Explorez tous les épisodes du podcast DealQuest Podcast with Corey Kupfer
| Titre | Date | Durée | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Episode 313: Expert Insights on M&A and Private Equity in the Lower Middle Market with Scott Weavil | 23 Oct 2024 | 00:44:42 | |
M&A expert Scott Weavil joins the DealQuest Podcast for an insightful episode!
And much more. • • • FOR MORE ON THIS EPISODE: FOR MORE ON SCOTT WEAVIL: FOR MORE ON COREY KUPFER: • • • Corey Kupfer is an expert strategist, negotiator, and dealmaker. He has more than 35 years of professional deal-making and negotiating experience. Corey is a successful entrepreneur, attorney, consultant, author, and professional speaker. He is deeply passionate about deal-driven growth. He is also the creator and host of the DealQuest Podcast. Get deal-ready with the DealQuest Podcast with Corey Kupfer, where like-minded entrepreneurs and business leaders converge, share insights and challenges, and success stories. Equip yourself with the tools, resources, and support necessary to navigate the complex yet rewarding world of dealmaking. Dive into the world of deal-driven growth today! | |||
| Episode 312: Harnessing Resilience as Your Entrepreneurial Secret Weapon with Frederick Cary | 16 Oct 2024 | 00:43:19 | |
Entrepreneur and resilience expert Frederick Cary joins the DealQuest Podcast for an inspiring episode! In this episode, Frederick shares his remarkable journey from facing significant setbacks to building a thriving business empire. He dives into his strategies for cultivating resilience and transforming challenges into opportunities for growth. In this episode, you'll learn:
Whether you’re navigating personal challenges or seeking new ways to enhance your professional journey, this episode is filled with actionable insights that you can implement immediately. Frederick's wisdom, combined with my expertise in deal-making, will equip you with the mindset and tools needed to thrive in an ever-evolving business landscape. Don’t miss this chance to learn from a true master of resilience! • • • FOR MORE ON THIS EPISODE: • • • FOR MORE ON FREDERICK CARY: FOR MORE ON COREY KUPFER: • • • Corey Kupfer is an expert strategist, negotiator, and dealmaker. He has more than 35 years of professional deal-making and negotiating experience. Corey is a successful entrepreneur, attorney, consultant, author, and professional speaker. He is deeply passionate about deal-driven growth. He is also the creator and host of the DealQuest Podcast. Get deal-ready with the DealQuest Podcast with Corey Kupfer, where like-minded entrepreneurs and business leaders converge, share insights and challenges, and success stories. Equip yourself with the tools, resources, and support necessary to navigate the complex yet rewarding world of dealmaking. Dive into the world of deal-driven growth today! | |||
| Episode 303: The Hidden Struggle of Founder Depression After Business Exit with Corey Kupfer | 14 Aug 2024 | 00:23:48 | |
Join me for this episode of the DealQuest Podcast, where I address the emotional and practical challenges entrepreneurs face after a successful business exit. We delve into the often-overlooked issue of founder depression and explore strategies for navigating the emotional aftermath of selling a business. • • • FOR MORE ON THIS EPISODE: FOR MORE ON COREY KUPFER: • • • | |||
| Episode 213: A Discussion on Business Partnerships with Corey Kupfer | 04 Jan 2023 | 00:31:16 | |
I’ve frequently talked about various alliances in businesses, but today let’s specifically discuss business partnerships. At its core, choosing a business partnership is a deal, and so for many, choosing a business partner is their first deal. If you’re going into a business partnership, it’s just like any other deal, and requires the same consideration and respect. A BREAKDOWN OF BUSINESS PARTNERSHIPS What I mean when I say “partnership”, I mean that from a business (not legal) point of view; namely, two or more people who come together to have joint ownership of business in whatever legal form that might be. This includes, general partnerships (which are almost never recommended), limited partnerships, limited liability companies and corporations. Your choice of business partner structuring is dependent upon several criteria. This may include, but is not limited to:
My firm, Kupfer & Associates, deals with many aspects of the legal side of forming business partnerships, from writing up the paperwork to begin a business partnership, to dissolution of partnerships. Our goal is to provide a process that moves in a positive manner for all our clients and their deals – the workings of a business partnership is no different. STARTING A BUSINESS PARTNERSHIP There’s a limitless number of reasons as to why people are drawn together to form a business partnership, but the two main one’s you tend to see are:
There is no wrong reason to start a business partnership; nonetheless, there will always be advantages and disadvantages to how you go about obtaining a partnership. For example, forming a partnership with a close friend or relative provides you with firsthand, personal knowledge of the person/people you will be doing business with. While knowing who you’re going into business with is vital, it might strain the personal relationship, especially in any potential adverse situation.
On the contrary, when you seek out an unfamiliar person to partner with, you lack that pre-existing personal knowledge. Building a business partnership can be and often is a personal experience that requires trust, so you will need to spend some time developing trust and knowledge, which can take a fair bit of time, thus slowing down any expected timeline you may have.
Thoughtful and meticulous due diligence is important in any deal; finding and beginning a business partnership is no exception, no matter if you’ve just met your prospect, or you’ve known your prospect for 20 years.
Regardless of the who, your due diligence should include, but is not limited to, looking at:
THE BENEFITS AND DOWNSIDES OF A PARTNERSHIPS There’s plenty of reasons for wanting to begin a business partnership. There benefits are also vast. They include, ideally:
While you can bring in employees to cover many of the above areas, a partner is often more valuable than an employee in many of these areas simply because of their commitment and vested interest in the company. A partner with a stake in the company is, of course, going to have more to lose, and thus be more vested, than someone who is hired to take on certain things. That’s not to say an employee doesn’t care about your business, but their interest in the business’s success and growth isn’t going to be as deep as someone who has that same vested interest as you do.
Depending on your personality, your goals, your circumstances, and even the type of business you want to start, the benefits of having a partnership can easily become the downsides. You can’t just do what you want with the company. You have to work in collaboration with others and take into consideration their goals, values, and expectations. ALIGNMENT AND THE EVOLUTION OF A BUSINESS PARTNERSHIP You’ve chosen the who, you’ve sorted out the how, and you’ve built your business. Keeping alignment with your partnership(s) is critical to making your business grow and succeed. Generally speaking, I always encourage people to listen to the market and their clients when growing. With that I don’t mean ignoring your – or your partner’s – goals and expectations, but remain conscious and sensitive to where the market is at or what your clients are asking for is going to help your business grow, as well as keep up with demand and remain competitive.
A lot of times, this can mean steering off course from your original plan. Both you and your partner(s) need to be adaptable in your goals and expectations. Without this adaptability, your partnership alignment can quickly fall out of sync, which undoubtedly will create problems.
If you find your partnership desynchronized, it’s important to take stock of what is causing the issue and how to resolve it. Sometimes that will mean formulating an exit, which can be done with minimal damage and with amicability. Conflict of vision or expectation does not have to mean the death of a relationship or business. ANTICIPATING THE EVENTUALITIES It’s important at the start of a business relationship to expect all sorts of scenarios, including how to handle an exit. From the legal standpoint, your legal team is going to want to anticipate any and all potentialities to the best extent possible and how to handle them, and get them in a legal document. While it absolutely is great practice to get as much in writing as possible, it’s impossible to predict every single potential scenario, positive or negative.
Provisions made in your legal documents for partnership can be a roadmap to how to handle situations you may not have anticipated at the start. You may have a provision made for a potential exit, but you can’t possibly come up with every possible reason for, and outcome of, an exit.
Deciding in the beginning on a general methodology of Circumstance X will provoke Outcome Y will be beneficial later down the road if Circumstance X happens. If it does happen, then sorting out the specifics to achieve Outcome Y will be much more fluid, and result in less headaches and legal troubles. • • •
Corey Kupfer is an expert strategist, negotiator, and dealmaker. He has more than 35 years of professional deal-making and negotiating experience. Corey is a successful entrepreneur, attorney, consultant, author, and professional speaker. He is deeply passionate about deal-driven growth. He is also the creator and host of the DealQuest Podcast.
If you want to find out how deal-ready you are, take the Deal-Ready Assessment today! | |||
| Episode 212: An M&A Matchmaking Firm with Brian Scanlon & Joe Zanca | 28 Dec 2022 | 00:46:58 | |
DealQuest Community, this week I bring you another triple discussion. This week I have Brian Scanlon and Joe Zanca, Managing Partners of Dealgen Partners. DealGen Partners is a Deal Orientation company sourcing deals for Private Equity Funds, and Strategic Acquirers. Currently, Dealgen Partners manages $2.7B in buy-side mandates. THE “PARTNERS” IN DEALGEN PARTNERS Neither Brian nor Joe had any idea in their younger years that they’d end up in the M&A Space. As with many young boys, they both dreamt of being sports stars. Brian recently found a “What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?” paper from his 6th grade year of school, and there was no doubt his eye was on a specific prize: Shortstop for the New York Yankees.
Joe also dreamt of being a baseball player. Growing up with his father as a firefighter, Joe said to himself that if baseball didn’t work out – which it didn’t – he would become a firefighter like his father. His brother is now a firefighter, working alongside their father, and Joe has found himself in the business universe, having started his own storage company business in college with teammates from his baseball team. The business model was literally in the basement, specifically the basement of a teammate’s parents’ home, however storing other students’ belongings in a home basement proved to be a great business idea for 20-year-old Joe. This company continued for 8 years before Joe finally sold it to move along his career.
Brian’s start into business was a coincidence – his aunt had a PR firm based in New York. In 2007, one of her clients showed great interest in the up-and-coming social media site, Facebook. His aunt didn’t understand Facebook, so she offered him $500 a month to curate and upkeep the client’s company Facebook page. As time went on, and the interest in Facebook took off, his aunt continued to send her clients to Brian for social media, and even started gaining his own clients.
Brian began his investment career after selling his marketing firm, Social Mediators in 2014, and joining the Sell Side M&A Advisory space through O’Hare Management. Brian established a strong network in the Investment Banking space during his time at O’Hare. In 2016, Brian founded DealGen Partners with the goal of providing quality deals to companies in the acquisition process. Brian and Joe met at Babson College and remained friends for several years, until one day after they both had sold their businesses, it sort of clicked for both of them that they should partner up and build something great. A VIEW FROM THE SELL SIDE Brian’s background has allowed him an insider’s view of the sell side of a deal, a literal crash course in how deals can fall apart. Seeing these deals, in his words, “crumble” over the years, he saw that there was a lot of opportunity to be had with the private equity groups.
The sell side of the industry also moves at a much slower pace. On the buy side, a firm can be working on several hundred to thousands of deals in a year, whereas on the sell side, those numbers will rarely go over the double digits. Brian notes that at one point, he was only working on 3 deals, whereas a buyer he was working with had some 3000 deals they were evaluating.
After seeing this stark contrast in a number of deals, Brian began to wonder if there was a way to service both sides, without as much reliance on a single deal closing. It wasn’t that he saw the grass is greener on the other side, so to speak, he was merely reaching a place of burnout, and wanted to move forward onto different things in his career. Thus, Dealgen Partners work on an estimated 70 – 80 deals at a time. LESSONS LEARNED IN THE NUANCE OF DUE DILIGENCE Through Brian’s perspective on the sell side of seeing many deals fall apart, especially at the 11th hour (after LOI, etc.), there were lessons in due diligence that Brian learned. He recollects two deals that fell through:
Through seeing these reasons, and a myriad of others , causing deals to fall apart at stages at which it was essentially considered a done deal, Brian learned a valuable lesson about due diligence: Cover all your bases and leave no rock unturned.
While it’s easy to chalk up something to being out of one’s control, in the deal-making process, a lot of times, this isn’t always the case. It’s important to keep your finger on the pulse of every deal to completion and ensure you’re doing all you can to complete the deal successfully; there is always more you can do. This is a good lesson in not only being proactive during due diligence, but also how nuanced and meticulous one’s due diligence must be to ensure the deal, lest it fall apart. THE ENTREPRENEURIAL STEP For Joe’s experience with running his college business, he learned about the many reasons for selling a business. Some of those reasons include:
In Joe’s case with the storage company, his partners wanted to take the company in one direction, and he wanted to take it in another. In the end, his partners bought out his equity, and Joe continued his path forward – still very much in positive friendship with these former partners, and the company still exists today. DEALGEN PARTNERS By the time Joe was exiting his storage business, Brian already had his motions in gear for what his next step was. They then decided to bring Joe in as a partner, as they both felt they knew each other well enough and had seen each other in business to know they would work well together.
Dealgen works primarily with PE (Private Equity) Funds. Per a tagline on the Dealgen Partners website (www.dealgenpartners.com): “We find the deal you wish you knew about. You close them.” An eloquent way to sum up the services Dealgen Partners offer. They have grown a vast network of trusted partners, utilizing that network with proprietary outreach strategy in order to bring PE firms the ideal targets for their deal criteria – a facilitator of deal courtships, in a way. A CRAFTED OFFER Even the most desired deals take time to unfold and build. Dealgen Partners has built a formula for their company to offer to their clients the best opportunity to be successful within the dealmaking relationship.
This is a great setup, right? So how does Dealgen Partners structure their offer for their clients? Dealgen charges a working capital deposit at the beginning of the relationship with a PE firm or strategic buyer. That deposit buys:
By taking on this risk, they found a way to really set themselves apart from the marketing agencies. WHO DEALGEN WORKS WITH Dealgen Partners are retained and paid strictly by the buy side, whether it’s a Private Equity Fund or a Strategic Acquirer.
This places Dealgen in an interesting position wherein they can approach a number of sellers with an expansive network of serious buyers. They can, with certainty, approach the sellers and present they are going to be bought for the most amount of money possible. In an industry where there tends to be more buyers than sellers, this confidence and guarantee becomes extremely attractive to sellers.
Their paradigm also allows them to operate in a way that an Investment Banker doesn’t necessarily have. By operating as a matchmaker or liaison of sorts, this veil of you’re working for one side and one side only tends to not exist, allowing for comfortable familiarity and trust to be built in all directions.
Now of course, they’re extremely loyal to their clients – the buyers. They certainly aren’t playing both sides of the field, however, they’ve crafted their business to allow them to remain loyal to their clients, while simultaneously forming positive relationships with sellers, which is a very unique position.
Dealgen Partners is confident in their skills, experience, and network. They are more than willing to go that extra distance in all avenues of an M&A deal. By giving the guarantee to their clients, forming positive relationships with sellers, and building their offer for the clients in the way they have, it takes a lot of the risk pressure off the clients and ensures everyone finds the utmost satisfaction. • • •
FOR MORE ON BRIAN SCANLON: FOR MORE ON JOE ZANCA:
Corey Kupfer is an expert strategist, negotiator, and dealmaker. He has more than 35 years of professional deal-making and negotiating experience. Corey is a successful entrepreneur, attorney, consultant, author, and professional speaker. He is deeply passionate about deal-driven growth. He is also the creator and host of the DealQuest Podcast.
If you want to find out how deal-ready you are, take the Deal-Ready Assessment today! | |||
| Episode 211: Happy Holidays DealQuest Family | 23 Dec 2022 | 00:07:52 | |
| Episode 210: A Dive Into Financial Due Diligence with Pierre-Alexandre Heurtebize | 21 Dec 2022 | 00:45:32 | |
In 2019, Pierre-Alexandre Heurtebize launched one of the first financial due diligence practices, HoriZen Capital, which is 100% dedicated to SaaS businesses, and launched the first online course on how to conduct financial due diligence. As an ESSEC MBA alumni and PwC Transaction Services alumni, Pierre has accumulated nearly 10 years of financial due diligence experience, which includes 3 years fully dedicated to reviewing SaaS and subscription models. Prior to launching HoriZen Capital, Pierre spent many years as a Private Equity Investment Associate and M&A Advisor. His background has afforded him a unique and professional understanding of the process of professional investors. He has also written articles on FDD, M&A, and financial analysis for top-ranking websites such as TechCrunch, Toptal, and MicroAcquire.
Through reading a lot of Disney’s Mickey Mouse and Scrooge, by around the age of 12, Pierre knew he wanted to be a trader,but his idea of a trader at twelve-years-old wasn’t totally correct. He imagined traders were “people who would look at the newspaper, understand what’s happening from a geographical perspective and a geopolitical perspective in South America, figure out if there is a conflict in that country that impacts the production of oil and gas in another country, and then one thing leading to another… The price of a pen is going to skyrocket. So, let’s just by pen stock.” While his Disney perception of what a trader was wasn’t entirely correct, it was still a relatively sophisticated analysis for that age.
As he grew up, he learned what traders actually were – not something he actually wanted to be – and he found great interest in understanding the work, and how to use that knowledge to make good business investments. A UNIQUE DEAL Pierre’s first deal occurred about a decade ago, and involved investing in a wind turbine plant in France through a crowd-funding platform. The aim of the proposed wind turbine project was to bring wind-generated energy within the city streets – for instance Paris – by designing the turbines in the shape of trees, wherein each branch was the turbine.
This concept of designing something man-made to blend in with natural surroundings is called “biomimicry”. Recently, especially in the alternative energy discussion, biomimicry has become very popular to help preserve and blend in with the natural environment.
Investing in creating wind turbines designed to mimic nature isn’t something investors hear about every day. Pierre was interested in the equity investment scene, so he began doing research online, where he stumbled across the crowd funding platform. Initially he began to think he could utilize this platform to become a venture capitalist on his own, especially after finding the wind turbine project. The wind turbine project not only fascinated him, but he found it to be the most efficient wind turbine execution available. FROM CROWD-FUNDED WIND TURBINES TO PRIVATE EQUITY This browsing of a crowdfunding platform soon evolved to Pierre entering into private equity. When he was interning at a company that focused on hip-hop and urban media. The company was in the process of being acquired – this was his first experience with private equity. By the time he entered his third internship, he had decided to take the leap fully into private equity.
He began his venture into private equity through BNP Paribas Private Equity, which at that time, was branching off into Isatis Capital Team. Being a part of this journey proved to be good timing for Pierre, as this spin-off from BNP Paribas into Isatis allowed the team to essentially become independent. During his first year with Isatis, they worked on fifteen deals with five being completed. Isatis isa successful independent private equity firm today, and still growing. EXPECTATION MEETS REALITY During his schooling, Pierre says there are many resources at your disposal in order to learn the processes of business. This is true for almost all education, you have virtually limitless resources at your hands, without much struggle to find the information you need,however that information never fully prepares you for the real world. In the real-world, thenecessary resources and information aren’t as easily accessible. You can ask, but often you are you’re going to have to go out and find them on your own. A lot of this information you’ll require is imperative to your due diligence when in the M&A space; one piece of incorrect or missing information in the due diligence stage, and you can easily flip your deal upside down.
Another issue that comes up in the due diligence and information gathering phase is that you get a lot of information at once, most of which is disjointed or not exactly useful to your fact-finding mission. This is where ensuring your due diligence skills are sharp comes in handy. You have to be able to:
Without the ability to do all these things, you once again will have a hard time creating a successful deal. LESSONS LEARNED IN DISCERNMENT AND DISTINCTION As we’ve established, schooling doesn’t fully prepare you for real-world navigation and application of due diligence. Pierre recognized this gap between formal education and being in the business world without the proverbial training wheels school offers you,but recognizing this gap didn’t come without his own lessons and experiences.
Of course, when it comes to dealmaking, every person who has a seat at the table is there for a purpose, you benefit from the individual and combined experience of each person at the table, and logically, the more experience you have – especially specialized experience – the easier it gets. To make your overall experience as easy as possible, you want to make sure you’re bringing to the table your skillset at its sharpest – and this especially includes your ability to effectively do due diligence.
Discernment and distinction in what we outlined above is priority. Without the ability to effectively discern and make distinctions between information given to you, your deal will likely struggle. A general guideline Pierre gives is: Discern what are the highest priorities, and ensure they are covered; then, if you have the time, work yourself down the list of non-high priority items. Deciding what is high priority includes:
Beyond those, the biggest surprise for Pierre in the adjustment from being a student to an actual professional was in the valuation process. In school you learn about DCF (Discounted Cash-Flow), the mathematics behind it, how your discount factor must be reflective of the industry you’re in, etc. Then you go into small cap private equity – large cap is a different conversation – and the precision of what you learned in school is much looser. The smaller the deal, the more apt it is to just be whatever the parties end up negotiating. You really will need to adapt to the person in front of you when working on smaller deals, and a lot of times that means a lot less technicality to the deal. SAAS AND SUBSCRIPTION-BASED BUSINESSES As Pierre’s experience and talents were nurtured, he began to see that he was prepared to go out on his own and begin his own business. Pierre chooses to focus on SaaS businesses versus any other business because he finds them to be quite easy, stating once you develop the software, it’s quite simple to operate.
To refresh: A SaaS (Software as a Service) company, as defined by DigitalGuardian.com, is a company that “maintains servers, databases, and software that allow the application to be accessed over the internet — most likely by web browsers. Users can access the software from almost any device.”
Pierre finds the easiness with focusing on SaaS and subscription-based businesses comes from:
WHERE’S THE FOCUS? When it comes to SaaS and subscription-based companies, customers are key. Your goal is to ensure you have a loyal customer base that will stick with you. When you start a SaaS business, your first initial customers are going to be the ones that will stick with you through your company’s lifetime; they really want the product you’re offering. As you bring in more customers, those customers are less likely to automatically be desiring to stick with you, so you need to figure out the best way to retain those customers for as long as possible.
While bringing in new customers is great, you want to do all you can to retain those new customers. If you’re losing customers just as quickly as you’re gaining them, it can have a major impact to your gross revenue;much more than if you were to establish a loyal customer base that sticks with your company through its lifespan. It can also greatly impact your company valuation, especially during an M&A deal. THE ROLE OF PIERRE AND HORIZEN CAPITAL Pierre has an expansive background, and he certainly can help you with the valuation process, however, his role is to be an advisor. With that comes:
HoriZen Capital is providing financial due diligence (FDD) services for your SaaS targets, from $100k to $50m in ARR. HoriZen Capital's objective is to advise you on your SaaS company and offer you their network of capital and expertise in order to take your SaaS company to the next level of growth. Ultimately, you will find someone who is more than happy to buy your business. • • • FOR MORE ON PIERRE-ALEXANDRE HEURTEBIZE AND HORIZEN CAPITAL:
Corey Kupfer is an expert strategist, negotiator, and dealmaker. He has more than 35 years of professional deal-making and negotiating experience. Corey is a successful entrepreneur, attorney, consultant, author, and professional speaker. He is deeply passionate about deal-driven growth. He is also the creator and host of the DealQuest Podcast.
If you want to find out how deal-ready you are, take the Deal-Ready Assessment today! | |||
| Episode 209: M&A Talk with Leading RIA Aggregators and Integrators: Bob Oros of Hightower Advisors | 16 Dec 2022 | 00:53:03 | |
Bob Oros is Chairman and CEO of Hightower Advisors, a national wealth management firm focusing on empowered investing for independent-minded financial advisory businesses to drive growth and help clients achieve what they call “Well-th Rebalanced.” With more than 25 years of experience, Bob spent the bulk of his RIA career at the large custodians, such as Schwab and Fidelity, recruiting, retaining, and supporting advisors. Since joining Hightower in 2019, the company has completed a number of acquisitions of high-profile independent wealth management firms, expanded its operational and business acceleration services for advisors, and achieved consistently strong organic growth.
In addition to his position at Hightower Advisors, Bob is involved with, and a part of, several social improvement organizations. He sits on several boards, including The Chicago Mental Health Association and EEqual, a not-for-profit focused on providing opportunities for students who are battling homelessness. He is passionate about the cause of financial literacy, and speaks to student groups, as well as contributes frequently to panels and thought leadership pieces.
In his adolescence, Bob had no superhero ambitions, however he definitely had no issue working hard for what he wanted. A self-denominated “hustler” as a child, Bob would wake up at 5:30 AM to work a multitude of odd jobs around his neighborhood, including lawn-mowing and paper routes. Clearly his entrepreneurial mindset began at an early age. THE EVOLUTION OF HIGHTOWER Back in 2008 -- at Hightower’s founding -- the company was a revolutionary idea. Long before Bob came into Hightower, back when they were not in the M&A business, I had the pleasure of coming in and doing a full day’s white-boarding session with the executives at the time to check the landscape of entering the business of M&A.
Once Hightower entered the acquisition market, my firm was involved in some of their early deals from the sell side, representing several of their affiliated advisors in the sales of their businesses to Hightower. It has surely been interesting and a real pleasure to see where Bob has taken Hightower. Under Bob’s leadership, Hightower has made an impressive 35+ deals.
Part of what makes the 15-year-old company so stable is Bob’s belief in flowing with the tides and evolution. The RIA world is still relatively in its infancy, so it’s going to be ever-changing. Bob’s commitment to keeping Hightower relevant and evolving supports Hightower’s growth prospects for long into the future.
HIGHTOWER’S DEAL TEAMS In 2016, Hightower completed its first successful deal. While Bob was not a part of Hightower at that time, it’s still a very important moment in the Hightower history books, but getting to the point of making 15+ deals a year with 3 deal teams is no simple feat. It takes clever strategy, experience, and operating deliberately. Bob impresses the serious nature of the industry and urges buyers and sellers alike to not take it lightly. In fact, if you’re not prepared with not only enough capital, but the right know-how, it’s very easy to do a lot of damage.
For Hightower, taking the industry seriously has allowed the company to:
Bob also stresses the importance of being purposeful in the direction you choose. Dealmaking is not something everyone can, or should, do. If you’re going to get into the industry, you take on an obligation to become educated and diligent in your deals. FUNDING HIGHTOWER The source of capital a firm has is one of the most important factors to stability and growth. If your capital source is weak, your business will be weak, ultimately making your deals weak. I’ve seen many firms falter because of unstable streams of capital. In 2018, Hightower was at a place where a fresh injection of capital was crucial; this resulted in Thomas H. Lee Partners becoming the majority investor in Hightower.
When choosing capital partners, you want to be mindful of who you're choosing. Choosing the wrong capital partners or investors can easily turn potential growth into a stalemate. When choosing your investors, Bob suggests choosing someone who is:
Because of Hightower’s calculated and disciplined choice in private equity in January 2018 and the growth that helped facilitate thereafter, by December 2020 they were able to do their first equity recapitalization, which can become a useful tool with building future growth.
Given all of the above factors, Hightower knew they had a very robust opportunity, and they wanted to be entirely sure they had the right capital structure to support all the growth opportunities. The structure included:
This structure has been incredibly sound and beneficial to Hightower’s strategy of driving leading organic growth. For Hightower – deals aside – the most valuable companies are companies that can generate consistent, leading same-source sales growth. Bob truly believes they’ve created such a company. HIGHTOWER: AN INTEGRATED AGGREGATOR? On the topic of Aggregator versus Integrator, Bob brings up what he calls “The Curve of Conformity,” which asks the question: How conforming does the buyer make the seller?
Within this “Curve of Conformity,” a low-conforming buyer would mean the seller keeps its ADV, branding, etc. etc. – typical aggregator features. Whereas, on the other side of the curve, with a high-conforming buyer, you are conforming to become them (one ADV, one brand, one tech stack, etc.) – which is more aligned with an integrator model.
That established, within Bob’s conformity curve, Hightower sits somewhere right in the middle:
There’s conformity in, as Bob describes, the back-office areas, but where they try to keep the autonomy and individualism is in the client value chain.
Hightower doesn’t have a single view on how you manage money; meaning, they do have the capability to help their advisors if they want to turn that over to them, however there is no requirement to do so, which really balances out to most who don't need that help, and a few do. Neither is right or wrong for Hightower.
Client satisfaction is highly important to Hightower’s “integrated aggregator” model, and advisors having the freedom to serve their clients in the way that best fits both parties is key in how their company functions. By doing things this way, Hightower’s goal is to unlock value by giving them access to scale, but also access to new capabilities that can be value-creating for their client.
In order to help determine where on the curve you belong, Bob suggests to sellers that they come to the table with their top two non-negotiable items; any more than that, and the list is too long and impossible to work with. THE HIGHTOWER TARGET Hightower is done with wirehouse lift-outs – so, no more breakaways. Bob doesn’t think it’s a bad strategy but Hightower is focused ontheir acquisition strategy. Their transactions of established businesses don’t really mesh well with a wirehouse lift-out, so the majority of their deals are standalone RIAs with some IDB deals.
Hightower also doesn’t take into consideration size or geography. While their history suggests their deals tend to skew on the larger side, they really do not discriminate based upon size; there is no artificial number they’re looking for. The same is true for geography.
What they’re looking for are great leaders. This is because Hightower is not attempting to come in and create a full conformity take-over, they’re coming in to build a great leadership team, take some things off their proverbial plate, and power them with new capabilities.
A bullseye target for Hightower is a relationship with great leaders and leadership teams.
• • •
FOR MORE ON BOB OROS AND HIGHTOWER ADVISORS: Corey Kupfer is an expert strategist, negotiator, and dealmaker. He has more than 35 years of professional deal-making and negotiating experience. Corey is a successful entrepreneur, attorney, consultant, author, and professional speaker. He is deeply passionate about deal-driven growth. He is also the creator and host of the DealQuest Podcast.
If you want to find out how deal-ready you are, take the Deal-Ready Assessment today! | |||
| Episode 208: Mortgage Note Buying with Scott Carson | 14 Dec 2022 | 00:49:25 | |
Entrepreneur, podcast host of Note Closers Podcast, and President of WeCloseNotes.com, Scott Carson, is an expert in real estate investing, raising capital, and marketing. He has a heavy focus in guesting on podcasts, speaking at industry conventions, and helping thousands of investors and entrepreneurs each year create wealth through his debt-buying classes, podcasting, and coaching. In 2022, he was named by US News Reporter Magazine as the #4 Entrepreneur to Follow.
Underneath his expertise, Scott enjoys traveling, sports, and gardening; all things that create lasting memories for him. The specialty of buying mortgage notes wasn’t what the small-town Texan had in mind. His parents had opened a local hardware store, so Scott fully believed his future would be carrying on that business, or going into sports. In his childhood, Scott was the neighborhood “that kid”, wherein he was always busy doing odd jobs for neighbors on the weekends to make some money. Halfway through his college degree in communications and journalism, he switched to majoring in business, allowing his childhood entrepreneurial mindset to later serve him to become one of the most sought-after speakers in the real estate space. MORTGAGE NOTES & MORTGAGE NOTE BUYERS On the DealQuest Podcast, we’ve not covered buying mortgage notes, so I’m thoroughly excited to introduce the DealQuest audience to this type of deal. To better understand these types of deals, we will first brush-up on what a mortgage note is, and what a mortgage note buyer does.
But what exactly is a mortgage note? They are defined as “a legal document that establishes the terms of a loan for both the borrower and the lender.” In layman’s, a “note” is merely an active debt.
Banks will have owed debt that isn’t performing – the borrower hasn’t paid on the debt for some time – and the banks will sell off the debt to third parties like Scott – a note buyer -- who will purchase that debt for a lump sum price from the bank. The new owner of the debt will now be responsible for collecting the debt from the borrower. THE BUSINESS OF BUYING NOTES Operating within the secondary mortgage note market, mortgage note buyers like Scott offer the owner of a mortgage note the opportunity to receive an upfront sum of cash rather than a series of small payments from a borrower. Scott primarily focuses on buying:
The process is straightforward: the note buyer purchases the note from the lender for a predetermined lump payment. Despite the fact the transaction between the note buyer and lender is for a fraction of the original debt, the borrower continues to have responsibility all unpaid amounts due under the original note amount; they just do not owe it to the original lender, but instead to the note buyer. This is how note buyers make their profit.
For Scott, he prefers to open a discussion with the borrower and find out what prevented them from honoring their lending agreement. Financial hardships can come to anyone at any time, and Scott wants to work with the borrower to help get them back on track. Understanding why they became delinquent on their agreement is a part of that process.
Some note buyers will restructure the debt in a way that is more accessible to repay for the borrower to get the note to perform again. This includes but is not limited to: Reducing that debt by a certain amount, adjusting the payment amounts, or adjusting the payment schedule. The profit comes from paying a smaller lump sum to the lender, and then collecting the original owed debt and interest from the borrower even if it is over a longer period of time.
To make this a profitable business, note buyers have three options:
To break this down:
A borrower accrues $50k in debt on a mortgage note and stop making payments ↓ The lender will then put the note up for auction ↓ A note buyer will purchase that note for a negotiated discounted price up front, for instance, $25k ↓ The borrower is beholden now to the note buyer to repay their debt ↓ The borrower still owes the $50k and needs to pay that off to the note buyer ↓
↓
BUYING NOTES: A PRO-CON DEAL In the context of non-performing mortgage notes, lenders – in this context, usually banks -- have all of the same options as note buyers when it comes to recouping their loss on a note. They, too, can renegotiate terms or foreclose on the property and sell it. So, why would a bank opt to sell the non-performing note rather than foreclose and re-list the property for profit, or attempt to get the note to reperform? This is the #1 question Scott gets asked.
Like all deals, there are pros and cons. And those pros and cons are going to be dependent upon what the goal of the lender is. Sometimes the cons will outweigh the pros for the lenders, sometimes the pros just won’t be enough.
When it comes to banks, it’s about leverage and velocity capital, as well as every state has their own foreclosure timeline (Texas being the fastest in the country; New York State has a multi-year foreclosure timeline). These foreclosure timelines also play a role in whether a bank chooses to take on the responsibility for the note at full, or sell it on the market to a note buyer. There are also financial and other reasons that banks don’t like to carry non-performing loans on their books plus they are not in the business of buying, managing or reselling properties and generally have no interest in being in such business.
BENEFITS OF SELLING
As with any deal, the goal is to make a transaction that benefits both parties, however, many banks would rather take their hit and not the risk. They would sooner sell the note for $0.50 on $1, and immediately turn around and loan that money 10 more times, versus playing the long game and taking the risk of the borrower finally honoring the note. Having multiple non-performing notes in circulation means money is just stagnant for long periods of time, and with banks it’s about keeping that money circulating and moving at as fast of a pace as possible.
THE WEBUYNOTES MODEL Scott and his company, WeBuyNotes.com, do not work with major national institutions such as Chase or Bank of America. This is because the notes done by larger institutions are usually $50M+; instead, they buy from regional banks, small institutions, and hedge funds for smaller sums. The reason for this is in part due to operating on a smaller scale, but also because it offers him the ability to purchase multiple, smaller notes at one time, versus one large note. Logically, this choice makes sense for his company’s size, as acquiring several notes increases the the impact of it not performing has a much larger negative impact. .
An important part of Scott’s goal is to select notes on which he can collaborate with the borrower to get them to a state of reperforming, and help people stay in their homes. However, Scott does not only buy residential notes, or sometimes there are borrowers who will not get to reperforming. As a result, there are numerous elements to consider while determining which notes he will bid on.
Scott’s refined considerations on whether or not to bid on a note have led him to a point where an average of 60% of occupied properties end up to a state of reperforming, and people can remain in their homes. This is a high percentage in the industry.
NOT RECESSION-PROOF Nothing is guaranteed “recession-proof”. However, Scott’s model for WeBuyNotes.com has helped him succeed through uncertain times. The unprecedented COVID19 pandemic has claimed many businesses, jobs, and family homes. Many people could not foresee the impact the pandemic would have across the board; not just personally, but in business, as well. There is no denying that during the height of the pandemic, Scott felt the pressures.
Due to pandemic-induced financial instability for many people, more and more people began to default on loans and debts throughout 2020. While this may sound like it’s “good for business” in the context of note buying, it actually made things a bit tougher for Scott. He had to stick to his criteria and considerations for purchasing notes, be smart about his risks, and not lead with fear or over-confidence.
By remaining on task to his criteria and considerations for note buying, and remaining on top of his due diligence, Scott and WeBuyNotes.com are coming out on the other side in a strong position. • • •
FOR MORE ON SCOTT CARSON:
Corey Kupfer is an expert strategist, negotiator, and dealmaker. He has more than 35 years of professional deal-making and negotiating experience. Corey is a successful entrepreneur, attorney, consultant, author, and professional speaker. He is deeply passionate about deal-driven growth. He is also the creator and host of the DealQuest Podcast.
If you want to find out how deal-ready you are, take the Deal-Ready Assessment today! | |||
| Episode 207: M&A Talk with Leading RIA Aggregators and Integrators: David Canter of Bluespring Wealth Partners | 09 Dec 2022 | 00:44:00 | |
Musician, Lawyer, and President of one of the nation’s premier RIA firms, David Canter, is focused on positioning Bluespring Wealth Partners as one of the premiere acquirers in the industry. He is very hands-on with operations, including overseeing day-to-day operations and identifying new areas of opportunity and growth. David has worked himself up the ladder in the space, previously serving as Executive Vice President and Head of the RIA segment for Fidelity Clearing & Custody Solutions and now serving as President of Bluespring Wealth Partners.
David has worked on many sides of the RIA space, including custody, and now acquiring, but, as most stories go, working in the RIA space wasn’t his life-long passion. Without question, he had his sights set on the entertainment industry. He based his life around going into the entertainment industry – training at one point as an actor – and has a love of music and playing his guitar. Breaking into the entertainment industry is hard; beyond acting as an extra, he found that the work just wasn’t there. He quickly had to realize that there were other avenues he could take to make money, while still keeping the arts as a deeply held passion.
Once he made the decision to focus himself elsewhere, David was drawn to law. The lure of the courtroom was undeniable to David, and he went on to pursue a Juris Doctorate from the University of Baltimore. He loved the courtroom and trial-work, and currently holds his FNRA Series 24 license and is a California State Bar member. THE BLUESPRING ATTRACTION David has been a jack of all trades in the best way possible, but what attracted him to Bluespring Wealth Partners after nearly three decades in the RIA space is simple: He wanted a new challenge. He wanted to find a place that met his self-evaluations for a new challenge after 12+ years at another firm. He found Bluespring’s platform very appealing. That platform is based on:
For David, Bluespring Wealth Partners wasn’t just a challenge, but a fitting piece to the next chapter in his career. It allows him to be entrepreneurial, but simultaneously intrapreneurial. This balance allows David many freedoms he wouldn’t otherwise have, and a chance to build the company into something new. It is now a 29-firm platform spanning 16 states – and growing. The firm will do 9 acquisitions by the end of 2022, but not just for the sake of acquisitioning. Their acquisition plan is focused on solving the problems of their “partner firms”, as they call their network of firms.
AN INFORMED CHOICE In the RIA space, there are many choices an investor can make just to get to the starting line. David believes in choice, and not merely having choice, but having informed choice. David understands that Bluespring Wealth Partners isn’t going to be the perfect choice for everyone, however he wants the DealQuest listeners to know what Bluespring does.
Bluespring Wealth Partners can be best described as a practice management consultancy at its core that happens to be in the strategic M&A space. It is the responsibility of practice management consultants to assist offices and firms with improving efficiency within their workplace and in their business operations. That’s the bulk of Bluespring Wealth Partners’ approach: Addressing problems with their acquired “partner firms” and problem-solving efficiency via the network of firms under Bluespring. ONE SIZE DOES NOT FIT ALL Two of the most commonly used words in the RIA space are “aggregator” and “integrator”. Many firms operate either pure aggregator or pure integrator, however, there are a number of firms that pick elements of either model to formulate their perfect model. There is a reason all these models exist, and that’s simply because no singular model works for every firm, entrepreneur, client, or investor.
Again, choice plays a vital role in decision for the model under which Bluespring operates. The choices David lay out are:
These seven choices on how to proceed is what allows a firm to formulate how they’re going to move forward with their M&A deals. Bluespring Wealth Partners primarily functions as Choice 4, the Entrepreneurial Model, while recognizing the benefits of all models, opting to borrow practices from other models to give their entrepreneurs the best of all worlds, and allowing over half of their firms to be standalone RIAs.
THE VALUE BLUESPRING BRINGS David affirms there are about 90% of opportunities that cross their path that they do not take. Bluespring is very transparent with those opportunities as to why they pass. By being particular in the opportunities they take, Bluespring has built an elite and strong network of firms. Offering immense value to the firms that Bluespring acquires.
One attribute of Bluespring’s consultancy is that even when they pass on an opportunity, they’re offering their consultancy to these firms to help them better grow, irrespective of Bluespring choosing to bring them into their network or not. Bluespring’s consulting really begins long before they even decide to enter into a transaction.
If Bluespring does go forward with a transaction, there’s a lot of due diligence they do by way of taking a consultative approach to how they’re going to do business together, and how they’re going to structure transactions so the right benefits, incentives, and horizons can be found.
Once a firm enters their network, they provide an array of resources to help their community network grow:
CHOOSING WHAT WORKS FOR YOUR SUCCESS There is a reason why there are so many various models and combinations of models. At the end of the day, choosing your model is about you and your goals. With Bluespring, David ultimately wants to operate as a culture-driven community. Allowing their acquisitions to remain primarily autonomous, while gaining the support of Bluespring and their resources.
There is no one superior model, however each firm will always believe they’ve found the key to making a successful business. That is true in a lot of ways because success is very abstract; they are successful because their model works for them, not because they have the superior model.
Reviewing choices, building a model for their needs and goals, and understanding what opportunities should be taken and those that shouldn’t, are all keys to making Bluespring’s model work successfully. They will be some of the keys to help build your success, as well. For my full discussion with David Canter, and more on the topic: FOR MORE ON DAVID CANTER AND BLUESPRING WEALTH PARTNERS:
Corey Kupfer is an expert strategist, negotiator, and dealmaker. He has more than 35 years of professional deal-making and negotiating experience. Corey is a successful entrepreneur, attorney, consultant, author, and professional speaker. He is deeply passionate about deal-driven growth. He is also the creator and host of the DealQuest Podcast.
If you want to find out how deal-ready you are, take the Deal-Ready Assessment today! | |||
| Episode 206: Should Uncertainties In The Market Impact Your Deal-Making? with Corey Kupfer | 07 Dec 2022 | 00:27:25 | |
There are undoubtedly many uncertainties and changes happening in the economy right now. Many businesspeople are feeling those uncertainties currently due to the stock market correction, increasing interest rates, inflation, world events and more. I want to talk about those changes with you in this solocast of the DealQuest Podcast, and determine whether they should impact your deal-making, and if so, how? CHANGES IN THE ECONOMY Over the years, I’ve discussed many ways to initiate growth, especially during positive economic times. I have also preached about not becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy by focusing too heavily on recessions and market downswings. The temperature in a lot of spaces all over the world is that of uncertainty and unease, and many people have a lot of questions.
THE FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLE Regardless of where the economy is, no matter what’s going on in the world, the underlying principle is this: There are still deals that need to be done. Naturally, the context and mechanics of deals in new or uncertain circumstances may change, but that doesn’t eliminate the fact that there will always be deals that need to be made and opportunities that come about even in challenging economic times.
Which leads me to my next point: These deals in uncertain or adverse circumstances does not mean they are automatically less attractive. In fact, if you are smart, you can turn challenging times into great opportunities. As a smart dealmaker, you should be looking for deal-driven growth consistently, and adverse circumstances are no exception to that. THE CONCERNING FACTORS Establishing that a dealmaker shouldn’t lose sight of deal-driven growth is only the first step. Just because deals will always need to be made and opportunities will always be available doesn’t exclude one’s concerns during a shaky economy or impactful world event. What are some of those concerns?
CONCERN: INTEREST RATES Especially in the U.S., interest rates continue to rise. In November 2022, several economists forecasted the Fed to raise its benchmark rate even higher leaving borrowers with 4.75-5% range by March of 2023. This increase of interest rates has and will continue to cause the cost of capital to increase.
About a year ago ago, I did a solocast in which I discussed some research I did that showed there was no correlation between interest rates and volume of deals. That tells us that deals are being made regardless. Let’s look at an easy example most will understand: Real Estate. In rising interest rate environments sales prices for properties tend to decrease. With the cost of capital increasing, that makes sense. And, although there is often a period of disconnect when sellers are looking for yesterday’s prices and buyers want to buy at today’s lower prices, over time seller’s get realistic and deal flow picks up again. The same is true in the business deal market.
In episode 197, I discussed this topic with John Warrillow (the blog post can be found here). We discussed at length how sometimes buying low and selling low can potentially be better than buying high and selling high. Check out that episode for that interesting discussion. CONCERN: INFLATION The effects are being felt globally of inflation in a post-lockdown world that’s still enduring the Russian-Ukrainian War. U.S. inflation rates are the highest they’ve been in recent times, with November 2022 seeing a 7.75% inflation rate. Inflation is something to take into consideration, but like interest rates, its not something that should impede your ability to make smart, successful deals and in some cases can help facilitate deals getting done.
A smaller company that is experiencing difficulty raising priced but is experiencing higher costs due to inflation may be more amenable to being acquired, merged or ever brought on via acqui-hire (where a company is acquired primarily for its employees rather than its products or services, a.k.a “talent acquisition”).
CONCERN: SUPPLY CHAIN DISRUPTION
Supply chain disruption has been a challenge for many companies in industries like retail, construction and distribution. While that might cause economic pressure for some, it could provide deal opportunities for others. For instance, say you have an incredible supplier relationship that competitors in your industry do not have. Of course, you can use this to your advantage against your competitors in terms of organic growth, but maybe making a deal might be a smarter choice. There are multiple ways to go about this:
These types of deals can help reinforce a business, or even a whole industry, during economic uncertainty, however, you should be wary of careless dealmakers and the mindset of taking multiple weaker companies to combine them into one larger, stronger company. It doesn’t work that way. CHALLENGES CAN CREATE OPPORTUNITIES History shows us that economic or market uncertainty isn’t the end of the world; in fact, it can sometimes lead to very beneficial deals that would otherwise not be available. Allowing yourself to break free from fear of the unknown and from incorrect assumptions about the adverse impact of certain factors will cause you to become a more creative and more proficient dealmaker. Adversity can, and does, foster growth and some of the strongest businesses have been built during recessions.
It’s also extremely important to not make assumptions based on these challenging factors. It’s vital to understand that how uncertainties impact one industry or sector, may not impact another in the same way. It can be more impactful for some, whereas for others they might not feel any impact at all. This leads into making sure that you’re evaluating your business, your sector, your industry, and your own geography and not relying on commentary of the so-called pundits speaking in generalizations. Do your own due diligence and research, and keep that deal-makers mindset working for you. STAYING FOCUSED I am not trying to encourage anyone to throw caution to the wind and ignore adversities in the market or the economy -- quite the opposite. My goal here is to dissuade dealmakers from leading with fear, and instead, leading with intent and focus. Being aware of adverse climates is part of the deal-making process, and what you do in non-ideal circumstances can be just as important as what you do during the most ideal of circumstances. Take stock of what’s happening in your space, how the economy or any other situation is impacting your space, and proceed accordingly.
I want you, my listeners, to understand that having concerns or being cautious isn’t wrong, but neither is optimism, and that disadvantageous circumstances can lead you to be a better dealmaker. • • • For my full discussion and more on the topic: Corey Kupfer is an expert strategist, negotiator, and dealmaker. He has more than 35 years of professional deal-making and negotiating experience. Corey is a successful entrepreneur, attorney, consultant, author, and professional speaker. He is deeply passionate about deal-driven growth. He is also the creator and host of the DealQuest Podcast.
If you want to find out how deal-ready you are, take the Deal-Ready Assessment today!
| |||
| Episode 205: M&A Talk with Leading RIA Aggregators and Integrators: Allworth Financial with Pat McClain | 02 Dec 2022 | 00:46:01 | |
Pat McClain, Senior Partner and Co-Founder of Allworth Financial is much more than his company. He is distinguished in the RIA industry, co-hosting for more than two decades Allworth Financial’s Money Matters, one of the nation’s longest-running financial topic radio shows and podcasts. He has also served as a keynote speaker for a multitude of financial conferences around the nation. Pat was named one of the 10 “Icons and Innovators” by InvestmentNews in 2021. Pat’s expertise has contributed to Allworth Financial being ranked 23rd on Barron’s 2021 Top 100 Independent Advisors list. While under his and his partner Scott Hanson’s leadership, Allworth Financial has grown to over $15 billion in assets.
As the RIA space grows, the options for buyers and sellers can get a little clouded. As an industry leader, Pat understands just how make-it-or-break-it the market is today. Growing up in a socioeconomically modest, large Irish family, he jokes that what he wanted to grow up to be was “not picked on,” but his serious desire was to go into business of some sort, like his father.
Pat recollects his first commissioned job as a child through his father. They would go to hotels being remodeled and acquire all the pictures and paintings that were being replaced, then go to swaps and flea markets to re-sell them for $2-3 a piece. His commission was generous, he says, at 25¢ each picture. A good deal for a child who was not even 10-years-old!
That dealmaker mindset ran steadfast as Pat grew up. In junior high, he ran a cactus stand for a man at the same swaps and flea markets he would attend with his father. After 6 months, the cactus-stand owner went on vacation and never returned, so Pat was positioned to buy out the man’s entire inventory, and took on the business for himself. This adolescent cactus stand became Pat’s first business ever. ALLWORTH AND A MODEST START
Before Allworth Financial, Pat and fellow now-Co-Founder Scott Hanson worked at a different firm in neighboring cubicles. Three decades ago, Pat and Scott decided to leave that business and establish their own firm, Hanson McClain Advisors. Pat rolled out his $10k IRA for 60 days to fund the initial capital for the business, and he and Scott were able to lease office space from an accountant and began buying the bare necessities to get started. A modest start, but a start flush with potential nevertheless.
In their company’s infancy, they began with a salaried advisor model and market and make the appointments for the advisors.
HITTING A RISK TOLERANCE WALL
As Pat and Scott grew their firm, they realized they had something special. As time passed, more and more interest began coming towards the pair, and they were beginning to have to turn away offers due to hitting a risk tolerance wall. For Pat, he says that at that point more money was clearly possible, but more money wouldn’t necessarily make his life better, however less money would have.
Which is not often something many people think of when they’re riding the wave of financial growth. Many people think the goal is to just accumulate as much money as possible, however, a good businessperson understands the risks involved with consistently trying to accumulate more money than what you need or can handle, not just personally but within your business, too.
By taking personal inventory of his risk tolerance, Pat was able to balance his work and life to something he – and his family – are happy with. His business seems to be happy with his choices, as well. In his words, “he quit running his business for cashflow, and started running it for value and for long-term capital appreciation.” GROWING UP ALLWORTH FINANCIAL ORGANICALLY AND INORGANICALLY
In 2017, Allworth Financial sold a controlling stake to Parthenon Capital, a “private equity firm that partners with and invests in management teams and their companies,” per their own website. In 2020, Parthenon Capital sold off its $8 billion stake of Allworth Financial. Pat speaks highly of Parthenon, attributing this acquisition as “one of the best decisions we ever made.”
This major acquisition in 2017 by Parthenon allowed Allworth to grow significantly, and in Pat’s words, “Brought a level of sophistication to our business that was beyond what we were doing, but not what we were capable of; they made us think about us being bigger than ourselves.” This push in the right direction allowed Pat and Scott to go from $2.4 billion in AUM to nearly $10 billion in less than 4 years. In late 2020, a new capital partner, Lightyear Capital, bought out Parthenon Capital, adding great value to Allworth Financial.
Because of all these high-value deals, Allworth Financial’s menu of offerings to clients has grown exponentially. They’ve made acquisitions, integrated key additional capacities and other additions to their firm’s offerings such as:
Pat estimates because of these previous deals, his firm’s offerings have expanded by at least ten-fold.
Many of these expansions and additions are not accessible to smaller firms, as they weren’t to Allworth prior to their deals with Parthenon and Lightyear. Many small firms would love to have fully stocked departments and heads, but Pat states you have to get to scale in order for it to work. Although some owners can become overzealous and end up putting the cart before the horse, well-thought out strategic growth is very different. This goes back to one of my many discussions I have had about ego and dealmaking, and not allowing your ego to run your business. In Pat and Allworth’s case, the growth has been very strategic and successful. MERGERS & PARTNERSHIPS: A PERSONAL INTEGRATOR MODEL
In the RIA space, like many others, the term “mergers and acquisitions” is commonplace. For Pat, he prefers to call them “mergers and partnerships.” Pat prefers “mergers and partnerships” because Allworth looks to bring in like-minded aligned people who will become key partners in the firm moving forward, especially being on the same wavelength about:
While M&As don’t seem like a very personal thing, Pat and Allworth Financial choose to take a more personal approach to their mergers and acquisitions, ensuring that the partnerships and deals formed are about mutual satisfaction and harmony.
All that said, at the core, Allworth Financial operates under a primarily integrator model. The key to Allworth’s integrator model is the whole business is shifted onto a common platform. The benefit to this model choice is two-pronged for Pat:
EFFICIENCY IN BUILDING A CLIENT BASE
In a space where significant equity is being rolled over, Pat wants to make sure the deal is a perfect fit, and it can be exceptionally difficult to find a good fit for your needs. IE: The best marketers may not be the best financial advisors, and vice versa.
Pat’s model splits the two: He has 26 marketers on a team, and a call center that schedules the appointments for the advisors. While advisors are free to seek out their own clients – and the compensation for that may differ – he’s found that having a dedicated team in the call center setting up appointments for his advisors runs more fluidly for everyone involved.
This setup has also allowed Allworth the freedom to bring on many different types of advisors and personalities under their banner:
Granted, most of Allworth’s advisors choose to utilize the call center and have appointments assigned to them, having this freedom to accommodate different personalities allows for his firm to not restrict themselves on the types of clients they bring in, broadening their potential clientele pool significantly. INTEGRATING WITH PURPOSE
Pat has certainly been on many sides of the M&A scope. He’s been the employee, the small business, and the co-owner of a multi-billion-dollar company. He’s had the opportunities to see inside the nooks and crannies and inside all the closets within RIA space, so it’s safe to say his expertise is well-rounded through experience.
For instance, Pat knows that no entrepreneur has ever thought, “sign me up for a corporate job and give me an infrastructure that I need to report-in to.” His belief is that Allworth’s job is to find out what people’s motivations are. Pat offers the perfect anecdote of a firm they integrated recently, wherein the owner’s personal goal was to just go out and generate business, work the first couple of years with the client, and then he wants to step away and allow someone else to nurture the ongoing relationship. It’s important to Pat that his firm has flexibility for its clients, and has the ability to work with its clients, not against them, and certainly not force them into decisions or boxes they don’t want.
• • • For my full discussion with Pat McClain, and more on the topic: • • • FOR MORE ON PAT MCCLAIN:
Corey Kupfer is an expert strategist, negotiator, and dealmaker. He has more than 35 years of professional deal-making and negotiating experience. Corey is a successful entrepreneur, attorney, consultant, author, and professional speaker. He is deeply passionate about deal-driven growth. He is also the creator and host of the DealQuest Podcast.
If you want to find out how deal-ready you are, take the Deal-Ready Assessment today! | |||
| Episode 204: Breaking Away and Strategic Growth with Phil Fiore | 30 Nov 2022 | 00:47:10 | |
Having more than 25 years of experience, Procyon Partners’ Co-Founder, Phil Fiore, has extensive experience and expertise in the investment advisory space. In addition to being a co-founder of Procyon in 2017, Phil formerly held the positions of Senior Vice President of Wealth Management at UBS, Senior Institutional Consultant, Senior Retirement Plan Consultant, and member of the Institutional Consulting Group and its Advisory Council. 401KWire twice named Phil one of the Nation’s 300 Most Influential Advisors in the Defined Contributions Arena, The Financial Times recognized him as one of their Top 400 Advisors in 2014, and Barron’s named him one of their Top 1,200 Financial Advisors in 2015.
Given all these accomplishments and experiences, Phil is equipped to speak with authority in the wealth management space, but, when Phil was younger, the term “wealth management” wasn’t even in his lexicon. Coming from a first generation immigrant Italian family, Phil spent most of his early life believing that soccer would be what his future held. His father, a traditional Italian man, created the PAL Soccer League in his hometown in Connecticut. While his father instilled within him a go-and-get-it-yourself attitude as opposed to handing him money (a rudimentary business skill), soccer was indeed what his heart was set on.
Nevertheless, professional soccer only existed in Europe at the time Phil graduated college, so he had to figure out a new path. At first, his intended path was law school, but sometimes life chooses for you what you’re meant to do. In his late 20s, he was presented with an opportunity to join a business he couldn’t refuse which led tohim became the highly regarded leader and dealmaker he is today. THE NEW WAVE OF BREAKAWAY
Procyon Partners is a prime example of a new wave of breakaway RIA firms. Traditionally, RIA breakaways were wealth management practices run by advisors establishing their own businesses for their own reasons - mainly escaping big firm bureaucracy and limitations or the desire to be self-employed. On the other hand, a new wave of breakaways was ushered in, with Procyon being one of those to breakaway with new additional motivation: Authentic, strategic growth from the start. This is growth with intention, not growth for the sake of growth, but growth with the purpose to build a stronger organization that can service clients more fully and comprehensively.
Though Phil and his fellow founding partners started out in wirehouse firms (a full-service broker-dealer), they realized that their specialty expertise in retirement consulting and other key service offerings excelled well beyond the wirehouse’s “full-service” paradigm. As a result, they made the decision to leave the wirehouses.
“An exciting journey, for sure,” says Phil, but certainly not without its challenges. One of the biggest hurdles faced by Phil and his new company was actually the freedom they had to operate as they pleased. They had to take a step back and evaluate their circumstances, and not act on impulse, but rather conduct their business in a manner that was best for their clients and for their business. Another decision made in 2017 by the Procyon founding partners, was to collaborate with Dynasty Financial Partners. Due to Dynasty’s well-established standing, they were able to offer analytics, experienced transition, and operational support to Procyon in ways that would otherwise be inaccessible to them at their founding. This decision gives Procyon the ability to focus on transitioning their clients and providing personalized service at a high level for high-net-worth individuals, families, and business owners. In 2022, this partnership is still in place, and Procyon’s founders continue to benefit from and deeply appreciate the exceptionality, support and partnership that Dynasty offers. A STRATEGIC GROWTH-DRIVEN MINDSET
Procyon Partners’ authentic, strategic growth-driven goal was present from the beginnng in 2017. Their start focused on organic growth by the founding partners going out and attracting business on their own; however, their inorganic growth via bringing on new advisors has been what gave them their largest leg up.
It’s important to note that there is no one specific way to achieve growth, what works for one business may not work for another. Depending on business model and industry, primarily organic growth may be best, inorganic growth may get you further, or a combination of the two may be where the sweet spot is. For most businesses, a balance of the two is usually preferred, but in the RIA space, inorganic growth has become a huge drive of success for most of the fastest growing firms.
The model Procyon decided to use for their growth is “One Team, One Dream”. Phil explains that, for example, many M&A transactions may operate as “Corey Wealth Management, Powered by Procyon”, and while there’s nothing wrong with this, Phil believes that by operating with unity, they’re able to achieve more growth. Phil, alongside his Procyon founding partners, decided from the start they wanted their business to operate as one, with everyone who is coming in being in the same boat, rowing towards the same dream. That can provide some obstacles in finding the right people for your business, but in the end, when the right people come together, wonderful things will happen.
Additionally, Phil emphasizes that bringing in talent who are eager to be there, people who can act as leaders in your firm will help your company run like a well-oiled machine. You can generate a lot more growth by bringing in strong, enthusiastic talent as opposed to bringing in what’s available merely because it’s available or who doesn’t want to genuinely work with you. The latter will undoubtedly work against your growth prospects. AUTHENTICITY IN A COMPETITIVE MARKET
As the RIA space grows, genuine talent becomes more difficult to find, and of course bringing on talent is paramount to growth– organic or inorganic. How does a firm set themselves apart, and attract talent to bring on board? For Phil, the answer is simple: Authenticity.
Procyon’s message is deliberately authentic to attract authenticity. Many – not all – firms will promise the stars, and only deliver on half the sky. For Procyon, it’s imperative to:
By keeping things transparent and authentic, and not making unrealistic promises, Phil believes Procyon gleans beyond other firms who may not practice with this type of authenticity. Furthermore, they choose to set themselves above by being proactive in their hiring, choosing people who are good at what they do, and nurturing that talent with the right motivation. Not just comp, but something tangible so they can build, create, and grow with enthusiasm. “One Team, One Dream”: It’s a philosophy that’s not just words for Procyon, but one that is in chronic practice. A PIVOTAL DEAL
In May 2021, Procyon Partners acquired Pivotal Planning Group, whose partners became partners in Procyon. This transaction was so much more than cutting a check to add clients, it was a meaningful partnership for both Procyon and Pivotal. What Phil describes as “awesome” was the fact that neither Procyon nor Pivotal needed the other at the time of the transaction. It wasn’t need-based, it was taking a curiosity of “what if?”, and actually doing it. This important deal has helped Procyon continue to expand its offerings and talent in a way that would be difficult and time consuming to create organically.
By practicing authenticity and strategic growth, Phil and his founding partners have been able to build Procyon to be one of the most solid RIA firms in the U.S. They’ve afforded themselves the opportunity to make extremely beneficial deals such as with Dynasty and Pivotal, and grow their business to expand their services far beyond what they ever anticipated. They’ve done the hard work, brought in incredible leaders and partners, and built Procyon to be dynamic and unified, making the sum of Procyon extremely attractive to talent, advisors, and clients alike.
• • • For my full discussion with Phil Fiore, and more on the topic: • • • FOR MORE ON PHIL FIORE AND PROCYON PARTNERS: Corey Kupfer is an expert strategist, negotiator, and dealmaker. He has more than 35 years of professional deal-making and negotiating experience. Corey is a successful entrepreneur, attorney, consultant, author, and professional speaker. He is deeply passionate about deal-driven growth. He is also the creator and host of the DealQuest Podcast.
If you want to find out how deal-ready you are, take the Deal-Ready Assessment today! | |||
| Episode 302: Preparing for a Successful Exit with Business Transition Insights with Laurie Barkman | 07 Aug 2024 | 00:50:46 | |
Author and business transition expert Laurie Barkman joins us for this episode of the DealQuest Podcast where we explore mastering business transitions and exit strategies. Get a free digital copy of the Amazon best-selling book, "The Business Transition Handbook: How to Avoid Succession Pitfalls and Create Valuable Exit Options” by author Laurie Barkman. Corey Kupfer is an expert strategist, negotiator, and dealmaker with over 35 years of experience. As a successful entrepreneur, attorney, consultant, author, and professional speaker, Corey is deeply passionate about deal-driven growth. He is also the creator and host of the DealQuest Podcast. | |||
| Episode 203: M&A Talk Series: Holiday Schedule with Corey Kupfer | 25 Nov 2022 | 00:06:02 | |
| Episode 202: From Sports Star to High-Powered Real Estate Investment with Logan Freeman | 23 Nov 2022 | 00:40:41 | |
Co-Founder, Chief Development Officer, and Principal of FTW Investments, Logan Freeman, is uniquely talented in investments while remaining compassionate. Alongside his fellow co-founders, Cory Tuck and Parker Webb, he co-hosts their FTW Investments’ podcast Invest for The Win. Logan is particularly committed to equitable access to affordable housing, collaborating closely with numerous groups to help eliminate home inequality and houselessness in Kansas City. Logan’s personal motto, “Do well by doing good,” has helped lead him with authenticity in his business endeavors. Logan’s specialty is focusing on off-market properties, with off-market properties accounting for more than half of his completed transactions. Having completed over 125 transactions, totaling more than $150 million, Logan’s unique talents allow him to effectively guide individuals and organizations throughout their entire investment journey. Nevertheless, Logan’s first dream wasn’t in investment, nor was it his first talent. Logan spent his formative years focusing on basketball and football, becoming a standout All-American collegiate football player at the University of Central Missouri, where he was spotted and picked up as an underdraft free agent player by the Oakland Raiders. He also spent his youth working in a hay field, offering him a background and upbringing focused on a sense of hard work and being unafraid to get his hands dirty to get the job done. Prior to going into real estate, Logan would flip cars and motorcycles. The concept is the same as flipping homes: Investing in updating run-down objects and then selling them for a profit. Vehicle flipping afforded Logan a firm grasp of real estate, which fits with his approach to the industry: Just because something is broken down, doesn’t mean it isn’t salvageable. Combining his willingness to “get his hands dirty”, do the work, and look at otherwise dismissed properties, Logan sets himself apart in the real estate industry.
COMMUNICATION IS HOW SELLING HAPPENS Confidence in a deal doesn’t end with how effectively the deal is structured on paper, and dealmaking involves more than merely coming to agreeable negotiations. When it comes to dealmaking, Logan emphasizes the necessity of communication. “Selling is just the transference of feeling from one individual to the next,” he opines. You accomplish this by:
By working on your communication skills, and becoming adaptable to others’ communication styles, your ability to create a successful deal is going to greatly increase because you’re building authentic confidence in the buyer for not just the proposed deal, but confidence in you.
STARTING IN SYNDICATION Syndication -- syndicated deals or syndicated loans -- is simply just one way of raising money from other people in order to gain financial support for your own investments. Usually, syndication involves using two or more lenders to fund one loan for a single borrower. A lot of time this occurs when a loan request is too large for one investor or firm, or falls outside of their risk tolerance, so multiple lenders come together to share the risk, and fund the proposed deal. There are two forms of syndication:
MISHAPS IN SYNDICATION Logan chose the joint venture route at the start of his real estate investment career, however, he soon learned that going it alone wasn’t the ideal option because he quickly ran out of knowledge, experience, and most of all, capital. He sought advice from his mentor, who advised him to bring on business partners that would “supplement his skillset”. To do this, Logan needed to evaluate a number of things in order to determine whom to bring in:
It took Logan a year and a half to go through these evaluations and find the right fit for his needs to build a rounded team of people. In 2019, his team was prepared to begin looking for project-specific syndication. Now, Logan and his team look for larger properties, IE: multi-family properties, shopping complexes, and industrial properties.
SYNDICATION FUND MODEL VS PROJECT-SPECIFIC MODEL While Logan and his team are currently operating under project-specific syndication, he doesn’t knock the advantages of the fund model. In fact, his goal is to one day switch to the fund model, in order to have more freedom in his team’s investments. There are advantages and disadvantages to both models of syndication: Project-Specific Model
Fund Model
One thing that is true for syndications, regardless of the model, investors are not looking for short-term projects. Many do not want to fund a project for 12 months, and then turn around and have to find a new project to fund, therefore, Logan’s projects tend to be on a 5- to 10-year holding. Regardless of the model, one thing is true for syndications: Many syndicate investors are not looking to sponsor a short-term project, and then 12 months later have to look for a new project to invest in. Logan doesn’t buy a property, fix it up, and then immediately put on the market; his projects typically have a 5- to 10-year hold period. This way, he’s building long-lasting relationships with his syndicates, building trust with his syndicates, which in turn allows him the ability to build a portfolio of successful investments in order to move towards a fund model syndicate and be allotted more freedom in the future.
ANTICIPATION OF THE FUTURE As I’ve mentioned many times, I don’t like to discuss “The R-Word” and become a self-fulfilling prophecy,however, recessions are a reality of capitalism, and you wouldn’t be doing your due diligence if you didn’t at least plan for the chance of how to operate during a recession or market drop. Although there was a lot of fear and uncertainty in the market after the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Logan and his company saw this as a perfect opportunity to purchase because prices were so low. This time period was ideal for buying if you could get equity and debt because they were historically the lowest levels they’ve ever been. It just took getting over the overall fear in the market and having faith in an upswing that allowed the company to make this decision that proved beneficial to them. That being said, Logan and FTW Investments weren’t the only ones in 2020 to have this foresight. Inflation was brought on by the three rounds of U.S. stimulus checks combined with this decline in prices and debt creating heavy – and rather fascinating – competition in the market. All of these factors compiled have caused interest rates to soar, which is creating another problem: Sellers are wanting the prices of yesterday, while buyers are wanting the prices of tomorrow. This is called a Bid-Ask Gap: Wherein the amount by which the ask price exceeds the bid price for an asset on the market. This current Bid-Ask Gap is extremely large at present, and this is causing transaction volume to “drop off the cliff”, so to speak, and it takes time for sellers to catch up to the present, and essentially “face reality”.
FRAGMENTED INDUSTRY OPPORTUNITY As this competition in the market grows, the market becomes fragmented. This simply means, there are numerous companies competing, and no single enterprise or small groups that control the sector. The real estate industry is becoming fragmented because deals done in the last 2-3 years were made with floating rate interest rates forcing owners to either refinance or buy a rate cap. Rate caps are extremely expensive right now, hovering somewhere around 7-8%. However, this fragmentation allows for opportunities for smaller companies to come in and grab assets at a discount. This method may cause some grief and headache for 12-15 months, Logan says, but if you’re a good operator, and have access to sources of equity and debt you can turn to, you can take on the risks and reap the potential for a huge reward. This is the period in which leading businesspeople like Warren Buffet or Charlie Munger say: “The time is now.” Great risk has the potential for great reward.
A HEALTHY RELATIONSHIP WITH RISK Regardless of how safe a deal appears to be, risk will always be present. Although there are no mathematical formulas that can calculate and quantify the risk of any given deal, if you approach every situation with the mindset of a dealmaker, you can begin to assess risk in a constructive manner. By utilizing the dealmaker mindset, you are enabling yourself to break free from unhealthy far of risk, and choosing to evaluate and respect all potential risks to your current idea, project, or deal. (For more on having a dealmaker mindset, check out: How To Have A Deal-Maker Mindset or Overcoming Negativity for Deal-Making Success, from the DealQuest blog.)• • • For my full discussion with Logan Freeman, and more on the topic: FOR MORE ON LOGAN FREEMAN AND FTW INVESTMENTS:
Corey Kupfer is an expert strategist, negotiator, and dealmaker. He has more than 35 years of professional deal-making and negotiating experience. Corey is a successful entrepreneur, attorney, consultant, author, and professional speaker. He is deeply passionate about deal-driven growth. He is also the creator and host of the DealQuest Podcast.
If you want to find out how deal-ready you are, take the Deal-Ready Assessment today!
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| Episode 201: M&A Talk with Leading RIA Aggregators and Integrators: Matthew Cooper of Beacon Pointe Advisors | 18 Nov 2022 | 00:42:27 | |
There are many impressive things about Matthew Cooper. In addition to being featured in Forbes Magazine, he was named a finalist for “Individual Thought Leader of the Year” for the 2019 WealthManagement.com Wealthies Industry Awards, and he was the winner of “M&A Leader of the Year” for the 2022 WealthManagement.com Wealthies Industry Awards. But, most meaningful to Matthew is the business that he is a Founding Partner and President of, Beacon Pointe Advisors, one of the U.S.’s most successful RIA firms with locations spanning all over the country. The RIA industry wasn’t Matt’s first business calling. As a matter of fact, after graduating from college, he entered the life insurance industry. Nevertheless, life has its turns, and that life insurance firm branched out into the RIA arena and, as Matt says, “Here we are.” Since he was the one to work out deals when a client’s loved one passed away, he had an early start at dealmaking. Through this early education in dealmaking, Matt took that knowledge and built Beacon Pointe into what it is today, a remarkable RIA powerhouse firm and acquirer.
BRINGING IN A CAPITAL PARTNER For nearly 20 years, Beacon Pointe had no capital partner. That changed when they took on two underlying RIAs – one expressly for the inorganic growth side of the business – and discovered they weren’t as aligned as they had believed. Not only did the M&A RIA start to grow larger than the other RIA, but several veteran shareholders were looking to exit and cash out. This misalignment paired with the timing of shareholders wanting to exit, caused Matt to see the natural need to bring in outside capital and merge the two RIAs together. Alignment is extremely critical in M&A; if one facet is out of sync, the entire thing might come crumbling down like a house of cards in a downpour. Matt took on the challenge, recognized the opportunity, and decided to bring in a capital partner to help the firm evolve. Choosing the right capital partner can:
For Matt and Beacon Pointe, the right partner was KKR & Co.
IT’S NOT A HOBBY As a dealmaker, Matt has been doing a lot of heavy lifting through Beacon Point. To make even one successful deal – let alone the volume and caliber of deals Matt makes – it takes a great deal of knowledge, tenacity, and dedication. Matt emphasizes the importance of dealmaking as a conscious exercise; “It’s not a hobby,” he adds. Nothing could be truer. For Matt to make such effective deals at the volume he does, he has a process that he sticks by:
FULLY INTEGRATED MODEL TO SERVE CLIENTS As previously discussed in episode 199 of The DealQuest Podcast, there’s debate within the M&A RIA space about aggregators versus integrators. Beacon Pointe is squarely on the fully integrated model side. This means:
The goal, whether you’re an aggregator or an integrator, is to reduce confusion of potential targets when there are so many options and choices available these days in the RIA space. To help mitigate confusion, Matt constructed a consistent story in the marketplace regarding Beacon Pointe’s all-wealth approach. This allows the various teams across the U.S. to have the flexibility and speak with their own voices while remaining on agenda with Beacon Pointe’s strategy. Matt’s approach to dealmaking is very people-oriented, so it really is about how well people within his firms get along, so he has three pillars he focuses on with Beacon Pointe:
EQUITY-FORWARD AND MAJORITY INVESTORS Another feature of Beacon Point’s integrator model is being equity-forward and doing only majority investment deals. Because of the need for cash flow at the time, Beacon Pointe’s first nine deals featured a 100% equity swap, but they now prefer to keep the equity between 20% and 60%, with the sweet spot for a typical deal being the high-30% range. These percentages result from the fact that equity is the most expensive consideration for them. However, equity is generally a very attractive incentive to investors, as the higher multiples and growth rate of Beacon Point helps create greater enterprise value for all. Depending on your goals and expectations, bringing in majority investors can be viewed as positive or negative. Some of the attributes of bringing in majority investors:
ATTRACTING THE RIGHT CLIENTS UNDER A FULLY INTEGRATED MODEL A significant part of the debate between aggregator versus integrator models is not only the route to the end goal but also the type of clientele you’re aiming to attract to your business while avoiding wasting time on deals that won’t function well with your model. Beacon Point targets firms with assets ranging from $3 million to $2 billion for Beacon Pointe’s fully integrated approach. Those within that target range are the best prospective firms to whom Beacon Pointe can bring the most value in the future. Other attributes Matt seeks in potential firms:
The intention should always be to create your structure to be attractive to the people that want to be involved. If you’re not projecting yourself in an appealing manner, you’re not going to garner interest, pure and simple. Beacon Points approach is to ensure that equity is split all around to achieve a long-term outcome that satisfies all involved.
IT’S ALL ABOUT GROWTH Growth does not only refer to the expansion of your own business, nor just your own personal achievements. The M&A RIA space has undoubtedly evolved and changed over the past decades. Currently, more RIAs are being founded than are being absorbed, so the market is expanding despite the consolidation caused by the aggregators and integrators. Whether you’re an aggregator or integrator, or you lie somewhere in between, or considering selling to one, you are part of a natural maturation of the RIA space that will continue for some time. One of the many elements that enables this industry to continue to expand and flourish is healthy competition combined with increasing options for all involved. We appreciate Matt giving us further insight into Beacon Point, one of those quality options, and his view of the RIA industry and deal market in general. Listen to the Full DealQuest Podcast Episode Here • • • FOR MORE ON MATTHEW COOPER AND BEACON POINTE ADVISORS: Corey Kupfer is an expert strategist, negotiator, and dealmaker. He has more than 35 years of professional deal-making and negotiating experience. Corey is a successful entrepreneur, attorney, consultant, author, and professional speaker. He is deeply passionate about deal-driven growth. He is also the creator and host of the DealQuest Podcast.
If you want to find out how deal-ready you are, take the Deal-Ready Assessment today!
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| Episode 200: Setting yourself apart in short-term rentals with Alex Jarbo | 16 Nov 2022 | 00:46:03 | |
A native of Detroit Michigan, Alex Jarbo didn’t grow up wanting to be a short-term rental developer. In his teenage years, Alex developed a deep respect for engineering, especially aerospace engineering. But like most teenage dreams, that took a back seat to the needs of life, wherein he served 4 ½ years in the United States Marine Corps Honor Guard. In his last few months of serving, he realized he didn’t want to re-enlist, so he thrust himself into any real estate investment classes he could before beginning his real estate professional career at the age of 22. Alex founded Sargon Investments in 2021, a short-term rental development firm. When Alex first entered the short-term rental market, he discovered that pre-existing structures didn’t fully suit his needs or goals. As a result, Sargon Investments took the initiative to construct custom properties to provide guests of short-term rentals with an exceptionally unique experience. Through Sargon Investments, Alex has a goal to develop 650 cabins in the next 3 years. Like many entrepreneurs, Alex believes in sharing his knowledge and educating others. He does this by hosting a YouTube Channel by the name of “Alex Builds” (https://www.youtube.com/c/AlexBuilds1), and by providing a free masterclass on short-term rental development via his website, www.alexjarbo.com.
FLIPPING, LONG-TERM RENTALS, & SHORT-TERM RENTALS Originally, Alex was interested in flipping houses. Flipping is where a buyer searches the market for less-than-desirable, even broken down, houses to invest in, fix while maintaining as much of the existing charm as possible, then put the renovated house on the market for a profit. In fact, while he was still in the Marine Corps, he began a mentorship for flipping houses. That was until he realized that the bulk of his mentor’s long-term wealth was tied to short-term rentals. He discovered he could make approximately the same amount of profit from 10 long-term rentals as he would from one short-term rental. Flipping, long-term rental, and short-term rentals are all profitable. Each has its positives and negatives:
Each paradigm for how you get into the real estate investment market is going to take planning and money up-front. You must do your due diligence and determine what your budget can realistically afford, what your end goal is, and how much involvement you want in the property. For what he had saved while serving in the Marine Corps, he found that pre-existing properties on the market were out of his price range for his short-term rental goals. As a result, he decided to build from the ground up. In the end, it proved to be beneficial. As of this episode, Alex has:
DEVELOPMENT AND PRE-EXISTING PROPERTIES In Alex’s case, it wasn’t just a lack of savings that kept him from investing in pre-existing properties to create short-term rentals. He had a strong desire to construct distinctive properties that were appealing and offered an experience in and of itself – outside of the larger market that the guest would be traveling to stay in – something he couldn’t really find on the pre-existing market. He focuses on building unique properties such as:
He specifically chooses to build single-family properties rather than multi-family complexes. This isn’t simply because of his creative style, but also because he can easily sell off these properties in the future, if necessary. Alex will occasionally buy pre-existing properties on the market, but he generally only buys ones with decent acreage so that he may develop them later. Somuch of his business is solely focused on creating new, exclusive “Instagrammable” short-term rental residences- omething the guest will be more than happy to show off to friends and family, and on social media.
AIRBNB/VRBO ISN’T YOUR BUSINESS, IT’S AN ARM Alex emphasizes that your booking facilitator – no matter if it is AirBNB, VRBO, etc. – should never be your entire business. Short-term rental owners shouldn’t rely wholly on third-party facilitators to book and market their properties. Some of the most important recommendations Alex offers for lightening your marketing load while maintaining buzz and profit:
If you allow your business to live entirely on AirBNB or VRBO, not only will they take a portion of your proifts but, essentially, they will control your whole business as you are subject to and can become a victim of their changing policies and algorithms. . Your goal in marketing should always be to maximize your exposure while minimizing your expenses and uncontrolled risk.
YOUR PROPERTY IS YOUR INVENTORY Most businesses that offer a product for sale have a very clear inventory: you’re selling X number of Y goods for Z price. On the surface, this is equally true for rental properties, whether they are long-term or short-term properties. However, many property owners are unaware that their inventory is more than just the number of properties they have available. Your available booking days are your biggest inventory as a rental owner. Every day that your property is not booked is inventory that is not sold. In the short-term rental space, there are always going to be times of the week, month, and year that are just not going to book as much as others. Travelers generally come to rent during festivals, conferences, and holidays, however outside of those events, your property is susceptible to sitting dormant. This is where Alex suggests you bring in social media influencers to help market your property. It’s a win-win barter situation: you’re getting marketing, and thus your inventory is not going unsold, and the influencer gets a place to make content. By viewing your booking days as your inventory for your product, you’re shifting your mindset into a dealmaker’s mindset. You’re going to be more motivated to find leverage in those days and to book those days, sell your product, and in return, be more successful and profitable.
THE NEW EVOLUTION OF BUSINESS It is no secret that the COVID-19 pandemic has had a wide-ranging impact on business, regardless of industry. Because of the pandemic, some industries saw a boost in profitability, while many others saw a decrease. To acclimatize to this new way of life, every industry had to effectively restructure how they performed business, and this process is still ongoing. Alex recalls the height of the pandemic and how bookings were practically non-existent in the short-term rental industry. People were staying homed; however, many people in business sectors and other professions still had to travel for work. Many of these professionals would choose a short-term rental over a hotel solely to avoid having to share space with other individuals. Alex elected to raise his prices – primarily to cover more extensive cleaning costs and to compensate for a lack of bookings – and he was able to remain profitable. While I try not to use the word “recession” since it may become a self-fulfilling prophecy, Alex and I discussed market downturns, the post-pandemic market, and what to do when things aren’t as successful as every business owner hopes. Alex’s top recommendations for us are:
INVESTING IN THE ENTIRE GUEST EXPERIENCE When building a business in the short-term rental market, your goal is to set yourself above the rest. During times of financial distress, many people will choose to not take a long vacation to some far-off destination, rather they will choose to take a shorter vacation merely a couple of hours away from where they live. If you’re looking to get into the short-term rental market, it cannot be stressed enough how much due diligence will play a big role in your success.
MOVING FORWARD Alex intends to expand his unique short-term rental development firm, with a goal of constructing 650 cabins over the next three years. While he is committed to his objectives, he understands – as any good business person should – that life occurs, the market happens, and things may change. Alex is preparing himself and his business for stable growth potential and freedom as a business owner based on authenticity by conducting due diligence, remaining amenable to the ebbs and flows of the market, planning for both, best- and worst-case, scenario situations, and taking lessons from bad decisions or unsuccessful deals. Listen to the Full DealQuest Podcast Episode Here For more on Alex Jarbo: Corey Kupfer is an expert strategist, negotiator, and dealmaker. He has more than 35 years of professional deal-making and negotiating experience. Corey is a successful entrepreneur, attorney, consultant, author, and professional speaker. He is deeply passionate about deal-driven growth. He is also the creator and host of the DealQuest Podcast. | |||
| Episode 199: M&A Talk with Leading RIA Aggregators and Integrators: Introduction with Corey Kupfer | 11 Nov 2022 | 00:13:19 | |
On Wednesday’s episode of the DealQuest Podcast, I discussed attending two RIA M&A conferences, and how I felt inspired to create a special series on the DealQuest Podcast dedicated only to the topic of the different deal models and structures of the top RIA aggregators and integrators. Well, folks, this is the beginning of that series. On Fridays, I will be bringing in leaders of the top RIA aggregators and integrators. After all, 91% of all these deals happening now are mainly being done by these private equity-funded firms.
WHAT IS AN RIA (A QUICK INTRO FOR THOSE NOT IN THE SPACE) For those in the DealQuest community less familiar with what an RIA is, it stands for “Registered Investment Advisor”. A Registered Investment Advisor (RIA) is a firm that provides wealth management and related services to individuals and institutions.. Unlike at brokerage firms, it is the independent RIA advisors have a fiduciary duty to always and only provide advice that is in the best interest of their clients. Some other responsibilities of an RIA:
AGGREGATOR AND INTEGRATOR I’m sure you’ve heard me use these terms on the DealQuest Podcast plenty of times. These are also terms used readily in not just the RIA space, but other industries, as well. So, what are they? There is a difference between “aggregator” and “integrator”, and not everyone falls under one label or the other. A pure integrator model is where a firm comes in and buys your firm with the goal of usually rebranding under the buyer’s brand. Some perks of using an RIA integrator:
The expectation is, through integration, focusing solely on building the one brand and building equity, enterprise value, and scale within the one brand. Whereas aggregators come in, buy your firm, but generally allow you to keep your branding. This can be done through co-ownership or being a separate entity. Some of the purported perks of aggregators include:
Our discussions will also cover how, sometimes, the aggregator and integrator models can be combined. In fact, some firms believe the best way to build a better deal is by combining what they perceive as the most advantageous features of both models.
THE RIA SERIES This series aims to provide RIA firms and advisors who are considering selling or just want to understand the landscape better, the opportunity to hear directly from the leaders of many of the most active aggregators and integrators in the RIA industry. Some of these topics include, but certainly will not be limited to:
By providing you with this series, I want you, as a potential seller or someone looking to understand the various options available for any other reason, to have access to the ideas and principles that underlie top aggregators and integrators and to get access to the visions and plans of the leaders of each of these firm, allowing you to evaluate them individually and easily compare them to each other.. I want you to be able to comprehend what some of the best firms and dealmakers did to establish themselves as industry leaders and how that may benefit you by either doing a deal with these leaders or emulating their approaches for your own independent greater success. Ultimately, although directed most specifically to the RIA industry, this series will be valuable for those outside the RIA industry as well. You will get unique insight into a maturing industry into which significant capital is flowing but one that still has a lot of room for additional growth and evolution. . There will be a wide range of topics covered that will be applicable to many listeners from other industries. My aim is always to assist you in becoming a better dealmaker, no matter the nature of your deal.
Listen to the Full DealQuest Podcast Episode Here
Corey Kupfer is an expert strategist, negotiator, and dealmaker. He has more than 35 years of professional deal-making and negotiating experience. Corey is a successful entrepreneur, attorney, consultant, author, and professional speaker. He is deeply passionate about deal-driven growth. He is also the creator and host of the DealQuest Podcast.
If you want to find out how deal-ready you are, take the Deal-Ready Assessment today! | |||
| Episode 198: M&A Conferences In The RIA Space with Corey Kupfer | 09 Nov 2022 | 00:37:50 | |
In the RIA M&A arena, fall is a busy time for conferences. I had the pleasure to attend two such conferences recently, both run by quality investment banking firms competing against one another in the RIA market. Despite each conference being run by competing firms, Echelon Partners and DeVoe & Co, I find it very fascinating the echoing themes between the two conferences.
MINORITY INVESTORS The start of the Echelon Partners’ conference began with the 10th annual debate between Echelon Founder and CEO Dan Seivert and Mark Tibergien, former CEO of Pershing Advisor Solutions. The annual debate – which I find to be quite fun – involves Dan and Mark taking 6-8 current issues, assigning each an opposing side to argue, and holding a traditional debate. Think back to debate clubs in high school, except in the RIA industry. The debate ends with an online vote from the crowd on who debated their argument better, with this year Mark being the winner – evening the 10 years’ worth of scores to 5-5. A topic that has come up often lately with my clients is discussing their options on different financing acquirers/minority investors. This topic, specifically in the investment minority space, happened to be one of the debate topics by Mark and Dan. While Mark and Dan debated on opposing sides, in the end, both expressed their opinions on taking on a minority ownership interest. From my view of their conclusions, they both expressed certain skepticism about the advisability of taking on a minority ownership interest in your firm. This skepticism is very interesting to me because I’ve for sure witnessed more and more minority investors in the space. In fact, at the DeVoe conference, I met a new minority investor I’d not known before, and we discussed the positives of minority investments. Some of the positives of minority investors are:
SKEPTICISM IN MINORITY INVESTORS So, the trend of minority investors entering the space is in an upswing, but why is there so much skepticism in the space towards minority investors? Well, one of the truest criticisms is that you may think by taking on a minority investor into your firm, that you’re keeping control. For instance, you bring on a minority investor for 20%, you maintain 80%, logically one might think because they have a majority of the equity, that they have majority control which, to some extent, is true, but also not true in important ways. Simply put, majority control does not equal absolute control. You will still have to consult -- and even answer to – your investor, even if they have a fraction of the equity in your firm that you do due to contractual control rights that minority investors require in these types of deals. This also becomes increasingly truer, and more complicated, if you decide to piecemeal your firm out to several minority investors. The types of contractual usually provide them much more power than their ownership stakes would otherwise dictate. For instance:
While there’s validity for these minority investors’ contractual arrangements – protecting their own interests and investments – it can become troublesome for majority owners. The most obvious reason being having to give up a significant amount of control, despite having majority ownership and only having partially monetized their equity. In the DealQuest Podcast, episode 198, I discuss more about the skepticism, and lesser discussed criticisms regarding minority investors.
THE IMPORTANCE OF HAVING THE RIGHT PEOPLE BEHIND YOUR DEAL In addition to offering education, conferences also provide networking and connection opportunities to others in your space. While at the DeVoe conference, I discussed many important deal and RIA industry topics with other dealmakers, and one story struck me as an important lesson. One of the CEOs I spoke with talked about a deal he was making, and how the selling RIA firm had hired an environmental litigator (a friend of one of the partners) to represent their interests in the deal. Since the seller lacked adequate representation which was making the deal too difficult to get done, this CEO felt the best choice was to cancel the deal. It's important you have the right people behind you during your deal-making process. This CEO did his due diligence and recognized that having an environmental litigator negotiate an M&A deal was not going to be successful for them. Some things to be sure of when choosing counsel to assist in your dealmaking:
The importance of due diligence cannot be overstated. I emphasize it so frequently because failing to do adequate pre-due diligence and due diligence (including on the choice of your team) can ultimately land you in a very unfortunate situation during your deal.
RIA AGGRIGATORS & DEALQUEST PODCAST LIMITED SPECIAL SERIES Another common theme between the Echelon and DeVoe conferences was that a significant portion of all the deals currently being made are by the “big aggregator and integrator firms.” At the DeVoe conference, it was cited that 91% of recent deals being made were by these types of firms. At the DeVoe conference, they held two aggregator/integrator panels. It was, again, fascinating and inspiring for me to hear these major players discuss their philosophies, strategies, and what they’re looking to attract and see the maturation of the RIA industry - one in which there was practically no investment capital and significant deal-flow less than a decade ago. It has, in fact, inspired me to run a special series on my DealQuest Podcast. On Fridays starting on November 11th, I will be running a special series highlighting the RIA aggregators and integrators within the RIA space. During this special series, I will be interviewing the CEOs and top executives of these major firms to create a resource that will help potential RIA sellers to understand the different offerings, models, benefits and comparative drawbacks of each of these firms and how they may align or not with a seller’s goals and objectives. This is going to be a great series. Tune in! Conferences offer networking and educational opportunities – and I urge folk to attend them when they can – however, not everyone can attend them,so, my goal of this special limited series is to offer an accessible platform and space for these important RIA M&A-specific discussions. Again, that special limited series will begin on November 11th, and air on Fridays for six weeks. You can check them out on the DealQuest Podcast, available wherever you listen to podcasts including on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Corey Kupfer is an expert strategist, negotiator, and dealmaker. He has more than 35 years of professional deal-making and negotiating experience. Corey is a successful entrepreneur, attorney, consultant, author, and professional speaker. He is deeply passionate about deal-driven growth. He is also the creator and host of the DealQuest Podcast.
If you want to find out how deal-ready you are, take the Deal-Ready Assessment today! | |||
| Episode 197: Making Your Business Attractive to Buyers with John Warrillow | 02 Nov 2022 | 00:53:34 | |
As an expert at selling businesses, John Warrillow has had his fair share of ups and downs in making businesses attractive to potential buyers; however, his goal wasn’t always to sell businesses. In fact, as a child, he wanted to be a host of 60 Minutes, and even suggests that were he not doing what he does now, he would absolutely seek working for 60 Minutes, finding a great thrill in investigative journalism. Nevertheless, it’s undeniable that John has always had a streak for business. He reminisces about his grade-school days as “Johnny the Juice Man,” wherein he sold juice to the Grade 6 cafeteria. Albeit his motives for this childhood business weren’t entirely work-motivated; he got to leave class early to set up shop to move his product. He has turned his ability to make businesses attractive in the market into a full business in and of itself, by founding The Value Builder System™, which is a sales and marketing program built with business advisors in mind. John also isn’t shy to share his wealth of knowledge, hosting his own podcast Built to Sell Radio, and authoring multiple bestselling books: Built to Sell: Creating a Business that Can Thrive Without You, The Automatic Customer: Creating a Subscription Business in Any Industry, and The Art of Selling Your Business: Winning Strategies & Secret Hack for Exiting on Top.
“Johnny the Juice Man” to “The Guy That Sells Companies” John recalls back to the first major business he owned, and when he was coming to the point of wanting to sell the business. He was very confident in himself – too confident, he implies – and in the business that he built. His perspective was that it appeared to be a virtual gold mine. He believed there was no way it wouldn’t sell for top dollar, but when it came time to sell his business, he was quickly faced with the reality that due the business was too dependent upon him and his various mistakes, it was worthless on the market, and there was no way to market it to potential buyers. This stark reality caused John to reevaluate the company, his standing, and make major changes to his business model, including:
These major adjustments to his business model allowed him to redesign his company’s structure to later become more attractive to potential buyers, which ultimately allowed him to sell the company to Gartner Group Inc., a large tech company that advises smaller companies and entrepreneurs on how to strategize, decision make, and create insights for their future. This brazen self-assuredness displayed by John is one of the overarching lessons I teach: Do not let ego control you or lead you. By allowing his ego to run his decision-making, John was met with a blunt admonition, requiring him to take several steps back, and ultimately delay the ability to sell his company. Had John made wiser choices and not let his ego rule him, his business would’ve been ready for sale much sooner; however, this was a lesson learned, and John heeded the experience of reality, and found his passion in helping other entrepreneurs set up and sell their businesses in a smart, goal-driven way, without ego. (For more on the pitfalls of running with your ego: check out Authentic Negotiating: Winning vs. Success Part 1 & Part 2 on the DealQuest Blog.)
“Revenue is Vanity” Your mindset is also a large component to preparing yourself to exit. As I’ve discussed many times, there’s a different mindset for each position you’re coming at regarding a business. For example, a seller isn’t going to have the same mindset as a buyer. For John, he needed to shift his mindset from allowing hollow numbers to indicate success to him, because after all, his business wasn’t marketable. This has caused John to opine that this learned mindset is detrimental to authentic growth. He swiftly learned that he was chasing vanity goals, and not the goal of authentic growth. Herein the adage of “revenue is vanity” reigns true. Some examples of chasing vanity goals:
Some examples of goals to chase for authentic growth, and tracking comprehensive value of your company:
These examples are not to say that you can never take into consideration or care about top-line revenue, or set goals to be accepted into the Inc. 5000. Nor is it to say that you must entirely forgo your own interests for the interests of others within your company. It is merely to say: By keeping in check what’s important, and focusing on authentic growth versus superficial growth, your business – and by extension you – will open many more fulfilling and genuine opportunities for success. John cites that his shift in mindset also aligned with the timing of him becoming a parent. He likens his need for lack of ego and selflessness in parenthood to what is required of him as a business owner, going so far as to allegorize himself as “the parent of his company.” The goal for him in business is much like his goal as a parent: Prepare the business with all the tools it needs to be successful, without dependence upon him.
PROFITABILITY, VALUE, REVENUE Focusing on profitability isn’t a negative thing in business, however anchoring your company’s successfulness strictly onto profitability is the wisest move. While implementing authentic growth strategies is key to building more stable success, the value of a company in the market can often be oversimplified to just numbers. By understanding this reality -- while also maintaining authentic growth goals – you create a balance for yourself and your business, which increases your chance at lasting success. When taking into consideration the habit of processing the value of a company into numbers, it’s important to make sure you’re focusing on the right numbers. As previously pointed out: Obsessing over profitability isn’t a good move; rather, you should focus on 8 key factors to compiling company value:
PROFIT MULTIPLIER If you focus solely on the top-line revenue, and not how you generate your company’s overall profitability, you can easily get yourself stymied in the unreliable cycle of one-time revenue sources; whereas, if you focus on finding balance with the 8 keys to company value, your worth and market value begins to steadily rise with security. A sizable variable you need to focus on is the multiplier of your profitability; what multiple of your profitability would a buyer be willing to pay for your business. For example:
You want to build your business’s rounded, sustainable profitability to be so attractive to potential buyers, that you can achieve as high of a profitability multiplier as possible.
THE NAÏVETÉ OF ENTREPRENEURS Among the biggest challenges entrepreneurs face is their own naïveté and lack of informed knowledge in deal-making. John’s proclaimed mission is to better educate entrepreneurs, so they do not fall prey to the first flashy deal that comes in their line of sight. John’s goal is undoubtedly a noble one, but it comes from his own learned experiences. Many predatory buyers and VCs will pull out all the stops to woo a business owner, wine and dine, and slap a number with more than a few zeros on the end, enticing the lesser educated entrepreneurs into accepting a deal that may not be the most valuable, or have terms in the contract that traps you in (such as no-shop clauses). Here are some key topics John feels passionate about entrepreneurs knowing:
Being a highly educated entrepreneur will greatly reduce your chances of being taken advantage of or leaving a significant sum of money on the table by agreeing to a deal that wasn’t in your own best interest. John cites a study wherein it claims 74% of business owners have some form of regret a year after they sell their company. The last thing any entrepreneur wants is to wake up one day, second-guessing if they made the right decision, or to come to realize they left money on the table because they were too hasty, or not educated enough to make a beneficial deal. After all, “success” is not just closing a deal or the highest dollar amount- it’s also making sure you’ve made a deal that is the most beneficial for yourself. Never sell yourself, or your business, short or accept any less than what absolutely you deserve.
• • • Reach out to John for more: • • •
Corey Kupfer is an expert strategist, negotiator, and dealmaker. He has more than 35 years of professional deal-making and negotiating experience. Corey is a successful entrepreneur, attorney, consultant, author, and professional speaker. He is deeply passionate about deal-driven growth. He is also the creator and host of the DealQuest Podcast.
If you want to find out how deal-ready you are, take the Deal-Ready Assessment today | |||
| Episode 196: Two Can Be Better Than One: M&A and Building Boards with Brad Feld & Matt Blumberg | 26 Oct 2022 | 00:56:43 | |
When discussing entrepreneurialism and venture capital, sometimes the conversation can be greatly beneficial when it’s opened to beyond just two people. On episode 196 of the DealQuest Podcast, Corey does just that – he’s opened the conversation to include two successful and talented entrepreneurs- Brad Feld and Matt Blumberg. They discuss the many intricate details of entrepreneurialism, venture capital, starting and running a company, and so much more.
BRAD FELD Brad Feld got his entrepreneurial start in college when he founded his first company, Feld Technologies. This has allotted Brad over 35 years of entrepreneurial experience, which has been greatly beneficial to his co-founding of the company Techstars. Not only that, but working in tandem with his wife, Amy Batchelor, they run the Anchor Point Foundation. Not only is Brad actively engaged with entrepreneurialism, but he’s also written several books on entrepreneurship and venture capital, as well as began blogging in 2004 on these topics. At present, you can find him on Twitter, sharing his knowledge in the niche corner of “VC Twitter”. “VC Twitter” – aka Venture Capital Twitter – is a community of people who utilize the social media platform’s tools and broad communication to discuss venture capital, and come together to exchange education, knowledge, and resources.
MATT BLUMBERG Like Brad, Matt Blumberg is a long-time, successful entrepreneur, author, and business owner. Unlike Brad, Matt’s expertise is being a technology entrepreneur. Brad is also the CEO of Bolster, an on-demand executive talent marketplace, designed to help accelerate companies’ growth. They focus on this growth by connecting companies with highly vetted executives for the interim, fractional, advisory, project-based, or board roles. Matt’s experience spans back over 30 years in marketing, consulting, and venture capital. Having built, founded or chaired several successful businesses to date, including PathForward.org, Oblong Inc., and Return Path Inc. Matt’s success in entrepreneurialism doesn’t just stop at his personal achievements in business, but also his knowledge and skill in business has been recognized by Business Insider as one of New York’s 100 most influential technology leaders, by Crain’s as one of New York’s Top Entrepreneurs, and by Ernst & Young as an Entrepreneur of the Year finalist.
THE PROGRESSION OF BUSINESS RELATIONSHIPS Brad has been in the business of entrepreneurialism since the mid-80s, a lot has changed. When selling his first business, Brad was taken under the wing of two successful dealmakers of their time, who taught him some of the base tenements of deal-making. Their style of deal-making fell out of favor with the advent of the digital age – wherein things can become quite impersonal – but Brad prefers to keep it a bit “old school”. Simply meaning, he believes in keeping deal-making as a relationship – personal, and beneficial to both parties.
During the infancy of the internet, Matt was on the executive team for a then-small cap public company, Moviefone. Matt was alongside the CEO and CFO during the dealmaking process of selling Moviefone to AOL. He, too, attests to the importance of focusing on the relationship between professionals throughout the entire deal-making process. Ironically, the sale of Moviefone began over a handshake in a movie theater during the premiere of You’ve Got Mail. Matt spent 20 years building the company, Return Path Inc., with Brad spending 19 years on the board. Return Path Inc. was sold in 2019, however a potential deal two years prior almost came to fruition. Matt asserts that the former deal failed, and the 2019 deal was successful, ultimately because he knew the CEO of the eventual buyer, and he did not have a relationship with the earlier bidder. Thus, corroborating the importance of having a growing relationship between dealmakers throughout the deal-making process.
INVESTING FOR ORGANIC GROWTH Brad began to develop his serial entrepreneurial skills by getting in on the ground floor of new-age seed investments by quickening his pace, and investing in a new company each month, something almost entirely unheard of in the mid-90s at the beginning of the commercial internet, wherein most seed-investors played a slow and steady game with their investments. With the birth of the internet-age in the mid- to late-90s, new businesses in tech began to spring up like weeds, and Brad took this newly flourishing market to begin making angel investments.
For Brad, his ability to become an angel investor, combined with his strategic positioning within the companies, opened a lot of doors, leading into some of the more well-known VC businesses of today.
ACQUISITION FOR INORGANIC GROWTH While investing capital into a company to build equity is a good path to build organic growth, another valuable way to build growth, for some, is inorganically. By taking a smaller company, acquiring other smaller companies, to the point that the growth becomes a chain link of acquisitions that build a larger company. IE: Company A acquires Company B to make Company C, Company C acquires Company D to become Company E, and so on and so forth. The goal of growing a business is to always be additive to what you already have. In the business of inorganic growth, it’s important to only seek companies that can add to what you’ve already built – it won’t always work out successfully, but the goal is always to remain in forward momentum. Especially as a buyer, you can’t be afraid of making a mistake, making a bad deal, or acquiring a business that ends up not being additive to your core company. Brad’s anecdotal evaluation on acquisitions is a half-joke passed to him from his mentor: “Would you buy it for a dollar?”
As Brad says, “When you ask that question, [you find] there’s a lot of stuff you wouldn’t buy for a dollar.” This rule applies to the acquisitions of companies. Frankly, if you wouldn’t spend money on it, why are you entertaining the idea of spending money on it? When Matt was looking for investors for Return Path Inc. around the time of the dot-com bubble and collapse, another small company – that just so happened to have Brad on the executive board – was also at the doorstep of the same investment company. The investment company compared the two businesses, and noted that they were fundamentally the same. The deal then became merging the two like-companies into one larger company, with Return Path Inc. becoming the acquisitioner. While Matt recollects that deal in one way, Brad recalls his view somewhat differently, which revolves back to, and is another testimony of, the importance of building relationships in dealmaking with authenticity. Depending on your position approaching the deal, and your position within the respective companies, your field of vision on the deal may vary, and good practice is to keep in mind all the potentially differing viewpoints.
RISK ASSESSMENT FOR GROWTH Within business there is always a risk curve. You want to post yourself in a comfortable area of this risk curve, especially at the start of any new deal potential. Your deal should be primarily about generating upside, not mitigating risk:
* for more on pre-due diligence, check out Lesson 2: How to Prepare for Deals in the Deal-Driven Growth Accelerator course
THE PATHWAY TO BUILDING A BOARD While Matt has authored, with contributions from Brad, two other books on this subject, Matt and Brad jointly constructed Startup Boards: A Field Guide to Building and Leading an Effective Board of Directors, released in June 2022.
Board-building is no easy feat. Many of the things addressed in Startup Boards are designed to make entrepreneurs think about their board and evaluate:
Startup Boards is intended to serve as a field guide for all these entrepreneurs wading the harsh waters of startup and board building, and offer them guidance and a hand up to building their successful company board. They want and expect the reader to dog-ear and reference back to Startup Boards like a map, as the reader journeys through the world of startup and board-building, with hopes of becoming one of the success stories everyone hears about.
Reach out to Brad Feld for more: Reach out to Matt Blumberg for more:
Corey Kupfer is an expert strategist, negotiator, and dealmaker. He has more than 35 years of professional deal-making and negotiating experience. Corey is a successful entrepreneur, attorney, consultant, author, and professional speaker. He is deeply passionate about deal-driven growth. He is also the creator and host of the DealQuest Podcast.
If you want to find out how deal-ready you are, take the Deal-Ready Assessment today! | |||
| Episode 195: From Bicycle Ice Cream Truck to Serial Entrepreneur with Craig Swanson | 19 Oct 2022 | 00:49:37 | |
Craig Swanson is an entrepreneur, CEO, business coach, and founder of CreativeLive, a free-to-use, live online global classroom designed to educate entrepreneurs. He also likens himself as a “secret weapon” as a partner for many online businesses, such as KaisaFit- a fitness movement founded by fitness influencer, Kaisa Keranen. Craig’s expertise is focused in helping businesses hit—and succeed beyond—the multi-million-dollar mark. Craig is a dealmaker at the core of all his business endeavors as a serial entrepreneur. This entrepreneurial inclination began at a young age for Craig, having started his own large paper delivery route at the age of 12. As his paper route grew, he knew he wanted to franchise out, and decided to build his own ice cream truck--attached to his bicycle! Young Craig took his business seriously, going so far as to get the appropriate wholesaler licensing. With his creative look at his paper route and desire to expand, Young Craig was able to multitask his business into selling ice cream, while he delivered his 200 papers. Craig sees business as an opportunity for creativity; for instance, not many children would see an opportunity to deliver newspapers from their homemade bicycle ice cream truck! Craig is creative, original, and always seeking new ways to improve things that already exist.
Creativity in the Deal The biggest takeaway from Craig’s young inauguration into entrepreneurialism, with his combination paper route/ice cream truck, is a question that even highly skilled adult entrepreneurs fail to ask themselves: “I already have a customer base, how can I capitalize more on this customer base, and offer them something new?” Entrepreneurs, at all stages, need to find the same child-like creativity with their business, and should constantly be evaluating the following:
Creativity doesn’t just include coming up with a product or how you will market your product, it also includes how you’re going to build your customer base. For Craig, the creativity behind the product is easy; what he sees as the biggest challenge is how to market it to potential customers, and build that loyal customer base. Creativity in business also includes how to expand or exit your business. For Craig, he sold his first IT business, CreativeLive, to ex-employees in 2010. One might think that making a semi-internal deal such as this doesn’t take much creativity, but it’s not as clear cut as, for example, an external deal. By selling his business to his ex-employees, some of which had become his competition in the market, he had to work closely with these ex-employees, and build a creative deal. In fact, Craig had a pre-existing deal with an MSP (Manage Service Provider) built to sell his business externally to that third-party buyer; however, he decided he would rather sell to his ex-employees who were interested in buying his business, so he took that initial deal and creatively re-worked it in order to work for the “internal” purchase. For Craig, his first deal wouldn’t have gone so smoothly had he not been smart about his employee relationships. Ultimately, his business was sold to former employees of his company, who upon exiting his company, had signed non-compete contracts – as is a relatively standard practice for most businesses. However, even with the employees leaving the company, and signing non-compete contracts, Craig was smart enough to maintain positive relationships with these former employees, especially when they entered the same market in their own capacities. Because of these wise moves regarding his former employees, when it came time for him to sell his company, his former employees approached him to purchase it. He was able to work a creative deal, which was beneficial to all:
Playing “Cut-throat; Win-Win” Your mindset and attitude within business is just as important as maintaining good relationships and being creative in your dealmaking. If you expect to lose, you’re effectively playing to lose, and no one wants to lose in their business deals. By operating with, as Craig calls it, a “cut-throat; win-win” mindset, Craig is always proceeding like he will succeed with the deal, no matter how bleak it may look. He believes in knowing what you want, pushing the limits to what you need, but never pushing beyond the limits. Ergo, “cut-throat; win-win”: Pushing for what one needs and pushing just a bit harder, so something is on the table for everyone at the end. Confidence is key, but don’t let your confidence turn into overzealousness or arrogance. A less than desirable, common occurrence in business, and especially in dealmaking, is overconfidence or worse-straight arrogance. An example of arrogance impeding business would be:
This is where the importance of mindset and attitude plays a vital role. Had the CEO not gotten overzealous and continued to make promises they couldn’t (or wouldn’t) keep to a rising star within their company, they’d have never lost a valuable employee, clients, or created a competitor with a negative relationship. Don’t let your ego get in the way. Be confident, know what you want, and certainly push for it, but do not become so arrogant, you abandon your personal principles and become someone so willing to get what you want, you damage your credibility, or worse, damage another person.
Evolving Your Decision-Making Skills Craig recalls back to his 25-year IT business, and how he built it to be a business where the boss didn’t have to work. How various market dips, and personal business choices required him to essentially sell off his business bit-by-bit to get by, until he finally made the deal with the ex-employees to buy his business. By the time Craig got to the point of starting his next business, he brought in a partner with a 51/49 split ownership. While this worked well, having a virtually equal partnership posed some issues when it came to disagreements on decisions. This is where they brought in a silent CEO with 5% ownership. In bringing in a 3rd party with just 5% ownership, they allowed themselves:
A valuable lesson Craig learned from involving this 3rd party with 5% ownership is that being a creative person can sometimes be a detriment to your business. Just because he had a chronic desire to create and do, does not mean the business needed those things pushed upon it. By having this evolved paradigm for decision-making within their company, Craig was being held accountable and responsible for good decision-making, and making sure his personal priorities and interests were not forced upon the company’s priorities or interests.
Knowing Your Strengths and EOS® Any successful entrepreneur learns that finding a balance between relationships, decision-making skills and creativity is going to be your golden ticket to strategically and wisely hitting that $1mil a year landmark. Craig’s current business is using EOS® (Entrepreneurial Operating System). EOS® is a designed set of concepts and tools with the intent to:
Craig utilizes the EOS® in order to do what he does best: be hands-on. He integrates with emerging entrepreneurs to become a de facto operator to build a business, help them hit the $1mil milestone, and then take his exit to help another emerging business. The important part here is that Craig knows what his strengths and talents are, therefore after he helps businesses build to that $1mil a year milestone, he transitions onto the next entrepreneurial business; he’s talented at operating to that milestone, but beyond that point is where his talents and skills become less useful to the company he’s helped build, and thus takes a more advisory position, such as a board position. For Craig, the most satisfying experience is building the company to a point where it doesn’t need habitual micromanagement. For others, it may be stepping into the operation once the company is much larger, it’s all about knowing your strengths, skills and talents, and using them to be the most beneficial to the business being built. This harkens back to the lesson of never letting your ego get the better of you. He recognizes that his strengths are at their best and most joyful for him at the early stages of operation. While he knows he is capable of operating a business beyond his personal $1mil mark that is not where he is at his best or most passionate so he chooses to be self-aware and to not allow his ego to get in his way; he chooses to make sure his strengths are applied in the best way for the business, and not just for him.
Reach out to Craig for more:
Corey Kupfer is an expert strategist, negotiator, and dealmaker. He has more than 35 years of professional deal-making and negotiating experience. Corey is a successful entrepreneur, attorney, consultant, author, and professional speaker. He is deeply passionate about deal-driven growth. He is also the creator and host of the DealQuest Podcast.
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| Episode 194: International Deals with Corey Kupfer | 12 Oct 2022 | 00:23:38 | |
Business has many facets, and Corey covers one of the largest parts of business: deal making; however, deal making itself has many facets and forms. The larger your proposed deal becomes, the more intricate the process becomes. Once your business begins to take on international deals, there are very specific things that come up when evaluating the potential deal, and it varies greatly from doing domestic deals. ⦁ It is important to become familiar with business traditions and cultures of regions you're doing business in. Research the region you're doing an international deal within; some regions have very specific traditions they hold when it comes to business, and specifically making and signing deals. ⦁ It is also important to research the business and deal-making laws of the region you're doing business within. What's legal in your country, may not be legal in the country you're doing a deal within. ⦁ Some region's laws and cultures change between smaller jurisdictions,so be sure to look at laws and cultures not just of the country, but on a local, smaller jurisdiction scale, as well.
One must first start the process of asking themselves why they're wanting to make an international deal? Due to the increasing accessibility of deal-making on a global scale, it becomes hard to avoid international deals. Another reason many businesses have chosen to make international deals instead of keeping business domestic is due to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, and lockdowns causing serious supply chain issues. The war of Russia on Ukraine has also had a massive impact on supply chains and access to various goods and resources.
One of the biggest factors of international deals is strictly the availability of the region. Some regions are more flush with certain resources than others. There's more opportunities for certain businesses to grow by doing international deals, rather than seeking resources domestically. When deciding if your business would benefit from switching into an international deal, one must look at their business andneeds, and decipher whether they can continue healthy growth domestically, or if they should expand and begin looking to make deals internationally. This is the basic concept of "supply and demand," a business looking to grow must look at their demand, and find where the most accessible supply is.
As stated before, international deals have many benefits, but they also have a sense of delicacy, so you get it right. Going into any potential business deal with lacking knowledge is a bad idea; this is especially true for international deals. While having someone stationed within the region you're looking to do business is not a requirement, it greatly benefits your business and your deal's potential of success. A very important tool to a business looking to make international deals is having a trusted, local partner that is either extremely familiar with the region, or even better, resides within the region you're looking to do business within.
A person in the region you're doing business can help you define and navigate:
Finding a partner that is familiar with the region you're doing business can become a valuable tool to you and your business. They can help you navigate all of the region-specific characters and features. but moreover, you need to trust this local partner. Building a trusting relationship with your local partner is a key to having a successful partnership in the region you're aiming to do business in.
A great example of the usefulness of a local partner for an international deal is for regions like Japan, where tradition and culture are deeply ingrained into every aspect of life, especially business.
A deal within Japan is a very procedural affair. You build a relationship by having dinners, going for drinks or simply going to sing karaoke, wherein not word of business is spoken. If the relationship before business is discussed is comfortable, then the relationship within the deal is believed to go much smoother. In fact, if you try to force the business conversation too early, it can be perceived as rude or disrespectful, and your attempt at a deal will be shut down.
This is where having a partner that is accustomed to the locale's cultures, traditions and laws comes in handy. They know the intricate details of making deals within that region, and they are less likely to offend cultures or traditions, resulting in losing a potential deal.
One of the biggest hindrances to international deals: not understanding local legal and tax laws. If you're looking to expand your business to make international deals, you must make sure your legal, financial and tax employees are prepared and knowledgeable on the laws and tax codes of the region you're looking to do business.
Laws vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, so ensuring that your team is prepared and knowledgeable will offer you a chance to be successful, and avoid possible blockades,, be it legal, tax laws, governmental treaties, or merely a cultural disrespect.
A lot of foreign businesses will set up U.S. based subsidiaries because it's often easier for U.S. based subsidiaries to do business with U.S. companies, versus doing business with a foreign entity. This is not always the case, but it is a widely used tool for foreign businesses to do business within the U.S.
An important thing to note when being a U.S. business doing deals with a U.S. based subsidiary is the legal protections offered. There are many governmental protections put in place for deals made strictly within the U.S. borders, even if the mother company of the subsidiary is foreign. This comes in handy for disputes or breach of contract. It all depends on how the foreign company has set up their U.S. subsidiary, so be sure to do your due diligence on not just the foreign mother company, but especially the U.S. based subsidiary you're working with. Also be sure to be prepared and knowledgeable in U.S. business laws, and how they can benefit you when working with a foreign company's U.S. based subsidiary. Doing due diligence with a U.S. based subsidiary also includes doing your research on the mother company. It is your responsibility to know who and what you're doing business with, even if you're merely dealing with their U.S. subsidiary.
International deals are an incredible asset to many businesses, but they also pose inherent risks and road blocks.
By practicing all the due diligence you can, you're going to make your deals more successful and keep your business growing and thriving. Corey Kupfer is an expert strategist, negotiator, and dealmaker. He has more than 35 years of professional deal-making and negotiating experience. Corey is a successful entrepreneur, attorney, consultant, author, and professional speaker. He is deeply passionate about deal-driven growth. He is also the creator and host of the DealQuest Podcast.
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| Episode 301: Empowering Women in Entrepreneurship with Robbie Hardy | 31 Jul 2024 | 00:44:26 | |
On this episode of the DealQuest Podcast, Robbie Hardy joins me to discuss her extensive experience as an entrepreneur, author, and investor, particularly focusing on the challenges and triumphs of women in business. As the founder of XELLE Ventures, an angel fund dedicated to investing in female founders, Robbie offers unique insights into the entrepreneurial journey and the importance of empowerment and mentorship. FOR MORE ON ROBBIE HARDY: FOR MORE ON COREY KUPFER:
Corey Kupfer is an expert strategist, negotiator, and dealmaker. He has more than 35 years of professional deal-making and negotiating experience. Corey is a successful entrepreneur, attorney, consultant, author, and professional speaker. He is deeply passionate about deal-driven growth. He is also the creator and host of the DealQuest Podcast. | |||
| Episode 193: Professional Failure with Justin Skinner | 05 Oct 2022 | 00:38:17 | |
Growing up on a farm in the Midwest of the U.S., Justin Skinner had no intent or idea of becoming a real estate investor or author. In fact, he wanted to be a professional baseball player from the age of two, when his father gave him his first baseball. By the time he reached college, he realized that he wouldn’t be playing baseball after graduation, so he began to seek other avenues and jobs to figure out his life’s path. Through all the doors and opportunities of post-graduation jobs, he stumbled his way into real estate investment – negotiating his own real estate deal with a college friend in banking for an off-market commercial property. Connections and Relationships MatterDue to his connection from college, Justin was allowed access to creative financing for his first deal. Most people believe that going into a bank is just to crunch numbers, but it’s really about building a relationship. Luckily for Justin, he had a previous connection, so the relationship was already built, but that doesn’t mean you can’t walk into a bank today and start building a trusting relationship with a financier to help get you the best deal possible, whatever your endeavor may be. For Justin, he chose to utilize the growing popularity of short-term rentals via the renting giant, Airbnb. Justin buys and builds properties in vacation and high turnover locales and turns them into short-term rentals for various types of customers- the biggest being vacationers and traveling healthcare professionals. Short-Term Is Not For Everyone’s Long-Term Goals Like Justin, many people get into AirBNB with the intent of making it their entire business, but there’s a problem with this business model. If you’re intending to keep your business team small, en masse AirBNB ownership is going to be extremely limited. It is hard for a business owner to sustain multiple AirBNB properties without a team to match. Another issue with mass AirBNB ownership is local laws and neighborhoods that simply do not want a short-term rental property in their neighborhood. Laws are growing in every state to prevent over-saturation of short-term rental properties, and this can become an obstacle for those seeking to keep their AirBNB business to one locale.
Many travelers are tired of staying in characterless hotels, especially long-term, and long for the comforts of home. This is why many choose AirBNBs versus hotels on their journeys. This poses a tedious and expensive task for short-term rental owners: You are required to put significant money into furnishing the property and giving it the upper hand over traditional hotels through the feeling of “home”. This is why Justin is choosing to pivot his business to buying and building properties for a traditional rental structure. Pivoting into the Traditional By taking his knowledge of short-term rentals, Justin is able to pivot into traditional rental ownership. By building new residential structures, Justin is able to put a low down payment, for example, $10k, finish it for $220k, with an appraisal of $300k, and come out with a positive of $60k+ in property equity. He then uses this positive property equity to return it to his property, which means less money that needs to come out of his pocket to get the property prepared for renting. Justin currently chooses to keep positive equity within his properties instead of pulling it out or refinancing because of the uncertainty of the future with market drops and dips. This is his protection from these potential market fluctuations so he is not left trying to hastily put equity back into his properties.
Slow and Steady By rushing into trying to build a multi-million dollar real estate empire, it’s easy to get into debt. By managing your business growth at a slow and steady pace, your likelihood of failure is reduced. Becoming overzealous or lofty in your goals to make money – especially with the intent of quick money – you run the risk of a market dip tumbling your whole enterprise and falling into severe debt.
By making connections with seasoned real estate veterans, heeding their stories, looking at market trends, and doing the behind-the-scenes education, Justin is able to set up a comfortable standing for himself in the real estate business.
Professional Failure Certainly, Justin is no failure, but he has had failing moments. When getting into the business of real estate, Justin began listening to others’ success stories, in fact, that’s all he heard about: the success stories. Which was good to hear, but didn’t reflect his own experiences authentically,so he began journaling his thoughts and feelings about his experiences, successes and failures.
Justin began thinking about all the lessons he learned — especially from his failures — and how this mindset of failing can encompass a person. He began to believe that to get the whole picture, one needs to know about all sides, not just the success stories.
From these journaling and introspections was born his book, Professional Failure. Justin’s goal is to share the real experiences he’s had to help others not feel like a failure just because one single idea failed. He wants his readers to understand that fear of failure is real and valid, and how to navigate these feelings, while not allowing yourself to become consumed by fear or one bad experience. Justin believes that his learned experiences will help others to also push through their fears of failure to become the success stories he hears on podcasts and articles.
Professional Failure is the culmination of Justin’s belief that failure is not the end all be all, and that you cannot have the successful stories without the failures along the way.
Connect with Justin for more: justin@professional-failure.com
Corey Kupfer is an expert strategist, negotiator, and dealmaker. He has more than 35 years of professional deal-making and negotiating experience. Corey is a successful entrepreneur, attorney, consultant, author, and professional speaker. He is deeply passionate about deal-driven growth. He is also the creator and host of the DealQuest Podcast.
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| Episode 192: Upgrade Your Company's Marketing To Better Deals with Wayne Mullins | 28 Sep 2022 | 00:40:20 | |
Over the past 20 years, Wayne Mullins has proven himself a versatile professional. Wayne has worked with clients in over 100 industries, from nonprofit organizations to multi-million -dollar enterprises. He expertises in helping companies market themselves, find deals, and accomplish significant acquisitions. In this episode, he explains how to structure marketing in order to scale your company better. The bulk of Wayne's clients seeks his expertise because they are entrepreneurs who have come to realize their marketing is not effective. With so many functional sectors in a company, marketing is often left out, this often happens because many managers charge the marketing of an entire company to a single employee who is fulfilling a role and doing marketing at the same time; this approach does not work. A strategic approach is a better option, putting someone dedicated in order to achieve more. This is the difference between a company with effective marketing, and a company with poor marketing. Marketing In Acquisitions: Targeting The Audience Marketing for companies is not simply about giving credence or justice to your existing products. If you are positioning your company for acquisition, marketing is also essential. You need to ensure that the message you are sending is attractive and appealing to prospective buyers. To ensure that, see the following items:
Strategic Communication With Employees Imagine being hired by a company that just starts delegating without even communicating the company’s culture. Terrible, right? That is why a communication strategy for employees is crucial to your reputation. The team plays an important role in productivity, so it has to be treated with care. Many people do not even realize that marketing also has this function within a company. Anytime a change is going to take place – whether it is an acquisition or a sale – there’s always going to be some grief by the team members. Wayne works to craft internal marketing messages to help them move through that loss and grief process quickly, so the company can get back to scale much faster. Wayne advises companies to do this by helping them realize that the potential losses are not nearly as bad as they believe. The Message Format Is Important One of the larger questions asked is how does a company or manager communicate the message to the employee? One approach is simply an e-mail. This is an easy method to communicate your message, but it's simply not the best way. A much better approach is via sending a printed letter to each employee. This is a common marketing strategy that adds an element of personalization, which conveys to the employee that you value them. By taking the time to be personal in your correspondence with an employee, you set the tone for the relationship from that point forward. Relationship Marketing As A Small Business Tip Wayne’s company is in a small market, but it reaches millionaire customers via its long-term game strategy, meaning their marketing strategy is not about a transaction, but a relationship. Have you ever stopped to reflect on how your company connects with people? By focusing on marketing to develop relationships with other professionals and people, his company ensures an alliance with individuals who can add to his business. Organic Marketing For Scaling First, you need to decide what your business wants to achieve, then you utilize marketing strategies effectively. Marketing to scale is organic, unlike growth marketing, which often needs inorganic impulses. Scaling your company is not necessarily about revenue or rate of growth, the key component for entrepreneurs is that synergy must take place you. The growth is taking place because of others' inputs, alongside your own. Marketing Is About Communication Wayne shares that a common mistake is thinking of marketing as something to produce for the public and prospects; in reality, marketing is about communication and persuasion, so the intentionality behind the messaging matters. With clear intent to articulate marketing internally, you can overcome most of the obstacles that come along with buying, selling, and acquiring.
Connect with Wayne for more:
Corey Kupfer is an expert strategist, negotiator, and dealmaker. He has more than 35 years of professional deal-making and negotiating experience. Corey is a successful entrepreneur, attorney, consultant, author, and professional speaker. He is deeply passionate about deal-driven growth. He is also the creator and host of the DealQuest Podcast.
If you want to find out how deal-ready you are, take the Deal-Ready Assessment today!
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| Episode 191: Achieving Financial Stability Through Real Estate with Jack Gibson | 21 Sep 2022 | 00:49:45 | |
From his college dorm making direct sales, Jack Gibson began his journey at age 19, where he built a multimillion-dollar venture before he was old enough even to rent a car. After several stock market setbacks, he became passionate about learning everything to do with real estate investing and generating passive income. This is why Jack Gibson is now a go-to person for investment guidance. Gibson has also authored "Indestructible Wealth", a practical guide to building an investment income. In this episode, Jack shares his favorite investments to achieve financial freedom, and gives valuable advice for those starting out: focus on one main stream of income, and eliminate distractions to build your wealth faster. Investing in Something Predictable A common problem all entrepreneurs share is income inconsistency. It does not matter if your company is five, twenty, or fifty years old, results can still fluctuate depending on the country's economy. Of course, you can do dividends, but what good does a 1.5% average yield do? That is not enough to increase your net worth. As already mentioned in earlier episodes of the DealQuest podcast, it is hard to compete in the stock market, especially for the average individual investor. Doing anything other than dollar cost averaging into a diversified portfolio/trying to beat the market does not pay off for most investors. Furthermore, technology like program trading systems can make it all the more difficult to compete with the big players. To ensure a stable income in his career, Jack started focusing on passive investments. There are always going to be times of volatility in the markets--and no business is truly 100% passive--but, by focusing on investments in less efficient markets like real estate in which you have more chance to be competitive and find lucrative deals and in connection with which you do not lose any sleep fearing losing your income overnight. Real Estate: Low Risk And High Return Real estate endeavors represent 70% of Jack’s total portfolio, and is a great place to have incremental growth. As it is a less efficient market, there are more opportunities for smaller players to do well. The competition between investors is also fairer, as it requires you to study and dedicate yourself to understanding the market:
As an example, Jack once acquired an $80K property where he did not check the evaluation for five years, then he sold it for $230K. In his mind, no other investment has such low risk and high returns like real estate.
Storage: The Most Passive Income As stated earlier, there are no investments that are completely passive. However, storage is as close as you can get to it. Although real estate represents almost all of Jack's portfolio, he says his favorite investment is storage facilities due to how passive and resilient it is to any economic downturn. The way Jack can have good returns in the storage sector while not having it be a distraction to his core real estate business is simple: he is an investor in somebody else’s syndicate which makes the storage facility investments. Multiple Streams Of Income Can Distract You You’ve probably heard the phrase: "You shouldn’t have all your eggs in one basket", this is partially true! But for people early in their career, multiple streams of income can become multiple streams of distractions, reducing your ability to dedicate yourself to the possibilities for your money to grow. If you look at most financially successful people, they started with a single stream of income, focus and dedicate themselves to it, and diversified as they grew. According to Jack’s experience, this is the most effective way to build wealth faster. You Can Invest In Down Markets As opposed to what many people think, there are enormous opportunities in down markets, including when buying properties. People often miss this window out of fear and lose what could be a big deal. During the COVID-19 stock market crash, Jack was convinced the market was going to continue to drop, but after a few days, the opposite happened: it rebounded fast. Jack missed an incredible buying opportunity by trying to predict the bottom time. So, do not let fear stop you, markets always cycle in and out, we just do not know when.
Connect with Jack for more: https://www.myindestructiblewealth.com/ https://highreturnrealestate.com/
Corey Kupfer is an expert strategist, negotiator, and dealmaker. He has more than 35 years of professional deal-making and negotiating experience. Corey is a successful entrepreneur, attorney, consultant, author, and professional speaker. He is deeply passionate about deal-driven growth. He is also the creator and host of the DealQuest Podcast.
If you want to find out how deal-ready you are, take the Deal-Ready Assessment today!
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| Episode 190: How To Close the Deal with Corey Kupfer | 14 Sep 2022 | 00:10:34 | |
After finding the deal, structuring it, doing due diligence, and possibly a lot of negotiating with the counterparty, the most awaited part has arrived: closing the business deal. Whether you’re a first-time business owner or already experienced one, there’s always room to learn new approaches for getting deals closed. In this episode, I’m going to discuss some high-level but fundamental things you need to know to get your deals closed. Do Not Close The Deal In Your Mind One of the first mistakes that people make is closing the deal in their minds when it is not closed in reality. Just because the negotiation has been done, a letter of intent has been signed and things seem promising, it is not time to be careless. Before you ”close the deal in your mind” pay attention to these items.
The Risks Of Checking Out Before Closing The Deal
Watch Out For Your Ego When you are close to closing a deal, the counterparty may raise problems and create misunderstandings between the two of you. This type of moment requires a calm mindset: do not let your ego get in the way of a good deal. Keep your emotions out of it and trust your gut. That doesn’t mean that you have to do the deal. It’s important to be sure you can trust them, especially if it’s an ongoing partner. Maybe you realize that you’re not the ideal partner, or something may come up that goes against your principles. The way forward is to watch your emotions and reactions to make sure you’re clear-headed before giving up on a deal for good. Align When Third Parties Will Take Part The decision of when you or your counterpart should introduce new parties into your organization requires balance. Consider carefully how the insertion of additional parties into the business will be viewed by your counterparty is key, even before closing the deal. Balance the need to continue to operate the business and make good business decisions and how it might impact your potential deal All relevant people on your team also need to be aligned with this knowledge, so they can organize tasks in the best possible way. If this is not defined, it may adversely affect getting the deal closed. A fundamental negotiation principle is getting total clarity on exactly what’s acceptable to you in the negotiation. If you do not know your deal’s goal, anything - such as economic issues or if a key employee leaves - can rock the stability of your business and prevent you from closing the deal. Concentrate On The Pre-Due Diligence A lot of deals fall apart in the due diligence phase. One of the best ways to prep and make sure deals get closed is through pre-due diligence. A tip is to focus on who your buyer is and do the due diligence accordingly. For example: if somebody is making an investment in your company, your professionals (investment bankers, business brokers, consultants, attorneys, and accountants) should know what kind of due diligence (such as friends and family, angel, private equity, or venture capital investors) is going to want, and you should work with those professional in advance to ensure that you are fully ready for all due diligence requests. The Deal Checklist As a final piece of advice, do not let the momentum die down, ensure that stakeholders and other professionals are aligned with all aspects of the business, so they do not lose interest. Loss of momentum or interest can cause a potentially great deal to be lost.
Corey Kupfer is an expert strategist, negotiator, and dealmaker. He has more than 35 years of professional deal-making and negotiating experience. Corey is a successful entrepreneur, attorney, consultant, author, and professional speaker. He is deeply passionate about deal-driven growth. He is also the creator and host of the DealQuest Podcast.
If you want to find out how deal-ready you are, take the Deal-Ready Assessment today! | |||
| Episode 189: How To Grow Your Business Online Through Partnerships with Marion Wagner | 07 Sep 2022 | 00:40:22 | |
Marion Wagner is the Business Mindset Coach every entrepreneur needs. In her career, Marion has specialized in helping online entrepreneurs create six-figure game plans without a large following on social media. In the online space, there are a lot of opportunities to improve or create a new business. Marion teaches a combination of psychological and strategic approaches to transform her clients’ approach toward online growth. Marion also runs Marion Wagner Coaching and hosts the Get Out of Your Head & Grow Your Online Business Podcast. In this episode, we talk about online business deals, the psychology behind these types of moves, and how and why to seek strategic partnerships and collaborations to grow your audience and income. Know How To Make Online Deals And Partnerships Many think that when we talk about online deals, we are talking about influencer deals—in which a public person negotiates the exposure of a product or service with a brand; this is certainly one type of deal, but it’s not the only one. Many types of strategic alliances take place in the online environment, and you can explore all of them with your business. For starters, Marion gives some tips for building partnerships:
A good strategic partnership provides three things: 1- You form a strong—and maybe long-lasting—beneficial relationship. Relationships are essential in business. By partnering with someone in the same or a different niche, you are expanding your online possibilities. 2- You speed up your audience's growth. Through a good partnership, you can leverage someone else’s already built audience. The partner company has spent years and years building a loyal, engaged audience and getting access to them is precious—you can spend $30,000 on Facebook ads and not get that same ROI. 3- You align and tether to a top performer in your industry. Having that shared credibility and that recommendation is priceless. You can’t buy credibility, but you can partner with people who already have it. How To Make Partnerships If Your Company is Small A common question: why would big companies want to do deals with a small company? Marion explains this kind of mindset holds back many small business owners when negotiating. If you are an expert in your field, it does not matter the size of your following if you can add value to someone’s audience in a unique way that they are unable to fulfill without you or someone like you. You can bring in a new market, a new geographic target, your contacts, or your specific expertise. Launching A New Product Through Partnerships If you are launching a new service or a new product, it’s very intelligent to bring in strategic partnerships to gain access to their audiences. How does one do this? In this type of deal, there is usually a commission or affiliate fee/share that the partner gets paid. Choose the partners wisely and give them an affiliate link with marketing materials targeted to their audience. These partners share through their avenues, maybe launching your product with their email list or on social media platforms. In the social media market, it is common to have a 30% to 50% commission for this alliance. Tip: You have to figure out to whom you’re pitching a partnership. If you’re pitching to someone who makes seven figures to be an affiliate partner, and you’re only offering them 10% or 15%, that may not be worth their time. The Mindset Behind Growth If you are trying to get someone to close a deal with you, they can tell if you believe in what you are offering or if you do not believe in the pricing you are charging people. Nobody is going to pay you more than you think of your work. That’s why it’s so important to believe in your value. Marion works with her clients to help them develop this mindset and have them develop strong belief until nothing gets them down and they just keep stepping forward. She advises that you want to turn yourself into a magnet where good things are attracted to you. Authenticity Takes You Far Online From her own experience, Marion shares that believing in herself led to success. For one year and a half, she blogged for less than five readers. Marion then realized that with all the content she produced, she was trying to copy all the other bloggers. From there, she drove 100% authentically into herself and started using her distinct voice, not caring about rejection. Within a matter of months, she reached a quarter million page views, just by being in alignment with her real energy. Reaching People As An Exercise If you are an entrepreneur building an income, or if you already have your business and are looking for ways to expand it, Marion advises starting with the impact at the forefront of your mind, and then the income will come as you find your way; however, you can not find your way just by reading it in a book or watching someone else doing it. All successful entrepreneurs did not get to where they are by operating in isolation. The best way to start a relationship with anyone online is to reach out and tell them how great their work is. You want to build true relationships and connections over time.
Connect with Marion for more: Website https://marionwagnercoaching.com/ Instagram https://www.instagram.com/marionwagnercoaching/ Masterclass https://view.flodesk.com/pages/6262db3aec93244248594f0f Podcast https://marionwagnercoaching.com/podcast/ Corey Kupfer is an expert strategist, negotiator, and dealmaker. He has more than 35 years of professional deal-making and negotiating experience. Corey is a successful entrepreneur, attorney, consultant, author, and professional speaker. He is deeply passionate about deal-driven growth. He is also the creator and host of the DealQuest Podcast.
If you want to find out how deal-ready you are, take the Deal-Ready Assessment today!
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| Episode 188: Cryptocurrencies: Lessons And Perspectives with Phillip Blows | 31 Aug 2022 | 00:46:47 | |
Phil Blows is an expert in financial planning and wealth management. He has been involved in the crypto market for years and spent four years speaking to over 10,000 retail investors about how they manage their money and then designed AQRU - which he is the co-founder and CEO. The AQRU PLC is a business specialized in helping institutional and retail customers, simplifying the crypto buying journey by making it safe and accessible for everyone. Phil is also the author of a personal finance book, "The Money Triangle: 3 Simple Steps to Transform Your Finances And Achieve Financial Freedom.” According to Phil, 95% of crypto coins will die - however, only 5% that lives will change finance forever. In this episode, we’re going to talk about raising money through specs and the wild trials and tribulations of the crypto market - as in the second half of 2022, it is down about 70% from the highs. Whether or not you are familiar with crypto, this is a great episode for you to understand this market and how to invest in it. Do Not Measure Crypto Like The Traditional Market Phil explains that crypto is a digital financial asset, which is hard to measure. In a lot of aspects, cryptocurrencies work in the same way as the traditional financial markets; you can lend assets and you can borrow them. Unlike the traditional market, crypto moves faster, which makes it very unstable. In an economic crisis, the traditional financial market takes, on average, about 18 months to overcome the bear market. The same logic does not apply to crypto, as it occupies much smaller space and the pace of innovation is 20 times faster—one year in crypto is like 20 years in traditional finance. How to invest in crypto safely? People interested in this investment must do their homework by observing how this currency has performed in the past and using this as a reference. The advice to profit from this is to identify potential successes versus failed investments. Crypto Trends: Regulation According to Phil, there are two upcoming trends in this cryptocurrency: First is the use of different collateral types to bring what are currently dead assets into the financial blockchain and the second is the increase of regulation. In theory, crypto is a libertarian currency, which means that regulators should not interfere with its functioning. Phil counters this assumption: You shouldn't trust billions of dollars to people whose background you do not know. As in every market, there are frauds in this space and predatory activities going on. Regulations make it clear what financial institutions can or can't do, so the average consumer feels safe investing - they will know who to go after if they fall for a scam. As crypto has no real money on the market yet, these regulations will be beneficial to attract more investors. What Are The Risks Of Investing In Crypto? Everyone does not generate yield in the same way, which makes the risk profile poorly understood by a lot of investors. There is a yield curve in crypto as there is in traditional money. The longer you lend something to someone, the higher the yield you’re going to receive for that period. It is common for players to stop their investments because of uncertainties. It's complex to understand the yield in crypto. There is a lot of speculation. Investors may have the impression that they have entered the classic liquidity trap. They need to generate yield on it, just like a bank would, by lending out assets to other counterparty institutions that have capital-intensive businesses that need liquidity. Phil’s company, AQRU, helps with this transparency. He believes that this level of transparency of crypto will attract people who invest traditionally, especially in the economic crisis. Imagine if you had this level of transparency during the 2008 financial crisis when you could see a live assessment of the bank’s P&L. Should I Invest In Crypto In An Economic Crisis?Let’s be honest, we have never seen crypto in an inflationary environment, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't invest. Pay attention to the type of investment you are getting involved in and the amount of capital that you are putting into play. Phil advises that new crypto investors are getting the highly concentrated version of crypto when they should get the balanced version of crypto. As an example of his portfolio, Phil says he does not want 10% daily volatility. He owns 50% of crypto assets currently sitting in crypto that are pegged to the dollar value. In the other half, 25% of it is not a trend-following system. To get into crypto, Phil says we should understand that it should be only 5% or 10% of your investment portfolio.
Connect with Phil for more: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philipblows/
Corey Kupfer is an expert strategist, negotiator, and dealmaker. He has more than 35 years of professional deal-making and negotiating experience. Corey is a successful entrepreneur, attorney, consultant, author, and professional speaker. He is deeply passionate about deal-driven growth. He is also the creator and host of the DealQuest Podcast.
If you want to find out how deal-ready you are, take the Deal-Ready Assessment today!
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| Episode 187: Lessons for Building a Sellable Business | 24 Aug 2022 | 00:57:01 | |
Michelle Tucker is the Founder and CEO of Seiler Tucker Incorporated. She holds a M&AMI (Mergers & Acquisitions Master Intermediary) title, as well as the Certified Mergers and Acquisitions Professional (CM&AP) and Certified Senior Business Analyst (CSBA) titles. Michelle also owns many other businesses in several industries. She has sold over a thousand businesses in almost every vertical with a remarkable track record of success. Michelle is also an author; her latest book is called, “How to Acquire Wealth Through Acquisitions.” As a 20-year veteran in the M&A industry, she is regarded as a leading authority on buying, selling, fixing, and growing businesses. In this episode, Michelle explains why 80% of businesses can’t be sold and how to not become a statistic. She is the ideal person to teach you how to build a valuable business to sell, and to create a company that works for you - not one that you work for. Build A Sellable Business For The Desired Price Tag There are plenty of opportunities for businesses to do deals that will bring profit, but certainly, M&A is one of the biggest tools to grow and create enterprise value; however, most businesses are not sellable. According to Steve Forbes, 80% of businesses on the market will never sell. M&A Source says 90% of the ones that sell are not sold for the desired price tag. According to Michelle, the number one reason businesses are not sold by the desired price tag is because business owners are too busy working in their business, and not on it. They don’t think about selling until they are exhausted and burned out by working. Another reason is that in times of crisis, such as the pandemic, businesses go through difficult situations and entrepreneurs decide to give up their companies. Michelle warns you should never sell your business during a catastrophic event, as is trending downward. If your business is not making much money, the only one interested in buying is a turnaround specialist. Usually, this type of professional wants to acquire your business for a lower price than it’s worth. Start Planning The Exit From Day One Business owners have to plan their exit from day one of starting or buying a business. In case you’ve been in business for 10, 15, or 20 years, it’s not too late to plan. Start somewhere. If you want to sell a $20 million company, then build a million-dollar company. Use the GPS Exit Model as a guide. The GPS Exit Mode
Michelle advises all business owners to plan the exit with this GPS exit model. Many entrepreneurs do not have a destination and manage their company finances aimlessly. To work around this, follow the steps below:
How to Make Your Business Sellable To build a more salable business, business owners need to invest in infrastructure. These following items contribute to greater value for your company:
- People: Many business owners work performing most of the tasks in the business, making the business 100% dependent on them. Michelle’s lesson is to address your business weaknesses, rather than trying to solve them yourself. In other words, hire people smarter than you to deal with the issues. You’re never going to grow unless you let go of the control. - Product: Your product is your company or service. When you decide to sell it, you must do it in your prime. Map the industry and look at your position. You don’t want to lose the timing and sell your company when it’s outdated. - Process: You can have the best team in the world, but if you don’t have an effective process, it won’t be profitable. The process helps manage the people and streamline. Michelle uses McDonald’s as an example; the process design was developed around the customer experience. As a business owner, do not make the process convenient for your lifestyle. Ask yourself: what do my customers want to experience? If you don’t invest in great experiences in these competitive markets, especially in this economy, you’re going to lose market share. - Proprietary: Many entrepreneurs make the mistake of just registering their website’s domain and thinking that’s enough to protect their name, without ever checking the federal database, risking not being able to use the company name legally. To resolve this, hire an attorney to do the legal work. - Profits: To make a profit, you need to have multiple revenue streams. You can’t take the risk of relying on just one source. The pandemic was the biggest example of this. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Your Business is Your Asset To make your business sellable, Michelle advises business owners to think differently. Try to analyze the market you are in, evaluate the pros and cons of your company in this market and work on your business weakness. That way, you will create value for your company and be able to execute your exit plan. Connect with Michelle for more:
Corey Kupfer is an expert strategist, negotiator, and dealmaker. He has more than 35 years of professional deal-making and negotiating experience. Corey is a successful entrepreneur, attorney, consultant, author, and professional speaker. He is deeply passionate about deal-driven growth. He is also the creator and host of the DealQuest Podcast.
If you want to find out how deal-ready you are, take the Deal-Ready Assessment today! | |||
| Episode 186: How To Have A Deal-Maker Mindset with Corey Kupfer | 17 Aug 2022 | 00:09:35 | |
Being a good entrepreneur or successful business owner doesn’t exactly mean you’re a dealmaker. If you want to expand your business possibilities, you need to have the right mindset to avoid getting into poor deals. I am fascinated by the concept of getting into the right mindset to make good negotiations. In this solocast, I will explain some principles for you to shift your mindset to build a deal-related skill set. Know Your Potential Deals A good indicator that you have the dealmaker mindset is that you have the habit of thinking about the potential deals that you can already do; is simple, but extremely important. A dealmaker is constantly mapping out all the possibilities for new business. Don’t hold yourself back and always leave open the possibility of partnering with all types of people. When launching into a new market or niche with a product and service, my number one advice is to consider who the people that already have access to that industry are—probably the first group of people who come to mind are your competitors. Consider teaming up with them. Never eliminate the possibility of doing business with competitors. Even on the DealQues podcast, we had several professionals who shared their successful deals with competing companies. Consider reaching out to complementary businesses—businesses that sell into that client base, industry, or that demographic region you want to enter; those are the companies that sell complementary products. Approach them with some kind of proposal- it can be a partnership, a strategic alliance, a distribution deal, or a sales commission deal. First, don’t focus on how these alliances will be structured. This can derail the negotiation and limit your business opportunities. Focus on how this negotiation can be helpful for your company. The structure can be worked out together later, or you can also ask your attorney for advice. Specialize In Deal-Making One of the important aspects of this mind shift of becoming a dealmaker is scheduling time to look for new deals, meeting professionals to tutor you, and educating yourself about businesses in your field. I started this podcast so that more people could hear from other professionals and their deal processes. Always take other's experiences as lessons for your career. When you hear a professional talking about their deals, take note:
This can all be learned through videos, books, or podcasts on the deal side. This has to be a priority in your routine, as well as your other administrative tasks in your business, so you will be better prepared to do what is most beneficial for your company. Get Used To Taking Risks Yes, every entrepreneur is a risk-taker on some level, but for a deal-maker mindset, you need to constantly watch yourself to make sure you’re not in your comfort zone. With the day-to-day of the company, having to do the payroll weekly, and with some ups and downs in the market, it can seem intimidating to take a risk on a deal that there is no guarantee will work. The shift to becoming a dealmaker is being able to calculate and take those risks. Practice The Deal-Maker Mindset Train your mind to look out for opportunities and understand the risk that’s involved with deals. Gradually, you will be more and more confident about making good negotiations. In the DealQuest podcast, there are thousands of examples of successful deals that you can apply to your career as a way to start.
Corey Kupfer is an expert strategist, negotiator, and dealmaker. He has more than 35 years of professional deal-making and negotiating experience. Corey is a successful entrepreneur, attorney, consultant, author, and professional speaker. He is deeply passionate about deal-driven growth. He is also the creator and host of the DealQuest Podcast. If you want to find out how deal-ready you are, take the Deal-Ready Assessment today!
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| Episode 185: How To Raise Capital For Your Company with Maximilian Rast | 10 Aug 2022 | 00:38:51 | |
Maximilian Rast has over ten years of experience raising capital for different companies. He was CMO at YFood Labs GmbH, the 100+ million euro revenue brand with over 100 million euros raised by Jumia South Africa. After years of working as a stakeholder raising capital for other businesses, Max now raised funds for his own company. He is the Co-founder of Klar, a single source of truth for e-commerce brands in Germany. Klark combines its data to help track performance, scale growth, and increase profitability. In this episode, Max shares his valuable capital-raising lessons from the perspectives of the stakeholder and the decision-maker, as raising capital in his own company. He is the ideal character to provide the best insights for entrepreneurs looking to raise funds. Have A Clear Target For The Capital Yes, your company needs capital, but do you know how to use the money that will be raised? You need to define your company’s simple needs and how that investment will be used, even before raising capital. Set this as precisely as possible for yourself and the investors. There can be so many company needs in the beginning that it can be confusing to understand how the funds will be used. For companies that are just starting out and do not have market experience, Max gives a tip: when defining objectives, understand the model and alignment of expectations of where this company ought to be going. You will have a better destination for the capital raised. If your company has been in the market for a few years, the targets are already clearer. Max shares that speed to market motivated him to raise capital for his company, as there was a market need for his product. He used the investment money to increase the chances of exploring that opportunity, getting more people on the team and getting out there before the competitors. When Choosing Investors Think Strategically in Value To finance his own company, Max chose one institutional investor and a dozen angels. Behind this choice, he strategically thought about how these professionals could add to his company. His tip is: ask yourself if the angel is someone you see yourself getting a call from every week to help you grow the business. Max explains that choosing the angel isn’t about the money, as his company had a good track record.Raising money wasn’t the concern; the concern was the value the investor could provide on top of the money, especially in the early stages. It’s surprising the expertise you can acquire from your collection of angels. Companies that are successfully raising money get a lead investor, who’s a significant player with some status. Once you do that, it’s a lot easier to raise capital from others, since it makes it possible to have more investor options. That’s a dominant position to be in because you can make strategic decisions amongst the people interested in funding. The Idea Is Not The Most Important To Investors Many people have the misconception that to get investors, the most important thing is the innovative business idea. Of course, the product or service ideas matter, but it is not the main one. According to Max’s career experiences, investors are attracted by: 60% team involved 30% market in which the business is inserted 10% idea or product Max shares that when getting to know your business, potential investors want to know if the team involved can carry out the proposal, which is the biggest concern. Investors also need to know if the market for this product is viable and healthy for investment. These are the factors that sustain the success of a good idea. When presenting the proposal to investors, include some aspects to give dimension to your project, so investors can trust their money on you. There are a few main things they want to know:
Raising Capital Pre-Launch You may wonder when you should raise funds for your company. There are certain types of businesses that can only exist if they raise capital pre-launch. This type of company needs significant capital investment to build product development, testing, and government approvals. If your company team is a large group, you also need to prepare and raise funds before launch, as these employees will need health insurance. Raising Capital for Acceleration Raising funds is not just for companies that have not started yet or are going through some financial difficulty. Capital raising is a way to expand opportunities that are not practically fundable through cash flow. For example, if your company is already operating well, then raising capital can allow it to advance even further. Maybe you need a growth accelerator, want to more quickly gain market share, a desire to grow enterprise value more quickly or foster geographic growth- all of this can be achieved with additional funding. Focus On The Projections There is no good deal that’s not fundable. The secret to winning over investors is to show projections and returns that are exciting enough for an investor. Investors are concerned about what the return on investment would be, as 9 out of 10 investments fail. That is why it is essential to explain how big the potential market is going to be. When raising capital, understand how your company operates and especially what the primary motivations are for raising this money, which will put you in a better position to organize and raise capital at the right time.
Connect with Max for more:
Corey Kupfer is an expert strategist, negotiator, and dealmaker. He has more than 35 years of professional deal-making and negotiating experience. Corey is a successful entrepreneur, attorney, consultant, author, and professional speaker. He is deeply passionate about deal-driven growth. He is also the creator and host of the DealQuest Podcast.
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| Episode 184: When a Win-Win Deal Becomes a Win-Lose Deal with Steven Rothberg | 03 Aug 2022 | 00:46:26 | |
Steven Rothberg is the founder and chief visionary officer of College Recruiter, a leading job search platform for students and recent graduates around the world who want to find career opportunities, such as internships, seasonal work, and part-time jobs. In business since 1996, College Recruiter has helped 5 million candidates. In his career ahead of College Recruiter, Steven has been involved in hundreds of deals. Regardless of the deal, his goal is to provide beneficial and helpful candidate and recruiter experiences. CR clients are primarily Fortune 1000 companies - the largest companies ranked by revenues in the United States - federal government agencies, and other employers who want to hire newcomers to the market. In this episode, Steven recounts how he created win-win partnerships to ensure that both organizations involved become strengthened. He also unfolds his experiences with what entrepreneurs fear most: breaking a deal. Steven gives professional tips on how to prepare for this end by having a mutually satisfactory agreement up front that provides a clear roadmap for how to end the relationship. Understanding Win-Win Partnerships To understand partnerships and start using them in your career, Steven warns that the best partnership is the one in which both companies come out stronger than they came in. The alliance must bring profits and/or other benefits to both for the life of the partnership. If, at any point, that is no longer true, at least one of the parties will be looking at how to end the deal. Let’s say you’ve started a great partnership and for a while nothing seems to shake it. Does that mean it will be like that forever? Steven says that it’s very common for partnerships to be win-win at the beginning, but if one partner starts to lose profit over time or the deal no longer fits their business model, then it no longer makes sense to continue in the deal. Business models change, the market changes, and people change - turning what was a perfect fit into a detrimental partnership. This is where you should look for how to amicably and cooperatively work together to end the deal and be freed up to find your next partner. As an example, let’s take the first strategic alliance to increase organic growth that College Recruiter made in the early years of the company. The company had already launched the job board, but the site was not very good - if it had over 25 people using it mutually, it would crash. Can you imagine? The solution to making College Recruiter improve their software issues was to team up with a technology company that provided everything they needed for the platform on a white label basis. Like most businesses, College Recruiter hasn’t built all of its company resources from scratch, but buys and licenses parts of the company. The service included all the development work, customer service, and processing of credit cards with customized services and heavy customer support. All this was for an extremely cheap price in hindsight! As the partner company providing these services grew and developed, they realized, within a couple of years, that this was not a sustainable business model for them anymore. It wasn’t a win-win deal, as it was very profitable for College Recruiter alone; this is why the partnership ended. This often happens in business, and entrepreneurs must be prepared for it. Parting Ways After the partnership ended, Steven had to deal with another scary part of the business: parting ways at the end of a deal. There are some ways to be ready when it comes to ending the contract. Steven shares key principles for every entrepreneur: Face reality - a lot of entrepreneurs don’t want to look at the possibility of something potentially going wrong. It’s important to be a realist when doing business deals. Whether it’s because of speed or saving money desires, they don’t evaluate their contracts carefully and it can bring issues when it is time to part ways. The entrepreneur needs to be realistic and prepared for the rupture of the partnership from the beginning. Agree with your partner from the start - the entrepreneurs need to agree on how to part ways from the beginning of the partnership. Analyzing the contract with a professional before signing the papers is crucial and will save you a headache in the future. That’s why doing shareholders’ agreements or operating agreements for multi-owner companies is so important. Attention To The Contract Parting ways is not simply deciding who owns the candidate data or who owns the relationship with the customers; you still owe the revenue share to the partner. Will that be terminated? Bought out? Steven says that when it came time to part ways with his business partner, it was an extremely easy process. There were no real disputes, as everything was already agreed on previously in the legal documents. A golden tip is to entrust these agreements to good lawyers, as they guarantee any potential problems in advance. Steven shares that this is a great help as the lawyers go through each contract clause and have experience anticipating these potential issues. Making Partnerships Without Getting Stuck Even if partnerships and business development deals boosted your company’s growth, they may not work in the long run. As shown by Steven, every entrepreneur needs to know how you end a partnership that is no longer working. Every deal inevitably ends. Be prepared for it! Connect with Steven for more: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevenrothberg/ https://www.collegerecruiter.com/ Corey Kupfer is an expert strategist, negotiator, and dealmaker. He has more than 35 years of professional deal-making and negotiating experience. Corey is a successful entrepreneur, attorney, consultant, author, and professional speaker. He is deeply passionate about deal-driven growth. He is also the creator and host of the DealQuest Podcast.
If you want to find out how deal-ready you are, take the Deal-Ready Assessment today! | |||
| Episode 300: From Homelessness to Financial Empowerment with Grace Vandecruze | 24 Jul 2024 | 00:47:21 | |
On this episode of the DealQuest Podcast, Grace Vandecruze joins me to share her remarkable journey from humble beginnings in Guyana, South America, to becoming a leading investment banker in the financial services industry. With over 20 years of experience, Grace brings a wealth of knowledge in mergers and acquisitions, financings, capital strategies, valuations, restructurings, and private placements. FOR MORE ON GRACE VANDECRUZE: FOR MORE ON COREY KUPFER: Corey Kupfer is an expert strategist, negotiator, and dealmaker. He has more than 35 years of professional deal-making and negotiating experience. Corey is a successful entrepreneur, attorney, consultant, author, and professional speaker. He is deeply passionate about deal-driven growth. He is also the creator and host of the DealQuest Podcast. | |||
| Episode 183: How To Invest In Real Estate with Kent Ritter | 27 Jul 2022 | 00:44:06 | |
Kent Ritter is a full-time real estate investor, a former management consultant, corporate executive, and startup owner. After successfully exiting his first company, Kent turned his focus to real estate. Now, he is the CEO of Hudson Investing- a multifamily investment firm that helps professionals scale and diversify their real estate portfolio with cash-flowing wealth and building assets. He has achieved financial freedom and is dedicated to teaching others how to make good investing decisions. Whether you are new to real estate or have years of experience, this episode includes some valuable real estate lessons to help you along the way! Increase The Value Commercial real estate is an income-based evaluation. If you increase that income, you increase how much it’s worth; this is an important investment tool that allows you to achieve financial freedom. Kent shares that one of his favorite aspects of real estate is the ‘forced appreciation’- by infusing the property with capital, renovating units, and taking care of deferred maintenance, you will be able to increase the rents and decrease expenses, which drives up valuation. It is similar to buying and selling businesses: the higher the quality of the property, the more profit. Not only do you make more cash flow, but if one day you exit that business or sell that property, you’re getting a multiple on that cash flow. Stay Away From The Bigger Players A valuable lesson learned over the years in Kent’s career is that unlike the open stock market, where everyone is trading all over, real estate is more about the broker’s network. Investing in real estate allows competitive value, as there is not as much exposure to these types of deals. A lot of opportunities in real estate are not on a national platform, so this is a benefit for minor players! To help lessen investment competition, Kent discovers strategic moves with opportunities that others may not see. For example, Kent and his company are strategically staying under an ROI of 200 units when investing. Reason being is when you go above 200 units from a multifamily standpoint, it will attract the bigger players who usually go 200+ units and the competition becomes unfair to small entrepreneurs. ROI, or Return on Investment, is a formula to evaluate how an investment has performed compared to your initial cost. Buy Off-Market And Sell On-Market In his career, Kent has been buying properties directly from the seller, because there’s no broker in between, which means there is less negotiating and competition for the deal; however, the same logic does not apply when reselling. Kent rarely sells directly to a buyer since it is not the most advantageous way for the reseller. If you want to maximize the value of the property you are selling, put it on the market. If your property is out on the market, you can create a competitive environment. For example, to resell one of his properties, Kent’s company hired a broker and went through the marketing process, which allowed negotiation from a strong position and the profit was much higher. That wouldn’t have happened if they had sold off the market without intermediaries. CAP vs Interest Rates The most common misconception about real estate investing is that if interest rates go up, then CAP rates must go down, but Kent warns they are actually not correlated. A CAP rate is mostly used as an evaluation metric. It is what’s expected to return to your capital. As an example, if you had no debt on the property, with a million dollars invested and made 100,000, the CAP would be 10%. The other way to look at the CAP rate is the inverse of the multiple. If the CAP rate, for example, is 5%, that means the multiple on each dollar is 20 X 20. For every dollar that increases in income, it is also increasing value 20 times. CAP and interest relate to the amount of money that is chasing a deal. When interest rates are lower, money is cheaper. Whether interest rates go to 6%, there is still a lot of money to chase real estate. CAP rates do not move with interest rates meaningfully. Do Not Miss Opportunities To Invest Both commercial real estate and rents move up with inflation. The country’s current economic state is an example of this. Kent advises that when you are in an inflationary environment, invest in things that typically rise with inflation. That is a great time to invest in tangible real assets. Many people have their money in bank accounts because they just do not know what to do with it and do not realize that they are losing 8.5% a year on that money. Avoid having your money sitting in your bank account for too long, investing is your best option. Take ownership to deploy your capital and your investments.
Connect with Kent: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ritter-on-real-estate/id1511017979 Corey Kupfer is an expert strategist, negotiator, and dealmaker. He has more than 35 years of professional deal-making and negotiating experience. Corey is a successful entrepreneur, attorney, consultant, author, and professional speaker. He is deeply passionate about deal-driven growth. He is also the creator and host of the DealQuest Podcast.
If you want to find out how deal-ready you are, take the Deal-Ready Assessment today! | |||
| Episode 182: How to Prepare for Deals with Corey Kupfer | 20 Jul 2022 | 00:09:14 | |
Congratulations on finding a deal! Now what? Whether the deal is a company you’re going to acquire, a buyer for your business, a joint venture, a strategic alliance, or licensing, you want to be prepared to make yourself deal-ready; think of it as even being pre-prepared. In today’s solocast, I discuss some practices to help prepare yourself and your team to get you deal-ready and how to minimize unforeseen issues that may arise. 1 – Pre-Due DiligenceTo prepare for a deal, do pre-due diligence on your end to avoid unforeseen issues during the actual deal process. In this process, your goal is to find and solve any issues beforehand. The counterpart in the deal will look at financials, past litigations, team members, company history, and much more. Different deals have different levels of diligence and tackling this head-on, will prevent a great deal of stress and help your deal to be executed and integrated much more smoothly. 2- Manage ResourcesKeep in mind what resources, in terms of team members and outside sources, you need to make the deal. Depending upon the size and type of the deal, you may need to pull in more people from your firm or hire professionals outside your company, such as advisors, accountants, lawyers, consultants, or investment bankers. Once you’ve decided which people you need, make sure they have time and availability to help you. Doing deals takes time and you don’t want to risk someone not being available when you need them most or have it interfere with other projects or tasks for which they are responsible. 3 - Plan The Integration StageSuccessfully preparing for a deal also means preparing for the integration once the deal is complete. The integration happens post-deal, but to prepare for it, you want to consider what resources and implementations the integration will need, such as team members, finances, strategy, communication, and even cultural integration. This may include some very difficult decisions, which you want to execute or plan for beforehand instead of during the actual integration. 4 - Do Your ResearchThere is preparation in terms of your own due diligence on the deal’s counterpart. Do research on them; not only from the legal and financial regulatory due diligence but also the cultural and personality differences that you may have to bridge. Research thoroughly so you are aware of all potential legal risks and what their objectives are. Figure out what the working relationship is and how that’s going to affect the culture of your company. Preparation Will Save You Time & Money During the deal process, most business owners are also concerned with running their company and managing the day-to-day processes, so the more advanced planning and strategic thinking you can do, even before you have a particular deal in mind, the easier the process will be. When you get a particular deal, you can deal with deal-specific items that you couldn’t do in advance, but at least the general ones are done. Get yourself deal-ready to avoid wasting time, money and energy.
Corey Kupfer is an expert strategist, negotiator, and dealmaker. He has more than 35 years of professional deal-making and negotiating experience. Corey is a successful entrepreneur, attorney, consultant, author, and professional speaker. He is deeply passionate about deal-driven growth. He is also the creator and host of the DealQuest Podcast.
If you want to find out how deal-ready you are, take the Deal-Ready Assessment today! | |||
| Episode 181: Growth Through Acquisitions With Ryan Goral | 12 Jul 2022 | 00:46:08 | |
Ryan Goral plays a unique role in the M&A space. He is the founder of G-Spire Group - a company focused on helping entrepreneurs, executives, and small business owners to grow through strategic mergers and acquisitions. He provides fractional corporate development executive services, which means he comes in as an executive fractionally. Ryan’s expertise is centered on adding value to entrepreneurs from capital structuring, advising strategy fit, and conducting through final transaction execution and integration. If you’re an owner, or operator of a smaller and middle-market business trying to grow through acquisitions, this episode will help you. To connect with Corey for more: Website: https://www.coreykupfer.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/coreykupfer Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CoreyKupfer Twitter: https://twitter.com/coreykupfer | |||
| Episode 180: How Communication Affects Deals with Brenden Kumarasamy | 05 Jul 2022 | 00:44:05 | |
Brenden Kumarasamy is a communications expert. He coaches ambitious executives and entrepreneurs to raise venture capture and become their industry’s top 1% communicators. He also has a popular YouTube channel, the MasterTalk, dedicated to giving access to communication tools to everyone in the world. In this episode, Brendan will talk about how communication should be applied to deals, including how to deliver the perfect presentation and pitch to raise capital. With some daily communication exercises you can use, Brenden provides valuable information for any business owner! Communication Is Key You can have the greatest product or service, but it won’t do much in the market if you can’t communicate. Brenden says that most CEOs are very good at building products, finding the tech gizmos, and creating a solution to a problem. But that doesn’t make them excellent communicators. Many leaders and business owners cannot communicate their products or service in a way that a non-technical person can understand. Many who are starting out focus too much on the feature set, instead of what’s the benefit to the end person and how that relates to people. This is a recurring failure in all business fields with most founders. Fundamentals for Better Communication A lot of founders have goals with their career and business, but not with their communication skills. To start a more communicative career and be able to communicate your product or service more effectively, Brenden gives some tips: 1 - Make a list of the top three CEOs and leaders you admire. Brenden explains that whoever it is, the personalities chosen are all exceptional communicators. By noticing the chosen CEOs, you can model them and establish communication as the priority. 2 - Know how to communicate well in general. You could tell the best story in the world, but it’s not enough. Focus on the filler words, delivery approach, and eye contact. Train this in all communication you do, not just in business. That way, you’ll build confidence. Exercises to Improve Communication Brenden lists some exercises he uses in his training to help leaders improve their communication:
This is an exercise in imagination. Put yourself in a situation with the toughest audience who just asked hundreds of questions about your business. Think of answers to each of these questions. The exercise doesn’t end until you have an answer and backup slides for everything. This helps to be prepared for any situation, demonstrating confidence in your business. The investing community is a tiny community. One recommendation is: to assume that if you screw up once in front of an angel, VC, or PE firm, word will get around. That’s why preparation is so important.
Pick a random word like ‘phone’ or ‘avocado’ and create presentations out of thin air. If you can make sense out of nonsense, it will prepare you to communicate about anything and react calmly. Especially when you’re in a room where they ask questions about your business to which you don’t know the answer. The Structure of the Perfect Pitch For Investors Brenden coaches leaders in making formal and informal pitches. Regardless of where you are, when structuring your pitch, break it down into pieces: problem, solution, how it works, competition, traction (how much progress you’ve made), and closing. It is essential to communicate the traction, even in the early stages of your business. You want to give the illusion that your rocket ship is taking off with or without the person’s money. Whenever you close the pitch, don’t just summarize and open for questions. Instead, help your investors imagine a world where all your ideas come to life. What does that world look like? Easy Daily Practice To achieve more and more visibility and investment, it is very important to prioritize communication as your businesses scale. The best thing is to invest five minutes every morning and ask yourself ‘what’s one question somebody could ask me about business?’. Spend four minutes reflecting on the answer.
Connect with Brenden Kumarasamy https://www.youtube.com/c/MasterTalks https://www.rockstarcommunicator.com/?r_done=1
To connect with Corey for more: Website: https://www.coreykupfer.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/coreykupfer Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CoreyKupfer Twitter: https://twitter.com/coreykupfer | |||
| Episode 179: Growth Accelerator Lessons For Your Business with Mike Reid | 29 Jun 2022 | 00:48:42 | |
Mike Reid is a skilled entrepreneur and the ideal person to help entrepreneurs stuck in their business growth. He is the co-founder and CEO of Dent Global, a business accelerator best known for helping six to seven-figure founders establish themselves as the go-to person in their industry. He is also the host of the Dichotomy Podcast, which addresses dichotomies leaders face in business. In his career, he has specialized in business growth accelerators and implementation techniques for entrepreneurs. In this episode, he shares the framework to put together joint venture deals and partnerships to help a business grow. Being A Good Professional Does Not Mean Knowing How To Do Business Anyone in a company’s leadership role has possibly studied and specialized in the field in which they operate. The business service is delivered based on the intellectual property the business owner owns. But most of those entrepreneurs never really get taught how to build a business, or how to build a brand. Not even how to do specialized marketing for your field. Mike explains that this is a problem. At some point, these entrepreneurs realize the market is getting noisy and more competitive than it’s ever been before. Although they have knowledge of the field, they don’t have the skills to stay in this very competitive market. Mike’s tip is: these founders need to understand what are the key skills they need to develop as a go-to person, or a go-to brand within their industry. Partnerships As A Way To Grow Your Business Mike explains that as human beings, we were trained to think we need to do it on our own and we shouldn’t ask for help. This gets in the way of the business mentality, as it is often a partnership that will save you from bad timing in the market. A brilliant entrepreneur is more of a packager than a creator. What we do as entrepreneurs is take bits and pieces of other businesses. When we talk about partnership, we’re really talking about putting together joint venture deals - be it strategic partnerships or distribution partnerships. Mike explains this by triangle, as many entrepreneurs probably lack one of these three things:
Whether your business has any of these issues, the solution is to look for partners. Mike mentions an example: making partnerships for products. Usually, most of those product partners appreciate getting their product in front of a new audience. It is valuable for them and it’s valuable for you, because you get to add more value into the ecosystem for your client. How to do efficient partnerships As a final lesson, Mike breaks through one paradigm: the illusion of limited resources in business. If your company is missing something - if you don’t have the money, or trust or a great killer product - it’s just asking ‘who has it’, and how can I partner with them? You’ve got to go out and pitch for partners to get involved. Remember to only ask partnerships for one element of the three corners of the triangle. Because if you ask for over one third, it feels like a request rather than an opportunity to your partner. If you struggle on how to take the next step to grow your business, partnerships may be the solution. Keep in mind which people you could approach and what element of the triangle they can contribute effectively.
Dent Global Mike Reid https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikejamesreid/?originalSubdomain=ca
To connect with Corey for more: Website: https://www.coreykupfer.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/coreykupfer Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CoreyKupfer Twitter: https://twitter.com/coreykupfer | |||
| Episode 178: How to Find Deals with Corey Kupfer | 22 Jun 2022 | 00:09:10 | |
Maybe you’ve reached a point in your career where you want to grow through deal-driven growth besides your organic growth, you want to buy companies but don’t know where to find them, or maybe you have some ideas of the kinds of deals you want to do but don’t know how to reach them. I can help you. In this solocast episode, I’ll be focusing on how to find the right deals for you. Go To Intermediaries In the search for deals, a suitable solution is to gamble on intermediaries. They are investment bankers - common in the M&A space - who will do a ‘side representation’ for buyers who are looking to acquire companies. Their job is to find companies for you to buy or package to sell to someone else. Investment banking firms will only work on bigger deals, often in very high numbers in multi-million-scale. There are some other intermediaries for smaller deals, such as small investment banking companies, business brokerage firms or other advisory businesses that do work in the lower middle market. Your Own Connections Are The Way Out Not only this would apply to M&A deals, but to any kind of deal: find a strategic alliance to join as a partner. It sounds obvious, but a lot of entrepreneurs don’t do it. The tip is to start with your connections. Some options are:
When looking for partners, you want to be careful how you share your business information, especially if you’re on the sell side and M&A deal! You may not want people to know you’re in play if you are buying companies, looking to joint ventures, strategic alliances or licensing deals. Other Easily Accessible Resources Different places can become an opportunity to find business.
Have Your Company Goals Well Defined Finding deals takes time, attention, and resources. To a successful hunt, ensure that you have your company’s goals well defined. In this way, you don’t get involved in an unprofitable negotiation. One of the biggest things in seeking deals is to make sure that you make it a priority. It’s a project that needs a plan, a stare team and funding. Do you already have a well-defined plan for your business?
To connect with Corey for more: Website: https://www.coreykupfer.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/coreykupfer Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CoreyKupfer Twitter: https://twitter.com/coreykupfer | |||
| Episode 177: The Challenges Of a Cashless Society with Brian Asingia | 15 Jun 2022 | 00:45:16 | |
Brian Asingia impacted a lot of companies with his knowledge of innovation. He is an advisor, asset manager, and author of Cashless Society 101. Brian is also a former Wall Street analyst, has over 10 years of executive strategy experience, and is the chairman and CEO of The Pearl Dream Inc - a company that trains, advises and funds ethical entrepreneurial leaders. In his career, he has explored various types of deals. In this episode, he brings an analysis of the market, talks about investments, and brings some insights about raising capital for your business. To understand how to apply all this in your career, stay glued to this episode. What Is A Cashless Society By definition, a cashless society is a society where all money transactions are made electronically or digitally, with no physical cash in hand. Due to Covid, this type of system is here to stay. You may ask, how does this affect business? Businesses are being pushed to adapt 100% to this form of payment. An example was the subway systems in New York City, with fully electronic payment, by credit card or cell phone transfers. Keep Your Business Up To Date Brian's advice for every business, regardless of industry, is simple and effective: digitize your business and save costs. These two factors are directly linked because anytime you digitize, you're cutting out a lot of costs from other processes that were done analogically.
According to Brian, as long as your business involves tech in the company's processes, you're always going to be okay. As an example, the businesses that survived the pandemic were somehow interlaced with technology - as companies had to adapt to online sales and remote transactions.
Additionally, Brian points out that organizations need help to navigate this new digitized automated world. Everyone uses technological tools, but financial literacy, intellectual property, legal, financial, or even regulatory aspects of these tools are left out. It is important to study these aspects, especially to make transactions, raise funds and make investments more effectively. Lessons For Getting Investors 1- In most companies, investors want to see the ability to get a customer, clients and the ability to revenue for the founders. Many people don't understand that it's just the tiny percentage of companies that actually get funded before they actually have profits. In most cases, investors need to see, at some level, the opportunity proven on the market. 2 - Brian shares that in his mentorships with organizations who want to get investment, his advice is: explain to investors why you need to raise this capital, what kind of capital, and for what purpose. Assessing the internal value, which could be from talent, IP, or actual revenue. This inventory has to be done. You have to be able to communicate that yourself. In this way, the investors won't tell you what's valuable and what's not; That's up to you as a founder to explain and defend the right strategy you want to go with. Do you ever stop to think about how you would explain to an investor the reasons that led you to look for investment? Keep this very clear in mind.
To learn more about Brian, head here:
To connect with Corey for more: Website: https://www.coreykupfer.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/coreykupfer Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CoreyKupfer Twitter: https://twitter.com/coreykupfer
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| Episode 176: From Pizza Delivery Guy To Franchise Owner with Robert Riopel | 08 Jun 2022 | 00:44:04 | |
Robert Raymond Riopel is an entrepreneur, international best-selling author, app designer, and business trainer who spent over 18 years traveling around the world sharing his passion for self-growth and business. At first, Robert had little on his hands, at twenty-one he started delivering pizzas for Domino’s in his hometown to support his family. After a lot of hard work, he became the Manager of the Domino’s franchise he worked at. His wife joined the business as an Assistant Manager. After a year and a half of working about seven days a week, they qualified to be franchisors. At thirty-two, he had already conquered financial freedom. In this episode, he tells us about the lessons he learned through his franchising deals. Important Notes About Franchising If you want to be a franchisee, you can’t just buy a store. You have to successfully manage a location of the franchise for at least one year. Then, meet the financial criteria required for the purchase. If approved, you have to have the money to buy or build the store. Sometimes, there’s a fee that has to be paid to the old franchise owner too. Back in 1992, Robert and his wife needed $90,000 to be able to buy the two Domino’s franchises in their sights. That was the problem for Robert. He didn’t have that kind of money. The solution was to ask the bank for help. In five months, they got all of their funding. Lessons Learned From Franchise Negotiation Acquiring two franchises at a very young age, Robert learned many things through trial and error. Some of the biggest lessons are: 1 - Build a good relationship with your bank. He only got the financing he needed because he already had an excellent reputation with the bankers. Robert had enough assets to secure all of his investments. The entire acquisition of Domino’s didn’t cost any of his personal money. 2 - Do not confuse 'buy a business' with 'buy the assets'. Early in his career, Robert used the wrong term saying he wanted to buy a company, when in reality he wanted to acquire assets, without buying the business itself. There's a BIG difference between these two paths. Know which one you're taking. Ask for it correctly. 3 - It’s important to have an abundance mindset. People can smell when you’re desperate. Robert shares that he was getting deep in debt at one point in his life and then sold one of Domino’s stores. In a moment of desperation, a person took advantage of him during the negotiation. 4 - For problem-solving, use the two words ‘what’s next?’. That way, you don’t get stuck on the problem. You focus on the solution. Be careful. Once you have decided how to solve it, doubts may arise. The other words you should use right after that are ‘all in’ to make sure you go all the way in your decision. Don't give your doubt room to keep you playing small. The Journey To Becoming Financially Free After Robert acquired the two Domino’s franchises, all was looking good. Until a very common small business mistake snuck up on him. Over time, he realized he was spending more than he owned. At the eight-year mark of running Domino’s, Robert was over $150,000 in debt. When your business is in debt, or when it has repeated frustration in the way it operates, the question you should ask is ‘what fully implemented system do I not have in place?’ This approach helps you to really solve your problem. He went from being over $150,000 in debt, to actually selling the stores and retiring nine months later, at thirty-two years old. This says a lot about knowing when to leave a deal. It was easier to create a passive income when Robert decided to sell Domino's, as he would no longer have the expense. Where in your business do you need to cut a tie, move on, or lighten the expense to make room for something more profitable or fulfilling?
To learn more about Robert, head here:
To connect with Corey for more: Website: https://www.coreykupfer.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/coreykupfer Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CoreyKupfer Twitter: https://twitter.com/coreykupfer | |||
| Episode 175: How To Develop Strategic Partnerships With Your Competitors with Natasha Miller | 01 Jun 2022 | 00:44:25 | |
Natasha Miller is a CEO who is not afraid of getting her hands dirty. She is responsible for Entire Productions in San Francisco, an event and entertainment production company that produces powerful experiences to her clients—Salesforce, Google, Apple, LinkedIn, and Adobe. During the pandemic, her crew was reduced. She had to find solutions to manage outstanding events with only half of her team. Since then, Natasha uses partnerships as a part of her business strategy. She is also the author of Relentless: Homeless Teen to Achieving the Entrepreneur Dream (2022), in which she recounts her journey from being homeless at 16 to becoming CEO of a company on the list of 5000 fastest-growing companies in America. This combination of experiences makes Natasha Miller the perfect guest to guide us through the struggles of the corporate world and how to get out of them through the right alliance. Competitors As A Way Out In the corporate world, many people make the assumption that you should constantly be afraid of your competitors. You may believe that you must find out what they are doing to outrun them and treat them with diligence. But believe me, it's not like that! In all the years of my career, I’ve always repeated this: there are many opportunities to do business with ‘competitors’. They don’t have to be your enemies. Great deals can come out of an alliance of companies in the same market. Partnerships Expand Your Business Natasha's competitors have been the go-to solution for her business in recent years. In March 2020, her multi-million dollar business went to zero profit. In order to save the company, the solution was to lay off half of her team and that worked for a while. When the pandemic situation eased and events returned in full force, Natasha faced a problem. She was getting inquiries for full production at events, but without a proper team. The solution was to negotiate with a competing company that would provide the services that her former team used to do. Since then, Entire Productions never abandoned partnerships. Investing in partnerships is for those times when your company has a great business opportunity, but your team may not be big enough to handle it. In these cases, a good partnership strategy is white labeling. What Is White Labeling? In business, you need to satisfy your customers and deliver the final product. That’s where white label deals come in: you, as a company, pass off a piece of business or services for a partner company to do, but you present it to the customer only under your brand name. Natasha started white labeling because it was confusing for some of her clients to understand that she was strategically partnering with a competing company to deliver the final product. The clients assumed they would have to pay more for the project if it involved more than one company. One of the enormous benefits of white labeling is: it’s not confusing to the client, as it’s all under your brand. The company that is white labeling for your company just works as an extension of your team. White Labeling As Your Greatest Ally The other good reason for white labeling is to build an excellent reputation in the market. Natasha shares that in some of her pitches; the track record of the company’s financials is very relevant to the client. By teaming up with another company through a partnership for a project, Natasha can then present the track record of the two companies together and add a greater reputation to her work. Your reputation can take another turn as well. Always keep in mind that when you are entrusting the delivery of a project or product to another company, ensure that you know and trust them completely. You will have to be responsible and accountable for the quality and delivery of the services provided. Business Opportunities In The Most Difficult Times Entrepreneurship opportunities can appear in situations you least expect. Natasha’s journey is an example of this. As a professional jazz vocalist and classical violinist, she was booked many times on the same night. As most people with an entrepreneurial spirit know, it’s hard to turn down work. She ended up putting music groups together and managing them so they could play all the venues that were booked. Over time, this became an entertainment production company, and then the full event production company that she manages today. Who would have thought, right?
To learn more about Natasha, head here: https://www.officialnatashamiller.com/
To connect with Corey for more: Website: https://www.coreykupfer.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/coreykupfer Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CoreyKupfer Twitter: https://twitter.com/coreykupfer | |||
| Episode 174: Trading Services for Equity with Corey Kupfer | 25 May 2022 | 00:23:51 | |
Back in the early 2000s, artist David Choe graffitied Facebook headquarters and charged $60,000. One of Facebook’s founders convinced him he should take Facebook equity over the money. Fortunately, David did. As it turned out to be worth over $200 million. In this solocast episode, we’ll go through the benefits, harms, and how to trade services for equity. I’m putting this episode out there, especially for those who are in the service business as consultants, trainers, or lawyers who always asked me whether I would take equity instead of a fee. How Equity Works Equity is an ownership in a company, whether it’s stock in a corporation or a membership in an LLC. You can own 3%, 1%, or 10% of the company and receive the corresponding percentage of the profit. From the company’s point of view, equity for service is a brilliant solution when you need certain services and are in an early stage of the business where cash is tight. From the service provider’s point of view, you will be offered equity instead of cash - it could be for consulting, training, or technical, as it’s more often services - because the company doesn’t have cash for a start-up or because you are going to be an ongoing partner. What To Consider? The real question is how to decide whether to accept equity over cash. First, there are a few things I would advise you to consider if you choose equity: 1 - If you’re getting a small percentage of equity, you will not end up controlling any company decisions just by the ownership percentage. Unless you own 51% of the company, the company has contractual rights to have veto power over certain major transactions. You are most likely going into a situation without having a say in decisions. For this reason, you need to be confident and comfortable that you trust the company’s management. 2 - You don’t have any guaranteed distribution. This money might be distributed or quarterly. However, that’s not guaranteed because the executives, founders, and employees can be getting paid compensation that could zero out the profit, making nothing available for distribution. The solution is to give yourself some protection and make sure they can somehow guarantee distribution legally. 3 - You will be taxed. When choosing equity, make sure that there is a requirement to distribute at least enough capital to cover your tax liability, because in those types of entities you’re going to get taxed on your relative share of the taxable income. 4 - You can take part in an exit capital transaction when they sell the company or when they monetize their events in some way. If they’re going to sell the company for $10 million and you’re entitled to 2%, you can get $200 of profit. 5 - The equity may get diluted at lower valuations. If the company is not doing quite as well as they projected, they might have to raise capital which can dilute you disproportionate to the value you bought it originally. If you exchange your services for equity and you own 2% of the company, maybe you can be diluted down to 0.2%. It’s a risk. Treat Equity Like An investment If you find yourself in a situation where equity seems like the best solution, my advice is: treat equity for services the same way as if you got paid in full and then made an investment. That’s actually what is happening. Ask yourself, “If I get $60,000, would I invest all this money in this company?” A determining factor is whether you need the cash or not. This will tell you a lot about your risk profile and whether it will be the best option for you. One thing that is also valid is to do the hybrid. Consider taking a discount on your fees for a portion of equity, so you can get paid enough to at least cover your costs. If you’re not an investor or don’t have investment experience, one thing to keep in mind is: you’re just providing services to this company, which doesn’t mean you know the industry enough to evaluate it as an investor. In this case, it is better to play safe and choose the money. You Can’t Be Too Careful In my career, many times I’ve had clients who regretted their decisions because the amount of equity they gave away for the cash was worth a lot more. At the same time, many people get excited about the company, thinking they’re going to get rich. In most cases, those investments don’t turn out too well. In order not to fall into a not very advantageous negotiation, it takes a lot of analysis, understanding the CAP table, and figuring out whether the evaluation is fair. For the best decision, get some professional advice. To connect with Corey for more: Website: https://www.coreykupfer.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/coreykupfer Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CoreyKupfer Twitter: https://twitter.com/coreykupfer | |||
| Episode 299: Celebrating Milestones: Reflecting on DealQuest's Journey to the Top 1% with Corey Kupfer | 17 Jul 2024 | 00:17:56 | |
Celebrating Milestones: Reflecting on DealQuest's Journey to the Top 1%
Our firm’s extensive experience in corporate services encompasses entity formation, operating agreements, and employment agreements. FOR MORE ON COREY KUPFER: Corey Kupfer is an expert strategist, negotiator, and dealmaker. He has more than 35 years of professional deal-making and negotiating experience. Corey is a successful entrepreneur, attorney, consultant, author, and professional speaker. He is deeply passionate about deal-driven growth. He is also the creator and host of the DealQuest Podcast. | |||
| Episode 173: International Deal Lessons with Wendy Pease | 18 May 2022 | 00:41:11 | |
For almost 20 years, Wendy Pease has worked with hundreds of companies to help them communicate across more than 200 languages and cultures. As a young child, she lived in Mexico, Taiwan, and the Philippines. Through these experiences, she fell in love with the languages and cultures of the world. She came to understand that people around the world are similar. Although how they communicate can be quite different and miscommunication can lead to trouble. She bought a small translation company in 2004. The previous founder focused on high quality written translation and spoken interpretation services. Through that acquisition, Wendy became an expert in multilingual communications. Since then, Rapport International has grown substantially.If you’re looking for a way to get better international deals and don’t know where to start, Wendy Pease is the right person to help. Acquiring VS Starting A New Company If you’re new to an industry, finding a buyable company can be a huge win. Acquiring an existing company means you already have an active base of existing customers. It costs up to seven times more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one. There’s a lot of potential for companies to do international business. But it’s still a small portion that does - less than 1% of US companies export. To internationalize your business, it only takes small modifications on your website. The most important thing is to translate to other languages to bring in additional visitors. Wendy pointed out that 90% of buyers are more likely to spend time on a website if it’s in their language. The state and federal governments offer free support to companies that want to do international business. Such as grants to help you do an international trade show, help to translate your website, and also free stretch strategic advice. There are resources to help when you’re getting into a deal situation, such as the Department of Commerce. In this department, it is possible to find people at your state trade offices who have been to other countries to share their business tips. Lessons From Report International It is very important when cutting a deal with somebody in another country to dedicate yourself to translating the content into their mother tongue. Even though English is the global language, people feel more comfortable with a better deal if you’re doing things in their language. The globe is getting more used to people’s function differently. By spending that time learning from others and making these minor efforts, companies have achieved more success and deals. Wendy explains that working with translations specifically means anything written. Interpretation means anything spoken. In Report International, they start with the company’s strategy, define what they want to accomplish, and go all the way through providing an in-person interpreter, telephone interpreting, or video interpreting. Lessons From Wendy When many companies internationalize, they don’t have a trusted local relationship. Companies think that they either have to open up an international office or they’ve got to go right out and get a distributor. But there are lots of ways that you can enter the country without having that trusted relationship. No need to hire the distributor directly. The Department of Commerce has offices all over the world. Every company can reach out to people in the country and they’ll help make introductions. Do a trial basis and build that relationship. And once you do deals, you get to know more about what’s there. Closing an International Deal The Right Way When closing an international deal, it’s not enough just to speak the language in which you’re closing a deal. You need to understand the culture. Just because someone is bilingual does not mean they can help, as they may not understand the misunderstandings that can happen. Wendy recommended hiring professional translators and professional interpreters. They have been trained on how to navigate the two cultures. As an example in Report International, they work in over 200 different languages. The translators or interpreters have to be fully bilingual, as well as understanding the culture and business practices to close a deal. In whichever contract, even if the person you close the deal with speaks some English, the best thing is to have an interpreter because they work as the real cultural conduit with explaining what’s going on. To hear more about Wendy’s thoughts on international deals, listen to the full episode!
To connect with Corey for more: Website: https://www.coreykupfer.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/coreykupfer Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CoreyKupfer Twitter: https://twitter.com/coreykupfer | |||
| Episode 172: Why Deals Fail And How To Prevent Failure In Deals with Bill Flynn | 11 May 2022 | 00:48:05 | |
Bill Flynn has collaborated with Alan Mulally, pitched Steve Jobs, accomplished much, failed often, and learned many valuable lessons from thirty years of studying the science of success. Creating efficient businesses is only one of many ways to make the world a better place. In this episode of the DealQuest Podcast, Bill Flynn shares some insightful ways to prevent deal failures. Why Do Deals Fail? While it seems like the deals fall through at the end, they usually start to fail from the beginning; you just didn’t know it. Most deal failures are traced back to poor preparation and the inability to remove prospective fail points - a fail point is any point within the deal process that has the potential to affect a satisfactory outcome or the quality of the deal. Deal success is fundamentally about good integration planning and execution. Integration in an M&A deal refers to adopting one culture, one set of processes, and one long-term goal for two individual firms. Critical integration aspects are culture, management, talent acquisition, and goal setting. A good integration plan outlines exactly how and when the acquiring and acquired companies’ significant resources, assets, and processes will be combined to achieve the deal’s goals. Appropriately done, integration starts at the deal-planning phase and kicks in after the deal is announced. If executed well, you will see the structure of the deal put in place and integration already beginning. If the process looks challenging, it may be because the deal was ill-conceived - and deals can fall apart in this phase. However, several other factors contribute to deal failure, ranging from acquisition doubts to working with the wrong client and many more. What Happens When Deals Fail? History tells us that corporate marriages do not always last forever; even a deal that appears now to be very fitting may not be so in ten years, particularly as the world economy or new technologies develop in ways that dramatically change markets. A split–or corporate divorce–need not be a bad thing: divisions that their large corporate owners unloved can go on to be a massive success with different backers or even as independent companies. However, once a split does become inevitable, special attention is needed over issues such as staff and governance to ensure an amicable break-up. How To Prevent Failure In Deals Not all deals go how we want them to. It’s necessary to learn from past events and make daily improvements to your skillset. For Bill Flynn, there are some ways to prevent deal failures, including: High-Quality Communication A high-quality communication plan is crucial to the success of a deal; this can be done in-house or by external parties - public relations advisers. Having a good communication plan can help build a good business relationship, negotiate effectively and increase your team’s morale and efficiency.
A PR Adviser creates a plan to bridge the trust gap between a business and its would-be clients or customers. The expert works on increasing the company’s credibility within its given industry and its overall reputation. The importance of a PR Adviser is underestimated in deals; they help prevent poor communication. Poorly handled communications during mergers and acquisitions can lead to disgruntled employees, distrustful customers, and a confusing brand message.
Effective communication is often a reflection of a well-prepared and well-aligned combined management team. The case for synergies should be clearly articulated in the due diligence phase, and the integration plan should be written by the time the deal is announced. Overcoming Acquisition Doubts Several research studies have shown that most deals fail on the merger level. The failures are almost always from the cultural level. You have to make sure there’s an excellent cultural fit. Find a way to do things gradually, and understand the cultural differences. People are already terrified when an acquisition is in process, so you can’t rush their decisions without understanding their perspective. Two critical points are:
Finding The Right Customer Working with the wrong set of clients is one factor that leads to failure, and no one wants that. Work hard to figure out who your customers are and how to recognize and find them. Do that due diligence upfront to identify your best customers, why they come back and what you’ll gain from them. Once you’ve figured these out, it’s straightforward to approach with a focused mindset. With a good outcome, you’d get access to another market.
Bill shares a self-experienced story where he joined a beneficial group filled with entrepreneurs with large businesses. He narrated his fruitful relationship with the group even after leaving. As mentioned in past episodes, NO GOOD RELATIONSHIP? NO DEAL. Only good relationships will help you keep customers and get referrals. Overcome High Expectations A successful deal is not easy to achieve, and it depends on the people, parties involved, and a relentless focus on the components that makes a deal work. No deal is the same as the last or the next, which is what makes it so fascinating, but some themes are consistent across types, sizes, and geographies. Many failures can be avoided if company executives keep track of the three big mistakes of dealmaking: planning, communication, and people. Growing A Healthy Company And Enterprise Value All the business owners that have grown healthy companies in the past achieved that because they did some things right. If you are going to grow as a business, it costs money. You can certainly get money from outside, but depending on the size of your business, you’re better off receiving funds from your customers instead of someone else. In addition to having a system, the point is that you will earn money, but you will have to spend it too. If you have investors, they will want their money back in a few years. Not just that, you need to do your research. Move with people that are better versed in an area than you to avoid repeatable mistakes. Bill shares what he believes to be the core point of enterprise value growth. The things that get you to enterprise and exit value are the same. As the leader, you must build a management structure that makes your presence almost redundant. You don’t have to be essential to the day-to-day activities of your business. To Bill, you’re more effective when you rest your brain; you get the best ideas when you’re not actively fishing. So, REST YOUR BRAIN! As a leader, you have to be necessary once in a while. You have to set your team in the right direction when needed. People often need reminding a lot more than they need instructing. You need to remind your team about the goal and help them grow to achieve it.
https://catalystgrowthadvisors.com/
To connect with Corey for more: Website: https://www.coreykupfer.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/coreykupfer Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CoreyKupfer Twitter: https://twitter.com/coreykupfer | |||
| Episode 171: Win-win or Win-lose with Mike Lander | 04 May 2022 | 00:50:04 | |
Mike Lander is a successful entrepreneur and an expert negotiator based in London, UK with a proven track record of buying, growing and selling businesses. He has a valuable perspective on dealing with commercial deals. He worked on both sides, as a procurement director in MSP organizations and as an entrepreneur. Mike has negotiated hundreds of deals. He is the ideal person to give negotiation lessons based on his experience. Win-Win Negotiations Mike shares that one thing to always keep in mind when in a negotiation is the true motivation of the counterparty. He believes that most deals, in the early stages, are win-lose by their nature, as you’re not creating more value for both parties. If measured from a long-term view, deals can be a win-win if one party really grows their business or establishes clients. When trading, you need to look at the risk profile. It doesn’t matter the size of the organization when doing business. To become a win-win deal, the important thing is how big that client is going to be as a percentage of your profit in the future. Negotiations Take Time In any kind of deal, the important thing is the attention to detail, as well as your ability to listen and capture what’s going on. If you are in an hour-long trade, perhaps the counterpart will pressure you to close the deal at the end of the meeting. The best alternative is always to take a break to reflect on what’s been discussed. In this break, go back to the agreed-upon points to make sure you agree. As in the heat of the moment, they can go unnoticed. The question often arises: who should make the first offer? But there is no rule, and it depends on each deal. What makes somebody a skilled negotiator is to know the situation and feel. Be careful with the last minute cheapskate. If you’re negotiating with a company for a while and there’s no tension in the deal, don’t be surprised when they try to pay cheaper than agreed. Choose a Business Framework Mike shares that having a framework for your deal negotiation is essential. Without one, you can’t negotiate. He uses the simple four-step process that allows anyone to negotiate anything: 1 - What are the goals of each side or the interests of each side? 2 - How long is it still going to take to close the deal? 3 - Which issues come up during the deal, who raised it and what’s behind it? Lessons From Mike Lander In the industry, Mike Lander notes that negotiation frameworks have changed very little in the last 15 years. When three or four buyers may be interested in your company, the challenge that presents to most entrepreneurs, no matter what scale, is how do you negotiate the deal properly. He advises having people who are in the deal space who know how to run a process, and especially, know how to create tension. If you don’t engage the right professionals to help with the deal, you might have no money in your pocket. An important part of the negotiation is negotiating commercial terms that don’t stretch your working capital too far. In Mike’s experience, he shares that it’s necessary to have deep insights into your sector and client issues. As a procurement professional, Mike says everyone thinks their work is only about price. But that is not true, anyone can buy cheap, but you can’t buy quality and high-quality delivery and timely delivery. As a buyer, it is necessary to create value for your organization. Building Relationships For Negotiations It is necessary to see negotiations as the beginning or the continuation of relationships. In the industry you are in, you need to realize that you will see your counterpart again and again. Be careful and strive to have an ongoing relationship. If you don’t see it that way, you may even win the negotiation, but you will lose the relationship. I believe that my success comes from the relationships I’ve built over the years. And also because I’m always catching up. In 2015, I decided to go virtual in my business. When the pandemic came, we had no adjustment. We’re already operating that way. Nothing changed in the relationship with my clients. Cash Flow Control Many companies get into trouble as they don’t manage capital. Once you get past being a really small company, you can’t survive on a spreadsheet. You need a system to manage that cash flow. To improve this management, the ideal is to organize within the month, not at the end or beginning of the month, because on a day-to-day basis, you need to know your cash flow absolutely. For better control, there are some simple rules to help: - Have six months of cash on the balance sheet - Have your investment capital on top - Have a separate bank account with your tax payments and trading account If you concentrate everything on the same account, you’re taking loans from other parts without analyzing the impact where the money’s coming from. The last thing I want to remind you about is that negotiating tactics are useful things to know. But they are not rules to be blindly followed. It all depends on the situation. And the more experience you have, better negotiations will happen.
To connect with Mike for more: Website: https://piscari.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikelander
To connect with Corey for more: Website: https://www.coreykupfer.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/coreykupfer Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CoreyKupfer Twitter: https://twitter.com/coreykupfer | |||