Mar 3, 2020
What is one of the surest paths to substantial wealth? Grow and sell a business. Today’s episode is all about Joe’s book project, “The Exitpreneurs Playbook.” Joe has over 8000 stories to tell about what it’s like to buy, what it is like to sell, and ways to outsmart the typical entrepreneur process.
Mark is interviewing Joe about this upcoming project, his motivations behind creating it,
and how getting to the writing process carried its share of challenges. Joe believes that an exitpreneur should have the tools in hand to start, run, and grow their business for better decision making later on. He is not telling anyone to sell, he is offering them the strategies they need in order to be ready if they do.
Episode Highlights:
- Joe’s idea and the process of putting it into book format.
- Why he wanted to write the book.
- Reasons exit planning can be challenging for the business owner.
- The differences between an entrepreneur who is considering a sale versus one who has actually prepared an exit.
- How businesses often outgrow the founder and smart moves to make before that happens.
- The importance of reverse engineering to the goal for a better exit strategy.
- The difference between the entrepreneur and an exitpreneur.
- How Joe came up with the book title.
Transcription:
Mark: So Joe I was at an event recently in Salt Lake City and it was in just general kind of a conference meeting room for about 50 people or so and they had a lot of books in this place. And I was intrigued to just kind of look around and see what was there and you’ll never guess what book was up on the shelf. Actually, do you want to guess?
Joe: Yeah I want to guess. I’m looking around my office, Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss?
Mark: You know what? It actually was in there.
Joe: It was in there.
Mark: Not the one I’m referring to.
Joe: The ONE Thing by John Keller? Now, wait let’s call out one of our friends; Superfans by Pat Flynn?
Mark: You know I don’t know. There were a lot of entrepreneurial focused books so maybe that one was there; I don’t know.
Joe: Okay. Buy Then Build by Walker Deibel?
Mark: Buy Then Build by Walker Deibel; yeah absolutely, that was on the shelf. In fact, they had multiple copies of it. They were giving that book away. And today; what is it? It’s February 11th so we’re a little bit past a year since Walker launched that book and it spent a year as number one on Amazon Bestseller in this category which is pretty fantastic. I mean obviously, we’re super happy for Walker. He won an award for being the thought leader of the year through a major alliance of mergers and acquisition advisors.
Joe: Huge.
Mark: That is huge. He’s had professors from Ivy League colleges come up and talk to him about the book. All of this leads me to something beyond just the accolades and that is the information that’s out there in this space about what it’s like to sell, what it’s like to buy. Walker is talking on specifically which is the buy-side and how to use this as an investment vehicle, how to outsmart the Startup Game as he says and reduce some of that risk. But there’s also a whole on the sell-side as well where people don’t really know that their business is sellable or they don’t think about it. But just yesterday I was reading something on the fastest way to build wealth; what is the fastest way to build wealth? And the conclusion that they had is the fastest way to build wealth is through building a business and selling it. This is one of the quickest ways to actually building wealth. And I know you’ve had guests on the podcast here who have talked about this process or you call it your Incredible Exits series. I’m really, really excited that you’re writing a book on this and you’re not calling it Incredible Exits despite everybody else’s opinions that you should but it’s these stories behind the scenes.
Joe: Yeah I’m excited to be writing it finally. I sat down with some friends a year ago probably around a fire pit; maybe a year and a half ago because it was summertime. We’re recording this in February of 2020 and I said look I’m making an announcement, I’m writing a book, I’m telling you guys to call me out on it and then I didn’t do anything but I tried. I tried to write it. I tried to outline chapters. I tried to follow up…
Mark: Hold on one second. You made this promise right on a fire pit with friends?
Joe: Yes.
Mark: How much did you consume before you made this promise?
Joe: I’m a 2-drink maximum kind of guy, that’s just the way I am.
Mark: Okay.
Joe: It’s like giving myself an injection of the flu when I have more so it wasn’t much. But I didn’t get it done. It’s a lot of work. So I followed the original book in a box method and didn’t get it done at the scheduled time. I was at Brand Accelerator Live with our friend Scott Voelker last September and one of big Scott’s announcements was that he actually wrote a book. And it is also here on my desk somewhere; where is it Scott? It’s the Take Action Effect. I just turned my head away from the microphone, sorry folks. And I met his scribe; a young lady by the name of Brennan and I connected with her during the event and talked with her and said okay this is it I’m done. I’m hiring a scribe and I’m going to write the book. And I’ve talked to a number of people about it and let me just cover the process and then answer the question as to why the heck I’m doing this because it’s a massive undertaking. The process is instead of actually writing a book myself with written words and a keyboard I get interviewed for I think it was 8 2-hour sessions; so 16 hours in interviews. First, we outlined the chapters and go through the whole process and instead of talking about; I mean writing an article or a chapter on seller’s discretionary earnings and add-backs and the three levels of add-backs and all the different things that we talk about on a regular basis Brennan interviewed me. She transcribes the entire interview through UberConference and Rev.com for those that really want great transcription services. And now we’re in the sort of lull between all of those interviews and me getting my first draft. They’re going to give it to me in thirds. So the first one I will get will probably be I want to say mid to late March and then they’ll drip it out in thirds every week for 3 weeks. They want to overwhelm me in terms of reviewing and editing. I still have a lot of technical stuff to add to it but it’s really kicked the process into high gear. It’s not cheap, let me tell you that. It’s an expensive undertaking but I think given what we do for a living and how many people we’re trying to help I think it’s well worth it. Why am I writing a book? Walker’s been an inspiration, very successful with Buy Then Build and the amount of people that he’s been able to reach and help on the buy-side. We work with sell-side brokers or sell-side clients for the most part and I’ve done the math Mark, does it sound inconceivable that I’ve talked to 8,000 entrepreneurs over the last 8 years?
Mark: Not at all.
Joe: Yeah and that’s probably a conservative number. I’m not saying I’ve had an in-depth evaluation with 8,000 of them but I have without a doubt talked to 8,000 and that does not count standing in front of a room with 3, 4, 500 people. And the challenge has been we’ve got to reach them one by one and I know that Walker’s book has been as you said best seller. I think it’s probably sold over 10,000 copies at this point.
Mark: It’s over 15 at least.
Joe: 15,000 copies?
Mark: Yeah, I actually talked to Walker about it a while ago.
Joe: I think he told me something like 99% of books sells less than a hundred copies that are published. Now Walker, correct me if I’m wrong but it’s pretty impressive. So to get what we share on those valuation calls into somebodies hands before, during, and after they have a valuation call and when they’re in an audience that will give them every possible detail that we’ve developed over the last 8 plus years of doing what we do and sharing that in writing so that they can essentially change their mindset. And that’s the goal of the book, it’s to change their mindset from reaching out to us when they’re sick and tired of running their business or they’ve had a bump where things get tougher and they say Gosh how can I sell this business? A buddy of mine told me I can get X multiple. I’m going to call Mark and say Mark how much can I sell my business for? I want to change people’s mindsets. Instead of saying how much can I sell my business or more often they say how much is my business worth, I want them to say I want to build wealth like you said at the beginning and I want to sell my business for X dollars. I want to do that in 4 years. In order to do that, they need to understand where they are today. And the book is going to help them reverse engineer the path from where they are today to that exit so that they can do a partial valuation, get comfortable with brokers, and drive that path. I had a conversation with Mike Jackness recently and Mike talked about the fact that about what we do sometimes entrepreneurs just don’t want to hear it because the idea of exit planning is so beyond what they’re trying to do when they’re just trying to keep the wheels on the bus, right? They’re running out of inventory, they’ve got competitors coming at them from every angle, they’re trying to do cash flow planning and it’s just so hard that they can’t see out the front window. The objective of the book is to sort of clear that window, have a clear path to an exit that they understand and it’s a much better ride. I’ve been through it myself personally. You did it for me back in 2010. I could see nothing, understood nothing, we had a call, we had several calls and the light bulbs went off and I knew exactly the path to take and I’ll tell you what operating my business became a lot more fun and exciting even though I was sick and tired of it after 5 years.
Mark: You know the more I experience the business and grow as an entrepreneur the more I’m learning. With anything dealing with a goal really the best way to achieve these things is what you’ve said, reverse engineer it. Rather than just kind of impulsively decide that I’m going to do something figure out where you want to be and then reverse engineer. But in order to reverse engineer it, you need to understand the mechanisms that are going on to create that value. You’re trying with this book to create a shift in the mindset of entrepreneurs, right? By the way, folks if you haven’t figured this out we don’t have a guest; Joe is the guest. I’m going to interview Joe about the book and maybe we’ll talk a little bit about what it is like to do what Joe and I’ve been doing and everyone else at Quiet Light.
Joe: Right, we’re co-guests. We’re co-hosts and co-guests today because I want to grill you too.
Mark: Very good. Alright, I want to start out by saying okay let’s talk about your experience. You’ve been doing this for 8 years. You’ve done literally tens of millions of dollars of transactions on your own within Quiet Light Brokerage.
Joe: I’m fastly closing in on 100 million.
Mark: That’s right you are. You are; absolutely.
Joe: Inaudible[0:11:17.8] 12 to 18 months; pretty shocking. That’s amazing.
Mark: Absolutely amazing. Talk to me about the mindset that you often see or most naturally see in an entrepreneur that comes to us to sell versus those rare cases of somebody who has planned to sell and what is the difference in the actual process value and stress levels I would say for everyone involved.
Joe: Yeah. Look all the success stories that you guys hear about on the Incredible Exits for the most part those are people that had the mindset that they wanted to determine and plan out their exit. They got an education, they figured out what their exit goal was and they called Mark, myself, Jason, Amanda, Chuck, anyone of us and reverse engineer the path to that. They didn’t call and say what’s your fee, okay I want to list. It was this how does this whole thing work and then we worked with them over a 6, 12, or 18 month period sometimes even more. Those are the success stories that you’re hearing about. The people you’re not hearing about never sell their business because they call. They might have a call like this or I was just at eCommerceFuel last week as an event and kudos to Andrew Youderian and all the guests and all the people that are there; brilliant, so many smart folks. But even with that high level of entrepreneurial success and drive I still get e-mails like I’ve gotten this week which is a great chat last week, great presentation. I did a presentation with Mike about the sales of ColorIt. You’ve really inspired me to sort of try this path to an exit. And then I said okay well this is what I need. Yeah, I don’t know I’m so busy with adding SKUs and I’m not really there yet. I’m not ready to sell yet. I’m not ready to think about selling yet. Whereas the yet it should be now regardless of where you are in the business. These people are already doing; the 2 that I’m thinking about where I got the e-mails like the one I don’t know his growth. Well, I could do the math on his growth but the discretionary stands out that he’s close to 600,000 in discretionary earnings and it is 5 to 6 times more than he ever made in his prior day job. And so he’s trying to work towards an exit and retirement. The other was doing nearly 10 million in revenue and had a 25% decline. He’s young, he’s under 30 years old. And neither of these guys are really ready to exit. Of course, they’re not ready to exit but I want them to set a financial goal. I don’t care if it’s 3 to 5 years from now. Set that goal. I need to exit for X in order to exit. And then figure out where they are, get the education, and work towards that. In 5 years if they’re not ready to sell then move the goal post, move it 6 years down the road or 7 years down the road. That is as you said at the beginning the surest way to real financial wealth. But we’re not talking about them yet because they’re pausing, they’re hesitating, they’re not going to do it. Those are the stories that I talk about a little bit in the book. There’s somebody that was my first million-dollar listing back in the day at Quiet Light. I remember it well. I’m not going to name names. We’ll call him Big Mike. That’s not his name but we’ll call him Big Mike. He had no financials; none whatsoever. And I remember sitting over Christmas break taking all of his bank statements and I actually created the profit and loss statement myself. That is a no-no. We do not do that anymore. No. But I did it. I got it all detailed and accurate and listed the business for 1.1 million. I got an offer for 800 from the gentleman that you sold his business once upon a time. It was actually a good offer because the revenue trends were in decline. And Big Mike said to me well why would I accept it all I have to do is XYZ over the next 12 months and I’ll make a quarter of a million dollars and then we can sell the business for 1.2, 1.3 million. And I had a great deal of experience in paid advertising at the time as you know because I just sold my business. This was probably 2012 or early ’13. And so we walked through all the possibilities, what to do and how to do it and off he went. The problem was that Big Mike’s heart was not in it anymore. He had run up all of his personal debt and personal expenses; his overhead was very high. He lived the life of a very, very successful entrepreneur and his business was no longer trending that way so money was getting tight. He didn’t have the ability to pull money from the business and put it into the ad spend that he needed to to reverse it. And so every year for the following 3 years I got any mail from Big Mike that said something along the lines of hey my revenue and profit is at XYZ, can we sell the business for this? And each year it went from that offer from Tony of 800 to the value really was in about 600 the next year. And then the next year he sent me an e-mail it was really based upon what he had given me, about 500. The last time he sent me an e-mail it was about 400. Every single time I replied with based upon what you’ve given me which is just an email with numbers and I’d say your business value was probably X. Please run a profit and loss statement out of Quickbooks or Xero and export it to Excel with a monthly view. Silence, nothing for 12 more months because he didn’t take the necessary steps to do what you have to do in protecting your most valuable asset, in his case his business. And so he’s probably got a job, unfortunately. And that’s the path unfortunately too many people go down or they learn from the mistakes and they hang up their hat on this particular business. They can’t sell it and they move on to another one and hopefully learn from that mistake but it’s a painful one. I just want to see people learn from that and therefore the painful process of writing a book.
Mark: You know it’s great to focus on the success stories. We like success stories. I like talking about success stories that make me happy. But for all these success stories that you have shared so far through the podcast that you’ll be sharing through this book we also have the stories like that. And I could probably rattle off a number as well. Maybe I’ll start a new podcast or write a book called Unincredible Exits or Nasty Exits or something like that. It will be real depressing and no one will ever want to read it. But you’re absolutely right in; that example is really good. That example shows what we see so often from entrepreneurs where they’re running; they’re used to the hustle, they’re used to the grind, they’re used to being able to pull themselves up by their bootstraps to be able to correct something but sometimes when a business gets mature especially after you’ve run it for a while doing that can be really, really difficult. I also think it’s; I want to re-emphasize something you said which is the picking number, reverse engineering, and getting to that number doesn’t mean that you have to sell at that point. We’ve been pretty public and I will continue to be public by saying that the best scenario for you is to create a business that you can own for your life, right? Because it’s difficult to start a business; the cash flow that they build is great, the value that is in them as assets is also fantastic. So I’m a big believer in building and holding or buying and holding and growing but that doesn’t mean that exiting shouldn’t be an option. And so when you hit that number, if you’re not ready to sell you can always move the goalposts as you suggested or create a new goal. But something that I know you’ve told me in an email where we were discussing this book is you said one of the goals is to not allow the business to outgrow its founder. And boy this is an issue that comes up time and time again that we see and that is business owners were really good at starting, really good at founding something and even growing it to a certain extent getting to a point where making that next shift is difficult. I always describe that the growth path of a business is a series of climbs and plateaus. You climb to a point and it starts to plateau and then you have to change the business a little bit. Maybe you have to add new people; maybe you have to add a different structure to the business. And once you do then hopefully you start climbing again and then you hit another plateau and then it’s another shift or another restructuring of the company or maybe a new initiative. What point and is there any examples that you’ve seen where somebody has hit that point where business is just about to outgrow them and they were smart enough to be able to not let it do that?
Joe: Yeah the climbing the plateaus, by the way, let’s not forget the valleys, right? Yes, my name is Joe Valley but…
Mark: Don’t forget the valley.
Joe: There are two valleys here, right? It’s a climb, it’s a plateau, and then boom there’s a really nasty valley right there and you’re in it. You got to climb out of it. That’s why I think it’s important to actually do something that you like; something that you enjoy a little bit. It could be something that you’re passionate about because when those tough times come and as an entrepreneur they will unless I’m unique and nobody else has tough times. I don’t think I’m unique. You’re going to have to fight and climb back out of that valley and on the other side there’s a mountain, a peak; not a plateau hopefully. And those are great success stories to tell and very sellable businesses. But the idea of a business outgrowing the founder is not original, right? I mean this is something I’ve seen throughout my own entrepreneurial life where I used to do radio advertising. I owned a radio direct response media buying agency back when there were 800 numbers associated with 60-second spot ads. I could have held that business and grown it but it would have required more and more overhead in terms of people. I don’t like managing a lot of people. I tell you what your job is and how to do it and I expect that you’re going to work hard and do the best you can. If you don’t I’m kind of blunt unfortunately and fortunately in some ways. So if you’re in a situation and I see this a lot where buyers sometimes naively say well if it’s so great why are they selling it? And it is because the business more often than not has outgrown them. They wanted to live the 4-hour workweek. It turned into 30 and that’s okay. And they’ve got 5 VA’s and that’s okay. But in order to take it beyond just a SaaS business that’s doing 2 million in revenue, they need to hire 3 more developers. They don’t want to go through the headache and hassle of that. Or to take it off of Amazon they need to learn SEO offline or email marketing or whatever it might be and that’s not their skill set. Or it’s hiring people and that’s not their skill set. And they learned that one of the greatest ways to earn wealth is to sell a business. Now people that buy Walker’s book have learned that they can; a different breed, a different mentality of an entrepreneur comes in. They’re not the startup entrepreneurs. They come in and they take over where that startup entrepreneur left off. The business has outgrown them and they hand it off to somebody like Matt Howeth who can. He comes from the corporate world. He’s always had lots of travel, lots of staff, and lots of hours. He gets it. He can take it and bring that business in and have a team of employees, a team of VA’s and manage it and take it up to the next level because that’s his passion. That’s what he does. He gets it. The startup is not his passion. It’s not his skill set. So one of the things that I think is critically important and sometimes this only comes with age and mistakes and failures and successes and that is to figure out who the hell you are. What kind of entrepreneur are you?
Mark: That brings in mind 2 clients I’ve worked with in the past 14 years now. And one of them; I’ve quoted this story before but he came to me with a business, I’ve never talked to him about sharing his story so I won’t say what he was selling. But he was selling a physical product. He had initially acquired this business for 5 figures, like a mid-5 figure level and immediately grew the business significantly to the point where it was doing 7 figures in top-line revenue, mid-6 figures in discretionary earnings and so when he gave it to me to sell one of my very first questions was why are you selling? You’ve been growing year over year, you’re only adding value to the business, this looks like a fantastic business, you’ve got great rankings, great positioning great pricing; all these things working in your favor and he said well right now I store all of the inventory in an external garage on my property. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, my son and I go out and we fill orders. It’s really nice. It’s like I don’t have any more room for inventory and if I wanted to get another space I’m going to have to hire somebody and then I’m going to have to hire more people to handle the marketing. I just don’t want to do that. I would rather cash out and move on. Meanwhile, another entrepreneur that I’ve dealt with, he was a CPA by trade and loved being on the buy-side and what he really, really enjoyed was taking a business that was somewhat complex, somewhat messy, somewhat inefficient in the way it was run and simplifying it. And I love; I’ve sold a couple of businesses for him, I love taking a look at where his businesses started. Their P&Ls were these super long crazy messes and by the time that he was ready to sell they were consolidated down into less than 30 lines because he simplified these businesses, really focused on this principle of 80:20 and said I’m going to just focus on what really makes sense and I’m going to get rid of all the rest of it. For him the act of cleaning it up was great but he would; unlike with Walker’s book which is a lot of buy, build, and grow, his was I’m going to buy make more efficient and then I’m going to sell. And he did this several times and it was really fun to watch because he knew who he was. That first seller that I had, he knew who he was. He knew he didn’t want to have a staff he had done that and didn’t want to do it again. He loved running the business with his son. The second entrepreneur, he was a buyer, he knew what he liked, he also didn’t want to have a large staff. There are other people out there that do want to build that team. There are people out there that say I want to have 100 million dollar exit so I’m going to buy a bunch of these businesses and build something or I’m going to acquire 15. They’re all different types of entrepreneurs and everyone has different skill sets. Knowing who you are I think that right there is a great bit of advice but going back to what you were saying earlier Joe if you’re so busy and in the weeds constantly and just running and hustling and hustling and hustling and never taking a moment to step back and to think about either the exit or about maybe this topic here of what type of entrepreneur are you, where do you want to see yourself in the next 5 years, what type of business operation do you want to have it’s really hard to know where you’re going and then your business drives you instead of driving your business and your career drives you instead of you driving your career.
Joe: Yeah. Walker’s book takes the mystery out of buying a business and the how-to and building it beyond that hence the title Buy Then Build or what he coined as acquisition entrepreneurship. My book The Exitpreneurs Playbook is going to take the mystery out of selling your business and setting those goals on what your exit is and reverse engineering a path to that. Now that I’ve said the title can we make fun of me in terms of predicting I don’t know the future doom and gloom of this title because I did the opposite of what everybody told me to do?
Mark: You know what? I like it. I remember doing this when I picked the Quiet Light Brokerage logo. I did 99 designs and I had everyone vote on different types and I hated what everybody chose. So I’m like well it’s my business so I’m going to do my own thing.
Joe: And you know it’s a check, check, send something; I don’t know, it must’ve been fall of last year and email out something about the Quiet Light logo and how it has stood the test of time so kudos to you. Yeah so I sent an e-mail out to a couple of dozen past clients that I sold their businesses and they’re going to be part of the book. So part of the book is education and part inspiration; inspiration with them sharing some golden nuggets, wisdom, experience things that they wish they did differently. So I sent it out to them and then another say dozen of influencers that are in the space. People that we know well like Mike Jackness, Greg Mercer, Andrew Youderian, Ezra Firestone, things of that nature; people of that nature. And I think out of roughly 25 people Jason Yellowitz is the only one who said he liked Exitpreneur. Everyone else said Incredible Exits, Joe, it just rings, it rings. And there’s been something about the term Exitpreneur that has stuck with me during the interview process and the more I said it out loud the more Brennan and I, and again she’s my scribe, the more it just felt natural. Because that’s what people are becoming when they sell their business, they’re exitpreneurs. The difference between an entrepreneur and an exitpreneur is an entrepreneur is somebody that runs their own business but an exitpreneur is somebody that runs their own business and they have the knowledge and a plan. And I want to give them that knowledge in order to devise a plan and become one of those people that generate most of their wealth from an exit. So fingers crossed on that. Can I do a shameless plug right now for the Quiet Light Podcast where I think we’re about 25 minutes in and just a little bit of a shameless plug? I have to tell you…
Mark: I felt like this whole thing was a shameless plug for your upcoming book.
Joe: I know but I don’t even; I haven’t even put up a website yet. There’s no Facebook group. Really what it is, is a plug for education because part; in truth, I’ve said the same thing 8,000 times over and over. Maybe I’m just tired of saying it so I’m…
Mark: With that Joe when I was on this trip recently I was in the airport and thinking about Mission, Vision, Values for Quiet Light Brokerage and I don’t have the vision statement out yet but this component of education, if it’s not part of our main vision it’s definitely one of our core values and really something that I’ve built up. I was speaking to somebody just this morning before we recorded this about one of the goals or one of the mission; I’m sorry one of the core values of Quiet Light is to give entrepreneurs the right education and the right set of tools to be able to make good informed decisions. Because when I sold my business I didn’t feel like I had that. I felt like I was misled. I felt like I was put in a position where somebody wanted to get me in an exclusive contract, promised me big bucks, and then when I went to go sell I was completely unprepared. I didn’t know what was happening and so when I started Quiet Light the goal has been from day one not to tell anyone to sell but to give them the tools so that they know what their business is worth today, what it could be worth in the future, what’s driving its value so that you can just make a good decision. That’s your decision. So the education piece and I joke about this being a shameless plug; the reason that I’m excited about this, and I genuinely am excited that you’re writing this book is because that education piece needs to be out there. And I love the idea; more than the idea, love the opportunity that we have to educate entrepreneurs of what’s available to them if they transition from an entrepreneur to exitpreneur, understanding that, the bulk of the wealth that you build in your lifetime for most entrepreneurs will be at that exit. That might be 2 years from now, that might be 20 years from now, either case it’s fine but having that plan to maximize that value and keeping the process smooth is important. Sorry, I totally cut you off of that but I want to emphasize that the education piece is really what I’m super excited about.
Joe: Now we were going to do 2 parts of this podcast, a little bit on the book and a little bit about the philosophy behind Quiet Light’s foundation and how you built the company and the entrepreneurial approach. So let’s do a; I think we should do an entire podcast on this business and how it’s built with entrepreneurs helping entrepreneurs just to educate people more about who we are, what we do, and why we do it because I think it’s necessary and you’ve done an incredible job with the model. But in terms of the education, I got a voicemail yesterday and this is the type of thing I want everybody out there that thinks they don’t have time to do it and they’re just keeping the wheels on the bus so to speak, take the time to make time for planning your exit using the educational tools that we provide whether it’s this podcast or articles or Walker’s book on my eventual book or having a conversation because that’s an education tool. Have a conversation with an adviser at Quiet Light. Really do it. But I got a voicemail from somebody who I sold businesses for, very, very well off financially, runs a family office now, bought a business from Walker for around 8 million dollars in 2019. And he heard the podcast on product innovation, product development with Zack at Gembah. And he just left a voicemail yesterday saying hey man I just want to let you know on the way back home from Austin I got a chance to meet with Zack and we’re going to go ahead and do some product innovation, product expansion, adding a number of new SKUs and accessories to the brand. I really appreciate it. I don’t know if enough people tell you that we actually use the tools that you share so thank you. It’s great to hear that. So thank you sir; I’m not going to say your first name, for reaching out and letting us know. For the rest of us this is the shameless plug part and I’ve said this, I said this at Blue Ribbon Mastermind and I said it in eCommerceFuel, Mark you and I have done now I think it was 114; I checked this morning, podcasts. So that’s how many are up on iTunes. We’ve got a total of 31 reviews. They’re all huge close to 5-star reviews. Thank you, everyone, who has given us reviews. I wasn’t aware that we had any at all because we hardly ever plug it. And so I was at Blue Ribbon Mastermind talking to David Wood who will be a guest on the podcast in a few weeks. He’s a personal coach and a good friend of Ezra’s and he said something about he was on 70 podcasts last year and he chose which ones to go on based upon the number of reviews. So I checked ours. We have 31; pleasantly surprised. I checked the EcomCrew, Mike Jackness and he’s got 81. So I stood on stage at Blue Ribbon Mastermind and I said everybody come on now Mike’s not here, I want one more reviews than Mike has. He’s been doing; I think he’s done 3 times as many podcasts as us so we’re doing okay. But please if you enjoy the podcast, if you like the podcast take a minute and go to iTunes or Stitcher or wherever you’re listening and pop in a review. We greatly appreciate it and share the information and wealth with all the others that need it.
Mark: Yeah. There’s a video out there and I don’t know if we’re going to be posting it on our YouTube channel but there’s a video out there of you making this plug at Blue Ribbon Mastermind and Ezra is standing there with you and he’s thinking this is what you’re using the stage time for? Like you have the opportunity to talk about what Quiet Light does and all you’re doing is trying to beat Mike Jackness and like absolutely I’m trying to beat Mike Jackness that’s it.
Joe: We won’t be sharing that video. That’s not ours to share but I shared it with the team and had a good laugh at myself because of it so no doubt about it. Mike’s a great guy. Ezra is a great guy. We don’t mention people that we don’t like obviously so if we’ve never mentioned you oh boy that’s a long list; oh no, I can’t say that. Let’s just say thanks; final thanks, Mike Nuñez. Thank you, Mike.
Mark: Yeah, Mike Nuñez, absolutely. I think that’s a great way to end up this episode here. Let’s do one in the future about the building of Quiet Light Brokerage and I’d also love to get feedback from people that have listened this far through this episode and are listening right now. Are there topics that you’d like to hear us talk about outside of bringing guests in? And we can bring on people within Quiet Light Brokerage, bring in Walker on the podcast again or Chuck or Brad or any of the many entrepreneurs that are working with Quiet Light Brokerage. Anything you want us to talk about specifically when it comes to buying or selling? We’d love to know, we want to produce content that you guys wanted to hear so feel free to hit me up Mark@QuietLightBrokerage or Inquiries@QuietLightBrokerage as well.
Joe: Awesome. Thanks, everyone.
Links and Resources: