In this podcast, Dr. Basil Peters, author of “Early Exits,” talks about:
- What are the biggest mistakes when you’re selling your company;
- The importance of having an exit strategy and the need to develop better practices on exit timing; and
- Tips on how to increase the probability of a successful exit.
About the Guest
Dr. Basil Peters is an M&A advisor, exit coach and angel investor. Dr. Peters is the CEO of Strategic Exits Corp., a firm specializing in optimum exits for technology companies. Dr. Peters managed three top performing funds, a hedge fund, a venture capital fund and an angel fund. He has been a technology company CEO in Vancouver and Silicon Valley.
Basil writes a blog on exits at www.Exits.com/Blog. His first book, “Early Exits – Exit Strategies for Entrepreneurs and Angel Investors (But Maybe Not Venture Capitalists),” was selected by Inc Magazine as one of the 10 best business books of the year.
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Read the Full Transcript Here:
Noah Rosenfarb: Hello everyone and welcome. It’s Noah Rosenfarb from Freedom Business Advisors here with another great guest, Dr. Basil Peters. He is the author of a wonderful new book called “Early Exits,” but beyond that he is the CEO of Strategic Exits Corp and he has done a lot of amazing things. Basil, thanks for coming on the show.
Basil Peters: Thanks for inviting me, Noah.
Noah Rosenfarb: My pleasure. Why don’t you our audience how your first introduction to exits, when you built and sold your company? Walk me through what happened there.
Basil Peters: I’m an engineer and really I’m a geek, techy, nerd – whatever you want to call somebody who has been fascinated by technology from a young age. I went through, got a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering. When I was at grad school, I started a company in the actual electrical engineering building at my alma mater and we manufactured equipment for satellite television and cable television applications. We grew that to be the second largest company in the world of that type and I was the chairman and CEO right from the founding all the way through to the exit.
My first introduction to everything not to do when you’re selling your company was in actually living through that first exit where much later in my career, I finally had the courage to go back and actually admit to myself all of the things that I did wrong in that first exit. When I say courage, I’m not exaggerating. It was actually very difficult for me and very painful for me to recall all of the things that I now know and I shouldn’t have done or could have done better in that first experience.
Noah Rosenfarb: How long were you operating that company?
Basil Peters: From the founding through to the eventual sale was between 11 and 12 years, depending on how you count the sale date. So we get up to about 500 employees. We were a pretty good sized company and we actually ended up selling the company to our largest competitor, which was a Fortune 500 company called Scientific Atlanta and then they were subsequently acquired by Cisco. So the company that I started in grad school is actually still alive and well. It’s a part of Cisco. Some of the people I hired right out of school are still working at Cisco on the business that I started many years ago, which is quite gratifying.
Noah Rosenfarb: So what seems to be such an outward success story, you know, building a business from nothing to 500 employees over a decade, selling it to what was a wonderful brand name and which in turn became Cisco and it still lives on. What would you say are some of the biggest mistakes in spite of the story that sounds so wonderful and what everybody wants?
Basil Peters: Well what everybody wants I hope, Noah, is to have a successful exit and I think to be fair, I cannot count that first experience as a successful exit. Yes, it was an exit but it wasn’t what I would call successful because we didn’t do some of the things that I now hope that all good boards, founders, and CEOs would do. If anybody wants to learn more about everything that I did wrong in that first experience, the most popular video on my blog has, for years, been top off the gate, the Entrepreneur’s Organization. When they wanted me to come in and tell a war story, tell a story about all the things not to do and that was when I first enumerated all of the mistakes that I made in that first exit and on my blog, you can find that either by searching “how not to sell a company” or something like that. It’s pretty prominent out there.
Let me tell you a few of the things that I wished I had been better educated or I wish my board members had been more knowledgeable about in that first exit. The first thing was we never had an exit strategy. At no time, even though we had seven people on the board most of time and they were good, intelligent, experienced angels and VCs, at no time in the history of the company did we have a conversation about the exit strategy. I’m embarrassed to admit that today and I’m still quite mortified by how many companies when I ask the CEO or I ask directors what the exit strategy is, I get a blank stare back. Not having that exit strategy, not having any understanding of what was we were trying to do when we came to work every day, having no goal that we could align the company and its team around, led to a couple of other serious shortcomings in the eventual exit process.
One of them was that we did not time our exit well. We actually let ourselves be at the mercy of the external macroeconomic events and that’s what determined when we decided to start the exit. Like I see in so many companies, when things were going wonderfully well, when every quarter we were telling more and every quarter the profits are pulling up, when my biggest challenge was how to hire more people, I never thought for a minute about selling the company. It was just too much fun, but as I’ve now come to appreciate that absolutely the best time to be thinking about selling the company when everything is going perfectly.
If I could go back today and talk to my 40-year-old self, the first thing I’d do is I’ll grab myself by the lapels, whack myself up in the head with a brick and say, “Everything is going perfectly. For heaven’s sake, sell the company now,” because companies are started and often managed by entrepreneurs who are eternal optimists, we are really bad at doing that. We are really good at seeing the potential of growing the company in the future, we’re really good at imagining how much more it will be worth if we can just continue on this growth track, but almost universally, we’re terrible at assessing risk and in the financial world, risk and reward are inextricably interrelated. That’s why so many entrepreneurs end up doing what I did which was to have a less than successful exit when they finally sell the company they have been working on for so many years of their lives.
Noah Rosenfarb: Yeah. Would you say that was a predominantly from a financial standpoint or even emotionally and going to work for the buyer or whatever transgressed after that?
Basil Peters: I think the financial part is not the biggest part of what I would consider successful. In most exits, in most company sales, the event has much greater impact outside of the financial sphere. For most founders, most CEOs, often even for angel investors, the exit is a life changing event and one of the ways that I describe my lack of complete success and one of the things that I speak very often to groups of entrepreneurs about is timing your exit better so that you don’t live through a phase of your life like I did where for a better part of a couple of years, I would go into work every day. I’d work 12 maybe 14 hours. I’d work hard. I’d work smart and then I drive home. In the worst times, I would think to myself that today after working hard for 12 or 14 hours, I probably lost $10,000 or $20,000 personally.
That happened in our case because we got into a change in the macroeconomic environment and no matter how hard we worked, there was nothing we could do to prevent the value of the company from decreasing. In my own case, I lived through a couple of the worst years of my life where all I could do was just go in there and work my heart out, but the result everyday was I was $10,000 or $20,000 poorer everyday for like a couple of years. That was kind of painful and that is something I am devoting a good part of my life to providing the knowledge and the skills to entrepreneurs and investors to prevent that from happening to them because as I say in my workshop, “That’s part of your life you’re never going to get back.”
Noah Rosenfarb: If I had to recalibrate that into like a financial term, are you saying if you backload your sale with an earn out and you’re not taking enough chips off the table upfront to make you feel like you have a successful exit, you’re just leaving too much risk in the company without the upside?
Basil Peters: Let me do it even better than that, Noah. Let me describe it in how it happened for me. I believe that if we had an exit strategy and I know that if we timed the exit just a little bit better, like let’s say we sold two years earlier than we did, I could have gone and taken my family and lived in the most expensive resort in the world for those two years and I still would had more money left over than I did for working my heart out for that two-year period because the difference in what we could have gotten if we’d sold at the top and what we ended up selling for, I probably could have lived for 10 years in the most expensive resort in the world.
That’s kind of what I wish for entrepreneurs and shareholders is if they had an exit strategy, if they were better at exit timing and you could see your life taking two paths – in one path you work your heart out, you go home poorer every day, not that much fun. In the other path, you sell at a better time and you spend that time instead in the most expensive resort in the world just doing whatever you want to do – and you end up at the end of those two with about the same amount of money. In the future, my preference is to stay at the most expensive resort in the world and I’m doing whatever I can to help more entrepreneurs, more shareholders, more angel investors make that choice rather than letting events happen to them, letting the exit be driven by external events rather than a well thought out exit strategy.
Noah Rosenfarb: Rob Slee’s is famous for saying that, “We can’t time the public markets but we could time the private market.”“We can’t time the public markets but we could time the private market.” Do you agree with that?
Basil Peters: I do and just to make sure that we’re being clear to our audience here, none of us can predict the timing of the markets very well. We don’t know what’s going to happen in the economy. There are events that even the chairman of the Fed can’t foresee, but what we can do and to Rob Slee’s point is we can decide when we want to sell our company. That is such an enormous opportunity for any shareholder of any private company to think about the optimum timing, the amount that you could end up making might be 2, 3, 5 times more. I’ve seen cases where it was 50 or 100 times more just by getting the timing closer to the optimum. Again, this is one of the things that entrepreneurs and shareholders of every type whether they are friends and family investors, whether they angel investors, and whether they are venture capital investors.
One of the things that we just haven’t learned to do very well yet and one of the things that I’m devoting a lot of my time and money to is helping to develop better practices on exit timing and I hope helping hundreds of companies do it better. One of my famous quotes in one of my famous and very popular videos is one that I call, “Don’t ride it over the top.” What I’m trying to put in the minds of the entrepreneurs and the shareholders is that image of riding it over the top, waiting too long to exit, starting down on that negative slope where the value is decreasing and you can’t stop it and then you end up selling. I’m trying to help people visualize in the private market where we can’t see the price of the stock every day, helping them understand how to best estimate the optimum exit timing and how to sell somewhere near the top of the value in their business rather than the alternative.
Noah Rosenfarb: I was with a client the other day, actually his 65th birthday and we spent in the office talking about his exit, him and his wife. They just had their second grand kid and here he is on his 65th birthday and he says, “You know, I’d like to work another five or 10 years,” and I’m suggesting to him that he could work five or 10 years and potentially get the same price, total value, total return between today and 10 years from now that he could get it today and not have to work, not have the risk versus maybe waiting 10 years taking out the cash flow over those 10 years and then selling 10 years from now just because I see at the market is willing to pay a premium for a company like his and that premium might not exist forever. Is that the message that you’re sending to a lot of entrepreneurs?
Basil Peters: I think that’s very wise, Noah, and I think that you were providing that gentleman and his wife with some invaluable advice just then. This is another example of something I see almost every day and it breaks my heart. That story you just told me is a very sad story because here is somebody who sounds like they have been successful, who sounds like at 65 should be enjoying their life, who probably because they aren’t a M&A professional doesn’t appreciate that this is the best M&A market we’ve seen for 15 years at least and also probably being not a student of the markets but probably an expert in his own business, but not an expert in the financial cycles doesn’t appreciate that even if he does work for the next 10 years, there’s a really good chance he’ll never get the price he could get today even if doubles the size of the business. If we just return to historic valuations, he might not get as much as he could today.
Here’s a gentleman, I think if he doesn’t take your advice really quickly and start right now, I’m really worried that 10 years from now, he’ll have worked hard for 10 years, he’ll have shortened the remainder of his life by working too hard for 10 years. He’ll end up with less money then than if he’d sold now and gone to the most expensive resort in the world, stay there with his wife, I hope she’s listening, stay there and they still have more money left over. A better part of that, Noah, just to reinforce and to make it even more hit it home a little bit harder. I think that every company will have an exit and I think that they kind of divide into three categories. There’s the people who have a strategy, a good exit strategy and there are opportunities to sell the company well for an incredibly good price especially these days or as I see happen far too often, they end up selling the company for far less than they could have because they didn’t have the strategy and also because they didn’t have the professionals to help them and quite frankly, they get taken advantage of by the buyers.
But the worst thing that I see is far too often for people of the generation you were talking about a minute ago, they very often get wheeled out of their offices. I see and I have so many friends who are mid-60s, early 70s, they have been eating right, they have been working out, feel invincible. I hate when I get a call from the wife who is now the CEO, who is completely devastated by the loss of her husband and is now the shareholder and CEO and everything else in that company. I think that if more CEOs, if more business owners could see that future, they would be lined at your office and they would be taking the advice that you were giving that gentleman who was 65 years old.
Noah Rosenfarb: Well unfortunately, the surveys are that 85% of people don’t have a plan, right, even though if they are in their 50s and even into their 60s. People are averse to planning for what’s going to happen to their business. How are you persuading them to put pen to paper and come up with a strategy?
Basil Peters: I think there’s two parts to it. The hard part is human psychology and the easy part is education about M&A. I’m at a point in my own career where I’m fortunate that I get to do whatever I want and I spend about a third of my time, the enjoyable third of my time putting back by helping to educate business owners, investors, CEOs, and boards about exit strategy. That’s what I think of as fun. That’s what I do in my weekends and whenever I get the chance. The harder part though is much more subtle and that’s the human psychology. You’re absolutely right that most of those owners don’t have an exit strategy in part because it ties into their own perception of mortality. So many founders especially like myself and most of my friends start businesses and their own identities become intertwined with the business. They start to be confused about where their personal identity ends and the business begins. Like most of us, we all aspire at least to live forever, that combination of that identity fussiness and that mortality denial often leads business owners not to have an exit strategy.
It’s the same reason by the way that lots of very wealthy people don’t have a will is that they don’t want to put their minds to the fact that they might not be doing what they are doing and having so much fun doing forever. Whenever I get the chance, I put my time and some of my money towards the education part and I’d even spoken at M&A advisory conference a few years ago in Chicago and I did a talk on the psychology of exits. I had about 500 M&A advisors in the room and I was polling them by show of hands how many of them had appreciated what a large part of the work that we do is actually psychology rather than just finance.
Noah Rosenfarb: Did you ever imagine that going through engineering school?
Basil Peters: No I didn’t but it’s absolutely a part of it. Dealing with the very important psychological aspects of an exit strategy and an exit execution is something that I wish every business owner have the opportunity to take advantage of. To be able to work with somebody who had gone through the same thing themselves and then gone through it several dozen times with other similar types of business owners, it’s an important part of it. It’s an important part of what I would consider a successful exit.
Noah Rosenfarb: We at my firm profess that the reason owners don’t have a plan whether it’s a plan for how they are going to exit their business or a plan for their finances or a plan for their estate, it’s because they don’t have clarity around their goals and objectives. At least in my world, the entrepreneurs that I deal with when they’ve got their sights set on something, there’s no stopping them. They are going to leave a wake behind them. If they have clarity of what they want to accomplish, they are going to get there and yet when it comes to personal finance, tax and estate planning or business succession planning, it’s not a topic that creates a lot of enthusiasm because they are not sure what their options are. Do you see that could be true with the people you speak with?
Basil Peters: Absolutely. I think that’s universal and for some of the reasons I was saying before but you extended it, absolutely you’re right. If they had clarity on that exit strategy, the chances go up dramatically of having a successful exit. To me, it’s astounding that these people are such successful business people and in no other aspect of their business would they not have a strategy and a plan except in this case for the very most important thing they have ever done, the largest transaction they have ever done in their lives, no strategy, no plan, not even any serious thoughts lots of the time. Again, it’s an example of where our psychology defeats us. It’s not that these people are bad business people, it’s that their human psychology in my opinion prevents them from objectively assessing that element of their business because it’s so intertwined with their personal identity.
Noah Rosenfarb: So aside from creating a plan, what else could owners do to increase their probability of a successful exit?
Basil Peters: Great question. It all starts in my opinion with that strategy and when I say exit strategy, Noah, I’m not talking about something very complicated. I’m talking about having a realistic goal for when you want to sell the company and how much you want to sell it for. I think that’s a lot easier to do than most business people would think. It often requires some outside input. It requires some professional judgment especially on the valuation side. A lot of business owners could pick when they would like to sell and that’s often driven by some personal goals. It’s often driven by some business goals. It should be driven more often by the M&A market as you and I have been talking about, but once you’ve got clarity on a strategy, when and how much, then as you said a minute ago, it comes down to execution.
Execution when I was doing it the first time, was pretty mysterious but I’m not sure how many exit transactions you’ve actually lived through as a professional, Noah, but for me, I remember a time, a decade or so ago, when all of a sudden it became easy because all of a sudden, you get to a point in your career after you’ve done a few dozen eggs that’s where you think “This is exactly what has happened in the majority of the situations before. I’d seen this before. Same things happening again” and like any other human endeavor or any other aspect of business, when you do something enough times, you get better at it and it’s the same reason that you don’t want to have a surgeon who is in their early 30s. If you’re going to get some surgery done, I don’t know about you but I want the guy with the gray hair and the grizzled face who I think is probably done that same surgery 500 times before. That’s who I want holding the scalpel if it’s me on the table.
It’s the same thing with the exit. When it comes the time to sell the company you’ve been building for decades or longer, you want to have somebody who has been there and done it enough times so they really are an expert. There’s just no shortcut to learning by doing when you’re talking about selling companies. There’s no way you can go to school and learn about it. There are no textbooks you can read about how to sell a company well so part of the execution is building a team that’s going to execute your plan to the very highest quality and ultimate end result, which is really the price and the terms you’re going to get. A large part of why I think so few owners have successful exits is that they do another thing that they would never do in their business which is they under resource the project. They don’t actually get the best people available and they don’t put the resources to the project, and like anything else in business, they don’t end up with the best end result simply because they’ve under resourced.
Noah Rosenfarb: Chris Mercer was on the show recently and he has what he refers to as the 1% solution. Take 1% of the value of your company and invest that in your planning process around how to maximize value. Do you think that’s the right budget? A $20 million company spends $200,000 a year and a $5 million company could spend $50,000 a year just putting the pieces in place.
Basil Peters: I haven’t heard of it specifically as a budget item but it’s an interesting way to look at it. I think when you put it in those terms, most business owners would say, “Yeah that seems like a reasonable thing to do.” I think that most of the work in developing an exit strategy is usually not hard cash outlay. Most of the time, I think the work is talking with the other stake holders, it’s thinking about it, it’s talking to professionals about what’s possible so to me in my experience, it’s more of a budget of time and thought than it is in dollars, but yeah, I like that 1%.
Noah Rosenfarb: His corollary was you pay 1% to have the asset manager manage your portfolio so why not pay 1% to your board or advisors to help you through this strategy of how to create value and successful exit. I like it. I’ll mention another guest we had on the show was saying they encourage CEOs to spend 25% of their time thinking about how to build value and exit successfully with their 3-5 years out from a transaction. That took me a little bit by surprise but I thought, the reality is that most owners, they are looking to a banker and for the banker to basically carry through a process but they are so far behind the 8 ball. By the time they hire the banker, they don’t know about the data room, they don’t about due diligence, they don’t know really what to expect. They don’t know what’s going to happen as they walk down the road with some private equity firms or some strategic acquirers that have been there and done that, and how they are going to get beat up. What are some of the things these owners should be doing to increase the probability of a successful exit aside from that plan, aside from making sure they are being thoughtful, any tactical pieces to it?
Basil Peters: I just want to go back for a minute. I think I’m going to disagree pretty violently with what you said a minute ago. If I heard you right, you said that one of your other guests suggested that a CEO should spend 25% of their time for three years prior to the exit thinking about ensuring that transaction was a success. Did I hear that right?
Noah Rosenfarb: Essentially yeah, meeting with private equity firms, meeting with bankers, spending time, putting your ear to the ground listening to the market place.
Basil Peters: After I sold my first company by the way and I won’t go too far into my background but I have been a professional investor for a couple of decades. I’ve made about 100 investments myself mostly in technology companies and as a shareholder, I don’t think 25% is nearly enough time. In fact I think that CEO has exactly one job and that one job if I’m a shareholder is to increase the shareholder value and optimize the timing of its monetization. For me and I would suggest for every company, the CEO’s job is to increase the value and then to turn it back into cash. I think it’s their only job and so for me if the CEO said, “I’m going to put 25% into that job,” I’d be looking for a new CEO. I’d want somebody who devoted every waking minute to increasing the value and to optimizing the timing of that exit.
Another one of my messages is that you have to understand why you have a business. Some people have a business because it’s part of their personal aggrandizement. They want to be famous or they want to be something. That’s fine. They can do that if they want, but if you want me to be a shareholder, then I’m a pretty simple guy. I want you to make me some money. If what you’re doing in a business is making money, then for the vast majority of businesses that have external shareholders, it’s about one simple thing. Get the price up and turn it back into cash. That exit strategy is unbelievably powerful in clarifying that in the minds of the CEO and the board. Once you get down to the basics, once you understand really why you’re going to work in the morning, it gets much easier to create that value and just to continue on that way just a little bit longer. One of the things I wish I knew when I was a young entrepreneur running my first company was something that is being propagated out of a group in Ohio called the Ohio Tech Angels.
The Ohio Tech Angels I think are ahead of anybody else in the country in really understanding the creation and alignment of that exit strategy in the organization. What the Ohio Tech Angels are doing now is they are reaffirming the exit strategy at every board meeting. At the beginning of every board meeting, the chairman reads the minutes and the first item on every agenda is, “Okay, give the exit strategy that we have agreed to. Again, it’s simple, when and how much. Is there any discussion anybody think that we need to think about changing that, if not, let’s have a show of hands and ratify that that’s the reason that we’re all here and the purpose of the company that’s the CEO’s job, execute the exit strategy.” We can’t prove it yet. I think we’ll need another 10 years or so but I think that in a decade, you’ll be able to go back and look at the portfolio of the Ohio Tech Angels. I’ll be willing to bet my house they are going to have a higher return simply because of that clarification and that regular reinforcement of the primary function of the company, which is to create shareholder value which they are doing at every board meeting. I think it’s brilliant.
Noah Rosenfarb: I love it. I’m going to implement that with all my holdings now. I love it. I do quarterly board meetings at insular companies and we talk about our three-year target and our 10-year target, but we don’t quantify the price and the timing for when we want to exit. I think that one simple change will make those issues manifest more readily, the pure philosophy that if we put it out there, it’s more likely to happen than if we don’t talk about it. I do have one company that I was a series A investor but they are going to raise series B pretty soon and they are very clear, $100 million in 2020, that’s their timeline, 35% IRR to the series B investor. They’ve got it mapped out and that was attractive to me. I think everything that you just said there leaves me to believe that that’s a very powerful simple to implement strategy. Thank you for that.
Basil Peters: Thank you and I’m really happy to hear that there are companies out there with that clarity. I think if we could do a double blind study and we had half of the companies that had that clarity, half that didn’t, and you measured the outcomes, measured the results, it would be a staggering difference in how much money those shareholders made, and the shareholders in the companies with clarity on the goal I think would be so much more wealthy. Again, simple yet incredibly powerful thing that I hope more and more companies adapt.
Noah Rosenfarb: I would say based on what you said about a CEO’s job being 100% focused on growing shareholder value, versus the other guest I had said was 25%, a lot of that is the perspective of who is the shareholder and do you have outside shareholders, is it really a closely held lifestyle type family business, but in either event, the family or the owner that had outside shareholders, everybody should be in agreement on when we’re going to sell it and how much we’re going to sell it for. It would help to not miss the bus when it comes by, which I have seen all too often happen to entrepreneurs. They get a great offer and they are just not ready to accept it and by the time they are ready to accept an offer, the market has changed on them, business has changed on them, their health has changed on them, whatever the circumstances are and the value is just not there the way it was when opportunity presented itself.
Basil Peters: I see that all the time too, Noah, and it just breaks my heart. In fact, to really be brutally honest about what’s actually happening out there, I also talk at conferences about the fact that I believe only 25% of the companies that could be sold end up being successfully sold. What I’m saying is that of the companies that were valuable, the companies that could have been sold, only 25% exit well. They have what a lot of people call a happy exit. There’s a great book that was written this year called “Finish Big.”
Noah Rosenfarb: Bo was just on the show. Bo was our last guest right before you. There you go.
Basil Peters: Bo did us all a service because he put five years of his life into writing Finish Big and what he did that I hadn’t ever seen written before is he interviewed not just the people who had successful exits. He interviewed a lot of people who had what I call unsuccessful exits. Bo calls them unhappy exits or unhappy after. He didn’t coin that specific phrase but “Finish Big” I think should be required reading for any CEO or business owner because it gives you a chance through his amazingly skillful writing see the two types of exits – the successful and the unsuccessful.
To me as a business owner, as an investor through most of my life, that 25% is a terrifyingly small percentage. We blow it 75% of the time. For the business owners that are listening to this, there’s a 75% chance they are not going to have a successful exit. This is unbelievably bad news I think in one way because what it means is all of these lost wealth that families, that shareholders, that investors are going to have because these companies aren’t executing their exits better. There are lots of reasons why this happens. In my full day workshop, I spend hours going through the various mechanisms that I’d seen contribute to these unsuccessful exits. I won’t try and do that now on this call but if anybody is interested, they can have a look at the videos on my blog where I’ve recorded some of these workshops and I’ve described all of the main reasons that companies don’t have successful exits and what I’m really trying to do is to get across what can be done to increase that from that terrible 25% to I think 50%.
I think we could get it right half the time and that’s me perhaps being an entrepreneur and being that indefatigable optimist that I think we can be twice as good as we are now, but I think that just through knowledge and education, we could get to the point in the not too distant future where half of the companies that were sold had successful exits. I think if we could just do that one thing, it would make an enormous difference in the overall economic growth of the country. You’d see the GDP of the country increase if we could just capture that enormous amount of wealth that’s not in circulation because so many of those companies had less than optimum exits.
Noah Rosenfarb: That’s the reason we do the show. You couldn’t have said it better than me. I appreciate you coming on to talk to our audience. If they want to read your blog, read your book, where should they go?
Basil Peters: The easiest thing to do is just go to www.Exits.com. You can see everything that I’ve written on all those nights and weekends on my blog which is just Exits.com/blog but I’m easy to find. You can search Basil Peters. You can search Exits and you’ll find my material. My sincere hope is that some of that content is going to help business owners, help CEOs, help boards just do it better than they might have without that additional knowledge and education.
Noah Rosenfarb: Thanks so much for coming on the show. We certainly share in the same mission of helping entrepreneurs succeed and I appreciate the thought leadership that you’re providing in the field. Thanks again.
Basil Peters: Thank you, Noah.
Noah Rosenfarb: Alright, take care. To everyone, don’t forget to rate us on iTunes and if you have any future guests for the show, email them in to me, [email protected].