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Podcast: After Helping 500,000 Entrepreneurs, Jay Turo Has Advice for You

By Noah Rosenfarb
Published: January 20, 2016 | Last updated: March 21, 2024
Key Takeaways

Growthink’s co-founder and CEO, Jay Turo, provides a candid interview on best practices for strategy planning in lower mid-market businesses.

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In this podcast, Jay Turo, co-founder and CEO of Growthink, talks about:

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  • Challenges of selling a lower mid-market business to an owner-operator;
  • Importance of building a growth-oriented entrepreneurial business culture;
  • Three most important things that owners should be thinking about if they’re contemplating a future exit;
  • Challenges owners face with strategic planning and execution; and
  • Most common mistakes owners make around their exit strategy.

About the Guest

Jay Turo has led Growthink's emergence as one of the nation's largest strategic advisory and investment banking firms focused on the entrepreneurial marketplace.

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In his 14 years at Growthink, Jay has advised dozens of emerging, middle market and corporate clients regarding their growth and capital formation strategies. His corporate clients have included Deutsche Bank, McKesson, Infospace, Samsung, Porsche and Paramount Pictures.

Jay has an MBA from the Anderson School of Management at UCLA and earned a bachelor's degree with distinction and with departmental honors from Stanford University.

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Read the Full Transcript Here:

Noah Rosenfarb: This is Noah Rosenfarb here with a great guest today, Jay Turo. Jay is the CEO of Growthink, a consulting firm that since 1999 has helped over half a million entrepreneurs and business owners with developing their business plans, raising funding and growing their business. He’s an active angel investor, speaker, a writer regarding private equity, entrepreneurship, technology, and Jay’s got a wealth of knowledge, and not only is he someone that helps CEOs grow their business and create value. He’s also sold a couple of companies. Jay, thanks for joining us and your willingness to share your experience.

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Jay Turo: Thanks for having me, Noah. I’m really looking forward to it.


Noah Rosenfarb: You were telling me before the call that you had a frozen food business. Why don’t you share with me and our listeners a little bit about your experience as an entrepreneur?


Jay Turo: Yeah. Well, I had a couple of experiences, I think that are relevant to our audience. It’s family business. My brother and I, we purchased a fleet of ice cream trucks in the 90s on Cape Cod and Massachusetts. We built that business up from kind of a core, the beaches and the concession stands and the neighborhoods on Cape Cod, which is a resort area, and built it up into a full scale distributorship of frozen foods that we eventually sold to an owner/operator as a precursor to starting Growthink. In that experience, we had the opportunity to hire, train, manage and unfortunately fire a lot of people – a few hundred people – not fire all of them but hire and train and recruit and manage a team of operators and sales people. We worked with a lot of government contracts in that business.

I had a family business dynamic working with my older brother, which working with him for seven years was a lot of the family business challenges that we see in businesses in the lower middle market, very personally cognizant of those, what the opportunities are working with family but also the challenges, and also saw some of the – I think two things. One was a natural limitation of growth in a mature market, that’s one, so thinking a lot about market opportunity and valuation. The business didn’t sell for as much as we thought it was worth. We got a nice number for it but started to get high multiple because of the overlay of the industry. Then also just that, I think that normally it’s just the value of change for change’s sake. I think that very admirable quality of a lot of business owners to stick with something for a long time, but there’s also a lot of personal value to do things in different businesses. As you have that opportunity, you’re able to deal with these actualization opportunities to do very different businesses.

I had a business in the frozen foods and the ice cream business, I had businesses in the telecommunications arena. We’ve had a business in the music arena that we’ve run. We’ve had a business in the digital product information publishing business that we’ve started, that we’ve sold off pieces of. We’ve had a business, kind of an IBISworld, Forrester competitor where we’ve created research support and sold those online that we built and sold, so a lot of opportunities to do things that are adjacent to your core business and core experience but then also nothing like thinking about building a business to exit both for the financial freedom – and I know that’s key to a lot of how you think about exit planning, Noah – but also that I think an underrated component is the ability for self-expression to do different things.


Noah Rosenfarb: Take me back in time when you were in the frozen food distribution business. What prompted you and your brother to sell? Did you get an unsolicited offer? Did you have an auction process?


Jay Turo: We hired an investment banker who ran an auction process. He helped us put a book together and we were tasked with communicating with the historical financials of the business were as well as its growth potential. As is typical in these processes, we kissed a number of toads and it was a winding road. Of a business that size, it wasn’t big enough to sell to a strategic or financial acquirer, which was a key thing, and I’m sure we’ll talk about it here, but having to sell to another owner/operator, there was a degree of seller financing that was necessary in the transaction. Any time a business is sold, big or small, there’s just complexity of training. There was a consulting agreement that went along with the sale to provide post-sale advice, which is always tricky because you have to go from a little bit of an adversary, a relationship, in the sale process, as you’re negotiating to a partnership, and one of that is the seller financing, earn-out component, so all those aspects.

In terms of why we decided to sell, it was I think for a lot of reasons. We were both in our – at that time – in our early 30s and it was, "Let’s try some other things in life." We had a good run, we made some nice money, and the dollars that we made from the sale gave us the opportunity to do some other things that we were interested in doing. My brother has moved on and he took a corporate path. From a lot of that experience he got a job manging the Dasani water brand for Coca Cola, which is a very cool job. He eventually moved over to Fortune brands and was managing their Sauza Tequila brand and then their Cruzan rum brand. In big companies, a lot of the product management dynamics is very entrepreneurial. They’re given a budget, a marketing budget, operational responsibility for P&L, and now he runs all of Jim Beam’s, all of their operations in Mexico. He lives in Mexico City now so he’s got a team of marketing people and operators and all the – Tequila’s a big product in Mexico. He’s trying to build out other spirits’ businesses in Mexico, as the middle class matures there – the rum business, the vodka business, other spirits’ businesses are growing there and managing that growth. A lot of those entrepreneurial experiences are very portable to what he did and to the things that I did in founding Growthink after selling that business.


Noah Rosenfarb: So when you look back and reflect with you and your brother, what was the biggest takeaway, either the best positive experience or the best learning lesson?


Jay Turo: I think that the best positive experience was the winning, growing the business and making money. The seasonality to the business, there were a lot of days when you’re putting on a lot of money and you’re not seeing a lot back. Cape Cod, the population swells by 3 or 4X in July, August – summertime months – and seeing the money roll in was very invigorating, a lot of adrenalin. You’d have days where you could see the profits. It was very exciting. That was very rewarding. It may not be the most, you know, I think we forget about that. Making money is a lot of fun. It’s always fun to make money. That was rewarding.

In terms of lessons, I think around company culture and people and creating entrepreneurial structures within an organization for people to succeed. Your best people are always going to have a strong mindset of entrepreneurship, of proactivity, and your challenge as a business owner is really, if you’re going to build a business of lasting value you have to have the people around you have structures that allow them to be entrepreneurial and be successful. That’s a huge lesson about getting, I think when you start out as an entrepreneur that it’s very much about you and your experience, but the really, really successful folks, the really admirable folks, the greatest entrepreneurs of our time – the Richard Bransons and the Steve Jobs, the Bill Gates – they create these cultures where people are able to do the best work of their lives. I think that’s a key thing, to build or to create a culture to do that.

Let me add just one more thing to that, Noah. To do that, you’ve got to grow. If you want to attract talented people you have to have growth. If not, there’s not going to be opportunities for them to have all those experiences.


Noah Rosenfarb: Did you have a plan in mind prior to selling the frozen food business of what you were going to do at your time, or did you kind of sit on the beach for a few months and figure it out afterwards?


Jay Turo: You know, it’s a good story. Dave Lavinsky, who I think you’ve been in a little bit of dialogue with, Noah, I got my MBA from UCLA in the latter years of running this business so that was a story in and of itself. I was getting my MBA in Los Angeles and I was running a business in Cape Cod, so we’re not going to come back to what my classroom attendance was during that, but I made it work.

The story is that Dave – a very, very extremely talented marketer – his background, he worked at some of the most prestigious market research firms in the world. The idea of Growthink, a lot of it was, he sees business very much in terms of market opportunities, it’s very fundamental to the DNA of Growthink, and then I see business very much of a small business from a financing, making money standpoint. Growthink was a lot of a combination of market opportunity, that piece, and then the small business natural aspect of building a company. So speaking of the idea of Growthink, at that time I was running the frozen foods business. At this point, my brother had segwayed from it and on Cape Cod I had a house, I had a car, I had a business, and I had a girlfriend – I’m married now so hopefully my wife won’t listen to this podcast – I had a girlfriend. I had kind of the basic building blocks of a life and so Dave came up with the idea of Growthink. Within two months, I had sold the house, sold the car, gone down the path of selling the business, and for better and for worse broke up with the girlfriend and moved to California.

The joke was that as opposed to selling these things in their component parts, like a certain amount for the car, certain amount for the business, certain amount for the house – and the girlfriend – put them all together as a package, kind of sold the whole life, but the girlfriend, she didn’t want to go for that. We sold them off in pieces.


Noah Rosenfarb: What was the idea behind Growthink? What attracted you to the company?


Jay Turo: With Growthink, we were very much of this idea, first of all, Dave’s background, his parents are special education teachers – or for many years, they’re retired now – so he has very much of a mindset of teaching, of helping. That’s very much his philosophy of the world is to be a teacher, to be somebody to help people realize their full potential. Dave’s parents are wonderful people. They’re just that special kind of people that are of the mindset to help others be their best. So a lot of what we do here as advisors is coaching. It’s helping people do their best work. That’s a big influence of what attracted Dave to the business model.

For me, there was the aspect of I could see a lot of money be made in this business – that’s one. Two, it’s this concept of exits and a little bit of it is you can make an exit by owning a big piece of one company, or you can delve more on a venture capital or private equity model and get pieces – a lot of little pieces of a number of companies – and we thought there was an opportunity to trade professional services know-how for contingency equity opportunities in growth companies. I thought that was a very interesting model, very in line with the times and allow us to get equity positions and a lot of dynamic growth companies, especially technology companies, so we were very excited about that.

Also, Dave and I, we met in business school. We’re very good friends. What would we do for fun? What we would do for fun is we would go at a Costco and we’d look around at all of the products and talk about the business models and reading Inc. magazine and Entrepreneur magazine and just talk about business and learn about business. This is what we do for fun. When we’re old and we’re tired, what are we going to do? We’re just going to talk about business, and the idea to be able to strategize about business and get paid for it was wonderful because it was what we do for fun. If I didn’t do this business this is what I’d do. Now, I read TechCrunch. Now I read Private Equity Week and still the same idea of, "Wow, these business models!"

I had the good fortune of being at the Google Plex last Tuesday for a conference and what Google is doing in mobile and what modern branding is about with tweeting and with Google Glass. What’s that going to meet for brands? I would do that stuff for nothing.


Noah Rosenfarb: Well, I’m with you. That’s how I feel about my day job. So, tell me more about the process at Growthink and how you help owners? I mean, helping half a million owners, that’s really an impressive amount of people that you’ve influenced. Tell me, how did you achieve that level of influence and what is it that you’re influencing?


Jay Turo: As our business evolved over the years, it became clear that – professional services model – that you’re limited by your time, right? So you have advice in that you work with one client, there’s naturally an opportunity cost in terms of working with another client. About four years ago, we decided to take a lot of our best content and develop an e-learning platform, a do-it-yourself platform, where we sell a lot of our know-how in package products and templates, and we built a publishing business. We have a core product, a business plan template, that we do a lot of paid search and search engine optimization and social media to drive attention to our particular product, our business plan template, which is a distillation of a lot of our best practices of putting a business plan together. From there, like a Legal Zoom, we have a network of do-it-yourself products and services around raising capital, around exit planning, around crowd funding, as a specific aspect of raising capital, around social media marketing, public relations, and these products have been purchased by tens of thousands of entrepreneurs.

In that process, we’ve also then developed a lot of free educational content that we give away, and that has been now experienced by, four to five hundred thousand entrepreneurs around the world have downloaded a lot of our free content. That number, just a combination of those, have taken a lot of our educational products that we give away, a lot of the ones that we purchase, and then our core consulting practice that in the past 14 years we’ve worked with over 3,000 companies in helping them develop business plans and exit plans and then go out execute those plans, so many aspects to it, Noah.


Noah Rosenfarb: What would you say are the three most important things that owners should be thinking about if they’re contemplating a future exit?


Jay Turo: That’s a great question. I would start with timeline. I love the freedom branding around what you do and I think that’s a great – I’m working on it. We’re doing a strategical retreat for a gentleman in the collections business. He’s got a very nice business, one of the bigger collections firms in the country. I’m arranging a strategic retreat for him later this month, and he’s got this freedom date. He’s five years down in the future. I love that. Actually, he has a date. It’s his freedom date. It’s February 12, 2018, like, "That’s my date." That’s great. That’s focus. I love that. Put a date out there. Obviously, from there, you’d naturally get to a number, what that number is for your freedom, and then you work backward from there.

Dave Lavinsky, he wrote, last year, a booked published by Wiley Publishing, started at the end, that’s first thing, is that work back from a date and a number. Work backwards. That would be number one.

Number two would be people, would be about, you know, what is this organization, what culture is the business, one where the people – almost always there is going to be a number of people – very rare is a business sold that the people that are in the business are not a core component of the value. So what are you doing in terms of developing a learning organization, a culture where your people are doing great work and will be able to do that great work post-sale? That would be the second thing. Think about what is your people development.

The third thing is technology. Is your company a leader in the use of technology to automate your business, or are you laggard? There are a lot of studies that show the companies that are leaders in terms of technology and utilizing for automation and for competitive advantage. They sell for a much higher multiple than the companies that aren’t.


Noah Rosenfarb: We just had a great guest, Dan Abbate, from Robotaton, who goes into small businesses and automates them. It’s such an interesting concept that I posted it, you know, by the time this goes live it will be a few weeks ago, and it’s amazing the feedback you get from people that don’t think about automating their small business.


Jay Turo: Please let me know about that. I’d love to listen to that.


Noah Rosenfarb: Yeah. When you’re talking with owners about strategy, what would you say is the most common complaint you hear from them either in terms of the planning or the execution?


Jay Turo: That’s another great question. I think about that one a lot. I think that the challenge with traditional advisory processes – whether they be investing banking, management consulting, accounting overall – is that they’re a little bit stuck in the 20th century where they exist outside the main flow of the business. There’s the ultimate example that people say things like, "Why is that business plan placed on the shelf of my office?" That is an example of a process that did not get deep into the actual guts of a business.

I think a huge challenge is to think about strategic planning and have it be done with in the actual work processes of the business. A lot of that is now on software services. It’s on programs like Google analytics, cost and contact, sales force. There’s a million program software services and most quickbooks that modern businesses run off of and all this data and analytics, there’s actually strategic planning there so connecting those aha moments that we have in retreats and strategic planning processes to the way the business is actually being run. I think there’s a lot of innovation that’s going on there and so we figured out a way to do that so you don’t run these processes outside of your business. They’re actually integral to the guts of what you do.

When entrepreneurs say things like, "Well, I don’t have time to do strategic planning, I don’t have time for a two-day retreat with my key executives," they’re not thinking about the business the right way. They shouldn’t have time for the other stuff.


Noah Rosenfarb: It’s like having time to breathe.


Jay Turo: Yes, exactly.


Noah Rosenfarb: I know you guys have a great product called the Growthink dashboard. Is that what you’re talking about also in terms of bringing value to owners? Does the dashboard seed all the automated information into an owner so that they can interpret it?


Jay Turo: The dashboard is really a combination of our experience of working with thousands of entrepreneurs. A lot of it is we’ve experimented on many clients over the years. It taught us which way not to run a strategic process. Our dashboard is a combination of a lot of those experimentations. Also, the technology has matured but now it’s usable. Remember, Apple came out with an iPad 20 years ago – it was called the Newton – but it didn’t work. Technology wasn’t there. Now, the technology, the interfaces, the APIs, everything sitting on the cloud is good enough to create this effect – this dashboard effect – which is this idea, "Let’s take all the intelligence in the business and boil it down to what we call the magic metrics."

Those two or three key things that basically upon which the success of the business depends, and measure those very, very accurately and then be able to be really hyper-focus and laser-focused on how to improve those metrics. All that culminates in our dashboard product, which we think is the best of breed offering, specifically designed for lower and middle market companies, small businesses. It allows them to get all the data intelligence of their business out and into a frame that works for them to digest, then will allow them to make the best strategic and tactical decisions possible.


Noah Rosenfarb: Give me a practical example. Tell me about a client you worked with, kind of before and after, as it relates to automation, whether or not it includes your dashboard but in terms of the work you’ve done and the advice you might have to owners that are listening that they could replicate.


Jay Turo: I have a great story. We got all this political turmoil in Washington. I don’t know if you’ve heard, Noah. There’s all this drama going on right now in Washington, the shutdown and all of that. This isn’t a call about politics but there are a lot of folks in this country that are very anti-Obama. I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed this, so very anti, especially this folks that are very convinced that Obama and the democrats their goal is to take away all of the guns, NRA guns. It’s a huge hot button issue for a lot of people. I’m not going to take one side of the other of this call but this is an emotional issue, gun control.

We have a client of our dashboard that is in the crossbow business and two of these crossbows are, like Thor, you know, it’s like a bow and arrow but it’s horizontal.


Noah Rosenfarb: It’s like a rifle.


Jay Turo: It’s like a rifle but it’s not a gun. It’s a serious piece of hardware. These guys, they sell crossbows online and their core messaging is around, you know, when the zombies come and Obama’s taken away all your guns, you be there with your crossbow, that’s the basic message. So they’re a client of our dashboard and what they’ve been able to do, a lot of this is driven by very sensitive pay per click advertising around terms related to gun control, because there’s a lot of correlations. There’s not that much searching going on on crossbows so because they agreed you can advertise on terms that are interesting the gun owners, you get some pretty good correlations.

So all this data exists in programs like Google analytics that then connect to some kind of ecommerce software. Then it connects to Constant Contact, Mailchimp, an email marketing program and then the triangulation of this data is how you get intelligence on what’s working. Now, before, the way they would do this would be once a week they would look at all this data – it was very time consuming – and they’d have to log into Google analytics. They had a program called Infusionsoft, which is like a Sales Force competitor, and then they log into quickbooks and get all this data and see how a lot of their marketing, which mostly pays, they’re spending real money on this. They’re spending at Google ad words to drive traffic. All this is great but they’d be able to do it once a week because it’s very time-consuming.

We installed our dashboard and now all that information’s getting updated in real-time every 20 minutes and they can see now on an hour by hour basis which keywords are performing best, which landing pages are performing best, not just in terms of revenues but also in terms of margins because some of their products with shipping and all the discounts they offer are tremendously profitable and others are a little bit of loss leaders. So all this data existed in the business but was not in an actionable form. By doing a dashboard integration with this client, they’ve been able to improve their profitability. We’ve just installed the dashboard for the client at the beginning of the first quarter of the year and in the third quarter numbers will be out very shortly, but for the second quarter it was the most profitable quarter in the history of the company and they attribute a lot of that to kind of that fine-tuning that they’ve been able to do because of the dashboard.


Noah Rosenfarb: That’s great. Modern technology is amazing when you use it. Share with us more about how Growthink helps owners. Maybe you can tell me another story or two about owners that have come to you. What did they come to you looking for, how were you able to help, and what was the benefit in the end?


Jay Turo: They come in two buckets and one certainly is this idea of getting to an exit but just clarity around what’s the best path to take to give them the highest likelihood of getting to an exit, a sale, of the company. That’s a big bucket.

The second bucket, which is related, which I think is actually more on point is that they have existing businesses that they like but they don’t love. They’re there and they’re seeing a lot of the limitations of their business where it could be because the market’s not growing that fast, competition is such that’s sucking out margin. They like it but they don’t love their existing business, and they also see technological threat. They see these businesses are going to be a challenge because technology is eroding some core competitive advantage. So they come to us with ideas for adjacent business opportunities. They’re businesses that are related to what they’re doing but they’re different.

As an example, in the crossbow business, there are opportunities in other forms of personal defense products and services, so that’s a related business but it’s different. They want to build a business plan to execute on that business and it’s hard to do because they have an existing business that takes up all their time so they’re trying to get this new business launched within the context of the existing business but they want it to be separate. That’s a big thing they come to us for. That’s very typical. In fact, I see most entrepreneurs of ambition that they have a business and they’re executing on it but as they’re doing it they’re seeing anywhere between three and ten adjacent opportunities that are like, "Oh man, I’d love to go after that," and they bring in guys like us to help.


Noah Rosenfarb: Well, I always see shiny new objects.


Jay Turo: Yes.


Noah Rosenfarb: Yeah, and it’s great, I love it, but it’s one of the challenges of entrepreneurial ADD.


Jay Turo: It’s the balance, right?


Noah Rosenfarb: Right. It’s finding balance and making sure that there’s revenue coming in and profits to support you in what you want to achieve.


Jay Turo: Yeah, you got it.


Noah Rosenfarb: Walk me through the first bucket. With the companies that are looking to exit, how are you helping them? What kind of services are you offering, and maybe even more specifically can you talk about what are the most common mistakes you see owners make before they get to you around their exit strategy?


Jay Turo: I would say that a huge mistake is not really – having a very myopic echo chamber view of the market. Their view of the market, they just stop listening to what’s going on in terms of how their market is changing, what their competition is doing. A lot of "poo-pooing" of competitors, not really digesting what the competitors is doing, and as a result there’s stagnation of strategy. It’s not very innovative. That would be a huge bucket, not letting themselves just step out of the paradigm of their existing model. That’s a big one. I think in that realm, they don’t have enough dialogues going on with people that are candidly better than them.

A lot of entrepreneurs, they’re kings of their little castles, so relative to the people let’s say that work for them, or in their social circles, they’re like the most successful person, right? I think that’s wonderful but that also can lead to a certain degree of stagnation so building social networks, professional networks of people that are more successful than you and also from totally different businesses that have different perspectives and getting into those high-value conversations, I find that to be an area that a lot of small business owners fall into that trap.


Noah Rosenfarb: I’ll just add a comment, a plug for EO. If anyone is looking for an international association of entrepreneurs, I’m a member of EO. It’s a great organization. Cory, who’s the founder of Divestopedia, he’s also a member up in Calgary – I’m a member down in South Florida. Check out EO and find a local chapter. I strongly encourage that.


Jay Turo: It is a great organization.


Noah Rosenfarb: Yeah. So aside from the errors that they’re making – and I think you kind of bucket them into two broad categories that are common unfortunately – what about having the discussions with internal and external stakeholders around an exit? Is that something where you guys get involved? Do you have advice to offer to owners about how to approach this topic with their employers, their vendors?


Jay Turo: I actually think that that conversation can be framed very positively and that many owners take it as being something that is naturally a negative for the people in the company. I think that in many sale dynamics, many acquisition dynamics, it’s a great opportunity for the people in the company to expand their skillsets to make more money. It’s not always a threat. Also, to get to sell a business at a valuation that’s beyond a couple of times earnings, you kind of have to communicate that. You have to communicate that there’s some under-utilized assets within that company. There are a lot of scenarios under which it’s a positive for the employers of a company and I think that spending some time thinking through options that are win-win, that are positive for the employees and get high multiple for the business, I think that’s a place to start. It doesn’t mean that there isn’t a need for discretion and confidentiality in these processes, of course there is, but just taking a pause in that discussion, and don’t always assume that the employee’s going to view it as a negative. You may not be as great as you think you are.


Noah Rosenfarb: Yeah. Your partner wrote a book Start at the End. How has that influenced Growthink? Is that something that you guys – is there a message in there that’s gotten converted into your process at Growthink?


Jay Turo: The book is a distillation of a lot of our consulting processes. There’s a Start at the End website that has a number of worksheets and do-it-yourself templates that follow a lot of the principles of exit planning that Dave outlines in the book. Like everything else, you can buy a book on nutrition or you can hire a nutritionist. You can buy a book on working out or you can hire a personal trainer. There’s just different levels of services that could be layered on top of those principles because it’s very competitive. If you’re trying to do things on your own and your competition has the best advisors and coaches to help them, you’re going to lose. Is there an Olympic athlete who doesn’t have a coach? Every one of them does.


Noah Rosenfarb: Yeah, that’s great. So I guess if you like Start at the End, if you’ve read it and you like it, it’s a great opportunity for someone to come to Growthink and get that personalized coaching service. That’s terrific.

Before we wrap up, maybe you want to share a story or two about either your experiences as an entrepreneur and how they might be helpful to our audience, or your experiences as an advisor to entrepreneurs. What could you share with our listeners that you think they might not already know?


Jay Turo: I would say that we’ve been running Growthink for 14 years now – we started up the company in 1999 – and I would say that the biggest takeaway is to – I’m going to come back to what I said earlier, Noah, that I think that the great companies, they provide opportunities for the people in the company to do their best work and I found that to be not just the most personally rewarding when we get to those circumstances, but the most profitable work that we do. If you look at some companies, let’s say, Genentech or Microsoft, when you look at their revenues per employee, it’s over a million dollars. These businesses are really, really profitable so they’re doing something that these bigger companies where they have these cultures, where they pay their people well and these people sit in a culture where they do great work and I think a lot of small businesses – lower middle market companies – they lose sight of that. It’s too much about the success for the entrepreneur and their success if being limited because they’re not creating enough opportunities for the people around them to be successful.


Noah Rosenfarb: Yeah. Well, that’s great advice and I think if the owners on the call and even the advisors to owners just walk around their office and take a look around and see if their employees are reaching their full potential and excited about the work that they’re doing, they’ll know quickly if they’ve achieved everything they can, right?


Jay Turo: A hundred percent, Noah.


Noah Rosenfarb: Terrific. For listeners that would like to get in touch with you, what’s the best way?


Jay Turo: Certainly, visit our website growthink.com – grow as in get bigger, think, what we sometimes do with our heads, we think, that’s a great place. All the contact information for myself and all of us are there. You can follow me on Twitter at @jayturo, and we maintain an active Facebook and LinkedIn page for Growthink so we’d love to interact with you there as well.


Noah Rosenfarb: Terrific. Well, Jay Turo of Growthink, I appreciate you sharing your experiences as an entrepreneur and as an advisor to owners. Thanks to all of our listeners. Please continue to do me the favor and post your reviews on iTunes – we’ve gotten a few more in – and for those of you listening if you could take a few minutes out of your day and post a quick review on iTunes, we’d really appreciate it, and certainly if you want to forward a link to someone you know that you think will benefit from the interview we’d always welcome that. Thanks to everyone and have a great day.

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Written by Noah Rosenfarb

Noah Rosenfarb
Noah Rosenfarb, CPA/ABV/PFS has devoted his career to advising business owners on all things related to money. He is a Personal CFO and Holistic Wealth Coach at Freedom Business Advisors, which provides middle market business owners guidance on how to successfully transition out of the management and or ownership of their company. Mr. Rosenfarb is the author of EXIT: Healthy, Wealthy and Wise.


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