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Podcast: The Myth of Value Creation

By Noah Rosenfarb
Published: October 19, 2014 | Last updated: December 5, 2017
Key Takeaways

Most entrepreneurs believe in the myth that they are creating value in their business. What most entrepreneurs have created is a lucrative, interesting job for themselves, but not a business with significant value that they can sell.

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In this podcast, John Mill, author of “Hire Your Buyer”, discusses:

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  • The needs of businesses with enterprise value below $5 million;
  • The attractive force of the owner as the value of goodwill and how to capture that value;
  • What owners should look for in a successor hire and where to find them;
  • The classic generational problem; and
  • 5 stages of employee development.

About the Guest

John Mill LL.M. (international tax) has 25 years of experience as a corporate tax lawyer for small to medium size business owners, professionals and farmers. Succession is a much discussed but little understood term. John works primarily with accountants, lawyers and financial advisors as a succession architect for their clients.

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Read the Full Transcript Here:

Noah Rosenfarb: Hello everyone. Welcome again. It’s Noah Rosenfarb, your host for the Divestopedia Exit Strategy podcast, the author of Exit Healthy, Wealthy and Wise and a partner of Freedom Business Advisors. Today, we’ve got a great guest with John Mill.

John is a public speaker and business succession consultant, but perhaps more importantly in the focus of today’s discussion, he’s the author of Hire Your Buyer, which is a newly released book coming out. John, welcome to the show.

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John Mill: Thank you, Noah.

Noah Rosenfarb: John had posted on LinkedIn that he changed his title to author of Hire Your Buyer. I reached out to you, John, because I thought that title was just amazing. What we find is that so many of the business owners that – especially if they’re doing less than a couple of million in sales – their best path is to think about hiring their buyers so I really appreciated the title and couldn’t wait to talk to you. Share with our listeners what led you to write the book.

John Mill: It’s a two-part answer, Noah. Firstly, there’s my personal back story and then secondly is kind of the solution that I was fortunate enough to stumble across through my research.

Noah Rosenfarb: Start with telling me about your background then.

John Mill: The back story is that I started off as a small entrepreneur and as a result of my experiences I decided that law school would be a helpful thing and decided to become a small business lawyer. For 20 years, I worked as a small business lawyer in Windsor, Ontario and pretty much did everything along the way. I picked up a master’s degree in tax because tax is a big issue for a lot of small business people. I’ve appeared in the federal court of appeal and I’ve done pretty much everything there is to do legally or with respect to small business ownerships, but I was unhappy. I didn’t find the work of being a lawyer, I found it too confrontational, I found it too transactional and it just wasn’t satisfying to me.

I started looking for other things and along the way, one of the things that I stumbled into is I was asked to be speaker to a bank in Montreal High Net Worth’s group across Canada. I did that and I met those folks and they seemed like pretty happy folks so I thought, “That’d be a good thing to try.” I did that for a couple of years but it sort of didn’t work out because I was told that I had to be salesy. I asked, “What does salesy mean,” and they said, “Well, you know, you have to wear a white belt and white shoes and be salesy.” No, I don’t have a white belt, I don’t have white shoes so it sort of didn’t really work out for me because I’m more of a researcher type.

I came across the areas of business succession and I thought, “You know what, business succession, now that’s something that makes sense for me.” That’s when I decided to really dig into it and become a master of that area of planning.

Noah Rosenfarb: Have you had some clients that had gone through either succession challenges or problems that kept your interest or was it kind of out of thin air?

John Mill: Yes, exactly. I did have some clients and I started to connect the dots. I, myself, I’m 55, so I’m right in the age bracket of the typical baby boomer succession planner and also it’s an issue for me as to what I want to do with the rest of my life. Yes, I had some clients and we worked with them and exactly as you said, Noah, you hit the nail on the head, the under two million dollar valuation business is – which is what I’ve worked in almost my entire career and sometimes smaller businesses in that, just because they’re small doesn’t mean that they have big problems because some of them do – but that’s what we did was work with them, with the owners, work with their employees and it became a very happy, harmonious time.

Noah Rosenfarb: That was the inspiration for Hire Your Buyer, to bring this message to the masses?

John Mill: Yeah, essentially, because I did the research. My experience is a little bit different. It has overlapped with a lot of the people I’ve heard on your show but my experience is a little bit different because I worked almost exclusively with such small businesses. Their needs are a little bit different than when you get into the above five million-dollar enterprise value and you start to get into the mid market and you have M&A advisors. It’s a more professional environment from a business perspective.

In my audience, my small business market, 90% of the businesses really can’t sell for a meaningful amount of money or enough to last in retirement for 20 years. In fact, the website, bizbuysell.com, which is a business listing website in the United States – ten million page views a month and they’ve got hundreds of thousands of listings – the average business value on that website is 155,000. That’s not going to cut it for 20 years of retirement. A lot of business people are surprised that the same business that generates $200,000 a year of income may only be worth even less than $200,000 and sometimes often not more than $300,000 or $400,000, and that’s not going to cut it and that’s quite a surprise.

The question really is, “Okay, well, if it’s really not meaningfully going to sell and a lot of businesses don’t go to the family members – Price Waterhouse thinks about 30% – that leaves a big gap in between. That’s where I saw the opportunity.

Noah Rosenfarb: One of the things you talked about in your book or wrote about in your book, I should say, is the attractive force of the owner being the good will of the company. I thought that was a really interesting framework that you laid out. Maybe you could share with our listeners the comparison of good will with Coca Cola that you used with the kind of good will at these smaller businesses where the owner’s really the one driving the ship.

John Mill: That’s a very good point. It’s a fundamental business point. It is understood, again, in the M&A circles and the valuation circles, but with the smaller business owners that I talk to it’s not as obvious. A lot of the business owners are, I find, are the entrepreneurs because – what is it that the book tells us that 80% of businesses don’t make it past 10 years. Most of the entrepreneurs, the baby boomers entrepreneurs that are my age, have been in business 20 years or longer so there’s something going on there. They have something of value but the attractive force – the term good will – essentially means attractive force. Good will is a valuation item that would be over and above the value of your assets. It would be the attractive force of the business.

In the case of Coca Cola, Coca Cola’s gone out and invested hundreds of millions in marketing to develop a happy, warm, fuzzy image of their polar bears dancing around the North Pole and all the other things that attracts us to Coca Cola. That good will in the valuation of Coca Cola is worth about $60 billion, which is just astounding because if you take all the equipment and everything else that’s worth about $12 billion. The other $60 billion is just based on good will, the attractive force or the fact that you put the name Coca Cola on the can.

If we go back to a small business, the attractive force is the owner personally, and the difference is and the problem is that that good will is not transferrable. You can’t sell it. If the owner leaves, the good will is gone and all you have left is liquidation value.

Noah Rosenfarb: What should the owners be doing with that in mind? How do they try and capture that good will so it becomes transferrable, capture that attractive force?

John Mill: That’s a really good question. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about that because it is such a common problem. I describe the personal good will – the technical term the attractive force – is what happens with good will. Good will actually is like a magnetic force that pulls employees and customers and suppliers to want to work, to want to have a relationship – that’s the attractive force – but the technical term usually used is called personal good will. It’s personal, non-transferrable, good will.

I analogize personal good will to a light bulb in a room. It’s casting off a lot of light and a lot of heat but it’s all being wasted. The owner really only needs enough light to read a book or to walk down the hallway. All the rest of the light especially the light behind his back is wasted. What I want to work with the owner is to capture that wasted personal good will and translate it and convert it into value. The way that we have to do that and one of the simplest ways to do that is through hiring your buyer and training those people and bringing them up so that they can essentially trade off and employ and utilize the attractive force that the owners created and use that to create more value.

Noah Rosenfarb: What should the owners look for in this successor hire? What are some of the key attributes? Walk me through how they might find someone. Is there a hire your buyer job pool or that’s kind of going to come later in the business process?

John Mill: No, and that’s a great question. A lot of these questions are great questions because many people are confused. Yeah, okay, hiring your buyer sounds great, and I talked to one guy – and this is the classic. What I’m going to do is I’m going to break the answer up into three parts. What’s the classic problem situation? What do we look for and where do we find them?

The classic problem situation. I’m sitting down with somebody who’s 74 years old, old school, very hardworking, very intelligent, great education, hard work ethics, and we’re having coffee, very nice person, and he’s bragging to me about how last Saturday he spent until five o’clock at the shop making sure the drawings were right because nobody else could do it. That’s the classic problem right there. Nobody else can do it. I asked them. We’re talking and having a nice conversation and I said, “Well, have you ever considered hiring your buyer,” and then he gave me the magic answer, Noah, that I’ve heard on a number of occasions. Here’s how he starts. He says, “You know, the kids these days, they just don’t know how to work.” As soon as I hear that, I know that this person is not the kind of person that will qualify as a hire your buyer candidate.

Noah Rosenfarb: They’re not going to qualify because they won’t accept someone who does something different than them or something else? They just don’t have the right mindset?

John Mill: They don’t believe in the capability of their employees. They don’t believe that their employees that are capable of doing the work to the level, that they can do it. They’re just uncomfortable and so what they do is retain control.

Let’s talk about – and this segways into another part of your question which is what are we looking for in a buyer. What we are looking for in a buyer is something very specific, Noah. We’re looking for in a buyer exactly the same thing that I’m looking for when I’m interviewing an owner to see if we can work together. What I’m looking for in an owner is I’m looking for – and it’s really elementary – I’m looking for people that like people, I’m looking for owners that enjoy seeing other people succeed, I’m looking for an owner that could coach an under-11 kids’ soccer team and get the kids excited about playing even when they’re losing, even in the face of adversity and they come back and they go to practice and understand that there’s a connection between practice and how you perform on the field. That kind of person I can work with, and that’s the kind of person we are looking for in a buyer.

In a moment, I’m going to tell you where to find them but we’re looking for the same kind of thing because buyer is a – I use it because it’s a catchy jingle – hire your buyer. It sorts of rhymes in a way but buyer, in that sense, is somebody who might be in your company already, might be one of your children, but the idea is that buyer is a new position where somebody that was a good performer previously has got to step up. The person that could step up – yes they have to be good performer but what are they performing in? They could be in your design department, they could be doing finance, they could be doing marketing, and whoever’s going to run the company has to do all of those things. We do want somebody that’s been historically a good performer but we’re looking for potential. We’re looking for somebody, again, same quality. Does this person like people? Can they build a team? Do they want to see people succeed?

Noah Rosenfarb: Do they exist, based on the complaints of the baby boomers and even I guess their predecessors more so that say these gen X and gen Y kids, they just want to be home for dinner every night and they don’t know what it’s like.

John Mill: Every generation – and there’s multiple examples – of every generation will go back and say that. They said it when I was a kid, they will say it in the next generation. Every generation there are people and really all they’re really saying is, “I don’t believe in people, I don’t believe that people can succeed, I believe that there are certain special chosen people like myself and we’re the ones that are suffering the labors of the world and everybody else is sort of on a free ride.” That’s not the kind of person that will be good for it. What I’d like to tell you, explain to you, is where is it that we can find these people.

Noah Rosenfarb: Yeah, that would be great. I know of some people that are looking.

John Mill: Okay, and I’ll tell you. It’s an abstract answer but it is the truth. I’m going to start with a story about Lebron James’ high school basketball team, and there’s a great, great documentary that I highly recommend to anybody called More Than a Game, because he was filmed while he was in high school. It tells the story, because Lebron James comes from Dayton, Ohio from a smaller kind of a rough neighborhood and Lebron’s mother was 16 when Lebron was born and she doesn’t know who his father is. Some of the kids on his team had brothers who were killed in gang violence, and the coach of the team who’s the narrator of the video is saying the reason they chose the title More Than a Game is because that’s what he saw.

He saw the game of basketball as an activity that was a way out of the neighborhood. It was a way to come together to work in a guided fashion with a goal so that these young boys could become men and develop character. That’s why it’s called More Than a Game. That’s what he saw as basketball. There’s just a great awesome scene when Lebron is in Grade 11 and the team has won the state championship, and they’re on the way now to determine the national. However, I’m not sure how that works exactly but there’s some kind of a tournament or a playoff system to determine who’s the number one basketball team in the nation. Because Lebron’s team is ranked so low they have to play the number one team in the nation from a place called Oak Hill. Oak Hill is this private boarding high school academy for basketball and what they do is they recruit the best basketball players across the country, high school level, and give them full scholarships to go to Oak Hill and do nothing but play basketball with the best coaches in the country and whatever schooling that they have to do.

This is the team that they faced and they went in – Lebron’s team comes in singing the song “We are ready, we are ready,” and this is all on video. They go into that game and they crush Oak Hill 80-60. Of course, in good movie style, even though it’s a documentary, they go on to become the number one team in the nation. What was great, what was fascinating at the end, was the coach was sitting there and he’s saying, “Look. Think about this. We’re from this small neighborhood, this small rough neighborhood in Dayton that’s three or four blocks big and all the members of the team essentially are from that neighborhood, I live in that neighborhood, and from that neighborhood we came out and we took on the team that was the best players in the country. I’m just so thankful that we had that opportunity and that’s really amazing.”

I do believe that’s amazing and I guess to answer your question, Noah, and I believe this most sincerely, is look in your neighborhood. Buyers are everywhere. It’s not about finding. It’s about connecting and engaging. They are everywhere and there’s a lot of kids, including me and you, that were born in the past generation or so, and we like to work. There’s a lot of them out there.

Noah Rosenfarb: Yeah, great answer, great analogy. In terms of looking, any suggestions that you offer in terms of a process to find them or any skill requisites that you think are important? I know that you mentioned personality and willingness to coach the team. What are some of the other traits people should look for, a way that they could source connections?

John Mill: In getting a little bit more specific – and I guess what I would say is, I’m going to take a bit of a duck on that answer, which I think is there for me – I would say that you want to get to know some HR, human resources people, that are good, that understand engagement and understand process and start talking to them. In terms of skill sets, the skill set really is leadership because most people can learn. Most intelligent hardworking people can learn the specifics of business process. Obviously, if it’s computer science or engineering or something that requires a specific education they’re going to have to have that specific technical education.

Really, really, honestly the answer is people that understand the value of connection and the value of engagement. If the book Hire Your Buyer would have come down to one word, that word would be engagement. That’s the key.

Noah Rosenfarb: Do you feel the owner that’s 74 that doesn’t believe that there’s another human on earth that could do what they’re doing, do you believe that part of your mission is to get him to open his eyes change his mind or are you focused on the people that get it when you say it and recognize that there is someone and they should just control their intention and put them on the right path, or both?

John Mill: I’m firmly a believer in the old joke about how many psychologists does it take to change a light bulb, and the answer is only one but the light bulb has to want to change. If somebody who’s an intelligent person is sitting across the table from me and in a very calm, thoughtful fashion telling me that Hire Your Buyer won’t work, I’m doing disservice to both of us to try to force the issue.

Now, I can do something other than hire your buyer. We can recommend a financial planner. We can talk about how much retirement is going to cost. We can do those things. To me, it seems a bridge too far to try to get that person into their heads, if they’re clearly telling you, clearly messaging, “I don’t want to go there, I don’t want to do that, I don’t believe you.”

Noah Rosenfarb: Just an interesting anecdote and I’d love it if you could share some stories. We had a friend of our firm that was in his late 60s and had called up my partner saying, “You know, I’m thinking about closing my business. Can you just come over and take a look at things and just tell me if I’ll be all right.”

In the conversation, what we found out is that the owner who was in his late 60s, he would be fine if he closed the business down. He’d get about $600,000 out of the business if he liquidated his assets and collected his receivables. From a financial standpoint he was going to be okay. He can live the rest of his life financially secure. What we showed him was that he actually had a key employee, and if he was willing to transfer equity to that key employee over the course of a three to four year period in exchange for some of the compensation he was already paying that individual, instead of the $600,000 he’d collect about $1.4 million.

From an effort’s standpoint, it probably wouldn’t be a much greater effort on his part and it also, from an emotional standpoint, it’ll give him a sense that he’d create a legacy. He’d create an opportunity for someone else. Actually, he’s embarked on that plan. He did I think a year or two with that plan and it’s going very well. It was serendipitous for him. He never thought to hire his buyer. Again, like you said, the buyer was already there – he had already hired him years ago – but he never thought of the opportunity to structure a deal with him.

Maybe share some stories with me of clients that you’ve collaborated with where they found opportunity either in the people that they already had working with them or around the corner.

John Mill: Yeah, we’ll do that in a moment but I want to deconstruct your story a little bit because I think you have laid out almost the archetype of classic hire your buyer story, as you acknowledged at the end.

The difference between my fellow telling me that young kids these days can’t work, which I do believe is a big (….) and I’ve heard it a couple of times, the difference is he had no key employees, nobody that he would consider key. It is a very common goal, and as you have alluded to and are exactly correct, that many, many owners do not make the connection that this key employee could be someone that takes over. There’s a big problem, I think, in the professions especially in the small business advising professions – and I have heard this many, many times. Noah, I’d be interested to (…..) I’m from Canada – is it’s probably the same in the United States. I’ve heard this many times. I’ve had many people come to me and we talk about Hire The Buyer and I hear, “Oh, my lawyer, my accountant, told me I can’t do that.”

I un-bundle that and I said, “Why is it that you can’t do that?” “Well, as soon as you give an employee shares you have to share financial information with them, there’s control issues and you just can’t do that.” I’m thinking to myself, “Well, why can’t you do that?” Now, in certain situations – and I’ll give you one example of why you can’t do that and maybe we’ll look at some others – but I talked again to another owner. He had a key employee. I was in a meeting with his accountants and I suggested, “Well, what about … this guy’s 30 years younger than you. You’re telling me he runs the entire shop, the entire operation. What about, you know, hire your buyer?” He said, “Oh, no. I’m going to work in this business for another five years.” I’m thinking, “Okay, that’s like the perfect timeframe,” but he’s thinking, “No.”

Then the accountant goes, “Oh, yeah. I’ve done that before. I know what we’ll do. We’ll give the employee some non-holding shares that we can buy back for a dollar at any time and every once in a while we’ll give him some dividends. It’ll make him feel like an owner.” I’ve heard this before, but then the owner says, “Oh, he’s going to get financial information? I don’t want to do that.” As it turns out, this owner is making a lot more money out of the company than he’s ever told anybody, he’s always cried poor, and what he’s doing is forcing everybody’s wages down. That person is not going to want to do that. That’s I guess another kind of situation where that person will not engage in this kind of a plan.

Noah Rosenfarb: Unfortunately, you and I both know the statistics and I’m sure our listeners do too, that these small business successions, they fail. They fail to either find a buyer whether it’s internal or external, and the businesses are eventually liquidated. I think it’s, in large part, due to the mentality of the controlling owner that doesn’t want to just open their mind to the possibility that someone else could do this on their behalf.

I was going to ask. Can you share a success story on someone that you worked with?

John Mill: Sure. I worked with a firm of engineers, classic situation, very good engineer, in Ontario, and very successful. The original assignment was to say, “Okay, well, if you’re only one person, even though you’re a leader of the profession, you’re risks. If you want to take time off and if you ever were to become disabled, because what are the chances between the age of, say, 55 and 75, of being disabled. Not disabled in the classic sense but being unable to go to work or two or three months. I mean, statistically it’s an extremely high ratio of people that that will happen to at least once in that 20-year period. What happens? That’s a very, very insecure place to be.

Again, this person had lots of personal good will and so what we did was brought in a number of other engineers who were, again, same age – he was about 57, 58 – and the younger engineers were bringing in about 30, who were then very happy to have an opportunity to work with somebody of this caliber. We talked about taking the personal good will and essentially baking these people into place over four, five years. What essentially we do – and I explain this very honestly to everybody – is what we’re doing is we’re bringing you in by virtue of the unused good will that’s already here. There’s going to be a flow of business coming to you that you would not otherwise be able to get, and yes, they agreed, and I said, “So, what we’re going to do is we’re going to set you up and essentially we’re going to sell to you the cash flow that you create. If that’s okay with you, get independent advice.” I said, “Your option if you don’t like that idea is to try to do it on your own and spend fifty years building it up.”

Everybody that we talked to, once they’d looked at the numbers and everybody’s been straightforward and upfront about it, but that, essentially, using those people to convert the personal good will into cash flow that we then value and then sell back to them, but we sell it back to them not for money out of their pocket but for a share of the profit that they’re creating, so they’re really not out of pocket. It’s truly a win-win-win all around. You have a situation now where the person no longer has to worry about if they ever were to get sick for two or three months or if they want to take off to Florida, which is a big thing in Ontario, by the way, going to Florida. Not that big where you’re from but being able to go to Florida for a couple of months in the winter or whatever the places that you go to to take a couple of months off. Now, he has that situation and we got a bunch of happy campers and younger engineers that have this awesome opportunity to build this very flat organizational structure where they can engage in really high quality high end work that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to open the door to.

Noah Rosenfarb: Yeah, I think it’s great. One thing I talk about is the future of business owner planning, and part of that future that I envision is that owners are educated about all their options to settle or transfer their company. I think this concept of ‘hire your buyer’ is one that will become hopefully well recognized and in some part, the book that you’ve put out there, so I appreciate that. Thank you.

John Mill: Thank you.

Noah Rosenfarb: What else would you like to share with our listeners today?

John Mill: I guess the idea again, go back to think – because most people with the small business advisors, I guess I will tell you, though, one of my anecdotes that’s in the book and part of what, as I opened up the show and talked about my own unhappiness and where I discovered the answer to that. Essentially, what it was was I was not really connecting and not really engaging myself and so part of this reflects my own personal journey.

In the book, I write about – there’s a book called Tribal Leadership. It’s a book about employee engagement and in large companies, and in terms of employee development they break it down into five stages. In the first stage of employee development, there’s essentially the unemployable. They start with the people that are unemployable and what are the qualities and the hallmarks of people who are unemployable. Well, they live in a world that sucks. The world sucks, nobody understands them, nobody’s there, nobody reciprocates. There’s no point to putting any effort out because nothing good will ever come of it. If they ever were to try to do something that was good, it would be taken from them. That kind of mentality and that attitude leads to gang kind of behavior. Those people will be a liability in the company.

Stage two is a very large group and those are the kind of people that have the ‘Dilbert’ boss. No longer does the world suck but these are the people that ‘my life sucks’ and ‘I can’t ahead’ and ‘my boss doesn’t get me’ and there’s really, “I don’t understand what we’re doing here in this company and I don’t see how I contribute,” and the goal really is, “Let’s see if I can get away with working as little as I can.” That’s really what the focus is. That’s stage two.

Stage three is moving beyond that and stage three is all the refugees in your escapees from stage two. I worked in a number of jobs and I decided when I was in my teenager years that I wanted to become a businessman and then a professional. I’m the classic stage three escapee from stage two. Stage three is typified by the statement, “I’m great, your not.” In the book, they talk about how a lot of accountants and lawyers and doctors go, “I’m great, you’re not,” and especially I can tell you for sure, Noah, being a trial lawyer for 20 years, that’s the ultimate ‘I’m great’ exercise as being a trial lawyer is you’re there to win and prove in court that I’m great and you’re not. What that leads to is a lack of connection and a lack of engagement and that’s really the problem with the small business, lifestyle business, the entire kind of industry, is this ‘I’m great you’re not’ attitude’ because entrepreneurs generally are in the same kind of mind frame like the fellow we were talking about, the 74-year-old. Nobody else can do it. I’m great, nobody else is. Then they go to lawyers and accountants who share the same mind frame ‘I’m great nobody else is.’

I talk to a lot of lawyers. When we talk I say, “Do you realize that it’s negligence for you to advise people or owners to trust their employees?” Everything has to be documented and everything has to be in writing. That’s the stage three mindset and it’s that ‘I’m great’ that really keeps people polarized and it keeps them from engaging.

The authors then talk about, “Well, what is stage four?” Stage four is we’re great. That’s the hallmark of the great organizations in the country. They have this ‘we’re great’ team philosophy and attitude. That’s where I really want to get people to, is to ‘we’re great.’ There’s a lot of evidence and I outlined evidence in the book. A lot of people don’t realize – and I’ll tell you one piece of evidence and then kind of wrap this little anecdote – is that the greatest companies to work for, there’s a Fortune magazine. Fortune magazine has Fortune 100 greatest companies to work for. If you were to take the list of the greatest companies to work for and make it a stock index by itself and just track the performance of that 100 stocks as an index, and then compare it to either the S&P 500 or the Russell 3000, the greatest companies to work for – since it’s been tracked, they started in 1997, on average, out performs the regular stock market by double. This stuff that I’m talking about is not based on totally touchy feely kind of unprovable nonsense, and that’s what I’m trying to set out to prove, is that there really is something to this – I call it a martial art.

I don’t want to be naïve. I’ve done trial law for 25 years. I don’t want to be taken advantage of. I don’t want to give up control naively in a bad situation, but I believe that doing it intelligently in a way that we can engage people will lead to a lot more value.

Noah Rosenfarb: I happen to agree with you, and hopefully our listeners, if they don’t agree with that, they can read more about it in Hire Your Buyer. How might they get in touch with you, John? What’s the best way?

John Mill: Two ways. I have a website called successiontaxcounsel.com and I also have a group on LinkedIn called Business Succession Professionals. Either of those ways would work.

Noah Rosenfarb:

Terrific. Thank you so much for coming on the show today. Thanks to all of our listeners for tuning in. We’d welcome your advice and feedback. Please share it on iTunes or send me an email, [email protected]. If you have recommendations for any future guests, feel free to share them. We look forward to having you back to listen on another episode. Thanks again, John, for coming on and thanks again to our listeners.

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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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