How Henry Woodman Built His Business for a 20x Exit

Every now and then I talk to someone who’s exited their business and it seemingly has gone to plan. A bit of Luck’s come their way, the right deal, a strategic buyer. They had some competitive advantage in the marketplace with some high cost or barriers to entry. And that’s the story with Henry Woodman. He exited his business, found a strategic buyer, knew the price he wanted, negotiated it fairly quickly, and now he’s off working on his passion project. It’s a great story. Henry’s a great character. I think you’ll enjoy this one. Welcome to the podcast that’s dedicated to helping business owners to prepare for exit and maximise the valuation so you can exit on your terms. This is the Exit Insights podcast presented by Succession Plus. And I’m Darryl Bates-Brownsword. And today I’ve got a great guest with me. Henry Woodman is an entrepreneur. I’m going to say perhaps a reluctant entrepreneur as he’s some of the stories he’s telling me. But Henry, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining me today.

Thank you, Darryl. It’s great to be here. And whatever insights I can bestow, hopefully they will go heated or not.

I like the way you weave that into beautiful. What a professional. Now, Henry, look, I want to tap in because we’ve got two stories in one here, and it plays out, I guess, the good and the bad and what we could have, should have done around the whole exit planning. But you owned a business, you, entrepreneur started a business. I’ll get you to put it in your own words because you do it so much better. But why don’t you start by giving us a little bit of a background as to how you started your business and just the highlights of the business history. And then we’ll dig in a little bit as to your exit when you’re starting to think about the exit. So if you can just bring us up to speed quickly there.

Absolutely. Yeah. The business we’re going to talk about, the most recent one and really was the successful because I’ve had other small little enterprises, but I’m in Chile, in Latin America, and I’m producing game shows, and somebody introduces me to this new fangled technology called virtual tour is the coolest thing ever because I used to produce travel films and I thought, now I can travel around producing these virtual tours without having to drag all these guys in 17 pieces of luggage. I’m going to start a company doing virtual tours. So I set up a company called World Travel Vision. I start selling hotels and destinations on this newfangled 360 virtual tour concept. I would give them CDroms, they would take them to trade shows and conferences. That was the story. And eventually, this is now the mid to late nineties, they say to me, how do we get this virtual tour stuff on this new world Wide Web thingy? I don’t know. Send them a CD rom, right? And they say, yeah, we do, but they don’t have any standards and they don’t know what to do with it. I’m like, all right, well, let me see what I can do to help. So we start to build a technology to deliver virtual tours to the existing or the newly found travel websites like Expedia and Travelocity, right. And when we’re looking into this, we then realise that there’s a bigger problem here, and that is the photos weren’t properly delivered because those reservation systems that have the rate and the availability, they didn’t have photos right when they were built back in the seventies and eighties. Right. And so photos was a problem. And of course, virtual tours is nice to have photos is need to have. So we eventually pivoted and I said, okay, we’re going to start to move and start to manage and deliver photos for hotels to the travel websites, right? So, you know, we were an instant success after 25 years of growth and struggling. And so now, after all that time, if you go to a travel website, pretty much any travel website on the planet that sells hotel rooms and you see photos of hotels, they would have come from, probably come from my server. So we would collect from the hotel groups, the Wyndhams, the Hiltons, the Hyatts and the independents, and we would size tag, categorise and give it to all the travel websites in their required specs. And that was the core of the business, okay?

So right at the beginning of, I guess, the Internet becoming a thing and people really adopting and adapting to it and starting to leverage the potential of the Internet right at the very beginning. There’s not too many industries you can say that about.

Yeah, there’s a lot of, well, that’s the thing is there were tons of opportunity that you really didn’t know about unless you knew what the challenges were. And, you know, like any good entrepreneur, it’s always, how do I find the opportunity? You pretty much say yes to everything. You have to be in a space that, you know, the challenges and the problems and wow, here is a problem. Okay, let me see what I can do to solve it. And then even in the beginning, when I was doing virtual tours and then morphing for virtual tour distribution. Then I would produce virtual tours and use it as a lost leader to distribute the virtual tours, which would make the money, and then eventually photos. So we slowly said yes to everything. I mean, we beginning said yes to everything and slowly then started saying no to everything. Quit the photography, quit the virtual tours, and focused maniacally on the one thing that we believed we could win at, which was the photo distribution.

Okay, so this started when did you exit the business? Let’s fast track to the exit and just from a date, and then we’ll talk about the time leading up to that exit event.

It was a really lucky timing. It was a year before COVID It was 2019. In February, the business was exited.

Well played, young man.

We deal with hospitality, and we all know that COVID decimated hospitality. So one year before I sold the business.

Hey, the harder you work, the luckier you get. I say. So. Well done.

Thank you.

So early or in 2019, you sold the business. Let’s talk about, I guess, the two years leading up. Unless there’s a longer timeframe that’s relevant, what was happening in the two years leading up to 2017. 2018, sure.

I’ll actually take you a little bit further back, because when I started the business and I realised, okay, here’s an opportunity. First, I didn’t know technology. I still don’t know technology. I thought, all right, I got to hire the right people. Now, I didn’t know how to run a business, right? So I essentially made a deal with these guys who had recently left Microsoft, and, you know, they built the technology, which was a great, fortuitous moment for me. But eventually, when people would say things like, you need to hire the right people. You need to have the culture and the vision and the KPI’s. And I’m like, I don’t know what that means. I can’t afford to pay myself, what the hell is a KPI? I knew nothing, right? So I went back to college to get my MBA in entrepreneurship. Somebody handed me a book called Traction by Gina Wickman, and all of a sudden, I was like, oh, so that’s what this means? So that’s what you do. So, for many years, I realised I didn’t know what I didn’t know. So in order to up my game, I would have to put this foundational elements, the processes, the procedures, identify exactly what the vision is, right, how we’re going to get there, how we’re going to measure our health with the KPI’s and so on. It took a long while. We had one competitor who was very well funded from a VC perspective. And we had, for the most part, I was bootstrapped. I had mortgaged my house. I had a couple of times where I thought, all right, well, my next line would be, what do you want with burger? You want fries with that burger? I didn’t think we were going to make it. So after learning the things that I did and going through and learning some of the challenges we overcame and the hurdles, we focused maniacally on exactly where we wanted to go, how we wanted to be, and really listen to the client to say, all right, what do you need? But before the sale, I really didn’t believe I was going to sell at the time that I did. I had a number on my mirror for about a decade. You know, I wanted to understand, what do I need to live comfortably for the rest of my life without having to worry about money? That would be my number. And then, of course, I doubled it because you never know, and taxes and stuff like that. So that was on my mirror. And what I decided to do was focus really, really maniacally on documentation. I told our team, imagine that we’re going to open up a franchise somewhere, and they can never talk to you, write the documents, so they know exactly how things work and simplify it and keep it up to date. Right. Connections change all the time, APIs change. We needed to make sure that all of those things were accurate. And so within the couple of years before the sale, we grew dramatically and we were keeping up on the documentation. We had built a solid foundation, not just for the technology, but the business to be able to scale. Right. And so that’s the two years up, really. It was getting focused on stability and process and practices.

Okay, so just going back a step, Henry, I think you mentioned you started the business and you had nothing but a big idea about a problem that needed to be solving. You identified the problem and you said, hang on a sec, there’s an audience here. There’s people who know there’s a problem and they would be willing to pay to have that problem solved. So that was your. I guess that’s the entrepreneurial energy that gets a business started. Most businesses start with some sort of big idea. And your big idea, I reckon there’s two types of big idea. There’s one that says there’s a Problem that needs to be solved and no one’s solving it at the moment, so let’s solve it. And that generally creates new sort of intellectual property and new ideas. And there’s another big idea that says, well, I’ve got this solution here that I’ve got access to, but I reckon I’ve got a new audience. No one else is already taking this solution to this Audience. And there’s the two types. One is a new product and the other is a new access to market. The access to market takes an existing solution, the new ip, the product, the solution takes it to whoever they see their audience is and then expand it to an audience. So I think that’s the entrepreneurial stardust, if you like, or birth of the solar system of the entrepreneur. And then the smart ones go, right, who do I need to help me bring this to life? And you’ve gone, well, I’ve got no idea. Part of it. You’ve said, well, I’ll go back to school and learn what I need to do myself, did an MBA or a master of bugger all, as I’ve sometimes called it, which is perhaps unfair, and then got a real education by reading something like traction. That was my experience anyway, I did the MBA and got a whole lot more valuable experience by doing it and reading books that really related to the SME growth, like traction.

You’re absolutely right. And part of the thing in the MBA experience and reading the book, I had the advantage of actually being into a business at the time because if I tell you, listen, you don’t know how to swim, I’m going to teach you how to tread water. Look at this video or read this book and then I’m going to throw you in the deep end. You’re going to panic and you’re going to flail your arms around and you’re thinking, I’m going to die, I’m going to drownden, right? If I get you in and I say, okay, this is what you do and let’s get in while we’re learning and we’ll move the hands around properly. Eventually you’ll understand how that treading water is different from panicking and flailing, your drowning. It’s the same thing. I had fellow students who would just read a book and they take a test and they’re like, I got an MBA and I’m like, okay, how do I apply this day to day in my business? How does this affect? Oh yeah, okay, this is what I can do. I get it now. So it’s a completely different animal doing and learning from, you know, the mistakes as well.

You’re living the case study in real time, correct?

Not that I recommend that by the way.

Yeah, but you’re an entrepreneur and that’s what we do. We tend to have a higher risk profile and just go, well, let’s just get on and do it, and we’ll solve the problems as we go.

And the other thing, Darryl, is I look at it and I say, is there a problem, or is there some problem you have that others might have? An example, like I said, is we just imagined early on that the photos were being delivered by the hotel groups directly. That wasn’t the case. It was something that you would not have known had you not been in that space.

Yeah.

And that’s where, if you know, yeah, it’s a problem. I can build something to make it easier and less friction for the client.

And it’s a really good point, because I think that’s how the birth of good ideas start. You’re in it and you see the problem, you experience the problem, so you know who to talk to, to go, well, is this a problem for you also? And because you’re in the industry, typically of whatever industry it is, you can talk to both sides, supply and demand, and see if it really is a big and big problem that people want solving, or if it’s just you and it’s a bit of a glitch, and it sounds like there was something there, or there obviously was something there in this scenario that grew into something significant.

That’s exactly right. And I’ll give you another really simple example. I’m in college. I have a pocket full of quarters. I’m sitting in a laundromat waiting for my clothes to dry. I’m addicted the time to Pac man. So I’m thinking, this laundromat needs a video game machine, right? And so I go back to my dorm room. I call every laundromat in Tucson, and I ask them, do you guys have video games? And they’d say, no. And I thought, hmm, if I got one, would you share the revenue with me? And a couple said, sure. Right now, this was my own personal need. And I thought, well, if I’m addicted to this game and I am a captive audience with a pocket full of quarters, and I would easily waste quarters to waste my time at a laundromat, other people would, too. So that was, that was kind of the hedonistic I want to play a game. And then I couldn’t even play my own games because if I did, I would be taking away from the people who were going to feed quarters into it.

But again, I think that you’re showing how businesses get started because you’ve identified that you thought about it as a, well, hang on a sec. If I’ve got the problem, I’ve also had the problem, too.

Correct.

So you’ve, you’ve gone, gone to school, you’ve done some learning, so you’ve been aware that you need to brush up your skills and go, well, hey, I’ve, I’ve extracted myself out of whatever it was I was doing. I need to make this work. I’ve got bills to pay. I’ve got, I need to make it work. So you’ve taken on some people and you’ve taken on some education. The business grows. You mentioned that you had a number on the wall. So was that a number of, hey, one day I want to exit this business and I want to exit it for x amount of dollars.

That’s exactly right.

So when you had that number, did you have any awareness of what the business was worth at the time that you identified that number?

Yeah, somewhat. You know, when you look at business valuations and you say, okay, the business should be making this much and the sale should be a multiplier of either the revenue or the EBITDA. And, and that’s what its value is. I looked at our numbers and I looked at the EBITDA and I thought I should be somewhere around six to eight times EBITDA. That was what I believed from what I had read. And that was where I thought, okay, if I sell the business, I need to be at a higher revenue to get more EBITDA so that I can get to that number.

Yeah. And was there any awareness around, hey, EBITDA is one part of the equation and six to eight is the other part. Was there any thought or consideration that, can I increase the multiplier?

Sure. The thought really was, who is it that’s going to buy the business one, and who’s going to give me a better multiplier? That would be a strategic partner, somebody who says, listen, this fits within my world and it would improve my offerings, so I need to pay a little bit more for it, or, you know, I either build or buy a. And in my case, because it was a huge moat, it was a fairly easy proposition to say you’re going to buy because to build and integrate would take you years. There was a strategic component to that as well.

Yeah. So strategically, there was a cost for new entrants to enter the market. Excellent, excellent competitive strength there. So you had some awareness around strategic buyers. And now, so you’re starting to think, okay, I’ve got this number that’s bigger than the number, the value of the business is today. I want to get out in a couple of years time, two or three years time. I need to start working on a, increasing the EBITDA to increase the valuation and hopefully make it more attractive to a strategic acquirer. At the same time, when it comes to increasing the profitability, essentially, of the business, the EBITDA, what was your plan? Did you have a strategy? Was it simply just do more sales, or what were you looking at to increase the, the valuation? And how big a gap was it that you had to close?

Right. So at the end of the day, you know, being a software, as a service company, it’s marginal cost to increase customers. So more customers, you increase your EBITDA. Right. Your net revenue. So it’s a fairly simple proposition. It’s not going to cost much more. It’s fractions of a penny per client to run the software. Right. It was a simple equation. And so more customers, higher net. Right. And more profit. So when I believed I just needed to add a few more customers to get to that six to eight times, that was the mindset. It obviously didn’t happen because somebody came along and was interested and said, we’re very interested. And I said, yeah, so am I, but I’ll listen to anything. But I have a different sort of view. And that’s where I wasn’t actively looking to sell at the time. I didn’t have an investment banker, it just that people were approaching me.

Yeah. Okay. And you mentioned that. So you knew the valuation about how many people were in the business at this time, Henry?

Two. Me and my competitor.

Oh, sorry. In your business, how many people were in your business?

How many people were working in my company? There were 26 in total at the time.

Okay, so 26, so more like you knew everyone in the business, but from a structural organisational structure side of the business, you couldn’t be the direct leader of everyone because there’s just too many to have direct leadership responsibility for.

And I consciously set that up to where I would be somewhat obsolete. So if somebody were to come along and say, hey, do you need this guy? And they’d say, of course not, he’s barely doing anything. Yeah, good, we’re going to get rid of him. Right. That was my mindset. Because early on, you can’t live without me. Right. But as things move on and I delegate more responsibilities and listen, the CTO oversaw a team in the Czech Republic. They were independent contractors as well, doing a lot of the tech development, and then the support people and the customer service people were all in house. But they were overseen by others. Right. And then the COO essentially ran the, the company from a day to day perspective. And I didn’t really do much except maybe the rainmaker for the big sales because we didn’t go with small. We did enterprise sales.

Yeah. So at this stage you’re operating in a chairman, mentoring, overseeing, keeper of the faith type of role?

Pretty much, yeah.

Brilliant. So you’ve totally eliminated any dependence on the owner, which led you to, I think you said you really focused on building process and documentation for the business. What led you to believe? What was the thinking, Henry? That thought said, this is what I need to do now. Why do I need to do, I’ve only got 30 people in the business. Why do I need to document the business?

Well, that’s pretty simple because of the interchangeability of the parts. For example, if somebody says, listen, I found something better, I’m out of here, okay. Somebody who comes in shouldn’t have to sit there and go, oh my God, the guy who just left had all the IP. He knows everything, or she knows everything. What am I going to do? All of that should have been documented and people can come in and plug and play more easily. And if somebody were ever going to come along and buy the company, they could look at the documentation and say, I clearly understand what’s going on here and how it works.

Yeah. And so that you’re effectively eliminating the risk to the new owners. Yeah.

Minimising it. That’s exactly right.

Yeah.

And in addition to the minimising of the risk with the documentation, I had phantom stock for key players, meaning they would get some monies at the sale of the company, but vested over two years. So if the company said, look, I really like that guy Darryl. Yeah. Well, if he wants to get his bonus package, he’s going to stay for two years. If the company says, I don’t like Darryl, good. The money’s an escrow. You fire Darryl, Darryl gets all the money right away. If Darryl then decides to leave prematurely, Darryl doesn’t get the money either. So it’s a win win win, in my opinion. And people can stay on and they, they help the company transition.

So you’re talking there effectively some sort of incentive so that you can attract and retain and keep the key people motivated so that they’re there, they help you leading up to the deal as it happened, but also after the deal, so that they didn’t take the money and run and that way we kept the risk low for the new owners of the business.

Exactly.

They’ve got the documented owner’s manual on how to run the business, but they’ve also got the experienced operators to keep things moving during a transition period.

That’s correct.

Alrighty. So we’ve now we’ve documented the business. We’ve created a whole lot of infrastructure. We’ve got the tools, we’ve got the vision. What happened next? Did a fairy godmother arrive and just say, we’ll give you your number? What happened? How did the process work?

Pretty much, yeah. I mean, the fairy godmother was really with me that time. I had a couple of groups, as I mentioned, come and sniff around, and they said, listen, we’re interested. I said, listen, I’m always interested, but I just want to let you know, here’s my number. One of the groups, they said, okay, thank you. And a month later, they called up and they said, can we meet in Atlanta? They’re an international multibillion dollar company. They fly in the CFO and the COO, and they start throwing out all these numbers and justifying why they would pay what they believed it worth. And basically I said, listen, I’m going to be honest with you. I make pretty good money. I don’t have any debt. I don’t have a boss. I don’t have a board. I sleep really well at night. Why would I sell the company unless I get my number right? I was honest. I believed what I believed. And I even said, you will overpay today for something. You will underpay for tomorrow. I believe that. I didn’t know about COVID you know, what was probably five or 6 seconds, but seemed like a minute. They looked at each other and finally they looked back and they said, fine, you got a deal. So no investment banker. The lawyers got the contracts together. Within a little over 60 days, money was in the bank and it was done. I was like, wow. Very godmother.

Like, yeah, that is a fairy godmother, isn’t it? That doesn’t happen too often.

And I might add, it was 20 times EBITDA.

Oh, well done.

Yeah, that’s because it meant that’s what got to my number.

So what do you think, Henry? That’s amazing. Well done. What do you think it was that got them over the line? I’m sure it took more than a couple of minutes, but what do you think it was that got them from the haggling position of trying to justify it based on, you know, whatever, whatever else is going in the marketplace through to them going. And I don’t know what they shared with you. But I guess I’m assuming they’re going, yeah, this is a strategic acquisition for us. Yeah, we will pay a bit more for it, but we’re really going to benefit in the long run because this business will be better in our hands than it is in Henry’s hands. And so. Yeah.

Well, what do you think was the.

Piece that got him over the line to go? Yep, no worries, we’ll do that deal.

Yeah. Clearly it was a strategic play because, you know, they were a large company and they were just entering this travel technology space. They had a few thousand clients and they looked at us with over 60,000 clients and they thought, you know what I mean when I say clients, I mean hotels. And that was also a shoe in to be able to get some quick and fast access to those clients and give them instacred ability. Right. And so it was a relatively small price to pay for a monstrous company to be able to do it because they even building it, it would have taken them, they stopped well, not knowing about COVID they’d still be building it to try to get there. So once you have a hotel group like Hilton, for example, integrated into the system and we deliver their images, it’s like a marriage, you know, it’s very difficult to get that divorce because why would you, unless something amazingly better comes along or the partners. Really horrible, right?

Yeah. So the key takeaways im getting from the deal, Henry, you were not in an operational role. You weren’t in a key role of the business. You had the strategic relationships. You were running the business by remote control.

Pretty much, yeah.

You had the leadership team in place who were running and they were making decisions as you would so that there was nothing scary happening for you, which allowed you to run it by remote control. You had looked at the business and thought, how do I de risk it for the buyer? And I liked your language of plug and play. So you’ve documented all the key parts. It’s only a 30 person business, so you don’t need war and peace level of documentation. But you documented the business to the right level of detail that gave the new owners enough assurance to go, you know, that this is good. You also had some cultural, commercial personnel agreements or contracts in place for the staff that not only rewarded and encouraged their loyalty and motivation, but, well, it did rewarded them as well. And that was another de risk for the buyers. And the other beautiful thing you had in place, which is not insignificant, is the fact there are only two players in the market and it’s a software as a service type of product. So it’s all good.

You’re right.

Now, what normally happens after this is the deal’s done and business owners suggest to me that that’s awesome. I’m now going to go off, sit on the beach, and drink pina coladas. So how long did you do that for?

I’ve yet to have my first pina colada on the beach. Actually, that’s not true. But, yeah, I actually knew. What’s funny is I had known that I would never want to retire and do nothing. So I had the rights to a book that I thought, you know, when I sell this business, it’s called Ice Portal. When I sell ice, I will then publish the book and develop the concept for a streaming series on tv. So that’s essentially not a full time, ongoing concern. And by the way, I don’t think I would ever have done that if it was the way I was going to maintain a living, because it’s that 1%. In any of the arts fields, whether you’re an actor, a musician, or a tv producer, it’s really challenging to make money unless you are at that level, and I am not. So it would be a passion project that would keep me mentally busy and out of trouble. So the idea was, we’ll publish the book, we’ll get a little bit of visibility, and then we’ll develop that into a streaming series with a much deeper dive into the concepts.

So did you have this in mind that you wanted to do this if the exit came off, or did this come about of. Now I’ve exited. What am I going to do now?

No, this was in mind 40 years earlier, right? Yeah, I’m in Los Angeles and I leave college, and I think, okay, I want to go to LA and produce and direct movies. Of course, that did not happen. I eventually ended up traveling, doing travel films and game shows in Latin America, and then started this technology company. But when I was in Los Angeles, I bought the rights to this book, and I thought, I want to produce a movie out of this. At the time, I talked to a producer, and he loved the book as well. He went off in a different direction at real estate. I went to game shows in Latin America, and we stayed in touch, and I said, you know, when I finally sell this company, we will then develop the project for streaming tv, because now there are more opportunities. 40 years ago, it was a handful of studios controlled a lot of the production and distribution, whereas now there’s more opportunities with content, distribution and production, even though any kid with a camera and a computer is a competitor as well. The dynamic has changed, but good content and good conceptual stories, I think, continue.

They’ll always rise to the top. A good story. So I guess the big question for me and the audience from an exit planning perspective, Henry, do you think the million dollar question, or maybe it’s more or less, I’m not sure, but is the big question the fact that you knew what you were going on to, you had a, I guess a next goal that you’ve gone, okay, once I exit my business, I need to get this exit cleaned up and tidy. And I’ve got this passion project that I want to, it’s going to take a fair amount of time. It’s not a full time gig, but it’s going to keep me out of trouble over the next few years. And I want to bring that to life. And you’ve got enough, a lot of energy behind bringing that to life. Do you think that knowing that you had that up your sleeve, did that help your exit?

Oh, absolutely. I mean, I like you and I talk to people and they go, oh, I can’t wait to lay on the beach and have a pina colada, or I’m going to play golf. And I’m like, okay, yeah, what are you going to do in week two? Because like most entrepreneurs, you have this add idea and you’re like, I need something. And anybody that reads about what happens in retirement, you have to have a passion, a purpose. You have to do something even if you’re volunteering. Right. And knowing that this is something I don’t need to be tied into in a nine to five. This is something that I have a passion for, and this is something I now have the wherewithal and the time to do without stressing about my bills. This is when I can do it. So I’ve always known that that would be the next chapter of the story.

All right. I love it. Yeah. It’s one of the big blockers that we see, Henry, is we see a lot of business owners who are invested in their business. Their name, their attached, their identity is all associated with the business they’ve owned and been running for 10, 20, 30 years. And I guess there’s an element of separation anxiety somewhat, or just of, well, this business is my life. I don’t know any different. If I stop owning and running and the business, who am I? What am I going to be doing? And that identity or the role identity fusion, as it’s sometimes known, is, is, can cause delays or problems with, with, with the deals proceeding. So I love the fact that you’ve gone, the way you talk about that, the transition, it almost seems seamless. But I think that’s a bit of your character as well. And. But, yeah, it’s just such a great story to hear and it’s, it’s really rewarding to see, I guess, a good story like this come, come to life. And I look forward to seeing the story on maybe Netflix or Amazon one day.

Me too, to be honest, because I do talk to other, I coach small businesses now just to help them out. And I hear stories and I hear stories about earn outs and I hear stories about horrible deals that at the last minute they come and they want to change the number. And I look back and I’m like, man, I am the luckiest person on the planet to have that seamless transition. And I did stay there to transition with the company for a couple of years, but hey, COVID happened. So I spent most of my time not doing what I was regularly doing because everybody was at a, we’re putting everybody on furlough. They’re letting people go. We’re in a freeze. The world’s coming to an end. So, you know, I was fairly lucky to have gotten out at the time that I did. But also, you know, the thing. But the, you know, the next step was, you know, now that I’ve got a little bit of extra time and I’m transitioning, you know, let’s start to plant the seeds for the next chapter as well.

Brilliant. Henry, look, I really appreciate you sharing your exit insights with us and the owner managed community today. I just one last thing. We’ve covered a bit of ground and what your passion project was as well. Out of everything we’ve discussed, what’s the key message that you really want business owners to take out of our conversation today?

Yeah, there’s probably, I’m going to say two things, because if I look back and I go, what would I have done differently? It’s probably I would not have stressed as much as I did and lost all the sleep. And I’d like to say hair, but I still have hair. Is a matter of looking back and going, listen, your thoughts create your life. And there were times where I thought the world was coming to an end. I was going to panic, I was going to lose my house and my life and, oh, my God. So one, just try to overcome the obstacles and learn from them. And then two is probably that saying that you’re the average of the five people you hang out with. If you associate with those that are inspirational and motivational and get you going in the morning, you too will wake up going, yeah, I too want to achieve these things right, as opposed to my friends. They just punch the time clock. They come home, they drink their beer and have their chips, and I’m going to do that as well. So who you surround yourself with also is helpful in who you eventually become brilliant.

Henry Woodman, thanks for sharing your exit insights with us today.

Thanks. And if anybody wants more information on the next chapter, the website, if you want to post it, it’s mariethestory.com. it shows, it has information about the book and it has information about the series.

Excellent. We’ll include that link in the show notes in case anyone wants to follow it up. We’ll be gladly shared that and we’ll look forward to seeing it.

Thank you, Darryl.