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30 Days to ETA | Day #22 – ETA Deal Flow | Brokers

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If you’ve been reading along in this 30 Days to ETA series, you know that in the Day #21 post I discussed how as Acquisition Entrepreneurs you can bet that there will be mistakes made, something I call ETA Mistakes. You can make one mistake, or you can make one million! Regardless of how many mistakes you make, how you recover from them will make a massive difference (You can read the previous post by CLICKING HERE). One mistake that I see time and again made by Entrepreneurs Through Acquisition (ETA) is not having enough opportunities in the Mergers & Acquisitions pipeline. So, in today’s 30 Days to ETA post, we’re going to explore ETA Deal Flow | Brokers… Enjoy!

30 Days to ETA - ETA Deal Flow | Brokers

ETA Deal Flow | Brokers

At Tip of the Spear Ventures, we’re often asked our opinion on broker utilization. A Broker can help you more than you might be thinking in an acquisition. On the one side — The Sell Side Broker — they represent the seller of the business. On the other side, and this one is often more rare — The Buy Side Broker — represents the buyer (you, the ETA or Acquisition Entrepreneur) with the purchase of a business. We mostly think of brokers as only representing the seller — Sell Side Broker. Mostly, they initiate and mediate the interactions between the buyers and sellers. In fairness, each one provides a similar service. However, each has a different skill set that provides different advantages and disadvantages for particular buyers and sellers. So let’s identify the players, look at their skills sets, and decide how you will work with each broker as you look to conduct ETA in 30 Days!

#1. The Sell Side Broker

Also known as a business transfer agent, or intermediary, a Sell Side Broker acts as a mediator between buyers and sellers.

Who Do They Serve?

Typically, the Sell Side Broker serves smaller, local or regional “mom-and-pop” companies that gross less than five million dollars in yearly sales. According to the Exit Planning Institute (EPI), around five million companies fall into this small business category. Those companies usually sell for less than five million dollars and sell to individual buyers. For the most part, they also have less than one million dollars in EBITDA, or Earnings Before Interest, Tax, Depreciation, and Amortization.

How Do They Get Paid?

Sell Side Brokers do not tend to charge sellers an upfront fee for services. If they have to clean up a huge mess to get the seller positioned to sell, however, they may charge an initial set-up fee. But most of the time, they don’t. Instead, they often charge a commission that funds and pays them at the time the business sells. So no fee for you as the Acquisition Entrepreneur!

What Do They Expect?

The Sell Side Broker requires the seller to compile a multitude of materials to prepare for the sale. Those could include marketing materials used, past and present financial reports, or financial forecasts. In medical fields, a business broker might ask for total patient counts and demographics. Sellers may even have to list what types of procedures, services, or products they offer and how many they provide or sell on an average day. Although sellers will have to provide quite a bit of documentation to the broker, they don’t usually have to go to an accountant for help or additional compilations. What are they looking for the Buyer to do? You probably guessed it, the higher their commission is a direct relative of the sale price of the business. So, they want you to show up at closing with bags of cash!

What Benefit Do They Provide?

Similar to a realtor, the Sell Side Broker walks sellers, and sometimes buyers, through the sales process. The facilitating broker can list the business for sale, develop marketing strategies to attract buyers, arrange business walk-throughs, meet with buyers’ agents, answer questions, and help negotiate sales terms and conditions if issues arise. Essentially, he puts polish on the business to make it look better to attract a buyer. He also acts as a cushion, or an emotional barrier if you will, between the buyer and the seller. His objectivity and creativity repairs hurt pride and dampens fiery tempers if the sales process does not go according to plan. For the buyer, they can also be a pollyannaish resource and their advice/counsel should be seen as such.

#2. Buy Side Broker

The converse of the Sell Side Broker is that of a Buy Side Broker, who acts as a mediator between buyers and sellers but acts in the best interest of the buyer who hires them.

Who Do They Serve?

As stated above, the Buy Side Broker represents you — the Acquisition Entrepreneur — throughout the Mergers & Acquisitions process. You find them and hire them, they then work for you.

How Do They Get Paid?

Buy Side Brokers charge buyers an upfront fee for services. Think of them as a key member of your ETA Professional Team, and unlike the Sell Side Broker who works for the seller and their best interest, they work for you and your best interest.

What Do They Expect?

I’m often asked why would an ETA want a Buy Side Broker? Simple — Most ETA or Acquisition Entrepreneurs are likely buying their first business. With this heading into often unknown spaces, a Buy Side Broker can help explain what the process is and act as a Sherpa if you will. They expect you to follow their guidance (and you hired them, so why wouldn’t you?)

What Benefit Do They Provide?

With this first business comes much upheaval! Think of an acquisition as an ocean with several highs and lows of the wave — or the waves trough and crest. A good Buy Side Broker will help calm those waves, making the acquisition a more expensive one for the buyer, but a better one with less frayed nerves!

SUMMARY

Iin today’s 30 Days to ETA post, we’re going to explore ETA Deal Flow | Brokers. Having a broker may be vital whenever you’re getting ready to acquire a business. Whether to walk you through the entire process and make the business look good to you as the potential buyers or to guide and direct your actions and temper emotions on both parties — Buyer and Seller. Just like the importance of having a sharp attorney when creating a Letter of Intent (LOI) or Purchase Agreement (PA) contract, you will want sharp brokers when implementing those contracts.

Sam Palazzolo

30 Days to ETA | Day #21 – ETA Mistakes

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If you’ve been reading along in this 30 Days to ETA series, you know that in the Day #20 post I discussed how as Acquisition Entrepreneurs you can identify and hire the most vital part of your Professional ETA Team — ETA Business Law. No matter how many jokes you’ve heard about lawyers, good attorneys can save you hundreds of thousands — or even millions — of dollars when it comes time for you to acquire a business (You can read the previous post by CLICKING HERE). Another ETA difficulty is the opportunity to make mistakes. You are going to make mistakes, but how you recover from them will make a massive difference. So, in today’s 30 Days to ETA post, we’re going to explore ETA Mistakes… Enjoy!

30 Days to ETA - ETA Mistakes

ETA Mistakes

At Tip of the Spear Ventures’ Mergers & Acquisitions practice, we have a quality goal – “No Mistakes!” While it’s a great goal to have, as Managing Director I know that it is 100% unrealistic. We are going to make mistakes when we set out to look for businesses to merge or acquire. I like that it’s a high goal, so we’ve kept it from the inception of the practice area.

Mistakes are a part of business. Your ability to risk mitigate, or go into damage recovery after you identify that you have made a mistake, will make all the difference. We also make a habit of backing up and identifying how we don’t make similar mistakes in the future if at all possible.

So if mistakes are a matter of “if” and not “when” for the Acquisition Entrepreneur, I wanted to share in this 30 Days to ETA post some of my most proud mistakes.

You’re going to make mistakes. Your ability to recover from them is the part to focus on.

Sam Palazzolo, Managing Director @ Tip of the Spear Ventures

Emotional ETA Mistakes

The seller of a business, be they an individual or a group, is not and does not personally care about your business goals and aspirations, but you do and can often be mislead to believe that they do too. Come time to sign the Purchase Agreement (PA), you’ve put years of blood, sweat, and spears into buying a business based on their value. The majority of your personal worth will most likely be tied up in the new company after acquisition. So, buying it will be hard, scary, and emotionally exhausting. You don’t want the seller to interpret your emotional ups/downs as weakness. Demonstrating a halfhearted attempt to buy a company at your valuation-derived asking price could prove devastating. If you’ve assessed the Minimum Viable Acquisition (MVA) price, you need to stay strong and fight for the price you identified regardless of your emotional state.

The ETA Mistake of Going All-In

Once you provide a buyer’s offer, you can do several things to exude an air of confidence you may not feel. You don’t want to walk into a sale with weakness and work from anywhere but a position of strength. So, what can you do to ensure a successful purchase happens?

  1. Have courage. – Pull yourself up by the bootstraps, and man up! The minute you decide to sell, jump in or stay out.
  2. Assemble your Professional ETA Team. – Now is the time to bring in your ETA Professional Team in for some much needed counsel. A well-rounded team will help you stay strong and vigilant during the ETA process.
  3. Build the Exit Plan. – Choose one of your four professional players to oversee the ETA process with precision.

A Rookie ETA Mistake

As you prepare to show a strong, united front in the face of your potential seller, you don’t want to make rookie ETA mistakes, such as:

  1. Don’t stop working on other Mergers & Acquisitions deal flow.
  2. Don’t take any counter-offer just because it’s their first business sale.
  3. Reign in your eagerness to buy.
  4. Don’t quit in the middle.

SUMMARY

I’ve heard it said that buying a business is 80% emotional and 20% business. As we’ve identified in this 30 Days to ETA post, the largest hurdles you face will be ETA Mistakes that derive from emotional errors. You are going to make mistakes, but how you recover from them will make a massive difference. While you won’t be able to avoid making ETA Mistakes, your ability to plan for the recovery afterwards will be beneficial.

Sam Palazzolo

30 Days to ETA | Day #20 – ETA Business Law

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If you’ve been reading along in this 30 Days to ETA series, you know that in the Day #19 post I discussed how as Acquisition Entrepreneurs you can create and justify the price you should pay based off of objective versus subjective criteria — The ETA Business Valuation. Part of the ETA difficulty as an entrepreneur is identifying the value you should be willing to pay for a business as a part of your Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition journey (You can read the previous post by CLICKING HERE). Another ETA difficulty is knowing who you can trust. No matter how many jokes you’ve heard about lawyers, good attorneys can save you hundreds of thousands — or even millions — of dollars when it comes time for you to acquire a business. So, in today’s 30 Days to ETA post, we’re going to explore how you can identify and hire this vital part of your Professional ETA Team — ETA Business Law… Enjoy!

30 Days to ETA - ETA Business Law

ETA Business Law

As go through the process of Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition, there’s one person on your professional advisory team who will probably make you feel like you’re operating in a safe/confident manner – the lawyer.

I’ve been fortunate to work with both good and bad lawyers in my professional and personal life. I say fortunate for both good and bad not because of the obvious outcomes of why I employed them, but because each provided a different subject matter expertise (SME) that I needed at the time given whatever I was working on. Similarly, as a part of being an Acquisition Entrepreneur you’ll want to make certain that you find just the right lawyer for the Mergers & Acquisitions task at hand. To get us started on finding the best lawyer, here are three overall tips to follow: 

  • Choose a razor-sharp attorney to be on your Professional ETA Team – Pick a seasoned lawyer who knows the ins and outs of the business acquisitions process.
  • Work with the attorney as long as the acquisition is in progress; then stop – You will get tired of the legal jargon and the mountains of legal paperwork involved in the business acquisition process (and don’t get me started on the retainer funding and billing procedure!)
  • Be 100% focused on the specific legal tasks at hand – Your attorney is going to ask you questions over and over during the business acquisition. It will take effort to answer questions in answers that are short, concise, and accurate.

I’ve spent more money on attorneys that I’d ever care to admit.

The reason why I spent so much? They were worth it!

Sam Palazzolo, Managing Director @ Tip of the Spear

ETA Business Law Contracts

I’m often challenged on this lawyer-thing, typically by an Acquisition Entrepreneur asking, “Why do I even need a lawyer when you acquire a company?” I know that the internet is a plenty with legal forms/templates that you can use. I also know that while you didn’t finish law school, you can get yourself believing that you can skip a few steps and save some money without employing an attorney. I’m going to tell you that’s a huge mistake!

You’ll be dealing with a ton of documents and contracts that require a lawyer’s knowledge and keen eye. Contracts are legally binding documents that detail all agreements between two or more entities. Since you’ll need a strong contract to record every facet of the buyer-seller agreement, term, and condition, you’ll want a lawyer to protect your assets, future business and personal goals.

6 ETA Business Law Contract Elements

I have seen six basic reoccurring elements in the best contracts I’ve seen during my career.

  1. The offer
  2. Acceptance of the offer
  3. Consideration of the details
  4. Mutuality of obligation
  5. Competencies and capacities
  6. Written and recorded specifics

Those are just the basic elements in sound contracts. Obviously, each business will require industry-specific and business-specific provisions to be added to the contract.

6 Additional ETA Business Law Contract Elements

There are many more provisions that could go into your business sales contract, but here are a few additional ETA Business Law Contract Elements:

  1. Ability to choose a closing venue
  2. Allowable time extensions and term expansions
  3. Coverage of attorney fees in closing costs and buyer loans
  4. Provisions for termination
  5. Hold-harmless Indemnification Clauses
  6. Market exclusivity demands

Trusting ETA Business Law

I started out this post by sharing that you’ll want to find/hire a lawyer that you can trust. For me, trust is the foundation that everything is built on. However, trust is not blind. In other words, I am going to recommend that you don’t put 100% of your trust in the ETA Business Law process and never inspect what it is that’s being done. While I want to hire a competent attorney, and you do too, we both need to inspect for what we expect. Here are a few more helpful tips when it comes to trusting the ETA Business Law process:

  1. Read contracts thoroughly – Ask questions on anything you don’t understand 100%.
  2. Make sure it contains the terms to which you agreed.
  3. Take out irrelevant terms and conditions.
  4. Delete duplicate statements.
  5. Ensure fairness to both parties.
  6. Prepare for what-if contingency scenarios.

SUMMARY

In this 30 Days to ETA post, we explored how you can identify and hire the vital part of your Professional ETA Team — ETA Business Law. Part of the ETA difficulty is knowing who you can trust. No matter how many jokes you’ve heard about lawyers, good attorneys can save you hundreds of thousands — or even millions — of dollars when it comes time for you to acquire a business. I made several suggestions on how you can find the right lawyer as well as key aspects to a contract that you’ll want to consider.

NOTE – I am not an attorney. This post is purely for educational purposes and should not be taken as legal counsel. Seek an attorney to provide you with ETA Business Law solutions.

Sam Palazzolo

30 Days to ETA | Day #19 – The ETA Business Valuation

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If you’ve been reading along in this 30 Days to ETA series, you know that in the Day #18 post I discussed how as Acquisition Entrepreneurs one of the paths forward for you could be The ETA Conglomerate. If you love what you do, and in doing so want more love, then it’s natural to want to explore owning more than one business as a part of your Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition journey (You can read the previous post by CLICKING HERE). Part of the ETA difficulty as an entrepreneur is identifying the value you should be willing to pay for a business. So, in today’s 30 Days to ETA post, we’re going to explore how you can create and justify the price you should pay based off of objective versus subjective criteria — The ETA Business Valuation… Enjoy!

30 Days to ETA The ETA Business Valuation

The ETA Business Valuation

At Tip of the Spear Ventures’ Mergers & Acquisitions practice, we’ve analyzed over one-thousand businesses in our screening process. The filters that we employ allow us to accurately, and objectively based on quantitative data, assess a business for potential acquisition. Why do we look at so many?

The reason why we invest time/money/effort into exploring so many different businesses for mergers or acquisitions is because we have a number of filters in place in our search for a business. These filters are by design established to move potential businesses out of the process, as opposed to passing them on or through the process to the next step. Why do we want to filter out organizations sooner, rather than later?

Preparing for The ETA Business Valuation

Buying a business as an Entrepreneur Through Acquisition will find you with a ton of businesses you could explore purchasing. Today, as I write this, there are over 11,000 businesses listed for sale on BizBuySell.com in the geographic-freindly location that we focus on conducting M&A work. With this large quantity of businesses available to explore, you will have to have the mental fortitude, the financial fortitude, and the emotional fortitude to get through this ETA process. It’s imperative before you begin the process that you stop. Let’s do a personal and business assessment to determine the Minimum Viable Acquisition (MVA) Criteria you need before exploring as an Acquisition Entrepreneur.

Minimum Viable Acquisition (MVA) Criteria

Minimum Viable Acquisition (MVA) Criteria focus on what you need a business to consist of at the minimum levels in order to move forward in your due diligence investigation. It’s in this MVA analysis phase where you are identifying if you should move forward and further investigate the organization or discharge them from the process. Whatever your answer is, have you quantify this in an objective manner.

ETA candidates typically ask me why I’m so firm on the objective nature of MVA versus a subjective one. After all, I’ve had several ETA candidates tell me that the concept of “love” as in “I love what I do” is typically a subjective one — not an objective one. While I encourage you to love the business that you’re exploring, I also know that love can cause you to be blind. And it’s exactly in these blindspots that if you allow for subjective decision making to take over, you’ll quickly fall out of love and worse yet end up in the poor house! None of us — and I mean none of us — are going into this Acquisition Entrepreneur initiative with the end goal of arriving at the poor house (Perhaps this is why the focus of nearly every Day #1 through Day #18 here in this ’30 Days to ETA’ series has been focused on end results of selling the business you ultimately acquire for a profit!)

So I ask you to stop, pause, and look at your leadership capabilities. Then, ask yourself the following Minimum Viable Acquisition (MVA) Criteria planning questions:

  1. What do you need cash flow to be?
  2. Will you have enough to finance the Acquisition?
  3. Are your risks managed?
  4. How will you lead your new business?

The ETA Business Valuation meets MVA

You see, the goal for most of us in the ETA space is to acquire a business and grow it to where it’s just a part of our overall net worth, not 80% of it. Many times at this ETA phase, I see entrepreneurs desiring 500k, 1, 5, 10, 15, 20, or even 40 million dollars a year in revenue. Or, like many of my clients, they are bringing in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in their personal income from the organization that they currently work for — income that needs to be replaced/offset/improved on after the acquisition of a new business.

I was interviewing a candidate for our Entrepreneur in Residence program here at Tip of the Spear Ventures. The candidate was extremely bright, very well educated, and had what I thought was a great aptitude to be one of our owner-operators of a business that we would acquire. What they weren’t great at was seeing that being an owner-operator wasn’t like working for a Fortune 500 company or a consulting firm with built in compensation structure. As the owner of a business, there are times when you acquire one and need to sacrifice your monthly compensation so that you can make payroll for the team you inherit. The candidate couldn’t wrap their head around this, and ultimately went to work for a consulting firm instead.

How to Estimate the Value of a Business

So this is where business value comes back into play. At this point in your ETA process, you will need to have a rough estimate of the value of the company. Now, I’ve created a whole post about business valuations and how businesses are valued. My experience as a Managing Director at Tip of the Spear Ventures and as a value growth expert has led me to draw up detailed assessments of current business values based on EBITDA and industry-specific value multipliers.

EBITDA stands for Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization. So if you have a business that is worth five times EBITDA, or 200% of collections, or three times recurring revenue, all of those things are good guidelines to follow to get you close to what you think your business is worth. At this point, I’m not talking about the nitty-gritty of value calculations. I’m just talking about getting together a very rough business value estimate, or assessment.

Determine the Minimum Viable Acquisition (MVA) Criteria You Need

After you evaluate and quantify your personal and business assets, you will need to determine whether or not you have enough money on which to live after you buy the company you are investigating.

If you tell me that the current value of the business you’re exploring is two million dollars, I’ll ask, “How much do you need to reach your goals?” If you tell me you need two hundred thousand dollars a year to reach your goals, I’ll ask “What other assets do you have and what in the business could be potential levers we could improve to achieve that comp level?” If the business doesn’t currently generate that compensation level for the current owner, who is smart and has been running the business for the last 30 years, what makes you think you can jump in the President role and achieve that so as to reach your desired compensation. In other words, you may be in trouble.

Conduct ETA Business Valuation GAP Analysis

After running personal and business assessments, you may find that there is an ETA Business Valuation GAP. In other words, there is a difference between the business valuation of the company you’re looking at and the minimum viable acquisition criteria you actually need to meet your life goals.

That ETA Business Valuation GAP can occur at many different business and personal levels, so it’s time to find it. Now is the time to look for the gaps – before you buy the business on the open market.

SUMMARY

In this ’30 Days to ETA’ post we’ve explored the concept of the ETA Business Valuation and the role it plays in allowing you to search for businesses that are appropriate for your goals. Too small of a business valuation could lead to missing your Acquisition Entrepreneur goals. We’ve discussed the objective versus subjective nature of ETA, one that can keep you from falling haplessly in love — and help you avoid the poor house! I also introduced what I call the Minimum Viable Acquisition (MVA) criteria. This MVA criteria allows you to focus on best-case businesses that are closer to where you ultimately want to get with your goals.

Sam Palazzolo

30 Days to ETA | Day #18 – The ETA Conglomerate

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If you’ve been reading along in this 30 Days to ETA series, you know that in the Day #17 post I discussed how as Acquisition Entrepreneurs we need to have focus on the end with The ETA Exit Plan. While you need to buy your business via Mergers & Acquisitions at the right strike-price, it’s equally important as a part of due diligence to sell the business right as well as a part of your Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition journey (You can read the previous post by CLICKING HERE). But what if you get into this as an entrepreneur and you find out you really enjoy owning a business? I mean, what’s better than owning a single business? Two or more businesses! So, in today’s 30 Days to ETA post, we’re going to explore how you can expand/create an empire by owning multiple companies — The ETA Conglomerate… Enjoy!

30 Days to ETA The ETA Conglomerate

The ETA Conglomerate

As Managing Director at Tip of the Spear Ventures, one of the most amazing things I see during an entrepreneur’s journey in Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition is owners walking away from a buyer’s dream offer. If we’ve spent all of these years building a business to sell it, why wouldn’t we want not to explore taking it? What makes some business owners take the money and run, so to speak? And what causes others to turn down millions of dollars to keep working their fingers to the bone?

Ultimately, I find that some business owners are scared of their lives after leaving. All they’ve known is business, and they don’t know what else to do. That makes their future-after-business-ownership extremely precarious. But it also gives them an advantage: They shouldn’t just own one business… Enter the ETA Conglomerate!

3 Decisions Owners Make as the ETA Conglomerate

Essentially, Acquisition Entrepreneurs will do one of three things in order to excel as The ETA Conglomerate. Two decisions we make can lead to life and prosperity after the business sale. However, one decision could lead down a path of self-destruction before the business acquisition or in life after the business sale.

Here are three decisions we owners typically make when it comes time for The ETA Conglomerate:

  1. Take the money and run! We want more challenges, we need more challenges, but we take the money and run rather than investing those Benjamins in additional businesses where they can make more!
  2. Make an offer but make a calculated decision not to buy at that time. This decision has the potential to be rewarding. Maybe we invest the time and energy into exploring other business for sale, and it becomes so highly efficient that we don’t have to be in the office every day. With a highly functioning business, we find time to relax AND run the company. Or maybe we want more time to save for our ideal retirement goals. Sometimes, we want to spend more time building the business’s value to get a better offer later. Either way we go, we can still get to a sale’s table at another point in our business’s life and take more time to prepare ourselves to leave the business.
  3. Walk away from the Letter of Intent (LOI) prior to Purchase Agreement. This is a dangerous decision we ETAs often make. We perceive value in a company and make the offer we want via LOI. But when it is time to sign on the dotted line, we change our minds. It seems unlikely, but so many of us make this mistake that the Exit Planning Institute has done studies with the results that 80% of companies making below $50 Million in revenue never sell.

Questions That Determine The ETA Conglomerate Path

So you have an ETA Conglomerate Plan that’s been in the works for months, years, or decades? What makes you hesitate just long enough to back out? In my business at Tip of the Spear Ventures, I typically find that the deals that we’ve walk away from a business mergers or acquisitions scenario haven’t been the ones that we’re mentally prepared for. In other words, we get too attached to the company.

Ultimately, though, our answers to two questions tend to determine whether we can achieve The ETA Conglomerate dream:

How Much Money Will I Get?

Money can fix a lot of problems, but it can’t fix everything. I’ve witnessed Acquisition Entrepreneurs with lots of money self-destruct before they ever get to the sale of the business — Just as quickly as businesses with little/no cash flow. When it comes time to acquire businesses (multiple) though, money will be a deciding factor or the deciding factor.

Almost without exception, we Acquisition Entrepreneurs know how much we want for our business and how much we actually need to earn from the sale of our company in the future.  If we’ve planned our business sale for years and worked with professionals to come up with a realistic company valuation, we’ll balk if a buyer offers us significantly less. For instance, we’ll walk away if we’ve valued our company at $5 Million, but an outsider only offers us $1 Million. Alternatively, if we think our company is worth $1 Million and someone offers us $5 Million, we’d likely take that money and run before they change their mind. This scenario is with one business, and diversification or exponential growth/sales figures can be achieved with multiple businesses. So how much money you receive from selling The ETA Conglomerate is a crucial metric/KPI to consider!

What’s the WHY?

As an Entrepreneur Through Acquisition, and you know this all too well by Day #18 in the 30 Days to ETA series, you will face many ups and downs on your journey. Money, while a considerable factor to consider may not be enough to drive every decision you make. I’m going to ask you to dig deep… Deeper than you probably feel comfortable with and ask yourself why you are doing this whole ETA journey for in the first place. Is it to live the lifestyle that you’ve always dreamed of? Is it to provide generational wealth for you/your family? Is it to better your community/state/country?

If you strip away the exterior and are stuck with the interior decisions that you are attempting this ETA climb, you’ll find your WHY.

SUMMARY

So what will we business owners do when we get to the future moment of selling your organization? Will you take the money and run, or will you stay put? In this ETA Conglomerate post we’ve looked at why some Acquisition Entrepreneurs decide to do just that. My answer: Build an empire! If you can take one business and scale it, several businesses will allow you to better diversify and get to your endpoints of money or WHY.

Sam Palazzolo