The Growth-Drive Hot Seat

George Sandmann [00:00:02]:
Hi, this is George Sandman. I am the founder and CEO of Growth Drive and this is the business advisor Hot Seat. In the hot seat, you're going to hear from industry leaders and thought leaders as they share their victories and failures, building advisory businesses, helping you and your colleagues, and helping clients get the results they want. I'm also the author of the Growth Driving Advisor, proven strategies for leading businesses from stuck to best in class. And in this book we share a methodology and process for leading clients to growing profits and transferable value. It's available on Amazon and Kindle, and if you like it, please be sure to leave a positive review. In this episode we have as our guest John Brown of the Business Enterprise Institute, home of the certified exit Planner credential. And John is the man who invented exit planning, author of several books, and with a vast amount of experience helping both business owners and advisors get where they want to go, we're lucky to have them.

George Sandmann [00:01:12]:
So here we go. This episode is brought to you by Growth drive. Growth Drive is the number one bestselling business advising platform with training, technology and support you need to get the success you want, find and win new engagements, expand your reach and impact, and build a thriving advisory business based on delivering client wins growth drive. Find out more@growthdrive.com.

George Sandmann [00:01:43]:
Well, welcome, ladies and gentlemen. I'm excited. This week on the business Advisor Hot seat, we have Mr. John Brown of the Business Enterprise Institute on the hot seat. And welcome, John. It's great to see you.

John Brown [00:01:58]:
Great to see you again, George.

George Sandmann [00:02:00]:
Yeah, thanks. And John and I have been doing a lot of work together since we met, actually, at your conference in August, which I'll be back at this year for. Yeah, we, I think we were just chatting and we met when I pounced on the opportunity to be a guest on your podcast. And we had a great conversation. And actually that conversation led to more. We just kept the conversation going about, not just about exit planning, about all things value growth, transferable value. What's top of mind for you today? These days, I should say, well, what's.

John Brown [00:02:41]:
Top of mind with me today, since I'm doing a presentation tomorrow on this topic, is owner based planning. We have a training course tomorrow and the day following two three hour sessions on owner based planning. And that's for business advisors.

George Sandmann [00:03:04]:
Yeah.

John Brown [00:03:05]:
Can you tease that out a little.

George Sandmann [00:03:06]:
Bit, a little bit of color, of infomercial? I'm a huge fan of the owner based planning program. In fact, I participated in your inaugural.

John Brown [00:03:16]:
And you did just a swell job, George, I want you. Thank you it was great. No, it's fun. So Vei started as an exit planning entity and it's still very active. And today, in fact, I just did a session with our advanced training course in exit planning last week. So it's still very active. But exit planning focuses on growing value with the idea that the owner is going to exit. And so that's the focus of exit planning.

John Brown [00:03:52]:
Growing value, protecting value. But there's going to be an exit. So the design is for an exit. It might be to a third party, it might be to the kids, whatever. So a lot of the planning and implementation deals with the actual exiting of a business. Owner based planning is not that owner based planning is simply helping owners grow and protect business value and ensure the business continues. So it's not a focus on exit planning at all, but it's a focus on growing value and protecting value. And part of the inspiration for that, giving you all the credit you deserve, is your book.

John Brown [00:04:37]:
The first thank you few pages of your book. There's a survey, for example, of 50,000 ceos and owners, and one of the questions involved growing business value. And over 80% of the respondents knew that they had to grow value. And 50 or 60% were actively trying to grow value at that time. And only a small percentage were actually in the process of planning their exits. And even a smaller percentage of that, as you noted later on, actually would be capable of exiting their business. They just weren't prepared. So that really highlighted to me the fact that all owners are going to leave the business at some point.

John Brown [00:05:26]:
All owners are going to want to start planning the business at some point, but what they really need to do is to grow value.

George Sandmann [00:05:34]:
Yeah.

John Brown [00:05:38]:
If you'd done that survey 20 years ago, or you do it ten years from now, the percentages are going to be the same. Great majority of owners need to grow value.

George Sandmann [00:05:50]:
It's the ultimate measure of business success, right.

John Brown [00:05:52]:
It really is. And to be able to exit successfully, you have to have a business that can operate without the owner. So a lot of what we talk about, and you talk about as well in your program is the idea of creating transferable value, which means the ability of the business, at least in our definition, the ability of the business to maintain its income stream without the intervention of the owner. So the owner can retire, the owner can go away, the owner could die, perhaps, and the business will continue with minimal interruption. So what does that require? And I think that's what your organization does and that's what owner based planning does as well, is to develop the tools, the process to move the business forward in terms of growing value, but also protecting it. Also in our case, if something happens to the owner, if the owner dies, what happens to the business? And we included that in owner based planning because I've seen that happen when I practiced law for 30 years and in the process also starting and running Bei, we would see what happened when a business owner died. If it was a sole owner, usually the business did not continue because the owner was too important in the business. She hadn't created transferable value.

John Brown [00:07:23]:
And you can have the same scenario in a co owned business if one owner dies, unless provision has been made for continuing that business and not just transferring ownership in a buy sell agreement, but also making sure the cash flow continues, the management team stays and all of that. So that's what we do in Bei. And owner based planning is part of exaplanning in a sense, but it's a standalone entity. If you have clients who simply want to grow value or you recognize the need that they have to grow value, then owner based planning has the tools, the software, et cetera, to enable the advisor to do that.

George Sandmann [00:08:11]:
Yeah, it's fascinating. That's why you and I ended up, actually, you were gracious enough to come to our conference and you and I co presented on this exact topic because that's the intersection. When we talk about growing transferable value, we are talking about reducing owner dependence and making sure that, but a lot of business owners don't get. So, ladies and gentlemen, in case you don't know, John invented exit planning. I'm saying that with a smile on my face. I'm thrilled to be having this conversation with you. You're the first guy to describe it as such. Write a series of books to turn it into a training and then a credentialing program.

George Sandmann [00:08:49]:
Very highly respected, rigorous, and you have a huge community. You have impacted thousands and thousands and thousands of advisors and through them, and this is sort of our vision and mission as well. Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of businesses. And if you guys think about the impact that has on communities and real lives, it's profound. So, John, what you and I got into was, all right, we need to have an effective senior leadership team, and if we're going to have an effective senior leadership team, and I'll pull it out of the growth drive methodology and just put it in lay terms, what do we. And this is why I got so excited about earner based planning. Do you mind highlighting the types of retention and performance and behavior that owner based planning can kick start and reward.

John Brown [00:09:44]:
Yeah, I given a lot of thought to how our two approaches to helping owners do exactly that. Our goal is the same, but what our organizations actually do is quite different. So I view what our members do is provide incentives for performance, usually on the part of management, whether it's an incentive plan, whether it's a stock plan where we're going to include ownership again based upon the key people performing at some ever increasing level. So we provide that approach. You on the other hand, actually, I view it as digging into the middle of this business and figuring out what has to physically occur for the business to do what the owner wants it to do. So it's more than just incenting key people, it's more than just even attracting them. It's actually getting them to perform according to, well, growth drive methodology. And then putting that together with an incentive package, retention package, et cetera, to me is really an elegant solution for most owners.

George Sandmann [00:11:08]:
Absolutely. And so much more sophisticated than many advisors bring to the table. And I encourage our community members to participate and they are in this training, the one you're putting on tomorrow and periodically throughout the year, because you're talking about sophisticated tools that protect cash and, and I'll get on my soapbox a little bit. But you are creating deferred compensation incentive plans. You're talking about stay bonuses that may be colely funded, whether that's term insurance or whole life. You're talking about phantom stock or synthetic equity plans. All of which, by the way, protect the business's cash. And our methodology is the three dimensions of growth.

George Sandmann [00:12:05]:
And the first dimension, the launch pad for growth, the anchor, the most important thing is having predictable profits and cash flow, or predictable profitable cash flow. Care to comment on that, John?

John Brown [00:12:19]:
Yeah, you made me think of something else though, George, in that comment. That's all 100% accurate. But the other side of, in addition to incentive planning and owner based planning, we also focus on preventing damage from happening to the company, often caused by its employees. So when we have senior management, senior leadership providing an incentive plan, they're understanding what they need to do internally to grow value. We also want to make sure that should they leave, they cannot, they cannot take employees, they cannot take vendor relationships, they cannot take trade secrets, et cetera. So we combine the incentive side with also the protection side.

George Sandmann [00:13:13]:
Yeah, absolutely. That's what I mean about.

John Brown [00:13:15]:
I have seen, we're talking before we started this podcast, but the greatest learning experience for me in doing exit planning and owner based planning is the mistakes that owners make. And we come in afterwards trying to clean it up, and it doesn't happen. One would be not having employment agreements with your key people with non solicitation provisions. That's a mistake. They can leave. They can take all of the important customers, vendors, trade secrets of your business unless you take steps to protect it. So you combine that with incentive planning, and there's all kinds of other provisions one can take to protect the value of the company.

George Sandmann [00:14:09]:
You share a story about, if memory serves, about they weren't a construction, a manufacturing business, where I can see you just recognized the story and the guys left and what happened when their key employees left.

John Brown [00:14:28]:
Yeah, actually, I've got a lot of stories like that where the key employees left and the business shut down. But the one that's the most dramatic, I think, was when I was still practicing law. I was called in to represent a group of four owners who wanted to do some planning work, and they had a fantastic facility. It was a door framing and door construction business, and they had $15 million of revenue. They were making $3 million of EBITDA. And I asked them, I said, boy, how long have you guys had this business? It's wonderful. You could eat off the factory floor, it was so clean. They said, oh, we've had it for two and a half years.

John Brown [00:15:17]:
I said, what? How did you create this in two and a half years? He said, well, we were kind of the management at this much larger company just like ours, and we didn't think we were treated very well, so we left. And would you know that all of the major customers, the really good employees, they all came with us to the extent that the national company left Colorado had shut down, and they just got all the business overnight. That was an example of simply not protecting their most valuable asset, which is their key employees.

George Sandmann [00:15:57]:
Yeah, that's like an egregious example. Not egregious, happy ending, whatever. I always want to dig into culture. I'm sure there were some cultural issues of the national.

John Brown [00:16:08]:
Oh, yeah, I'm sure there were, because.

George Sandmann [00:16:11]:
When customers and employees leave the business like that in a chunk, they're not to blame.

John Brown [00:16:20]:
Yeah. And I think in this case that I cited, the ownership just wasn't involved. So there was nothing keeping these four bright, ambitious people from doing exactly what they did.

George Sandmann [00:16:35]:
It's interesting because if we do the right planning, we can have contracts that are kind of the stick and deferred comp. That's the carrot. It's like, listen, if I have a contract, and also you're not going to get paid so let's behave. When I mentioned behavior earlier, I love that. Like I said, I'm a huge fan of owner based planning of the conversation and one of the, so I'll just take a step back and talk about our two communities. Your community. How would you characterize the professions represented? Like what's the dominant professions represented in the BEI community?

John Brown [00:17:15]:
Yeah. Well, it's interesting. It's evolved over the years. Starting out, it was a lot of cpas and lawyers doing exit planning, but over time it's evolved to financial planning planners and insurance advisors. And I think there's a number of reasons for that, but one of the biggest reasons is, and that sounds like I'm beating on my old profession, but I think it's true, lawyers, by and large are not planning oriented.

George Sandmann [00:17:53]:
I'm an attorney.

John Brown [00:17:57]:
We have plenty of work to do. So we're just doing reactive type. We're reacting to a situation, correcting a situation for the most part. And the same with cpas. And cpas, their practices have changed a lot over the years to the point where most CPA firms, now that I see, are so busy doing financial reporting and tax returns, they're not doing any outbound tax planning and things like that. So one is that those professions aren't as active in farsighted planning. And secondly, financial advisors, insurance advisors are more planning oriented, and so they take more naturally to creating value. And again, obviously the financial insurance advisors can informally fund deferred compensation planning.

John Brown [00:18:50]:
When we talk about making sure the business continues, if the owner doesn't, that's clearly a lot of insurance needs in there. And I think through owner based planning, the insurance advisor sees much more opportunity than they thought was there. And the big example I like to give is sole owned businesses.

George Sandmann [00:19:12]:
Which are.

John Brown [00:19:13]:
Half of all companies. Half of the companies in this country with fewer than 100 employees are solely owned. Well, what happens if that owner dies? Yes, it's a problem. There's a lot of just the businesses collapse. The guarantees are called, the performance bond is called, and it's just a mess. And I've seen too many of those to be happy about it.

George Sandmann [00:19:37]:
This episode is brought to you by Growth drive. Growth Drive is the number one bestselling business advising platform. With training, technology and support you need to get the success you want, find and win new engagements, expand your reach and impact, and build a thriving advisory business based on delivering client wins. Growth drive. Find out more@growthdrive.com so now we have.

John Brown [00:20:03]:
Tools that can prevent that or can alleviate that in owner based planning as well as exit planning.

George Sandmann [00:20:11]:
You know, it's interesting, John, because I talk about make your business immortal, right? We need to help business owners understand that their business, they shouldn't view the business through the lens of their career, which may end here. The business needs to go on to greater glory. It needs to continue to grow going into the future, because if it doesn't, first of all, the business doesn't have value, transferable value. It's going to, at a minimum, have friction when they leave. At worst, cease doing business implosion. Yeah. Which has a profound impact on all of the stakeholders. The employees lose their jobs, the suppliers, the vendors, the distribution.

George Sandmann [00:20:49]:
The community that this business helps support takes a body blow. Now, when we talk about creating an immortal business, what you've just described is the intersection. It's collaborative accountability. If you imagine having a business advisor who has a client and he says, you know, let's talk about how to make sure what we've just discussed, right. Your senior leadership team is incented. That there's a carrot and a stick because they're going to have to do the extra work it takes to grow the business. Let's make sure there's a. What's in it for them? That, oh, by the way, it's what's in it for them.

George Sandmann [00:21:29]:
It protects cash and is accretive to value. And we're talking about, in its most simple term, insurance that will make sure that the business is in fact immortal. That if the owner has to leave the business for some reason, 50% of exits, right? 50% of exits are not voluntary, they're not planned. So now if we talk about collaborative accountability, you have a business advisor who can bring in a personal advisor, an insurance or wealth advisor to do the planning. To do. Okay, well, Ria has attorneys that can do a non qualified deferred comp plan. They can do the tax planning, they can write the insurance, et cetera. It's a terrific collaboration.

George Sandmann [00:22:17]:
I hate the word referral. Collaboration between two pros. That is incredibly good for the.

John Brown [00:22:27]:
Make me. You've caused me to think about one of the very few quotations I can remember, and it's from a guy by the name of Peter Drucker.

George Sandmann [00:22:37]:
I may have heard of him.

John Brown [00:22:39]:
Yes, you may have heard. Probably the most famous business consultant of all time. He made a statement in one of his books that said, you need to hire top management before you can afford them. So his point was really, it boils down to having the best possible management well trained, well incented. And by doing that, we can create what we started to call transferable value.

George Sandmann [00:23:13]:
Yeah.

John Brown [00:23:14]:
So things all kind of center around the ability of that management team. And I've seen businesses where there was a successful business making a million dollars of EBITDA a year or more, but it was because of the owner.

George Sandmann [00:23:29]:
Yeah.

John Brown [00:23:30]:
And if the owner tried to sell, he couldn't sell it because no buyer would want to buy it without the owners remaining indefinitely. So that's a real problem. Or the owner dies and the business collapses. It's just so important to develop that management team if you want to grow the business.

George Sandmann [00:23:53]:
Yeah, absolutely. And you never know. Unfortunately, life comes at you fast, and we all have stories. I could tell a personal story about. You wake up one morning and your world has turned on its axis. And with all the best intentions in the world, you may not be able to go and work in your business. And what happens then? And as planners, so strategic planning, I believe, deeply needs to consider the human factor, and that's where owner based planning is so effective.

John Brown [00:24:30]:
So, George, where would your advisors that you train and support? How do they fit into this picture that we're talking about? When do they begin that relationship?

George Sandmann [00:24:44]:
I want to make sure I answer the correct question. When you say that relationship, what are you getting at?

John Brown [00:24:50]:
Specifically, the planning relationship with the business owner.

George Sandmann [00:24:54]:
Yeah, when we train people, what I recommend, we're not a franchise. You can do whatever you want. But what we train on is to say, listen, your first conversation, you're doing a couple of things. First of all, you're qualifying your client if you're a business advisor. And we work with everything from wealth advisors who just want to create awareness and start to educate the client through fractional cxos, right. Most of our community, the middle of the Bell curve, there is people who are the architects. They're creating the plan, and the general contractors who are turning that plan into reality. General contractors don't have a hammer.

George Sandmann [00:25:34]:
Right? They have a phone. Architects and general contractors. And what we train on, John, is to say, listen, you're going to want to qualify clients. If you're going to want to be the architect and the general contractor, you can't work with. Just because someone has a pulse and owns a business does not mean they're a good client. We start with a growth conversation, and that growth conversation is, and I've said it 100 times, is sort of an exit planning conversation because we're saying, listen, where does this lead? Where does this go? How does your story play out? And how is your business positioned to be an ingredient of that story. If you would like to take your husband and move to a villa in Tuscany. Fantastic.

George Sandmann [00:26:19]:
The business is going to have to deliver that cash. How will the business get there? So we start with a conversation. Before we even get into our clarity software, we want to have a conversation about where are you going, what are your dreams, what are your financial aspirations for yourself and for your stakeholders? And are you the type of person with whom I think I can work long term? How do we start with execution? Start with the end in mind. I think that's also Peter Drucker. Start with execution in mind. So we start there and we try to create a strategic plan that aligns personal goals and professional goals at the same point on the horizon. And at that point, you don't have to do something. What we want to make sure is you have, as a business owner, you have options here.

George Sandmann [00:27:09]:
By doing this work and getting to this .5 years hence, you could sell the business to a third party. You could continue doing what you're doing. Just keep on keeping on, keep on. Continue to take cash out of the business to fund your portfolio. Great. You could sell it to management. What would that look like? You could gift it to your child or otherwise transfer it to the next generation. You could be doing it.

George Sandmann [00:27:36]:
An ESOP. Love esops. There are a bunch of things we can do. How do we create those options at that point on the horizon? Did I answer your question?

John Brown [00:27:46]:
Yes, you did. Talk though a little bit about you really emphasized the importance of senior, you call it senior leadership. I like that term, by the way.

George Sandmann [00:27:57]:
Thank you.

John Brown [00:27:59]:
Did you come up with that term?

George Sandmann [00:28:01]:
Well, senior leadership team has kind of become a phrase. I hate the term management. I don't like manage. I do love lead. So that's why I really have wrapped. Thank you.

John Brown [00:28:16]:
So you emphasize that. How do you work with a business owner in discussing the role of senior leadership and how might you, I guess, include in that discussion some of the incentive planning and other tools that we use in order based planning.

George Sandmann [00:28:39]:
Sure.

John Brown [00:28:39]:
Kind of wrap this be a nice little wrapped present all the elements.

George Sandmann [00:28:46]:
Exactly. Well, we start act one, scene one in the growth drive methodology, the three dimensions of growth. Right. Is the first dimension is predictable profits and cash flow. And the first thing on which we focus is effective senior leadership team. And we want to help the owner understand the power, the transformative power and the immortality that they create when they have an effective senior leadership team. What is an effective senior leadership team? Well, that they get along as a nice to have. It really is nice.

George Sandmann [00:29:23]:
Right. To come into work, to work with people you like and care about. That's great. That's not a must have, right? Read Abraham Lincoln's team of rivals. They are going to have people who hate each other and are still an incredibly effective leadership team. So when we start talking, the first question in our inquiry is, well, listen, as the owner, let's just say one shareholder, keep it simple. Have you defined a goal for the business? That can be a revenue goal. It can be a value goal.

George Sandmann [00:29:54]:
It can be a number of different goals. Have you defined a goal for the business that's time bound? And have you communicated that to your senior leadership team? So right away we're getting into are you willing to be transparent and vulnerable with your senior leadership team? Because if you're not, here's a qualification question that I'm putting an x in. You're not getting a check mark. And I would be saying that's kind of a warning flag, but let's say they are. Well, if you were going to have a time about, I need the business to deliver $20 million in assets to me in five years. Terrific. Have you told your senior leadership team? Yes. What's in it for them? That's the next question, right.

George Sandmann [00:30:37]:
If they are going to be aligned with and accountable to that goal, we can either take a totalitarian approach because I pay you, Dagnab, and my name's on your check, get back to work. Or you know what, John? I'm going to give you phantom stock in the business. I'm going to make sure now at the end of the year, I don't want to be writing big checks out of cash. Non qualified deferred comp. There are a number of different ways to approach this. Those come out of owner based planning, how to have that conversation and the tools to use and importantly, the relationships to have. I'm not saying that our guys should become insurance salespeople. No.

George Sandmann [00:31:18]:
Have a relationship with them. Or as you approach a personal advisor, wealth insurance advisor, have a conversation that says, listen, here's what's in it for you. I want to collaborate with you. We train our people. Again, it's not a franchise, I don't put a gun to their head, but we train our people that, listen, if you're going to collaborate with. If I were to meet you as an insurance advisor, you have a Rolodex full of business owning clients. That's, hey, listen, John, do you have clients who have 3 million or more of gross annual revenues? Sure I do. Okay.

George Sandmann [00:31:55]:
I'm going to propose that we sit down with some subset of those and let's do a trial run. In fact, you and I can do it face to face without anyone else in the room. But I want to sit down with a business owner, and I'm going to lead a conversation in which I'm going to increase your relevance to an impact on the value of the business over the long term. Your relevance to an impact on protecting cash flow over the long term. Creating an immortal business over the long term. And when I work with you, John, I am going to cc you on the emails. You're going to know about meetings before they occur. I'm going to keep you briefed on an ongoing basis about what's going on in the business.

George Sandmann [00:32:39]:
And that's how I work, because I want to have a collaborative and accountable relationship with you as we work together, because these are complementary professional goals as we work together to get the client to. Let's make it easy, a successful transfer of value, a recapitalization to a third party, et cetera. Did I answer your question?

John Brown [00:33:02]:
Yeah, I think so.

George Sandmann [00:33:04]:
Okay.

John Brown [00:33:08]:
You really want to partner, in a sense, with that other advisor, and you help them grow value, and they then do what they do, whatever their profession.

George Sandmann [00:33:19]:
Is, makes a lot. And you mentioned it, and I believe. What do we see? We see Morgan Stanley, UBS, Raymond James, mass mutual. Very close. We have a very close relationship with mass mutual. We see these large financial services institution, insurance services and product institutions getting involved in the businesses. Why? Well, because they want to be relevant and they should be. Right? This is at the transaction so that they help their clients maximize their value, so that they get away from what used to happen.

George Sandmann [00:34:00]:
Which would be, I'm writing a financial plan for you and say, hey, John, what's your business worth? 26 million. 26 million into the plan and you and I are smiling, but that's literally what was done. Oh, 26 million. How do you know that? Oh, I had evaluation done when I did my buy sell agreement. Oh, great. Ladies and gentlemen, we don't have enough time to talk about that, but, yeah, we want to make sure that everyone growing a business and exiting a business is a team sport. No one can do it alone. Having and perhaps the most natural.

George Sandmann [00:34:41]:
There are four people. Four horsemen of the apocalypse at the table. We need a strategic doer, strategic planning and doing. We need an attorney. We need an accountant. And the right attorney. And the right accountant. And we need a wealth and insurance person.

George Sandmann [00:34:57]:
And if you think about those four, I know there are other folks that. But if we're going to approach a transaction. We. Absolutely. In the run up to that transaction, those four pros need to be at the table. Do you agree with that?

John Brown [00:35:12]:
Yeah, I think in a longer term relationship over years, you will tend to include more advisors, professionals.

George Sandmann [00:35:23]:
Absolutely.

John Brown [00:35:24]:
But the core would be the insurance, financial advisor, CPA lawyer, and the growth advisor.

George Sandmann [00:35:33]:
And what we're hitting on here, you and I, is sort of to toot our own horns, but we're talking about a more sophisticated level of strategic planning and strategic growth execution than you're going to get from an EOS implementer or from a gazelle or know, frankly, from some of the best of the best, the pinnacle guys. Great people. Right. These are all good, consummate professionals. We are simply bringing a higher level of game to the table that applies to businesses. When we get past that two and a half, $3 million gross revenue threshold, it applies especially well to those businesses. And it sure is fun. And it delivers a lot of good.

George Sandmann [00:36:22]:
Delivers a lot of good.

John Brown [00:36:24]:
Yeah, I agree.

George Sandmann [00:36:25]:
John, we've been chatting. Hard to believe. We've been chatting for a half hour now. This is how our conversations go. Right. We're on a if. In closing, if I might ask you just one question, and I'd love to get your perspective. What is one thing that you think that either a business advisor or a CEO should know? What's the one thing they should know.

John Brown [00:36:57]:
About a business owner or the business or how to plan?

George Sandmann [00:37:02]:
Exactly. If you just met, like, listen, if there's one thing I can tell you, let's focus on business advisors. There's one piece of wisdom I can share with you. It would be.

John Brown [00:37:16]:
That'S good. I can't think of just one thing that I would want to know about a business or I'd want to know a lot of things.

George Sandmann [00:37:31]:
Okay.

John Brown [00:37:33]:
I suppose the biggest difficulty or shortcoming that advisors create for themselves is they try to jump to a solution too soon. The life insurance guy is trying to sell life insurance. The estate planner is trying to develop an estate plan without really knowing enough about the owner's family and the owner's goals. It's because I have a hammer, George, and you're the nail. Right. Saying, but that's the biggest problem. They end up shooting themselves in the foot when they do that because the owner is not going to go for that. So we have to offer value.

John Brown [00:38:22]:
We have to show how we can help the owner with his issue.

George Sandmann [00:38:27]:
Yeah.

John Brown [00:38:28]:
Not our solution. And I think that's the biggest problem that I see. And there's a saying that if I can just remember it. In order to represent somebody, a business owner, you have to show them that they have an issue that you can solve. If you can't do that, then you're not going to get a client. So that's not by telling them they need life insurance or they need an estate plan. It's finding out what in the heck they need. And it may have nothing to do with your profession initially.

George Sandmann [00:39:04]:
And by the. And what's more honest than saying, you know what, that's not something without checking help you. You should talk to John Brown. I absolutely love that answer, John, for a couple of reasons. One is now we're approaching the conversation with true deep listening. Right. We're listening to hear the client. We're not listening for a dog whistle to pounce on with strategic planning.

John Brown [00:39:31]:
Right.

George Sandmann [00:39:32]:
We're listening.

John Brown [00:39:33]:
I like that dog whistle metaphor, though, I have to say.

George Sandmann [00:39:36]:
Well, we do. I met Kevin Knebel kn at your conference last year, participated in a day long workshop. Kevin has a great saying and we should all remember it. Don't show up with commission breath. Don't show up with commission breath. If you're going to sit down and have a conversation with a business owner, do not show up with commission breath because they can smell it and it is not attractive.

John Brown [00:40:02]:
Show up and be worried that that's going to be the first thing that comes out of somebody's mouth is how they can solve their problems with just this one product or whatever it is. Yeah, that's what we want to grow and growth drive. It's a long engagement. It might be years of working with a business owner or helping them solve all kinds of issues, some of which your profession can resolve and many of which it can't. And that's the reason really then to develop this team of advisors that you talked about. We have a recommendation called a business roundtable. We help our members, whether owner base planners or exit planners, create a team of advisors. You mentioned there's three or four to begin with, but as you become more experienced and do more work, you're going to be adding other advisors.

John Brown [00:41:02]:
Investment bankers, business brokers, search firms for key employees. All of those will be part of the tool chest that you have available to help a business owner. Most of those tools are not going to benefit the exit planner or the owner base planner or the growth drive planner directly. They're going to help the.

George Sandmann [00:41:26]:
Absolutely, absolutely.

John Brown [00:41:28]:
And that's what we try to create, what we like to say. That's why we plan, that's why we.

George Sandmann [00:41:36]:
Pay I know that's your tagline. I love it. Awesome. John, listen, thank you very much. This is a fun conversation. It's been a. Yeah. And there will be.

John Brown [00:41:51]:
Well, does that exceed your length of your.

George Sandmann [00:41:57]:
It's all. I'm going to stop the recording and.

George Sandmann [00:42:01]:
Hi, this is George. Thanks for listening.

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