to the preparing side or the navigating side?
Probably the preparing side because 50% of deals
fall apart in due diligence and just so many people
are just not prepared.
So let's focus on that.
That makes a lot of sense.
OK.
And then we're talking about small businesses
that are maybe looking on the horizon
to prepare for this five to 10 years out
or that are kind of like here and now in the mix of it.
You know, all of our data says it's here and now.
And so it's anywhere from I'm ready to do this today
to within the next 12 months.
OK.
That makes a lot of sense.
Perfect.
All right.
What are the top three greatest secrets in this case
for preparing for exit?
One, businesses that have not done any preparation
are unlikely to actually complete a transaction.
Two, a myth about the whole industry at large
is that every business is looking for a buyer.
Close to 50% are actually know who that buyer will be.
So it's going to be an employee, a family member, or a business
partner.
And three.
All right.
Welcome in to Vision Pros Live.
With Jackson Calame, I'm your show host.
We'll be doing interviews for visionary entrepreneurs
and guest leaders who are building
fantastic visions out there.
Hey, there, and welcome in to Vision Pros Live.
I'm your show host, Jackson Calame, founder and CEO,
first class business.
I'm excited to have Eric Grafstrom here today.
He has a depth of knowledge and background
with startups, with small businesses.
In fact, he's built the software called Exit Guide
that looks quite impressive.
And I'm not in the process of exiting my business right now.
I'm in the process of building and scaling it.
But the baby boomers out there, a lot of you guys are exiting.
Also, a lot of people that have built something substantial,
and maybe you're thinking, what can I get in return for this?
I do recommend checking out Exit Guide as a potential tool.
You'll get to hear from the founder himself in just a minute.
Before we bring Eric on stage, though,
we're going to talk about these sponsors, some of these tools
that have helped us, some of the tools that
could have helped me when I was getting started.
So a whole click is what we use for our LinkedIn automation.
And that gets us in front of brand new people
every single day.
Yesterday, I went into my messages.
I had 47 messages that were marked for me to respond to.
And I usually only go in like once every once,
sorry, twice every week.
I go in and check and see what messages need my attention
versus a virtual assistant.
There's 47 messages.
Super helpful.
People who want to be on our show, in our case.
People who want to engage with us about our growth principles
as well.
I went back in today.
I responded to all those yesterday, took me about an hour.
And then I went back in this morning and looked,
and we already had 22 messages.
It's really helpful to have a system that
drives those types of opportunities to us
so we can find the people who are ready to reciprocate with us
and providing good to the world.
That's what we look for.
Then there's the simple, fast websites.
Shane Michael, young guy, got a startup.
He's already starting to rank pretty high
on Google for this thing.
And I was just impressed that he's
trying to build websites at $179 a month
as a starting entry point.
When I was starting my business, if I
could have had a website provider help me at that rate,
I probably would have just paid him and said, hey, man,
give me whatever I need to submit
and allow them to build the first iteration of my website.
If you're new to business, your website's going to be created.
You're then going to talk to your market.
You're going to realize you need to change.
You're going to pivot a lot and make a lot of adjustments.
So rather than spending a ton of time up front on your website,
stay focused on productively representing your brand,
talking to people, trying to get the website done
as a placeholder.
One secret for all of you pros out there,
when we're interviewing people, sometimes even our visionaries
say, oh, our website, I really need to update that.
Everybody does.
Your website's a representation of your past.
It always will.
But you can't have a website that represents your future.
It can only represent what your potential future might
look like.
So rather than harp on your website or feel bad,
just know that it's getting the job done of putting a,
if you're getting the job done putting a professional brand
out there and what you've accomplished,
that can be your springboard to attract people to talk to you.
If you're looking for a website that converts,
you're going to need to spend a whole lot more than $179.
So be ready for that too.
Then there's the Water Project.
The Water Project is one thing that we always
talk about on this show.
It's what we really want to drive awareness around,
what we give back to as well.
There's millions of people who don't have access
to clean drinking water, like you and I do.
What I love about the Water Project
is they show you which project you're able to,
you can contribute to, you can pick and choose.
And you get to see how that affects the community.
And you get to see the results of the borehole well
or the sand dam that they create.
I think the transparency is amazing.
If you're thinking in your head and your heart,
you're like, Jackson, there's this thing
that I really want you to talk about or contribute to,
do us a favor.
Drop the link in the comments, because there's
lots of ways to help.
There's 8 billion people for us to help in this world.
And if we're fortunate enough to listen to a podcast right now,
the least we can do is create some awareness
for those people who drastically need more help than we do.
So with that said, let me pull up exit guide real quick.
All right, let me do that.
Here we go.
I want to dive into Eric's depth here.
And again, if you're not looking at the screen,
I'm not going to read these to you.
We can always come back to the YouTube channel.
Some of the striking comments in Eric's testimonials
from founders about him being the guy to go to,
him being the person that they called last minute,
and they got the information that they needed,
like super on point, got centered right
before going into their negotiations
or into moving their brand forward.
It's quite impressive.
He's got a background of helping more than 20 venture-backed
companies in Silicon Valley.
For those of you, again, newer to the startup space
or not involved in startup world,
while San Francisco has its pros and cons,
one of the championship titles it's known for
is the fact that it knows how to scale and grow businesses.
So having the background of helping
these 20 different venture-backed companies
in Silicon Valley and then being known as the guy
to come in and solve the problem,
and having the clarity to know if you're building your team,
your fundraising, operating or planning, operating plans
and budgets, if you're deciding if you should pivot
or you need validation on a concept,
I just, I'm very impressed with what he's put out here
in terms of his clarity.
I'm also very grateful for his no BS approach to business.
I got to experience that firsthand in my pre-show
with Eric, I honor him for that
because I know he's respecting both my time
and his in the process.
And as you can see on my screen,
there's a whole lot of clarity built into exit guide
and the free valuation assessment.
I think it's absolutely worth diving into.
So Eric, thank you so much for joining us
in Vision Pro Live today.
Great to be here, Jackson.
Look forward to our conversation.
Yes, well, man, one thing I'd like to do is
there's just so much noise online
with profiles these days, right?
There's a lot of accolades.
Anybody can build a profile that makes them look
like the Wizard of Oz, right?
So I'd like to know from your firsthand background,
your words, like kind of who should be listening
and what is it about your background
that helps them key in on understanding
why you're the guy to come and talk to about exiting?
Well, this was born out of actually decades of experience.
I had good fortune of starting at a company called
AudioNet in Dallas, Texas, and that became broadcast.com.
So I was sitting in a room on a card table
banging out cold calls to people.
Back then, I don't wanna date myself,
but people did not have sound cards and speakers.
And I was asking them to try to broadcast corporate events,
what have you, over the internet.
Through that journey, it just kind of led me to
what it took to actually go from an idea
to put in a business in place,
scaling it and driving revenue.
And I had some wins.
I mean, broadcast.com clearly worked out,
but between then and now, I mean, it's been hard.
And so I think one of the things that you look for is
somebody who has the experience
of getting punched in the mouth.
Someone who's had the experience of failure,
because in taking nothing away from people
who've come from accomplished backgrounds,
but if you've gone to a very pedigree school
and you've gone to work at, say, a Google or a Facebook,
again, it takes certain skills and insights
and knowledge and talent to do that.
But when I interview people or when people talk to me,
I do wanna know where they failed
or what they've learned from that
and how that built them up
and what are the things that they know they need to avoid
and how that made them a more resilient entrepreneur.
I love that.
I'm a little bit infamous for saying
that the best sales rep for Disney
is the fastest paper pusher.
And granted, they have skills, they're trained well,
but their cell is secured.
I'm going to Disneyland,
I'm gonna get there whether you get in my way or not.
And so there is a different mentality.
There's a different style, like you said,
when you've been punched in the mouth, I love that.
Yeah, let's talk first about the success vision.
What's the vision look like for those that you serve?
What's their destination arrival?
I don't wanna say practical,
because it could be huge and amazing too,
but what can they anticipate?
Well, with Exit Guide,
I came from this background in Silicon Valley
which has its own weirdness
when it comes to the valuation of a company
and should they exit
and people pay for companies that have no revenue.
So I had experience with this
and a bunch were, to be very clear, were dumpster fires
and it was not easy trying to help navigate the path.
What I realized though is that bubble
is does not align with the rest of the business world.
And when it comes to small business,
I'm gonna give a couple of data points here.
Small business is about 40% of the GDP in the United States.
Okay.
85% of small businesses are owned by Gen X and baby boomers.
Youngest is about 44.
Most of them are over the age of 60.
Now big majority, probably 90% or more
are worth less than $5 million.
So what's gonna happen over the next 10 to 15 years is-
You said 90%?
Over 90%.
So they're really small,
meaning they might have a couple of hundred thousand
or maybe a million dollars in revenue.
And so a couple of things are gonna happen.
One, 100% of them will have to exit at some point
for obvious reasons.
People are gonna retire or pass away or whatever it may be.
Now, because the baby boomer generation is so large,
there'll be tons and tons of businesses
worth more than $5 million.
Say between 5 million and 20 million,
and they will gobble up all the resources
for business brokers, M&A advisors, attorneys,
and CPAs and so on and so forth.
What will happen though is to those that are worth,
say anywhere from 250,000 to about 2.5 million,
is they don't have access to these resources.
One, they just generally speaking, they can't afford them.
But two, even if they did wanna overpay for those resources
relative to the value of their business,
why would you help somebody
who has a $600,000 value business
when you could help somebody
who has a $15 million business?
Correct.
So our vision really is to blend technology
and expert resources to kind of create
a very simplified M&A process that starts with,
I don't even know what I'm doing to,
okay, now I know what my business may be worth.
I know the steps I need to take.
And I know how to navigate the steps
to actually close a transaction.
So I think democratize gets overused.
I'm gonna use it here because it's just easy.
But we wanna democratize an M&A process for Main Street.
That's noble.
It is.
I actually, having worked on a lot of things,
I mean, I had the good fortune of living
in Menlo Park, California for 17 years,
which is home of Facebook, Sand Hill Road,
it's right where Stanford is.
And you're in this crazy bubble.
And if I didn't have access to somebody
through outside counsel at a company I was working not with
or maybe somebody on the team,
I mean, it was somebody that was a neighbor
or a parent of one of my kids friends, whatever it may be.
I could say, hey Jackson, let's go meet for a cup of coffee.
I wanna get your opinion on X, Y, and Z.
And for a $6 cup of coffee,
I'm getting world-class advice, right?
And that's just not normal.
And so what I wanted to do is I wanted to say,
look, for whatever reason that bothers me,
because you have people that have businesses,
whether it's the local floral shop or a coffee stand
or a plumbing business or whatever it may be.
And they haven't really broken through that big value,
but of a multimillion dollar a year business.
But the real businesses, these people have mortgages,
they have kids, they put food on the table,
they've been a part of their community
and done so for as few as three to five years,
in many cases, 15 to 20.
And I think it's unjust crazy that we are not as a society
trying to help them with fundamentally
the most important business decisions
they'll make in their entire life.
It's huge.
I love that.
I'm not from the Menlo bubble.
And I've never really, I've stepped foot in it once.
Oh no.
I hope you're okay.
Right?
Yeah.
And most people I don't think, no, I'm LDS.
And so I'm familiar with the Mormon bubble in Utah.
And I went to school in Provo for a little bit.
They call it Happy Valley for a reason.
And there's this very different culture,
you know, of connectedness, activity level,
again, that mentorship that exists
from a spiritual standpoint or a pathway standpoint,
to each their own on the process.
I don't like it.
Like for me, it wasn't, it's not for me.
I love Texas.
I love third world countries.
I really do enjoy living in those types of environments
where then there's just, there are different pros and cons.
But for me, the same as saying, same thing is true.
Honestly, I felt a little bit worthless
in the Mormon bubble, right?
I didn't feel like I could help people as well
while I lived in an environment
where everybody was pretty much better than me
in everything I did.
And it felt that way.
So it's no surprise too,
that it also has the highest rate of depression.
I don't think those are ironically connected.
Well, there's a saying of don't compare your inside
to someone else's outside.
So I appreciate what you're saying and where it comes from.
And I think a lot of us, including myself,
have experienced that.
And you don't know what's going on inside someone's heart.
You don't know what's going on inside
of someone's day-to-day life.
Things may look great in the outside
and be very tumultuous inside.
But I know where you're coming from and I appreciate it.
Absolutely.
And then you take this skillset though,
and you apply it to the rest of the world.
And now you're creating,
you're expanding the environment of success by doing that too.
I think it's awesome.
So what's your vision for you?
You know, I've been a startup guy my entire career.
I'd probably make a terrible employee, you know,
but through the dozens of startups,
we moved from Dallas to London and London to California.
And we moved to Austin about three years ago
after raising our kids in Silicon Valley,
may or may not have been the best environment for them,
but they're young, healthy adults.
I could be more proud of it.
My daughter, Taylor, who's in London,
my son, Wilson, who's in Denver.
You know, I wanna do this.
Like, you know, at this stage in my life and my career,
I should be peak salary.
I mean, you know, my kids are relatively, you know,
launch, you know, newly launched.
I should be killing it, you know,
as an executive at some technology company, you know,
but there's a couple of things, a vision for me.
One, I wanna help other people.
And I feel like I've been blessed
with some resources along the way,
as well as a weird journey through startup land
that took me to different countries and different places
that has taught me a lot.
I have a journalism degree.
So by all accounts,
I shouldn't have done any of the job I've had over the past,
you know, 20 years.
But I feel very passionate about this.
I just, this is a thing, is a friend of mine asked me,
I need to see this in the world,
which is kind of this,
how do I make this process accessible to people
who otherwise would not have access to it?
And like, even if I made, let's just hypothetically say,
let's just say hypothetically made $100 million
from exit guide, I think I couldn't,
I gotta play golf,
but like I couldn't just sit around and, you know,
you know, do hobbies.
I would go do this again.
I would either do it as another founder
or help in a group of founders or whatever it may be.
But this is what I do.
I believe this is what I was designed to do.
And so my, the vision for me is continue
to be a great husband, a great dad.
Hopefully I'm both of those contributing member,
you know, to my community and to my society
and then use the God given talents that I have for,
you know, crazy startups and technology
to help other people and solve problems
and hopefully not create new ones along the way.
That's amazing.
I love that.
And it's, you know, it's a,
obviously it's not a vision to judge by any means
or say like, hey, here I am to quantify this
or say that was the right thing or anything like that,
but it does resonate with me as a rising visionary.
So in terms of some of the things that you said,
I wanna go back to this reality of SMB
versus Silicon Valley, right?
The world is different.
The options are different.
The mentalities are different.
Well, one reality that also exists would say
is the sports world of business is also different, right?
That's another segment.
There's virtues that are practiced in all three
and there's vices and challenges that exist in all three.
So having the spectrum, you know, the paradigm
from somebody like you that has been
in at least two of those worlds is one that,
again, those who are listening,
if you're preparing for that
and navigating your small business exit,
you want somebody by your side
with that type of depth and knowledge from both perspectives.
Another strange question for you.
I'm a big fan of the book, Five Dysfunctions of a Team.
I don't know if you've read it.
I have not.
Okay.
I probably experienced all five in 67 too, but go ahead.
99% of companies do.
Yeah.
Well, what I wanna compare to though is in that story,
the CEO comes in, the new CEO has been hired.
She is very different than the demographic
of the existing employees.
And she spends her first two weeks listening,
not saying a word, going into these.
Okay.
So what I exist.
So she's been those first two weeks listening,
not moving anything,
making sure she understands the culture really well.
And then she gets to work after that point.
So I was gonna ask, is that how you go about things
or some of your testimonials are like,
like he came in and he made an instant microwave difference.
And so I was like, I gotta ask Eric about this.
No, I think I look at,
I always think it's funny when people professes
that you just need to follow a methodology.
You just need to do this.
You know, and in, you know, a side note
when it comes to exit guide,
one of the things that was core to my thesis
when I started this is,
well, exiting your business means different things
to different people.
I mean, everybody's like, so you help them find a buyer.
I'm like, no, in fact, we don't do that at all.
Most people start with, I don't even know what to do.
Some wanna sell to an employee.
Some don't know if they can sell their business
and need help with that.
Some will have to sell the assets in close.
Others will successfully find a buyer in their community.
What I've learned, you know,
through all my years of experiences,
you know, when you're moving into an organization,
a core tenant of leadership for myself is,
you know, find and recruit wildly talented people
that are smarter than you.
Focus on building a level of trust with them.
And then your job at that point is to get out of the way
and allow them to operate at peak performance.
I've been in many organizations where I've come in.
I've been the cleanup guy in a couple of startups.
You know, some that literally had burned through 50
to 60 to a hundred million dollars
and had, you know, a hundred thousand dollars left
from the bank and CEO was tossed out and I came in.
And through that, you don't come in with all the answers.
What you do is you need to identify
who on that team is still committed.
Can you trust them?
Will they trust you?
And then how do you enable them to operate
so that they can actually thrive and do their job?
And I've said in a number of occasions,
if you think I have all the answers or you're relying on me
to come up with the plan without you
and tell you what to go do, we're screwed.
And anybody who believes they come in
and have all the answers or whatever it may be,
super big red flag, like it's waving,
the lights are flashing,
get off that ship as fast as you possibly can.
But somebody who comes in and says,
look, I just need the right three, 30, 300,
whatever the number is in your organization,
who are committed that I can trust
and want to operate at a high level.
And my job can be, there are days where some of my job was,
I will go get lunch.
And people are like, why are you gonna,
like you're the CEO, why would you go get lunch?
I'm like, I can't code.
I mean, like this is a technical problem
that you need to fix.
And if you being fed is part of you
continuing to collaborate as a team,
going and getting sandwiches is the most important thing
that I can possibly do.
And so I've done that before.
And so, yeah, without extrapolating too much
from your very, very brief description
of the book and the scenario,
she sounds like a brilliant CEO and a great leader
in moving into that environment, probably was successful.
Yeah, it's well documented, well said.
We just added a new addition to our dysfunction for the team.
Oh yeah, you got your awesome spot.
Yeah, I saw that, I know.
That was great, man.
That's something that's been on my mind.
So let me go back to our next question.
Our next question is a bit darker.
It could be a whole lot darker.
What's the worst leadership experience
you've ever had been a part of, seen?
Let's go far down this road.
Yeah, I mean, and because we live in a public world,
so I'm not gonna get too specific
because people could go in and be like,
oh, he was talking about that company
on his LinkedIn profile.
I have been part of teams where we were micromanaged.
And what that does is it drives
the really talented, independent,
fiercely committed people, it drives them away.
And the sycophants and those who wanna get ahead
based on managing up, it drives them closer.
And it's happened probably twice in my career
where I've been a part of something that you can tell,
been in rooms with very smart people
where you're thinking, why?
I mean, you don't have to be rude, but you can disagree.
And if an executive team or a management team is together,
and there isn't some discourse of,
I'm not sure I agree with that,
where did you get that data?
Is that something you think?
Or do you have experience with reports on that?
Whatever, maybe, but leaders who have micromanaged,
I got fired once and left in another company
where that was the case.
And it's just terrible because it demotivates people,
it robs them of their money.
It robs them of their joy of wanting to come to work
every day, even when it's hard and it's difficult.
The reason we call it work is because it's worth, right?
All right, yeah.
So that whole, and I think Scott Galloway and others,
there's like, the whole thing that is a total misnomer
is follow your passion, you never work a day in your life.
That is the biggest pile of hooey ever, ever, ever.
It's the dumbest thing.
Thank you, Eric.
You know, so when people say that I'm like,
you know, look, nobody in their right mind does what I do.
I haven't been paid in three years.
Like I should have sold my house in California,
moved to Austin and taken a job is something.
Like a fool, like I went and did this
because I wanna go do it.
And so, you know, when you're asking people
to do something that takes them away from their families
and other things that bring them joy,
you know, you need to make sure that you're giving them
something that leverages who they are and what they can do.
I do love what I do.
I do love, you know, working on launching companies
and getting them off the ground and helping them scale.
Is it a passion?
Well, I mean, I guess it is.
Food's a passion, I love to cook.
I actually, you know, at one point thought about
doing that professionally.
And then what I discovered is like,
I'm not a late night person and chefs have to work
really late at night and they're on their feet all day.
And I went to cooking school for like a week.
It was just a try before you buy sort of thing
going in bar for everyone.
I was like, oh my gosh, this is a passion.
And if I pursue this as a career,
it would kill my passion for cooking.
So, you know, long-winded way of saying like,
you know, don't micromanage people, you know,
being in an environment where your talents are respected,
who you are as a person is respected.
And is somebody really kind of helping you kind of thrive
and get the most out of you,
or are they trying to kind of manage you
and tell you what to do because they think they're right?
Right, very good.
Let's talk about the best leadership experience ever.
It's the opposite, it's what I just described.
And I've really tried to emulate it.
It's coming in, you know, one of the best questions
I think a leader can ask of employees is saying,
I don't know, what do you think we should do?
And especially when times are tough, right?
Especially when you're in a very tense situation.
Because it happened to me and I emulated it later when,
you know, you're about to run out of money,
a product launch did not go, you know,
the way you expected it to,
marketing campaigns aren't working.
And there's something empowering about, you know,
being asked or asking people,
what do you think we should do?
And especially if, you know,
it doesn't have to be the vice president.
Sometimes you just go to, you know,
the person with the hands on the keyboard
of who's really managing your Facebook campaigns
or is handling customer support.
And being like, let's go ask, you know, let's go ask her.
What does she think?
And you're like, why would you ask me?
I'm like, because you're the one
talking to the customers every day.
I'm dealing with these knuckleheads
and investors and other people.
Like you've talked to a hundred more customers than I have.
What do you think we should go do?
Well, I don't know, this might not be the right idea.
I'm like, well, clearly if we had the right idea,
we wouldn't be here.
So, you know, great leaders, you know, foster dialogue
in being in environments where, you know, it was,
I wanna know what you're thinking.
I wanna know what your opinion is.
And I wanna create a space where you feel empowered
and encouraged to come forward
with what you think is the right thing to go do.
And that's something that I had the good fortune
of having some great managers.
The number one piece of advice I give to people
when they come out for the first five years
out of college or high school
and they're working for something,
don't worry about the title.
Don't worry about the organization.
Don't worry about all the other nonsense.
Find a great mentor and manager that you can work for.
The person you're reporting to is much more important
than whatever name is on that paycheck
or whatever the profile of that company is.
It could be Bob's Sporting and Fishing Store for all I care.
But if you've got a great manager who's teaching you
how to work and learning to craft,
that is 100 times more important than saying
I'm the associate assistant to the vice president
of the regional manager at Fancy Pants Technology Company.
I like that.
I wanna create a new page for our demos
and call it Fancy Pants Technology Company.
I'm gonna buy the domain soon as we hang up.
That's good.
The race is on.
I'll beat you to it.
That's awesome.
All right, Eric, if this was the last opportunity
to share with us a powerful lesson,
well, powerful lesson kind of their visionary
has learned from your experience.
You know, I have a life verse that I've accepted
that is a Yiddish proverb.
And listen to the intent behind the message
and not necessarily the source of the message
depending on where you are with faith and whatnot.
I'm a Christian, but this is a Yiddish proverb.
If you wanna make God laugh, just tell him your plans.
And so it doesn't mean don't plan, but by that, I mean,
like we are all sitting on this blue dot
in this massive orbit and, you know,
we're trying to move things ahead.
And one of the ways I look at important decisions is
how will I feel about this decision
when I'm say 70 or 80 years old,
provided I'm blessed to live that long.
And so when you're thinking about all these things
in front of you and it's easy to stress,
I do it all the time, like I wake up stressful.
Like I'm a total ADHD anxiety driven entrepreneur.
And, you know, I feel like at some point
I'm gonna be living under a bridge.
Just like I deal with that too.
But what I try to do is I try to say, hey, look,
if I can put my head in the pillow at night,
feel like I did anything and everything I did today
to be both who I wanna be and to kind of accomplish
my goals and move the ball forward,
then that's all I can control.
The rest I simply cannot.
I cannot control wars.
I cannot control the economy.
I cannot control those other things.
So I'm not gonna let those things get me down
and limit my ability to move ahead
and just wallowing despair and doom scrolling.
But at the same time, I'm going to move ahead
and I'm not gonna worry about the competition.
I'm not gonna worry about whether, you know,
venture funding is down.
I'm not gonna worry about the state of technology
or Bitcoin or whatever.
Can't control those things.
What I can do is I can try to recruit people
to help them work with me who are super talented,
build trust with them, get out of their way
and work my tail off on doing what I think
is the right thing for my business each and every day.
And that's as much as I can do.
The rest, if you think you can control
with all these other things and you can read the tea leaves
about where the market is going, awesome.
Start a blog, get on Twitter.
That's what those things apparently are for.
And, you know, the rest of us will kind of sit
in sidelines and smile and nod.
I like that.
You'll laugh with God.
I get that.
So there's something I really like about that proverb
that's kind of a hidden message within it.
And so those of you listening,
if you wanna make God laugh, tell him your plans.
I think one of the big factors of that proverb
is that you're telling the universal entity,
you're telling him how it's gonna go.
There's no humility.
There's not a whatsoever.
It's one thing to converse, right?
It's one thing to plan and have an idea,
but I'm a big fan of the same,
well, I'm not a big fan of the same,
strong opinions loosely held.
I prefer strong opinions delicately held, like a baby, right?
You don't wanna squeeze it to death,
but you are never going to drop it.
The same is true with our opinions,
if we can have them and know that we have a conviction
around them, but also be receptive to life lessons,
I find more peace when I do.
Absolutely.
And things will go wrong.
I mean, accept that.
I mean, what I tell people about raising money especially
is what do you look for an investor?
So the most important question in my opinion,
in my experience that you can ask any potential investor
is tell me about a situation
where one of your portfolio companies,
just something went really wrong.
And how did you help them get out of that?
Because they'll all tell you the same thing.
We have a great network, we're very founder friendly,
on and on and on.
And not to be dismissive of it.
I'm sure some of that is true and people work hard.
But startups like life will have their own challenges.
Unexpected things will come up,
you will make mistakes and whatever it may be.
And when that happens,
who is gonna stand beside you and say,
wow, that is a pretty big mess up.
Like, wow, that sucks.
And then say, all right,
take a minute, take an hour, recalibrate, regroup,
and then let's figure out
and let's get a game plan to get out of it.
That's what you need.
That's what you need in life.
That's what you need in startups.
That's what you need
whether you're gonna start a small business.
The people who are gonna say, what are you gonna do?
Or why did this happen?
I mean, those are relevant, important questions
because you don't wanna make the same mistake twice.
But I don't need somebody asking me,
what are you gonna go do when the crap hits the fan?
Like, I'm well aware, like I'm covered in it.
Like I know what happened.
I'm covered in poo.
So asking me like what I'm gonna go do,
well, clearly I'm going to go clean myself up
and I'm gonna get back in it.
I don't need you asking me that.
I don't need you asking me in badgering me
about other things.
If you wanna help, then jump in and please help.
If you're gonna sit here and bicker and question
and second guess, then stop taking up oxygen in my space,
go somewhere else and do it there
because my team and I have real work to go do
and we're gonna get back in the room.
You're setting a healthy boundary
and you're making sure that the cancerous nature
of doubting does not infect the surroundings.
I'm a big fan of that too.
And one of the entities that face that more than anybody
in this past year is the Texas Rangers.
So Texas Rangers, right?
You can imagine, they've never won the championship.
And so naturally, as they get closer and closer,
you're gonna have the, I don't know,
sometimes it's the holy fools of the world,
or the people, the naysayers and the doubters say like,
well, I don't know, you've never done this before.
Yeah, I don't know.
Like we know, I like that you say that.
I'm already covered in that response.
There's no new addition.
And so there's a politically correct or a PR need
to kind of handle that with grace, to an extent,
but there's also a need to just shut the ears
and focus on the virtues of what we need to do to win.
So I'm really glad you hit that.
Let's use the rest of our time, Eric,
if you don't mind, to talk about preparing
for the small business exits.
What are the things that, so obviously exit guides,
a big part of that.
And if you want me to, I'll share the screen
and kind of guide you through that tool and resource,
but feel free to talk about anything that we need to know.
Yeah, so really, the people we're targeting
are small mainstream business owners.
And so, different than Silicon Valley,
which I was, still enjoy working in that environment,
but what I say is the people we help
are kind of real businesses with real revenue
that deliver real value and you interact with every day.
And most have never exited a business before.
They may have successfully started one and run it
or taken it over and run it.
They've never exited it before.
So what we want people to start is,
let's just help you learn.
What could your business be worth?
Like we have a free assessment.
It takes seven to 10 minutes to complete.
It's gonna give you a range
for what your business is worth.
And then we're gonna drop you into an experience
where you can at least understand what are the steps.
So the steps for selling the assets
and closing the business are actually different
than the steps for preparing your business
to find a buyer in your local community,
which is even different than trying to assign the business
to a family member.
So we wanna create a simplified journey
that allows you to prepare.
And this is the step I think a lot of people,
to date have missed that we're trying to correct,
which is, come onto our website,
we'll list your business and someone will go buy it.
Well, not really.
If you plan to sell your house,
you don't just wake up one morning
and stick a sign in the yard and list it on Zillow.
You kind of go around the house and you're like,
okay, what needs to be repaired?
Should I get an inspection to find out
what are the things that need attention
that are gonna get flagged in the inspection?
So the initial assessment gives you kind of an idea of,
okay, your business is worth between X and Y
and based on the information you've given us,
your intended plan is to do this type of exit,
sell to a family member,
and you wanna do that in the next 90 days.
So now we get somebody kind of ready
to go through the preparation process.
Well, that gets down to a whole host of things,
documents, formation documents.
Is this an LLC?
Is it an S-corp?
Is it a partnership?
Is it a sole proprietorship?
What do your financials look like?
How owner dependent is this business?
Are there systems and procedures in place
that would allow a new owner to step in?
And all the data suggests that about,
over 50% of deals fall apart during due diligence.
And a big portion of that is because people jump the gun.
They're just like, I want $500,000 for my business.
Someone told me it should be worth around that
and I'm gonna start listing it on BizBuySell
and a bunch of other websites and see what I get.
Probably the worst thing you can do.
And there's a variety of reasons for that.
One is, well, if you're listing the hyperlocal business
on a website that attracts millions of eyeballs
from around North America and around the world,
somebody who lives in Tallahassee, Florida,
looking at your business in Spokane, Washington,
quite frankly, is just burning dollars.
So one, you need to think about who in your local community
might be a buyer for your hyperlocal business.
Two is, if they say, yes, I'm interested
and you have bad information or not enough information
or, right, so if you have a leaky roof
and your foundation is in need of repair
and you haven't disclosed that or done that process yet,
well, this isn't going to go well.
You may have actually just pushed
your greatest opportunity away
and the deal's gonna fall apart because you're not ready.
So when we talk about preparation,
we really wanna help people just get their ducks in a row.
And virtually, I'm gonna say the same thing.
I don't know what that looks like.
I'm like, that's exactly why we exist, right?
We want you to be able to do this from your smartphone
or your laptop and we'll show you what it is
and we're not gonna use a whole bunch of gobbledygook language.
We're gonna say, you're gonna need
these types of financial statements.
You're gonna need these types of reports.
You can upload this here if you have questions.
And then what we've done is we've recruited experts
who normally would work with much bigger entities,
but they all love to help small business owners
and so they will do coaching sessions
in their one hour session.
So if you wanna talk to somebody who's a valuation expert,
you can book an hour of his time.
If you wanna talk to somebody about deal structure
and talk to an attorney,
you can book an hour of someone's time.
And that goes on and on and on.
And so our goal is to say, hey, look,
you don't have a $20 million company
that can put six people on this deal
and they're gonna go prepare the reports
and create the data and do all the other.
We're gonna show you how to go do this.
It doesn't need to be overly complex.
There generally is not as many moving parts
for these types of businesses that are with others.
And what we'll do is we'll have somebody
so that before they send out, for example,
they could take one of our sell sheets
which they can purchase.
And it's kind of a slick way of packaging up your business
presented to potential buyers.
But what we want them to do is before they send that thing
out is that they're sending it out knowing
that if two people come back and say, yes,
I'm interested in taking a deeper look,
it doesn't send them into a panic and it shouldn't.
But that's what happens today.
So people ask me like, what do people do today?
And the honest answer is they're left dangling in the wind.
They don't really have tools.
People say, we'll try to sell your business here
but no one's gonna buy that business.
It's not ready to engage a buyer.
And so the part of learning is let's give you a range
and it's generally pretty wide range
of what your business could be worth.
Let's give you access to videos and content for free
that you can at least say, okay,
what does it meant by an asset purchase agreement?
Well, what does due diligence look like?
How do I do it?
And then when you're ready, then we put some tools in place
so that you can actually go and start to put those pieces
in place and then when you're ready to transact,
then we put a deal team on it,
which are a small percentage,
generally about a third of what a broker might charge
to put a small deal team in place
to help walk you through using this dashboard.
What you need to do so you can go from,
okay, Jackson and I have agreed
that he wants to buy my coffee shop for $450,000.
Now what?
Well, now we can kind of say, okay,
has he reviewed all the financials?
Has he taken these steps?
Have you provided him this information?
And then when you're ready to transact,
how do we put the right agreement in place?
Am I helping you finance this through a loan
from the seller?
And so you're getting support from real people
along the way who aren't necessarily doing the work for you,
but what they're doing is they're giving you those guardrails
to make sure, okay, you've given your buyer
the right financial information,
you've put the right deal terms in place
and the right type of agreement.
Is this an asset purchase?
Is it a business purchase, a share purchase?
And now you guys have moved through this
and now you're ready to actually consummate the deal
and close the transaction.
So we're there in many ways in the background
is supporting CAS, combining these experts
with the technology platform
so you can kind of move through these steps
in many ways like you would with a TurboTax, right?
You can get everything ready
to prepare the taxes on your own,
but if you get stuck and you need help from the CPA,
you can get it done.
And hopefully it's not a panic on April 14th
that you're filing it, but if you do, we'll do our best.
Right.
Eric, I can't say enough how much I love your vision.
Thank you.
I really can't.
And there's some elements of the brand
that just really stand out to me.
One, your authenticity as a leader
to dive into all of the jarring things
that not everybody agrees with.
Two, the UX and UI of Exit Guide,
the amount of dedication you put in
to make sure that you want to do more.
Yeah, that's a shout out to.
If you wanna see, if there was a competition
for the world's worst UX person,
like gold medal, I'd be the Michael Phelps.
So Jason Ricci and Andrew Lee are my co-founders
and they are there.
You already said it.
Find the people who are better at you,
at doing the things and let them go to work.
I'm micromanaging.
Absolutely.
What I'm seeing with that, and here's why this matters.
Okay.
Credit Karma, should, again, UX, UI,
I would have never trusted them with my credit scores
as a consumer.
I would have never trusted them
with the credit card recommendations
and the loan recommendations and all that,
but they do two bit things very, very well.
And I see you on the same track.
One, they're extremely transparent.
They try to be.
I'm starting to see them cut a little corners on that now,
as years have gone by and they're trying to scale
and all that, but they've dedicated themselves
to educating the market to an extreme fashion.
So I see you doing that.
And then I see the dedication to helping this feel friendly
and the experience that's there,
the type form going into to calculate it at the end
and I'll get the email about it
and y'all are moving in very much the direction
in a market that desperately needs to understand this better.
And I know one of the challenges that you'll face
and visionaries who are listening in
that might be at that stage where you're trying to sell,
my greatest advice to you is if you're going into that
and you're not willing to reveal your cards,
you're going to get a very wrong answer.
Yeah.
Don't manipulate the system.
Oh, dude, I'm gonna inflate these numbers
because I feel bad for whether,
you're not gonna get a real answer.
So that's something that, that's again,
why this transparency aspect matters to me,
why the vision matters.
I've been in other systems that profess
having all of the knowledge,
but when you try to dig for understanding it as a beginner,
there's nothing there.
And it's like, well, you didn't bridge my knowledge gap.
So I can't confide in you.
And the system is just so 1990s
that it's also hard to be motivated
to go through and explore the depths of what's there.
So again, I just speaking as a startup founder
who's been through the grind of creating system after system
after system after system and knowing like,
I love what you're building.
Well, thank you.
I wish you the best for that.
Yeah.
Vision pros.
If you have a question for Eric,
or a comment regarding these processes,
by all means throw it in the show notes.
Sorry, throw it in the social media channel of your choice.
We'll forward those to Eric on the landing page.
We'll have a link as well to exit guides.
You can check that out.
Of course, if people want to reach out to you directly,
Eric, what's the best way to reach you?
Eric at exit guide.com.
And it's Eric with a C.
Cool.
You got the email address, my friends.
Put your chat GPTs on that.
This has been a lot of fun.
Thank you.
Thank you, Jackson.
Really enjoyed it.
I love what you're doing for entrepreneurs
and for your community and being authentic as well.
Absolutely.
We look forward to having you back in the near future.
It'd be awesome to dive into more details.
Be happy to.
Thanks again.
Take care, everybody.
Bye-bye.
Thank you for being here today.
I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions
as these episodes continue to move forward.
This is gonna get more and more fun.
We'll have more and more engagement as well.
We'll invite people to participate in the show.
And thank you for giving us your time and attention.
Have an excellent day.