Creating a Turnkey Business to Increase Value for the Next Owner

In this episode of The Faces of Business, John Canniffe and Jo Stapleton, Co-Founders of Exeo Advisors and ExitEngine™ delve into Creating a Turnkey Business to Increase Value for the Next Owner.

In this episode of The Faces of Business, John Canniffe and Jo Stapleton, Co-Founders of Exeo Advisors and ExitEngine™ delve into Creating a Turnkey Business to Increase Value for the Next Owner.

John Canniffe brings over two decades of expertise in M&A, strategic initiatives, and technology transformation. He has successfully led both startup growth and exit strategies, including the sale of a startup to a private equity firm. With his financial acumen and hands-on experience in business integration, John shares actionable insights on how to prepare a business for a successful exit.

Jo Stapleton, a seasoned business consultant with a track record of driving over $400 million in business growth, specializes in maximizing business value and saleability. As a co-host of The ExitEngine™ Podcast, she has a deep understanding of how to create seamless transitions that ensure a company’s ongoing success post-sale. Her knowledge spans various industries, making her insights invaluable for business owners aiming to optimize their exit strategies.

Download our free business valuation guide here to understand more about business valuations and view our business valuation FAQs to answer the most common valuation questions.

Exeo Advisors focuses on empowering business owners with personalized M&A advisory services, aiming to simplify the complexities of the sale process while enhancing the value of businesses. Their ExitEngine™ platform educates business owners about the importance of exit planning, helping them to maximize their businesses’ worth and secure successful sales.

Damon’s excitement is doubled by the duo Jo and John, his today’s guests. He requests Jo and John to share their professional backgrounds.

Jo reveals his unconventional path into the industry, mentioning his experience as a serial entrepreneur and marketing expert. He started in advertising as a copywriter, and later he joined digital media, establishing his career in marketing consulting. With over 30 years of experience working with Fortune 500 clients and managing his ventures, Jo has experienced both successful and challenging business exits, which makes his insights valuable.

Do you want to know if your business is ready for your exit or what you should do to prepare? Learn this and more with our business exit assessment here.

Similarly, John discloses that he began as a financial consultant and quickly transitioned to entrepreneurship, where his first business sale was a learning experience due to a mishandled exit. He returned to Corporate America and joined a company that acquired, managed, and integrated businesses. This role sparked his interest in mergers and acquisitions. John later met Jo at a brokerage firm, where they realized they shared similar perspectives and recognized a gap in traditional business brokerage.

Damon steers the discussion to the show’s agenda i.e. to create a turnkey business that can operate independently to maximize its value for a new owner. John believes that a common issue is entrepreneurs often wear multiple hats in their business, making it challenging to sell because willing buyers seek a business that can run without the original owner. Jo adds that a successful sale requires building a sustainable, scalable business that demonstrates growth potential and profitability, especially for private equity buyers expecting returns within three to five years.

Jo further outlines three principles for achieving this. First, entrepreneurs must shift their mindset from hands-on involvement to building a business that operates without them. Second, the actual business value often differs from the owner’s expectations, and Jo and John’s system assesses this with a detailed valuation model. Finally, there is “saleability” — having a business structured and attractive enough for buyers.

Get the most value for your business by understanding the process and preparing for the sale with information here on our Selling a Business page.

Jo and John’s “total exit value system” scores ten key areas of the business, guiding owners in making strategic adjustments that enhance both value and saleability. They encourage viewing the business through a buyer’s eyes.

In their view, simple adjustments, like understanding EBITDA, can increase business value and entertain their professional development.

The guests’ insights on saleability impress Damon. He points out that valuation alone is just a number unless there’s a willing buyer. He asks Jo and John about saleability issues.

Jo says that high-multiple success stories, like a business selling at 10x or 15x earnings, are rare and often create unrealistic expectations among business owners. Such stories can mislead business owners, especially brokers who may overpromise to secure business listings, counting on one major sale to cover their year.

Upon his turn, John shares an example where a potential buyer discovered that 85% of a business’s revenue came from two clients with soon-to-expire contracts, which led to valuation challenges and, in another case, a deal collapsed due to inaccurate cost accounting.

John maintains that some entrepreneurs lack the skills to properly track costs, which brokers may overlook, resulting in failed sales and wasted time.

Together they suggest providing financial transparency to willing buyers, ensuring that valuations reflect a company’s true worth, and helping prevent deal-killing surprises during due diligence.

Damon observes that sellers often don’t understand that customer concentration, especially private equity firms, must apply to minimize risk. Private equity has strict criteria, which can discourage acquisitions if a business isn’t thoroughly prepared.

Agreeing with the host, John advocates for an early, ongoing exit strategy, urging owners to shift from daily operations to a strategic, “meta-managing” view, positioning the business as a desirable, risk-reduced investment.

However, Jo explains that sellers risk leaving money on the table if they rush to market without maximizing their business’s value. He suggests implementing an “Exit Roadmap,” a strategic process that helps business owners understand their market readiness, desired outcomes, and steps needed to achieve it.

Damon believes that with planning for several years, business owners can potentially save millions on taxes.
Jo explains that defining success for each business owner is essential since everyone’s goals are different. For example, some prioritize ensuring financial security for family members.

Jo also believes business preparation for sale not only enhances its attractiveness to potential buyers but allows it to be marketed effectively to different types of buyers. To attract around ten serious prospects, hundreds of potential buyers need to see the listing.

John adds that addressing all issues isn’t always necessary before a sale. Besides, presenting documented growth opportunities, like geographic expansion plans, can be valuable. Buyers often appreciate seeing a roadmap for operational improvements and growth, even if those steps haven’t been implemented yet.

Damon discusses the critical role of “saleability” in business exits. He says that the growth cycle alone is insufficient for a successful exit if a company isn’t fundamentally prepared to be sold.

Jo illustrates his point through an example of a business with outdated equipment. Instead of viewing this as a negative, the seller was advised to position it as a growth opportunity for potential buyers. This approach, known as marketing “marketable inefficiencies,” lets sellers turn perceived weaknesses into strengths. Conversely, Jo says that this strategy only works if the company’s core operations and structure are well-prepared for sale.

At Damon’s request, John and Jo share their passion for uncovering hidden value in businesses. John enjoys learning about different industries, analyzing operations, and improving companies’ finances and strategic initiatives.

Jo, similarly, loves identifying overlooked aspects that can drive massive value. He’s motivated by “aha moments” where simple changes reveal substantial profit potential.

Toward the show’s conclusion, the guests iterate their resolve to show owners how adjustments can enhance not just profitability, but also work-life balance and company culture. John says their mission is to make 1,000+ business transitions possible by 2030, aiming to benefit both sellers and buyers.

The show ends with Damon thanking John and Jo for their time.

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ABOUT EXIT YOUR WAY®

Exit Your Way® provides a structured process and skilled resources to grow business value and allow business owners to leave with 2X+ more money when they are ready.

You can find more information about the Exit Your Way® process and our team on our website.

You can contact us by phone:  822-BIZ-EXIT (249-3948)   Or by Email:  info@exityourway.us

Find us on LinkedIn:  Damon PistulkaAndrew Cross

Find our Companies on LinkedIn: Exit Your Way®,  Cross Northwest Mergers & Acquisitions, Bowman digital Media 

Follow Us on Twitter: @dpistulka  @exityourway

Visit our YouTube Channel: Exit Your Way®

Service Professionals Network:  Damon PistulkaAndrew Cross

Facebook:  Exit Your Way® Cross Northwest Mergers & Acquisitions

Other websites to check out:  Cross Northwest Mergers & AcquisitionsDamon PistulkaIra BowmanService Professionals Network (SPN)Fangled TechnologiesB2B TailDenver Consulting FirmWarren ResearchStellar Insight, Now CFO, Excel Management Systems  & Project Help You Grow

• 50:19
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
business preparation, exit planning, valuation challenges, saleability issues, growth cycles, financial transparency, customer concentration, operational improvements, business value, willing buyers, market readiness, exit strategy, business brokerage, professional development, business transition
SPEAKERS
Damon Pistulka, John Canniffe, Jo Stapleton

Damon Pistulka 00:07
All right, everybody, welcome once again to the face of business. I am your host, Damon Pistulka, and I am excited, because not only do we have one guest today, we have two guests today, we have none other than John kniff and Joe Stapleton from my exit engine and ex CEO advisors. Thanks for being here today. Guys,

Jo Stapleton 00:29
thank you. Damon, great to be here. Man.

00:31
Thanks, David. All right.

Damon Pistulka 00:33
Well, guys, it’s always fun to have people that are in the industry of helping others prepare their businesses to sell, you know, and sell their businesses when they’re ready. Because I think that, you know, we are serving a part of the business owners life’s cycle. I guess, if I’m saying this correctly, that can meet a great deal to them.

Jo Stapleton 01:01
Absolutely, yeah, yeah. It always means. It always means a great deal to them. The problem is whether or not they actually get out of it, what they’re expecting it out of it, right? Yes,

Damon Pistulka 01:10
yes. That is the challenge. That is the challenge, and that is the thing that you guys are helping them do. So I like to start out by, first of all, let’s talk a little bit about your background. So Joe, go ahead, lead us off. Tell us about how you got into what you’re doing today, and we’ll start that go from there, sure.

Jo Stapleton 01:32
So probably came about this in a kind of a roundabout way, although, you know, I think most people who get into this industry don’t, don’t, it’s not like you head into this industry from college or anything like that, you know, it’s, it’s something that people kind of fall into, I think. But, yeah, my story is, you know, look, I’m a, I’m a serial entrepreneur, a marketing guy from way back, you know me and Al Gore invented the internet. That’s my that’s what my kids say. Anyway, yeah, but no, so I’ve been, you know, I started off in the in the advertising, you know, business as a copywriter, you know, saw the internet stuff coming along. You know, partly that into the first interactive division of the advertising agency I worked for. And kind of my consulting career was kind of off and running at that point. But 30 years worth of marketing consulting for big clients, fortune, 500 clients, and then my own businesses, some of which were really successful, and some of which really weren’t. So I have exited businesses in more ways than than is probably, you know, anybody really should, yeah, and I’ve seen a lot of the the good at the bad and the ugly when it comes to, you know, when it comes to business exits and and the good ones can be great, you know, and the bad ones can be, you know, pretty awful.

Damon Pistulka 02:50
That is for sure. That is for sure. Okay, because most people don’t realize that it is the complexity of doing it, and the length of time it takes, and then just the sheer amount of hard work,

Jo Stapleton 03:04
sheer amount of hard I mean, hard work to the point at which it takes over your life, right? I mean, it’s very difficult to be in to do anything else when you’re and when you’re an entrepreneur, you know, sometimes you don’t really want to do anything else, which can be its own problem, you know, whatever. So not everybody in your life will get that and and so that can obviously take a toll that way as well, you know. But yeah, it’s, and of course, when then, then the business doesn’t, then the business doesn’t succeed, that’s a whole other layer of disappointment, yes, for everyone to have to deal with as well. So yeah, definitely it’s, yeah, it’s definitely hard.

Damon Pistulka 03:40
Well, John, how did you get into this? How did you how what brought you to this point in your career?

John Canniffe 03:46
Yeah, I mean, I started as a financial consultant, right? I was right out of college, and then moved into entrepreneurship right after that, after about three years, we started our own business, had a had a sale, completely screwed it up. Hands up here, I was one of the people that helped to do that, unfortunately, but learned a great deal. Went back to got a job in corporate America, and eventually found my way to a an entity that was buying companies. So I was responsible for executing and managing and and and transitioning those companies into the larger company. So that’s where I got bitten by the bug of mergers and acquisitions and business sales. We were, you know, going through a financial model, buying companies and and doing that. And I met Joe at a after that. We went. I met Joe at another brokerage company and and we sat next to each other the training, and sort of clicked. And we had similar questions and similar answers. And I, you know, I like the cut of his jib, as the sailors say. So we saw that there was a gap in this, in this business, right the and I think we’re going to get into this, but the traditional business brokerage is it works. Some people, but it just doesn’t work for people like me, like Joe and I, because we have the experience of of improving our businesses. And we think, you know, helping companies sell their businesses really starts with improving their businesses and getting them out, getting the owner out of the businesses. So that’s what we’re really passionate about, is is really helping businesses grow so that they can be sold for more money,

Damon Pistulka 05:24
yeah, and that’s that’s why we title the show today, creating a turnkey business to increase value for the next owner, because that is so key. And you hit it right on the head there, John, because, as you saw many times, I’m sure as you’re going through this as a business broker. The One of the downfalls usually in the entrepreneurship journey is that the entrepreneur themselves are really good at the business they’re in, or the technical piece of the business, and that that severely hampers them when they go down the road.

John Canniffe 05:56
Yeah. And the great quote from Marshall Goldsmith that we talk about all the time is what got you here won’t get you there. And the entrepreneur is often the chief cook and bottle washer, the Chief Sales Officer, the Chief Technology Officer, whatever they’re doing, they’re doing that because they know, they know that they need to grow the business and they need to do those things. But that’s exactly what doesn’t help them when they go to sell the business, right? Because they don’t want to buy the John show. They don’t want to buy the Joe Show. They want to buy a business that can operate independently of Joe and John, because John’s going to be on the beach in Costa Rica, or starting his next business, or doing something else where I’m going to pay him to leave the company, frankly, so I want to make sure that what I’ve purchased is a viable economic entity separate from John, yeah,

Damon Pistulka 06:46
yeah. So Joe, how have you seen this go bad in your experiences? Which

Jo Stapleton 06:53
example should I pick? So a couple of things that we see kind of happen a lot, right? Which is that, and I think, John, you know, we do say, we literally use that quote every single day, okay? Because we are talking about people with people about this all the time. And the hardest thing to get people to do is to back off. I think that the, it’s not a great way of putting it, but I think that the what they have to understand is that the what a new buyer wants to see is a is a a business that is going to be able to sustainable. It’s got growth potential, right? It’s going to basically get them a return on their investment as soon as possible. If we’re talking about private equity companies, you’re talking about a three to five year hold Max, right? Most of the time, every once in a while, they’ll do a longer term thing than that, but most of the time, you’re talking about three to five years, they want to know going in that they’re going to get their 30% invest, you know, return on their investment in three to five years. When you are what we see a lot of people do is mistake their emotional kind of, you know, involvement with the business, with the valuation of the business. That’s the first thing that we say. So the first mistake people make are, are often in a situation where they’re over, almost always overvaluing their company. Okay, that’s that’s an easy thing for us to fix, because we’ve got some tools and things like that will show them immediately what their actual value is, the bad news, and then in the same shot, tell them what it could be worth if they pulled a couple of levers. That’s the up upside, right? So there are ways to be able to kind of deal with that, but most people, again, are walking in, already kind of out of the stratosphere in terms of reality. Okay? So that’s the first challenge. The second challenge, then is okay, once you can, are able to actually talk to bring them back to Earth in terms of the valuation the company, they have to understand the other part, it’s not just anybody can put a price tag on something, right? The problem is, is that, is there going to be anybody willing to pay it? And so sale ability is actually a bigger issue than the valuation, and it’s probably the thing that is neglected most often, especially by business brokers. Okay? And again, we have business broke. We love business brokers. Business Brokers are our friends, but they are all that’s not their fault that they are sucked into a model that is doesn’t necessarily always work for people we’re trying to sell. Okay? So the second thing, big thing that they will do is that they will not they will not be. They will not have a business that’s prepared to sell or is sellable. In many ways, we look at 10 different areas of the business, okay? We call this our total exit value system. Lots of people have a similar thing. But the idea behind what we do is is look at 10 areas of the business that and basically we score it. Okay, yep, we have a model. We score the we score it. So we can wick, in addition to a valuation, a Num, $1 figure, we can give you the score that you can actually see change over time, as you make improvements, as you change things. And what we’re basically trying to get you to do is to look at at your business. Through the eyes of a buyer. Okay? The biggest mistake that people make is that they continue to look at their own business with their own perspective. And their own perspective, as John mentioned, is is different now than it was when they were trying to grow revenue. And part of the problem is them being so attached themselves to the business. And so the the ability for people to be able to understand, really, three basic principles is what we’re teaching. One is, understand that you you, as John said, I’m just gonna say it again. What got you here? Won’t Get You There. That is principle number one. Principle number two is the the value you the value of your business, is not what you think it is. Then the third principle is that there’s, there’s this thing called saleability, and it’s, and it’s actually, there’s a we can actually put a percentage, you know, the we can put the odds on your company being able to sell or not based on its state and its condition, yeah, and the condition is going to be, again, based on these 10 different areas of the business that we can examine. And the cool thing is, what people miss, I think, is that there’s actually some things that are right there that are easy to spot, that could immediately change and upgrade the value of your business, like right off the bat, okay, understanding Evita, what it is, how I can adjust it. All that stuff is one area that we come across that that is like an immediate value enhancer that people in terms of the actual value of the business that people just don’t understand. So that’s just one example, but I think, but I think those are the, that’s the, those are the kind of the key things that we see, kind of, you know, over and over and over again,

Damon Pistulka 11:33
yeah. So it’s, it’s interesting that you talk about saleability. I mean, it’s something that we’ve, we’ve brought up for years because it is really I mean value. Value is just a number. But as you said, if you read the fine print on any valuation you pay money for, it’s going to say one, one critical thing, and it says that value is only applicable when you have a willing buyer and seller, and that is, you know, they’re trying to say in and it’s and it usually the values come out fairly close. I mean, we’re not saying because if somebody does a decent market review, looks at comparable pricing, looks at the industry, looks at your business in comparison to it, you’ll come out fairly close, but you still have to have a willing buyer and seller in those two things. And that willing buyer is where the saleability really comes in.

Jo Stapleton 12:30
No question. I think, look, and I think that’s, that’s one of the things that actually is becomes a detriment to people early on in this practice. You know, if you the stories we hear about the 10x and the 15x that this guy got the thing and, you know, an amazing thing, those are the stories we hear, right? Yeah, yeah, but, but how often have you come across that? Right? I mean, the reality is, is that the reason it’s in the news is because it’s, you know, it’s, it’s man bites dog, right? It’s not dog bites.

John Canniffe 12:57
It’s an anecdote, right? That’s an anecdote by definition, right?

Jo Stapleton 13:01
It’s a very definition of an anecdote. And of course, it’s the kind of thing that gets attention, and of course it gets everybody on, if it happens to be in your industry, oh my god. So now that’s what I’m gonna get. I’m gonna get 10x I’m gonna have this thing, right? And so you’re starting in a hole, right? In a way, you’re starting kind of the perspective is off. And I think that that one of the things that happens with those things is that when we hear these stories, we think, Well, I can do that. And we know that that’s just not the case, you know, and, and, and frankly, there are people out there preying on on unsuspecting business owners, trying to get the business. Because the reality is, is that for Business Brokers, look all the irons in the fire I can possibly get, and then one thing will hit, and I’ll make my nut for the year. And that’s kind of the way that it’s, you know, that it’s looked at. But I think we do, we do the industry a disservice when we tell these stories, because they just don’t really, they don’t happen all that often, you know, yeah,

Damon Pistulka 13:54
yeah. So what are your thoughts on that on sale ability, John, you’ve seen this a lot too, yeah.

John Canniffe 14:01
I mean, it’s interesting. What we’re talking about, the value. You talk about the valuation, right? So, so you get a valuation for whatever the valuation has to be, the, let’s say the businesses were, is, it’s, you know, 10 million but then, you know, you have a buyer, discerning buyer, going in there and looking at the the revenue streams, and looking at the various customers, the very customers, and all of a sudden, when they find out that, you know, 85% of the business is provided by two customers, and both of the contracts are coming up in 2026 or 2025 and you’re selling the business, well, you know, from a buyer’s perspective, that’s a huge risk, so They’re going to discount that valuation, or maybe that comes up in due diligence. There’s a, there’s a couple of lawsuits that come up, or there’s, there’s things that that to your point, Damon, there has to be a willing buyer and seller, and the buyer can get cold feet, you know, because when they get in there and they look at the at the at the business, and. Look at the components of the business that make up that revenue, man that can, that can really destroy and we’ve seen that. I’ve seen a deal that that blew up because they they couldn’t account for their costs appropriately, right? Like they had four products, one of them was 55% of the revenue, and they couldn’t. They had to. They had an 85% gross margin on that product. Well, that looks suspicious. And then we looked and asked it again, and they sent us a different spreadsheet. And I don’t think that wasn’t fraud, right? That’s not Yeah,

Jo Stapleton 15:30
on purpose, yeah, right, right, yeah. That was

John Canniffe 15:32
in that case, I really believe the entrepreneurs did not know how to appropriately account for their costs. Now, that’s unfortunate, but the business broker that was representing them did them a disservice, because they putting them in front of these buyers. They’re wasting everyone’s time, and that’s why we want to that’s why, again, Business Brokers are our friends. We work with them each and every day, but we do something different, like we go in and we try to prevent those, those forest fires, if you will, right? We prevent those fires from ever happening, and we appropriately account for their costs, so that when they present information to buyers, it’s true, it’s accurate, and, and, and the buyers can rely on it, and they can make an accurate projection of what they want to buy the company for. That’s our that’s one of our goals,

Damon Pistulka 16:19
yeah, and that’s a big part of it in in my previous career, in working for the equity companies and buying and selling and combining, it was, you know, that is one of the first things you find, and one of the first things that sellers don’t understand. They do not understand the the pressure of the buyer, the kind of the scrutiny that they have to go through to invest money. I mean, I tell people, it’s like, you have to, it’s spending your grandmother’s last nickel, right? She’s on the street if you don’t keep making more nickels with that nickel you spent, you know? And because it’s literally that hard to get that investment into your business, whether it’s a I think it’s harder with an equity than it is with with an individual a lot of times. But sellers don’t understand that they have they’ve had 10 years, sometimes 20 years, getting comfortable with their business, the ebbs and flows, and yes, it’s gotten hard, but then it’s gotten better. And they think that you know that they just don’t understand that perspective well enough. Yeah, and

John Canniffe 17:32
they don’t understand that the risk that you’re comfortable with as the entrepreneur is very different, or can be very different, from the risk profile of the private equity form or the or the individual that’s buying it. If you have an individual that’s buying your company, she could have a very different perspective on on your business if she realizes that 85% of the business is two customers. Well, you can explain to her until you’re blue in the face, that those customers have been with you for 25 years the contract, which she has to rely on, is up at the end of 2025 that’s going to be a big red flag and a risk for her, and she’ll discount it. And the way that, the way that buyers express their willingness to buy a company still is they lower the price, and that lowers their risk.

Jo Stapleton 18:18
What we tell people all the time too, is that, is that you know you’re doing this once in your life, okay? These, these guys, private equity, group investor, you know, individual buyer, you know, novel investor, whatever, right? They’re doing this every day, yeah, okay, so you know they have a format. They have a, they have a, you had a, you know, when you work for the private equity company Damon, you had a, you had a checklist of five things that was it. And you don’t want to be outside those things, and you don’t want to be you don’t want to change them, and you’re not going to give them up, and you’re not going to negotiate, because, as you said, it’s your grandmother’s last nickel, yeah. And I think that what that just understanding that alone is why it’s also but by the way, why we created exit engine and why we created, you know, and this model that we have with exio, which is very human focused, because the thing that we saw happening was that, and I think again, this is partly the fault of the private equity group, or at least because of the perception around private equity in general, is that the since the private equity groups or anybody selling a business, have to be So careful and so buttoned up about what they do. They don’t buy businesses. I mean, what happens is, you know, the irony here is that having all these requirements and having all these different companies have all these different requirements actually ends up in less businesses being bought, which is probably good. The good news for the private equity companies, because they’re not spending your grandmother’s last nickel on crap, yep, the but, the But, the other side of the same equation is that’s creating a, basically a, you know, a situation where companies aren’t able to sell, and that’s creating a problem, especially when we’re looking at Baby Boomer generation, you know, this, this, this was supposed to be a silver. Tsunami of people coming through and turning over all this generational wealth and the whole thing, and it’s not happening. And the reason it’s not happening is because the private equity companies are scared to pull the trigger because but and they’re not wrong. They’re right to not. The businesses aren’t ready. And the reason the businesses aren’t ready is because they haven’t taken the advice. They haven’t listened to people like us. They, they are they, if they are ready, they’re listening to business brokers, and they’re looking for the quick dime and and one of the things that you got to know as a business owner is that you’ve spent 20 years building this business, yeah, what makes you think you’re going to get rid of it in five minutes? Right? So you got to know that there’s work to be done. You need to look at your business completely differently than you have been for the last 20 years. We call it meta managing. Okay? You got to get up above the clouds. You have to hand over the operations of your business to capable people on your team. And then you got to raise yourself up and start looking at a different situation, a different set of metrics, KPIs, a whole different set of of instruments. You’re flying the plane with now than you than you’re used to doing, and

John Canniffe 21:09
you’re doing and you’re fundamentally doing different things right? You’re not going on sales. You are going on investor calls. You’re not your your objectives has changed. You’re no longer selling the widget or the service that you’ve been selling for a long time, right? You’re selling the business, and that’s how your perspective has to change. And

Jo Stapleton 21:27
it’s a different it’s a different thing. It’s a different animal, right? There’s similar things. Yes, it’s a marketplace. Yes, you know you’re gonna have your business as a product, right? And and so you’re gonna try to get your product as buttoned up and as ready to sell as you possibly can. But if you think that’s going to happen in four months, okay, then you’ve got another thing coming. Yeah, yeah, that’s the problem. And I think what we’re seeing is that, again, if you if, if more people could take the time, and what we preach is, you know, you know, like voting in Chicago, do it early and often. Okay, Exit Planning is something that you got to start early. Okay, yeah, we got a client. We just were signing a new client right now. And the whole thing, they’re a year old, okay, well, yeah, they see the value in what they need to do to be able now they’re in a fast moving industry that might, you know, they might go quickly. Okay, so, yeah, so there’s not, it’s not, it’s not that simple. But the idea is that they were smart enough to know that we got to bring somebody in, who knows what they’re doing, because this is going to go quick, and we could blow our only shot.

Damon Pistulka 22:25
Yes, right? Well, and that’s you bring up a few great points. First of all, I want to say we got some listeners, and we got Fifi in here today. Thank you. Bye, and we got Zach Whipple. What’s the guys on the bottoms? Name that’s Joe Stapleton. Look him up. Jo Stapleton on LinkedIn there, and Rosie gives us a thumbs up. Thanks for being here today. Thanks, Rosie. You bring up some great points there, Joe, and let’s, let’s dive into those a little bit, because the one thing that I think is is such a detriment to going to market before you’re ready is you don’t have hundreds of buyers coming to you to buy your business. You just simply don’t I don’t care how good of marketing you are. I don’t care how it you just are not going to have hundreds marketing, uh, hundreds of, hundreds of buyers lining up at your door. You you may have 10. If you’re lucky, if you’re if you’re in a smaller business, right? You know, sub 100 million, you may have 10. So the thing that I think is a huge disservice to the overall industry that does not encourage stomp their feet, whatever you want to say to make a business prepare a business owner take the time to prepare. Is that very fact, they can be toe to toe, eye to eye with the perfect buyer, and they are there and they are gone forever. That’s right. Let’s hear your thoughts on that, guys,

John Canniffe 24:03
yeah, yeah. I mean it, it happened. You know, in one of the examples I gave earlier, the the buyer just went and bought another competitor, right? So they got, they got, they got the financial statements. They love the business. They were, I think it was one of four buyers, if I’m not mistaken, but, but the biggest the one that we were like, This is the one you guys got to do. This is one you guys got to do. They looked at the financials, they got the second set of financials, and then they were gone. And it’s like, they’re not going to stick around. Yeah, these people have a format. They have tons of companies, and all they’re doing is looking at 10 companies every day, and, yeah, that’s all we’re doing. And they’re popping the top two maybe to their manager, and then the manager decided between two to go up to the to the investment partner and and it’s just it wastes everyone’s time, and that buyer will never come. Back to that business. Anytime you send around a sim, a confidential memo to that to that buyer, they’re going to discount you if they recognize your name. And it reflects on the business broker too, right? It’s not just the company. It reflects on the business broker, which is one of the reasons that that we wanted to do something different, right? Because we don’t want to be associated with a quick sale or what if they missed something, or something happened in due diligence and they didn’t catch it, and they end up buying a bad business that reflects so poorly on me that all we have in our in our lives are our reputations, and the last thing I want to be thought of is trying to sneak one past the due diligence police at a at a private equity firm. I don’t want to be that guy,

Jo Stapleton 25:42
absolutely right? I think the other thing that comes into play here too, and in terms of, you know, the question was, what, you know, what? What’s the danger in putting on a business on the market before it’s ready, right? And, and the other other danger that happens here is that the the, let’s take it from the owner’s perspective, you know, the reality is, is that you’re probably leaving money on the table, okay? And one of the things is that you’re as upset as you might be about the valuations lower than you think it is. Like I said before, we’re going to show you in our system how the value of the company is and what the value could be. Okay? And so you have, you can see for yourself on paper that if you pull these levers, you’re going to be able to get here. And by the way, there’s other things that might be longer term projects that could good, could further enhance the value too, right? So it’s a matter of your time frame. So, and I think that what happens is that, again, we, as we said, before people rush to this stage, they get to the point, yep, you know, people get tired, right? Especially if they’re getting close to retirement. They’re like, all right, I’m done. I want out of here. Get me out of this thing as fast as I possibly can. And don’t take as long as it took to build a company to get me out of it, right? Which is, which is fine, but we need nine months. I mean, I will just say it out loud. I mean, that’s we need nine months to sell your business. You need, you need nine months. And that’s if you everything is good. That’s if everything’s ready. Yeah, yeah. That’s if everything’s ready. And so that minimum nine months to be able to actually get the thing together, to be able to be able to be able to put, you know, a marketing plan and everything behind that, to be able to go and start talking to investors, and to be able to bring people into the table, like you said, you’re going to get 10 people interested, Max, yeah. And so you need one of those things to hit. And so I think that the other thing that happens when you, if you were, if you bring you come to market too soon, is that the you have no opportunity if you don’t go through the process of, of the process we call Exit Planning, which, again, is it gets a bad rap, and it has a weird name, and all that stuff, right? But it, that’s really what it is. The idea is to say, I’m going to make an exit, and how do I get out of here? We call it an exit road map, whatever. Everybody calls it, something else. The idea is what, what you should be doing is saying, here’s where my business is right now. Here’s where I’d like it to be, over here. What are the steps I need to take to get it to there? Okay, very simple. And and some, some of the things are easy and they happen real quick, and some of them take longer time to do stuff. And you’ve got to kind of take that into account. And you have to figure out, from the owner’s perspective, how much, how much can you go through sometimes? And I know Damon you, this is something that you guys do, too. You might be in a position where we’re going to say to the owner, here’s the strategy. You’re going to leave the company now, okay? And we’re going to replace you and whatever, and we’re going to put in a seat, we’re going to put in an interim CEO, and we’re going to hire and we’re going to bring in a chief sales officer or chief revenue officer, and we’re going to bring in X, Y and Z, and we’re going to completely replace your management team temporarily. Okay, you’re going to sit on the beach. We’re going to raise this value of this company to x, okay, and then when we get to x, we’re going to put it on the market. We’re going to sell getting the revenue to X might include acquiring another us, acquiring a company, okay? The idea it’s always comes down to time money, what we call time money and magic, yeah, okay. Those are the three things that you had that everybody wants, and everybody just, you know, feels they don’t have enough of. Okay, yeah. And so if we can, if we can get a business owner to understand that you if you have time, then let’s do all the things we can do to raise the value of the company if you don’t, if you don’t have the time, and all you need is money. Okay, well, that’s, that’s fine, but you’re going to lose, you’re, you’re going to leave money on the table. Yeah, you’re not going to get the value. You’re not going to get everything you want. But, okay, you want to get out now, then you can get out now, and this is how much you can get out for, okay? And again, saleability is another factor too. That has to be, you know, yeah,

Damon Pistulka 29:38
that magic magic. The

Jo Stapleton 29:41
magic comes from this, this notion the magic can be given to you because you get to be Wait. You mean, I’m already retired, yeah, potentially, you can actually be on the beach while let us go in and handle this and get this all done for you. And then you’re going to get a big, giant check at the end. And the other thing. I want to bring up to people too, is that, if you haven’t spent any time thinking about what this exit would look like, again, you there’s other things you’re leaving on the table. Yeah, right. The problem is, what are the what are the other things you want? We get people saying, well, you know that you think that, you think they let me keep the name, my name on the trucks. You know, it’d be like, Yeah, you know, we can ask for that. Yeah. Like, do you think that the higher my niece to be? Yeah, we can ask. You know, there are things that we could, that you can do. You have other terms besides just money, yes, right, that you might want. And if you don’t go through this process and think this, think through this before you put your business on the market, you’re leaving everything on the table, potentially, yeah,

Damon Pistulka 30:39
and there are so so many things and as and the one thing that I, I’m always love to make sure of too, is that, you know if, if a business owner starts early, as you said earlier, and they stay 567, years ahead of this, if I’ve got a business that’s going to be worth 10, $20 million if I work with The right people at that point in time on taxes and all these other things, you can literally save probably a million dollars or more in taxes on your way out. Yep, and these, and these are the kind of things that you completely overlook if you run to the end and go, I’m done and want to get out today. And those conversations five or six years early, don’t have to change the way you run your business. They don’t have to change anything, but they can certainly change the money you take out in the future. And that’s where, you know, working like people, like yourself, or like we do in the situations. It just it. It can make a huge difference on one or two different levers out the the what you get out of the exit. Like you said, it could be that, hey, I want to keep, I want to have my my country club membership for the next decade after I’m done, then I don’t care. You know, there’s all these kind of things that you can, you can work out. It

Jo Stapleton 31:56
always amazes me. Damon, the things that actually matter to people. I mean, yeah, it’s, it’s crazy. And so our process, you know, the first thing we ask people is, you know, where do you want to end up? What does this look what does success, successfully selling your company look like to you? Yeah, because it’s different for everybody. You know, some people are like, I read a client before. It’s like, I want my wife to be paid in perpetuity.

John Canniffe 32:19
Okay? You know, great,

Jo Stapleton 32:21
we can make that happen. You know, if you get a check that comes out in the whole thing and make sure that if I die, that this, that this company is still paying my wife and stuff like that, all possible now, yeah, again, all possible if, right, if you’re buttoned up, if your company is saleable, and if you have a good valuation, and you’ve done the things, you’ve examined, the 10 areas that total exit value looks at and, and you’ve done the things if you’ve done your homework, yeah. And the other thing that, again, that does doing your homework does is prepare you for anything. Yeah, because in order to get those 10 people to show up right, to have the choice, or to have 10 people examine your business, you need hundreds to see it. Yeah. And and what you need to be able to do is to say to those 10 people, or or however many kind of people, to come in the door, because they all have their own interests. You need to be able to position that company in front of that particular buyer in the way in which that particular buyer wants to see it, not just in the way of any buyer wants to see it. Yes. And so there’s so much to do here before you get to prepare yourself to do this that people are just completely overlooking and they’re uninformed. And again, the business broker market has some something to do with that, unfortunately, yeah, and

John Canniffe 33:33
let me just add one thing is, when Joe’s is way better at talking about this than I am, but talking about marketing inefficiencies, right? So, so one of the some, some this can sound daunting to a lot of companies, right? When, or a lot of business owners, and we come in and we tell them that they need to do, it could take four years or three years or or even a year for some people, right? Damon, and you’re laughing, but you know, some of those owners come to you and say, I want to sell my company. And when you come back and tell them that it could take two years or three years, you got to do these things. It’s not you don’t have to solve all the problems of your business, right? Some some business, some buyers like to have that opportunity and and if you’ve written down some of those opportunities that you haven’t taken, you haven’t geographically expanded into Canada, or you haven’t moved production to to to Mexico, or whatever it happens to be, they like to buy those businesses with that potential that, hey, you’ve at least thought of this issue, and you’ve put it on the table for them to say, Hey, I didn’t do this, but, but, but you could, and this is the way that I thought about doing it. I mean, buyers love to see that you’re thinking about expanding and improving your business, even if you didn’t do it right. Of course, they like to see financial statements that are accurate. But if you have a three or five year plan of things that you would have accomplished if you did it, they love to see those things as a growth model.

Damon Pistulka 34:55
That’s that, I think is a huge thing, and one growth is obvious. One of the things that we really push hard on, because growth. Aa, first of all, growth covers a lot of sins. Right? When you look at as a buyer, comes a lot of stuff. If I got 20% growth, how much do I have to worry and I don’t have terrible customer concentration, I don’t have to worry about a lot of things. It makes it a lot different than if I’ve got 2% growth, and I worry about a lot then, and you just made a great point, is that that growth today, you know growth is in cycles. We all know it goes in cycles. So if you are the the optimal, which we really found works spectacular when you can do it is get into a growth cycle. Get into it 4050, maybe 60% but as soon as you see that growth cycle really hitting that is when you put your company on the market, because it’s right in the middle of that

Jo Stapleton 35:57
growth cycle. It’s right there and ready to go exactly, yeah, it’s

Damon Pistulka 36:00
right there, if you’ve done the other things with the team, because structure is a huge thing in it, and where you’re at, like you said, getting the owner on the beach, but getting that growth cycle going, and watching the organization execute on that growth cycle. And then, as you said, John, being able to articulate and this is what is next, because they a buyer comes in and they see it, and they feel the growth happening. They see it, and they go month to month and and then from the professional that’s that’s got the the company talking to a buyer, you can say, well, you can wait another month, but it’s only going up. And the seller can sit there and say the same thing, you can wait another month. I make more money, I’m happy, but I want to sell it when I can. I

Jo Stapleton 36:43
think that’s that was a that was a huge component into in the, in the, you know, the one of the successful exits that I had in selling a digital marketing company was exactly that we just did it at the right, you know, a lot of it timing, right? And so, yes, we weren’t trying to sell. We weren’t really, you know, we were getting tired. You know, it was that kind of thing where we’re working a lot, you know, you’re, you do get, you go through cycles with with how you feel about your own business, too, yes. But basically, we were, you know, we got to kind of get the time we were a little bit tired, we thought about stuff, but we started to have people kind of just say to us, other companies, you know, hey, you guys, ever consider, you know, an exit, whatever, and the whole thing? And we didn’t really realize what was going on, because we were right in the middle of it, until we sat middle of it, until we sat back and went, they can see what the growth cycle that we’re on right now. Yeah, right. They can actually see that. They can see this. They can feel it. And we are in an area in which they want us, because we’re going to be able to provide something. And most of the companies that we’re looking for other, you know, kind of other firms, or we actually ended up being bought by a giant consulting company. But the idea was that, you know, when you get yourself into one of those cycles, it’s a palpable feeling, like everybody around you can kind of feel it. And when you can bring a buyer in at that time and again, you’ve had some other stuff buttoned up, growth. I love what you what you said. Growth covers a lot of sins, you know, really, and then, and being able to say this is where we would go next at that moment in time shows that you’re like, first of all, you hit on this one. So you know what you’re doing. You’ve got the you got the business into a place in the whole thing already. So you must be right about this. I’ve, I’ve, I work in the business already, because I’m a private equity company here. So I understand that what you’re saying is true, you know? And so all this stuff lines up. And now, suddenly, now, now you’re in a competitive, potentially, even in a competitive situation, which is the perfect situation to be in when you which is what happened to us? We got in a competitive bidding situation, yeah, because of where we were in that growth cycle, because everybody could feel

Damon Pistulka 38:37
it, yeah, yeah. It’s, it’s a, it’s a great thing. And when, when you like, as you said, you have to have sale ability first, because if that’s not, there doesn’t matter. I mean, you can be growing like crazy. That’s great. You’ll make more money. But if you’re trying to do it for for terminal value, you’re not going to get the value you want, getting out the

Jo Stapleton 38:56
door we had. It’s just, just another example on that one point the whole thing was talking with somebody other day, and they were talking about a about, I forget what kind of business it was, but the the idea was that they they felt like they had they wanted to sell. They wanted to sell right now. The problem that they were experiencing was they hadn’t put a lot of money into the equipment that they had. Okay. And so this was shown, and this was like a known thing. The advice they were given, which was just brilliant advice, was they turned, they turned that lack of being able to put money into the equipment, and turned it around and made it, spun it into a positive that said, Yes, guess what all you guys have to do when you buy this company, is replace the equipment, and you are now you’ve moved it from here to here, right? And so those are the great example of like turning this, you know, we call it marketing, marketable inefficiencies, right? Yeah, the idea for you to be able to sell something about your business that looks like a negative and turn it into a positive. But you can’t do any of that stuff until you have, you know, again, this. Mobility factor, which is really about how everything else is buttoned up. You know, all the basics have to be there first.

Damon Pistulka 40:05
Yeah, yeah. So John, what? What excites you the most about what you get to do and get to help owners do? I, I’ve,

John Canniffe 40:14
I’ve been sort of a Mr. Fix it at at a lot of the jobs that I’ve done, even in corporate America. So I love the fact to get into a company and and help make improvements, right, be it from a operational standpoint. I was a COO, I was a de facto CFO at a company. So I like to get in there and look at, really understand the the finances and how a company operates. So I appreciate the the this, the Director of Operations, roles, the Director of Strategic Initiatives, roles, those types of roles at companies where, you know, they’re sometimes unsung heroes. At businesses where they’re, they’re the ones that know how everything they’re they’re the ones that know where the bodies are buried. Yeah. So what really, like jazzes me, is to get in there and learn, frankly, about different businesses and how they operate. Because, you know, I don’t know very much about manufacturing businesses, to be perfectly honest, and I would never pretend to be a manufacturing expert, but I went to, like, an envelope factory when I was younger in business school, and it was fascinating. And I think I was the only one that was fascinated by it. But it was so interesting to me because I didn’t have that background. So I just I’m a lifelong learner. I built training for for six years and early in my career at a different job. So I like to go in and learn about businesses and and the thing that exio advisors allows us to do is learn about professional, more professional development companies and all sorts of other businesses that how they make money, what the levers of their business are, then turn and you can really affect things. So that’s sort of my passion in this whole thing. That’s

Damon Pistulka 41:50
awesome. Joe, same question to you, what really gets you excited about what you get to do today?

Jo Stapleton 41:55
In a similar vein, I think this is why John and I get along. Is that I love the I love the hidden stuff, you know, I like that. I like to find the things that are making a business, that are that are under the underpinnings of the business, that are things, levers that you can pull, that suddenly realize, you know, immense value. I’m a huge Malcolm Gladwell fan. I love the idea of being able to, kind of, like, turn things on its ear, on their ear. You know, I think that when we just purposely decided that when we kicked this thing off, that what we were going to do was was, was work for the owner, not the business, yeah, okay. And I think that that one of the things to understand is that, from our perspective, is that, you know, again, because you’re, you’re a business owner, you’re myopic when it comes to your business, right? And what I love about what we do is being able to go in there and show these aha moments, right? Yeah, when we, when we walk in there and we show somebody on a spreadsheet, basically, how that what their business is today, and what it could be if we just did these three things, and the whole thing, those those moments, are the moments we have another product that we can bring in. We can take a look at your at your the way that you break down your customers and your and your products, and at the end result of it is, you know, sometimes if you just got rid of these two products, you would, you would, you know, increase your profitability by 20% that is the kinds of moments that just go, Oh my God. And I love

John Canniffe 43:23
that. Yeah, get rid of, get rid of unprofitable customers buying unprofitable products. It’s like, what a light goes off in their head. It’s amazing. And

Jo Stapleton 43:32
they’re always moments that, after the fact, they’re like, oh my god, I can’t believe I didn’t see that. You know, I mean, but the idea is that this is, this is the thing about being a business owner. Because we’ve all been business owners, we know exactly what it’s like, you know. I mean, we know exactly how it feels and so, and we also know that it’s hard to see everything you know just is you’re the again, what we want to be able to do is to have people stop for a second and go, Okay, if I move myself up to this level and started to look around at from a different, you know, point of view, I’m going to be able to see things that I couldn’t see before, right? Our our heart whole, like the exit engine website, the cover of the is a is an iceberg, okay? Because the business that you know is the piece piece of the iceberg. It’s above the water. But we all know, right, all the hidden stuff below, right? And so what we like to do is, we love looking in and digging into the stuff below, to be able to, you know, to be able to find that stuff and bring up that latent value, and be able to and be able to show people that things that look if you, if you just, you know, if you just able to go and get a new salesperson, you this might all turn around, right? Or, if you hired, if you hired a full time, you know, Chief Marketing Officer, as opposed to the, you know, using the friend of the friend of the friend to do your marketing that you’ve been doing for 20 years, you know, I mean, you might be in a completely different place, you know, yeah,

Damon Pistulka 44:54
yeah, those are great things. And, and as as you guys, that is one of the most. Most enjoyable things to be able to show a business owner a different way of running their business that actually is better for their lifestyle, better for their health, better for their their wallet, yup, and and better for the people in the business. I mean, you get these, these quadruple wins, we like to call them and it you really can put these things together and show them a different way of running their business that does, as you said, early in into this, John, take you know what they were doing. Got You Here. That’s awesome. But to get you to the next place, show them the thing, it’s the niche, the next place that you want to get so you can exit the way you want. It’s such a powerful thing to see that happen. It really

Jo Stapleton 45:45
and it feels, you know, it feels good. But I think that the idea is that, you know, John and I decided that from the beginning that we were going to be on a mission, and that our mission was going to that we’re going to help 1000 business owners transition successfully by 2030, okay, there you go and and however we can do that, yeah, and if it’s because XGL comes in and helps them do that, or whatever, or because we get people to get on the beach early and whatever and help them run the company, or whatever, or because we teach them how to do it themselves with exit engine whatever, because they’re just there’s too many people out there not being able to take advantage of their life’s work. And I think that that’s that is really the crime. And I think the, I think that the crazy thing about what’s happening right now is that the business owners are suffering and the business buyers are suffering too, yes, right? And so, you know, the idea here is that we can all do this together. We can sell more businesses. We can get we can make businesses better. We can sell more of them, and we can get the private companies to make the investments in the whole thing. And again, just one example of a buyer, to be clear. But, but, you know, those things can all work together if we all decide that we’re going to say, look, and this is kind of what we’re doing. We’re saying, Look, this is where the buyers are. This is where their heads at, like a seller, get your get your head where the buyer’s head is okay, and that’s how we’re going to kind of meet, and we’re going to be able to meet in the middle. But if you want to stand here and and say that you know how to do everything, because you built a successful business for 30 years, I’m going to point to 3 million other people just like you, right? So the how do you different? How are you standing out? And the reality is, much of the way you’ll stand out in the market is because you hired someone like us to come in and help you get it prepared and set up. That alone is going to make you more sellable, you know, probably raise your valuation and probably make it, you know, a more successful chance at exiting than if you did it tried to do it any other

Damon Pistulka 47:40
way. Yes, yes. And hiring someone like like yourselves and or someone to help you do this, what you will hear from buyers. And I guarantee, if you invest your money and do this with the right people, you will hear this. We don’t come across businesses like this very often. That’s what you want to hear exactly. And that is exactly what you want to hear. Because when you hear that, you know that you’ve done what you needed to do, get it to get it attractive for the buyer and and ready to go. So awesome having you guys here today. Oh man, thanks so much for the conversation. You know, again, we’re talking about creating a turnkey business to increase the value for the next owner, we got covered a lot of topics. We’re going to have to have you guys back early next year, and we’ll talk about some other stuff. For sure. I know there’s going to be some some people that are interested, but if someone wants to get a hold of you guys, John or Joe, what’s the best way to do that?

Jo Stapleton 48:36
So you get our so first of all, the name of our company is exio advisors. We also own this platform called Exit engine. So you can go to my exit engine.com and check that out if it’s something that you’re interested in doing yourself or learning how to do it. If you feel like I don’t want to, I don’t time for this. I need to have someone else do it for me. Then, of course, then exio advisors.com is where you can find us there for that as well. Look, we are always open, you know, I’ll take an email at Joe at my exit engine.com you know, and answer questions. We do this. We actually have a podcast as well called the exit engine podcast. You can find it wherever you get podcasts and and so that’s the, probably the best ways to get it. We’re on LinkedIn a lot too. We find us on LinkedIn, which is where, primarily, where we we spend our time from a social media standpoint,

John Canniffe 49:21
and you can reach out to me at J O, H N, at my exit engine.com Awesome,

Damon Pistulka 49:27
awesome. Well, thanks so much, guys. I Yes, I did forget to bring up your your podcast, the exit engine podcast. Get out there and listen to that, the with John and Joe, or Joe and John, however you want to see it, but I want to tell the people, and we just had George stop by and say, Give us thumbs up. Thanks for dropping in, George. Now, if you got into this late, get back to the beginning. You want to listen to John and Joe talk about creating a valuable business that is not only valuable but sellable. Sellable. Sellable because. Your value is one number, but the saleability of your business is going to be key in getting that money. So let’s get back there and listen to that. All right. Thanks everyone for being here today. Guys, hang out. We’ll finish up offline. Have a great day, everybody.

Jo Stapleton 50:16
Thanks a lot. Damon, thanks.

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