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From HELP to Success: Avoiding HELL with Richard Parker · The Heart-Led Business Show

• 0:01
  Speaker: Welcome to the Heart-Led Business Show, where compassion meets commerce and leaders lead with love.
• 0:08
  Speaker: Join your host, Tom Jackobs, as he delves into the insightful conversations with visionary business leaders who defy the status quo, putting humanity first and profit second.
• 0:20
  Speaker: From heartfelt strategies to inspiring stories, this podcast is your compass in the world of conscious capitalism.
• 0:29
  Speaker: So buckle up and let's go.
• 0:30
  Speaker: Let your heart guide your business journey.
• 0:34
  Tom Jackobs: The Pied Piper of Profit, the Jocular Juggernaut of Entrepreneurship and heart-led Helmsman, Mr.
• 0:41
  Tom Jackobs: Richard Parker, riding the rollercoaster of ownership for over 30 years, bought businesses from nuggets to high stakes and penned to buy a good business at a great price.
• 0:54
  Tom Jackobs: Today, we'll uncover the heart and hustle behind this venture virtuoso's victories, on the Heart-Led Business Show.
• 1:00
  Richard Parker: Thank you, I appreciate you having me.
• 1:02
  Tom Jackobs: A lot of heart-led business owners don't always think about buying other heart-led businesses, but I think that's definitely a area that they need to be thinking about, and I'm really excited to have you share your wisdom with them and some of the good and bad and everything in between first, what's your definition of a heart-led business?
• 1:24
  Richard Parker: A heart-led business an overused term where people talk about, we want to do well and do good.
• 1:30
  Richard Parker: I think that's a little overused.
• 1:31
  Richard Parker: So to me, it's a business trying to provide a meaningful experience to all stakeholders, meaning with clients, suppliers, and so forth.
• 1:41
  Richard Parker: And so that goes just beyond the money, and I believe there's a double click to each one of those a meaningful experience.
• 1:48
  Richard Parker: I've always believed that if there's an economic benefit, and you go about it in the right way, The money happens by default.
• 1:55
  Tom Jackobs: I like that word experience, for businesses.
• 1:58
  Tom Jackobs: a lot of businesses don't think about the experience of, all stakeholders, whether it's employees, suppliers, shareholders, and clients could you unpack that in terms of different experiences that businesses have put together that have done really well and those that maybe not have done so well?
• 2:18
  Richard Parker: Sure.
• 2:20
  Richard Parker: Each one of those stakeholders that you alluded to, whether it be investors, suppliers, customers or employees have their own pyramid of priorities.
• 2:31
  Richard Parker: So if you take a look at employees, for example, people need to be paid properly.
• 2:36
  Richard Parker: Okay.
• 2:37
  Richard Parker: And they want to make sure the checks don't bounce, but the experience comes into play when empowering employees, as a young business owner, 29 years old, and for a number of years, my ego and insecurities got the way.
• 2:53
  Richard Parker: I was afraid of hiring people that would challenge me because I was insecure.
• 2:57
  Richard Parker: once I got over that, the light went on.
• 3:01
  Richard Parker: when I started hiring people better, than me, paid them well and said, do your job.
• 3:05
  Richard Parker: And if they didn't do their job, we replace them.
• 3:06
  Richard Parker: But empowering them to actually do their job, to make decisions, to pursue initiatives they thought would be helpful to the business.
• 3:17
  Richard Parker: And all these components to their job that were just beyond getting a paycheck.
• 3:22
  Richard Parker: So when providing a meaningful experience, say, hey, here's your job, this is what you're expected to do, you're going to be measured, you're going to be paid properly, you're going to have a big upside.
• 3:31
  Richard Parker: If you don't do your job, you'll lose it.
• 3:32
  Richard Parker: this is your little business.
• 3:34
  Richard Parker: if you manage it well, essentially you're the boss and you're going to have a good upside.
• 3:39
  Richard Parker: So that comes into play related to managing employees.
• 3:42
  Tom Jackobs: What about the client experience?
• 3:45
  Richard Parker: Clients have a different objective but they want an empowering experience business owners should look at the client experience from a standpoint of help.
• 3:54
  Richard Parker: Business is not complex.
• 3:56
  Richard Parker: provide value to customers at a price they're willing to pay and you're going to do very well.
• 4:03
  Richard Parker: And when I say value, it doesn't mean just cost It's value in, are you helping them?
• 4:07
  Richard Parker: every business is in the help business.
• 4:10
  Richard Parker: If you don't do it right, you're in the H E L business.
• 4:14
  Richard Parker: So what are their pain points?
• 4:15
  Richard Parker: What are they trying to solve?
• 4:17
  Richard Parker: most smaller businesses are one piece of the pie for their customers.
• 4:23
  Richard Parker: it could be something as small as a dry cleaner to a 50 million, digital marketing company providing services.
• 4:29
  Richard Parker: But if you take an extra either side of the equation, you're providing help.
• 4:33
  Richard Parker: You're answering a problem.
• 4:34
  Richard Parker: stay focused on that, People will be happy to do business with you sometimes it takes a little adjustment in your pricing at the beginning to get your foot in the door But if you problem solve and you provide them with help and that is the experience that they want.
• 4:49
  Richard Parker: You know when I was in the We have retail merchandising service company that used to go to retailers and help them put their stock onto the floor when they had an ad running to make sure that the inventory was in a prominent position, et cetera.
• 5:06
  Richard Parker: And it was a very lucrative business.
• 5:07
  Richard Parker: And I used to tell all of our and my partners collectively, we told the staff You're solving a headache.
• 5:17
  Richard Parker: retailers with a large number of stores, didn't have adequate personnel to make sure every one of the products they bought was displayed in its right location and advertising events when there was a national ad being broken to make sure the inventory.
• 5:29
  Richard Parker: In fact, came out from the back room because that was, it still is a big problem where, the inventory gets shipped to the store.
• 5:35
  Richard Parker: They have an ad breaking and it's nowhere to be found in the store.
• 5:38
  Richard Parker: So it was our job to go in and manage that inventory at store level.
• 5:41
  Richard Parker: That particular business was run in Canada at that point.
• 5:44
  Richard Parker: I've been living in the United States for 28 years.
• 5:46
  Richard Parker: Canada's far less floor level employees.
• 5:49
  Richard Parker: You go into various retailers.
• 5:51
  Richard Parker: It's like, where the find anybody to help me here if you've got something in the flyer, it's symptomatic, and cross border we used to tell our staff, you're answering a headache.
• 5:59
  Richard Parker: You're providing help.
• 6:00
  Richard Parker: take care of that headache for the buyer, the merchandise manager, the vice president of merchandise at the retailer.
• 6:06
  Richard Parker: We are going to command significant dollars for that service.
• 6:10
  Richard Parker: that experience is the help experience.
• 6:12
  Richard Parker: employees get one version.
• 6:13
  Richard Parker: customers get another, you'll have a different series for their experiences.
• 6:17
  Richard Parker: They want to make money.
• 6:18
  Richard Parker: they're not making money, they want to know why.
• 6:20
  Richard Parker: if you're not delivering to the investors what you represented don't hide.
• 6:25
  Tom Jackobs: Yeah.
• 6:26
  Richard Parker: Be upfront, totally transparent, understand what they're looking for, because business owners have a terrible tendency to run away from debt.
• 6:34
  Richard Parker: Meaning, if there's investors and, things aren't going as planned, they're trying to just avoid the conversation.
• 6:40
  Richard Parker: No the idea is have those conversations in advance, deliver bad news quicker than good news.
• 6:45
  Richard Parker: this way everybody is in sync.
• 6:47
  Richard Parker: They may not have the results that they want.
• 6:49
  Richard Parker: But it's a lot worse if it comes to them.
• 6:51
  Tom Jackobs: Yeah.
• 6:51
  Tom Jackobs: Nobody likes to learn about bad news.
• 6:54
  Tom Jackobs: Other than from the source itself.
• 6:56
  Richard Parker: At the appropriate time, heart-led business to me, everyone, these different stakeholders have different agendas, but at the investors, the last point we talked about, that'd be more maybe from a standpoint of empathy Understand they're looking for investment and how they want to be treated?
• 7:08
  Richard Parker: the overarching theme to all of heart-led businesses is make sure you treat everybody.
• 7:12
  Tom Jackobs: Set the expectations, create that experience and it all falls into place A little bit about what inspired you to create your heart-led business.
• 7:21
  Richard Parker: I've been in mergers and acquisitions for over three decades I've bought and sold 14 of my own companies wide range of dollar volume as you alluded to early in the introduction and been on the advisory side for buyers and sellers the help component resonated with me quickly.
• 7:37
  Richard Parker: When I started acquiring businesses early on, I recognize that the things that we talked about already, as far as maybe empathy, maybe empowerment, what have you is a pretty, common thread.
• 7:49
  Richard Parker: That goes through it like a common denominator in most of these cases.
• 7:53
  Richard Parker: in early businesses I was involved with found that if I could help the customers, they're going to buy from me I could help whatever problem they have.
• 8:01
  Richard Parker: so that really became very common in businesses that I've been involved in how do we help people?
• 8:07
  Richard Parker: And whoever they are and whatever area of the business that they're involved with.
• 8:11
  Richard Parker: And so the course that we developed over the years, which I developed strictly to memorialize all the deals that I was involved in, never thought it would turn into a business, and we have, a hundred thousand plus clients.
• 8:22
  Richard Parker: As a result, it still boggles my mind.
• 8:24
  Richard Parker: That was 100 percent done from a standpoint of help, the night before we made that program available, a robust 500 plus page program with resources, My wife asked me, how many think you're going to sell?
• 8:35
  Richard Parker: And those are the early days of the internet.
• 8:37
  Richard Parker: How many think you're going to sell?
• 8:38
  Richard Parker: And my answer then still is today is, if I sell one and help one person buy the right business or avoid buying the wrong one, that's good enough for me.
• 8:46
  Richard Parker: That's exactly what I want to accomplish.
• 8:48
  Richard Parker: that, philosophy has never changed.
• 8:50
  Richard Parker: I want to help people make the right decision, whatever that decision may be, And so I had an experience where I was looking at a business, it turned out to be of spaghetti to try to figure out the whole company.
• 9:03
  Richard Parker: I ended up backing out of the deal and I had this aha moment right after that said, the average person would have bought that business.
• 9:09
  Richard Parker: And it's only because I've been doing this for X number of years that I was able to figure out.
• 9:14
  Richard Parker: That I would never be able to figure it out and I walked away from the transaction and that became the inspiration for, what does the average person do is looking to buy a business who doesn't have the benefit of the years of experience that I have.
• 9:26
  Richard Parker: I'm not that smart.
• 9:27
  Richard Parker: I've just been doing a long time.
• 9:28
  Richard Parker: And so someone who doesn't have the benefit of that experience, what do they do?
• 9:32
  Richard Parker: that led me to figure out what people were doing and found out there no resources.
• 9:36
  Richard Parker: There was no good advisory service.
• 9:38
  Richard Parker: They had trouble finding investors.
• 9:40
  Richard Parker: They didn't know how to value a business, analyze a business, negotiate a transaction, which attorneys to hire.
• 9:45
  Richard Parker: It was a mess from beginning to end.
• 9:47
  Richard Parker: And that's, that became the if you will, to get into that business and business type from a help perspective because aspiring entrepreneurs and people wanted to change their lives and there was just no resources.
• 10:01
  Richard Parker: And here we are many years later, there may be more resources, but it's actually worse because now there's a proliferation of information by the internet and social media, garbage, delusional, misleading, not helpful.
• 10:13
  Richard Parker: demand for our materials, products, information explodes, it's up to people to find their way through the nonsense
• 10:22
  Tom Jackobs: that's the double edged sword of the information age is that there is a lot of information and you really have to do your due diligence in terms of figuring out what's good information and what's not good information as well.
• 10:34
  Tom Jackobs: What are some red flags you would look at for, buying a business that you could share with the audience
• 10:43
  Richard Parker: Make sure the business is right for you and marries well to your skill set because if you're the wrong person to operate the business based on your skill set, then that good business suddenly becomes a bad business because it'll turn sour in a hurry.
• 10:55
  Richard Parker: And so the definition of a good business fits perfectly with your best skill set.
• 10:59
  Richard Parker: So that's really important.
• 11:01
  Richard Parker: flags, especially in The smaller the business, the more this is appropriate.
• 11:06
  Richard Parker: Red flags, you get certain issues like customer concentration.
• 11:09
  Richard Parker: And that in manufacturing and distribution where there's a disproportionate amount of the revenue generated by a you also have supplier concentration.
• 11:18
  Richard Parker: I'm looking at a business now in distribution and 80 percent of their volume.
• 11:24
  Richard Parker: is from one manufacturer if that manufacturer goes out of business changes their mind or puts someone else into place or gets sold, I've seen this time and time again, where you have a manufacturer gets sold and the new owner.
• 11:36
  Richard Parker: Has a different distribution network and you're out of business.
• 11:39
  Richard Parker: So I like to tell people when you look at businesses, what can come up and bite you in the ass and put you out of business in a hurry certain things like customer concentration, vendor concentration, poor books and records.
• 11:51
  Richard Parker: There's also the reliance, far too much reliance on some key employees, right?
• 11:56
  Richard Parker: Where may have certain licenses or skills.
• 12:01
  Richard Parker: you don't have and you're held hostage or licenses that don't transfer with the business.
• 12:06
  Richard Parker: Fundamentally what people need to look at is how well is the business going to transition to them?
• 12:11
  Richard Parker: I believe I've been preaching the boss theory for many years.
• 12:14
  Richard Parker: I like businesses that are operationally sound.
• 12:17
  Richard Parker: That doesn't mean they're perfect, but fundamentally they operate well.
• 12:23
  Richard Parker: S is that they're sustainable.
• 12:25
  Richard Parker: Because the most important thing when you acquire a business, You want to make sure that growth is fantastic, but stable until you get your feet wet sustainable is, the third point and scalable cause you ultimately want to grow.
• 12:37
  Richard Parker: If you can't grow the business, it's going to go backwards.
• 12:39
  Richard Parker: People should use that as a basic barometer, that boss theory and look for items that theoretically can put you out of business.
• 12:46
  Richard Parker: stay, keep the emotions out of it because as people start to look at businesses, they start to fall in love with the product.
• 12:53
  Richard Parker: They start to fall in love with entrepreneurship.
• 12:56
  Richard Parker: intangibles you don't pay bills with intangibles.
• 12:59
  Richard Parker: Here's what I'm going to do with the product add to the website.
• 13:01
  Richard Parker: chances are the owner tried that until you know the business, you can't decide what you're going to do because you have no knowledge of the business.
• 13:07
  Tom Jackobs: no, that definitely resonates.
• 13:09
  Tom Jackobs: the business I bought, was a fitness business relying on one person.
• 13:14
  Tom Jackobs: The books were.
• 13:15
  Tom Jackobs: handwritten, no systems in place and it was, the owner wanted to be involved in, helping me transition for a number of months.
• 13:25
  Tom Jackobs: And that turned out to be a absolute disaster, but I was able to turn it around and kick them out and make it my own at some point.
• 13:32
  Tom Jackobs: Yeah.
• 13:35
  Richard Parker: Yeah, people should understand you want a proper transition if it's, if you feel that you need someone there too long, it's probably the wrong business.
• 13:40
  Richard Parker: But the reality is the sooner you get in, learn it, get them out you're the new sheriff in town, learn the business and get them out of the way.
• 13:47
  Richard Parker: it's your business.
• 13:47
  Tom Jackobs: when I sold that business, 10 years later, it took me two years to get it ready for sale, where I wanted to make sure that the books were proper.
• 13:56
  Tom Jackobs: It took out all of the extra, the owner compensation items, and so it really represented a true P and L statement of the true business value that made the transition easier.
• 14:10
  Tom Jackobs: The new owners, have, been operating it for another five years after that and as well.
• 14:16
  Tom Jackobs: It's, when you do it right, I think it, it really benefits both parties, on the buy and sell side.
• 14:23
  Richard Parker: Absolutely.
• 14:24
  Richard Parker: One of the big advantages, people don't realize how much money they leave on the table.
• 14:31
  Richard Parker: When they sell a disorganized business, and if you proper preparation, just, not only will the value, when you run a proper business where you have good books records, procedures, systems in place, not only will you increase the value when the time comes to sell, but you're going to be running a better business.
• 14:47
  Richard Parker: So chances are the business is going to grow much stronger.
• 14:49
  Richard Parker: The three things I tell people is number one, run your business like you, you up at night as a business owner is magnified because they have no perspective.
• 14:57
  Richard Parker: They haven't run the business.
• 14:58
  Richard Parker: So if you have a concern about the business, maybe it's about, recruiting, training and retaining employees.
• 15:04
  Richard Parker: You, Push through all the time and you managed to do it.
• 15:07
  Richard Parker: Someone from the outside who comes in and sees that it's a problem with the business, they're going to think it's catastrophic.
• 15:12
  Richard Parker: So whatever keeps you up at night about the business, address and solve for, because in the eyes of a buyer, it's magnified.
• 15:18
  Richard Parker: And the third thing I tell people is what happens if you get hit by a Pepsi truck?
• 15:22
  Richard Parker: Can someone take over and run the business?
• 15:24
  Tom Jackobs: Yeah.
• 15:25
  Richard Parker: Like it's that basic.
• 15:27
  Richard Parker: having people in place a second tier management is wonderful, looking at it from a perspective of what happens, if something happens to me today, what happens to the business tomorrow, is it sellable?
• 15:35
  Richard Parker: If I put things in place to make it sellable, could come in and figure out what's going on in order to buy it or sell it, If you can't answer that with conviction and a resounding yes, you need to revisit that.
• 15:47
  Tom Jackobs: I think that point is going to be money for so many business owners, especially heart-led business owners that because a lot of the ones that I work with are solopreneurs, solo practitioners.
• 15:57
  Tom Jackobs: they may have one or two employees that are working with them, but ultimately the business is them because they are the wellness practitioner in that.
• 16:05
  Tom Jackobs: And if something does happen to them, that is quite catastrophic for the entire business.
• 16:10
  Tom Jackobs: And so it's just a matter of putting those SOPs in place, making sure that you have redundancies and you have other people trained up and that the businesses that I've seen that are doing really well, the owner hardly does anything in the business, which is.
• 16:27
  Tom Jackobs: where it should be.
• 16:27
  Tom Jackobs: They're not in the business.
• 16:29
  Tom Jackobs: They're on the business itself.
• 16:31
  Richard Parker: It's a big adjustment where, many businesses are able to do it and they don't, meaning starts a business.
• 16:38
  Richard Parker: I'm the buy business guy, but I see this more in businesses that have started from the ground up sometimes, people that.
• 16:44
  Richard Parker: Owned a business for a little while.
• 16:45
  Richard Parker: We see this frequently where business starts to do well, you're making X amount of dollars and the owner keeps taking out the excess adjusting their lifestyle accordingly.
• 16:54
  Richard Parker: So they started out making, a hundred grand and then the business grows.
• 16:57
  Richard Parker: Now it's making 200.
• 16:58
  Richard Parker: they're living a 200, 000 a year lifestyle.
• 17:01
  Richard Parker: then the business grows further throwing off half a million dollars.
• 17:03
  Richard Parker: Now they're living on a half million lifestyle.
• 17:05
  Richard Parker: they would have been better served to live on that 200 or 250, 000 lifestyle for a while, put the money back into the business in marketing or hire key people.
• 17:14
  Richard Parker: Because the beauty of when you exit a business, every dollar, the owner benefits, as you were talking about earlier, that package you put together what it's going to look like for a new owner, that dollar number is.
• 17:26
  Richard Parker: There's a multiple attached to that.
• 17:27
  Richard Parker: That's how you arrive at the valuation or the purchase price.
• 17:30
  Richard Parker: So in very simple math, if you have a business that's making a dollar and it sells at a four times multiple, the business is going to sell for 4.
• 17:39
  Richard Parker: Every dollar of value that you add to the business, you're going to get 4 back.
• 17:44
  Richard Parker: So aren't you better off to put the money into the business, into the right people, into the right marketing, because you're going to get 4 back.
• 17:51
  Richard Parker: Because very often you put money back into the business, it multiplies.
• 17:54
  Richard Parker: And so that, that concept, because businesses as an investment should be the best investment you ever make, put the money into the business.
• 18:02
  Richard Parker: Don't keep stealing.
• 18:03
  Richard Parker: Don't keep taking out the business money for your own.
• 18:05
  Richard Parker: Yes, you've earned it, but think every dollar you add of value in the business, you're going to get three, four, five in certain businesses.
• 18:11
  Richard Parker: It could be seven, eight, 10, whatever the multiple is.
• 18:14
  Tom Jackobs: Yeah.
• 18:14
  Tom Jackobs: that's excellent.
• 18:16
  Tom Jackobs: advice especially for smaller businesses where it's, solopreneur, maybe with, less than 10 staff, it's very easy to see successes and then pull the money out for personal use for reinvesting.
• 18:30
  Richard Parker: We had a document preparation business that we used to do preparation of documents for people that were looking to, represent themselves in court.
• 18:36
  Richard Parker: They're called pro se litigants for uncontested divorce, child custody, et cetera.
• 18:41
  Richard Parker: I bought this company and it was a real mess.
• 18:43
  Richard Parker: They had no systems, no nothing.
• 18:44
  Richard Parker: It was marginally profitable, barely, but we looked at this business and said, as soon as we started generating, we saw what it was going to look like.
• 18:53
  Richard Parker: We immediately took as part of our acquisition cost.
• 18:55
  Richard Parker: It wasn't an expensive acquisition and plowed a ton of money into automating the entire business, And when the time come to sell, if I had sold that business, we got the multiple we got relative to the multiple we paid was extraordinary.
• 19:09
  Richard Parker: And it was really tied into that automation.
• 19:14
  Richard Parker: Now it would have been very easy to take that money and just put it in my pocket.
• 19:17
  Richard Parker: We put it all back into the business and develop these systems so that anybody can come in and they could really identify, Hey, I could run this business, although it's complicated.
• 19:25
  Richard Parker: It's, I press a button and by and large, 90 percent is ghost, right?
• 19:30
  Richard Parker: So that'd be, that was a perfect example where it would have been easy to make the decision to haul out the money.
• 19:35
  Tom Jackobs: When do you think business owners should think about selling their business?
• 19:39
  Richard Parker: People want to sell when business is doing this.
• 19:42
  Richard Parker: You don't want to sell it when the business is plateaued and you definitely don't want to sell it when a business is declining.
• 19:47
  Richard Parker: Business owners wait too long.
• 19:49
  Richard Parker: if they've stopped loving their business, they should sell it.
• 19:51
  Richard Parker: if you stop loving your business going to decline.
• 19:53
  Richard Parker: It's like having a car, when you stop caring things go wrong ideally sell the business when it's trending upwards.
• 19:59
  Richard Parker: And don't lull yourself into a false sense of security, thinking that you can keep trajectory because every business, starts out down here, it grows, it hits a peak, and then it declines.
• 20:09
  Richard Parker: That's just the life cycle of every business.
• 20:11
  Richard Parker: It's just a matter of how long that takes.
• 20:13
  Richard Parker: so while it's trending upwards, near a peak is a good time to sell, or when you're tired of running the business.
• 20:19
  Richard Parker: the other thing to keep in mind is you want to really prepare in advance.
• 20:22
  Richard Parker: It does take, I have clients, sometimes it takes three months, six months, 12 months, in your case, it took a couple of years, but that preparation is critically important.
• 20:30
  Richard Parker: So I would say to people, anybody who owns a business, whether it be, A timing issue, meaning you're, 62 years old and you say you want to be out.
• 20:37
  Richard Parker: by the time you're 65 or 67 you know what your timeline is.
• 20:40
  Richard Parker: Get stuff in place.
• 20:41
  Richard Parker: Certainly if you've lost interest in the business, you've got to make, plans to start getting out and the third piece was definitely want to sell as the business is on an upward trajectory.
• 20:52
  Tom Jackobs: And now is there a difference between selling to an outside party and selling the business to the employees, especially for, that you're retiring, you're 65, you love your employees, they've done a great job and you want to sell them the business is there a difference in doing that versus finding somebody outside?
• 21:10
  Richard Parker: There's definitely a difference and probably the most important one is smaller businesses will almost always have vendor financing, seller financing, a balance of sale, because it's the only way, to get the deal to the finish line.
• 21:26
  Richard Parker: You can't really get these business financed completely.
• 21:29
  Richard Parker: So there's always a piece of a seller note, if you came to buy my business and we didn't know each other, we would have to have a pretty long feeling out process till I felt comfortable Cause I want to make you paid a note.
• 21:42
  Richard Parker: are you able to run the business?
• 21:43
  Richard Parker: Is he a good guy?
• 21:44
  Richard Parker: Is he trustworthy?
• 21:45
  Richard Parker: is his heart.
• 21:46
  Richard Parker: in the right place, are all the things aligned?
• 21:48
  Richard Parker: This is the right person to take over the business, I'd have this whole checklist of things that I'd ask.
• 21:52
  Richard Parker: Now compare and contrast that to if you turned around to thinking about your employees.
• 21:56
  Richard Parker: You know them If you believe they're capable of running a business, you'd be more inclined to provide them a seller note, you have faith in their ability.
• 22:02
  Richard Parker: You've seen it every day.
• 22:04
  Richard Parker: So the single key biggest difference between selling it to the employees and selling it to an outsider is the terms and condition by which small businesses transact.
• 22:14
  Richard Parker: There may be a higher level of comfort providing favorable terms to people
• 22:18
  Tom Jackobs: and that can provide a nice revenue retirement for that business.
• 22:22
  Richard Parker: In retirement, there's a relationship there.
• 22:23
  Richard Parker: You want to see them succeed.
• 22:25
  Richard Parker: We had something recently with, which I was exposed to, which sort of off the subject a little bit, but one of the things I advise your listeners, especially if you have a lot of solopreneurs or smaller businesses, there's a situation recently where a company was sold, all the employees were really pissed.
• 22:39
  Richard Parker: and the reason was the owner of the business had represented for many years when the time came that they were going to retire, they were going to try to figure out a way to sell it to the employees or give it to employees.
• 22:50
  Tom Jackobs: wow.
• 22:50
  Richard Parker: very favorable terms.
• 22:51
  Richard Parker: this had been a carrot held in front of the employees for many years.
• 22:55
  Richard Parker: then they sold it to a third party and the employees were livid.
• 22:57
  Richard Parker: this was an employee based business.
• 22:59
  Richard Parker: all employee generated.
• 23:01
  Richard Parker: I had the conversation with someone recently, and this goes back a ways as
• 23:05
  Tom Jackobs: Yeah.
• 23:05
  Richard Parker: still animosity.
• 23:06
  Tom Jackobs: Wow.
• 23:07
  Richard Parker: if there's something you're thinking about and you represent it to your employees, if you change your mind, let them know early if you mention it to them, then give them the first shot at doing that.
• 23:15
  Richard Parker: Because if not, you could really, and so you don't, not only could you ruin the employee, the person buying it now got a group of employees.
• 23:24
  Tom Jackobs: Oh, wow.
• 23:25
  Richard Parker: Exactly.
• 23:25
  Tom Jackobs: What a nightmare that would be for the new owner to sort out.
• 23:29
  Tom Jackobs: Oh my gosh.
• 23:30
  Tom Jackobs: Richard, this has been a fascinating conversation definitely the pitfalls and, but also the good things to look at, especially for those heartled business owners that really feel like the business is them.
• 23:43
  Tom Jackobs: And I like what you said about removing emotion when selling or buying a business so the transaction can happen.
• 23:51
  Tom Jackobs: Versus being so emotional that it sabotages the deal thank you for being on the show.
• 23:57
  Tom Jackobs: How can people find out more about your business and how you might be able to help them?
• 24:02
  Richard Parker: The easiest way is richardparker.com.
• 24:04
  Richard Parker: We've got articles, free resources, videos, podcasts.
• 24:08
  Richard Parker: lots of educational material if they want to get in touch with me, use the contact us page, just mentioned there, please send this to Richard.
• 24:13
  Richard Parker: So my team will make sure it's routed properly, but richardparker.
• 24:16
  Richard Parker: com.
• 24:17
  Richard Parker: And I really appreciate you having me.
• 24:18
  Richard Parker: nice to have these, more, the questions related to heart-led questions, as opposed to just numbers.
• 24:24
  Tom Jackobs: Awesome.
• 24:24
  Tom Jackobs: Thank you so much for being on this show.
• 24:26
  Tom Jackobs: I certainly appreciate your time.
• 24:28
  Tom Jackobs: Thank you listeners and those watching the show as well on YouTube.
• 24:31
  Tom Jackobs: We really appreciate it.
• 24:33
  Tom Jackobs: Make sure you're checking out everything that Richard's doing.
• 24:35
  Tom Jackobs: We're going to provide the link in the show notes find out more about buying a business.
• 24:40
  Tom Jackobs: Buying a business or selling the business and making sure that you're doing it the right way.
• 24:44
  Tom Jackobs: And a little word of advice from somebody that's bought and sold a business, do it early until next time, lead with your heart.
• 24:52
  Speaker 2: You've been listening to the heart-led Business Show, hosted by Tom Jackobs.
• 24:57
  Speaker 2: Join us next time for another inspiring journey into the heart of business.