The Growth-Drive Hot Seat

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Well, welcome, ladies and gentlemen. Excited to have you back here in the advisor hot seat. This is a chance for us to really get down and as we say, get naked about the things that senior professionals see inside their engagements. And today my guest is Anna Halliburta. Anna, welcome. Thank you, George. It's great to be here today. Awesome. Anna and I have worked together for a long time and we've become very good friends. And so we will try not to wax into the irreverent, but we might.

And Anna is a, you know, when I first met you, right, you had Triumph. And then you created and are growing Be Ready Exits. And you want to talk about, probably not, you know, a brief description of Triumph so people can place you in the stratosphere, a little bit on your background, and then, you know, why you started Be Ready and where you're trying to take it. And then we'll get into, you know, the things we see in client engagements. Sound like a plan?

It's a plan, George, thank you. All right, I'll just jump right in. Let me give my background first. I am a CPA for over 40 years. I've been a CFP certified financial planner. I got that 86. At the time they had a pilot program going on at the Florida Atlantic University. And after I went through my...

in class training for the CFP exam. They asked me to come back and teach the tax section, which I did for three or four years as an adjunct professor at FAU. So I've had many iterations of my professional life and what George was talking about was one of the latest and that's Triumph

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mimics a full-blown CPA firm, but we specifically did not name it CPA firm. We named it Business Services because we were entrepreneurs, my co-founder, Cousteau Avalos and I, co-founded Triumph Business Services, and it was geared towards advising business owners. Everything from how to structure the best structure for your business,

Obviously, tax planning, how to actually run a business, what the different phases of business growth were, because we're entrepreneurs. We've been kicked to the curb a couple of times going out, trying to figure for ourselves, like many business advisors. And that has grown. We have clients literally worldwide on that.

We are in the process of expanding that couple of ventures outside of the US. So we do have a few things. We now have two additional partners. So we have grown the business. So yes, we do know how to grow professional service businesses. Well, about six, eight years ago, I.

started to understand that when it came to business advisory, exit planning was key and critical there. And what exit planning does really is it focuses the business owners' attention on not only growing the business and the day-to-day minutia that business owners get into. What it really does is it says, all right, here's where your starting point is.

let's talk about where you want to park this train. It's, first it was just an engine and a coal car, and then you got some baggage compartments and other things. So with your business exit, how do you grow that? And the more I worked in the exit planning industry, and I did go through the IEPA exit planning training.

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which I feel is the premier exit planning education and services organization out there and shameless promotion for the IEPA there. And so I started to understand that a lot of the other business advisors that I worked with really were cards close to the vest.

they were afraid to share too much. And if it's our clients, that's one thing. But if it's another advisor's clients whose client needs that kind of help, then they're worried about, if they're another accounting firm, are we gonna steal the business from whoever referring it in?

And is that is that the Reddy's mantra is really we collaborate and we're not here to steal your lunch money? That's exactly what it is. And we do one on one client engagements. But what we also specialize in is the collaboration with other professionals such as CTAs, attorneys, financial planners, money managers, insurance professionals, you know, whomever is out there advising clients on.

within their own siloed specialty. Most of these do not have the experience to advise a client or the training on how to figure out where they're starting from, what the value of their business is, what it needs to be when they exit, whether that's retire, go on to the next big business project, whatever that looks like. And...

is that going to be enough money because most businesses are the largest single asset. So in working and collaborating with other business advisors, our goal is to protect their relationship. There's no hornet any matter than a money manager who's dealt with a business owner for 15, 20 years.

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and have gone through the hard times and have collected a thousand, three thousand, five thousand, ten thousand dollars a year in fees and commissions from providing key services to that business owner only to have the liquidity event when the business owner sells and some exit planner or M&A professional comes in and says, oh, you know, that's just a small shop. I've got somebody you should be talking with.

So they refer it out and the big liquidity event, let's say their payday comes along and all of a sudden they're cut out of the loop. Well, the Be Ready business model is to protect and build that relationship. Part of it is the Be Ready team. We educate and train the other advisor as we go through the process. I'm not gonna teach them to do my job, but I am gonna teach them the concepts

and the path forward so that they can be a good participant in the exit planning process and their role they can be as involved in there within their own silo as they need or want to be, or they can be a cheerleader on the sides, the business owner's best friend to help them through the process. You know, yeah, because there's a lot of emotion in the process as well.

Yeah, and I'm hoping to have, we have a future guest. We're gonna get into that. She's probably the worldwide expert on this issue. So Anna, you know what I love is, and this is one of the reasons you and I become such good friends, you know, a referral is kind of a dirty word, right? And you seem to, your business model recognizes that. This is about collaboration, which is, I know it's a hackneyed term, but this is about, hey, you know, we are working together.

for the benefit of the client, we're each going to get our equitable participation in the good we're delivering. That's capitalism, that's great. But I think you're saying, and I've seen you do it, we respect and honor your role and we support you. And we wanna make sure that you meet your business advisory needs as well. Can you share how that's played out in an engagement?

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Absolutely. And I go back to about 2012, 13, 14. I'm at an ESOP seminar downtown Denver, and everybody's sitting in this huge room. And during breaks and on lunch, you know, we pair off into different groups or go off into different groups and talk. And I start talking about business exit planning. And I'm approached

by a gal who her and I have become good friends at this point. And she says to me, you know, I've got a client and he is looking to sell his business. He's done a lot of work on it, but you know, I'm really kind of struggling to figure out how he can leave his business and walk away from it with enough money to live.

So this actually gets into a different story that I've told once or twice before. And this gal's name, and is it okay to mention her name? Sure, sure, absolutely. Alicia Firestone, what a wonderful name. I love her name. Absolutely. But she's an LPL advisor. She does financial planning, money under management. And so she said, would you step in?

meet with a client, take a look at it. So I did that, I met with a client and we all got along. And so I brought them to market, you know, and Nalisha's looking for that liquidity event out there. So I brought them to market and we got all the way to about a week before the closing. And this was back in 2016. And so.

you know, we've got the LOIs in place and we're ready to go. And in the latest update of the contract, it was disclosed that they were going to change the name of the business day one. Now, let's look at some of the emotional backstory here that I found out working with this client. Client and his wife had been married for quite some time. What was his reaction to the fact that they were gonna change the name?

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He walked away from the deal. Boy. All right, so they were offering 10X when at that, you know, 10 times earnings when at that time three and 4X was normal, not only for the business environment, the economy at that time, but also within his industry, within the geographic setting of Front Range, Colorado.

This man could have just retired, not worried about anything else. But the problem was, uh, he and his wife could never have children. The business was his legacy, his baby. So he walked away from it so that he could find somebody to take over the, the business by the business that would retain his legacy. And so we did a complete about face.

And I found a different deal structure form, which is something I call the Structured Stock Redemption Plan, an SSRP. And, you know, not everybody understands that particular exit strategy. But it took us another two years to find the appropriate individual to come in and take over

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We did the contracts, everything got in place. And so it's a number of years later, everybody's happy and satisfied. Nalisha retained the client over the years. The client moved out of state and kind of rolled off into the Arizona sunset.

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It's interesting the things that can blow up a deal when you're at the altar. And sometimes it's like that. It's an, oh, by the way, oh, by the way. That's fascinating. And you ended up with a very happy collaboration partner, right? Happy collaboration partner. It's so important.

When we're doing this business advising, whether you're... And I know you work on, we talked about triumph, you work on growing profits and making the purposeful link between profits and transferable value. This ends up being a team exercise, right? This is not... Let's talk for a sec, Anna, about that concept and about how...

Why do we get along so well? Why do we work together? What do you get out of the work we do together? Because having an echo chamber is one thing, having access to a platform is another. Well, one of the things that any advisor challenges advisors face as they go out to do their job.

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with business advisors. And I've collaborated with business advisors over the years. I've had them as clients over the years. Sure. And one of the, you know, mantras in the advisory business is you want something that's wash, rinse, and repeat, but most advisors don't have, you know, a tool, a platform to do it. So they're recreating.

in engagement every time they go through and get a new engagement, a new client, unless their scope is so very, very narrow, such as, all right, I'm a money manager. I want your 401k money. So that's a very narrow conversation. But if somebody's collaborating or advising a business owner, the dynamics there are

huge. When we talk about business drivers, and so most of the advisors find a tool or three or four that they love, but what they're tasked is getting what they can out of one tool and taking that piece that they like, that they understand, that they can apply to their client, coupling that up

another system and take out of that what's good until they find something that works best for them. And up until recently, when the technology has caught up to business advisory services, but when we specifically start looking at not the narrow business advisory services, but the broader consulting on growing the value of the business, you need to look at all of the business drivers.

There is not an easy to use, predictable outcome platform until recently. Now there's, and I have used many tools and I've got my own tool bag. Yeah, absolutely. I learn a ton from you, yep. And so, like for instance, there's one tool that I love. It's,

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Excel based, it's called Profit Sense. What a wonderful tool. But it has a wide narrow, if that makes any sense, range of application. And in order to get all of the benefit of using the tool, you've got to spend some time using the tool. So when- And for clients, it's not written in CEOEs.

So you sit down with Profit Sense with a client, and if they're not in that slim minority, that is very numbers-centric, they tend to be much more visionary and operational. You sit down with Profit Sense and we all see the client's eyes glaze over, right? Sorry to interrupt. Go ahead. Yeah. And Profit Sense was written for the advisor to have the information.

to communicate that to the client. It does produce great reports, but you have to sit there and walk through the reports with the client and explain to them why that is a valuable tool. What is the information that they're receiving from that tool? And then start to get them to say, all right, well, how can I learn, change?

what I'm doing, change my habits, change my operations in order to grow the value. So a lot of that historically has rested on the skill set of the business advisor. Yeah, because ProfitSense doesn't show you the levers, right? It shows you the numbers to work on for sure, but it doesn't show you the levers to pull inside the business to generate a predictable outcome. Correct. So, and it does a good job. And that's

That's a tool in my toolbox. You know, it's, you know, let's call it the hammer, but if I was a roofer, I want a fricking nail gun or a, you know, bang, bang. I want my guilty. Yeah, you bet. So, but which is why when you develop growth drive and clarity, you developed it as a platform and not a tool.

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And I'm fortunate enough. This is not a paid promotion, ladies and gentlemen, by the way, but thank you, Anna. Well, because you and I have been friends for a while and have worked on engagements, I got to see behind the curtain a bit. I was gonna say behind the kimono, but let's cut that one out. No, and you know, and those of you listening, I call Anna,

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We pick the brains of senior professionals, right? And say, okay, what are you using? What are we seeing? And we get a consensus, and then we could take that back into the lab, into the skunkworks. And so, which is why, I think the point that I'm anticipating you're gonna make, in fact, I'll shut up and let you make the point. Go ahead. That your platform, and let's...

differentiate what a platform is to what a system is. You have both training and software that between the two, and let me give you the, I'm gonna steal this from you, the third leg of the stool, you have the collaboration from people who are.

business advisors in the industry that understand and know your technology. So there's also a community out there, which is in my mind is extremely important. Yeah. So that if somebody says, okay, you know, I'm a business advisor and I want my job to be easier. I'm really good at what I do. You know, but I don't want to, you know, create an

whole new set of Excel spreadsheets or customize them. You want something out there that does that part for you. But not only that, it gives you additional insights and actions to take that the advisor can either follow or not. Yes. But from what I've seen, those are the...

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best in class actions to address how do you build the value? How do you build recurring revenues and profits? How do you build the recurring cash flow? And when you change something in the business and this might be, I probably got this either from talking with you or from your book, Growth Drive, that

When you change one thing in the business, it is not out there as a standalone thing. If you increase sales, you need to make sure you have the infrastructure to handle the increased sales. So the... In a way that delights the customer. Yeah. It's all... Instead of makes their life harder, it delights the client. It delights the customer so that...

Yeah, you can sell more, but you know, your delivery time, you know, went from 10 days to 60 days. That's not a happy happenstance. No, that's right. That's exactly right. You know, and so when under the be ready moniker, when I look at collaborating with other advisors, you also need a platform under which the other advisor

who does not have your background, your training, they can understand the process as well as the owner understanding the process so that they're not there on a separate call after you get done engaging with a client for a day or a week, you know, having a private conversation saying, yeah, you know, I'm not sure that gal, you know, seems to know what she's talking about, but that doesn't seem right to me. You know, you take away that

a pushback from the other advisor because if they don't understand the process, if they can't see where you're leading the client's business, they will often, if they don't know it, they get scared. Voodoo, right? It creates voodoo. I completely agree. And that's the delta between a qualitative, right? And you're describing a qualitative experience and a...

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quantitative experience. And we're, you know, we're, we have ladies and gentlemen, we're, we're quants, right? We love to quantify, to measure, and to do it in ways with numbers that, some of which are related to, have dollar signs in front of them, many of which are operational, operational metrics. And what's cool, and...

So you've used, so when you use the three dimensions of growth, for example, with the methodology with another advisor, so we take a wealth planner who has this much experience. I mean, they typically have grown a business, right, their own, but they've never run a manufacturing company, you know, what have you, a company that's similar to the clients.

When you have a common framework, it's something that's easy to approach for the advisors and for the business owners. What's your experience been in terms of gaining, you know, gaining momentum and helping to start to deliver change?

One of the things I really try to do is I have a variety of, and I call them introductory tools. Some of these are the level one in clarity. Some of these are surveys from like the IEPA. And some of these are from my own experience as an advisor.

Yeah, you have a terrific quick value gut check on your website. Yeah. The veracity of the financials. So what I always recommend is for the referring advisor to take the survey and the level one of clarity themselves.

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because another advisor will not be able to understand the output unless they have their own input and see what the output is to see if it's real or not. And that's a secondary sales process that I go through because I need the advisor to understand what I'm doing.

and to understand the information the client is getting and just how impactful it is. Sure. And that's really twofold because the, here I am giving you the special sauce here. The recipe to my special sauce is that if, say I've got another advisor out there, almost doesn't matter what discipline they're in. And they take the surveys.

and they understand it, usually by the end of the engagement, I will say, would you like to do this for your own business? Interesting. So if I could get the other advisor to get their business more valuable, running better, them making more money, have it be easier for them to make the money they're making? Yep. All right, so even if they refer me,

one or two or three more clients, but they may become a client as well because they need what this type of advisor is offering them. They need to eat their own cooking. You know, they would eat our own dog food. Absolutely. You know, it's interesting. I'll tell a quick war story. These concepts are

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You take a, the CPA firm was looking at themselves and saying, listen, why is our tax practice struggling so badly? And they applied some discipline, some concepts that you'll find in the book. They ended up selling their entire firm to a top, let's just say top 10 without giving it away, but firmly in the top 10 of US accounting firms because they had made it such a well-run machine.

And I can tell you that the managing partner of the firm became a friend for life, big fan. Yeah, so helping them understand. So Anna, if I understand you correctly, you're saying that you sit down with, let's say a wealth advisor, right? And they're running an advisory business with support staff, with goals, with all the things that have marketing and sales and all the things that come along with it.

You're saying, okay, yeah, I'm working with this client and we may work with several and I think that's a pretty common experience for you. Right, they get, they start getting some traction, they're gonna open up their Rolodex, but you're pivoting and saying, hey, what about you? Are you ready to run the marathon? That's fascinating. I did not know that by the way. Thanks for sharing the secret sauce. As a case in point, several weeks ago,

There was a lady, I was out to dinner. You're not just out to lunch. Oh yeah. Sometimes I am, but I was out catching an early dinner. I was out seeing clients and I said, all right, so I'm going to stop. And there's this lady sitting next to me and she's got her laptop open and she's having dinner. Turns out she was waiting for her daughter to get done with hockey practice at a rink close by. Been there.

And so we started talking and she's a business advisor to the medical profession here in the Front Range area. And the more we spoke, the more we found we had in common. So I said, great, you know, let's keep in touch. You know, we traded cards. I sent her an email. Great to meet you. And then

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couple weeks ago, we finally connected. And she said, I'm holding a symposium for the medical field. Let's talk about how you might fit into it. You know, it's, it's going to be pre recorded, because it's hard to get doctors in a room. And so by the end of an hour and a half conversation, and our conversation was scheduled for 30 minutes, she said,

You're on. And so I'll be speaking at this symposium in April. But I said, take the surveys. So I believe that she is going to become a wonderful collaboration partner because I'd love to work with this gal. I really would. She's smart. She's bright. We talk the same language. But she has her niche.

And so I can see us working together. And that's from a conversation. I was tired, she was tired. Yeah, you never know, right? You're one chance in counter away from a tremendous relationship. And that's true of so many things in life. You know, one of the things that you've said that really resonates is this concept of a platform. And that's something that, you know, candidly, you and I talk, you and I have been talking.

about business advising systems, business advising platforms. And what we have here is a platform. How do we plug in? We have a platform that interacts. Oh, by the way, that interacts with outside. Can't solve all the world's problems. We interact with outside systems like ProfitSense to better help the client.

Yeah, you know, it's interesting platform and collaboration are, you know, joined at the hip and George and you know, because this is a conversation that our community will be listening to the other and because of the be ready business model is geared to collaborate with other professionals.

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I don't know everything, I'm the first to admit it. There are people out there that have strengths and weaknesses, but understanding how you, for, one step back, for a business advisor to understand how they got to where they're at, that's important. And that's important to me as a collaborator. So if you collaborate with somebody,

How did they get to that point in their business advisory services? When I went to university, there wasn't a college course called consulting. No, there still isn't, right? Not to my knowledge, but... There are plenty of MBAs who would argue with that, but you're right. You're right. And so most of the middle market, lower middle market advisors...

have either come up because they've started and grown a business in a particular industry, maybe one or two. And they've been successful and then been able to really monetize what they've done. And maybe it's because they have a process. Maybe it's because they have.

a knack in intuition of making the right moves. You know, like maybe it is one of the MBAs out there. Sure. So, you know, they've done it through experience as I like to pick up the old term, the school of hard knocks, and they go out there and they'd see other business owners struggling and they want to help them. I've got one client, he's a client of my partners at Triumph.

and he comes to me for business advisory skills. So he has started to advise other small businesses in his industry, how he got profitable, how he grew his business. Sure, sure, heck of a legacy, right? To share that out with the world. Oh, absolutely. So that's one way to get into a business advisory. Another one is that you've worked your way up, you've sat in the COO, the CFO, the CEO.

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seats. And you know how to run a certain size business in a certain industry in a certain location and you can duplicate that. So you have a narrow focus on who your business owners are. You know, like whether it's in medicine or whether it's in transportation. So they're

delivering what they deliver. And then you have people who are specialists in one area who are called into an advisory engagement to do things like marketing, websites, whatever that looks like. Which I say with all affection and respect, wrench turners, right? These are people who have specialty expertise and we need to bring them in. And as business advisor, you don't, I mean, you do happen to know a lot about

these aspects, but you're not a marketing professional, right? You're not a CMO. You're not, but you, here's the thing, and this is a key. You bring in, you help your clients see where outside expertise could help them break through a logjam, could help them make their processes better, grow more quickly. And that is incredibly valuable. Yeah. And, you know, we've been chatting for a few minutes here, about a half hour.

So unfortunately, we're going to have to wrap this up, which makes me sad. Uh, our conversations, ladies and gentlemen, sometimes go into the two hours, uh, free form, but we'll, uh, we'll keep, we'll stay on desk today. If there's one thing, if there were one thing, right? Piece of advice, admonition, warning, uh, suggestion for clients, advisors, the market. What would that be? Do you think? Put you on the spot.

Well, you know, and I'm just falling back on the Be Ready business model right now. The collaboration part of it is that whenever you find a new tool, test it out on yourself in your own practice first, run your own numbers through it. That's the only way you will understand, but more importantly, trust the output of the tool.

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and how to apply it. And then if you are advising a client that, you know, your business is too dependent upon the owner, if the business is a hundred percent dependent upon you, then you need to put best practices in place within your own practice in order to deliver that, you know, do it by example, not by,

You know, do what I say, not do what I do. Sure, no, eat your own dog food. Yeah. Eat your own dog food. You absolutely have to do it. Yeah. And then, you know, one of the things that I've learned is that if you don't know the answer to a question, it's easy to say, I don't know, but we can find out. Yeah, exactly. You know, it's so funny. Yes, I don't know, but I'll get the answer for you. Yeah, absolutely.

All right. Listen, super fun conversation. Thank you very much. And, uh, and you're, you're kicking. Alphabet, uh, out, out in the world. It's fun to work with you. And, uh, and so, uh, listen folks, if, uh, you know, if I'm sure Anna is actually, it's funny, I'm sure that you, Anna is available, right? She's a, you're, you're one of us. You were a, you're a neck giver. Uh, I mean, you're a thought leader and, uh,

And it's fun, you know, these are always fun conversations. So thank you very much. And, you know, folks to find Anna and people like her, you only have to go as far as the growth drive community. And there we have a lot of folks here. Anna happens to be one of our leaders. And it's a pleasure. Thank you very much. Thank you, George, for letting me share a little bit about

my experience and what I do. Thank you. Awesome.