Author: coreykupfer

The business world has changed in some dramatic ways due to the emergence of modern technologies. The old ways of doing deals are giving way to modern sensibilities, expectations and strategies. How do you make sense of it all?

Meet Dan Seivert, founder and CEO of ECHELON Partners, a leading investment bank and consulting firm in the wealth management and investment management industries. Dan is an expert at dealmaking and helping his clients navigate, strategize and complete deals.

On this week’s episode of Fueling Deals, Dan discusses some of the major changes that have taken place in the wealth management industry in recent years, and he shares his thoughts on the modern face of dealmaking. He shares how the emergence of wealth tech and the prominence of venture capital and private equity are reshaping wealth management as an industry. I hope his wisdom offers you valuable insights that you can apply to your own deals.

Equity Compensation and Wealth Tech

One of the topics Dan discussed during our conversation was equity compensation and its role in an overall compensation package. He shared how his firm, ECHELON, helps organizations strategize and develop equity compensation plans. In Dan’s view, equity compensation can be a wonderful offering for the most valuable talent within a firm, but the offering should be tailored to each firm’s unique circumstances.

Dan also discussed the increasingly important role of wealth technology to the industry at large. As technology has disrupted modern life in general, wealth management technologies have disrupted the wealth management industry. There are key firms who have led the charge, and it is important for any wealth management firm to stay current on the latest tech and trends to remain competitive.

The Age of Private Equity and Venture Capital

Another primary trend Dan has recognized is the growing prominence of wealth management firms being backed by private equity and venture capital investors. This infusion of investment money into the space has certainly altered the way many firms do business.

However, many private equity firms are now competing with one another to enter the space. This increased competition is great for wealth management firms and is exerting force from the other direction, and it is beginning to raise the bar of entry into the space.

As a key player in the wealth management industry and as someone truly experienced in deal-making, succession planning and equity capital, Dan Seivert’s wisdom is invaluable for anyone working in this industry. If you’d like to learn more about Dan Seivert and ECHELON Partners, you can visit their website at www.echelon-partners.com. To find out more about ECHELON Partners’ Deals and Dealmakers Summit, please visit www.dealsanddealmakers.com. For more informative episodes of the Fueling Deals podcast like this one, please visit us at www.fuelingdeals.com.

Corey Kupfer is an expert strategist, negotiator and dealmaker. He has more than 35 years of professional deal-making and negotiating experience. Corey is a successful entrepreneur, attorney, consultant, author and professional speaker who is passionate about deal-driven growth. He is also the creator and host of the DealQuest Podcast.

If you want to find out how deal-ready you are, take the Deal- Ready Assessment today!

One of the major challenges many entrepreneurs and new business owners face is in finding the needed funding to invest in their business and help it grow. Not everyone qualifies for a bank loan, but finding alternative sources of financing can be a challenge, especially if you don’t know where to look.

That’s where Kedma Ough comes in. Kedma is a “small business superhero”, author, fifth-generation entrepreneur, and an expert in helping small business leaders and entrepreneurs locate funding for their businesses. Kedma has helped more than ten thousand such business leaders deal with the challenges of entrepreneurship, and she specializes in connecting them with creative funding solutions tailored to their needs and situations.

On this episode of Fueling Deals, Kedma discusses how she first got involved in her work after a divorce and a bankruptcy left her struggling to find funding for her own entrepreneurial endeavor, and she shares the kinds of innovative funding solutions she helps her clients pursue. I know that Kedma’s words of wisdom will be immensely helpful for your business.

The Catch-22 of Getting Credit When You Have None

As a fifth-generation entrepreneur, it was no surprise when Kedma decided she wanted to start a business of her own. The challenge came when she needed to raise start-up funding for her bed and breakfast spa idea. Without current employment or credit to lean on, the bank unsurprisingly denied her request. However, Kedma’s tenacity was a tremendous asset, and she learned how to work around her limitations.

Today, Kedma works as a “small business superhero”, to help other entrepreneurs access critically needed funding through highly targeted sources. The seemingly inescapable trap of needing to have money to get money is one that Kedma is very experienced in helping her clients navigate. Her Target Funding methods help entrepreneurs find multiple funding sources that are tailor-made for their businesses.

Target Funding

As an example, during our conversation Kedma shared the story of a recent, highly targeted funding source looking for new, African American-owned for-profit legalized marijuana businesses in Portland, Oregon. This kind of very specific targeting means that there is reduced competition and businesses that apply have a high chance of being approved. The specific “variables” that make your business unique are also the ones that can help you access business funding from surprising sources, if you know where to look.

One type of funding Kedma touched on specifically during our conversation is called a “forgivable loan.” In this situation, a qualifying business can take out a loan and, should they meet the specific stipulations outlined in the loan agreement, the debt will be forgiven at the end of a specified period of time. Kedma gave the example of a $25,000 loan for a daycare, requiring the daycare to hire and employ five daycare attendants for a minimum of six months. By fulfilling the criteria, the loan would functionally turn into a grant with no repayment requirement.

These remarkable and innovative funding solutions are exactly the kind of superhero work Kedma does for her clients. If you’d like to learn more about Kedma Ough, please visit www.kedmaough.com. To learn more about her book, Target Funding, and the remarkable resources it contains, visit www.targetfunding.com. For more informative episodes of the Fueling Deals podcast like this one, please visit us at www.fuelingdeals.com.

Corey Kupfer is an expert strategist, negotiator and dealmaker. He has more than 35 years of professional deal-making and negotiating experience. Corey is a successful entrepreneur, attorney, consultant, author and professional speaker who is passionate about deal-driven growth. He is also the creator and host of the DealQuest Podcast.

If you want to find out how deal-ready you are, take the Deal- Ready Assessment today!

Mergers and acquisitions aren’t the only types of deals that can help your business grow inorganically, and sometimes it can be helpful to think outside the box. Creative deal-making can supercharge your growth, if you can identify and capitalize on opportunities.

Damon Gersh is a master of recognizing and taking advantage of opportunities like this. Damon is the President and CEO of Maxons Restorations, Inc., an innovative leader in the property damage restoration industry. Damon is a winner of the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award, the Fast Company Award for Leadership, and Inc. 500 and Inc. 5000 awards. Damon is also a Past President of the Entrepreneurs’ Organization New York City Chapter, the co-founder of the Gathering of Titans annual entrepreneurial conclave, and the co-founder and Past President of Restoration Affiliates, LLC.

In this week’s episode of the Fueling Deals Podcast, Damon and I talk about some of the innovative and creative deal-making strategies he has employed to turn his business into a leader of the restoration industry. Damon shares how having a passion for his work and aligning his values to his business decisions have helped him create some unique and powerful alliances with competitors in the industry, as well. I hope you are able to learn much from our conversation.

Finding Your Choke Point

One of the keys of Maxons Restorations’ success was when Damon identified and capitalized on the “choke point” of his industry. For the restoration field, this choke point is found in the availability of experienced and capable people who know how to clean up after major disasters. When the 9/11 attacks rocked New York City, Damon recognized that there would need to be intense cleanup efforts for a long time, and he locked down as much of the experienced crews in the city as he could with exclusivity agreements.

Doing so allowed Damon to ensure that the available talent in his field were working for him during the cleanup process, and his army of 1,600 employees were major players in Manhattan’s restoration efforts. This gained his company a significant amount of brand awareness and national recognition. Damon strategically used deals to strengthen his company while shutting out competitors.

Partnering With the Competition

Following the 9/11 cleanup, Damon recognized another opportunity to use deals to help position his company. He formed Restoration Affiliates as a partnership with major competitors from diverse geographic regions as a way to refer clients to other organizations working in areas where Maxons does not operate. Damon realized that the industry is stronger together and was able to unify many players in the industry under one umbrella, despite earlier similar efforts that had failed in the past.

While it may sound counterintuitive, strategic alliances with competitors can often be highly beneficial to all parties involved. Maxons gives and gets referrals through Restoration Affiliates, and they are able to partner on projects too big for competitors to handle alone. As Damon demonstrates, there are many possibilities for deals that can strengthen your company outside of standard mergers and acquisitions. The key is to be flexible in your thinking and recognize opportunities for such deals when they appear.

If you’d like to learn more about Damon Gersh and his company, Maxons Restorations, please visit www.maxons.com or call 1-800-3MAXONS. For more informative episodes of the Fueling Deals Podcast like this one, please visit us at www.fuelingdeals.com.

Corey Kupfer is an expert strategist, negotiator and dealmaker. He has more than 35 years of professional deal-making and negotiating experience. Corey is a successful entrepreneur, attorney, consultant, author and professional speaker who is passionate about deal-driven growth. He is also the creator and host of the DealQuest Podcast.

If you want to find out how deal-ready you are, take the Deal- Ready Assessment today!

Our economy has been moving in a positive direction for around ten years now, ever since it began recovering from the dramatic 2008 recession. Since the economy tends to run in cycles, there’s a not-insignificant chance that we may be headed for another downturn in the near future. What does this mean for doing deals? Is there anything we as investors and business leaders can do to prepare for an economic downturn?

As a matter of fact, a weak economy is an ideal time to do deals. A bear market creates new opportunities for deal-making that aren’t always available during periods of strong growth. A recession exposes hidden weaknesses in business that aren’t apparent during a bull market, and weaker or less prepared companies are often available to purchase at steep discounts. Now, it’s important to remember that nobody can tell you what’s in the tea leaves with any certainty, and trying to time the market can be a risky prospect. I’m not saying that a recession in the near future is a certainty, but there are many statistics and other indicators circulating that could potentially be predictive of clouds on the horizon. Readying yourself and your business now, while the weather is still nice, can help you be more prepared for new opportunities if a storm should roll in whether that is 6 months or 6 years from now.

For this episode of the Fueling Deals podcast, I talk about what key events take place when a good economy starts to turn in the other direction, and I offer strategies for preparing your business interests and investments to survive and even thrive during a recession. The key takeaway from this episode is that it is important to begin thinking about the kinds of opportunities a recession creates before it actually hits, and I hope this episode offers you some insights into how to do so.

Why a Bad Economy is Good for Deals

Here’s the thing, a strong, healthy economy full of growth can “artificially” prop up businesses and make them look healthier than they actually are. The real test of the health of a business comes when the market recedes. To use a metaphor, as the tide rolls out what’s underneath the water is exposed, and many businesses find that they aren’t on the stable foundation they thought they were. This can dramatically devalue weaker businesses, which in turn can create fantastic deal opportunities to purchase these businesses at a steep discount.

It’s said that there is a lot of money to be made in a recession. Ultimately, most of this money comes from deals, which is why some investors begin raising and saving capital during the tail end of a healthy economy so that they enter a recession fully prepared to take advantage of these new opportunities. It’s a viable strategy, although as I’ve said before it can be risky to try to time the market. Regardless, your first step should be to look to your own business and investments and ensure that they’re as healthy and stable as possible before you begin preparing for new opportunities.

Deals are Always Available, No Matter What the Economy Does

Even in a good economy, there are ample opportunities for great deals to be done, so I don’t want you to get the idea that you should wait for the market to begin turning before you look into deals. This episode of the Fueling Deals podcast is about getting you to stop and consider, to really think about the kinds of opportunities that may come open during a recession so that you can fully prepare to take advantage of them.

The fact of the matter is that the start of a recession is a very unstable time with lots of risk and lots of opportunities, and the only thing you can’t do during this turbulent period is trying to do business as usual. Build up your economic strengths so that you can weather the chaos, and then take advantage of other businesses’ weaknesses by doing deals at steep discounts. That’s the secret to making money during a recession and, while it’s easier said than done, careful preparation and planning can open up new opportunities for you to grow your wealth and the success of your business.

For more informative episodes of Fueling Deals that can help you grow your business rapidly and inorganically through deals, please visit www.fuelingdeals.com.

Corey Kupfer is an expert strategist, negotiator and dealmaker. He has more than 35 years of professional deal-making and negotiating experience. Corey is a successful entrepreneur, attorney, consultant, author and professional speaker who is passionate about deal-driven growth. He is also the creator and host of the DealQuest Podcast.

If you want to find out how deal-ready you are, take the Deal- Ready Assessment today!

Statistics say that around 70% of small business owners intend to eventually sell their business and use that money to fund retirement, lifestyle or next business. The scary fact is that somewhere around 90-95% of small businesses are “unsellable” in their current state, and so too many business owners have built a trap for themselves where they are never able to pull out and exit the business

That’s where Mike Finger comes in. Mike is the founder of Exit Oasis, a firm that specializes in helping business owners prepare their businesses to be more attractive to potential buyers. Mike is an expert in helping business owners extract themselves from the day-to-day operations of their companies. Mike has been there himself; after founding a business with his wife and growing it over the course of years, he was ready to make major changes in his life. But no buyer was interested in buying Mike out of the company he’d built, because he was too integral to its successful operation. Mike had to learn how to make his business more attractive and independent to make it more appealing to buyers, and now he teaches other business owners those same hard-won skills he learned.

For this episode of the Fueling Deals podcast, Mike and I discuss these important skills and the fact that the market does little to teach business owners how to exit. Mike shares strategies and tools that can help business owners turn their “unsellable” business into an irresistible one. Mike Finger is a true expert in developing exit strategies for business owners, and I hope you enjoy our informative and eye-opening conversation.

The Trap of Great Leadership

As Mike explains it, one of the biggest traps business owners can fall into is that the very same hard work, skills, long hours and dedication that can help them grow their business is the thing that makes the business less attractive to potential buyers. Think about it for a moment; can your business operate entirely without you? If you were to just stop going in, would your business continue to run at peak efficiency?

If a business cannot operate without its owner, why would another party be interested in buying that business from the owner? If the current owner is the business, there’s no real value to be found in the company after the deal is done. That’s the trap. The very things you’ve done for years to grow and strengthen your business are the things holding you back from being able to sell it. And, unfortunately, the market doesn’t do much to teach business owners how to extract themselves from the everyday operation of their business.

How to Ready Your Business for Sale

If you are hoping to sell your business, it’s important to begin making your business more attractive to potential buyers. You need to truly consider what your business is worth without you there to run it. Try to look at your business from an outside perspective. Where is the value your business can offer to a potential buyer? What advantages and drawbacks would a buyer find when evaluating the worth of your business? It isn’t just a matter of whether your business is profitable, it’s a question of whether a potential buyer would keep that profitability after buying you out.

Mike and his team at Exit Oasis are experts at helping business owners answer these complex questions, and they can help simplify the process of readying a business for sale. Having a guide to help you through the process can certainly make things easier by eliminating much of the complexity for you. They can show you how to document and illustrate the value of your company, and they can help you see potential pain points that might frighten buyers away. No matter how many deals you do over the course of your time as a business owner, selling your interest in the business may be the most important deal of all.

If you’d like to learn more about Mike Finger and Exit Oasis, please visit www.exitoasis.com where you can find free tools and resources as well as other valuable information on readying your business for sale. For more informative episodes of Fueling Deals like this one, please visit www.fuelingdeals.com.

Corey Kupfer is an expert strategist, negotiator and dealmaker. He has more than 35 years of professional deal-making and negotiating experience. Corey is a successful entrepreneur, attorney, consultant, author and professional speaker who is passionate about deal-driven growth. He is also the creator and host of the DealQuest Podcast.

If you want to find out how deal-ready you are, take the Deal- Ready Assessment today!