What do founders get wrong about life after an exit?

The day you sell and leave the business, no one cares about you. I have never met a founder who sold their business and then was as happy running the business for someone else as they were running their own business. What do you see as common for founders that they constantly always do after exit? Number one is I think it's a very important question for founders to ask themselves, what is enough and what are they willing to do to get there, to create that outcome. Everyone thinks that they're going to advise other startups and angel invest. 95% of people do this and for the vast majority ends up being like a phase. One of the things that emotionally founders have to do is Hey everyone, welcome back to Fundraising Demystified. Today we have John Roode with me today, a exited founder who sold this company for more than eight figures to private equity and also wrote the book on Beyond the Exit. John, welcome to the show. Hey Jason, thanks for having me. It's good to be here. Now, I'm excited to talk about your experience and and what you've done, but to give the audience a little bit of color, you built a material business, you spent years, you know, building it and you had what most founders dream of is, you know, an eight-figure exit. Uh can you tell the audience a little bit about what the company you built and we'll kind of talk about kind of the process of selling it and why you sold it. Does that sound good? Yeah, sure thing. So, I had started and built an educational services business in the test preparation niche. So, we started out helping students succeed on the law school admissions test. Ultimately built a business in the medical pre-medical education space. Pivoted from where we started with kind of tutoring and services to be more software-based and more content-based. And then ultimately that was one of the the larger pre-medical test preparation businesses in the world when we sold it. Wow. And I guess in that process, you took it from a service business to a software business. And for founders that don't know, that's a material difference when it comes to exit value. What gave you the insight that you needed to switch to a software business? So, I I think it was it was two things. And one was luck and then one was skill. So, the luck was we um saw some places in the market where, you know, our students were not really being served with some of the software and content solutions from our competitors. So, we had an opportunity to go build that, which was great. And so, it's always great to serve our customers better. Um, and then the second was uh you know, and this is where I think I I I did some smart things. I had a really good advisor who um had worked for our competitors for a long time and then was, you know, had a a great MBA and was a uh you know, a high-level consultant at a big firm. One of the smartest people I've ever met. And one of the great things he did for me was he took me around to private equity firms well before we were interested in selling. Um, and just said, "Hey, you know, sit down with these people, meet these people for 15 minutes, talk to them, see what they want, see what kind of businesses they want to buy." Um, and sure enough, exactly as you had said, um you know, a uh you know, a a small tutoring business is not really worth very much, but a um you know, a scaled business with software, content, tens of thousands of students is worth much, much more. Yeah. And so, that's something I want to kind of point out. You had an advisor and in this case it could be investor, advisor, mentor, whoever, but you know, that understands the business, understands, you know, the the economics of private equity that can introduce you to how to start thinking like that. What point in your journey did they kind of introduce you to this concept of private equity and you know, those conversations? I think we were probably five or six years in and we ended up selling when we were eight years in. So, you know, I think we were we were big enough to have those conversations. Like it would have been a little absurd to go you know, go to the you know, downtown high-rise and sit down with the full investment team and say, you know, to your point, I've got a $100,000 tutoring business. Like that's just not not the way to create the right relationship. Um but, you know, I think it was when we were large enough and interesting enough that people could see um at least some path forward to us being a tuck-in to something else that they were doing at some point in the future. And so, you started those conversations 2 years before you actually ended up selling and I think that's you know, probably what led to maybe a a more successful you know, outcome. So, I guess walk us through from the the spark of like, okay, now I know what the end goal is that's going to maximize enterprise value if I do XYZ. Like what did you do with the business to maximize the value? Well, I you know, I think that it's it was really the basics. I mean, kind of after we had that strategic direction of we can't just be you know, a a one-to-one services business. It was really clear what we needed to do. We needed to um build software and content that gave us substantially higher gross margins and then just scale that as quickly as we can and you know, I probably talk all day about how you do that in an education business. Probably not super interesting to your your audience altogether, but I mean, functionally it was just the blocking and tackling of growing that business and scaling in a in a smart way as we could. And how much did you grow like were you growing faster than you were before? Like did you invest Did you play any like So, some things I talk to founders about is like there's these certain financial games you can play in terms of investing in certain parts of the business can drive top-line revenue and give you a greater multiple like almost 5x 6x your money that you invest because you're investing in the right thing in the business. Like was there any kind of strategy around that that you guys played into? Yeah, you know, one of the things that I I learned and I you know, I was a I was a humanities major in college, so I have no finance background whatsoever. But one of the things that I learned is that when you make investments in your business and you have clever finance people, you can sort of just say that those are that that's CAPEX as opposed to something different and um and often times kind of get that knocked off of of your costs. So, um I think that to answer the question, you know, when we invest in software, we invest in content and we expect that software and content to be valuable for, you know, 5 to 10 years. Um that turned out to be, I would say, an extraordinary investment. Yeah, it's a basically taking increasing your EBITDA sort of artificially to then, you know, that little bit of increase, you know, could be multiplied or depending on whatever multiple you sold at like five times, you know, six times, which exactly. a, you know, very material impact. Uh and so I was just challenged founders to think about, you know, what are they what are the things you can do like certain investing in certain things in the business in terms of growth or EBITDA and you know, there's a multiplier effect, which is pretty powerful. Um All right, so when you get two years down the road, like what what actually kicks off the sale process? What what's kind of going through your mind? You know, why did you kick it off when you did? What what what happened there? So, there's a a couple of things that came together at same time in the right time. So, one of them was it it started to get clear that we were large enough to sell. So, we started to get quite a bit of just inbound um from uh from competitors, from kind of the search funder crowd. Um when we got search fund emails, they're all exactly the same. We get one at least once a week. Um this is like, okay, you know, this is material enough that, you know, that's interesting. Um I would say that that aligned with the time in the business where we had gotten, I think, a lot of the value out of what we had built and sort of to kind of get to the next level up, we would need to make to your point earlier like a substantially larger investment in technology and people and management, etc. Um so as I was thinking about that, you know, I I I didn't have any money when I started this business, you know, my my parents were teachers, there's no there's no trust fund for me. Um and so I didn't have any money and all my all my net worth was tied in that business. So, there just it it was just time where, you know, safeguard, you know, my my family's future um to make sure that, you know, we actually got something out of the business which a lot of entrepreneurs don't. Um it was time to think about taking some chips off the table. And then that, you know, I think happily coincided with one of the private equity groups that we had met a couple years ago popped up on my radar again and said, "Hey, we're looking to do a, you know, a roll up in this space." Um that's kind of what set us off down the path. So, here's some terms that you've uh mentioned, search fund, roll up, and just for the audience's perspective, just want to give them a quick education. So, like, search funds are often led by MBAs who raise a little bit of money to go hunt down a deal. And, you know, spend 2 years trying to hunt down a deal and then raise financing from those investors to actually close on a deal. So, they're basically prospecting. And so, you're getting a lot of that prospecting and then roll ups is when you basically buy one platform company that is like kind of a core piece to a strategy, like in this case maybe test prep um as a platform and then they buy a bunch of bolt-on companies to stack on top of it and increase the value. Um those are strategies we talk about often and I think founders need to know that those exist out there so they know what language to to use when having conversations for potential exit. Um So, when it came down to the the exit, so it was a one of those firms you met 2 years ago. It wasn't one of the new So, that's the thing also, like, how important do you think that relationship was to doing the deal with them as opposed to others? I think it was I think it was medium important. So, I think that we were going to we would sell that business with or without the folks that we had met previously just cuz it wasn't an you know, an attractive business at that time. I think it was easier. Um number one, it's it's nice to know the right people. Uh that makes things I think go a lot more smoothly. Um I think it's nice to have some relationships. And you know, there's always there's there's a cap on the value of relationships where it's like okay, you want to do a deal with people that you kind of know and trust a little bit and you know, you're friendly with. Now, is that worth $10 million? No, like that's not worth $10 million. But like, you know, is that worth like uh you know, a little bit of extra trust? I think it is. Um so, you know, I think that having a group where we already knew the people, um thought they were you know, good people. Um I think that was really beneficial. Yeah, and and being able to having done that little bit of a road show early on helped kind of set the stage for what inevitably happened 2 years later. And Yeah. And when you ran your process, did you hire bankers? Did you guys do it yourselves? Like how did you guys go about running the process and letting the world know you're ready to sell? Yeah, we hired a banker. Um I think that it was probably the market would describe it as a limited process. So, we went out for a relatively select number of buyers cuz we already had an offer on the table that was I think pretty good. Um so, it was just a matter of figuring out, you know, was that top dollar? Um was there more that we could do? Um and so, I I don't I don't actually know if that was the right approach or not. Um I think that it's always I I don't know a single entrepreneur after talking to hundreds of them who doesn't kind of Monday morning quarterback their sales process. And the the challenge of it is that when you make a mistake, you know, you make a mistake in like your daily life or whatever. Like, you know, like whatever. Like you could have bought milk for 10 cents less at the different store or whatever. Like, who cares? But like, if you make a mistake in your M&A process across millions of dollars. So, I just you know, there's some entrepreneurs probably that have said that they did it perfectly, but I don't think I know any. And so, did I do it perfectly? No, I don't think so, but I think I did as best I could at the time. What would you have changed like what were some of the things that you would have changed uh when it came to the running of the process piece? Um I think we could have gotten more buyers involved. Um I think that Yeah, I mean I think that that's probably the the big one that stands out, but again, it's tough to complain about it because, you know, what what were my goals in this process? I wanted to hatch chips off the table. I wanted to let the company continue to grow without every dollar coming out of my my bank account, and we succeeded in those things. I I I think that's a very reasonable perspective, and you mentioned kind of founders playing Monday morning quarterback and like what could have been, what could have happened, and like when we sold our company to to Walmart, there's a lot of Monday morning quarterback, what we could have done better, and blah blah blah blah blah. Um that would have made material changes and so on. So, it's it's something that I think is a a pain for all founders to to go through, but I think what you said there is like, well, you still ended up accomplishing your goal. Could you have gotten more? Could you have say been greedier or like reached for more? Yes, possibly. Um but you never know what happened. You know what you know now, and you have what you have now versus what could have maybe not happened or did happen. Uh and I can speak from experience. I had a board member get greedy, and we all lost a lot of money. Yeah, and you know what? He wanted more and pushed, and we lost the deal. And what's What's What's interesting about it is that that Monday morning quarterbacking to me um is totally divorced from any actual utility that people usually could get from having more money. So, I've had these conversations with people that got, you know, $100 million in in proceeds, and um you know, are modest people, like they don't need their own private jet, like functionally have no utility. Like they could lose 80% of their money, and their life would be totally the same. Um but they're still going to Monday morning quarterback their process, right? So, I think one of the things that emotionally founders have to do is just make sure that they kind of go through this process of thinking like, "Well, wait a second. Like, I have enough. So, you know, if I had more, it would not change my life." Like, yes, I could have been like, you know, like a big strong man and gotten max top dollar. Um but that doesn't matter. Like, it just doesn't actually matter in people's lives. So, I think there's a process where we kind of learn not to let that wake us up in the middle of the of the night like 1-year, 3-year, 10-years later. That's so important. You mentioned the word enough. And I think that that's often a challenge I have with founders when we first engage cuz we're always telling the founders that like ultimately the end game is some kind of exit. But there might be a couple milestones to get there. And you know, they're looking like, "Oh, I want to be a billion-dollar company." Like, "Do you really? Like, is that really the life that you want to live for the next like 10-15 years?" And it's like, "If you had $20 million versus $100 million, would that be a material change in your lifestyle from how you perceive yourself today?" And it's like, "No." It's like, "But if you sold for $20 million in 2 years versus doing this for 10 years for a billion, like, you know, what's what's actually up change? What's worth, you know, having that that security scenario uh what not?" So, uh I I think it's a very important question for founders ask themselves, what is enough and what are they willing to do to get there uh to create that outcome. So, Totally. You sold the business. Yay. But what happened after? So, I worked in that business for 2 years under our new owners, um which was, you know, I you know, again, like it was pleasant people. Um you know, we we had no problems with the deal. Like, you know, the money came, the things happened that people said would happen. Um and there's always a transition when you've been an entrepreneur, you know, functionally your whole career and then, you know, suddenly you have investors and bosses. It's just different. Um so, after 2 years of that, uh it was time for time for me to move on. Um and then I was trying to figure out what to do next, like what to do with my life, and it was surprisingly hard. And you know, one of the things that surprises me still is that I tend to be a very introspective person. So like, you know, I journal, I think about, you know, the scope of my life and all this stuff. And just like that's the stuff that that I do. But I don't think I ever really sat down like before the sales process and said, here's exactly what I want my life to be like you know, after I leave this company eventually and what however long that takes. And so when I got out of it, I you know, I didn't know what to do. And that was a you know, a a real struggle for a while in my life. And I guess that ultimately led you to writing this book. Yeah, so I you know, I I tell people I wrote the book for two reasons. One of them was utterly selfish, which is I'd always wanted to write a real book. I mean, I've I've got my name on 10 test prep books of you know, of medical terminology, but that's not really what I had in mind. Yeah, you know, like when I when I thought, you know, as a kid I thought, what am I going to do? It's like, well, probably write a book in my life. So I wanted to do it and I did it. So that was great. The less selfish reason was you know, I really think that this is a this is a a part of kind of the entrepreneurial journey that people don't talk about very much. You know, I've heard it described as as like the like the dark underbelly of the world of entrepreneurship where you know, we think we're working really hard to get to a goal, we get the goal, and then people aren't happy. And you know, that was that was my experience. That's experience of you know, I I interviewed 70 people for this book with exits from 1 million to 700 million. You know, varying degrees of happiness and kind of I guess success in post exit life. But universally it was not as easy or not as smooth as people might have thought it was going to be. Like basically no one took the money, went to live on the beach, and was like serve like tiki drinks for the rest of their life and was totally happy. That didn't happen. I always think of it as like the visual of like the what if the coyote caught the roadrunner? It's like, okay, well, now what? Right. It's like, okay, you got the roadrunner. It's like, okay, you got everything you've been working for your entire life. You suffered in miserable pain to get to. Um and kind of now what? And so, I guess kind of across interviewing over 70 founders that have sold their companies, what are some kind of the underlying themes that you saw that, you know, would be important for founders that haven't got there to know? Yeah, so there's a a couple of things I would point to. Um the one that I think is most helpful for founders that are still like on the journey is uh basically no one planned well for their life after exit. And there's a couple reasons that I found both in my own experience and the folks that I talked to for why that happens. Um one of them is from an identity standpoint, we can't think about ourselves as anything other than entrepreneurs, right? So, that's just like that's what we are. We wake up thinking about our business, we fall asleep thinking about our business, and so it's hard to imagine anything else um than than exactly that. Um so, I think like that's a that's a big challenge. Secondly, I think that the sales process um for for virtually everyone happens so quickly. There's just not a lot of time in there to really sit down and think like, what do you actually want? Um a lot of people in were in kind of positions similar to what I was in where, you know, you've got a mid-size business, you guys get some demand for it, and then you get uh you get an offer, right? And the offer kind of comes out of the blue, and it's good enough that you have to consider it. Um and so, for folks like that, like, you know, in in my situation when the offer came, like, I hadn't thought I hadn't sat down and thought like, what do I want you know, the next 30 years of my life to be like? Um and when you don't do that, you know, then you kind of get in the sales process, and it's like rolling a boulder downhill, right? Like, and everyone wants you to just get to close because everyone in your world is now financially incentivized to get your deal to close. Um your banker, you know, your lawyer, your accountant, whatever. Um and so there's just not a lot of time to think about that. So, one of the things that I think is really important is making sure that people think through really holistically, like what do I actually want to have happen when I leave this business? Um the other reason why that's so important for both folks on the journey is because I think that it informs the kind of deal that they want to that they want to have, right? Because if you've never thought about this and suddenly, you know, there's a private equity group comes in and says like, well, we want to buy 70% of your business, but you have to stay on as general manager for, you know, four more years to, you know, to grow this or whatever. Um do you really want to do that, right? Do you really want to work for four more years in your business, right? If you have to do that, is that worth a million dollars, 10 million dollars, 100 million dollars, right? And so, those are the things that are really hard to weigh when you are doing ba- for most entrepreneurs, one big transaction in your entire life, right? Um you only get one chance to do it. Uh and, you know, if you kind of mess that up, like the cost of of unrolling yourself from a deal that, you know, you end up not liking the terms of can be really challenging. You're likely having trouble raising money or selling your company. Personally, I've had four exits and I've raised over 145 million dollars. If you want a free coaching session with me, just like, subscribe, and leave a comment down below letting me know what you think of today's video for a chance to win a free coaching session with me. I'll select three winners every single month. You just have to like, subscribe, and leave a comment down below for a chance to win. Now, onto the video. Yeah, I completely can derail a founder post exit. There's many people that go into a state of depression after losing a sense of identity or doing the deal in a way that again they run it morning quarterback too often. Um so you kind of talk about this like mental preparation prior to but like what are the tools or like resources or networks that exist out there for for founders that are feel like they can build a material business and want to know their options. Yeah, totally. So I think there's a a couple a couple good things to do. So number one is just learning from other folks that have done it. Um so you know what the risk of over self promotion like I wrote a book on on how to do it. Uh there's a couple other good ones too um about about the same topic that I think folks should take a look at. I'm happy to put those in the show notes. Um so number one is learning from you know books and articles. Number two is learning from other entrepreneurs. So one of the most impactful things that I did in my business was join entrepreneurs organization. Um and now there's you know there's ten of them YPO, Hampton, uh etc. etc. There's a ton of those now. Um so those are where you know that experience often times lives and it's hard to hard to just kind of meet people who have sold a big business before but that's that's the way that you do it. Um and then the third way is there's lots of tools that you can kind of use for life planning and I talk about a lot of them in my book. Happy to you know talk about them now um but I think just like sitting down in like away from your business and away from your family like really truly taking like one to three days to disconnect from everything and you know thoughtfully like journal and do exercises about what you want in your life. Like that I think is ultimately how people get to uh the right level of self confidence and then go get the deal that makes them happy. Yeah. Uh incredible advice and it's you know starting those conversations. I know it's like hard when you're a founder and you feel like you're running in a hamster wheel and like you got to you got to keep everything going all the time. Um but it's it's important to start making those connections after you kind of hit probably like a million in revenue and that's kind of when EO kicks in is after you hit a million in revenue. It's when you can start joining these types of groups and getting exposure and uh having these conversations. Um So, when it comes to the the post exit, so you can kind of talked about the the psychological impact or what do I do, but like what do you ultimately recommend that they, you know, start exploring? Like where where do you where do you see founders kind of where where do I say what what do you see as common for founders that do exit? Like what are the one or two or three things that they constantly always do after exit? Totally. And it was remarkable how quickly these patterns develop when I started to do this research. Um here's the things that founders do that turn out to be sometimes sometimes helpful for them and sometimes um unhelpful or unhealthy. So, number one is everyone thinks that they're going to advise other startups and angel invest. Like 95% of people um do this and for the vast majority ends up kind of being like a phase. Um and I I I drew this diagram after seeing this pattern over and over where like you you exit your business. One of the things that happens is people stop like talking to you. Like unless you're like Elon Musk or like really really well-known like like, you know, you're like Reid Hoffman or something. Like um if you're me and you run like a little education business, the day you sell and leave the business, no one cares about you, right? You're not you're not on the news. And it's this constant cycle of um you know, your employees need you, your vendors need you, your customers. They all that goes away, right? And so, the thing that people do to kind of fill that lonely gap is angel investing because then like like just like like mana from heaven, all of these really smart young people start like calling you and they're like, "Oh, Mr. Rude, I just need a minute of your time." It's like very flattering, right? To have bothers. Yeah, exactly. So, um so then you do you know, you do angel investing and again like if you're someone like me, you may be in a different situation like for someone like me, I I don't know a lot of Silicon Valley people. Like I'm not well-connected. I'm not a top investor. So, the deals that fall to me are not the top deals, right? So, like I'm like I'm like the proverbial like dentist from Akron, right? Where like deals that I get are like just like the worst. And um and actually have money, I'm going to go after you. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. Um so, you know, you you do that, you make some angel investments, whatever. Um all the young people that really wanted to talk to you after the check clears, never want to talk to you again, right? Like maybe they send you an update every year like if you're lucky, maybe not. And then tax time comes, and now you've got like 35 K-1s that you're trying to track down from these 23-year-old kids running businesses where you invested $25,000, which is not an amount that you even care about. Um and then you like get out of angel investing and put your money in in in mutual funds, right? Like I see that pattern over and over. So, angel investing is a is a big one. Um the other obvious one that people do all the time is they just they start another business. And I've got some other business things. Like I don't think it's wrong, but I think it's there's a emotional risk that entrepreneurs take where you know, they get out of their business, like 2 weeks later, um they start to kind of get antsy. Like they're they're like no one's calling, like no one needs me, you know, my am I my washed up at 35 or whatever. Um I'm going to start a new business right away, right? And the reason I think that that's risky is if you don't take time to like sit with that discomfort, like sit with that uh loneliness and with those feelings, I think you're just kicking that can like down the road of trying to figure out like who you actually are, what you actually want in life. So, again, like a lot of the people I talked to had second businesses. Um the ones that are happy are the ones that were really thoughtful about what kind of a business do I want? Why do I want to do this? Cuz like it's not it's not for money, right? So, there's got to be a reason why I want to why I want to have another business. Um and the ones that I talked to that were not happy were the ones that just said, you know, 2 weeks after I sell my business, I'm going to start another business as close to the old one that I just sold as I possibly can without violating my non-compete. Rinse and repeat. Yeah, I I see the same exact patterns. Um you know, being in the path group, there's now like 3,000 members of post-exit founders and hearing these stories of like sold my company 2 weeks ago to raising for my next. Here's now take a breath, man, cuz like I would I did the same thing. You know, I was sold to Walmart and then I was just like right back into it. You know, operating at the you know, without even breathing for a moment. And um you know, kept going, kept going for at least 3 more years before I kind of like hit a wall and I was like why am I doing this? Why am I going through a max pain all over again? And yeah, I had to basically pull it you know, pull the plug and you know, took my chips off the table that I had at the company I was at last and you know, basically reflected for months and I did probably jump too fast into what I do today, but I you know, I was it was a lot of that thoughtful alignment in terms of this is what I want to do for the rest of my life kind of thing versus you know, kind of the tech startup route again, but um yeah, it's a very common kind of thing. Yeah, angel investing, writing checks, great time to write checks in 2021. This is like lighting money on fire. Um I feel like every founder's got to go every exited founder's got to write those like five angel angel checks they go why did I write that check? You just get excited. Yeah, do it. Let's throw the money out there. I I got to go. Oh, that was a mistake. Yeah, there's um there's a lot of things that feed the ego like that and after you have left your business and no one cares about you anymore, like that's like that's what that's what people crave is to have their ego fed one way one way or the other. Yep. 100%. And when you're you know, in the in the book itself, like are there any kind of like key takeaways that you want to highlight for for founders that you know, might be considering, you know, either had just recently exited and and kind of want to know what to look for or you know, might be on that trajectory to exit. Yeah, I think that it's all about planning and it's all about thinking about what are the parameters that actually make you happy. Um, and so I've got a lot of stories in the book about about exactly that and a few of them are people that started other businesses and tried to make them big and, you know, whatever they were already doing, but so many of them were people that built big businesses in tech or whatever and then just like ended up doing something completely different um, and are totally happy with that process. So, you know, I interviewed one person um, who had studied um, opera singing and after she sold her like large business um, she became an opera singer and and loves doing that. Um, my all-time favorite story though, I have a prop for it, too, is um, I I talked to this guy, um, who had a big, what was it was like a technology integration provider like in the 90s like when that was like a thing where you could make a lot of money like like putting software on people's computers at their office. So, he built that, he sold it to um, like Hewlett-Packard or something. Took like 9 years off and like I would I don't want to say did nothing, but like did nothing that was like business-related. And then one day he's at this conference for knives and watches cuz he loves knives and watches and he always has had a knife collection since he was a a kid. And he meets these Danish guys who have this like these beautiful knives and just have don't have the right distribution. They're not, you know, kind of getting the market credit for what they're they've built. So, he ends up putting together a company with them. Um, they go on to make Inc. 5000, they win knife of the year. I've got Here's Here's my prop. It's weird to hold up a knife on camera, but like I got one of their knives I have with me all the time. It's a great knife. It's a great company and it's just you know, it's this guy just doing the things he wanted to do when he was a little kid? And, you know, that's one of the things that I think can be a It's like a really easy shortcut in people's like journal. You just take 10 minutes and say like, "What did you like to do when you were like 13?" Right? Um and those are the are often times the seeds of what end up making people like really truly happy when money and status and prestige um no longer can make them happy. It's a valid way to to look at it. And you know, I know some founders that you know, were building at 13. Totally. can't stop building. That was me building. Um and then you have others that, you know, kind of tinkered in something and fell into a business that ended up becoming a material value. And you know, kind of reflecting back is it's definitely, you know, being an entrepreneur, there is no easy path. Uh sometimes it might be look easy on the outside in terms of what's actually going behind the scenes. Everything's always on fire. There's always like a issue that's, you know, arise. And but as a founder you're going to be like, "No, everything's fine here. Nothing's wrong. Everything's good. Uh please be our customer. Please buy us." Yeah, to your point, it's it's never fine. And people miss people miss that. Entrepreneurs miss that. Um just like the the number of people who you know, go from everything being on fire and then like everything is perfectly fine. And then that drives them like functionally insane is is like very high. Um so it's about like how do you How do you fill that How do you fill that niche? Um and that's And that's what the work is about. And And it's real work. Yeah, it's like a complete reset button for for a lot of people. Just how do they self-reflect? There's coaches. There's a whole industry for these things. Founders after the fact. You know, there's books. There's, you know, coaching. There's all kinds of uh retreats and experiences for for founders that kind of fall into it. It's like, "Oh, woe is you. You have millions of dollars to cry into at night." But you know, it's real problems. Like, you know, you're still still a human, you still have your problems change, but you know, it's always an interesting um adventure, you know, kind of after that point. Um from here like, what would be some advice to the founders that are getting ready for the exit? And you know, when they think when you think about kind of what you had, that mentor that was like 2 years prior uh to an exit, like, how like what would be advice to go seek that mentor or to to kind of get ready for the exit? Totally. So, I've I've got the functional advice and then I've got the emotional advice. And the functional advice is kind of exactly what what you said, which is that you have to have find people that you trust that have done this before, and that's where I think the wisdom that you get from joining, you know, YPO or whatever. Um I I think that's a that's a a great way to do it. Um in the absence of that, like, studying like I mean, literally exactly your podcast and the podcast of the other folks that are that are talking about these issues. Um I think are really important. So, I think finding out what those options are are important because that again, like that molds the kind of deal that you want to ultimately end up with, right? Like, everyone like I think one of the things that you don't know if you've never sold a business or never been through the process is there's a headline number, but under the headline number, there's a lot of red tape, right? And so, there's how much do you sell versus, you know, how much do you roll over if you sell to private equity? Um how many years do you have to stay with the company? Like, what's your obligation level? What if you what if you hate it and you want to leave? And those are the things that I think that people, you know, don't really consider, but have such a huge impact ultimately on your happiness um once you're out or once you're at least like have have, you know, gotten the first check. Um I think one piece of advice that I always give folks, and I I try to say it in a very neutral way, but I have never met a founder um who sold their business and then was as happy running the business for someone else or like working for someone else as they were running their own business. I just I've never met someone like that. Um maybe they exist. And I Oh, was that That was you? No, no, no. I'm just saying I'm the problem. Yeah, maybe you're the one. Um but so like however happy people think they're going to be after they sell, if they're still in their business, I always say like discount it by 50%. So, if you think your life is going to be better after you sell at work, like nope. If you think you're going to be miserable working for someone else, like it's going to be even worse than you think. Um and that's not anything to do That doesn't mean that any of the people are evil, right? Like that doesn't mean that your new boss is going to be mean to you. It doesn't mean that like you know, that anyone's like done the wrong thing. Like we're just entrepreneurs. And so I think that people that you know, kind of think about that really hard and think through like well well well wait a second, like what does it mean to have a 2-year earnout where I earn $5 million, right? Like if I hate if I if I hate this on day one, will I actually leave and lose $5 million? Or will I burn 2 years of my life, which is irretrievable? So, I think when you're kind of in those first stages of thinking about selling, like that's really important to give some thought to. Yeah. No, I think that's valid valuable input. I mean, we talk about that with with founders we work with in terms of like a deal structure. It's like you know, those early conversations when terms start being tossed around, having a good idea of what you truly want post-exit you know, materially changes the outcome. It's like, you know, earnouts can be varied very complicated in terms of whether you get paid, and it's like how much control you have, how much control you don't have. How involved you get to be, how much of the the reins going to be pulled against you, and it's like the stress that can cause. And if you've already made a material exit, do you really need that extra you know, couple mill that might, you know, come in after the fact? So, I always think it's a very good uh conversation point to have with founders that they start to explore that. And then I guess for for founders that are listening today that you might be in the situation, might want access to your book, might want to reach out to you. What would be the best way for them to to learn more about you and the book? Sure thing. So you can you can find me on LinkedIn. Communicate with people all the time there. The book is called Beyond the Exit. So it's on Amazon. It's there's paperback, audio version, etc. And then the the website for the book is Beyond the exitbook.com. So I'll I'll put that in the in the show notes, I'm sure. Feel free to jump on there. I've got an occasional newsletter that I send out. I don't do it every week, but I try to make it good when I do it. So that's a a good way to stay in touch as well. Well, let me ask you what So outside of the book and you know in general advisory, like what do you what do you do now? Where where was your post-exit path? Yeah, sure. So it's a I think it took a long time to get here, but what what I I settled on was that there's four things that I want to be in my life. So one of them is and the most important honestly is a good father and husband. So I spend obviously more time with my kids than I did before, which is great. They're now at the age where like they come home and they're like "Daddy, we want to go play with our friends. Like get out of my way." So So that's not as important, but that's still important to me emotionally. Number two, I want to give back to my community. So I try to do you know I do some volunteer work and board work locally in the community. Number three, I want to keep learning. And number four, I want to keep teaching. So functionally what that's meant in my life is I do I do a bunch of I do a bunch of training stuff in the AI world, which like if I sat down and said what's a great business to start where I can maximize my money like like AI training is not it. Like I would pick something else, but I just love it. Like I love to learn things and then teach them to other people. I've loved that since I was a kid and that's kind of what makes me happy. So I'm doing a lot of that. Slightly adjacent to test prep. It is yeah, I mean I it's not an accident that I was in test prep either. No, that's good. But it does not violate my non-compete importantly. Yeah, exactly. No one's No one's knocking on your door just to be clear. Yeah, so adjacent as you were saying earlier I get adjacent too. Yeah, but not non-competitive. Uh well Alok it's been an absolute pleasure having you on the show and like sharing your experience and you know quite a lot of people are like you are writing these books to help founders just know that there is there are answers for you out there and like be a starting point to like learn the language and learn the expectation you need to have as a founder. Um for preparing for these like you said like once in a lifetime very large transactions. Very rare that someone goes through it twice. Um so thanks for coming on the show. Appreciate it. We'll make sure that all the links are in the show notes down below. Jason, thank you. It was a fun discussion. Thank you for watching today's episode. As a reminder I'm your host Jason Kirby. I have built and sold multiple companies with over 135 million in transactions as either a founder, operator, or investor across multiple industries. I'm currently the managing director and founder of thunder.vc where we help companies and founders at all stages navigate what capital to raise and who to raise it from and help improve companies odds of raising capital. If you need help reach out to us at help.thunder.vc. If you liked today's show, please share with your friends, give us a like or comment down below. As a reminder this show is published weekly to get notified of new episodes and our newsletter be sure to go to our website at join.thunder.vc. And if you sign up today I'll send you a few freebies on how to negotiate a term sheet, how to get a free list of relevant VCs and much more. That's it. No more shameless plugs. Thank you and see you next week.