Podcast: Selling Your Business Using a Brokerage Firm

January 2, 2020

James Thomson

Partner at Buy Box Experts

Listen to the podcast

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [01:59] What is a brokerage, and what do they do?
• [03:17] The kind of company that would need a brokerage
• [04:16] How the entrepreneurial spirit was awakened in Mark
• [08:14] The early days of Mark’s work with Amazon
• [10:30] Mark committed to the business for 6 years
• [12:19] Learning from mistakes
• [18:28] How to get companies to learn to think long term
• [20:30] Learning from mentors
• [23:05] What makes a business attractive for a potential acquisition
• [28:45] Success stories for Mark and his team

Resources Mentioned on this episode

• Quiet Light Brokerage
• LinkedIn for Mark
• Buy Box Experts
• The Amazon Marketplace Dilemma: A Brand Executive’s Challenge Growing Sales and Maintaining Control 
• The Prosper Show

Sponsor for this episode

Buy Box Experts applies decades of e-commerce experience to successfully manage clients’ marketplace accounts. The Buy Box account managers specialize in combining an understanding of clients’ business fundamentals and an in-depth expertise in the Amazon Marketplace.

The team works with marketplace technicians using a system of processes, proprietary software, and extensive channel experience to ensure your Amazon presence captures the opportunity on the marketplace, not only producing greater revenue and profits, but also reducing or eliminating your business’ workload.

Buy Box Experts prides itself on being one of the few agencies with an SMB (small to medium-sized business) division and an Enterprise division. Buy Box does not commingle clients among divisions as each has unique needs and requirements for proper account management.

Episode Transcript

James Thomson 0:33
I am James Thompson, one of the hosts of the Buy Box Experts Podcast. I’m a partner with Buy Box Experts and formerly the business head of selling on Amazon team at Amazon, as well as the first account manager for the Fulfillment by Amazon program. And the co-author of the book The Amazon Marketplace Dilemma, and co-founder of The Prosper Show, one of the largest continuing education conferences for Amazon sellers. This episode is brought to you today by Buy Box Experts. Buy Box Experts takes ambitious brands and makes them unbeatable. When you hire Buy Box Experts, you receive the strategy, optimization, and marketing performance to succeed on Amazon. We are the only agency that combines executive-level advisory services, but expert performance management and execution of your Amazon channel strategy. Today, our guest is Mark DOS, the Founder, and CEO of Quiet Light Brokerage, founded in 2007. This brokerage helps entrepreneurs in the online and internet business sectors to sell their businesses for maximum value. Mark’s team has worked with hundreds of brands that sell on Amazon. I speak from firsthand knowledge when I say that mark is one of the good guys in this brokerage space, as he and his colleagues invest significant time, with not yet ready to sell companies to help them make the long journey to prepare their businesses for eventual sale. So welcome, Mark. And thank you for joining us today on our Buy Box Experts podcast.

Mark Daoust 1:57
Thanks so much for inviting me on

James Thomson 1:59
We start with a very simple question. Not all of our listeners are necessarily going to understand what does a brokerage do? And if I’m a company that sells on Amazon, why would I want to talk with you?

Mark Daoust 2:12
Well, I mean, a brokerage, people understand real estate brokerage, right? So it’s similar, right? You have a house, you want to find a buyer for it and get the most money for it as possible. You would hire a broker to help you with that, or some sort of real estate agent to help you. We do the same thing, but with Amazon based businesses. And to answer the second question, why would you want to hire someone like myself? Well, hopefully I’m bringing more value, both in terms of real dollars and also in the process of selling. I think it’s a little bit of an eye opener for people when they go through this process the first time to see just how many decisions they have to make, how many things come across their desk and how much work it is to go through preparation and finding a buyer answering questions and by goodness, you know, buckle up buckle your seatbelts when you Due Diligence because that is really very tense. So we’re there to help and kind of walk through that process. And that’s, that’s what we do. Right? So our firm, we’ve all done this personally. We’ve also have our own businesses, we’ve all bought businesses as well. And so we try to walk with you through that process.

James Thomson 3:17
What does an ideal company look like coming in your door, saying, okay, Mark, I need your services. What does that company look like?

Mark Daoust 3:25
Yeah, it should be established for a little bit. I mean, we’re looking for businesses that have been around for a little while, have shown that, you know, they’re sustainable, and really what we’re looking for, we can boil this down to kind of a philosophical concept. Can you show potential buyers that they will make a return on their investment if they acquire your business? So do you have some good intellectual property protection in place? Or do you have such a unique product, you know, that this is going to be sustainable, down the road, and that’s really what we’re looking for a little bit of maturity. We’re looking for some revenues and earnings coming in. And typically, you know, for our firm, we’re looking for revenues. The mid six figures earnings, you know, the low six figures. At a minimum, we will work with businesses a little bit below that, but the start to get a little high for those companies. But that would be the typical profile that we work with companies up in the eight figures of revenue as well.

James Thomson 4:16
So before you worked at your own company, you work for a lot of other companies in your professional career. What At what point did you decide that you wanted to set up your own business? But what awakened that entrepreneur in you? I got fired.

Mark Daoust 4:32
I got fired. Yeah, that was that was what really awakened the being professionally unemployed. Right. So you know, I ever since college, I kind of knew that I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I always thought about this as a career path. But right out of college, I got hired by an internet based company based in Baltimore, Maryland, and was thrown right into the thick of this this world of internet based businesses. And you know, this was the.com boom of the early 2000s. And then we went through the.com bust. And I remember I walked in one day, and our department went from around 30 people down to three, they kept the three of us that were new. I was among the three that they kept the for the four of us. We were new, we were cheap, and we would do whatever they wanted, basically. And then for the next year and a half, boy, you know, we struggled, we went through some some tough times, and we had to have some really hard talks with our clients I went from you are an account manager. That was also my role, right? I was an account manager for this company. And I had to initially went from having just a couple of clients to clients to 220 clients overnight. And then they said, Okay, so we’re in financial trouble, we need to effectively introduce this new monthly rate, which is going to effectively double your clients costs. And these are your clients will go ahead and start calling them you can imagine how those conversations went, it was stuff and being thrown into the fire after a couple of years. In that position, you know, corporate politics got in the way. And I got caught in the crosshairs. And look, I I’ll be the first to admit I don’t play corporate politics well, and in it, it copy, I was let go and I was forced to, you know, sink or swim. But it was a good opportunity because it really put me in a position of having to go out on my own. And then I had a number of entrepreneurial starts and some were successful, some are not. And I like was born out of some of those those starts and failures and successes as well.

James Thomson 6:35
So So why a brokerage rather than some other kind of business where you’re the boss?

Mark Daoust 6:39
Yeah, it came from when I sold my first business, right? And I hired a business broker to help me out and it was pretty evident that he didn’t understand my businesses very well. And I saw that I thought, Boy, this would really be useful if we had somebody out there that actually understood internet based businesses, you know, both on the buy side and on sales. How do you evaluate a business? in this space, we don’t understand the mechanics behind what makes it successful in the market, the mechanics, the sustainability of it, things of that nature. And so I always toyed around with the idea because look, when you sell a business, you got this guy that you hire, or lady that you hire, they walk through this process with you. And then they take a percentage, right? And I remember thinking, I’m like, dude, I’m gonna put it all work. You know, like, I’m the one that did a ton of work to build this business up. And I got to this point of cash now and here’s this guy who came in and frankly, they didn’t do that much work for us. But they took 10% I remember thinking, like, it doesn’t seem that hard what they’re doing. I shouldn’t say that as an entrepreneur, right? We should never say it’s never this way. It’s always harder than it looks. But then about a year after I sold my first business, very good friend of mine from those account management days, one of my clients from account management is so that he wanted to solve his business and he asked about help them and I did and We got it. So literally that day I was about to go broke because I blew through all the money that I got from selling my first business. And then that was the first sale in pilot brokerages history and built it from there one tell the time.

James Thomson 8:14
What were the early days like as you were building both sellers and buyers to help support your business.

Mark Daoust 8:22
Yeah, little chaotic, definitely a learning curve, you know that, that that statement I made of how hard can it be? Look, there’s a learning curve and trying to understand this financial world that I wasn’t really born into. I knew the basic mechanics of a sale, because I’ve been through it personally. So then it was inevitable, you would run into somebody that had been through this a dozen times that I’ve been through it two or three times, you know, and they would run circles around you and you learn you learn from that pretty quickly. And then you apply those lessons to the next one and then you learn some more lessons and apply those lessons for today. So it was a little chaotic. There wasn’t a ton of people in this space doing it at the time, which made it a little bit easier. And businesses were. I don’t want to say easier to understand back then. But I think I mean, I don’t know if you would agree, James, but I think the the world of the internet has become more complex over the past 20 years. And I think sizing up some of these businesses was easier. We were also dealing with smaller companies, right. So I sold websites that sold for like, 510 thousand dollars. The first one I sold was 625,000. But then, you know, a big makeup of what I had was, you know, 30 4050 $60,000 Now, that’s a different type of sale. So lot of learning a lot of starts and fits I remember, it was like, I don’t know, maybe 10 months into it. I was like, Man, I’m I’m not a good salesman. I’m just not I’m not going to say that simple. So I’m going to go I’m going to hire some salespeople, and they’re going to become my advisors and the brokers out there. So I hired five people, all five flamed out within two years. I was like, man, I thought I thought I was the one that that couldn’t set up with these these guys couldn’t sell, I had to keep selling to keep this thing going. And so a lot of like trying to figure out how does this thing actually work? And frankly, it didn’t, didn’t really settle in until about six years in before I realized I was going to do this full bore. And

James Thomson 10:18
was there was there a turning point where you said, I have a business here, that’s actually more than just a job. I’m actually building my own business here. And I’m going to be successful doing this.

Mark Daoust 10:30
I committed to the business six years, and I would say so when I hired Jason yellow. It’s Jason was the first of our current team. And he’s still with Twilight brokerage, and he was a previous client, you know, I had sold his business and then he came back to me a little bit later and said, Hey, I’m kind of interested in what you’re doing. And I said, I’m not interested in taking anyone on, frankly, at the time, because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. But once I did take him on, and he started to crush it, I mean, he just knocked it out of the park and I looked at what he was doing and it was like Wait a minute, I hire five people. And none of them were able to really do well, something okay, you know, of varying levels of success, but they all left with it two years. Why is Jason able to come in here and so similar to the way I was able to sell some of these businesses, Mike, it might be the fact that he’s an entrepreneur right here, this actual practical experience he’s bought, he sold, he started going through that. And so I started looking at that, and then I hired Joe and Amanda. And they started knocking out of the park and I was like, Ah, you know, this might be where I’m going like this is this is the right direction. And so it was at that moment that I actually started getting rid of any other business that I had and focusing entirely on my brokerage and really building up from there, you know, that we were pretty content with just the the, the the four of us for quite a long time, actually. And then manda decided to take a short break, and I brought Joe on his partner and we started to expand the team Amanda’s back with the team right now. And we’ve grown significantly over the past couple of years. Mainly because we’ve been focused on really trying to expand and get bigger and see what we actually do with this thing.

James Thomson 12:07
As you think about those first six years where we were still trying to figure out the kinks of that in the business, was there was there one particular mistake you made somewhere where you said, Oh, my goodness, I thought I knew what I was doing. But I have learned so much by having made this mistake.

Unknown Speaker 12:24
Gosh, I don’t know if I could not

James Thomson 12:27
believe it. At least one mistake somewhere along the way. I was gonna

Mark Daoust 12:29
say there’s so many of those, like, there’s So look, I got sued, like four months into this thing. It’s like, yeah, it’s right. Because the guy that sold my initial business was was helping me as an advisor. I did trying to give you some advice on how to do this thing. And so the company that he was working for sued for patent mission of a non compete agreement, and I was like, Okay, that was stupid, right? Because I asked him do have a non compete. He’s like, Yeah, but this is totally fine. They don’t mind if I work with companies like this. I do it all the time. And again, I didn’t know my God. Okay. Right. Instead of asking for the non compete, which is really what I should have done, I did. Now, here’s the good news, there was no damage. So everything was dropped eventually, but it was a wake up call right away, like, Oh my gosh, yeah, get your stuff together on this. There were other times too. I mean, look, I’ll be the first woman. There were a couple deals early on where people got burned at as somebody who helps facilitate it. That’s a terrible feeling. I don’t want to be in that position. But you take those lessons you learn from them, you apply them and you don’t you know, the thing that really pushed me into this space, is when I was selling my business, it became really clear that my business was a piece of inventory. Right, and the broker that was helping me, His goal is like churn and burn it like this. Initially, they told me Hey, we think we can get you $350,000 for a business like, Wow, really, that’s a lot more money than I thought. First offer came in 75,000 next off, and they came in, like 125,000 You know what I broken was telling me, I’ll take the money run, I will take that money and run my. But this is not your business. Why are you telling me what to do? I think this is more valuable to me personally, then than what you’re telling me, right? So I got into this business partly because I wanted to be somebody who would would shed light for people on what their situation is, as an entrepreneur, you have an asset, it’s worth something. Here’s what it’s worth in the marketplace. And now go make your choice. It’s up to you not up to me to make that choice. I will tell you what I think I will tell you what I think from a market standpoint, and then I’ll leave the decision back into your core. I’ll put it back over to you. So I really got off track there, James, I apologize. But that’s no, I mean, one of the things that

James Thomson 14:49
in my interactions with you over the past few years, you know, you have spent so much time with people helping them understand what they need to do to get to the point that two three years from now, they might Be ready to sell all that investment of time. Initially, only some of its going to pay off with future leads. How do you how do you? How did you get yourself to the point where you said, I’m going to have to think very long term in order to make this business work?

Mark Daoust 15:15
Yeah, I mean, it just came over the years when you start looking at tracking, right? Because I would, I would consult with marketing experts and be like, Okay, guys, I need to increase the lead flow to qualify, we need more clients coming in. And so they would immediately ask like, Okay, well, do you have tracking setup? Well, tracking doesn’t work in our business, right? Because I talked to somebody and then, you know, that’s going to be two, three years before they might list with us. And over the years, I’ve had this experience over and over and over again, I remember a situation I had now probably four years ago, where somebody called me and said, Hey, Mark, I don’t know if you remember me. I called you eight years ago when I was looking at buying this business. And I asked if you would take a look at it. Just give me your opinion. And you did. I really appreciate it and I’m thinking of selling get right. That’s an eight year time frame for your pipeline. So how do you measure that? And the answer is you don’t you measure a leading indicator. So what we measure here Twilight instead and we say measure, it’s more just kind of, we take stock of it, but we measure our value and our activity based and valuable conversations like, are we having good conversations with entrepreneurs, not necessarily conversations that will lead us to revenue right now. But did I just talk with, you know, Joe, somebody and was able to provide some value to him because down the road, Joe, somebody might decide to sell probably will decide to sell it. If I have been that person who added real value, I hope he comes back to me. And if he decides not to sell, great, that means he has a great business, but you know what, he knows other entrepreneurs. And so, it sounds so basic, everyone knows that referrals are important, but how do you build that referral network by adding value, the weird thing about our business that’s different, like five bucks experts, you can talk to somebody and say, here’s what we can do to make your business more profitable today. And that’s a Great pitch, what I’m going to say is, here’s what I can do to have you stop doing what you’re doing today, right? Now you’re going to get some cash off the table, but you’re going to lose that asset value. I’m talking about end of life sort of transaction for that business itself. And that’s not something that I would ever pitch to somebody to do, I would just tell them that that’s your decision to do whatever you want. And so that’s where our values sort of differ. And so instead of trying to pitch you should sell I don’t pitch that you should sell that you should own until it makes sense to sell. We can talk about that if you want, but I would rather add value now. And then should the Dave show up when you’ve you realized that want to sell and hopefully you plan to get there, you know, one of the natural people to work with because we’ve already been with you to part of that journey. So

James Thomson 17:50
question about last year, you wrote an article in Entrepreneur Magazine, and you talked about looking at long term trends of the business to figure out its value. Conceptually, I get it. But given that so many private label brands on Amazon haven’t been around very long, this concept of what does long term mean, as you think about companies that are basically private label Amazon brands that come to you, how do you help them think about this long term? These guys are in and out and four or five years starting yet another business? And yet we need to be thinking, where could this business be going in, in another two years or another two years after that?

Mark Daoust 18:28
Yeah, I mean, one thing I think people should start to explore. And I know this is kind of a difficult topic to get into. But I do think people should start to look into forecasting with their own businesses, right, let’s not talking about forecasting as a boy or really hope we do this right, because people that’s how most people treat forecasting, but actually hiring somebody who knows how to forecast and looking at your current list of agents. How are they performing, understand how they might perform over the next two years if you are able to read the next three to four months, for that matter in the seasonality that’s coming up. There’s all sorts of benefits to forecasting in the Amazon world. But then also understanding the marketplace that you’re in and the expansion within the marketplace. Do you have a unicorn product? Right? Is that something that is really just within a space? I found the one thing that’s going to work really well, there’s not a lot else that can work in here, or is are a lot of natural expansion. I work with businesses, I’m sure you have as well, where there’s a ton of room for expansion in product line. And there are some others where know that kinda hit the big one, you know, and everything else is just going to incrementally add on revenue there. So thinking long term, it’s not easy to do. One thing I would recommend, especially in the Amazon space that people will get will be the protection that you have, right Amazon, the buyers criticism of Amazon is always How am I protected from competition coming in and really destroying what you’ve built? And it’s a great question. So we look at that pretty heavily when we’re evaluating an Amazon business. Do you have an intellectual property protection, do you have something proprietary If it’s private label, do you have any distinguishing features? Are they big enough to actually make a difference? Right? Those would be some things I’d be looking at. So

James Thomson 20:08
so let’s let me shift gears here a little bit and ask a personal question. The process of being an entrepreneur is for those people who’ve never been one, it’s hard to understand what it really entails on a day to day basis. Take me through what kind of mentors you had, who helped you become an entrepreneur and what kind of advice they gave you that really resonated with you? Not necessarily that was correct. But at least I said, Okay, this is more complicated than I thought it was, just as you had said earlier, how complicated Could it be, and good mentors throughout this process? And have you been able to learn from them either by doing what they said or doing the opposite of what they said?

Mark Daoust 20:49
That’s a good question. So probably the one mentor that I’ve really had has been but it was actually my first client, Chris Barry. So he and I used to talk pretty much on a daily basis. about business. And you know, I found working with mentors it isn’t as much of what they say as it is having somebody to talk through the issues with and that makes such a big difference. So Chris Barry has been a big part of it, but then with in quiet like, ever since then, the mentors have been my team, you know, the benefit of hiring entrepreneurs who have been there done that, which is kind of our mantra right now, we’ve all been there, we’ve all done that, is that I’ve got a team of like nine really successful accomplished entrepreneurs, who have done things that frankly, make my resume look absolutely laughable. And so when I am coming up with a certain problem or a decision, I often kick it to my team and like, what do you guys think? And I invariably what, what does it say you ask 10 entrepreneurs for? Yes or no opinion, you’re going to get 100 different answers, right? I mean, you get so many different bits of feedback from them. And a lot of it, you know, it’s not always on point, but it’s helping you kind of think through their process. So I would say that I’ve often gone my own way. And this, you know, I haven’t really taken the advice of people a lot. But it’s the idea of working through it with them and hearing where their feedback is and seeing where they’re there. Maybe criticizing something that I’m doing. You know, I have taken some some bits of advice throughout the years, Jason, he always had a great work again, my first advisor that I hired in this current group that I have, he recommended that we raise our minimum fees and start dropping some of the small listings off of our site. And that was a substantial shift in us, in our company to start increasing the average deal size that we’re doing, you know, today, our average deal value as well into the seven figures, and growing as well, you know, that that wouldn’t have happened if we were still working in the 20 to 30 to $40,000 sites. Frankly, it just just wouldn’t happen if

James Thomson 22:52
you’re in this unusual situation where your clients are companies who want to sell their business and yet you’ve developed large group of contacts of prospective buyers, you know, companies that may be potentially interested in buying, and you can reach out to them and have those conversations and share with us what kind of advice you hear from prospective buyers around the kinds of things and discipline that companies need to be putting in place. So that to me is supposed to be attractive to be a potential acquisition. You see, you know, not all of them are going to be equally sellable. So what are prospective buyers? You know, what are they saying that that have helped you to do a better job of representing your clients?

Mark Daoust 23:33
Yeah. So we actually developed a very simple framework for this for people to be able to understand what makes an attractive business. And I’m going to preface it by saying this. When we think about selling a business, think about something about selling a business and an acquisition sense because we start thinking about things completely backwards. I want you to think about it in terms of maybe a product even right and then ask yourself, well, who’s buying this and why are they buying it? Most importantly, and the answer to the Y is always the same return on investment, right? People are buying a business for an ROI, they want to see that, which means everything you do when you’re preparing your business for sale, needs to speak to ROI, both the revenue in the future being sustainable, and something that can grow. Right. So these are the elements that really starting to drive this framework that we built. We call them the four pillars of value, pretty simple. Risk, growth, transferability, and documentation. And frankly, the last two transferability and documentation are really an extension of risk. So risk First, we want to appeal the buyers we want buyers look at this and say this is sustainable. What elements of your business will a buyer look at and say, Oh my gosh, that scares me because if this goes away, this business is done. Right? And maybe that’s just that you hit the market has not been on a market very long, and it’s just a matter of time before copycats are flooding the market and whittle away your revenue. So sustainability and timing there to make a big difference. Or maybe you have one manufacturer that you’re relying on, and they’re the only ones that can really manufacture this product, which gives you a ton of risk there. Right? And so these are things that we look at from a sustainability standpoint, or maybe you don’t have any sort of IP protection, intellectual property protection, you know, that would be risk. So what’s going to happen in your business that could undercut it and cause it to that the revenues just get crushed overnight? That’s a big consideration. The second pillar is growth. Right? So we’re looking at macro trends in your marketplace, like are you an industry that’s growing here? Or are you an industry that’s really a big fad? For example, few years ago, we had the great American Solar Eclipse and people that were selling solar eclipse classes did really well, totally unsolvable business, right? For obvious reasons. Unless they want to say that hey, this is like once every 10 year life cycle that we can Bitcoin because there’ll be another one coming up here soon. And there’s probably going to be a bunch of people selling glasses again, but good example of business that is not sellable. So growth or even an industry that we can tack on new products, are we an industry that’s naturally growing because they have good traction to it? And the more that you can speak to that growth, the better. And I want to caution people here, though, because it’s so easy to be like, Oh, my God, my business has called potential, it’s got a ton of growth potential. The secondary question, the immediate follow up that a buyer is going to ask is, okay, what do we have to do to unlock that potential? Right? And the more you have to do to unlock that potential, the less valuable it is, right? So the more real it is, the more immediate it is, the more valuable your company is going to be. Your trends for your business play a huge role in this. So if you’re currently growing like mad, and we can show that and point to that, that is something that we can look at and say this is this business is really growing right now. It’s growing 200% your year, and it’s been an industry that’s growing like crazy. That makes it really, really valuable. So growth, risk and growth. Those are the first two. And the third is transferability. This is an important one here. Do you have things like standard operating procedures in place? Do you have any contracts that are not going to transfer over? Like, is your manufacturer gonna be like, whoa, I’m already working with you as you bring somebody else and it’s, you know, the price goes up for them. Right? Or do you have your aunt out there? So it has that you’re selling on Amazon? Because that’s a problem, right? That that’s a speaks to transferability issues. And last will be documentation. And this is obviously we hit this one so hard because it’s 100% in your control, and it’s so often ignored. And now first bigger financials, do you are you keeping good records of your financials and do it properly as means do not on accrual basis, having an accurate, verifiable, separate from other businesses, and then you have all the documentation in place contracts that you may be assigned against standard operating procedures that you might have Or, you know, manuals, things like that these things all play a role in this. And they all set up this idea. And they all speak to this idea for a potential buyer of pay, I want to stroke a check for seven figures for your business. Am I going to see that money back within a reasonable period of time and most buyers are looking at a two to three year payback on that and be Am I going to be able to make more money than I actually put into this? Because if I don’t, why would I buy a business? If I’m not going to be money? Really, it comes down to that. So let

James Thomson 28:28
me ask you one final question for our discussion today. Share with me in you can disguise the client but share with me a particular client situation that particularly stands out for you as something where you were you were proud of the fact that you have this company. We’re proud of your employees. You realize you did something really good. It may not necessarily made you a ton of money. But But it all came together nicely. And you realize we got this week totally. We know what we’re doing and we have helped somebody create a good outcome here.

Mark Daoust 29:00
I mean, there’s there’s a number of those situations. I try and pick one, maybe two. One that pops off the top of my head was a guy who signed a certain type of sporting equipment. I’ll leave it at that. Yes. And if you had a good business, I mean, it was it was it was solid. It was. It wasn’t huge. It wasn’t like a you know about a six figure business in terms of its either. So bottom line earnings were it was about six figures. He was looking pretty comfortably, pretty well established, wasn’t going to go anywhere. He had another business that he was looking to get into. He had several partners that he had lined up, they had all invested in he went to go invest into the business by pulling a line from the bank, and the bank came back and said, You can’t pull line because you already have some debt with us. You need to pay this debt off. And so here he had this new opportunity, which was huge. I mean, it was it was going to dwarf what you currently have, and wanted to just we obviously wanted to get into this new business. He had a whole bunch of partners. waiting. It’s we had a pretty tight timeline to get sold. And we were able to package it up finding great buyer, that buyer got a great deal got great business, he was able to pay off that line of credit, move into his new business and do really well with a new business has a great situation for us. The other situations that really come to top of mind, frankly, the kind of the sad situations where you have somebody who has learned a terminal illness, or sometimes the other happy situation. So if somebody actually I’ll bring this up, we just profile this guy, by podcast recently, was a UK based amazon seller who was having his first baby and he wanted to take a couple years off to really get to know his baby, you know, and so it was a tricky sale on a lot of levels. And in the podcast episode we did we did we talked about just how many advisors we had on this deal because it was a UK based company. Like literally we did a sell side conference that I joined like you are the 13% of his call Mike, oh my gosh, this is insane. The number of people we have to get to work with this. But the team was awesome on that deal, we were able to get a good deal for him. And for the buyer, buyer, they’re working together really, really well. He’s able to take some time off, spend some time with his with his child. I mean, that’s really edifying to be able to bring somebody home in that sort of this situation. So I do love it when stuff like that happens when somebody has a great reason to sell and look. good reason to sell is usually not financial, not to say that you shouldn’t want or get as much as you can ensure in that’s why preparing like we’d be talking all the time. Don’t. Don’t decide, don’t wake up and decide one day I’m going to stop because they’re going to leave money on the table. plan to sell even if you don’t think you’re going to sell anytime soon. Still plan to sell but put the plan in place. So that if you do find yourself in a situation to someone day, then then you’re ready. Because life throws curveballs at you. You might have a new business opportunity you want to pursue you might have aside, I am done. And I want to travel the world for a few years. And that’s totally legitimate reason to say, I’m going to take this off play for a while I’m going to go do something different. never know what you’re going to do one, two or three years. So being in that position, makes a big difference and again, helps you maximize the value of what you could get from what might be the most valuable asset you all

James Thomson 32:20
mark. I want to thank you today for joining us on the white box experts podcast. For those of you are interested in learning more about Mark’s business, please go to www quiet light brokerage. com. Thank you all.

Unknown Speaker 32:36
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