Your Business Might Be Unsellable

A good business does not guarantee a good exit.

Preparation, timing, the competitive process will create a successful exit.

Every business owner believes the same lie.

If it's profitable, it's sellable.

Well, the man who sells companies for a living says that's wrong.

Buyers don't pay for profit.

They pay for what keeps working after you walk out the door.

Welcome to the Real Jason Duncan podcast.

I am Jason Duncan, your host.

And every guest on this show is here for one reason.

They used to believe something that turned out to be wrongs.

And some figured it out on their own and some had to get knocked down first.

But either way, by the time they sit in this chair across from me, they know the difference between what's real and what isn't.

And the lies that do the most damage are the ones that they look like wisdom.

They're the ones that everybody repeats.

They're the ones you're so sure about, you never even think to question them.

But a lie like that builds a cage around you.

And here's why you stay in it.

The cage looks like gold.

It looks like the smart play.

It looks like the good life.

It looks like a strong marriage.

It looks like the right way to do things, whatever it is.

And nobody walks away from something that looks like treasure.

And that's what this show is about.

The gold.

is the lie.

And every conversation here is about finding the cage, seeing that the gold was never real.

And how do we walk out of it?

So today's cage is built around, you know, is built out of this number one thing that every owner trusts the most, the bottom line.

That's what we're all in for, right?

It's the bottom line.

And you grow revenue, you protect margin, and every year the P&L tells you that you're winning.

And the bank, the bank believes that the award lists believe it.

You believe it.

And the whole time you're assuming that the when the day comes to sell your business, that that profit is what a buyer will pay for.

But here's the problem.

The way most owners produce that profit is by being at the center of everything.

And the very thing that made the business profitable is the thing that makes it unsellable.

And most owners don't find that out until one moment

They can't afford to find out.

It's when they're trying to leave.

And that's what we're going to explore today on the show.

My guest today has sat on both sides of the deal table.

He built, he scaled, and he sold his own company, one that made the Inc 5000 list three times, and then he crossed over.

So today he runs Hartman Rhodes.

It's an M&A advisory firm in New Jersey that helps owners of companies worth one to $25 million actually get sold.

And he wrote the book on it called Sweat Equity Payday.

Mark Hartman, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Jason.

Really excited to be here today.

Well, I'm glad that you're here because this, as I was telling you pre-show, this is going to be a great conversation for me because I don't often on this show get to talk shop about what it is that I do for a living.

But because you and I are in the same place, even though we do very different things, well, not very different things, but we do different things.

We're going to get to talk shop today.

But before we get rolling, I told everybody in the opening that you came here to blow up a lie, that the belief that a profitable business is automatically a sellable one.

And you've lived this from both chairs.

You built and sold your own company, and now you're the guy on the other side of the table getting deals done.

So put it on tape today.

In your own words, what's the lie?

And where did you first watch it break somebody?

The lie is that a profitable business is automatically a sellable business.

And in mergers and acquisitions or business brokering, profitability gets the buyer attention, but transferability gets the deal done.

You know, I saw this in my own life, right?

I think that maybe we take a step back here.

You brought up the Inc 5000.

Everybody likes to hear that.

three years in a row on the Inc.

5000 list with my medical claims cost containment company and the phone started to ring.

This is where the lie became very relevant and real to me personally.

The private equity group offered me three times for my company on a three-year earn out.

Earn outs, good or bad?

Earn outs are terrible.

Depends, right?

Mostly, mostly, right.

Right.

If you're, okay, let's talk shop.

I have this discussion all the time with people, right?

Two out of 10 businesses are only going to transfer, right?

If you've not built your business for transferability, earnout might be your only option.

That is true.

And if you can accept that, realize that and understand that you may not have a choice.

At that time in my life, I was in my thirties and I didn't have to sell.

I wasn't sick.

I wasn't getting divorced from my wife or my business partner.

So from my perspective, I could have kept doing what I was doing for the next three years and at the end of three years, be at the same place, but I don't own the company.

So I think that that is something that if, you know, I used to believe that if you built a good business and you worked hard, it would sell itself.

But that's simply not the case.

Building a successful business and successfully selling that business are two entirely different disciplines.

And a good business can still produce a bad exit.

That's a good line.

We should use that.

A good business could still produce a bad exit.

You know, I talk about that a lot, is that, as you said, two out of 10 businesses transfer.

Exit Planning Institute says that 80% of businesses that go to market never sell, which follows what you just said two out of 10 actually do.

And the number one reason they don't sell is because of owner dependence.

And what a lot of people assume is that those eight businesses are bad businesses.

And that's not true.

I mean, your business evidently was good enough to get on the Inc.

5000 list three years in a row.

I had a business, same thing, two years in a row in the Inc.

5000 and then I couldn't sell it, even though we had a million dollars in EBITDA.

We were profitable, but it still ran through me.

So I want to start with your company.

You were those three years on the Inc.

5000 list, which by the way, congratulations, because that is based on growth year over year.

It's not an easy thing to get on it multiple years.

The first year maybe, but certainly multiple is hard to do.

So by every scorecard,

Certainly the ones that owners worship, you'd won.

So walk me back to the point in your own sale when you found out your company was actually wasn't what you thought it was.

Was it when they offered you the earnout or was there something else going on that made you realize, holy crap, I built this the whole totally wrong way.

I built it the whole wrong way.

I learned in an instant that I had built a business that was

That golden trap, right?

It was wildly profitable, well over a million in EBITDA, right?

And it was great, right?

I was having fun.

I was making money.

I had an amazing team around me, right?

But I was the center of the hub in the spoke.

And at that time, I got introduced to John Warlow, the author of Built to Sell, and read the book, and I'm like, holy smack, I did this all wrong.

And three years later, I sold the company for eight figures.

Wow.

So you can pivot quickly, right?

And by the way, we received 42 inquiries after we signed the LOI.

I mean, we were hot.

Yeah.

But what did I have to do?

I had to get myself out of the two most important places, sales and operations.

So I hired somebody who was much smarter than me in operations.

Instead of telling him what to do, I told him where we needed to go and let him do it.

Hired a salesperson that had better contacts than I did and said, Just help us grow, man.

And he did, right?

Everybody was rewarded for that on the team.

In the summer of 2017, somebody came to us and offered us a lot of money and we took it.

Wow.

When I was going through a similar situation to you, I got to a place where we got really high EBITDA, things are going well, let's try to sell it.

And my business coach was the one who let me know.

He said this.

There's 14 words.

He said, the reason you want out is the same reason no one would want in.

And that was like, holy crap.

I want out of the business, but nobody wants in the business because the reason I want out is that I don't want to be the center of this anymore.

And that's why nobody would want in.

So you discovered that.

But in three years, you were able to turn that around.

Do you think that that's a common

or an expected timeframe for people to be able to turn these things around.

Maybe.

I mean, every business is different, right?

So possible.

I did it, right?

But that doesn't mean that it can be done.

It could be done in less time, probably.

Depends on the business, depends on the industry, depends on the will of the owner, I guess, more importantly than anything else.

Jason, I really think that, right?

The will of the owner, if you have a will,

to make the structural changes needed to make yourself completely 100% totally useless in your own company, then it's possible.

But you have to have that will.

And a lot of business owners simply don't.

Well, and you're right.

And now that you're on the other side of this thing where you're actually helping represent the person you used to be, how at a percentage wise of the people who come to you and say, hey, I want your firm to help me

I want you to list my company and sell my company for me.

How many of them show up in the same position that you were in?

Maybe one out of 10.

Only one.

Maybe.

So what's going on?

How do people figure it out where you and I didn't figure it out?

There's a generational thing.

Yeah, explain that.

So most of my clients are boomers, 60 plus years old.

And their mindset has always been because that's what they were told, get up at six o'clock in the morning, go to work for eight to 10 hours every day, put a couple hours in over the weekend, get two, maybe three weeks off, work really hard, pay your bills, live conservatively, and at the end of the day, everything will just work itself out.

And that's simply not true.

And our generation, maybe we saw our grandparents and parents work like that.

And we actually think a lot differently.

Yeah.

I mean, listen, when I sold Ethicare, I had life-changing money.

I never had to work again a day in my life.

But at 42 years old, I knew that I, A, had to do something to occupy my time because I hate chasing the little white ball on grass.

And B, there's only so many days a year you can spend on cruise ships and on land tours.

So for me, I had to build a second act, as we learned at the Eggs and Planning Institute, a second act that was going to fit around who I wanted to be the next chapter.

And for a lot of our parents and grandparents generation, they never think about a second act.

They just think about work until 70, maybe 75 or death, and then that's it.

So I think that while

Our generation is a little more open to receiving feedback and hiring coaches and mentors.

The Buber generation, it appears in my experience, may not be.

Yeah.

So let me make sure I'm positioning what I think you said right, is that 90% of the businesses that show up to sell with you are not ready.

They're still owner dependent and there is a process that's going to change.

Is that correct?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so how do you what do you do with those people?

How do you take those 90%?

How do you get that transfer?

Do you give them homework as they come back?

What do you do with them?

So most of them tell me that, you know, it's not the case.

Right.

Of course, that's what they say.

Of course.

Of course.

How resilient is the business without you?

Oh, it's fine.

Okay.

So let's conduct what I affectionately call the kidnap test.

Write about this in my book, The Kidnap Test.

I'll use you, Jason, for a moment.

If I kidnap you from your business for one day, what happens?

Probably not.

Probably nothing.

Right.

All right.

How about a week?

Maybe a month.

What about a quarter?

And it's funny because sometimes I get, you know,

I get the answer they think I want to hear, and then I start peeling back the layers of the onion with, well, who has the authority to handle payroll?

And who's going to pay the vendors if you're not there?

Who's the authority to sign checks?

And what about signing the tax return if this happens to be close to tax time?

Who has that power?

And inevitably, this helps me uncover the layers of the onion.

Some business owners

They're just never going to make that change.

They're just happy with the way things are.

And their philosophy is I'm selling a really awesome job.

Someone will buy it.

Hmm.

And you know what?

Um, in the mediums, the lower middle market, those deals, they're probably right.

Someone will probably on Main Street transactions.

Good luck.

Those are very difficult to sell.

So when we talk about that, only two out of ten businesses sell, my gut tells me that that number is those companies, you know, worth less than two and a half, $3 million in the current market.

Is right now, is there a trend that you're seeing

Well, let me back up before I ask about the trend.

We've got the silver tsunami.

We've got the baby boomers are all retiring, many of whom are entrepreneurs who have businesses, closely held businesses that they never had a plan for succession.

They don't know what they're going to do with it.

There's that.

But is there a trend that you're seeing among industry types or is there some sort of revenue model that is easier for you as a broker to say, you know what?

Let's, um, this got some legs on it.

Let's figure this out.

We can make this work even though it's owner dependent.

We could, you could shift it quicker than some other models.

Is there anything like that that you're seeing?

Yeah, we're seeing it every day, I guess, in roll-ups, right?

So we're seeing the guy that's out there with, you know, plumbing or HVAC business and he himself is doing the estimating and his technicians are out there doing service delivery, right?

And you're seeing the private equity groups will will buy a platform company and then bolt on other companies, you know right there.

And you're seeing that happen each and every day and it's going across many industries, mostly in home services and specialty contracting.

You know, business owners very infrequently in the specialty contracting space will give up that quoting aspect of things.

Some are learning, some are evolving, some are developing technology or deploying technology that will help them.

But many of them are still, they go out and they write the quote and then the service guy comes out and does the delivery work, you know, the next day or next week.

Well, I want to ask you about a specific case study from your experience.

You can anonymize, of course, where it went really well.

Like somebody came in, they were prepared.

How did that happen?

And then compare that to maybe another case study.

Okay, here's a similar situation.

They weren't ready, and here's what the outcome.

But before I get you to answer that, I'm going to give you a couple minutes to think about it while I speak directly to our listeners about a couple things they need to hear today.

Let's take a quick break to thank our amazing sponsors for making this podcast possible.

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And if you'd rather talk about it one-on-one, you can always book a call directly with me at TheRealJasonDuncan.com/talk.

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Thanks for listening to our sponsors now back to the show.

So Mark, I gave you a couple of minutes to think about, like, is there a study, somebody you worked with where, man, it was such a, they were not ready at all, and here's what the outcome was versus someone who was ready, and here's what that outcome was.

Have you got a couple of things you could share with us?

Sure.

So I, for a long time, have deployed the philosophy of the red velvet rope.

Right?

So I do an enormous amount of time upfront making sure that business owners are really ready to work with me before I send a listing agreement to get started.

But sometimes that doesn't mean that I find myself in a situation where, you know, at the end it's a little bit of a sideways thing.

And only one deal in the last, I don't know how many ever, I didn't get to the closing, I didn't get closed, right?

I got this one nearly the closing table, but I'm going to tell you a horror story.

And it worked out great at the end for the client.

The story goes like this.

We're talking about specialty home contracting businesses.

This was a large one doing approximately $12 million a year.

The owners were 70 plus years old and then they were contemplating, you know, selling to retire.

They had never bought a business before and never sold a business before.

So this was all going to be new for them.

They were a little tech savvy, but not so much.

publicly traded company, division of a publicly traded company comes in, wishes to acquire them.

And the due diligence was death by a thousand, maybe a million stab wounds.

And they wore the sellers down.

They wore them down.

And I think that was deliberate, although I can't quite say that for sure.

Because then at the end, after the buyers wore them down, they decided to retrade the deal on net working capital.

And I think they thought that the sellers were so emotionally invested and so tired that they would just give in.

You know what?

I told them not to and they walked away.

So from my perspective, the deal went sideways.

on a couple different levels, the client ultimately did the right thing for them, right?

It's the one that got away.

Eventually, I think that they will come back to the table, but they're still feeling the trauma of publicly traded company subsidiary due diligence, which by far was the most intensive I've ever seen in my life.

You know, and I think I learned some lessons there.

They got their eyes open to where the blind spots existed within their own company in HR, in compliance, in financial reporting.

So they got value from the process, but it took them a long time after the deal had ceased for them to admit that.

So I think that, you know, every one of these deals creates an opportunity for me to have fun and to learn a little bit, learned a lot from that transaction.

I'll flip to a positive story if you're ready for it.

Yeah, let's do it.

Let's talk about a good side of this.

So represented a company that sold its own proprietary cleaning product and they were not ready because they had a death of a shareholder who was actually the president CEO of the company.

But before

They engaged me, they engaged a CFO with the mindset, a fractional CFO with the mindset of get the business ready for sale.

And they did everything right.

Everything right.

So that when I, when I, everything, the financials were all cleaned up and ready to go.

They had waited 12 months after the CEO, president, shareholder had passed on to list the business for sale, right?

And sales did not go down, profits did not go down.

It was business as usual.

with a fractional CFO, a part-time fractional CFO and the, you know, the family kind of hanging around signing the checks.

And when they brought me in, they even gave me a list of people they wanted to sell to.

So for this engagement, it really worked out very well because we sold to one of the people on the list.

They were very happy about that.

And at the end of the day, um, you know, bringing in the right,

fractional CFO at the end made complete sense with experience and mergers and acquisitions to stage the business and get it ready for sale.

And they sold very quickly, much quicker than I expected them to.

And they got more money than I put on the valuation.

So I consider that to be a huge, huge win for myself and for the family, you know, as they transition the business away.

What I keep coming back to is this timeline, because I know you didn't mention it specifically.

It was kind of implied in the conversation, but an owner doesn't find out his business won't transfer when there's still time to fix it.

Usually they find out at the worst possible moment, which is like you said, in due diligence or at the closing table or after he's already emotionally left the company and he's kind of checked out because that lie, the lie that just being profitable

makes more company sellable.

It doesn't just cost you a bad quarter.

That can cost you to exit itself when you have the least runway to do anything about it.

Mark, you sit across from owners that are in their 50s and 60s and sometimes 70s who are counting on this business as their retirement plan.

Take me inside that conversation, the one where you have to tell a man the number in his head, It ain't real, man.

That number's not going to work.

What do you say to him

And what do you wish somebody had said to him 20 years earlier when he could still fix it?

So, you know, let's talk about entrepreneurship, right?

Because this is the heart of this.

Let's go backwards a little bit here, right?

Entrepreneurship teaches us how to build revenue, right?

While we're solving somebody's problem.

teaches us to hire people to make profit, right?

But nobody until recently has been starting to teach anybody about how to convert this business into personal wealth.

Really nobody has.

So owners naturally assume that if they build something good, buyers will recognize it and pay them appropriately.

And one of the first questions I have during the first I call it an exit discovery session is, you know, so-and-so, what's your business worth?

And from my perspective, it's a trick question.

I only want one of two answers.

I don't know.

Perfectly legitimate.

That's what I'm here to help you figure out.

Or I have a valuation done by someone who's a professional and it says this.

If you don't have that, as far as I'm concerned, when they say things, and I'm sure you've heard this, Jason, well, I want $5 million for my business.

What you want and what reality are two different things, right?

There's a lot of things I'd want, but that doesn't mean I'm going to get them.

So when I have these tough discussions, right, I have to approach this with a very careful

tone, right?

I have to approach it with the facts, right?

And I have to start with, you know, a little bit of honest labeling, right?

You should have been working on this all along, right?

Business exit planning is good business planning.

That's a fact.

If you haven't been doing that and you're a business owner, you've already waited too long, right?

Dr.

Covey teaches us start with the end in mind.

So 20 years ago, you should have been thinking about your business.

and thinking about how am I going to get out because I can bet one thing for everybody and I'm always right with this.

Every business owner will exit their business either vertically or horizontally and only God knows when that's going to happen.

So if you think that you're going to somehow mysteriously, you know, cheat something, let me know how that works out for you.

It's not going to go well.

So I have these discussions and maybe it's because I'm A Jersey guy and I'm just painfully obvious, you've got that from me, right?

And I've done it, right?

I've sat on both sides of the table, as you mentioned.

I was a business owner.

I understand you have to make payroll on Friday.

I understand that the vendors always get paid before me.

I get that.

I walked a mile in these guys' shoes, right?

And my story lends me to be a better advisor and to have this tough talk with them.

If you're 65 and you have a business and you don't know the value of it, and your philosophy is,

I'm going to work until I'm dead.

Well, that sounds great.

Wonderful.

But what about the family members who are going to have to clean up the mess?

So at least do them a favor and set plans, you know, in policies in place so that when that inevitable day comes and trust me, if you're 65, I hope you live to 100, right?

But as I've said a thousand times, right, man makes plans, God laughs.

Well, we've named the lie the whole episode that profit

is not what gets you paid.

So before we head into kind of closing our conversation, I want the truth on the table in a form that an owner can actually use.

If transferability is what buyers actually pay for, I want you to define it for the owner that's listing right now.

Give him the test.

What has to be true about his company for a buyer to write a check without him in the building?

And where does the average profitable business fail that test first?

So this goes back to your book and mine.

We address really two sides of the same problem.

You help owners build that freedom right before the transaction.

My book helps them protect the outcome, right?

So when I sit and talk with business owners ready, I talk about de-risk.

First thing I scream is de-risk.

De-risk yourself from the business, de-risk your vendor, right?

No one single source vendor, de-risk your customers, get your customer concentration down and de-risk your employees.

Do not rely on any one single employee, even if it's your cousin Jim.

Trust me, that will be a problem in the buyer's eyes, right?

The next thing I tell people to do is ready, get a serious, you know, due diligence done by your accounting firm on your numbers.

clean them up, make sure your books are accurate.

Three to five years at minimum.

This is what buyers want and demand.

And the last thing I suggest for all business owners, you know, as they think about getting themselves ready for a sale is know your numbers.

First phone call, your financial advisor, how much do I really need to get for the business?

Second phone call to somebody, an exit plan or business valuation person, M&A person, get a valuation on your business.

What is it worth today?

So when you started doing this on that side of the table, what was the thing that you learned that surprised you the most?

That nobody's doing exit planning, right?

You know, it's funny.

It's funny you talk about the Exit Planning Institute, right?

So I have a long history with them.

I am SEPA, Certified Exit Planning Advisor, number 241.

I think they're over 10,000 now, to be honest with you.

So I go back to 2012 when you used to have to go to the University of Chicago for training, right?

But it totally shocks me how nobody wants to have exit planning.

discussions, business owners.

It's frightening to me.

And I say nobody.

I see it with my peers my age who are thinking about it.

But when it comes to the boomer generation, they're just not thinking about it the way they should be.

And that's costing them when it comes time to sale, not just money.

It's costing them a lot of headaches as they go through due diligence.

It's costing them a lot of headaches with buyers who get skittish and walk away.

And that's a real problem.

It makes my job harder.

I wish everybody

a Jason Duncan program on building a business ready for sale and be handed to me on a silver platter that I could take to market because my job will be so much easier.

But the reality is that's just not the way it is with a lot of the boomers unfortunately.

Well, and we can certainly make that happen, Mark.

You and I can work on that because the Exeter Club, which is the pre-M&A exit advisory firm that I run and operate, that's what we do.

We can get them ready on a silver platter for people like you.

So thank you for mentioning that.

Well, before we close, I want to give you one minute.

I'm not going to interrupt you.

I want you to tell the world as directly and as passionately as you can what the lie is and why they've been believing it and what the truth actually is.

go.

A profitable business is automatically a sellable business is the big lie.

You know, in the M&A world, business brokerage land, profitability gets the buyer attention, but you know, transferability really, it gets the job done.

And, you know, I think this is something that many business owners have been conditioned to believe that the bottom line, how much money you take home at the end of the month, the end of the quarter, the end of the year, which shows up on your tax return, makes you have a good business.

And that because you made a million dollars in EBITDA, you have a sellable business.

Building a successful business and successfully selling a business, they're two different disciplines, you know?

And you know, lastly, I think it's the most important thing here is that profitability creates interest, transferability creates value, and a good business can still produce a bad exit.

Mark, tell people how to find you.

Best place to find me is on my website, Hartman Rhodes, H-A-R-T-M-A-N-N, Rhodes, R-H-O-D-E-S.com.

Maybe on LinkedIn too, I post a little bit on there.

Yeah, so hartmanroads.com.

We'll have that in the show notes and linkedin.com/in/markhartman.

And then you got a book, Sweat Equity Payday.

Where can people pick that book up?

So here's the book.

Thank you for allowing me this shameless plug that I love.

You can get it on Amazon.

It's available in hardcover and paperback and Kindle formats.

been recording, although to be honest with you, it's like the worst process in my life.

I've been recording my own Audible book, right?

In fact, tomorrow I think I'm going to record the last little bit of it.

But I highly encourage everyone to write a book and do that.

It's such a wonderful experience.

I've not done an audio version of my book.

People have asked for it for years, and I have not done it because I don't want to go through that hellish process.

But I know I need to do it, Mark.

I really need to do it.

I just haven't done it yet.

The funny thing is I got a lot of friends who apparently forgot how to read, and they've been begging for it.

I started this process months ago.

I dread it, right?

And my publisher is like, you got to do this.

So like once every couple of weeks I get an e-mail, can we record another chapter?

Because I'll only do one chapter at a time because I just hate it, right?

And I went on ChatGPT.

I'm like, are there services?

Let's just have a service do this.

And the publisher is like, you have a great voice.

You'll do yourself.

Yeah, my raspy New Jersey, I had too many cigars and bourbons last night.

Yeah, that's wonderful.

Great.

Yes.

Anyway, sorry, I digress.

Well, it's all right.

Well, listen, final question.

If someone listening right now is still inside that lie, they're still believing it, what's the one thing you want them to hear before this episode ends?

A good business does not guarantee a good exit.

Preparation, timing, I guess that a competitive process will create a successful exit.

Mark, thank you so much for being on the show.

We definitely should do work together and recommend people, refer people back and forth.

So thank you for being on the show today.

Thank you.

Really had a great time today, Jason.

Well, that's a wrap on today's episode.

If today you saw a bar on your cage that you hadn't noticed before, take a minute and send this episode to someone who needs to see theirs.

The gold is the lie.

And as always, I am your host, the real Jason Duncan and Jesus is King.

We'll see you next time.

Hey, thanks for listening to this episode.

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