Welcome to From Burnt Out to Bought Out, the podcast for business owners who are tired of being the hardest working, lowest paid employee in their own company. I'm Jon, joined as always by Ryan, and together we've spent years inside owner-led businesses helping founders go from running on fumes to running a business that actually runs without them. Every episode we break down the real problems nobody talks about. The burnout, the bottlenecks, the blind spots, and show you what it looks like to build a business that's profitable, sellable, and doesn't need you in the building every day to survive.
The Buy Box, Part 2: Customer Concentration and Your Multiple
You're sitting on a $2 million business, hearing that private equity wants a $3 million EBITDA minimum, and wondering if anyone would actually buy what you've built.
In this episode
Then you discover one customer accounts for 43% of your revenue... and that single relationship could cost you $900,000 at exit.
That's the reality of the Buy Box.
In Episode 10 of From Burnt Out to Bought Out, Jon and Ryan break down how buyers actually evaluate your business, why different buyers have completely different checklists, and what determines whether your company gets ignored or attracts serious attention. They cover private equity EBITDA thresholds, how customer concentration can destroy valuation, why recurring revenue can double your multiple, and the six numbers every owner should know before thinking about an exit.
If you feel trapped in the day-to-day, aren't sure what your business is actually worth, or think buyers will magically show up when you're ready to sell, this one's for you.
Chapters
Transcript · full conversation
Whether you're grinding through a plateau, thinking about an exit, or just trying to take a vacation without your phone blowing up, you're in the right place. Let's get into it. Quick wardrobe change, Ryan. That's right, Jon. I'm blaming the dog. Right. That's why you went into Irish mode? That's right. Profit First. We do what we preach here, Jon. But yep, that was the quickest thing I could do.
By the way, if anybody wants to adopt a dog, I'm just kidding. They can have both of ours. That's right. That's right. Well, I'm glad you're at least wearing a shirt. Yeah, yeah. Well, I just came in from the beach, so I figured, you know. A tough life. A tough life, and yeah, in Medellín. Well, I love that T-shirt too. That one is super comfortable, I wear it all the time.
Yours. No, no, we don't trade, we have our own, everybody. As much as Jon tries to pretend, we have our own. We're not that close. Yeah, and we're separated by about 4,000 miles, so thank God for airline trackers. I think it'd be dangerous if we were closer. Probably, yeah. All right, so back on track, the buy box sounds like really it's only for big business.
It's not, we know that. But does any of this apply to the $2 million owner sitting and listening right now? So let's talk about who your buyers are, right? There is not one buyer. There is four or five, depending. And so the biggest mistake owners make is that they're assuming there's one type of buyer out there, but there are more. So strategic acquirers, so those are competitors, suppliers, adjacent companies.
You know, the box is more going to be a synergy fit, pun intended, customers, geography, talent, capabilities. They often pay more than financial buyers because they can extract the synergies or economies of scale that a financial buyer can't, right? A financial buyer, again, is somebody who just wants really a printing press, an ATM machine, a well-run machine. Then we get into private equity. Ooh, badminton, you know, out there now, is those are the institutional buyers that everyone thinks about, Bain Capital and the lesser ones.
And there's a market correction coming, folks, just to let you know, but private equity is not all evil. But they do have strict EBITDA floors. They want recurring revenue. They want scalability and they use that more than the verb, right? So it's an actual thing for them. And they have the most rigorous filter. Typically, $3 million EBITDA is a minimum for their platforms. Sometimes it's more. If you're up in the $5, $10 million EBITDA range, you are definitely got a bull's-eye on your back.
And then we have the search funders and independent sponsors, which are named the searchers. They're often MBA grads. They're raising capital to buy one business and run it. Some of them will then try to get another independent sponsor to get another company to another company. Maybe they grow it up into a platform, roll it up, turn it into a portfolio, whatever that is. They're more on the small box side, right?
Because they're raising capital, maybe for mom and dad, rich uncle, some, you know, accredited investors. And so they're getting between $1 and $3 million EBITDA, because there is a multiple like Jon talked about. So, you know, there's a amount of cash going out there. They're looking for recurring cash flows. So these are the professional buyers, the financial buyers I was talking about, right? Where they want the owner willing to transition out to six to 24 months.
They're looking for a company that runs itself that they don't have to go in there and work 80 hours a week, right? That's their hope. And then we have the new fad out there and we've been involved with some of these folks. Great people, by the way, not knocking this, but it is the main street buyers. So you can see there are a lot of their ads on Facebook and all that kind of stuff, where it's really individuals leaving corporate, they've got some money, there's all other small owners doing like a bolt-on, right?
And so, they might be really well in real estate, those kinds of things, and now they wanna venture off and write their own ticket. And they're looking for anywhere between $250,000 to $2, $3 million of SDE, and up, right? And we'll get to SDE in a minute, Jon. I know this is one of your favorite talker. And the box is about transferability and lifestyle that last about scale.
And these folks are willing to actually move geographically and they wanna be in there running the business. And they think of it as, I'm gonna make $350,000 a year if I put my money in the stock market when I can own my own fate and maybe grow it up to millions of dollars. Okay? And then this one, this is gonna deserve its own episode at some point, this one is an ESOP and that's selling to your employees through a stock ownership plan.
There's real tax advantages for the seller. It's a slower process, but you stay involved and definitely it is worth its own episode for the fact that it can be a tremendous, fantastic thing and it can be an absolute disaster. So, a $2 million business with $400,000 of clean cash flow won't attract the PE, it absolutely attracts a main street buyer. Maybe a strategic competitor or a searcher, right?
So a different buyer has a different box, but it's still a box and it's still a checklist you'd be on, right? And so, I mean basically you're saying that the $2 million guy is not gonna get into a PE bidding war. He's not gonna force his value up by having multiple PE companies come in and take a look. No. He had hope, Brian. I know. Untold wealth. Hope is not a Biola, Jon, and hope has never written a check.
Right. Yeah, bang on. And yeah, the SDE reference, like SDE, that's what we're all in it for, EBITDA, SDE. So let's talk about EBITDA specifically. Why is it the floor everybody is obsessed about? EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA, recasted EBITDA, and SDE walk into a bar, right? They're the same thing. It's just a different way of saying things. Just trying to be funny. I doubt it, right? Why the long face? So the first confession here is that there isn't one number called EBITDA, right? I just named them. EBITDA though stands for earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization. And I just bored myself saying that, oh my God, I'm so glad I'm not an accountant anymore.
What it does is it, your P&L, what's that? The title doesn't make a difference, Ryan. It really doesn't. CFO, accountant, nerd, numbers nerd. No, it's all the same thing. That's all the same thing. Green shirt. That's right, that's absolutely right. What has my life become? Well, sorry to all the 15 listeners now. So what your P&L spits out before anybody normalizes it is what it costs.
What's normalization? Essentially, they're making a clean playing field for everybody. So some companies, they have a lot of depreciation, other ones don't, so they normalize it so that they can see across the board what that looks like, right? It's a raw number and almost nobody buys on this, by the way, on your EBITDA, because there are other things at stake. So what we do is we like to call that adjusted EBITDA, recasted EBITDA, or SDE.
It's the same thing, different name. Your accountant strips out all the add-backs, so all your owner perks, one-time costs, non-recurring expenses. So hey, we built a building and $150,000, we paid for it. Okay, they take that out, right? I bought a truck, you know, for my personal use, right? They take that out. This is one number you bring to the table. And if a buyer asks for your EBITDA, they almost always mean your adjusted EBITDA.
And then there's the quality of earnings adjusted EBITDA. And so that's what the buyer decides is real after their Q of E firm has gone through every add-back you submitted. This is the number you actually get paid on. And if you haven't gone through a quality of earnings before, it is a lot of fun, right? It costs a lot of money to get this, just to really come into a number that I could probably get you into within about 5%.
Like it's silly, but they wanna make sure that there's no funny business going on, that you don't have a rental property going and being deposited into your business account. So it is necessary because, you know, we just can't take the numbers where it's worked because there are different accountants and different things. And then SDE, seller's discretionary earnings, a little bit different. I call them the same because they're roughly the same.
It's the same concept, but it's for smaller deals, to roughly below $1 million of cash flow. Includes owner salary as part of that cash flow because if you're lower on that part, we wanna make sure that what would it cost to replace you? If you're paying yourself $600,000 a year, but really we could get somebody for 150, we wanna take that difference out. Or if you're paying yourself $60,000 a year, we wanna make sure that it's actually put back in at 150 because you're taking a haircut.
So for a $500,000 cash flow business, the owner's paycheck is most of the cash flow. It really is. So just making sure that it's an honest way to measure that. So if the owner says, I'm at a $1.5 million EBITDA, buyer's Q of E comes back at 1.1 adjusted, owners usually get offended, right? But the owner shouldn't get offended. You should have run the strokes themselves before sitting at the table.
And that's the thing. And a lot of these broker firms, seller broker firms, they don't get it right. And that's another episode in itself, is dealing with these brokerage firms. So the buyer adjusted EBITDA typically lands 15 to 30% below the seller reported, in my experience. And that's because there's a multiple of things, of add-backs, and so some of the add-backs that typically are accepted is one-time legal fees with documentation, one-time relocation, you got COVID stuff, insurance settlements, and then owner's compensation above market.
What buyers usually reject is your spouse on payroll who doesn't actually work, right? Personal vehicles and personal travel run through the business. Again, I am not the IRS, you do what you gotta do. We just wanna get to a real number when it comes to what the real value of your business is. Or a family member that your uncle Joey's been there forever, paying them $150,000 a year to do scheduling, right, that kind of thing.
So that stuff is gonna be excluded. So what we wanna do is build a cushion and make sure that the number's right. Right, yeah, because there's different numbers, right? And his is right, ours is wrong, or the buyer's is wrong. I mean, that's convenient. It's convenient for the seller, right? Well, it's not convenient, it's math, right? So if you wrote off your truck as a business expense, Jon, the buyer's gonna add it back.
Right, but generally the truck is a business expense. I mean, you're running a business. You drove it to your kid's hockey game on Saturday. It's not a business expense at that point. I guess so. I guess it's also a limited truck as well versus just the lower end model, right? That's right. All depends on the hubs. Yeah, I put a logo on it though. Therefore it's a business truck.
Yeah, exactly. It's one inch by one inch. It's in the top left corner of the window. That's right. Right next to the knowledge. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Customer concentration, you mentioned this before. You said 15% to 20% is generally the standard line. What happens if an owner is way past that? So the honest answer is that they pay for it. And sometimes the buyer will walk. So let's say, here's a true story.
Again, composite industries, everything's changed names, all that kind of crap, right? So $6 million service company, solid revenue, nice margins, buyer asked for a customer concentration report, owner says, well, I'll get it to you. Three days later, the report comes up, top client is 43% of the revenue, right? We'll call him my cousin Vinny, right? Hey.
I used to live in Brooklyn, so I could say that, right? So, so now picture the conversation, right? So the buyer asks, what happens to revenue if my cousin Vinny leaves? Owner says, he won't leave, he's my cousin Vinny. Buyer says, that is exactly the problem, right? The relationship will die when the deal is done, right? So on that deal, the cousin cost the owner about $900,000 because they had to take a haircut, right?
One client, 43% of the revenue, costs almost a million dollars. They'll get done, but that's what the customer concentration costs. So, you know, what a buyer looks at, at a 30% concentration, right? It's a binary risk. So if that client leaves in year one, half the cash flow disappears. That's a real risk to the buyer, right? And so on the seller's perspective, well, they've got the relationship with you, not with the new buyer, right?
So they can't go ahead and bet on future fund returns. They can't go ahead and bet that that relationship is going to be there because if it's personal, a college buddy, they cannot replace you in that relationship. Right. So buyer, you know, seller beware, you know, past 20% on any one client equals you have a value creation project. Right. So you need to buy diversify it. But the good news is, is that with discipline, and a discipline approach, 12 to 24 months and you can get that down past the 20%.
And the other half of this, Jon, that people don't talk about, and here's a bonus for this segment, is vendor concentration is also half the problem. I.e. COVID. We had all our vendors coming from China, China shuts down, we can't produce goods anymore. Right. So making sure that you're not reliant on one vendor, even if they're, you know, you have multiple vendors and some of them aren't as cheap.
That's a great way to avoid this vendor concentration. So I think the takeaway from this one is, you know, you got to start now. Make sure that in 12 to 24 months when you are really actually looking to sell or even diversify, right, or get out of owner dependence. Sorry, not diversion, I'm going to get out and own the dependents, is that you won't have to rely on one big contract.
You have products going and all that kind of stuff so you can go ahead and take a two-week vacation. It's one of the first questions that a seller asks, and when the CIM or the seller package comes through. The buyer asks. The buyer, yep. When that package comes through, we know, we see it. Every time we open up that package, we look at the customer concentration.
And people who know and are aware, you see it in the customer breakout. There is some sort of report which breaks out the levels of the customer and the spread. And so that immediately tells you that they're aware of how they should be running their business and arranging their customer base so that it makes maximum sense for somebody coming in to buy it. You can't hide this stuff, right?
It's going to come up in one of the first conversations because it's one of the first things that buyers look at. You're absolutely right, and then definitely we'll be coming out in due diligence. Right, exactly. So get ahead of it, plan it out, winning based off projects as well. If it's all project work that you're putting annual bids in for, then that also is a risk. That's, a buyer looks at that and says, okay, well hang on, what if this is about a handshake and it's about the owner and relationships, and I step in and suddenly we don't win all those projects and those bids, revenue drops 25, 30, 40% because of it. You mentioned $900,000 lost, I mean that's not a rounding error, right? That's, hey, that's a lake house. Well, that's two lake houses if you don't put in the dock. Cousin Vinny didn't even know. Cousin Vinny never knows, that's why he ended up, you know, it's doesn't end up in jail and had to get built up
Vinny, I thought it was Jersey. That venue was some Jersey. Whatever. Quick break. And this one is a company that pays Ryan's mortgage and based on his shirt today apparently dresses him. Wow. Okay. Half the people listening just heard us describe the buy box and went, cool, I have no idea why I've fallen any of that. That's the call. Ryan's CEPA Certified Exit Planning, Fractional CFO, CMO, COO, M&A Advisory Services, SOS Integrated Financial Management. Basically every acronym Ryan has ever made me look up mid conversation.
They're real things, Jon. I know that. I Googled them. If you're a $2 to $20 million business owner and you have no clue whose box you're in or what your numbers actually look like to a buyer, that's the call. We are wearesynergysolutions.com. Ryan and his team, including myself, work across North America and Latin America, which means his calendar is genuinely a war crime. It's fine. It is not fine. You took a call at 4am last week.
It was 5 Central. Yeah, that's not a time zone. We are wearesynergysolutions.com. Tell him Jon sent you. Recurring revenue keeps coming up. And I think it relates very closely with what we've just been talking about, right? Project-based work, bid-based work, these are not red flags, but they're warning signs to buyers coming in to dig deeper and make sure that there is a revenue source coming in. Why does recurring revenue matter so much?
And how does that change the picture? Well, buyers are paying for predictability in this chaotic world, Jon, right? Recurring revenue is the closest thing in business to a written guarantee. So if I have two companies, one is, they're both $5 million, one is one-time product revenue, and the question is, will the projects repeat? Did the owner sell them? Like you just said, will customers come back? There's a lot of question marks there, right?
Or if I have to continue to get new projects to fill that $5 million, right, there's a relationship base. Those are bid base, estimated base, but there's a relationship base. Whereas, think of it as, from the buying perspective, if I have $5 million and it's in the contract of recurring revenue for the next two years, whether it's subscription, service contract, maintenance, whatever, there's a contractual obligation there, a commitment that I can go ahead and bank on, right? And I can literally go to the bank and say I have $5 million of recurring revenue coming out of here, can I borrow some money? Can I get a lot of credit? Can I take on this crane or buy this crane or whatever it is? So the thing is that transactional service businesses, they tend to trade at three to four times EBITDA. And that's, by the way, a well-run organization. Same
business with 50% plus recurring revenue can get between six and eight times. That's double. Same EBITDA, double the multiple. And so let's make a critical distinction. Recurring revenue is not the same as repeating. Recurring revenue is contracted, signed paper, subscription, a retainer. Repeating revenue is customers always coming back but they don't have a contract. Will pay double for the multiple for recurring, not repeating. So, one of the biggest things that you can do in your organization, the highest ROI value that you can create is get recurring revenue.
Right. And there's an upside with recurring revenue of being able to tack on upsell and change the program to increase the amount that you're charging and billing out with recurring revenue. And well sure, look at your Amazon Prime account video, right? For $14.99 you can watch the videos and TV shows and stuff like that with ads, for $18.99 you can watch them without ads. And I remember when you had Prime and you didn't have ads at all, so they just changed the recurring revenue model, right? But what they did do is they just edged up just a little bit. Who's going to miss 50 bucks a year to not have to watch a minute and a half of ads?
Yeah. Or you can listen to us for free. That's right. We plan to increase our fees by 15% next year. Yes. So zero times 15%, folks, still zero. Still zero. The value that people get from our conversations. One more top tip because this is a thing, transferable contracts because if you're going to set up, whether it's project based or recurring revenue, one of the things that buyers look at is are those contracts transferable?
Buyers want to come in and I don't want to segue off this too deeply but they want to come in, generally they want an asset purchase because if you do a share purchase, you've got to buy all the litigation that potentially exists. You got to buy the debt around that business as well. And it's much, much cleaner to buy the business based around just an asset purchase.
However, when you do that, those contracts need to be transferable to the new organization. So it's a very simple one-line addition to any contract that this contract is transferable. May look at that level of detail, but they generally don't have an issue with it, and it makes the sale a heck of a lot smoother in the future. Well, I think we have a couple of episode ideas here.
Jon is walking people through the sale process from listings, dealing with their brokers, to LOI, to due diligence, to what asset versus equity sale is, and all that kind of stuff. So I think he hit something for future episodes. Did I sound smart for once? Man, yeah, at the surface. Board aligned. And then he kept talking. Yeah. Yeah.
Hey, marketing service. When I go like this, I mean, stop talking. You sounded great there, Jon. Just be quiet now. No, we know this. We do this all the time. So yeah. Let's move on. How does an owner figure out which buyer's box they're actually in? So I think there's three ways. There's one trap and you have to be honest. So let's do the trap first. Do not make a sell side M&A advisor your diagnostic.
So this is going to be an episode in the south. But essentially saying that when you go to a sell side broker, they're going to pump your number up because they're going to tell you that their fee is in there. They're going to give you numbers that look amazing to you, right? And they're going to pump you up because their whole thing is that they want your business so that they can sell your business and make a commission off of it.
Okay. They're going to help you through the process. So don't get me wrong. Sell side advisors are fantastic. We are sell side advisors. We're not a broker. There's a difference there too. I think we should talk about at some point. But the higher the number they can get you, the higher the fee. It's kind of like your real estate broker, right? The more they can sell your house for, the higher the commission that they make.
And so, yes, they're on your side, but they also need to make some money there. So I think that it's a very optimistic number. It's not necessarily the truth. And so when we look at some of these CIMs for on the sell side and the buy side, we go and diagnose them and dissect them and 90% of the time they are not within the ballpark at all, right?
And then you're going, you know, the trap is that you're being told your business is worth $2 million when in reality a buyer will come in at about 1.5. That's a big hit, right? And that's a big emotional thing so that your baby's not worth as much as you'd like it to be. Okay? So that'd be another obstacle. The timing's important on that though because if you've got an inflated sense of value and the numbers come in, it hits people's buy box, they're interested, and your immediate reaction is disappointment, and you're already not interested in what the buyer's offering.
You miss that opportunity, right? Like, people are looking for a long time before they reach out to make a purchase, and so you might actually miss the opportunity right away because you're not interested and your sights are set too high. So I think it's an important point to make. This isn't just being negative about brokers. It's about creating the right opportunity at the right moment and you wanna be level set right from the start.
Yes, absolutely. So good point. That's one for Jon this week. Two, I just made one earlier. Well, half a point on that one. Like brownie points for the wife, makes you so frickin' long to earn your brownie points and you lose them just by doing just, you forgot to close the door and all your brownie points have gone. Same system with you. Yeah. Well, you know, I think what have you done for me?
All right, let's get back into this. All right, so let's talk about diagnostics, right? So one is you got to talk to a Certified Exit Planning Advisor and hint, I'm a CEPA. All right, that is the gold standard. They're trained, some of us are trained in value acceleration methodology. Those are the fractional CFOs that have the secret degradation nation. The rest of them are wealth advisors and estate planners and attorneys and those kind of things, but they will help you get into the community is what I'm saying. So we want, you know, if you want to get that 1.5 million to 2 million, right, talk to a value acceleration person that is a Certified Exit Planning Advisor, right. And a lot of them are not compensated on sale price, although there are some, some success fees as well, can help you, tell you which box you're in based upon multiple factors like we talked about and you know even if you're five, ten, fifteen years out it's worth
having the conversation because again getting yourself into the right buy box is good business planning. Okay so talk to somebody who knows. Second one is look at the recent transactions in your sub vertical. So, you know, there's a bunch of these. BizBuySell, Axial, PitchBook, this trade publications, talk to some of your friends who are in the same industries. But again, we talked about this in a previous episode, is watch out for the person who sold for 6 million and 6X, right? That's not, might not be your reality right now. And, you know, note their revenue, which is the vanity plate that we put on there. But more importantly, the EBITDA, who they, who bought them, what their rock multiple was, those kinds of things.
So, buy him a beer and I'm an M as in him or her, right? A beer and talk reality, what happened. Three is, I think you need to have a very honest assessment with your baby. Is it ugly with some more? Is it beautiful? And there's a couple of things we gotta figure out, right? So go ahead and do this exercise, right? What's your revenue? What's your adjusted EBITDA?
What's your gross margin? What's your customer concentration? Do you have recurring revenue? If so, what percentage? This is the most honest thing, is how dependent is it on you, right? Do you have a leadership team that can make the decisions without you and you can go away for two or three weeks? Or is it that you can't even leave an afternoon, right? So let's be honest with that.
And then a bonus option is a fractional CFO with M&A experience can do this diagnostic for you. And if they're CEPA, even better. So you get the same value, there's no sale price bias for you, same conversation, they might do an hourly billing, there's no contingent on that, and they can tell you where you're at. So I think the worst thing you can do is assume that there's gonna be a bidding war when your numbers are saying else why, right?
So let's make sure that you're not thinking about the wrong buyer and focus on the one that you are. And let's make that attractive to him or her. And start it, start the process. Even if it's doing some of the things yourself because it's not that hard, right? To at least get data on some of these points but then reach out to the professionals. For somebody who isn't looking at being in buy boxes yet, what's a realistic time to get into one, to get in front of the right buyers?
So this might sound shocking to everybody out there, but it takes three to seven years, right? And the three to seven years is kind of like the exit planning standard, but really it comes down to a couple things, right? So let's take an example. If you have customer concentration, right, and you wanna drop cousin Vinny from 40% to under 20%, it's gonna take you one to two years, all right?
If you don't have a lot of recurring revenue and you wanna grow it from say single digits to 40%, that's gonna take you two to three years to model it and to get it out there, right? Your owner dependency can materially reduce, but again, we talked about this in previous episodes, it's about trust and making sure that people have the tools to be able to make the decision so you don't have to decide for lunch every single day, right?
And that's gonna take 18 to 24 months, right? And then we have to look at your margins, right? And so where are you at in the industry? Where should you be? That's not an everyday shift where we're just gonna raise our prices by 25% and then we're gonna fix our margins overnight. We'd be out of business, right? So if we do it in a focused fashion, I think one to two years to get there, to where we really want to be.
And the more we work on it, the higher you are with the industry, right? We want to make sure that your books are compiled and reviewed to be audited, right? And that takes a couple of years to get there, to get the close process down pat and to get everything ready on time, right? We need to make sure that you have a leadership team and a management that's built to get you there, right?
So that they can make the decisions, that you have a good marketing person, a good finance person, operations, the whole shebang. That might take a couple of years to find that talent and to groom them and to get them. And then, you know, and then we need to make sure that when all that stuff is happening at once, one thing will happen is that you're able to will grow. Right. And so sometimes if you do all that stuff, it could grow to two to three times during that three to seven years, depending on how quickly you can get these things on board. So now we're not talking a $1 million company on the bottom line, we're talking three. And now we've just gone from main street buyer to now piquing the interest of strategic buyers and PEs and institutional buyers. Now we're talking a completely new multiple that Jon had brought up, right? And by the way, when you take away your own independence, you have a management team,
all that kind of stuff, guess what? You can go spend three weeks in the Bahamas enjoying your family. And so now you have options if you want to sell or not, whether you want to continue to do this. So if you stack three or four of those, it'll take, you know, three to seven years to get there. If you get all those going, your multiple is going to go through the roof. People are going to be wanting, beating down your door to buy you. Yeah, turns into a competition at that point.
That's what every buyer wants. And is it easy? No. Is it worthwhile? Yes. Yeah, like $900,000 payout that would be great. Yeah, it's your lake house with a dock. That's right. Make a dock on weekend. Well think about that, Jon, if I get an extra couple million dollars I can have two lake houses with a dock, right? It's great. Yeah, side by side. So your in-laws can stay next to you all the time. Everybody's dream. That is, well actually our in-laws are on the same lake, a suitable distance away. Yes, that's the key, suitable distance away. Yeah, exactly. What's the biggest mistake owners can make around all this? Waiting. Yeah, yeah, waiting. Wait until they want to sell and then they're like, oh, that's all it's worth, right? You've got to give it time. You've got to do a self-evaluation now so that you can start planning on that.
Well, I'm tired and I just want to get out of this thing and two years max. Fantastic. Start working on it now because you'll be better off in two years than you are now. That's the thing. If every year that you build towards this, you can probably add high six figures, maybe seven figures, depending on the size of your company. So is it worth waiting a couple years to bring home millions of dollars?
That's the thing. So I think that it takes time, daily decisions to weekly decisions, to quarterly goals, to annual goals, to your three-year, five-year, seven-year goal. They all go hand in hand. Yeah, so that's the biggest mistake, is that not giving yourself enough time, not making this a focused effort, right? Because when you make this a focused effort, your business is just going to run better. You're going to be more profitable. You're going to be happier. Your life is going to be better. Your wife will drop off tea in the middle of an episode and you won't even care.
Yeah, no, you just kind of roll with it. That's great. Last question. What should owners do this week? What are the first steps here? I think three moves, gonna take an hour each. So you're gonna get some homework, but I think it's gonna be, you know, time and money well spent. One is write down your actual numbers on one page, right? What's your trailing 12 months revenue, right? So take the last 12 months, trailing 12 months, adjusted EBITDA, so you'll have an EBITDA or you'll have a net income, get into an EBITDA, and then come on, we're not the IRS. What's the adjusted number there? You know, what's your golf club fee?
What's your, you know, fishing boat in there and that kind of stuff, take those out and that's all we really care about, right? Your gross margin, right? What is it? So your top customer as a percentage of revenue. What's your recurring revenue as a percentage of revenue, right? Do your owner just this dependency score. Get six numbers, one page, that's done in one hour. Two, Google three recent transactions in your industry, right? Note the revenue range and the buyer type, you know, that's your concept. That's where you live in or you don't, right? And three is book a 30-minute call with a CPA or a fractional CFA or a CFO or somebody that you know that's in the M&A space that doesn't have a vested interest in that. So don't go to a sell side broker, right, because then you're on their radar. Go to somebody who maybe has been through it and kind of, you know, show them your numbers
and ask, hey, which box am I in? You know, which box am I close to? What do I need to do to fix this and to get on more lists? Because more demand means a higher price for you. When you have a bidding war, that's when you can get a higher price. When you have one person in the market willing to buy you, you're going to get the lowball or their offer and that's what you're going to take. So I think without that, you're building in the dark and you're hoping that someone will notice you.
So go ahead and do these things. You'll be well worth it. And why don't you, you know, give us a comment on how it went or send us an email and we'll let you know. Yeah, I mean, clearly we love this stuff. This is almost a double length episode just because we really love the detail here. Like to see how it goes because we're super interested. So basically six numbers, three Googles, a phone call, a cup of tea, and that's the whole show. That's it. Took us about 40 minutes to 40 to 50 minutes to say it.
All right, so the takeaway, Jon. Takeaway. So just like when you open up your shop, buyers don't accidentally find you, right? They're going to filter you, they're going to look through their revenue range, EBITDA, margin profile, customer concentration, recurring revenue, and if you're the industry fit, right? Six numbers decide whether your name even makes it onto a list of some and numbered employee financial analysts that will take it and they actually look into it a little bit more, right?
It's pretty scary. But what we wanna do is build towards someone's box on purpose. It's gonna take three to seven years of focused, hard work, smart work, before you want to sell. And when you do that, you're gonna sell for a lot more than you will today. And stop being the seller waiting for the call. If you build it, they will come. Awesome, that's a wrap. Excellent.
That'll do it for this episode of From Burnt Out to Bought Out. If anything we talked about today hit home, do us a favor, share this episode with another owner who needs to hear it. And if you're sitting there thinking they're talking about me, good. That's the first step. Head to the show notes and book a free triage call with our team. No pitch, no pressure, just a real conversation about where you are and what's possible.
You can also find us on LinkedIn and at wearesynergysolutions.com. New episodes drop every week. Until next time, stop running the treadmill and start building something you can actually sell.
Your hosts
RyanArchitect of Synergy Hacked and founder of Synergy Solutions. Certified Exit Planning Advisor and Profit First Professional; author of 3:17 A.M. (Morgan James, March 2027).
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JonMarketer and agency owner who has run his own businesses. CMO at Synergy Solutions, and asks the questions on the show.
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