10Xing Your Business for a Tax-Free Exit: Insights from Marc Adams

In this episode I had a fascinating conversation with Marc Adams. Marc is a consultant who works with businesses in that 3 million pounds to 50 million pounds bracket who have already got an established team in place. And he works with them where he prepares them for exit by 10xing the scale and valuation of their business and then helping the owners and the founders to exit tax-free, totally legit all regions.

And then he talks about, well, it’s 10xing the value of what goes into your account. So have a listen to the episode. It’s fascinating. He supports his he’s written a book around his methodologies. Get in touch with Marc if you want a copy of the book. Hope you enjoy the episode.

Welcome to the podcast that’s dedicated to helping business owners to prepare for exit so you can maximise the valuation and then exit on your terms. This is the Exit Insights podcast presented by Succession Plus. I’m Darryl Bates-Brownsword, and today I’m talking to, well, a guy who self confessed could talk for England. Marc Adams, welcome to the Exit Insights podcast. And you have got quite. Well, we’ve had several chats now, and I’m just trying to think the best way to frame it up. But you’ve got a unique way that you work with established entrepreneurial businesses, privately held businesses who really want to scale up before they exit. And then once they exit, you’ve got a methodology that can work in many countries on how they can do that, if not totally, but pretty much tax-free. Have I got that right?

Yes, sir, you have. But first and foremost, Darryl, my friend, thank you very much for having me on today. I sincerely hope that this is, this chat that we have is going to be of some help to your audience. I really, really do. If anybody at the end of this feels that they’d like to get a hold of a copy of the book that I’ve put out in the market recently to help them on this journey, I will make it available to your audience free of charge if they ask you or ask me or do something about getting a hold of it, you know, within, let’s say, two weeks if you’re going live with a podcast.

And so with that backdrop, I’d want to say I spent nearly four decades in corporate and as an entrepreneur, and my background was sales. Actually, my background started in engineering, found I wasn’t making any money in engineering, went into sales, and then found that I was making money in sales. And like most other people, went through promotions from a salesperson to a manager, to a leader, to a VP, to a CEO in privately held businesses, mainly in the tech sector, in the UK and in North America, done a couple of IPOs, I’ve also got involved. That’s how I got involved with mergers and acquisitions and private equity, because as part of that journey, we were not only building companies for sale, but normally you get held into a company that acquires for a period of time. And then I found myself doing acquisition acquisitions for them, mainly on the technical and commercial due diligence side, not on the raising money side at that time.

And then I crossed to the dark side into M&A and sort of fast forward quite a lot of years. I kind of found in the private equity world that what happens is people go out to acquire a company, and unfortunately, in the SME space, and let’s call SME, up to 50 million in revenue, you can be pounds or dollars, it doesn’t matter so loosely in that space. Nine out of ten companies that come to market, and, you know, we’ve spoken about this and I know we agree on it, don’t end up selling within a year to 15 months. And actually, a lot of them come off the market. And principally, there’s a reason for that. And in general terms, it’s because the price that an owner would like to achieve for their life’s work is probably really worth it, but not represented by the earnings of the business and what the market’s willing to pay. So, for example, you might be making a million in profit, but you want. I’m going to make it this ridiculous, but you might want 30 million for the business, and no one’s going to pay 30 million for a business that’s doing a million. And so on my private equity journey, we found ourselves in a position where we generated a pipeline of 93 companies just coming into the pandemic that we wanted to do something with, that were great businesses representing the life’s work, in the majority of cases, of people that were absolutely passionate about what they did, experts in what they did. But now, now it had come predominantly to a point where they were thinking about retiring.

In some cases, they were thinking about moving on to the next chapter in their lives because they were in ill health. But these are predominantly 50 somethings, 60 somethings or older. I do talk to a lot of people that are 30 somethings. It’s the same principle, but a different story. But for what we’re talking about here with those 93 companies, what private equity does is if they can’t achieve a valuation that makes sense from an investor point of view. And there’s this huge gap. They wait. They just wait for the price of the company to come down to a point where it does make sense, and then they’ll try and buy it, and in broad brush terms. And so that’s a lot to do with why nine out of ten companies don’t sell. And so in around 2021, when we were in the midst of the pandemic, I was talking to my then ten year old son, and I was trying for one reason or another, to get all these principles of entrepreneurship into him in six minutes that I’d learned in four decades.

And of course, we were talking about this pipeline of 93 companies and why nine out of ten of them don’t sell. And he said to me, dad, he said, you’re doing this wrong. And I thought, okay, that’s cool. And kept in mind, he’s ten, said, well, what should I be doing? He said, you need to be working with the nine companies that don’t sell because they need your help. The one that can sell doesn’t need your help. And so he’s thinking slightly differently. But what he said really resonated. And my initial reaction was, well, how are you going to do that? And I really began to think about it.

Now, the other thing I would say in general terms with a lot of businesses is that the, the owners are brilliant at doing their thing, and the more they run it, the more lifestyle it might be. If you, I can look at a company’s website and its set of financials and pretty much tell you whether we’ve got a 20% uplift in potential revenue and profit. Because if I can’t, depending on the business. But there are one or two characteristics of a website that I’ll look for that will tell me if they’re retargeting visitors to that website that might put something in a shopping basket if they’re an online business but don’t complete. And if they’re not doing that, then they’re losing out on some uplift potential there.

And I can look at their P and L and say, you know, what does their salary cost, for example? And in many instances, you can probably save them some money by getting them to do more outsourcing than they have been doing. And the reason that that’s important is in broad brush strokes, Darryl, I start on the basis that a business doing less than a million in profit EBITDA is worth one to three times what its profit level is. So if you’re doing 700,000 you’re worth 700,000 to 1.4 million, let’s say. But the minute you go into 1.21.3 in EBITDA, your multiple for that business is going to be somewhere between three and seven.

And then if you get, you know, wealth, if you get into the 5 million or 6 million in EBITDA, your multiple might be 15, 16,17 or more. And your buyer profile is going to be different. It’s a trade buyer at the lower ends and it could be a public company at the upper ends. A public company doesn’t often buy a little company if it’s not strategic. It doesn’t normally buy a little company because it doesn’t move the dial, but a trade buyer would, and so on and so forth as you go up the value chain of private equity and who they buy from and sell to.

So when I started to really think about this and the companies that we work with, I kind of thought there are probably, how am I going to get. So, as you pointed out, we work with companies following a formula that we’ve developed. And the aim of that formula is to ten x the value for them and get them out tax-free, which we can do in the UK and we can do in the US. I think we can do it elsewhere, but I haven’t proved it. But it’s not actually rocket science, it’s things that people can do themselves.

And as we are limited with the number of companies that we could directly work with, my thought was to put it into a book so that people could get hold of a book and follow the principles of it and do it themselves. That’s why I wrote the book, which kind of led up to us having a conversation, several conversations and meeting today. So the secrets to ten x in your business and cashing out tax-free is twelve short chapters that take into that, highlight and describe some of the things that you could look at that would help you save money. For example, outsourcing is a good example, make money in terms of how you might be utilising, go to market on sales and marketing. Those two or three things.

Those two things could three or four x your business. And I should say this doesn’t work for everybody, but it does work for a lot of companies. And then if you then bolt onto that the ability to buy another company, you know, what a lot of people don’t really put in their mind and don’t necessarily think about is if you bought another bump, another company of similar revenue and profit in an afternoon, you’ve doubled the size of your business in an afternoon, you’ve gone from 700,000 to 1.4 million in profit, using the 700,000 EBITDA example, and then you’ve doubled it, and then you’ve multiplied significantly the value of that business just on that one piece. And then if you can do cross selling and upselling, depending on the acquisition type, of course, from one company’s client base to the other, you’re going to grow the revenue there. And I’m just talking three out of twelve things.

Now, the other principle of it is once you’ve, let’s say, five or six x the value of the business because you’ve grown the profit, because you’ve grown the revenue, you’ve reduced the cost and you’ve acquired another business. If you were to, and if you were to sell the business, and maybe you got six x, then the other four x is going to come from, how could you exit that business in a tax efficient, appropriate, legal way, tax advantaged way that allows you to sell the business and pay no tax whatsoever, or allows you to the business and pay minimal tax. And that’s all to do with how you structure the deals. So you bring these things together, it becomes much easier to see how business owners could themselves put ten x, the amount of money in their bank account, rather than not get so much value for the business because it’s below a million in profit, for example, rather than sell the business and pay a bunch of tax on it. And rather than how do you then protect that legacy once you’ve managed to get that money in your bank account? So I spent a bit of time pulling the book together and I’m hopeful that it’s going to help people. And the reason I did it was because my son shamed me into doing it by telling me that I wasn’t really very nice because I should help the nine out of ten people that need the help, because the problem for them is often when they can’t get a lot of the time, they might pick a value that they want to sell the business for because it’s representative of what they think they need to retire on, for example. And so rather than say it’s too expensive, drop your price. What we’ll do is try and give them tools through the book to do it themselves.

Or we do work alongside companies too, to do it as a done with you service as well. But we’re limited as to how many companies we can work with at any one time. So to reach everybody, I had to do something. So I wrote a book. There you go.

There we go.

And I’ve taken a breath, Darryl, I bet you’re pleased about that.

I was wondering, I was looking at my watch. I think there’s 15 minutes before he. I’m sorry.

I’m sorry.

Yeah. So let me summarise what I think I just heard, and then I’ll ask some follow on questions. So the strategy is, or the premise is that nine out of ten businesses that go to market don’t sell for one reason or another. But one of the biggest reasons they don’t sell is ultimately the owners of the business want more for their business than any buyer is willing to pay.

Yep.

In the SME sector

This is typically. In the SME sector, this is typically owners in their fifties plus fifties and sixties. They’re motivated to exit the businesses established and been going a number of years. So they’re motivated to exit and they’ve gone, hey, look, I need to solve this dilemma, this problem that I can’t get as much as what I think, think I want to live their lifestyle in the way I want to become accustomed.

Now, one thing is they could get some help from personal financial planning and actually get a personal financial plan to model and see what they really need and change it, get some thinking around it, rather than this is gut feel and intuition, because entrepreneurs like doing things themselves and getting it done. Sometimes they invite you in because you go, hey, look, I know how to ten x your business and exit tax-free. There’s the headline message. And the way you do this, in broad terms is you go, well, the first thing we need to do is let’s cut some costs. There’s some immediate wins here where we can cut some costs and get you some savings, potentially through outsourcing, as long as you’re getting the same value of service delivery but at a lower price than employees.

With those savings, you then go and invest in some of the growth. And with that you can two x or three x times the business, looking at new products and distributions or new products and all markets. You then with that momentum you’ve now built, you’ve gone right. We’ve scaled the business up a bit, but to really make some headway, we need to start looking at acquisitions and let’s try and see if we can buy another business the same size as what we are, and we’ll double the business overnight. And then we’ll repeat that one or two times.

Get the business up to where it’s, you know, within with several years. Get the business up to where it’s now, looking at ten x times of what it was when you started, then you can have a look at it and go, right, we’re at the size and the magnitude, the scale that we think we should be at. Let’s start looking at what we do, how we can structure it in advance of any exit, of how we can now complete our exit strategy whilst we say tax-free. What we’re really talking about is ten x the money in our bank, because that’s what we really care about, our personal bank, and get our asset. Risk out of the business and put it into our own bank account, manage the tax there and have a look at how we can do that as tax efficient without doing anything wrong as we can. And we can do that while we do the planning in advance.

And then because we’ve ten x the business, we’ve built the business of such a magnitude where we’re one of the fortunate few who can now start preparing and looking after our legacy because it’s going to last more than the next generation. Is that the short story, the short version of where we’re at? So why don’t we dig in, Marc, and go, okay, so why don’t we explore?

Just before you do. I just want to say one thing, if I may. You’re absolutely right.You’re absolutely right in what you said and the way you summarised it. And you did a better job summarising than I ever do. So thank you so much for that. But what I would also say is there isn’t a one size fits all. It doesn’t work for everybody, but the principles can be applied to anything and you can look at it and it doesn’t.

I may prefer to show people the way that they can save money first. So one of my clients, for example, took out 30 people that were costing 100 grand a year and reduced the cost base for the same level of service to 70% lower than that. So less than 30 grand a year and put 2.1 million back into the business. Now, what do they do with that? They can put it on the bottom line and that, you know, has a minimum just on that saving.

That’s worth 10 million in value. But they chose to hire some salespeople because if they put sales peaks, so that’s where they’ve saved the money and they’ve made it neutral. And they put in some salespeople that are going to cost them quarter of a million to half a million a year based on performance, but they’re going to generate ten to 25 million in sales, top line so that’s the kind of a difference. Now, some people might look at it and say, I can’t really effectively outsource because of the nature of the business they’re in. But you’re going to look at that area and see where you can save money.

It might be just reorganising their contracts, it could be financially re engineering their cash flow to be a lot more efficient, to leave cash in the business a lot longer without putting the business under any kind of stress. That just creates free cash that you can invest. It may be any of those things, but it doesn’t mean that it would be. And then I look at there first because I don’t want it to cost them any money. If I can save the money, it’s not costing me any money.

You don’t have to divert funds from anywhere else to fund any kind of growth. Right. So then you start looking at the marketing thing. So what I see a lot with companies is, for example, and you’ve seen this, companies will put up a website, it’s a brochure, a lot of. And they don’t really think about necessarily, I can’t, and I still don’t believe this.

Driving any traffic to that to convert for any sales. Now, that’s not always the case. And I bet some of your listeners are going to listen to that statement and go, that can’t be possible, Marc, that’s a load of rubbish. But I promise you that it’s not. It’s exactly what happens.

So there’s missed opportunity there. Right. And the whole market thing is a very, very wide, brief. Could you take your products and get them out to market much more quickly by using different go to market? So I’ve got another client who’s in the meat and poultry business, and they do very high quality meat and poultry distribution, mainly poultry.

And their whole value is in how they present it to the housewife that’s going to buy it. And they do a lot through farm shops. And so in scaling their business, you’ve got two criteria. Do they have the capacity to meet the volume that you could produce? But how are you going to do it?

So one of the things I’m looking at with them is not the traditional marketing. It’s actually, most of us are familiar with the man with the van that comes around with this refrigerated van, with all these beautifully prepared frozen meals that housewives buy on the doorstep, and husbands and families buy on the doorstep and put in straight in the freezers. And so in their business, they’re not using that. But if they were to branch out at relatively little cost using the same production facilities, but having a preparation piece added on, which wouldn’t cost very much, then you’ve got a whole new line of business and more control because you can go direct to consumer and improve margin. And so anybody that doubts that strategy, go and watch Yellowstone from last season, I think episode seven or eight.

And if you watch Yellowstone with Kevin Costner and the crew and they’re raising cattle and everything else, they have the realisation that the people making the money are the packages, not the producers. And so borrowed straight from there and applied to this, you’d have to find the people to do the, you know, to do. To do the work, to get in front and do the routes and franchise out a little route for a particular person, that makes sense. But then you’ve got a centralised preparation and distribution thing. So there’s always loads of things that you could potentially do that don’t cost much money.

And then to your next piece. Yeah, absolutely. The tax piece is. There’s lots of different ways in which you can reduce the tax and there are some ways in which you can absolutely eliminate it, but you’ve got to follow a particular process to do that. And sometimes, to be fair, Darryl, there might be reasons why they can’t follow that process if somebody’s going to be, you know, in my own case in 2020, I was diagnosed with stage four cancer and given six months to live.

And I’m very happy to be here and say I’ve made a complete recovery. But if I was selling a business in that position and I only had six months to live, I wouldn’t be following that process. I’d be trying to get it out as quick as I could. So then it’s about tax reduction to the lowest level possible, not necessarily to zero. But the thing is, you bring these things together individually.

I’m not talking to you about anything that I don’t think you actually don’t already know, but bring them together as a strategy and deploy it. No one’s talking about this. No one’s talking about this as a. This is the path and the process and the methodology you follow. And I can’t speak with everybody and help everybody. So I put it in the book in the hope that it does.

Okay. So, Mike, let’s. Let’s help the listeners that are listening to this and narrow things down a bit as quick as possible. Are there any industries or types or criteria where your strategies are going to work better than others?

What’s the sweet spot where this is going to work really well. And they can easily be pretty comfortable that they’ll get to ten x and they will get the tax free benefits.

Yeah. So I’ve been a little bit selfish on this, if I’m really honest and open with you, and that for us, when we are working with a, with a client, they have to be generating at least 3 million in top line revenue, ideally at a minimum 10% EBITDA. So 300K EBITDA.

And the reason for that is really simple. There’s less requirement to save money when you’ve got a decent level of EBITDA, because you can do two things at the same time. You can invest ahead of the curve and try and save some costs to make it cost neutral, but you’ve also got the availability of cash in free cash flow or retained earnings to invest in some of these growth areas to get the growth there and the profit up there as well. So we don’t work with companies that are sub 3 million, sub 300,000 in profitability, very rarely that we do, because we haven’t got enough to play with the leadership team to make big enough changes quickly enough. It takes longer to get to that point where you can make a significant difference for us to work with them.

Now, the principles still apply, so the book can still be used and still be effective for entrepreneurs that are below that level. But we have had to focus on 3 million and above because obviously, if we’re working with a client to do that, and as I’ve said, we don’t work with too many clients because we have a capacity restriction ourselves, then we’ve got to, we are very mindful to make a big impact very, very quickly because, and the way that we get rewarded is back end results when we’re doing that anyway.

So I think, what about shareholding? Does it matter about the number of shareholders? Does it matter about industry?

So it only matters. So, yes and no. It really depends on who you are connected with in how you are discussing this proposition and the value.

So when we’re working directly with a customer, we are always working with the founder, the owner or the leadership team on the CEO. And so in that regard, I’m less concerned about 20 shareholders. The 20 shareholders, if there were 20 shareholders, they’re more likely to be six would be more of an issue. If you’re looking for an equity position in the business for your services upfront. And we don’t do that, we’re back end loaded on reward for the difference that we make.

So we kind of mitigate some of that. Obviously, the more people you’ve got in deciding the strategic direction of a business that can put their thoughts on the table to be considered, the longer it takes to get anything done. We focus on privately held businesses, but the principles work in public companies and in partnerships too. And we focused on a certain level of EBITDA and a certain level of revenue. We don’t really focus too much on the shareholding structure of said company.

We’re focused on delivering the results. Hasn’t impacted us in the way we do it. And the book doesn’t care about the number of shareholders either. Darryl.

What about industry? Are there any industries where it works well or industries where it’s just not, not applicable?

I can’t truly answer it because I’m not. We released the business in January. I’m sorry? I released the book in January. And so we’ve been published and the book’s been available for a couple of months and we, there was no, there is no reason why the principles of cost reduction and growth in the business and acquiring other businesses should not work in any industry.

However, if you are looking at acquiring another business as part of doubling your value, that will have a restriction not from my principles, but from the finances willing to invest in that market segment. So let me give you an example. Coming out of the pandemic, vitality and restaurants were absolutely and hotels with Persona non grata.

And so if you were trying to apply the principles of the book for growth, your m and a strategy to buy another hotel or to buy more restaurants and so on and so forth would have fallen on its face if you were looking for a leveraged investment from outside investors because nobody wanted to invest in those sectors. Right now, you’ve got a bit of a backlash in some areas of construction because interest rates are through the roof compared to what they used to be. And so the number of new builds in the residential sector, residential sector are down. So investors are sitting on the fence in terms of how they might be willing to lend money to entrepreneurs that want to buy businesses in the construction sector. So it’s more at that level that you’re going to face some challenges as to whether you can make it work or not.

And it’s not that you couldn’t make it work, it just means you’ve got to focus on six of the other twelve strategies to make it work and not that particular one. Does that make sense?

Yep. Okay. So as a reminder, there’s twelve strategies that the highest level context is, let’s save some money first. That’ll free up some cash flow. We can use that initial cash flow to invest in more sales and therefore profit. With the higher profit and the now beefed up business, we can do some M & A. And that’s the route, the secret, if you like, to fast growth and exit planning.

Yeah. So those are three of the more popular strategies of the twelve chapters in the book, each covering a chapter, each covering a strategy. By the way, I didn’t put artificial intelligence into the book, and there’s probably 60 or 70 different chapters that I could put into this book. But I wanted to get started with things that this particular sector, three to 50 million businesses, encompassing the traditional businesses, the blue collar businesses, for example, could look at and adopt to, you know, to help them down the path of 10xing the money that goes in their bank account if they were to sell their business. So there are some things that are missed out. Edition two will cover those things, but that’s edition two is not in the market yet.

And it doesn’t have to be. Save the money first. I look to try and save money first because it’s not costing him any money if I can. But you can’t always save money because coming out of the pandemic, all of us running businesses got really lean and skinny on what we were spending our money on. And so some of that fat that used to be there in eight out of ten companies was taken out because they had to do that to survive.

You’re beginning to see some of that creep back in now for sure. So you’d look at cost reduction, but you’ve got to look at it in tandem with growth. If I can save you money before you spend money, then that’s great, because cost does happen and you want to make sure that revenue, which might happen, does happen. So you don’t have to go, I’ll save money first. I do. I look there first and then I look for growth. But I’ve had clients say, I’m not interested in saving money, I just need growth. How are we going to get it? So one of my American businesses operates in 15 states, and we went outsourcing companies for them to grow by acquisition for them because they didn’t have an M &A  and a function in the other 35 states, they ended up buying three of them. And it made a big material difference to their business.

So I’m outlining in the book areas that people can look at to get advantage of, and you only need three or four of them to get towards, you know, all the way down the line of 10xing that business and putting yourself in a position where you can cash out. But there’ll be different things of those twelve chapters for different companies and different people because they’re going to be in different positions.

Okay, so we’ve talked about a couple. Can you give us some insight as to what’s covered in some of the other twelve chapters?

Yeah, brand absolutely. So I’d loosely say in brand that let’s say anybody under 35 understands backwards and forwards brand value. But let’s say for the purpose of this conversation that less people over 60 think about a value brand in the same way. So brand is something that we cover in the book to say where you can start focusing on improving your brand because it will add one or two points in your multiple if you get it right. The other thing is preparation of systems, processes, procedures, operations. Now there’s a school of thought that would say you should always make sure you’ve got that in place if you’re thinking about selling a business.

And I agree with that, it’s when you do it. Those are two other very significant parts of the book that would help you. Absolutely. ten x the business just by doing those five things I position the operational excellence and systems processes and procedures slightly differently.

I focus on growth first and then especially when I get into M & A and I’m working with an owner to buy another company, they will ask all the questions of the company that they want to buy to do with systems and processes and procedures that that other company should have been, should have prepared to get the best price point they can when selling it. And at that point I can say to them now, in order to sell your business at some point in the future you need the same level of quality in your systems, processes and procedures to maximise your equity value. So that’s huge. But I’m careful about when I introducing it. Depending on who the owner is and that’s covered in the book, then you’ve got the legal and the tax side which we’ve covered a bit of as well.

So there’s six out of the twelve and I’m conscious that we’re at 30 minutes, so I’m kind of pausing for you to give me direction.

Yeah, so we want to make sure that we get the right level of detail in terms of infrastructure for the right staged business. There’s no point in going into a three or 5 million pound business going right. We need to document your whole business, get all your policies and procedures written down. It’s going to drive them nuts.

It’s going to be way over documented, way too bureaucratic, depending on the industry they’re in, naturally, and the level of regulation. But in most cases, it’s going to be way overkill for any business. But what they do need is to make sure that when they are going through exit and they know they’re going to be going through a due diligence process, that they’ve got all of their records and they can demonstrate to the buyers as much as possible that the business runs without them. The best way I can think of it, demonstrating that the business runs the way you say it runs is having some documentation about the way it runs.

Yeah. And there’s one other piece of that which we haven’t spoken, either one of us, on this call, and that’s your management team, because that part, that’s part and parcel of your systems and your operations. But if you haven’t got the right team of people in play, in the right positions. So I kind of think of things in terms of solopreneur is one person, then you’ve got a couple of scouts out there, that’s two or three people, then you get up to eight people, then you get to 16 people, then you get to 32 people. And they’re decent sized businesses in those ranges of the 816 and the 32s. So in order for an entrepreneur to successfully sell the business and come out tax-free and not be tied into the business for the next two, three, four years, they need a good, solid team of people in place that are running that business effectively without them.

Too many business owners say they’re doing that, but they’re not.

Yeah, exactly.

And it doesn’t mean that you can’t sell the business. It’s just going to influence the terms and the structure of the deal as to how you sell the business.

Totally. Yeah. It affects the valuation. A good management team will really boost the valuation, especially if they’re running it without daily input from the owners in terms of decision making and what have you. Marc, I do appreciate your time and we are close to the end, but let’s just wrap up this conversation, if we can, and we go, look, we summarised it earlier, you’ve got a process that, and you’ve got the book that you’ll send anyone a copy who requests a copy, and we’ll put the links in the show notes that’ll be on the website. But the headline is there is a process of going, hey, look, we can ten times the value of your business and then set you up for a tax-free exit in inverted commas.

So there’s a headline, there’s caveats around that, but what’s the one key message? So there’s the book and that we’ll share, but what’s the headline message that you want business owners to take away from our conversation today?

So if you are a business owner that’s given some thought to selling your business and cashing out, and you would rather have, and you want to explore the possibility of 10xing the amount of money that you could cash out within your bank account, get a copy of my book. Because if you don’t, what you’re going to do is sell the business successfully. And when you do that, you’re going to pay tax and then you will sell the business successfully for maybe a lot less money than you could get just by following these twelve chapters and principles and implementing the three or four most pertinent ones to you.

And for the sake of a free book, which I’m going to make available to anybody on your podcast that wants it. I haven’t done this before, so I’m not quite sure the logistics. Darryl, you’ll have to work with me to how I do that. For the sake of a book that even if you bought it on Amazon is only $7, it’s worth just taking the time to have a short read to see whether anything adds any value to you or not. And if not, you’re going to get what you’re going to get.

But if it does, and I can help you 10x, then job done. All I ask is you let me know somehow that it helps you downstream because if it helps you, it will help other people.

Yeah. And just to reinforce that message, this type of thinking is so critical to do something around preparing your business to be ready for exit when you’re exit ready with the numbers at work for you. Because eight or nine out of ten businesses in the SME owner managed space that go to market fail to get a deal.

And as your son so incitedly pointed out to you, they’re the ones that you really want to help and make a difference to because the ones who are already got deals, got other shareholders, investors and what have you in their business. They don’t need your help.

No, they don’t. They’ve got it covered. There’s another group that I’m finding that interested in this and that’s the TikTok group of very young people.

And what their questions are really different though. They’re getting to the point where they started a business. They’re not ready to sell it, and they don’t want to sell it, but they want to cash out some chips on the table. Maybe they’ve struggled with. I’m working with a drinks business at the moment of a young, hardworking, brilliant mother who’s trying to get product to market.

And she’s done a great job of where she’s getting to, but she just wants to cash out something to pay off the mortgage. So she feels that she’s secure and not held to ransom of the ups and downs of trying to grow a business every day. So those people ask me different questions. They ask me, how do I get to this step? How do I get to that step?

The group that you and I are mainly talking to here have, you know, they’ve seen recessions go up and down. They’ve seen the good times and the bad times four or five times, as you and I have. And so they’re thinking about what do I want to do with the rest of my life? And how can I, you know, how can I take care of that with what I need and think about my legacy as well? But nobody talks about this. Nobody talks about this. And my son started it. He’s going to be the future creative and marketing director of the business, don’t you know? But he’s at the moment 13 years old, and he’s often, you know, he’s now a teenager, so he doesn’t even speak English anymore. It’s like.

But he was the one that started me thinking down the route, trying to solve this problem, and we’ve solved the problem.

Marc Adams, thanks for sharing your exit insights with us today.

Darryl, thank you so much for having me on the show. And I said, I so hope that it adds value to, you know, at least one of your, one of your listeners, hopefully more. But I just hope it adds value. Let me know what people think.

Marc Adams, CEO of Acquisitions4you, where he helps businesses increase their value by 10x and/or cash out tax-free. Specialising in working with established businesses ranging from £3 million to £50 million, Marc is a seasoned consultant with extensive experience in corporate, entrepreneurship, and private equity.

If you would like to learn more about how to start preparing your business, then you can get more information here: It All Begins with Insights.