What makes a B2B business truly valuable—and sellable? In this week's episode, Bill sits down with Steve Kohnke, Business Strategist, Certified Exit Planning Advisor, and CEO at Denver Business Coach. With a background in neuroscience and change management, and real-world experience in founding and scaling companies, Steve shares expert-level strategies for building businesses that thrive without owner dependence.

Explore the intersection of owner-led sales, operational scalability, marketing as a growth engine, and what buyers really look for during acquisition. Steve discusses the need for business owners to prepare for exit early and to focus on de-risking their business to attract buyers.

Bill: Thank you for joining the Missing Half podcast where we're discovering what's missing in manufacturing and B2B marketing. Today I have a very special guest with me, Steve Kohnke. Steve is a business strategist, a certified exit planning advisor, and a key partner at Denver Business Coach. With a background in psychology and neuroscience and real world experience founding and scaling small businesses, Steve specializes in helping entrepreneurs build companies that run smoothly and sell smartly. Steve, welcome to the Missing Half.

Steve: Thank you very much. Great to be here. Excited for it.

Bill: So Steve, all of my family members would probably appreciate if we took this moment and you use some of your psychology and neuroscience to like heal me or help me work through all my issues. But I think we're going to stay focused on business today and then we'll schedule other sessions later and support me in my journey of becoming a better person. Steve, tell us a little bit about yourself and how you ended up in the world of like business coaching and more specifically exit planning and helping people find value for their hard work.

Steve: Yeah. Yeah, great. Thank you. You know, it wasn't always in the cards to be a business coach, right? You know, I've always enjoyed entrepreneurship and ran a few businesses myself, you know, house painting business, put me through college, paid for it myself through that way. So that was a wonderful experience. You know, managed restaurants, ran a couple other odd job companies, kind of seasonal stuff, which was fun. But yeah, so through that, I opened up restaurants. That was a really great experience in customer service and managing people. You know, that was mid-20s probably. Then went into the world of change management. As you mentioned, I have the psychology and neuroscience degree. And went into corporate change management. And that was all about helping the people of projects, of businesses, of, you know we worked in big Fortune 500 companies and helped the individuals get through change effectively. You know, we were doing speed of adoption, utilization, proficiency, and whatever that future state was. So did that for a few years and really saw a gap in just people having the ability to change in all different ways. People for whatever reason like to do things the way that they've always been doing them and don't want to do it differently. And it definitely applies for small business. And I wanted to take all that experience and bring it down to the small business level and help individuals and owners change effectively and change is growth to me. If you're not changing, you're not growing. If you're not growing, you're not changing. So being able to do change well really serves me well and our company well and being able to make these transformations with small businesses. Went off on that journey over a decade ago and that's kind of what brings me here today. We've grown the company to about 12 different advisors that are all working with business owners of all different kinds.

Bill: That's a, congratulations. And let's talk about that change management for a second. I used to my family used to own 14 John Deere dealerships and we used to call John Deere the green glacier. We were entrepreneurial. And one of the reasons we exited that business is because they just wouldn't move fast enough. They would not adapt to market conditions. We were in the mid-Atlantic, which was not a heavy row crop area at the time. And they were if it didn't involve a combine corner soybeans, they were not interested. And we were in more of the CP products, the consumer product division. And yeah, we called them the green glacier and they did not handle change well and they did not handle it quickly. you know, that was easy for me to critique from my glass house here. But that is certainly a need. Well, when you think, Steve, about some of these business owners that you're working with and that your team is coaching into building a sellable asset, what does that actually look like in practice?

Steve: Yeah, that's a great question. So in practice, most owners are really thinking about their business when it comes to sell is like coming up with a price and negotiating that, It's not really an asset that is sellable or at least sellable at a number that's what we refer to best in class, best in class multiples and things like that. So it's not like that until it's really independent of the owner. So the business can operate, it can grow, it can scale without the owner's input. So that's, at its core practice, that's our objective is to get the owner out of the day to day, week to week, month to month operations of the business. We're working on strategy and aligning the personal side, the business side and the financial side all together aiming at a similar goal, making all those things come to life. And that's how we're building our complete strategy. We're looking at the people within the business, whether they're there or they need to be there, what those roles and responsibilities are, what the org structure looks like and making sure you have the right people in the right seats. And we say doing the right things as well. So that's the process side of really systemizing the business, documentation, transferability from a roles and responsibilities perspective. And then all of that really accumulates into performance. So we're looking at not only financial performance, I mentioned, you know, best in class. So we're looking at margins, gross margins, profit margins, so on and so forth, but also general business KPIs, sales rates, close rates, lead generation, individual KPI, so what their performance is, whatever their role is, you know we really believe that each position has a number, just figuring out what those numbers are and really helping people align, improving those numbers that all improve the performance of the business. So, you know, we really take that four-prong approach, strategy, people, process and performance and improving all those different categories and in turn, what that does is turn that business into the asset that can grow and scale without the owner.

Bill: So Steve, when you think about that without the owner concept, I hear that a lot. And I think there's a misconception that that only is true for businesses that are very small, say sub $10 million in revenue, maybe one to three in EBITDA. But I've seen, and I want to get your opinion, that that can transcend to much larger numbers with companies that have much greater revenue and really good performance, but that owners can still be a bottleneck or like the linchpin of the entire organization for much larger organizations. Have you seen that to be true?

Steve: Absolutely. You know, kind of going back to change management in a way, change in adaptability, vision strategy that all starts with the owner, right? And if they're not doing their part in driving the business forward by staying in the day to day and being in those daily meetings, those kind of operational tasks, that can really hurt a business and in fact, slow everything down if they're not understanding what their role as owner of the business means, what that actually means of not being in the day-to-day, but really helping to drive the company too. So yeah, I mean, owners at all stages, we've been in businesses, even at the very top of sizes. Owners or just leaders within the business can bottleneck any, any company at any size.

Bill: Sure. So Steve, when you think about building a viable transferable business or asset, what are some of the common misconceptions business owners have when it comes to growing the value of their business? Like what are the top one, two or three things that you see that are like, just, really everybody thinks they have a handle on and they really don't?

Steve: Yeah. Some misconceptions and we have an assessment. And one of my favorite questions there is, you know, do you deal with, or do your customers know you by name and prefer to deal with you? And a lot of owners that we speak to are like really proud of, yeah, everyone knows me. I know everyone. I talk to everyone. They always call me up. They have my cell phone number. And for a lot of them, it's a real interesting moment when I say, well, that's actually bad. You don't want that. So, you know, it's great when you're growing a business and it's fun and you're needed and you’re wanted and a lot of owners enjoy that. When we're looking through the lens of value, it devalues your business. It puts a major risk on it. If everyone is, you know, from a business development side, the people are sending you business because of you. And that's where a lot of business owners will grow their businesses is through that way. Instead of shifting the focus to referring to the company, shift from the owner. They want to keep that relationship. And same thing with everything else. If they're involved in it, they're important and they see that that's valuable. But again, through the lens of acquiring the business, it's, it devalues the business.

Bill: So I think one of the challenges we're facing in 2025 is that we're kind of hooked on a dilemma in that we don't want the owner to be at the pinnacle, like the peak of the sales effort. But founder-led sales and personal branding are driving revenue. So one of the things we're trying to piece together and advise our clients and those we work with with the best advice is how to drive value and build an independent business, but also leverage one of the most effective tools that's available today. Because we work with a bit in private equity and they want to drive great multiples. They certainly are more aware of the fact that whoever's the operator, whoever's coming in to lead that charge for the sponsor to execute this play needs to do a great job. But at the same time, they're most likely not going to continue long term with that organization once it's purchased by a strategic or financial buyer or however. They may stay on if it's more of a private buyer or someone who's looking at a long term play, but usually not. So I think that's interesting and that's something we struggle with. Do you see tension between founder-led sales and doing podcasts and doing LinkedIn and like going out and promoting that, but then also creating a separation layer that allows you to step away really rapidly from that business and the value still is maintained?

Steve: Yeah, yeah, I do think that's a fine line because with lot of clients we work with, especially the ones that we're working on getting them out of sales, the founders out of the sales process, you know, we speak to, their role shifts to developing relationships that will continue to grow the business and do the podcast and be, and kind of be the face in a way of the brand. At the same time, we're also cautioning them, you know, it's not you, it's the business, right? Like you're promoting the business, you're not promoting yourself. You're talking about how we do this and we do that. And my team is awesome and all those different things. And then you got to kind of transfer it very quickly to your sales team. So you got to be diligent in the way of, you are going to be in front and driving the business development side from that perspective, you just have to be really diligent in how you're going about that. Cause it can very, very easily go the opposite way that we want it to go and have it be focused on, this is my business or this is you know, Joe's business and we only do business with Joe and his team rather than you know, whatever name of the company is. My example.

Bill: No, that's good. So one of the things I think when you're looking at exiting a business, one of the things that I learned early in my career doing a lot of M&A, where my dad and I did a couple of roll ups together, usually owners would come to us when they had already checked out and or as soon as they had a conversation with us, they checked out. Whereas you know, my dad taught me, have every business ready to sell at any moment because everything is for sale because if a number comes across that is too good to be true or that you're really happy with, sell it and move on to the next one. How early should business owners start thinking about an exit? Like even if it's not on the immediate horizon, like when you're when you're 70 years old and like that's probably not the time to start thinking about it. And not to disrespect those who are older and have done a great job. But just like when we think about mortality and those type of things and retirement is probably not something to do in the ninth hour.

Steve: Yeah, I mean, the reality is the moment you create your business plan, it's how am I going to exit that? In practice, it's a little harder to think that way. But yeah, I am very much in the sooner is better. You know, of our lines that we say is we're, build it to sell whether you want to sell in two years or 20 years. The activities that you need to be doing actually creates a really good business and one that's enjoyable. So one, if we're doing the things that creates this asset aside from the owner, what that actually does, and we've come across this a lot and probably what you've seen in the M&A days is, owners want to sell their business because they're just done. Something happened and they're like, I hate this. We always say, who wants to buy a business that they hate? So it's one of those things where it's like, well, would you want to buy your business? And so anyway, the point being, the things that you do that create this asset makes your business really fun, makes it enjoyable, that actually desire it. And not only that within the business, but it gives you freedom of time. And that's one of our big KPIs that we're always looking at is how much time are we giving back to the owner by doing these things that they can spend how they want, when they want. So, you know, being able to just set up the business in that way just provides options. So the earlier you do it, the more ability you have to create some of those options. We're in a couple of conversations with business owners that are in the 11th hour of their business and come up with a scope of work of what needs to be done. And they're looking at it and they're like, I don't want to do that. You know? Like, that sounds really hard. And so that's what ends up happening if you're kind of waiting till, I want to sell my business this year, what do I need to do? It's kind of too late if that's your timeline and you haven't been doing it the whole time. So, you know, that's a big message we're trying to get across to a lot of, you know, mid-stage business owners that, be thinking about this way sooner than what you think, or when you should be thinking about it, because by the time you think you should be thinking about it, it might be too late, and you got another five years left or three.

Bill: Yeah, if you want to do it in a year, unless you're selling something that is in active roll ups with major PEs, like PE groups that are really paying exceptional multiples just because there's so much opportunity at a bigger number, you're going to go to Great Clips and get an amazing haircut if you want to do it in a year. And also I think your point of you know, a lot of these owners who are done, you need to go through this process while you still have the energy and the passion and the enthusiasm. And your group is willing to make those changes, right? You know, in the Bible it talks about how when King David turned over the throne to King Solomon, the first thing King Solomon did was kill all of David's advisors, because he needed a new administration, right? Thankfully, we don't do that in American politics today. I think in the media, they do that to each other, each of them. Anyway, that's a whole different story. I'm going to.

Steven: That’s a different podcast.

Bill: Yeah, that's a different podcast for a different group. But so I want to pivot here and talk about the role of marketing in growth and exit values, because, you know, in the Missing Half, we're trying to discover what's missing. And a lot of what we've been discovering recently is the impact of marketing on EBITDA and multiples at exit. So we really are learning a lot more about that. We're getting a lot of our guests to share. So how often do you see marketing as a growth bottleneck for your clients?

Steve: A lot.

Bill: That's a big number.

Steve: Yeah, it's a lot for sure. I mean, marketing, marketing is key because I have a client that's going through this right now. We've built the system for scale and, two years ago, marketing, lead generation, those things were not an issue and, and it's, been an issue this year. And so it's one of those things where we have all the other pieces of the puzzle put together and now we're re-looking at marketing because the channels that we were using before aren't working as well as they had. And so now it's in a way back to the drawing board and figuring out what is the next move here. So from a general sense, marketing can be in itself a linchpin to growth. You have to be able to grow. And a lot of the owner-led ones, we're kind of talking a little bit about it, of getting the referrals. The thing about referrals is they're unpredictable. So it's hard to build a machine based on referrals. I mean, they're great. Referrals are great. They feel good. They're free, right? And they don't cost money in most cases, but it costs time. And, and that can be a linchpin if we're not looking to diversify and what the, issue of, the client I was referring to earlier, we, one of the opportunities we missed is just continuously looking at our marketing. You know we, we had some really great channels that were working. We're like, this is great. You know, let's, let's keep writing this. And then all of a sudden it's, it's just not performing what felt like overnight, but really was probably a gradual, to get to that point. But anyway, if you're not revisiting marketing, it can slow you down quite a bit.

Bill: One of the things we've seen, and I'd like to get your perspective on this, is how critical timing is. Often we'll see businesses really dig a trench and huddle and get their operations scalable. They'll invest, they'll get ready to go, and then they'll say, okay, now it's time to look at marketing and growth. And there's usually two problems there. One, they may have loaded up on some people, processes, and tools that cost them money. And then if you have bad timing and you run into economic tailwinds that are unfavorable, and maybe you have some channels that dry up. And right now we're certainly seeing, I mean, we're all standing in quicksand with AI and what's happening in the market, inflation, tariffs. There's always a reason, right, for whatever. It would just change the name of it and there it is. But what do you see as the importance of timing the scalability of a business to the growth engine and kind of making sure there's convergent paths so that they're in parallel as opposed to one at a time? And I understand that that's hard. It's often hard to do both, you know, walk and chew bubble gum at the same time.

Steve: Yeah, right. And if you can, that's ideal, right? And to us, there's two schools of thought here. It's create the demand, then fill in the fulfillment side of it, and with people or process and just kind of figure it out as the demand comes in, hire, especially when it comes to people, hire for the growth. And that's sometimes what we'll lean in towards a little bit more often, especially if we have the resources to make it happen. I know sometimes that can be a limiting factor for this to actually work out. But that's why we really put a lot of emphasis on having the right people, because having the right people on your team can grow the business. On both, on the back end, the fulfillment service delivery side and on the front end of business development, marketing, sales, those components as well. So we'll usually take a look at really understanding which direction do we really want to go. Do we want to go all in on business, on the lead generation business development side and just hope we can figure it out on the back end? And try to do it simultaneously. It's always happening kind of simultaneously at one point. It might be 80-20 on business development and back in flow. More often than not, we're asking, can we bring someone on that will help us grow in this way?

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Bill: Yeah, one of the things we see in private equity is their absolute brilliance in financial engineering and putting deals together. And then there comes a moment where they have to switch gears and they need organic growth. And probably one of the biggest mistakes we've seen, and I think this is true whether you're doing private equity, whether you're preparing a business to exit as a private company, is you need to invest in that marketing function early. Even if it's small deposits so that there is a convergence of those, the scalability and the need for organic growth and for growth to happen while we have the operations come up simultaneously. And that seems to be something that no matter what the scale of the business or what the scale of play, that those are common issues that we see, experience. Whenever you’re preparing a company for exit and you're approaching a buyer and you want to communicate to them marketing maturity, what does that look like when you're trying to communicate that? Like if you had the perfect slide deck with here's the KPI or here's the story we want to tell. What does that story look like that you feel would create the most valuable exit opportunity for the owner?

Steve: Yeah. To me, that's all about predictability and scalability. It's do you have the right ICPs, ideal client profiles defined? Do you have multiple channels working together? Are you tracking KPIs and are they where they need to be, cost per lead, conversion rates, ROIs on those channels, ROAS? And most importantly, owner independent of the marketing engine. But to me, you have that, that is your engine, right? Of having that. And if you can have that working in a way where we're not necessarily trying to fix stuff, we're more optimizing. We already know the channels, we have our ICP, we have all those things in place and we're just fine tuning it and making it better and better and better. That's where we want to be, not necessarily what are the channels, right?

Bill: Sure. Yeah, if you don't know what the channels are, you're a long way from where you want to be. So whenever you have businesses that can present that information in the proper way, what type of reaction do you get from the buyer? Like in your estimation, what is the impact on the sale whenever those pieces are in place on the predictability and the scalability of the marketing and growth engine?

Steve: Yeah. I mean, on that side of things, a strong marketing system, it can add millions to your valuation. It could also probably kill a deal. You know, if a business, if an acquirer is coming in and saying, the, we don't have predictability in business development. I can't guarantee what these future numbers that you're telling me. Like I can't correlate those together. So I mean, it can be a pretty big impact. I mean, it can have one to two X EBITDA impact to on that multiple on the valuations, depending on industry, of course, but it's just the predictability will give the buyer so much more confidence in the acquisition and they won't be looking for other reasons to discount. Business development and having that part of a business figured out and predictable and scalable, it's a big issue to solve. And if you go to an acquirer and say, I've solved this part, you're good. They're going to be pretty happy.

Bill: Yeah, because they're never looking for reasons to pay more. So, yeah, don't give them opportunities to poke holes. Yeah, and we see that the companies that we've worked with and specifically in PE and even some smaller companies, we've helped them grow and sell. When they're growing well and it's dialed in, it's like it's not a question. We're not getting, we've been involved with some companies that have sold internationally to multi-billion dollar companies here in the US. And they, we prepared slide decks and information and all the reports. And one of the things I felt really good about is specifically in three instances over the past three or four years, whenever we presented that information, we were not called back to come in and defend it because it wasn't the issue, right? I'm sure there were other, you know, I'm sure there's a large slide deck and a lot of information and due diligence and there were callbacks and there were a lot of questions. We were not part of the second, third and fourth round of microscopic analysis. So, the buyers reacted really well to those items and were very pleased. So that helped those owners achieve those nice exits. Now, one of the challenges for us, as you well know, is as a marketing agency, especially whenever we're representing a company that's doing 30, 50, 100 million, and they're acquired by a multi-billion dollar company. Congratulations, you guys have just sold. Congratulations, we're out. But that's the name of the game, right? We're hired to be fired like football coaches. So that's the name of the game. So, well, Steve, I want to kind of move a little bit more towards exit planning strategy and let you talk a little bit more about what you do and helping these companies. And what are some of the different types of buyers you're seeing in the market and how do they impact how you're preparing a business? Like if you go to an owner today, they call you and you say, hey, I think this is going to be a strategic buyer. Hey, I think this is going to be part of a big P.E. roll up or whatever. How, are you preparing those owners differently or is asset value asset value and EBITDA is EBITDA? And if you do the fundamentals, it'll work out in the end. How do you approach that?

Steve: Yeah. How we're doing the exit planning side, for the most part, especially if we have a fairly long runway and we're not being sought after by PE or anything like that, we're preparing for the financial buyer. So we're doing those things that, kind of tying back to our previous conversation that acquires buying potential of the business, the growth potential, the return on investment is literally what they're asking, is what am I going to get from buying your business for this price? So we want to set those business up to be, you know, more or less a portfolio ad to someone who wants a return on their money, right? What that does is it looks really good to a strategic acquirer, if that's the case. But it doesn't cut out the financial buyer. Because if we only prepare for a strategic acquirer, unless we already have this strategy built and we have the buyer and all this, we cut out the financial buyer in most cases, right? Like a strategic acquirer is looking for technology, IP, geographical location, expansion, client list, things like that, where financial buyers, they want the asset. If we are being pursued in a strategic acquisition, it does change the conversation. It's saying, how can we best optimize for this company? What's important? What's not important for us to really develop? If it's a similar industry, we had one of our accounting firm clients get bought up by a competitor, basically. And it was just basically for territory and client lists and some of their staff. So you know, those things that like they had the backend systems, they had the marketing engine, they had a lot of those things going on. So we weren't, we kind of cut that out and just said, let's, let's optimize our, what we're doing with clients and things like that from our scope of work, because that just changed how we were preparing. So we're at least reading into those situations and seeing who has potential. But if we don't already have that potential buyer in mind, we're always going to build it for the financial buyer.

Bill: Got it. No, and that makes a ton of sense because if it's a strategic buyer that is more sophisticated or believes their sophistication is sufficient, that you don't need to invest in really dealing with that marketing growth engine or creating scale or type of operational efficiencies that they're going to change anyway, immediately, then take the path of least resistance and don't take that time, money and energy to invest in it and take the number. As opposed to investing in it. So that makes a ton of sense. So Steve, think when we look at those different type of buyers, is there, if you have a management buyout, which I don't see a lot of those anymore as much or ESOPs, do you see a different prep for that type of approach? Certainly than you would with a strategic financial or private equity roll up?

Steve: It is a different approach and we have, I'm working with, he does consulting for big corporate companies. And our current exit strategy, three year strategy is a management buyout. So he has a leadership team that has already expressed interest of wanting to take over the business. And so where the strategy has leaned more towards is developing those people and preparing them for ownership. So it's in some cases that is a really good exit for some owners. What we have seen with those, on the management, MBOs specifically, not ESOPs, but MBOs,you can kind of get discounts or it's discounted a little bit more. So, you know, if we're going for max amount of money, max EBITDA or max multiple, it's not the best option in a lot of cases, but it can be a really, a lot less resistance to making it happen and an easier transition for the owner to get out and just say, yeah, I'm gone. You guys got this. We've been working on this transition for the last three years. Let's make it happen. So it can change the tone on how we're doing it. So we do want to know what is most important for the owner when it comes to an exit. Because if it is money, we're going open market in most cases. And really preparing that way. But if it is in an internal buyout, it shifts the strategy a little bit, if that makes sense. I hope I answered your question.

Bill: No, absolutely. Yeah, no, that was great. So when we think about one of the other things I'd like to talk about today is like that owner mindset and personal transition, because that's a huge thing, especially in mid market, smaller marketplace, when the owner is such an important component of that business and the business is the owner, the owner is the business. And even if we're successful in extracting them in a three to five year period, that's still probably a large portion of that person's life was poured into that business. So one of the things when we talked earlier, you mentioned a high percentage of owners really regret their exit. And what's missing from their planning? Because my sense is, MBOs are not common or specifically in some industries, not even possible. So you know, and I think with an MBO, like you were just talking about, you could have some more friendly terms and different timelines and still some involvement if they wanted over, you know, kind of like an earn out or like a period where they're still the face and helping and coming to the golf outings and doing all the wonderful things. But what do you think needs to be in place if someone's going for that financial or strategic or P.E. roll up buy where like the day they sell it, they're gone and it's over?

Steve: It's like 75% of owners that sell regretted a year later. That's what the stat coming out of Exit Planning Institute says. And it's mainly due to not having a personal plan, not understanding what are you going to do afterwards? Because like you mentioned, most owners wrap their identity up in being an owner. Owning that business, growing it, especially the ones who've been doing it for decades. That's kind of, it's just wrapped up in their identity. And when that's gone, what do I do? A lot of them are very excited for a month and go to the beach and drink margaritas and have a ball, but that only lasts so long, right? Without purpose, we're kind of lost in a way. That's where that satisfaction or dissatisfaction rather comes from is really not knowing what you're going to do. So it's actually a decent size of what we're helping prepare our owners for when it comes to exit is understanding and getting excited about the day after. You know, we call it the life after action plan, but it's really understanding and putting it to paper and really painting the picture of this is what I'm going to do with this and getting excited about it. And then that satisfaction afterwards is much higher, I'll say.

Bill: Sure. Well, and certainly, there's reasons to sell that are beyond financial and there has to be a reason to do something after because most of these folks, if it goes fairly well, will not have to work. That pressure and the timing in their life is no longer an issue and they do need to figure out what they're going to do, I guess, when they grow up at that point, right? Because we're all grown up and we're ready to take the next step.

Steve: It can be, sorry to cut you off there, but the other side of that is what you were mentioning is the financial side. And sometimes this can happen. And what we're preparing a lot of our owners for are those ETA buyers, the entrepreneur through acquisition buyers that are in some cases backed by, know, Harvard has an entire division, an entire school dedicated to training ETA buyers and giving them the strategy and know how and sometimes money and funding to buy these businesses. And owners are essentially being gold called to sell their business in this way. And they're bringing a knife to a gunfight in that way of, you know, have no idea what this is. You want to give me money for my business? Sounds great. And then a lot of times they get taken, too, you know, because they haven’t, because one, they haven't been preparing for, you know, since since the inception and two, they don't know the rules of the game in that way. So the other dissatisfaction is leaving money on the table or at least thinking you left money on the table, but you're acting too quickly or not thinking through or really kind of doing the analysis on the financial side, which we also bring to the table of, we refer to it as a freedom point, is selling your business for this amount of money going to get you to that point that you're mentioning where you never have to work again? If you don't want to. So like that is also a pretty big factor to wrap up into it as well, is one, making sure that they're prepared and two, the financial component is there and the personal side. So that's why when we take the strategy, the holistic approach is we're bringing all three of those components into that strategy for exit.

Bill: Steve, if a business owner is listening today and they're still deep in the weeds of their business, what's one piece of advice or tidbit that you would like to share of something they should start doing today to start getting ready to build towards a better exit?

Steve: Yeah, it's looking at the risks, I think, and helping to at least be aware of what a valuable business looks like and where those risky parts are in your company. A lot of cases, it has to do with dependence, whether it's the owner or employees or suppliers or customers. Where are your dependencies? Where is the business itself as its own entity dependent? And at least be aware of what these things look like and start to think how do I make it less dependent? You know, if you're asking yourself those types of questions as you're building, you know your growth strategies, how can I make this more of an independent entity? You're going to be well ahead of most owners in that case. But yeah, so I mean, really it's just the dependency as a general piece of information of just where is the company dependent. As it relates to business development, start talking about the business and not yourself in that way. Stop treating marketing and that engine as a nice to have and more of like the backbone of what a saleable business is, I think.

Bill: That's great. I think, we think about de-risking that that's what buyers are looking for. Right. And anywhere we can de-risk it. And the good news is even if you're five, 10, 20 years out from a sale, that's a good move for your business value just to be valuable and make money. So it's a win for everybody. Steve, we are all about shameless plugs on the Missing Half podcast. So we want you to talk about Denver Business Coach. Want you to talk about your team and then also where people can find you and all of the things that you mentioned, the links, the bios, all that will be in the footers and everywhere we mention this on LinkedIn, on Meta, on YouTube, but go ahead and share about Denver Business Coach, please.

Steve: Yeah, I appreciate that. You know, our website's a really great place to learn more about us, DenverBusinessCoach.com, nice and easy. I'm pretty active on LinkedIn as well, but I have a great team. You know, part of, or the big qualifier to work on my team is you actually have started, grown, and sold your own company, bootstraps, all the way through.

Bill: Nice.

Steve: So, you know, we have all the certifications and all that fun stuff that goes around with having those processes and information and knowledge. But what I think is more important is we've all been there. We've all done it. You know, we're not reading from a book and telling you what to do from the book. It's not, you know, here, do step one, do step two. It's where are you? What are you struggling with? I've been there. This is how I solved it. How can we apply that to you? And so I think that's something that keeps us a little more unique in a marketplace that I think is relatively crowded and probably hard to find who are the good people that can advise on value growth and exit planning from the operational sense. But we've all been there, done that. Several people on my team have exited for eight plus figure exits.

Bill: Excellent.

Steve: Some have done it multiple times. So it's definitely been there, done that, and getting advice from people that actually know what they're talking about, which I think is pretty cool. But yeah, that's my little brag moment on the team.

Bill: No, Steve, congratulations on your, you and your team. And I think that point is so important. We, just like you are in a very crowded marketplace, a lot of marketing agencies out there, a lot of exit planning, business coaching agencies out there. And anybody, there's a large number of people who have access to information who can get a certification or learn how to use Meta who can participate in those markets. However, the ability to marry those things with the practical knowledge and experience of having your teeth kicked in while you've done it and lived through it is a totally different animal. And we applaud you and your group bringing that level of expertise and experience to the market. That is unique and that will most likely indicate a higher probability of successful outcomes because you've lived it and you understand how all of the, it's not just a financial package or a spreadsheet that you plug numbers into and they pop out of. There's a lot that goes into it. So no, that's that's fantastic. Well, if anyone wants to contact Steve and or Denver Business Coach, please look in the footer. We will have a lot of that information. And we just want to thank you, Steve, for joining us today. It's been a pleasure and look forward to following along, watching you guys, and seeing how you're progressing and hear of deals that are announced and moving forward.

Steve: Yeah, thanks for having me. That was a great conversation. A lot of fun. Appreciate it.

Bill: Well, be sure to subscribe to our channel, newly renamed to the Missing Half podcast and share the episode with your network. And thank you for listening. This is Bill Woods. Have a great day.