Mark L. Vincent—Succession & Exit Planning: How to Drive Value, Referrals, and Higher Fees

Mark L. Vincent  0:00  
Let's look at what you're offering. Let's look at how you're pitching it. Let's look at your business plan. And now let's figure out how you measure your ecosystem. You have to get in front of a certain number of people all of the time in a consistent way, in a helpful way, who could purchase your service.

David Bush  0:20  
Welcome to the Business Builders playbook, the show that breaks down the systems and strategies behind Predictable Revenue Growth to win in business. In each episode, we're diving into the proven strategies that separate the winners who scale from the losers who fail. This show is sponsored by bdr.ai the AI powered business development platform that automates your outbound prospecting so you can focus in on closing deals instead of chasing leads. Let's get started. All right. Welcome everybody. My name is David bush, and I get a chance to be your host and moderator of today's conversation with the amazing Mark l Vinson on the topic succession and Exit Planning, how to drive value referrals and higher fees by including the conversation around succession and Exit Planning. And a lot of you are business coaches, consultants, advisors, and you are working with business owners, and you are delivering extreme value. You're getting rewarded for the efforts and education and experience and expertise that you deliver, but you may be stepping over this amazing opportunity that we're going to dive in today, and we're going to talk about why succession planning often creates tension inside of coaching and consulting relationships, and how to navigate it better. We're going to talk about the five biggest Exit Planning blind spot that most advisors Miss, how to frame exit strategy as a growth accelerator, not as an end of career discussion and much, much more, but without any further ado. I want to introduce you to my friend Mark l Vinson. Mark is a founding member and facilitator for the sage group collective. He partners with accomplished leaders to pave a road through the process of business, business continuity and succession, slingshotting successors into the future as an executive advisor, process consulting pioneer and systems convener with more than 30 years of service Mark's executive advising practice walks alongside a global client base, including artful convening and facilitation of organizational systems facing complex scenarios. And today we're going to dive into a Q and A we have come up with some questions, and thanks everybody for submitting your questions as part of the registration process. If you're watching this as a recording, we would love to see comments and feedback and to answer questions. We'll put all of Mark's contact information inside of the description and show notes of this particular video if you're live, we would love to see your questions and answer questions for those people that prioritize the live session. So please feel free to throw those questions in the chat, and we'll get to those in the order in which they're received. And yeah, I'm super excited. Mark, thanks so much for joining me today. This is a pleasure. So I've read a brief amount of your 30 year background of service. Talk about the unique experiences that you've had that brings you to the table of what we're going to talk about today.

Mark L. Vincent  3:10  
Well, one way to summarize it is that my strongest and deepest background is working with associational systems. When you go to business school, you're going to study, you know, an organization, stockholder corporations make the best case studies and maybe some limited partnerships and that kind of thing, but they tend to be this company, but the longest, strongest, deepest and widest way that humans form businesses is in partnerships and in associations with other people. Let's pool our resources and get this thing started. So franchising is one of the major ways that that happens, holding companies that might own five companies on a platform that may or may not even be related. There's just these different ways that we connect up, and that makes for all kinds of shenanigans. And monkey shines when it comes to how are we going to work together? And do we still want to work together? The very thing that brings us together is self interest. That does not help us grow a business together. If we're only self interested, we have to care about a common mission that we've formed together. So there's just so many things that can go awry that I've just never run out of work to do in helping people figure out how to get through what we might call an organizational knot. How do you untie this thing and get us an alignment again? So that's that's been what my work has been. But as I've done this across the years, I've just done more and more and more work around business continuity and succession, because that's about as complex as it gets. There's so much at stake. There's a lot of just not future value, but current value of the firm or the enterprise is at stake, and a lot of self interest comes out yet again, among family members and partners and employees and persons who have ambition to maybe run the company, or they've got some desire for their own future. So. So way back when, what got me started was I was working at a master's degree in writing a thesis on group process and group facilitation. And there wasn't a lot of work done at that time in the academy for this kind of stuff, but Harvard, joint with MIT, did some work on group process and facilitation, dealing with difficult constituencies, was one of the things they came out with as a course. The book Getting to Yes, that I'm sure some of you have read by Fisher and Yuri grew out of that work. So that was all brand new stuff. Well, I'm writing this thesis, and so word was starting to leak, and people would call me and say, Would you come help us? You heard you're working on some methods to do this. So I found out the methods work. I wasn't a consultant at the time. I was just a student who had a job, but they work. And so then I got invited by somebody else. These warm referrals started kicking off. I ultimately make the long story short, had to decide, is this a calling? Is this a vocation? Should I make good use of this? And ultimately decided to do that, and I've been able to serve projects that are large and international and multi year and one day, facilitate this conversation for us, please. And but as I said, deeper and deeper and deeper into the continuity and succession. Because for me, that's just become the highest art form of dealing with these complex decision making scenarios. And that's what has me working as an executive advisor. You're working with the owners and the C suite, maybe a board, maybe a family office, as you

David Bush  6:37  
work through these things, yeah. So good. You know, our whole context is building a better playbook and helping business builders, including coaches, consultants, advisors, as well as business owners. And there are some people that are watching this as a coach, consultant or advisor, there's some people that are watching this as a business owner, and regardless of their title, many see succession and Exit Planning as something that happens at the end of their career or the end of their their business. And I'm just curious, why do you think that that mindset is dangerous, and how should advisors and business owners reframe succession planning as a growth accelerator that increases enterprise value today versus this end of the story?

Mark L. Vincent  7:20  
Yeah, that's a very important subject. And I think you've asked the question very well. I was with someone yesterday, and you could just see the lights come on when I asked a pretty simple question, which was, well, from what you just told me, it looks like you've only got 10 years to go. How do you want to end? You know, you got 10 years to get this right. So you're not talking to somebody who's, you know, at the very front end of their career, but you're talking with someone who hasn't figured some of this stuff out yet. Had had no plan, and so that, oh, wait a minute, I could you're just pointing me. I can see this thing sunsetting. I hadn't seen it. And just that simple question. So, you know, we are very fond, and maybe somebody's got something like this posted in their break room. You know, this has begin with the end in mind. Well, this is the most practical application. If you have a mission, you have a thing that you want to accomplish, you have some goals, or whatever else. You're extrapolating that out with a long term point of view, and not just a short term now, I've met a few people that have such a long term head in the clouds that they can't figure out what they're going to do today, but most people are focused on what they're doing today. They're focused on this month, maybe this quarter, maybe they've got an annual plan. There's a lot of conventional wisdom right now that says, you know, 18 months, maybe that's about the long you should have a strategic plan. I'm a big fan of multi scenario planning, where you have short, middle and long term in mind for multiple options so that you can keep navigating Toward this end that you have. It gives you a guiding light. It gives you the North Star. It helps you determine and discern whether you're going to go to the right or the left or straight down the field, whether you're going to sell something or take on something, whether you want another investment. How do you know if it's your only short term at that point? It's just how do you feel? What do people support? And you end up not really doing what you set out to do. So the keeping the end in mind, thinking about the fact that you have something that you're going to sell or you're going to give to somebody else, and you're making your decisions without losing sight of that. That's that's the big thing. You don't have to have all the solutions worked out, but to know the the direction you want to go so you can navigate by it. It's just a very helpful thing to remain patient, to have grit, to stay with it, to not abandon your project, to find creative ways to solve really difficult problems.

David Bush  9:55  
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Mark L. Vincent  11:41  
Well, I'm going to take half a step back, David and just recognize that we're in a moment where this is not just a good question, it's a critical one. Part of its criticality is that AI is stepping in and providing all kinds of partnership at hand right now for what a lot of coaches and consultants sell, if you're selling a particular kind of an expertise and ability to deliver things over time and for a while now, I've been saying, you know, that's probably not really what coaching and consulting is that's serving as a vendor. It's providing maybe a knowledge based service, rather than just a technical skill, but it's providing that in order to accomplish a goal, and at that point, you're pricing it by time, or you're pricing it with a marketplace of other providers who are in that space, and that's all getting very disintermediated right now, and there's a lot of threats for this industry. So what I would convey is, if you are even as a private practice, you're a business owner, you're an owner, also you have an enterprise, you have a goal, you have an end in mind. I hope otherwise. How are you going to help other people do this? If you've not played along yourself, or at least, at least being on the journey yourself to say, here's what I've been able to figure out. Here's some questions I'm asking. I'm here to help ask and answer some of these same questions that I work with. So I sometimes use my hands a lot, but I'll use them to model this. This is not here's the owner that you want to serve, and you're going to serve and carry out these tasks as their employee or contractor or vendor. You are beside them, helping them work on their stuff, as a peer. So as soon as you start to say, let me do this for you, you are putting yourself in an almost like a ployed or a contractor type of position, where they're saying, What am I getting for my money? When you are their peer, you're able to say, what's your end? What are you after? So you're a $10 million business. You want to be a $20 million business in the next five years, or 10 years, or by the time you end you, they've just told you what the value is. So we're talking about a $10 million thing. All right, what are you going to invest to get to that next 10 million? What do those things look like? What are you going to do to invest in your own skill, to actually be leading a company you've never led before? Now, that conversation is completely different, and the monetary value is not tied to my time. It's not tied to a comparison with other persons that are out there. We're talking about helping them achieve their value. They're going to declare kind of what their budget is of investment to make this happen. They spent a pretty penny to get to 10 million. What are they going to spend for the next 10 how deliberate are they? How planful are they going to be? And they're going, I don't know. I don't know, humming a, humming, humming a, here's where the value is, right? We're going to help you get there. And that changes the conversation without stepping out of the fact that I'm a peer, I am there running a business as they are.

David Bush  14:58  
Yeah, I love the phrase that says, if you. Need them. You cannot lead them. And if you're in this position where it's up one down one, and you're down here and you're working up in a vertical organizational alignment, you're always going to earn less than if you are peer level or above. And I think what you're saying is, and I remember Thomas Stanley wrote a book, Gosh, 25 years ago, called networking with the affluent. And he talked about the seven different roles that advisors could play to build more relational equity with affluent type of people. And he talked about, you know, being a connector, being an advocate, being a publicist, being a broker, being and all these things that you're talking about right now is really what that whole concept is about. It's about having those people in your Rolodex or database that you can go to to bring in for that succession planning conversation. And that's really the the hidden risk that's in all side of inside of all these relationships, is that they're working on things that are important to the organization, but they're not necessarily important to revenue systems, exit readiness and so why do you think that that is kind of a focal point for so many of these advisors? Why do they stay in that position versus leveling up?

Mark L. Vincent  16:15  
Well, we tend to trade on what we know rather than on what our ability of learning is. So if I am talking to a CEO, an owner, chair of the board, something like that, they got there based upon accomplishing some things, but they're succeeding not because you're doing what they already know. It's because they're still learning. They're moving into moments and into places they've never been. And even if they're saying, well, there's another company up the road and they're similar to us and all that, they're not identical. They're not in the exact same marketplace. They're not doing the exact same things with the exact same team. They're not exact same era of their business, you know, an organizational development. So you once you start to succeed, you get into unicorn space pretty quickly. You've differentiated yourself. That's why you're surviving. That's why you've got a unique offering. And you've got to keep figuring things out. So knowing helps learning is what helps you continue to succeed. So by coming to say I'm a technician, I'm saying I know stuff, and now I'm selling a service, and I'm selling time that stuff isn't going entirely away, but to say I'm here to walk beside you, and by the way, let me do your estate plan. You're, going right back into what you know and to what your technical skill is when you join someone as a trusted advisor to walk alongside them. You want that using the old word, Rolodex, contact list, whatever, of really high quality, trusted people who know how to do that technical work and really love the warm leads you're going to serve up to them with someone who's hungry for what they provide. And you're coming to them because they know that they're only a part of the thing. The temptation is, when you have this deep expertise in something, is to think that you've you know, that's the hammer for every nail. And from here, you go everywhere. And I don't think that's the point of reference here. The point of reference is that C suite individual. It's what they know and what they don't know, where they want to go. And you're serving them. If you're selling your knowledge, you're selling your time, you're going to bring a degree of anxiety to that conversation, I need to close this, as opposed to that long term relationship of being non anxious and being able to see that person and perceive them kind of, you know, create this, almost like a heart embrace, where I'm with you, for You, and where you want to go, or where you say you want to go, so let's go. You know that that's just a you can hear the qualitative difference in that kind of a conversation,

David Bush  19:11  
yeah, and I'm imagining that that, in itself, is extending the average lifetime value of a client, because if you have that kind of relationship with them, versus more of a transactional it's transformational is that you're really helping them to, you know, navigate life and navigate some of the emotional resistance that comes from succession planning, because there's some fear and there's ambiguity and many other things. So you know what you

Mark L. Vincent  19:34  
become an investment rather than a payment. So what are

David Bush  19:39  
some of the common fears that founders have, and how can advisors lead that conversation confidently without damaging trust and getting off into the weeds?

Mark L. Vincent  19:51  
Well, there are some common ones i However, kind of counsel against when I'm talking with people about this, about coming with my. List already preconceived, and I'm listening for which one of the five ones do you have or the 10 ones that you have. You listen to them tell you their fears, because there's some unique ones tied to the individual and to their story and their circumstance. They do tend to fall into some categories. Let me start with the fact that when some people are especially as founders, are starting to move to where they can see that the next great, big round of growth, or whatever, is likely to put this into somebody else's hands. Maybe, you know, three years, five years, eight years from now, they might go into denial, but the minute they can really begin to conceive of it, some people get excited, and they start taking their hands off the wheel the organization. So when you start working with them, you can see all the value leaks happening, and I think it's a slightly larger group, but you're working with them, they're keep postponing that because that's that's awkward, that's hard. They don't have the answers for that, and the business still needs them. And so they actually might start doubling down and clinging harder to something that helps them feel valuable, and they're postponing the development of their life that they're going to go to, ultimately making that meaningful, having some excitement about being able to shift and do some other work, chair the board, run a scholarship fund, be head of business development, while somebody else has to do all the operations, you know, any of those things, they don't give any attention to that. So they literally have their hand off of one of those wheels or the other. And that can be driven by a fear of not knowing, of feeling incompetent, of being afraid of, you know, decline that's also in there. And there are some who are threatened by younger people, people who might be different than them, people actually who represent maybe the skills that are going to be needed. Take the organization from here, and it often does require, especially a successful founder, it requires blowing up their role, more often than not, that the organization has grown up in them, and there's no one person that can know everything that that founder knows, even if they clone themselves in some way they, you know, here's everything I've ever done, there's nobody's going to have all of that tacit knowledge and the ability to respond to it. So you often end up with two or three roles that get created out of this one person, especially when you get to a certain scale, and that's that's a frightening thing, because you end up with not just one successor. You end up with multiples, and they have opinions and and they're not asking your counsel and all that because they're competent. And that can be it doesn't always but can be very frightening. Frightening thing. There's one other thing that it's maybe a delicate thing to touch on over and over. Especially, founders tend to overestimate the value of what they've built, and they're afraid of what the reality is. And it's actually by getting to that reality that you can face what value you want do the additional work that it takes to either build that or, you know, change your your plans a bit, or something along that line, there's a real fear to know what the real results might be, and so so many of these organizations do not have a current valuation, it becomes a real scary thing to figure out what it's worth, because they've not been keeping up with that all along.

David Bush  23:34  
Yeah, I know that we're at a point in the conversation where there's some people that are inspired, there's some people that are intrigued, and then there's some people out there that are thinking that this is much more complex than they're prepared to navigate or handle. So I'm just kind of curious if you can maybe shed some light as how do you work with an advisor to assist them in this process of having these conversations and really create kind of a strategic alignment or partnership to do things together, so that they can start to transition some of these relationships that they have, or open up new relationships with the full confidence that somebody knows how to navigate this conversational territory.

Mark L. Vincent  24:19  
I want to make sure that I don't sound like I am being critical of being a technical expert or subject matter expert. That's needed to pretend for me to pretend I'm a subject matter expert, it would be a silly thing to do, you know, around any of these technical skills, and if someone is really trying to sell, like patent law, you know, we'll help you with your IP, and they're translating that to try to be everything to everyone. They're going to dilute their message. They're going to dilute their offerings, just like I would be diluting mine if I tried to go down that lane. So the professional network. Of colleagues. Is so important to be able to have that kind of relationship. What does it look like if I refer someone to you? How do you how do you do that? Is there, is there? And what way do you like to receive it? I like I personally don't like it. If I get Hey, so and so wants you to call them. Why? Who, what? You know, I want to give a referral where it's like, served up hot to you. You know, be able to say, talking with this person, this seems to be what they need. I think this matches up with, you know, what? I understand your services. If I've got that right, they said they'd take your call, right, so that the door is open. That's the kind of work I want to do, and I want to work with people who do that kind of work with me, so that there's a nice, broad array of relationships. Maybe you don't call on somebody for 10 years or whatever else, but you keep those warmed up just like you do the clientele that you'd like to serve, because they're talking to those folks too. It becomes a nice ecosystem to do that, however, and to do that, well, you have to be a give first person. I'm here to help you. I'll benefit downstream, you know that, and I'll kiss some frogs along the way. But it's, it's being one who's contributing to a rich ecosystem so that we've got strong businesses, people who will come back to you again, people who trust you. They might not think of you for five years, but because of the kind of person you are, five years no, they come back. So I really like to sit down with a person who's saying, I'm trying to figure this out, and say, let's look at what you're offering. Let's look at how you're pitching it. Let's look at your business plan. And now let's figure out how you measure your ecosystem. You have to get in front of a certain number of people all of the time in a consistent way, in a helpful way, who could purchase your service. It would make, would make the buy. And you need to be talking with a group who's actually, you know, you've got a track, who's actually engaged with you in a conversation about how you might help them. And that has to result in a certain number of conversations where you're actually putting together a proposal or an agreement to provide that service, which means then you've got a certain number of clients that you're working with, and figuring out what that pipeline looks like for a specific person with their specific service is dialing it in. It takes that kind of work, but once done, you can actually have a business or a practice, and this is what I was the most freeing thing for me, where at the end of the day, I can close my computer and I've done enough, I can go read my book now. I can go out to dinner with my spouse. I can go read a story to a grandkid without that. There's more to do. There's more to do that. There's always more to do. So have I done enough? Have I served this ecosystem that I've been able to identify so that when I've done my seed planting and my tilling and my harvesting whatever else, there is a rich life to live which actually feeds my energy and my ability to face a client and not be an anxious presence. In fact, David, want to convey is that anxiety kills your practice. If you are an anxious person, if you're nervous about closing or anything like that, it you have a tell, and the client hears it and experiences you in that way, and to to be free of that because you've managed it and worked it out, helps you to be a relaxed, attentive, aware person of your client. There's no better skill to be client centered than to work at your own work in order to be a non anxious presence.

David Bush  29:00  
And I know that you serve on the board for 10x connect, and you're really big believer in the whole concept of entrepreneur, trusted advisor network and really creating that network of non competing professional service providers that can complement the different services. And that's really what I think you're encouraging consultants, coaches and advisors to do is to build out that trusted advisor network and have somebody that's in that position of succession and Exit Planning, and that will give you the ability to expand your advisory scope and hope, hopefully justify higher fees by expanding into the conversation of succession and exit readiness.

Mark L. Vincent  29:39  
Am I right on that? Yeah, and not higher fees, better results, which allow you to say, This is why you're making an investment to get this thing done. Because we're we're assuming, you know, if you're my client, I'm assuming that you're serious about growing your business so and accomplishing the goals. You're not just playing at it. So let's, you know, let's go and let's make sure you got the right folks with the trusted advisors and a network of them helps you be able to keep delivering what they need in a regular way, where you keep adding value, and you're not really up selling, you know, you're you're helping them to expand what they need at the right time, to get done, what you know they need to do to scale or to exit or to sell off, resize their organization, whatever those things might be. I really am a big believer in a strong operational system. That's why I really enjoy the work with 10x connect and all the EOS implementers and integrators I get to talk to in that work, and how they do things is often much in that same vein, but the real value they bring is to help the organization be able to do what it says, document what they're doing, which tends to drive value for the organization, because they're able to open their playbooks, due diligence becomes a much less onerous process when you've got great documentation, you've got a line of sight, you've got great dashboards and which point to what the value is. But I want to be honest about this, people who are going to make the investment, people who are going to buy, maybe even a successor who's going to step in. They all have their own agendas, too, and they have a different menu for what they consider value to be. So I really like to coach the clients. I work with these owners, whether it's a partnership or a sole owner, whatever, to do their best to understand the story of the investor or the buyer, the successor, so that they can articulate it in that person's terms to where they're saying, you get me now you're starting to go towards joint vision, helping them achieve their goals, raising your value in their eyes, and for it to not just be transactional, where you're trying to milk them for as much as you can get, for your banquet, for your future, when you take that same approach and coach that in the client, not just your network, where You're able to articulate the values other people have doesn't mean you agree with them, but it means you get them. And when people feel understood, the guard goes down. You're able to have a more productive conversation. You're able to find more mutual space to work things out, and that tends to actually help deals get across the line,

David Bush  32:42  
you have a question from one of the participants that's just sharing sharing an honest and transparent question, which is, I hesitate to introduce outside experts because I have fear losing influence. So what does a ideal collaboration look like between a succession advisor like yourself and where I the coach or the consultants or whatever their role is, remains the trusted quarterback of the relationship?

Mark L. Vincent  33:09  
Yeah, there's good reasons to have that concern. I just want to acknowledge that, because there are people out there who will wedge in, say, Thank you. Go away now. I've got it from here, right? And who am I? And now all this value is being created, and I've been shunned to the side. And those stories happen. And there are other stories where, because you develop those relationships with people, and you have some protocols you've worked out, you're able to invite them in, and then if they do that to you, you don't ever have to invite them again. You know someone who does not give first person they've proven out and they're going to sour their way through a network where they're going to get a reputation for not being able to share the value to work in partnership. But there's a little phrase that I like to use when I'm helping to build my own network out. And you can do this formally, like through a partnership, and you're all inside the same firm, but you all got different skills. You can do it with a broader network where, you know, kind of strike the deal when, when you've got an opportunity to serve someone. But the phrase I love to use is, if you refer to me and bring me in, I am working for you as you work for the client, and if I bring you in, you are working for me as you work for the client. I'm willing to go into either of those things. If you're not, then we're probably not great partners, right? But you have to be willing to take chair number two, or chair number one, or even chair number three. But the real chair, the real emphasis here, is the client. We're serving, the client, not just the self interest. So as soon as that self interest starts to bubble up to. The top that's, I'm not going to work with you. So I try to vet that from the beginning. And I found that that particular kind of language. So a person says, of course, I get it. Now we can keep going. But if they're like, What? What do you mean? That's not how we do things? Oh, then we're probably not, you know, going to be able to help each other.

David Bush  35:20  
Yeah, I played organized 11 man football and eight man football for almost 15 years, and there was only one quarterback, and there could only be one quarterback on the team, and the quarterback was the one that was in charge of the huddle. As much as everybody in the huddle had a role and responsibility, it was the quarterback that was in charge of the process, and so I like the idea, and that's kind of what I've shared with others around this concept about building that trusted advisor network, is that who are the 10 advisors that you would like to have on your team that are non competitive, they could benefit just as much as you could benefit By referring business to you and bringing you into conversations. And if you have 10 people in that environment where you've got, you know, an accountant, you've got a succession planner, you got financial advisor and so on. Now you have backups. You have people in position that are competing for that starting role on your team. And then you have the rookies that are the ones that you know you're battleing, and you're building a depth chart so that if somebody doesn't decide to, like, I've had situations where I've had these trusted advisor relationships, and they decide to retire, they decide to kind of put it on cruise control, and they're no longer actively, you know, bringing me into opportunities, I'm bringing them into opportunities, and it's a more of a one way referral Street. And so then I have to understand, when is it time to move that person that may have been the go to trusted advisor, to a backup, and when do I need to bring in another, you know, person, to start competing for the position? Because there should be a healthy positive competition for bringing in the very best. You don't want to have a group of average, trusted advisors. You want to know the people that are the most in line with your values and your mission vision for what you want to create. And if you don't have that person, you're going to have to keep interviewing those different people until you find

Mark L. Vincent  37:18  
them and you want actually, in this way that we're talking about it, you want them to outshine you. They know more than you do on this particular subject. They need to be someone that you say, I'm get them in front of you because they're going to be able to help you. And I'm going to be nearby. I'm going to learn like you're learning Absolutely. I think there are two critical points to make here. One is the definition of competition. I would propose that competition for a trusted advisor is chaos and loss of value. Anybody who is helping to reduce chaos and to increase value is a friendly competitor or a colleague, because what you're fighting against is loss of jobs, loss of value, loss of a dream, the fears that people have that would have them delay and deny to talk about. So that's that's one really important aspect. The other is, if I am focusing my career around being a trusted advisor, anybody that's on this thing, that's really that's what you want to do, and you were going to trust you're going to create a trusted advisor network and bring them you know you're succeeding when your client sits down with you, seeks you out, initiates the conversation and says, Who do you know that blank you're Now the Oracle. You are the place that they come and they're trusting you, not just because you have information, but because you're doing this vetting all the time, and you have demonstrated the ability to bring strong expertise right now targeted to what needs to be addressed. You do that well a time or two. You're the one who gets the call. Who do you know you're the first point of reference. That means there's long term value, not just for you, it's long term value for the client. And then you're pointing to the client. I'm probably getting on a soapbox here, but if you've spent time on my site and around my stuff, you're going to see every now and then, hey, I love this client or whatever else, but you're not going to see a mess of logos and badges. Look what I did. I've done this kind of thing with so and so, because I'm only as good as the current work I'm doing. And quite often, those badges or logos of company from 10 years ago, they got another person running that company. Now that's not my client, right? So it's who I'm working with now and pointing to them. Look what they're doing. I can't take credit that somebody grew their business by 300% I got to be present. I got to walk alongside them. But they are the leaders of their. Price. They're the ones who made the big investment, they took the risk. They made this their career. They've done the battles, and so cheerleading alongside them is where I would like to be found.

David Bush  40:13  
Well, I want to, as we land the plane on this thing, I want to really get into some tactical things, like, you know, value creation. So let's just say that an advisor has a business owner client, and their plan is to exit in five years. What are the specific thing based on your experience and expertise? What are the three to five things that you are, you know, helping advisors to say you should be talking about these three to five levers, or levers, and you should be working with an advisor who has the expertise to manipulate those levers in the right direction if you don't have that expertise and experience. Yeah, well, the

Mark L. Vincent  40:56  
probably the most important one, if we're talking about the value of the organization, a way to indicate that is to really have a very strong future value balance sheet. So this is a little bit more enhanced than the balance sheet of the organization. You know your assets and liabilities have to balance out. What you're looking for is, in five years, what is the capital play that needs to be in place to undergird the enterprise as you dream of it, or as you're strategizing and so forth. So if you're growing your income but your capital base and the ability to recapitalize it, to pay off pensions, to fund the estate, to de risk some things, and pull some cash out, and still have enough cash to operate the business, figuring that out, not just for right now, but for that point in the exit so that if you're selling or if you're turning it over, whatever else it is, much more of a plausible play. I don't know how many stories I've got, where people come in and they look great. The business is profitable. We got margins all that they get in there, and the infrastructure is crap. And they never thought to ask, and nobody ever thought that, you know, develop that, or they've got, was working with one not too long ago, where it's an actual ESOP, and the successor gets in there, profitable business, but then begins to see what the census is, and they've got major payouts to come with about 20% of their workforce getting ready to retire, and they it's not funded well enough, they're gonna have to actually take on a debt load or or strip some things down in order to satisfy what their obligations are, and it wasn't planned. So really starting with what's the capitalization for us to be a continuing enterprise matter, but in doing that, you'll also find that you have to think about your talent pool and how that's developing and so forth. So getting that really in place is hard work, but it's very specific. It gets very detailed, and it starts to lay the course a second one is company valuation, and getting it into a spot where you can have that updated at any point as you go. And this is, again, where EOS can be very, very helpful once it's in play, if you're an ESOP, of course, and that's the route you're going. You're going. You're going to have to do an updated valuation every year. I know that many of you know that. So those, those are very important pieces. There's another one that is much more subtle, and I'll stop with this one. There's four or five we could talk about. I'll talk about one more. Anybody who's run an organization for a while, has a leadership philosophy. There's a way that they do things they might not have thought it through, might not be expressed, but there's a way that they do things, and anybody who's going to step in behind them is going to trip over a whole mess of invisible suitcases that you've left, if you're that owner that you've left lying.

Speaker 1  44:01  
That's a great line in vehicles to cases.

Mark L. Vincent  44:03  
I learned that from a mentor. You know, you don't even know that you set them down sometimes, but like as soon as somebody says, well, that's not how we do it to the successor, or whoever's now running the company, well, that's not the way we did it before. That's an invisible suitcase somewhere along the way that didn't get surfaced. There's a reason behind it, so to reject it out of a hand can be problematic. To try to enforce it could also be problematic. So to help that leader bring to the surface that basic approach of how things are decided around here lets successors know what they want to carry forward, what they're going to reject and replace with something else, or what they're going to amend and give it some new language, or freshen it in some way, so that you don't have all this value, loss of hurt feelings that. Human and soft side of running the business is what we often don't attend to in a sale or a divesture event. So that might sound like, Well, how do you do that? Well, there's a fun way to do that. I've done this a number of times. I go around and just ask key people. What's something that this owner, this CEO, always says? What do they always say? And when you ask 10 people, you're going to get some themes that emerge, some common statements. Now you can sit down with that person say, Why do you say that? Where'd that come from? What's the origin story for you? Where you first began to say that you recall what was taking place? And out of the as they do that, out of this emerges, this is their approach, right or wrong, this is the approach. And so now we can know that and be able to see what strengths does that carry, and what does it not otherwise, we're just running around doing this with a lot of subconscious stuff. So those are two very, very practical things that future value balance sheet, and getting the leadership philosophy, even if it's just a half page of five bullet points, getting it in a place where everybody can work by it and know that we're going in the same direction, or we're not

David Bush  46:16  
so good. Well, we're about to land the plane here. I got three more questions for you, so let's, let's work through these. This one specifically is around advisors who decide to bring in succession planning and scalable revenue systems into client conversations. How do they differentiate themselves and attract higher quality referral partners, like CPAs, attorneys, m&a advisors? Have you ever had any experience, or could you tell us a story of maybe one of the different advisors that you're currently partnered with and how they did it?

Mark L. Vincent  46:47  
Yeah, I am actually meeting with one today that helps a company build the value so they maybe put a fractional coo in to really get it to where they need to do to trigger the event for sale, or for the the ability to take on a new investor, that kind of thing. And so what, what I did, and just they actually sought me out, which was a great thing, but it became a conversation of getting at, how do you approach this? How do you work at it? What does that look like? What's the revenue share? If I bring you in, what's the revenue share? If you bring me in, and we get that stuff figured out, so that I don't have to think about it when I'm talking with the client, if the client starts going down that direction, I just, I already know what the terms are. You know, I can. I don't have to. I don't have to go and say, let me get back to you in three days, and I'll write you a proposal, which, anytime you say, I'll get back to you, you have all of this drop off of prospects. So I want to have that stuff well in hand. And I take the time to do that so that when I'm talking to the client face to face, you can talk about and I can say, you know, this is what I think this would look like, and this is probably about what it would cost, and I'm ready to draw up the terms on that basis, if you if you think you want to go, do you want to go? So we were going right in just a short space of time from an idea toward close on that on that basis, without breaking eye contact, without having to pull a calculator out, because I know what those terms are, and I know what the value is. I know what it's likely to be, and quite often it's a percentage of something rather than a straight up fee. But then it scales, because you're going percentage of something, you know, it just anything that creates a simplicity there, so that you can stay facing your client, engaged with them serves you very, very well.

David Bush  48:43  
Yeah, one of my favorite speakers, Jim Rohn, used to say profit is better than wages, and I would say that percentages are better than consulting fees. There's probably some, some real big opportunities there. So when it comes to strategic partnerships, could you maybe list off a couple of job titles or industries that you think that advisors, coaches, consultants should be looking to strategically partner with to kind of fill out their trusted advisor network if they want to do more with succession planning and higher level conversations?

Mark L. Vincent  49:21  
I think one of the most important ones, if you're doing this with owners, you're trying to be that trusted advisor, is to have somebody who really understands what it means to work with capital wealth, not just Estate Wealth, not just guys really strong CFO. Those are also really good to have, like a good fractional CFO, a strategic one. Those are very, very good to have capital wealth is looking at this thing of, okay, here you've got four or five moving parts, a family and estate or shareholders in the States, and the capital structure and the business, they're all going to interplay. You got a tax code. They're working at this architectural level of the whole economy around that own. Owner. So that's a really important one. And from there, then it can get down to, yeah, we'll work with the attorney, yes, we'll work the estate planner, yes, we'll work the investment banker, yes, we'll work with the the patent attorney, the the the implementer that's working with getting EOS and the fractional integrator, you know, or the the ownership family, the family office, they'll be able to help you create that, that kind of spread of skill. So from there, you can go to about any of the next things that are needed. So that's one I would really strongly recommend as a capital wealth advisor who can do that kind of architecting? And then the second one really is the operation side, because that's where all the value is proven. Are they doing what they say they will do? Do they have great dashboards? Are things at hand so that we can prove things and not have to go through a great big almost like creating a whole other organization in order to prove that we are who we are, and to go back and document things that were never documented, so that that you know that that EOS integration, where they've been through that for that three to five years, to really grow that, that's another key one to have

David Bush  51:16  
that's good. Well, I know that there's a lot of people that want to have a conversation with you, so I have one more question. But before I get to that question, that question, what's the best way to make conversation with you and to explore how they can potentially partner with you inside of succession planning?

Mark L. Vincent  51:32  
Yeah, so I was fortunate to get my name as a website, so we just have a mark l vincent.com which is sort of a gateway to the things that I'm engaged in. So if you go there, you can look at that, and there's a way then to reach me through there, and I'm happy to have those conversations. As I said, we're battling chaos, we're battling loss of value, and I don't think we're ever done building our networks and thinking about these things. And I love learning from other people. So happy to hear from you.

David Bush  52:03  
Yeah, we'll put all of Mark's contact information in the show notes in the description of this particular video, for those that are watching the recording and reference that and get into contact with Mark. But the final question I have for you, Mark is that, if there's somebody watching this video right now, which I am very confident there is, and they're looking to immediately increase the enterprise value of their clients, businesses. What would they do in the next 30 days around succession planning and scalable revenue growth, or some of the discussions that we've had today that would move them strategically forward, anything specific that you could give them as a clear

Mark L. Vincent  52:40  
next step. They don't need to be afraid to ask questions. So to be able to say, even feeling like I'm under resourced here, I don't know what to do. But if they got a client and say, sounds like you're thinking about, you know you're going to wrap it up at some point, or whatever else, or or you're you just told me you don't have a successor, is that something you'd like to explore? You know, to just go right there. We tell people who want to be coaches, start coaching. Now. Don't wait till you've got your certification. Start practicing. Now. What's the worst thing that's going to happen if you ask that question? You're going to find out whether you are a trusted advisor to them or not. And then the second one is start building that network, because if they say yes and they're ready to engage with things, they might already be going into a place that you've not been before. So why not bring somebody along with you, somebody in your network, or somebody who's done this before, to walk with you in almost like a mentoring relationship. They're doing it beside you. You're seeing it happen, so you're going to be more confident the next time. That would also be a really good gift to give yourself. But start with the questions. Don't wait till you've got them perfected.

David Bush  53:52  
Very good. Well, everybody. Mark l vinson.com, you can see it just over his shoulder on his screen. If you're listening to this as a podcast, you can view the show notes and get access to Mark's contact information, but Mark, thanks for sharing your wisdom and expertise and experience with us today, and we're looking forward to having lots of people reach out to you to ask for those next opportunities to partner

Mark L. Vincent  54:14  
Well, thank you, David, and thank you for the service that you bring with businesses as they build out their offerings.

David Bush  54:20  
Thanks everybody for joining us. And if you have any more questions, reach out to us. You can find us@bdr.ai and we'll get you in contact with Mark. If you can't find anything that we talked about so far in terms of contact information, thanks everybody. Have a great day. Bye. Now, thanks for tuning in to the Business Builders playbook. If this episode gave you some plays that you can start running in your business today, hit subscribe and share with another revenue leader who's tired of the pipeline grind. Building Predictable Revenue isn't something you figure out alone. Whether you're looking to automate your prospecting with bdr.ai, or you just want to talk through the growth challenges you're facing, reach. Out We help business leaders, just like you, to build systems that actually scale. And if you're ready to stop being your company's Highest Paid Prospector, let's have a conversation. Reach out to us@bdr.ai until next time, let's keep building you.