business and evaluate your business during and before the due diligence period. So not going to just be you know, contracts and tax returns and you know, have you done everything on the up and up legally, that stuff they're going to do to during due diligence, but they're going to look at do you have recurring revenue, you have high customer satisfaction, are you are you highly dependent on one Customer, Vendor or employee? You know, what is the growth potential for your market? Do you own 90% of your addressable market or less than 10% of your addressable market? Because a buyer is trying to buy you know, something new to play with, right? They want to grow it. So if you already tapped your entire adjustable market, there's not a lot of room for growth, not a lot of fun to be had there. The same thing goes for what we call hub and spoke, which is the owner being the center of the Universal, the owner being very dependent on or the business being very dependent on the owner. And I like to tell people, it's like if I sold you a used car, and it was a classic car, and you really loved it. But to get started, I knew how to do this trick. And I always had to be sitting in your passenger seat everytime you want to go drive somewhere. So the new owner of your this fancy classic car, or aka your business, doesn't necessarily want to have to have you riding shotgun all the time to make this this Ride Run, they want to be able to go and hit the open road and take it wherever they want. They bought it. So when the business is dependent on the on the owner, it can be a drag, for sure. And then also on the other side is the fact that you know, maybe the revenue goes away, right? Maybe maybe the customers are attached to you, you know, maybe the employees are attached to you. And so I use the value Builder System with my clients to essentially survey them in their business on where they stand on those metrics, and start to pick off the low hanging fruit or what we think makes the most sense to address first, you know, there's no recurring revenue, how can we make that happen? If you don't really have a leadership team in place, how do we make that happen? And coming back to that timeline of one to three years, you know, those things, they don't happen overnight. And they take time they take iterations, when you're creating a new product offering and a new model, you've got to experiment with it. When you're building out a leadership team. I mean, small business owners, no hiring is no no easy task, especially if you're trying to hire senior leaders and more than one of them.

Cal Wilder:

So let's dig in a little bit to these, these eight key drivers in the value Builder System, let's let's help our listeners understand a little bit more like what they really need to do can we can talk about like, obviously, I'm hearing recurring revenue is is key, I'm hearing building out a business that can function without the founder is key. But like what are the what are the other few things that are really key that small business owners need to think about building in their business?

Glenn Grant:

So, you know, one I already kind of talked about is just financial performance, you know, how is your business going? That's like my least favorite driver to talk about because it's entrepreneurship. 101, right, we want to we want to sell more than it cost to keep some money. And we also want to grow the business. So that's a big one. But that one's kind of obvious. The less obvious one is I talked about a little bit of growth potential. You know, where can I take this company in the future? You know, is that new verticals? Is it? New product, right? Because New,

Cal Wilder:

Because the buyer is going to be looking at it from the perspective of what am I going to do with this business? After I own it, I'm going to do something different, bigger, better than what it's done in the past. Right?

Glenn Grant:

Exactly. Typically, but not always, typically, someone who's going out and looking to buy a business isn't investing in this business, they have money. And what they want to do if they're out buying a business is they're trying to find a healthy business that's already gone through the what I call the ramen noodle phase, right? The the real grinding bootstrapping phase. And then if they invest money in sales and marketing and a few other things, they can scale it up. So they're looking for something that has that solid foundation that they can invest in sales and marketing it scale up, but they have to have someplace to scale to, otherwise you're not so attractive. So I always tell folks, there's some reality and there's some Hollywood in this driver, right? So certainly, you want to look at markets that that you could grow into. But being an entrepreneur can be exhausting at different points in time at different times in your life. So you may not want to go there. But you should dip your toe in it so that you could show a prospective buyer, if they have the appetite for it, they could go there. So an example could be like when I had my IT company, you know, we went into health care Life Sciences. It's a highly regulated industry. Some other peers of mine are like, I don't know, if I want to go there because of all the certifications, all these other things. Totally understand. But you might want to put some of those pieces in place and that somebody else could see that, you know, basically prove the hypothesis that they can take it there if they want it, even if you're not all that interested personally doing it. Right.

Cal Wilder:

Yeah, that makes sense, a lot of sense because the buyer is going to value the business based on what it can do as the new owner of the business with new revenue streams, and, you know, quote unquote, synergies with its current business. Right. So how do we reconcile what the business has done in the past against what the business could do under new ownership right, that's the key.

Glenn Grant:

Absolutely. That next driver is is What we call the valuation teeter totter, it's basically that cash flow thing I talked about, you know, are you able to charge upfront or in real time are you always playing catch up and charging in the rears and having to live through a line of credit, or some other war chest of cash, that the buyer is going to have to, you know, they're gonna have to put up, right, you're gonna want to take as much cash out of the business when you sell it, but there's a certain amount that has to stay in the business in order for it operate. And that's, you know, something that, you know, I have always looked for to you and SmartBox Calvin that helped me with when I was running my business, and when I was praying for my exit.

Cal Wilder:

Yeah, that's right. I mean, the buyer is going to be typically a larger business that has a cost of capital, and they're going to start to, you know, do complicated analysis around discounted cash flow and value, you know, it's not just a valuation, multiple, it's multiple revenue or recorded profit, it's a discounted cash flow based on future positive cash flow. And so to the extent you can position the business as having positive cash flow, that definitely helps the valuation and reduces the risk, ultimately, the buyer cares a lot about risk, as well. And so like, what can the what can we do to get the buyer comfortable that this is a low risk deal, right? So what are some of the other things that reduce the risk profile, obviously, if we have a recurring revenue, that reduces the risk profile for the buyer, if we have positive cash flow, then that reduces the risk profile for the buyer? What are some of the other things that reduce the risk profile for the buyer.

Glenn Grant:

So, you know, one of the big things is what we call monopoly control, you know, how unique you are in the marketplace. If you can be more apples to oranges than apples to apples, then you can set pricing. If you are too similar or too commoditized of a space, you can really get into some pricing pressure with some competition. So when I was in the IT services business, my original launch business was very similar to a lot of my peers, we did outsource it for small business, you know, I had done outsource small it for small business when I worked for you at your first business, a lot of competition, a lot of pricing pressure, and I pivoted my business to be more focused on the cloud and DevOps and SaaS applications, which was more unique at the time, which really made my business more valuable because I had this sort of moat that I built around. And I went from having, you know, 25 competitors within a five mile radius to not like no apples to apples, nobody else was bidding on my contracts, and nobody else was cold, calling my customers trying to steal them wet. Another another piece in that the one we call the Switzerland structure, which is that not being overly dependent on one employee, client, or vendor, that is a risk profile there. So if you have, you know, one employee that you know, has all the secrets and the passwords in their head, and if they left, we'd be you know, up the creek, that's very risky. If you have a key employee that's really, really important to the operation. And they're not retained with some of their incentive plan, like stock appreciation rights, or some other incentive to keep them in the game after you leave. That's perceived as pretty risky, as well to a buyer, a high concentration of revenue and a single client or a few clients. That's very risky. You know, I learned in iOS Entrepreneurs Organization long time ago, to always try to make sure that I had no one client that was more than 10% of my revenue. Because of that one client decides to leave that or maybe they go out of business. You know, I've worked with a lot of tech startups who are fantastically awesome and valuable one day and completely out of business the next day, thank you Silicon Valley Bank, that, you know, that can be really risky. You know, and if you have a diversified income stream, and you lose a customer or two will totally derail operations. And the same thing can go for a supplier if a supplier decides they don't want to do business with you anymore, and they're only supplier or if that supplier goes out of business and you no longer can provide your product or service. That's that's a big challenge. So again, as an example, I was in the cloud services space, we were very, very tightly aligned with Amazon Web Services, great partner. But we made sure that we had a toe dipped in the waters of Microsoft Azure and Google Compute Engine. In the event something happened and we needed to have another vendor that we could run our cloud workloads on. So some some some some see cya there on the vendor and the vendor. front as well,

Cal Wilder:

Glenn, a lot of what you're talking about is, is really what I would classify as building enterprise value, meaning building the value of the business, independent of the founder, right? Because we can all start a business and work hard. And if you're diligent and good at what you do, you can build a business to half million or million dollars a year through just kind of personal efforts with a helper or two. But you basically own a job at that point, right. So what we're trying to do is figure out how small businesses can create a business that is worth something beyond their W two salary. Right? I think that's the one of the themes I'm hearing here.

Glenn Grant:

Absolutely, and not just to be sold, but to own right, right. Think of how much more fun life can be if not every phone call, and every customer complaint has to be routed through you, or every sales opportunity, every deal that gets closed has to have your signature on it. And that your company can make money for you and function without you so that you can go on vacation, or step out of the business, largely, and really kind of retain more of a chairman role. And when you get to that point, that's a great business to own, it makes money and it doesn't rely on you for a lot of effort. And then it's easily transferable to a new owner, because you've already sort of weaned the business off of you. If you are the one who's solely who's really in the driver's seat for sales, and customer relationships, and service delivery, or any one of those things, that is what's going to put you directly into the crosshairs of a big earn out scenario, right, where they are very much, you know, if they're afraid that if you leave, the customer is going to leave, or if you leave services going to decline. Or if you leave, sales is going to stall. And they're going to make you stay and prove either prove that that's not going to happen, or help them transfer those areas to some other person, the business that maybe they have to hire or maybe already works there, who knows. But when that earnout scenario that I talked about, usually there's a big amount of the purchase price of the business, that you have to hit metrics, and, you know, if their sales metrics, you know, maybe the new owner doesn't give you as many sales resources as you think you need to hit them. Or if they are profitability metrics, maybe the new owner is classifying different expenses in ways that you feel is unfair and unjust to you and profitability is going down on paper. And you no longer are, you know, achieving, you're not getting paid. Because ultimately you don't own the business anymore. So you don't get to call the shots. Right?

Cal Wilder:

You know, I when I was younger, and you know, I went through a sell process with a business when I was in my 20s. But when I was younger, I used to think you kind of build a business and you sell it. And as I get older and have the experience of working with a lot of other businesses now, as clients, I've kind of adopted the mindset of the market will tell you whether you have a business that can be sold. And the market will tell you when you can sell that business. And it's not necessarily your decision. It's the markets the system, right. And so I'm kind of curious, you know, based on your experience, working with clients, and selling your own business plan, if there are any particular pitfalls or advice that you would give to business owners that have this, you know, have this vision of ultimately selling their business, but how do we kind of get from that vision of ultimately selling the business to like, where we are now? Like, what are some of those pitfalls or misconceptions that you've seen that we could potentially address?

Glenn Grant:

Yeah, that's a great question. There's a lot of different scenarios there. But I think one that I've seen more often than not, in recent years is, you know, with the baby boomer generation, you know, there's a lot of boomers that are entrepreneurs have businesses, and they're going to sell them now. Because now's the time in their life that they need to sell them. But as you said, you know, especially now, today 2023, the markets not exactly in the greatest shape to be selling your business, especially at the highest value point possible. And we call that in the value Builder System, the freedom point. And people often don't think about the freedom point, they think about the calendar, I'm going to own my business until this date, then I'm going to sell it and I'm going to retire. But there's points along that scale where you hit what we call the freedom point where you're you're kind of playing with fire, you're gambling you You're on borrowed time, you've hit a point where you've got a max pretty, maybe not maximum value, but a good value for your company. And if you sold it for that value, you could achieve all the goals that you have with the rest of your life. But if you keep going with that business and something changes, you may miss that window, and that window may never come back, or it might come back a lot further down the road. So not not playing too far past your freedom point is advice that we give people. Even if you know, you're, hey, I'm not ready to stop working, take some chips off the table, start another business, take some chips off the table with a private equity firm and, and keep some in the game, you know, stay an advisor, keep keep that investment going have some sort of role within the company, if you want to stay active, and you would still like to grow that investment, but that you've sold the portion that really can make you financially independent. And you're not you're not gambling, you're not risking some you know, you know, some crazy event could happen. I don't know, maybe there's a global pandemic, for example, perhaps that could happen, right? Everybody sees that coming. You know, and if that was the day that you were getting ready to sell your business or retire, that could have been a problem. If you owned, let's say, 100 restaurants that got shuttered, or some other service that was highly impacted, like concert, maybe you had a great event promotion company. And you know, even now, you have to wait for everything to come back, which many folks have, fortunately, and get back in the game, but it's a little bit different than before that before the COVID hit.

Cal Wilder:

Yeah, that makes that makes a lot of sense. So, talk to me about the size of businesses that can realistically be sold, right? I mean, can be a great business. But if you do a half million dollars a year in revenue, it's just not gonna be that exciting to somebody to buy, right. So it can be kind of a certain scale. So how do we want to think about scale, when we get to the point of your business being interesting for somebody else to own?

Glenn Grant:

Yeah, so, you know, like you said, you can sell any business at any time. But your business is only worth what someone is willing to pay for. And there's definitely different points of scale where that value? The multiple goes up on that? You know, I would say to? That's a tough question, right? To each their own, I would say anything that's less than $3 million in net revenue, you should definitely keep growing it above that point.

Cal Wilder:

Yeah, I mean, I get inquiries, all the time looking to get introduced to clients of smart books. And the buyers always seems to want like a million dollars of EBITDA which, to dumb it down in terms of profit, they want like a million dollars of operating profit for a business in order for them to be interested in buying it. And we could do deals for businesses that are smaller than that. But you know, if you're doing a 10% profit margin, that's kind of the the bogey the benchmark for a business. So if you do a 10% margin, thereby wants a million dollars of operating profit, that means you need $10 million of revenue. And nobody can put together a deal for 5 million of revenue or 3 million of revenue. But at a certain point, there needs to be some scale that gets the buyer interested to cover their own costs of doing a deal, right?

Glenn Grant:

Absolutely. And 10 million, 10 million is one of the first big magic numbers. If you get your business up over 10 million in revenue, your multiple automatically go up basis based on essentially kind of the math that you just assumed there that you're doing at least a 10 to 20% net profit, which means you're doing, you know, a million to $2 million in EBIT. Uh, and, you know, that's an interesting business to have, right? For a number of reasons, but I think one of the most simple reasons for people to wrap their head around is growth capital. So if you're a $10 million business, you can go get a lot uh, you can go get some some some debt, a line of credit, or a loan from a bank for 10% of your receivables pretty easily and in a good economy. So I can go with a $10 million business, borrow a million dollars. With a million dollars, I can do a lot, I can hire a big Salesforce, I can make some small tuck in acquisitions to grow through acquisition. But if you're a million dollar business, and you can only borrow $100,000, then there's a whole lot less you can do with $100,000 to really grow that business. And when people buy the business, certainly they have money or have different debt financing to As they use to purchase you, but they don't always want to then continue to put their money into this investment, they want to use bank's money because it's cheaper. So loans and other instruments like that. And really that $10 million mark is you're big enough where people are going to lend to you at a rate that's actually going to be affordable, that you can make, make that all that math work and use it to grow and win in the end versus, you know, maybe some predatory lender with a high interest rate where he, you're gonna have to pull in some magic to grow your business to actually make enough money to exceed the cost of the loan to begin with.

Cal Wilder:

The gist of this whole episode is how to prepare your business for a successful sale. And we talked about what a successful sale looks like. And, you know, we've kind of determined that we need to have some recurring revenue, there needs to be a healthy profit margin associated with the business, the business can't be dependent upon the founder to function. So we need to have some enterprise value separate from the founders efforts, right. And so I know, Glen, you, you've got a consulting business these days that works with, you know, small to midsize businesses that helps them navigate to get toward that point where they become an attractive business for sale. So talk to me a little bit about how you engage with with clients and work with them to help them build that enterprise value.

Glenn Grant:

Yeah, so I'm, I'm a business coach. So I like to work with clients one on one, either just the founder or the founder and their partners. I also have a few clients that are husband and wife, you know, spouses that own the business, it's the family business. So I do monthly coaching. And I also do leadership team building of facilitation. So I used to be an EOS implementer in a past life. Now, I implement a different system that I've put together myself. But I only do that with clients that are also my coaching clients, they sort of graduate to that where I'll start to work with their leadership teams too. And the reason why I only do the leadership team facilitation with clients that are also coaching clients, is because there's, there's two to little pools of strategy, there's two audiences when I'm working with you. I'm talking to the business owner that owns this valuable asset or asset that we want to make more valuable called this business, the number one shareholders. But I'm also when I'm working with you and your leadership team, I'm working with you, the employee who works within that business with these co workers who are also employees. And the conversations we have in those circles are very different. So Calvin, if I'm working with you, and we're talking, and we're talking about how you want to work less, you want to take home a decent salary, and you also want to drop off a nice chunk of EBITA, the bottom line and take that as a distribution on an annual basis. As you work your way up towards an exit, we're not going to go to your quarter the session with your leadership team and be like, alright, Calvin wants to work 10 hours a week, he wants to take home 150 grand, he wants to pocket$400,000 In, in, in distributions at the end of the year, solve that problem for him, not exactly going to be bought into that situation, right. So in the coaching, we talked about those things, because that's building the company value getting you out of the center of the universe, also having you take advantage of of all the risk that you've put into owning this business, the reward is hopefully being able to get to get paid well while you still own it. And then when we go work with the leadership team, certainly we parlay initiatives and rocks and goals and OKRs, whatever method you use, into the conversation that are ultimately going to help us achieve that goal. But that we can have that more open conversation and strategic thought, thought jam, if you will, in the coaching session of where we want to take this business and this asset for the owner, and then have a different conversation of how the team is going to get us there and how the owner is going to play a part as one of the employees as part of that leadership team. So that's my approach to working with clients. And I use the value Builder System as sort of a backbone to that coaching, coaching timeline of building business value. And I use a number of other tools and learnings that I've gathered over the years as an entrepreneur owning my own business and being a member of the entrepreneurs organization to help build healthy leadership teams and give them different tools, whether related to employee management, or sales and marketing, or just simple operations to make that business run better.

Cal Wilder:

Yeah, I want to think it's great about that approach. So as business owners, we all have have this dream of, you know, selling the business one day. But ultimately, you know, if you do these things, if you build the recurring revenue, if we have a healthy profit margin, if we have positive cash flow, there's no need to be able to sell the business, like selling the business might be nice, and you can diversify your family's net worth. And that's all good. And you and I have both done that before. But in the absence of selling the business, if we do all these things to build a very healthy business, it's a nice business to own even if we never sell it, right.

Glenn Grant:

Absolutely. You know, and, and, you know, the first business book I ever listened to, because I don't read, I listen to books and audio book was the book Built to Sell. And you know, that's the basic premise behind that is that you do these things to get a business in a position that is built to be sold. But then if you don't sell it, you know that it's a fantastic business owner, I like to tell people, you're the next owner of your business. So would you buy your business from you today? Would it be something that you would be like, Oh, totally want to do that? I want to buy that thing? Or are you like, No, I would not buy that. If you are already independently wealthy, but you are toying with the idea of buying a business, do you think buying your business would be a headache and heartache? Or would it be a great toy to have that you could scale up and have some fun with, alright, so the buyer is going to look at the same way and you owe to yourself to get your business to that spot and enjoy it, and not just sort of stay in the grind, where I think a lot of us have gotten lost in the past, and some of us are still lost. And I think that working, you know, working with a business coach, or mentors or peers is absolutely vital to that. If I did not seek out that type of community and those kinds of resources, I'd you know, if I wasn't still stuck there, it would just take that much longer. For me to figure it all out on my own.

Cal Wilder:

Complete completely agree Glenn, go goal is to build a great business, and then maybe you continue to own it. Maybe somebody else comes along and makes an offer you can't refuse. But the first priority is building a great business, and then you can worry about who owns it. So, before we wrap things up, Glen, is there anything else you want to share with the audience?

Glenn Grant:

I don't jeez, I don't know, Cal. I mean, I you know, I love entrepreneurship, I think it's a lot of fun. So to all the entrepreneurs out there, listen to the podcast, high five to you. If you're if you're feeling if you're feeling blue, and down, down down in the weeds of your business, there are many, many ways to get yourself out, I highly recommend checking out the Entrepreneurs Organization, that's a great tribe of entrepreneurs to get involved with, you know, certainly, you know, check out getting a business coach, I'm a business coach, but I only take on so many people. So um, there are other firms out there that are really scaling up and growing. But having a coach I've had a coach is a great is a great resource as well. And then also, you know, when you are trying to scale your business up and make it a better business to sell, there's only so much time that you have as an individual. So start to think about possibly outsourcing pieces of your business that don't make sense. Or don't make your business unique, right. They're not the thing that makes you special. They're important. But you can do them, but should you do them, you know it bookkeeping, marketing, those HR, those are legal, those are some of the like low hanging fruit. Unless your business has something unique to do with one of those areas. It's not going to be something necessarily that makes you different. And if you do go to sell your business one day, those can be considered what we call add backs. Meaning if you're being acquired by a larger organization, who already has those departments, and they're outsourced in your business, then they simply no longer continue to outsource them. And then they save money and your business is actually worth more to that buyer. They say I'm not going to make that expense. So actually your EBIT just went up. But if you have employees in those positions, it's a different story. Because you you know, I mean, certainly you can lay people off, but it's not a nice thing to do. And it's not really popular and the severance packages and liabilities and everything else have a different cost to them. But those different things where you can leverage other parties that are experts in those areas on top of the fact that you don't need to do it and you can put your energy towards something else. I think that is something that's overlooked. And that people tend to be unnecessarily frugal looking at that lens of cost and not that lens of opportunity of like, well, I don't want to pay that person to do this bookkeeping thing, because because I can do it. And it costs money. Sure, it costs money, because it's work. That's why you don't want to pay somebody, that's what you do it to save the money for it. But if they could be doing it, you could be making two or three times as much money helping your sales team bring in new business, it makes total sense to do that. So I think people need to be open to letting go. And, and also, one last piece of EO wisdom on that area is an owner needs to get comfortable with other people doing things only as 80% as good as they would do it. Because entrepreneurs were overachievers. So what you think is 80% for you is really 100% for a mortal, none an entrepreneur. And that's a tough pill to swallow. But that's how you scale your business. You can't scale your business on unicorns and business owners. And if you keep trying to hire those unicorns believe because they're probably entrepreneurs, and they're gonna go start their own business. So

Cal Wilder:

Those are great nuggets, Glenn. I, I'm chuckling because I'm remembering my own history, in the area of thinking, I should just keep doing things that I sort of outsource to somebody else, because of the things you can outsource. They don't really add value to the business. They're just things you have to get done. But the things that really add value to your business are like the entrepreneurial creativity. It's deciding what market to get in, it's developing your product or service, it's figuring out the value proposition and how to deliver on it. It's definitely not, you know, doing the bank reconciliations and maintaining an email marketing list. I mean, it's, you know, the stuff that adds value. The business is what we all as business owners need to be focused on and outsource all the other crap that doesn't create entrepreneurial value.

Glenn Grant:

Absolutely, I think, to be the hardest thing for people to let go because they can do it. But maybe they shouldn't do it.

Cal Wilder:

All right, well, thank you so much, Glen for taking the time to share your perspective and valuable information with the audience here. If anybody wants to follow up directly with you regarding your own coaching services, what's the best way for them to connect with you?

Glenn Grant:

Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn Glenn Grant Self Assembled Ventures or you can send me an email at Glenn dot Grant at selfassembled.com and Cal thank you very much for having me here. And and you know, Cal alluded to it earlier on that we worked together on a number of ventures and also when I was in my 20s I one of my earlier jobs I worked for Calvin and his company Thrive networks and you know I owe a lot to you Calvin for really lightening that entrepreneurial fire for me because I saw what you and your your partners did and was part of that journey. And I was like, that's really cool. I should really go do that too. So thanks for the opportunity back in the day my man.

Cal Wilder:

You're welcome my man and it's been awesome watching you build and ultimately sell your own business. For more money than I sold my business for so was great to watch you carry that torch and wish you the best of luck and we'll be in touch.

Glenn Grant:

All right, cool. Thank you very much. Take care.

Cal Wilder:

You too, take care. Reference shownotes and find other episodes on empowering healthy business.com. If you would like to have a one on one discussion with me, or possibly engaged smart books to help with your business, you can reach me at Cal "C-A-L" at empowering healthy business.com or message me on LinkedIn where I am easy to find. Until next time, this is empowering healthy business. The podcast for small business owners signing off

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