Ep 476 Exit Story: How Ben Landers Avoided an Earn-Out in His 8-Figure Sale of Blue Corona
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Hi there, and welcome back to another edition of Built to Sell Radio, the podcast designed to help you punch above your weight in a negotiation to sell your company.

This week on the podcast, we're bringing you an exit story featuring Ben Landers, the founder of Blue Corona. Now, Ben built an eight-figure digital marketing agency focused on home service businesses and achieved something extraordinary. He negotiated a clean exit with no earn out, an almost unheard of feat in the service business world. Now, listen as Ben shares how he structured his deal, managed a complex partnership with a silent investor, and ultimately walked away with complete financial independence. He

If you're considering selling your business, you won't want to miss this one. Now, before we dive in, as a quick reminder, in 2025, we're introducing the four types of episodes to help you better understand the process of selling your business. Exit story, which is interviewed just like this. Conversations with founders who've sold their businesses. Inside the mind of an acquirer, where you're going to hear directly from buyers about how they evaluate potential acquisitions. After the deal, exploring life after selling a business.

The opportunities, challenges, and transitions that come when work becomes a choice, not a requirement. And lastly, mastering the deal practical tools and techniques to help you negotiate the best possible outcome when it comes time to sell. Now, if you know of a founder, acquirer, negotiation expert with a great story, you

and has some valuable insights to share, we'd love to hear from you. You can head over to builttosell.com slash nominate, where there you're going to have a chance to nominate yourself or them to be a guest right here on the show with John. Now, without further ado, here is Ben Landers. Enjoy. Ben Landers, welcome to Built to Sell Radio. Thanks for having me, John. Great to be here. Tell me the founder story behind this company, Blue Corona.

Yeah, I'll try. I'll give you the short version. I started my career working for bigger companies, the hotjobs.com and then WorldCom. Older listeners might know how some of those worked out. Not great. Yeah. And then I pivoted over to the small business world. And ultimately, I found myself working for an entrepreneur who really I went to work for him as like a mentor. You know, his name is Bob Perini.

And he was running a company called Drink More Water, a bottled water delivery company, homes and offices in and around the DC area, which is where I lived at the time. And anyway, I met Bob through, I think, mountain biking and a mutual business kind of connection. And I really went to work for Bob. I had no intention of going to work for the bottled water company, but I went to work for Bob because Bob was sort of your classic entrepreneur where a bunch of people that had worked for him had left to start their own companies.

of which Bob was an investor and owner advisor. And I was like, you know what? I don't have any money. My parents don't have any money. And I was a sales and marketing... My background was sales and marketing. I didn't have an operations background of finance or anything. And so I needed someone who could advise me in that regard anyway. So I went to work for Bob. And then through working for Bob, we'd started a couple businesses. We started an office coffee business.

And I was sort of running the office coffee business. It was within his drink or water business.

And I was doing a coffee demo for a plumbing company, residential plumbing company that I thought was huge. It was probably a $10, $15 million residential plumbing company. And I'm sitting here demoing the cured coffee machine. So I'm supposed to be focused on like selling this coffee machine to this guy and his staff. And I started asking about marketing. I said, you know, you guys are running full page color ads in the yellow pages. Like, what kind of sense could that possibly make? And he says, well, why would you say that?

And I said, "Well, I have an ownership interest in Drinkmore." I didn't really. I just... Bob told me to talk that way. And I do all the advertising marketing and we've cut all our Yellow Page advertising to just bold listing. And this was probably back in 2004, 2005. And he said, "That's ridiculous. Why would you have done that?" I said, "Well, we track. We built a system to track all the advertising. So we can see exactly which marketing channels

are bringing in the best leads, sales. We got the ROI." And he calls over his head of marketing and he says, "Tell her what you just told me." And I explained to her how we were tracking everything. And we had built this janky ad tracking platform. And I remember coming back to Bob saying, "I don't want to run the coffee business. We need to start a new company doing this."

Because that had no geographic limitations, obviously a much bigger total addressable market. And anyway, this is my version of the story. I'm sure Bob will listen to this and say, he has a completely different version, which is fine. But anyway, that's how it started. What was Bob's reaction? But Bob is, no one has changed my life more besides my parents and my wife and kids. No one has had a more positive impact in my life than Bob. And what was it?

What was his reaction to this idea of a marketing services? Well, so he loved it. I mean, Bob, Bob is Mr. Data and analytics like Bob. When I met Bob, I was, you know, had an advertising background. I loved, you know, marketing and advertising and sales. And I was pushing Bob, you know, sponsor cycling teams and, you know, do all sorts of stuff. And Bob was like he hated in a way advertising marketing because of all the fluff.

Right. The yellow page rep would come in each year and say, you know, your competitors doing this. You need to spend more. Look at what McDonald's and Nike do. You know, you're a little business. If you want to be a big business, you need to invest X percent of your revenue in marketing and advertising. And if it doesn't work, they tell you, well, you just didn't spend enough. Right. Or your messaging was wrong or whatever. Bob was an engineer from Duke and then he had a Harvard. He went to Harvard and got an MBA.

And he's really a finance guy, you know, numbers guy, engineer. So Bob wanted to quantify anything and everything in his business. And when it came to advertising marketing. So to tell him, like, we should have a business where we're using data to help small business owners see what's working, what's not. That's like 100 percent. He's all about that.

So Bob's an engineer. He's a finance guy. He understands numbers. How did you figure out the equity split with Bob? Did he put the money in and you get the sweat equity or did you each kind of kick in cash or how did you? No, that was a that was a big, you know, big issue from my standpoint. So Bob had a playbook.

for how he would launch these companies. And this is again, my vantage point. He might have a different view. But what Bob would do is he would... Someone working for him, entrepreneurial person, or he would have an idea. And then you think, "Who is going to run this? Who's going to own this thing?" And so he would incubate the company within Drink More Water.

And, and so, you know, you'd be sort of doing the services like with the coffee company, you know, we were running the coffee company and delivering coffee and charging people coffee, but it was all coming from Dream or Water. And the idea was that at some point it gets big enough that you'd split it out into a separate entity and sort of recapitalize it. And the, the person running, let's just use the coffee business, running it would get some shares, you know, call it, you know, one to 20% or something.

And Bob would have the majority, A, because he would put the cash in, and B, because you would have been getting paid by Drinkmore, getting benefits from Drinkmore. And technically, when you work for a company, you have this duty of loyalty to the company. Any idea that you come up with is the company's intellectual property, not yours. This is as I understand it. And so...

With Blue Corona, I was sort of when we launched that company, we sort of launched it. Our first sale was to his high school buddy. And again, we had no company set up. So he was paying us. But as I remember it, he was like covering the Google. It's kind of a longer story. We're doing the tracking for free and we were managing this Realtor's Google ad spend.

And we use the good, the customer's credit card for the ads. And then the fee, I don't even know that I was charging a fee. It's like a theoretical. And anyway, the point is, is you're sort of doing all this stuff. And then Bob, you know, it's kind of a genius. If you're the entrepreneur, if you're Bob, which is you get some young guy, me at the time, I think I was, uh,

This was in 2007 that we really kind of were starting with Grunow. And so I would have been like 30. And you get the entrepreneur, the person doing the sweat kind of in it, and then you sit down and have the equity conversation. So when we first sat down, it probably went something like this. Bob probably said, how much equity do you think you deserve or should get? He put in all the money.

As I remember, I didn't put in any hard dollars. And I probably said it was 50%. It's our idea. I came up with a lot of the idea. You shaped it. And he was like, well, don't you think that's kind of ridiculous? So Bob's saying...

It's kind of crazy that you're looking for half the equity here. You know, you're an employee. I paid you well. You know, I've incubated you. How did it go from there? Like, what was what was your reaction? How did you guys come to? Yeah, it was not. I mean, my reaction was I mean, it was it was tough. It was a tough, you know, one of the challenges that I'm sure a lot of the entrepreneurs listening to this, you know, listening to this might, you know, relate to this is.

I was the young sort of sweat entrepreneur. I was the sheep and Bob was the wolf. He lived three of my lifetimes in a sense.

in business. And so I remember calling my cousin who's an attorney and just saying, hey, this is the situation, what should I do? And he was like, you should kind of flip and sort of reinforce the mentor, mentee, like you're my sort of business idol and whatever equity you can get, you should be thankful for because it's all, you really are entitled to nothing.

And this is like my own cousin saying this stuff. And I'm like, are you kidding me? And then I went and met with I was a competitive cyclist at the time. So I was like an elite cyclist. And I, you know how sports works. If you're good at something, everyone likes you. And so some of the older guys, I was a 30 year old super fast guy. And some of the older slow guys were, you know, business guys or had a lot of money.

So I met with a couple of those, you know, while I'm sort of negotiating with Bob, I'm like after work going to meeting with like the wealthy lawyer friend that I have and saying, hey, what should I do? And that guy saying like, hey, me and my buddies will back you. We'll give you a million dollars right now. Screw Bob. But the reality was I believed that and I still believe this, that I needed Bob. I mean, I didn't understand, you know, finance, operations, organizational design, everything.

Yeah, I didn't understand any of that. I was a first-time entrepreneur. And so it was sort of like, gosh, I actually don't want just hard money or silent partners. I actually need someone to guide me. And later in my career, I joined Vistage and then YPO. But back then, again, I had no business. So there's no getting into YPO with no company.

So essentially, you know, it got very contentious with Bob and I think he would agree on this. He was incredulous. You know, I was like an ingrate.

Multiple times we were yelling so loudly in his conference room that people like came in and said like, is everything okay in here? Bob is similar to me. I'm a very happy guy, but I'm super passionate and I'm very competitive. And so I can get worked up at the drop of a hat. Bob is an Italian. Bob Perini is like an Italian guy. You picture like an Italian, like Godfather dinner, right? With the Don, right?

And like Sonny, that was me. So, you know, I said some things that I, in retrospect, probably regret saying, like, you know, how, you know, you know, this is like unfair and all that stuff. And so ultimately what we wound up with was 47 and a half percent Ben, 47 and a half percent Bob, 5 percent Alex, where Alex was Bob's daughter.

And then our bylaws, I required that the bylaws required super majority voting for all decisions. So it's basically Bob and Ben have to agree. And I thought I, you know, such a victory, right? I'm like 47 and a half percent. He can't fire me. You know, my fear was he has multiple kids that are extremely smart. Alex was our first employee. Hiring her was my idea. So in retrospect, I'm like, damn it, like should have hired some

Someone that wasn't related to either of us, but she was super smart. She had just graduated from UNC Chapel Hill and I knew her pretty well. And I thought that she would be perfect. She's kind of like me. She can do a lot of different things, you know, pretty well, even though she would have been right out of school. And so, um,

but i was of course a concern that i would build this company up and then he would like fire me and have all his kids you know take take it over sure um so um anyway i thought it was a big win what i didn't appreciate and what ultimately led to a lot of friction down the road was i could veto bob but bob could veto me i worked in the business

Bob did not. So, you know, I want the fancy office in a downtown area where it's cool place to attract and retain talent. Bob's like, we're not doing that. I had three people in my office when we were acquired, three people sharing my office because we were just busting at the seams. And Bob was like, I'm not signing on to a multimillion dollar multi-year lease. Now,

That was in 2020 that I had this multi-million dollar lease on the table. So in retrospect, it was fantastic that he put the kibosh on that because then COVID went totally remote. We never came back.

Right, right. Of course, we were the same in our company. We had a lease coming up for renewal. We were out touring around office space and we were all told, you know, the NBA ended it, like canceled the rest of the season. We're like, maybe we should hold off on that lease. Sounds similar to... But it was extremely contentious. And, you know, I don't know how...

Someone with a broader vocabulary of like negotiating terms and who's able to like keep themselves calm under pressure probably could have found a way. When we got through that negotiation, in one sense, things were never the same. Our relationship was always more contentious, you know, afterwards. And that's with a business that was doing incredibly well. Imagine if things had not gone well. Yeah.

Yeah. Just for my notification, when you say a super majority for major decisions, like what would constitute a major decision and how would you know it was a decision that you would have to go to? Yeah, that was a miss. That was a misstatement. That's what I wish the agreement said. The original agreement, the original agreement was all I remember how it was written. It's like legally is kind of your standard agreement.

We were an S corporation. And so we had bylaws and articles of incorporation. And I think the bylaw said something like all operating decisions. And so in the early years, when we were again, we were brand new. We had very little money. I was ordering stationery. Right. With our name, like letterhead. And it was like five thousand dollars. And I sent him a note and said, hey, I'm about to pull the trigger on this. Like, are you cool with this?

And he was like, I'm in Italy, like, you know, riding my bike. Like, why are you bothering me on this? You're the owner of the company. You're the CEO. Like, $5,000. I'm like, okay, okay. I didn't know.

So the way it worked practically was in the beginning, I was getting his approval for almost every expenditure. As soon as the company, you know, we started making money, the company started growing. I basically kind of said to him, look, I'm just going to go. I'm just going to do things. But like if I'm hiring, you know, like a new person is when we have like no employees. If I'm hiring a person now.

you know i'll kind of send you a note and make sure you're cool with it if i um you know any purchase over five thousand dollars i'll send you a note you know that kind of thing and then of course those limits by the time you know like flash forward um in 2000 you know so we started the company officially the company was incorporated in early 2008 by 2010 11

you know, I was going to Bob when we would have like, you know, a senior person leaves, you know, he was serving as like a Vistage chair or like a YPO forum person, right? Where he's like, like, man, I got a big problem. You know, our biggest client just gave notice, which, you know, what should I do? Or employee, we're doing discretionary bonuses. And this is sort of how I'm thinking about divvying the pie up. You know, what do you think?

that type of thing. And were you going to Bob in those days in 2012 as a courtesy in recognition of his ownership stake or because you still thought of him as a mentor? Both. Both. He is like again one of the smartest guys that I've ever met. Certainly within like the small business world. I mean he's just he's extremely bright.

And, um, there, you know, there was, and we had another moment later down the road where we had another big fight where he essentially said, like, I'm done being your, you know, sort of your, uh, you know, your blankie to fall back on. Like you put on your big boy pants, like you're going to make these. What was the fight over? Um, I think it was, I wanted to our office. So again, I'll keep this short. We had bought a building.

in a light industrial area in Gaithersburg, Maryland before starting Blue Corona. So when we started the company, we had a whole downstairs of this two-story building that was available. And so Bob's thing was like, let's keep the overhead super low. You can move downstairs and kind of use this space. And we were also subletting out part of that space. So he's like, as you grow, we'll kick out the subtenant.

And but, you know, when you think about we were running a digital marketing kind of marketing software company. So where are those offices and what do they look like? Right. They're in like downtown Baltimore, like Bethesda, Maryland, you know, Georgetown, somewhere cool, Arlington, overlooking, you know, something nice where you can walk down to lunch. You're asking people to work crazy hours. Why had people walk into the BP gas station for lunch?

You know, like I had people come to interview and they're like out front going like, all I see is this water factory. Like, where are you? So for me, I had all my key employees were I had some some employees that more than money, they were young and naive, but more than money. They wanted an office where they didn't have to drive an hour. They all lived in the city.

And so I think I said some things to him like, you know, we need this and you're being cheap. And he owns and owned the majority of the building. I had like a 2%, you know, stake in the building. So, you know, I probably said some stuff like you're way overcharging us for rent. And of course you are because you're the big owner of the building. And he probably heard that and said, you know,

piece of ass like how so ungrateful you know all the things i've done almost sounds like uh we were like an old married couple or even like a father-son relationship where the son finally kind of wants his own oh yeah you know yeah and the one thing that's funny is we've all had other partners in things since and um one day i had a call with him and i just said man

You know, it's like I owe you a big apology because, you know, I've had now this incident with this other guy. And like I would, you know, you were the best partner like I could ever had. And he's like, I never thought I'd say this, but I think the same thing about you. Yeah, I love that Munger quote, you know, the best way, you know, to attract a great partners to deserve one. And I think the two of us for all of our faults.

um you know i think we you know i always tried to do right by by him even if he didn't always see it that way and i think he was always trying to help me get out of my own way so let's talk about the business model in the early days you were doing you're one of the leaders i guess in in quantitative analytics based marketing for small businesses so instead of just you know

Yellow pages ads where you never knew where the ROI was. You were starting to become much more scientific about marketing. I understand at one point,

You decided to focus on home services as a vertical, HVAC, plumbing, garage door, et cetera. Maybe walk me through that strategic decision. What made you decide to verticalize? Well, so what's funny about it was it was not strategic. When we started the business, well, first of all, it started, the original idea was just to track advertising.

We were actually not going to do any advertising marketing. We were going to be this sort of independent, you know, tracker of all the different advertising marketing. But what happened was I had another plumbing company as a client, early client, where we tracked all their yellow page ads. And I show the owner that like you're basically throwing away $60,000 a month.

I mean, this was a big company, big plumbing company. Yellow Page Advertising was at its peak, you know, or kind of at the end now. And so he cancels it and he says, look, I love you. I mean, like, I can't believe it's like incredible what you've done.

and what you've helped us do. But I'm trying to grow the business. So what do I do? You're tracking all this stuff. What actually works? And I remember looking at his website. It was like an eight-page brochure site. And I said, when's the last time you rebuilt the website? Do you do SEO? You ever heard of pay-per-click? He thought pay-per-click. He thought I was saying paper clip.

Paperclip marketing. So like months went by and he's like, you know, I've been asking every business owner I know, and no one does this paperclip, you know, advertising. I was like, oh shit, that's good. It's not called that, but whatever, you know, we'll get there. But so I remember coming back to Bob and saying,

My background originally, Bob was the real analytical guy, not me. He had to sort of twist my arms to track things. And a lot of the tracking that we did back then was somewhat manual. And I hated it. I mean, I hated the business of it, like tagging phone calls, lead solicitation, et cetera. But anyway, that's how we got from tracking purely analytics to

to advertising, digital marketing, and analytics. And then the tracking became our differentiator. Like when we tell you that Google pay-per-click, I almost said pay-per-click, generated 50 leads at this cost per lead and this many sales and this many sales dollars, it's 100% accurate. We're not calling a lead like a phone call that is generated.

there was actually another advertising person trying to sell you more advertising and using Google as their prospecting tool. So that was the first pivot was from just analytics to advertising and marketing with this analytics differentiator. And then to your question about the home services,

Our original clients, first I went after all the bottled water companies. So my original case study, I did a case study of Drink More Water and I sent it to like 100, 200, 300 bottled water companies. But bottled water companies were having a really tough time because the 2008 recession, people were cutting all discretionary spending, offices especially, and two, the whole plastic, BPA and all that stuff. So that's...

Then I remember thinking back to the plumbing company where I did the coffee demo going like, who else does a lot of Yellow Beach advertising? It's like plumbers, electricians, roofers, home services. So that's when we went after, I got three or four plumbing clients, including Lend the Plumber, which Lend the Plumber today is a million dollar plus residential plumbing company. When we started working them, and outside of Baltimore, no one knew who Lend the Plumber was.

So that was that's what we liked. I liked home service companies for a couple of reasons. One, I knew the space. I mean, I kind of I spent so much time at Drinkmore kind of talking to those folks. When your office is in a light industrial area, that's who when you go to the burrito place down the road, it's all the workers and owners of those companies are out there, which are a lot of the home service companies.

So those were like my people, you know, in a sense. The other thing that I loved was when I would go to digital marketing conferences and I've written about this before, you'd have all these hoity-toity advertising people like, oh, you know, we have Porsche as our client. We have Four Seasons International. And then I remember being in a group of people and someone introduced me and they're like, this is my friend Ben. He does, he builds websites for plumbers.

And everyone like kind of laughed, you know, just like you're laughing. And, but I remember the problem with that, with their business in general, serving these huge companies, these huge clients is to do a pitch for Porsche. You're spending like 20 or 30 grand, like to do the pitch.

And it requires like super hoity-toity, you know, advertising, marketing people, kind of like famous industry people to do the pitch. And you're pitching against, you know, these other huge advertising companies. And so, you know, it's like with Len the plumber, we might have been the only one competing for that piece of business. You know, and the owner, you didn't have any committees. Like the owner would hear, would see the data and would be like, cancel all that stuff. I want to test whatever Ben's,

saying to Tess. So I loved it. And our average client back then was probably $1,700 a month. You know, they were probably spending with us versus the guy who has Porsche or gal has Porsche as a client, they might be spending, you know, 50 grand a month. But, you know, if I lost, once we built up enough scale, if I lost a couple of clients, I mean, it always hurt, but it was like, I'm not going to have to reduce headcount because I lost a, you know, one client.

And so it just it made for a much more predictable, scalable business. And again, when I met Bob, I wasn't I had an advertising marketing background and I was super passionate. I still am passionate about digital marketing, but I would have run the coffee company. You know, I was more passionate about the game of business than than like the type of business I used to joke around with the HVAC.

that our businesses are like identical. Like I could run your HVAC company, I think. And I think you could run my digital marketing company because the people component is such a big, you know, I didn't have trucks and inventory. That would have been a little hard for me to adapt to, but you know, whatever. How did you stick handle the,

competition factor where if you were working with Len the plumber and you were a specialist in helping plumbers generate demand and marketing and there's a second plumber, did you tell Len, hey, I'm working with a second plumber just to let you know? And how did you stick that out? That was like many sleepless nights, but only for me. No one else thought of it as. It's amazing how your internal dialogue

you know, shape so much of how you think and feel when other people do not feel that way at all. So when it first started coming up, we would do, we would do sort of like, like we're not going to solicit, you know, competitors. And if we get a solicitation, we'll tell you when we were really small, right? So if we were working with Magnolia plumbing, that was a big DC outfit. And we got a call in from, you

fill in the blanks. So like their biggest competitor, I might call up Joe Magnoli and say, hey, we just got this inquiry. How do you want me to handle it? Interesting with Joe, that did come up with Joe and he was like, go for it. Like help him. Like it's not us versus them. There are a million companies out there. I don't know if we've ever even run into that. So there were some business owners who had this very much like

They were in industry groups and they would share stuff, even with people that were arguably competitors. And then there were others that were like, no way. We had a roofing company where I became kind of buddies with the owner and we got an inbound inquiry from his biggest competitor.

And I said, hey, I just got this inquiry. You know, what do you think? And he was like, I would think you shouldn't respond to that. Like, you're my guy. So when we were small, we sort of navigated, I would say, case by case. We didn't put exclusivity in anything.

you know, agreements. As we got bigger, we got some bigger deals where they would, people would start requesting it, right? And so someone in the middle of nowhere to us, like middle of nowhere, Tennessee would say, hey, I want exclusivity 30 miles around my office. And back then when we were small, it was like, okay, like write it in there, right? Then we started getting a little bit more sophisticated where it was like, wait a second, like how are we going to work this when company A acquires company B, right?

and company B is now in an area where we had some exclusive, like what are we going to do? So then we started going through kind of the concept of look, like our policy became like, A, we're the best at what we do. So if you want to hire the best, you hire us and we'll put you with a different team, kind of set up the Chinese curtains. We're not going to share your data. And again, you're positioned differently in the marketplace, which is usually true.

Like we had one HVAC company around here and again, sort of mid to early on, we got a call from a close competitor. I tell the owner who I was kind of buddies with and he goes, those guys crawl, you know, dig around in crawl spaces. You know, we would never do some of the crap that they would do. So go ahead and, you know, take that one. But, you know, again, as the business grew, the company, the corporate philosophy essentially became

we're not doing exclusives. We're the best. You want to hire the best, hire us. And if you want someone who's exclusive to you, how good are they really going to be? And then you didn't ask this, but I'll mention it anyway, which is when we were acquired, we did have to go through every single agreement

and sort of pick out and say, "Hey, we do still have, fill in the blank, five clients with an exclusivity clause. And here's what it is. And here's what it prevents us from doing." How did that impact the conversations you were having with your buyer? Zero, because there were so few. We got lucky in a number of fronts. I really thought that we were going to have to be exclusive. We had a couple competitors, and that was their lead

And I thought as someone who obviously spent the beginning of our life selling our services, I was like, I'll never be able to combat that. Like, if I say that, like, I can close any of those deals. I mean, without question. But again, it kind of comes. But one of the things that Bob used to do in this, like, obviously brilliant from like a mentor standpoint is, you know, as he would just say, like, I question that assumption. Like, you think everyone out there thinks the way you do.

You think everyone out there is going to care. And I'm telling you, they don't. And I thought he was just saying that because, like, obviously, from an economic standpoint, it'd be much better if we didn't have, you know, sort of these constraints. But, you know, I remember when I hired a VP of sales and marketing, a guy who had a lot of experience ended up becoming the president of Blue Corona. And now he's the CEO of the company who acquired us.

But I remember bringing him in saying like, him asking that question saying, this is how we handle it. We just don't do it. And he was like, okay. I was like, geez. So don't, I guess what I learned, I still do it a lot, obviously, which is just, you know, making a lot of assumptions about how people are going to feel that they're going to think the same way I think. And they don't.

Yeah, it's a good lesson for sure. How did you handle the private equity kind of noise that was, I'm sure, disrupting a lot of your clients? Most of the businesses that you work with, these HVAC and plumbing companies, are being targeted, in many cases, rolled up by private equity groups. How did that impact your business? You know, it...

In a way, it reminded me early on, we made a strategic decision not to go after franchises or franchisees, or I guess either. We didn't go after either because typically the franchisee had all these restrictions. So like they couldn't track the way we wanted to track because corporate had them on some, you know, CRM or something that we couldn't tap into.

And we never wanted to go after the franchise ores because we thought they were too big of a pain to deal with and that they wanted cookie cutter, like they want a $500 SEO package that they can just drop in. And we're not the bespoke Porsche ad agency, but we're not like the yellow page, like drop in SEO thing.

Using competitive analysis, we started to figure out that franchises, franchisees, franchisors are super valuable to kind of add on to our business. So we did start going that way. And then going back to your question about the private equity, it was similar from the standpoint that early on when we'd have a client that was acquired by private equity, they would come in, it would be this sort of meeting where the blue card account manager would get told, I want you to walk

us through everything you're doing for us and the results here today. And it would be like some random date, like May 10th. And then there would be a new person on the call, usually some kid in a sport coat. And it's like, huh, what is this? And then it would come out later that, hey, this company has acquired us and they have a relationship with fill in the blank, bigger marketing company. And we're switching everything to them.

And so at first, you know, it was like, oh, this is bad. Like when private equity comes in and rolls up, it's bad for Blue Chrome, what we thought. But then later, you know, again, we had some internal meetings where it was like, OK, like

How do we play this? And one of the things we started doing is when those calls were happening, we would do like a full, like put lots of resources, like little, we didn't call it a tiger team, but you know, like a little team of people where we would present this, like what we're doing for that company.

in a way that we knew an MBA type would go like, this is amazing. It's ridiculous. We would show the data and really emphasize the apples and oranges element to the data. And we did that in a bunch of instances. And all of a sudden, the tide started changing where the private equity company would say, okay, we're going to let this company keep Blue Corona. And we're going to see how it goes versus our other

accounts and we'd like put our best people on those deals and then all of a sudden we started getting the whole platform you know the whole deal like all their brands and i don't i don't obviously don't keep in touch um closely and that the blue corona folks company's not been rebranded but wouldn't give me all the details but you know by the time we were you know in 2019 2018 the the roll-up of the home services world started really pre-code from my standpoint

We were suddenly seeing those as like a really strategic kind of growth channel for us and starting to, you know, we started really seeing like, wow, the data is really like our super competitive advantage. The results and the data and the reporting. Especially with private equity. Yeah, because you're talking to someone who the language of numbers and accounting and ROI, you know, they love that stuff.

How big did you get Blue Corona before you decided to sell? Well, what's funny about that is that when I met Bob very early on, I mean, we used to have lots of long conversations at like four or five in the morning about like life. And one of his comments was like, what's your number? And I was like, what do you mean? You know, what number if you had it in the bank, you just do nothing. You ride your bike, hang out, travel.

And, you know, I think for me at the time, it was probably $5 million. And he said his number, I think, was 10. And I remember any time, even before we started the coffee company, the idea was like he told me when he started Drinkmore that he had this model where he was going to start these stores and each store was going to do a million in revenue. And he'd get 10 of them. And then Deer Park, my Nestle would come along and buy them. And, you know, he'd have his money.

And so we started Blue Corona with the intention of selling. It was built to sell. I know all the books say, never start a company with the exit in mind. But I think I listened to your book on Audible. I looked it up. My birthday, 2014, was when I first listened to your book. And so we were already doing a lot of that. And that sort of just accelerated. But I say all that in that

We almost were sold to a client in, as best I can remember, it was probably 2013 or 14. And that fell apart in the 11th hour, really over my compensation. And that's, I'll get into that. Maybe that's a different story. And so the idea was I wanted to get the company into a certain size where I could have sort of my number.

And I was always thinking that way. And later when I hired that guy, his name is Mike Wilson. I hired a guy as a vice president of sales and marketing. And I remember Mike at various points saying like, you know, we're doing so well. Like, why would you want to step off, you know, even if you could get that? But I'm a worrier by nature. I mean, I think, you know, I obviously, you know, dream big and think I'm an optimistic person.

But I was always, you know, losing sleep over like Blue Corona could just fall apart tomorrow if Amazon gets into lead gen or, you know, Google decides to, you know, change the game and do direct connect. And so I just felt like, you know, all my eggs are in this one basket. And so when when people started calling me,

In 2017, I got an acceleration call mostly from search funds. I didn't know what a search fund was.

And Bob sort of encouraged me, why don't you just take the calls and just like you'll learn, you know, what people are looking for. And so I learned the whole search model and how that works and the multiples. Explain the search model for folks who maybe haven't gone through. Yeah, I mean, as I understand or as I would explain, it's a small, you know, small private equity fund. So a group of people put money in a bucket. MBA, you know, coming out of it, it originated at the top business schools.

But, you know, some MBA coming out of Harvard says, I want to run a company, but through acquisition. But, hey, I don't have any money, you know, because I'm a kid. But, you know, the person's obviously very smart. And so the group of investors backs the searcher. Usually the searchers pay like, you know, $1.25 a year. And for two years, they just do nothing but look for a business to buy when they find one that might work.

they present it back to their group of investors and investors might say, yeah, that sounds great. Here's the money. And in one sense, it's kind of like the Bob and Ben show, right? Then the searcher might have a couple percent, 5%, and they might be able to earn more equity based on growth targets and that kind of thing. So that's how the search model works. And what I joking would say to those folks is,

A, why in the world would you want to buy this business? It's a pain in the ass to run. You don't know anything about advertising, marketing, small businesses. You're crazy. And number two, I know you don't really have like a check for $20 million there. You got to take all this and go pitch it to some guys. A bunch of them are like doctors. They're probably a bunch of cheapskates. And the multiples that you guys pay for businesses...

In order for your model to work, you got to pay a multiple that no one in my shoes ever had to sell for, you know, five, four to six times, you know, EBITDA multiple. So it's like you're barking up the wrong tree. How did they react to that? I mean, no, I didn't say it quite that way. So, you know, I became friendly with a bunch of them. It's kind of funny. One of our clients got purchased.

And shortly after he got purchased, the guy emails me and he's like, and I told the guy, the guy was calling me to buy Blue Corona and I told him he should go buy a home service company. And he calls me, he's like, Ben, like, it's me, Dan, you know, like, remember me? It's like, I bought this company that turns out that they were using you. So yeah, I'm still friendly with a lot of these guys. And I've invested in a search fund incidentally these days. Interesting. So,

You're rebuffing these conversations with the search firms. You mentioned four to five times EBITDA. Did you have a sense of what you hoped the business would attract at this stage before selling? I mean, as you're building it, you're having 2017, you're having these conversations.

Are you thinking in terms of a multiple of EBITDA? If so, what are you starting to formulate? So what has been told to me, I made it a point, you know, when I finally got the business to where I had like an executive team running the company. And I would say I was only at that point was I functioning like truly as a CEO where I was sort of more outward focused in terms of like, you know, innovation and like strategic partners and all that kind of stuff.

I started reaching out to investment bankers and essentially saying, "Hey, look, got this business, great business. We might be looking to grow through acquisition.

And so what do firms like we might want to acquire, you know, what do they trade for? And this would have been in like 2019, 2018, sometime around then. And what I essentially heard was, you know, I'd get an investment banker and they'd sort of, I always kind of felt like kind of put in my place by those guys, you know, like I'm really sophisticated. You're kind of dumb. And businesses like yours, you know, trade, you know, for like six to seven times EBITDA max.

If you have software that's like a SaaS type add on, then maybe, you know, seven to nine. And I would say things like, you know, I was friendly with a lot of CEOs in our space. And I would say, you know, I know someone who sold their business and they told me they got, you know, 10, 11 times EBITDA. And I remember one investment banker in particular saying, like, that's bullshit. And deals get done at seven times.

No deals do not get done in your space. Like if you actually want to sell, this is how you need to be thinking. If you actually want to acquire a company, this is where your numbers need to be. The interesting thing, and you probably know this better than anyone, but maybe for the audience's benefit. And one thing I would caution folks about, again, I sort of learned it a little bit, which is

You know, people throw out these numbers like I got a 15 times multiple. Well, 15 times what? Right. So was it trailing 12 month EBITDA? Was it your projected EBITDA? You know, it's April and you're projecting out through the end of the year. Did you get a multiple of that in terms of the adjustments that you made? Were there any adjustments that they sort of accepted or did you adjust it where the number doubled?

You know, so I would I would end up I ended up meeting people over the years, either through YPO or other organizations where, you know, I would kind of learn that the 15x EBITDA and like the 10x EBITDA are a little bit closer than both parties would have you sort of believe. Or someone would sell and they'd say, oh, I got 15 times EBITDA. But, you know, they only got half in cash and then the rest was in a lengthy earn out and

If I follow up today and say, how much of that earn out did you actually get? I wouldn't even ask because I feel like I might know the story. In my mind, I wanted a number from the business. It's stupid, just a number in my head I had. I was focused more throughout the whole thing, both as we were thinking about selling, we were solicited. We weren't out pitching the business per se. At one level, I didn't even care.

I only cared to make sure that whatever multiple I was like, okay, if we do it on projected EBITDA and everything comes to fruition, our multiple would be this. And if we do it on averaged last three years EBITDA, because our EBITDA was going up so quickly, it would be this. And does all of that fit within a range of like, is it reasonable?

By any measure, I thought what we were being offered was rich. But I'm sure if I'm the acquirer, if I put on my private equity hat and I look at how I know the business is done, at least through when we were acquired, it would be very easy to look at that and sort of say, this thing is like just a little cash producing growth engine.

And so sure, we'd be willing to pay a nice

multiple for it. So if I'm reading between the lines, I know there's some confidentiality stuff that you can't get into it. I totally appreciate that. But at the time you're thinking, uh, you're hearing six to seven, seven is the kind of number maybe with some software nine, there's some kind of fishing stories out there where the fish grows in size. Every time that story is recalled that you're hearing 10, 15, um,

So in your mind, you're saying, OK, if if we take a blended average of our historical EBITDA, which is growing and and we get a maybe like a low double digit number on that. Well, that's that's pretty good. And what I what I what I sort of did was I took our I was very confident in our projections through 2021.

Okay. So you take 2020 and say that's kind of an outlier for a million reasons. You look at 2019, you look at 2021 and you say, all right, if I take 2021 projected EBITDA and then I adjust it, like I was not going to stay on other than some transition period. I mean, I told the person who solicited us, they said, what would your role need to be moving forward? I said,

I'm living in my dream house. We're putting in a pool. It's not for sale. If you want to buy it, that number has got to be such that I'm not sticking around. I'm out. That's the only way that I would sell. And so I put that out there on the front end. And so...

I took our EBITDA for 2021, added back my salary and a bunch of stuff that I thought was very reasonable that any investment banker would look at and go, okay, they wouldn't need that. We wouldn't use that. Of course, they wouldn't have done that if they were planning to sell. And then sort of gave the, all right, on the low end, I thought the banker, I thought they operate like realtors.

like when the realtor says you know you say what's my house worth the realtor wants to sell the thing they don't want to be sitting on it i don't remember whether it was outliers or one of those books where you know malcolm gladwell talks about how like realtors that sell their own house will sit on it forever to get yeah freaking out yeah yeah yeah yeah and so yeah so i remember here thinking like all right somewhere between this number and this number you know is like is my range and geez even if we got the low end of that

I would get my number and, you know, do I really care? Like the deal needs to get done. And then I also would tell potential acquirers, like I would say no structure, like that it's got to happen at that number. No structure, no, no earnouts, no, you know, wacky, wacky stuff.

Now, again, I said all that like thumping my chest, but the reality was there was obviously some – there were some elements of structure, but not mine. Yeah. And what was Bob's number? I don't know. Bob is one of those guys that like –

If I told him something like, you'd probably never share that with me again, then he would share it. But if I asked him, Bob, what's your number? Since starting Blue Crony, Bob had multiple. He still had the water company. It was growing. It had the building, which was being paid off rapidly by the businesses. And who knows other interests that he had beyond my purview. And Bob is 18 years my senior. I'm now 48.

So Bob was also, and he, you know, he has good taste, but Bob lived in the same house that, you know, he raised his kids in, you know, I mean, nice house, but not like, it's not like he made some money and then went out and bought a mega mansion. He had a modest house on a really nice piece of property with a pool and big backyard. But how did he feel about the numbers the M&A bankers were throwing out, like,

Six to seven, seven and nine.

After taxes, I don't know how people do it. I mean, I had to do it on post-tax dollars. So I would have walked from that with like a million bucks in cash. And I don't remember what it was, 10 or 15% of the go forward. And so Bob would have had more, but not too much more because he wasn't going to put any in the go forward. And he was like super irritated that I didn't do it.

And I remember thinking, like, why do you, like, you must make so much money through the water company and our distributions. Like, why, why would you, you know, need that? He was like, small businesses, like, almost never get sold. Like, you might be blowing our, like, one chance, your one chance to take, like, real dollars off the table. But it was funny, you know, when I was sitting down to negotiate with my, you know, would-be boss, new partner,

He gave me an employment contract and like the salary, I think was like 125 a year. And I said to him like, hey, or maybe it's 150. And I said, you know, hey, I can't live on that. He says, well, that's 25 more than you make today. You make 125. I was like, yeah, but we distribute almost 100% of the profit of the company and I own 47 and a half percent. So I'm not making 125. I'm making like, so what's your policy on distribution?

And he was going to do like a leverage. He was going to borrow money, get SBA loan and some other stuff. He was going to do kind of a leverage deal where he was like, wow, you know, we need the we need the cash flow. He said for growth, but I think he was probably meant to pay down the debt. I'm going to stack on this thing. So that that so Bob, if I Bob, also a group of us bought shares from Bob in twenty nineteen.

And I remember the guy that I hired said, "Hey, would you, I know you're not gonna sell shares, but would Bob sell shares?" No, no, no, no, Bob will never sell shares. I thought it was, he doesn't want a minority interest

you know, in the company he wants, you know, have say. Um, and so the, that guy was like, Hey, well, let's take him out to dinner. I'm going to ask him. I was like, okay, but yeah, I'm telling you what he's going to say. And we take him out to dinner and he floats that idea past Bob and Bob's like, yeah, I'd consider it. I was like, a lot of it done. You don't ask, you don't get. So a group of us bought shares from Bob in 2019. Um, and, uh,

How did you value the business for that? Another painful, painful decision. Bob, I mean, Bob was selling the shirt. The company wasn't selling the shirt. Bob was selling the shirt. So Bob came up with a one times revenue multiple and said, hey, that's like, that's the valuation. It was like... How did that equate to a multiple you've done? I don't know, but it would have been high. I mean, it would have been rich. And of course, it was frustrating to me. It was like, you know, it's like, I'm...

I don't know. It's this weird conundrum of like, that valuation is like propped up by me. And, you know, and yeah, you put it all this way. Yeah. But, but, you know, in retrospect, if you were to say, I was thinking like, you know, I've listened to other episodes, you know, what would you do then if you knew what you know now? Like I would have bought all of his shares myself, leveraged myself to the hilt to do it. But yeah. And in retrospect, buying shares, you know, from him was like,

amazing decision for those of us that did it. And just a great example of how, you know, when you look at a company's, you know, a company that might say a public trading company that's trading in some obscene multiple and everyone says, well, yeah, but have to grow here to make that happen. Like in some instances, you know, that, that, and then something happens and you wish you could have gotten it for the previous, you know, price.

What was important to you, Ben, about hitting your number? Like you've mentioned a couple of times this idea of like, like I had a number in mind. I wasn't necessarily that rational, but like, was it because you wanted to go buy something or what did that number represent to you? I, you know, I'm unlike, I have not met,

really anyone else like this. And I would love to meet someone like this. But when I listened to, I would, again, I was in Vistage, which is a peer-to-peer CEO group. I was in YPO. And I would hear these people that sell their business and they would get horribly depressed. Or they would say, I could never sell my business. I can never retire. I'm too wired for doing stuff. And I was like, you're out of your mind. All I want to do is not have to work.

Like, that's all I want is 100% total independence over my time and have the finances to do that. Now, you know, I would do this. I would get on a call and advise CEOs for free. I mean, it is fun, but I don't need to do it. I don't want to need to do it. So I wanted to get a number that I could live a certain lifestyle and never have to work again.

The financial guys that I hired to manage half my stuff, the what is no shitty jobs. Ben doesn't ever want to have to work again, take a shitty job. The motivation was really, I want complete independence.

hobbies, still a cyclist that play bad golf, bad guitar, hiking. I've got a 17-year-old son and a 14-year-old daughter that, you know, original vision was like, told my wife, I'm never going to be home. Like, what's your earliest memory? For me, it was like when I was 11 or 10. So I'm like, I really have the first 10 years of the kids' lives. They're not even going to remember that I wasn't here. And then I'll sell and I will be here all the time. I'll be like super dad.

So anyway, so my concept was I want to sell and not have to do anything. And to figure out that number, did you use the old 4% rule or a 3% rule? Or was there some math that you did? Yes and no. I mean, I started tracking my monthly spend just randomly, you know, maybe a couple of years before we started.

uh, we're really in talks with anyone about anything. Um, and, and then I, you know, sort of play, you know, I heard about the 4% rule, but the problem of course was, you know, like 2021 when we sold and I got a big lump sum of money, the interest rates were like zero. I mean, you put all that money in like a CD at what 0.8% or some crazy thing. So that the hardest part about the transition from being in the company to selling is the

I heard one of your other people say like you go from like playing to win, playing not to lose. I joked around that, like, I feel like I'm sitting on a giant sand castle and it doesn't really matter how big it is because every wave that comes like take some of it away. And when I had, you know, when you have a company, you're constantly pushing more sand up onto it. And, and so, you know, it doesn't matter that it's big because you keep thinking like a big wave could come and just take half my stuff.

So that part's very hard to sort of wrap your head around. I've heard it's really hard to live off your capital. I've actually heard it for people who are builders like you, it can be very psychologically difficult for no rational reason. What's also weird is I did the same thing with the post stuff. Like, what am I going to do post? I tried to meet with lots of CEOs who had sold.

and who manages your money? How do you think about it? How do you live off of financial assets, like financial capital versus human capital? And I tried to do a little bit of the pre-work. I mean, it was compressed because I was doing a lot of other stuff, but I couldn't believe how many wealthy people I met with that are like, "Oh, I got a guy in Merrill." And it's like, "What's the strategy? I don't know." I don't even know if he's doing that well. I got to call him. And it's like, seriously?

And I can't tell you how many people that I talked to that I would say, like, if I go back and change something, I spent no time learning about like personal finance, you know, like investing, just none of that stuff. I didn't have a background in it. I think the thought was like, well, I won't sell until I have so much that it won't matter. And to some degree, that's sort of true. But like you're saying, psychologically, yeah.

I've now tried to sort of set it up more like a family office, like treat it like it's a business. Like what's our goal? What's the strategy? How do we monitor progress? What are the key metrics look like? What do I do when something's going wrong? Like what's my process for sorting through it? I'm sure the finance guys, I've already had them a couple of times say like, we don't think about it that way. I'm like, well, if you want to do my stuff, you have to.

What was Bob's reaction when the deal closed? Somewhere, you know, extreme excitement. He is living his best life. I mean, he's got a house now in Colorado and his place, you know, in Maryland. And he was, I think he played high school football. I don't think he played college football, but he's had like both knees replaced and his hips replaced. But he's like doing great.

And but no, I think he's he's living his best life. And like I said, I knew he was excited to take some chips off the table way back during the first potential transaction and then selling to some of us employees. And and and so, yeah, I have to imagine that he was super excited. And, you know, those deals, it's obviously everyone listening to this. It's so hard when you're

You're kind of like, it's like, like sort of engaged, but not married, you know, and like at any day, your fiance could just say, you know, I've changed my mind. I'm going a different direction. You're not what I thought you were. I know your time is short. Are you up for a quick lightning round? Go for it. All right, real quick. What's the slimiest trick an acquirer tried to play on you in the process of selling your business?

You know, I've only worked with or only had interactions with a couple. And the I mean, the folks that we did the deal with were super above. They did every single thing they said they were going to do and better. And I stayed on a little while after after the sale.

And this a hundred percent, like we had a big software that we were replatforming. I thought for sure, as soon as they acquire us, they're going to scrap the whole thing because why it's a big expense. They put more resources into it. The only thing I can think of that it's not a slimy trick, but we did have a group once that wanted us to do like a proof of concept, like, like sell to our clients proved that it was a strategic kind of cross sell situation. And yeah,

you know again i mean i don't know that it was nefarious it but it felt a little like oh then we then we like get hooked in kind of like bob's thing of like letting it build big enough that now you almost have to take whatever i offer you yeah yeah emotional high and low of selling i mean i remember when the money hit my bank account i went on this mountain bike loop that i would do right from my house and i remember getting halfway through the loop just like pausing

like pulling up my Schwab account or whatever it got wired to and just looking at it, like screaming in the woods. Someone, if there are any houses nearby, probably like some guy just, you know, got attacked by a coyote. Like a mountain. Yeah. So that was like the emotional high. The low, I will say it's weird. I've always been told that you want to be rich and anonymous. That's actually like the best. But it is weird when you're a CEO and your phone rings nonstop.

you know, key employees, vendors, friends, you know, and everyone wants to bend your ear on stuff, get free restaurant, you know, new restaurants opening, bring your team here. When they, when you're out, it's like all of a sudden it's just gone. No insurance sales guys calling anymore, but also no one like rolling out the red carpet, you know, unless you, you know, go out and make yourself visible.

Can you point our listeners to any resources that you found helpful as you prepare to sell? I know you talked about talking to other CEOs, so that was super helpful. It sounds like. Yeah, I would have done more. I would have done more of that. Folks running companies that have gotten to a certain size, you start to sort of feel like, you know, you have a team of people running the company and there's actually like not much for you to do, which is amazing. But sometimes that CEO role, you sort of think like, what should I be doing? I'm like,

you know, you have to kind of like create the job, whatever will add the most value to the company. And like, again, I did some of this, but I should have done 10 times as much as I did, which is calling, you know, other business owners, meeting investment bankers, talking to as many people as I can. I think what I see happening, I saw this happening with our clients, the home service companies, what would be, you know, they would be like in an industry group

and a buddy of theirs would get acquired and they would sort of just then all of a sudden be linked in with that group, with that acquirer. And so I think that's a tricky one. There's one other thing that's happening in all spaces, which is like Service Titan and these kind of ERP CRM systems. I mean, one, if you're on that platform, it's great because your data is automatically structured

in a way that an acquirer can kind of make sense of it quickly. But those companies have an awful lot of your data and they're impossible to get off of once you're on. So there's just ways that you might want to think about some of that stuff. If you're not on the platform, you're just kind of zooming out and sort of thinking big picture about what you might want to do.

Yeah. Well said. Last question. Trophy. What did you buy yourself to commemorate? You know, what's sad is I bought, I eventually bought a house, but I bought that more for my wife than for me. I got a house that joins a country club overlooking the golf course. I'm looking at it right now. It's amazing. But I had bought myself a trophy, you know, the first time we almost sold, I always wanted a 9-11. It was like, you know, I had it like stuck in my office or something.

And when the deal didn't go through that first time in 2013, 14, whatever it was, I went on 2015 when I finally had some cash and bought a nice car. And it was so funny. I didn't even feel like we could drive it because I was afraid one of our clients would see it and say, like, this guy's like overcharging us. And I realized that the biggest irony that people probably it's like this weird thing, which is once you can buy yourself anything you want.

you you i i got to that point unfortunately after i realized that none of that stuff is creates any kind of like real happiness it's it's like the ultimate like you know i can buy anything and i don't i know that buying any of that stuff does nothing for me so anyway so what did you buy in 2015 uh i bought i bought a 911 you know rare 2s convertible you know like a

Typical jackass, you know, I didn't have much gray hair. And so, you know, I like to think that I didn't look like wasn't too crazy. But what was funny is I got it. My kids were little and I would say to my kids like, hey, let's go for a ride. And everyone, my wife included, hated it.

It was loud. You know, my daughter's hair would fly over. Now that my daughter's like 14, she's like, why don't you buy another one? You know, my son's like, if you ever buy a car like that and pick me up at high school, I will kill you. I'll never, I'll pretend I don't know you. Right.

So I think I've raised one of them at least. Yeah, they sound like they're well adjusted. I know I've overstayed my welcome. So thank you for doing this. Where can people reach out if they want to say hi on social? I think LinkedIn might be the best. Yeah, I'm on LinkedIn. They can always email me either Ben at BenLanders.com.

or I've set up a new entity yet to be determined what it does, but Ben at aheadofnext.com or just go to LinkedIn. And anyone who is facing a situation pre, post sale, I'm generally an open book, happy to try to help and add value any way I can. Well, you've done that today in spades, Ben. I really appreciate you sharing the story with such candor and humility. It was really good to get to know you and congratulations on everything. Thanks, John. Thanks for the time.

And there you have it for today's episode between John and Ben. If you enjoyed today's podcast, be sure to hit that subscribe button wherever you're listening to today's show. And if you want to help support Built to Sell Radio, as always, I'd encourage you to leave a rating and review. If you want to watch this full video interview, head over to our YouTube channel, which is at Built to Sell. And for show notes, including links to everything referenced in today's episode with Ben, including definitions for some of the more technical terms that may have been used

you can visit Ben's episode page, which you're going to be able to find over at builttosell.com. Special thanks to Dennis Labataglia for handling today's audio engineering. And thank you to our community of certified value builders who help us bring our message to you. Our advisors are experts in helping you build the value of your company. To get in touch with an advisor or learn how to become one yourself, head over to valuebuilder.com. I'm Colin Morgan, and I look forward to talking to you again next week.