Understanding What You Want with Ryan Tansom

Reading Time: 24 Minutes

In this episode with Ryan Tansom, we discuss how business owners can get what they want and have an impact if they clarify what they want from their business and why, and intentionally focus on growing the value of their business.

Takeaways We Learned from Ryan…

Clear alignment.

Align your long-term goals with your daily decisions. Understand how each action brings you closer to your goals and course-correct when necessary. By having a multi-dimensional goal, you can ensure that your path is clear and purposeful.

Ownership vs. job separation.

Separate your ownership in the business from your role as a leader. Clarify the distinction between your equity in the company and your responsibilities as a W-2 wage earner. Recognize that your desires for the business as an asset may differ from your job-related goals.

Cash flow visibility.

Gain a comprehensive understanding of your company’s cash flow. Know how much money will be available for reinvestment, distributions, or other purposes. Without clear visibility into your financials, it’s challenging to make informed decisions about growth, investments, or personal financial planning.

Define success holistically.

Look beyond the financial aspects when defining success. Consider the impact on your legacy, employees, community, and personal goals. Selling a business for a high price doesn’t necessarily equate to true success if other important factors are neglected or compromised.

Retain control and autonomy.

Strive for control over the major events and outcomes in your business. Avoid feeling powerless in critical moments by understanding the intricacies of valuations, financial structures, and strategic decision-making. By grasping these concepts, you can maintain autonomy and influence over your business’s trajectory.

Grow equity.

Growing the equity value of a company requires a focus on creating sustainable, predictable, and transferable cash flow, which is achieved by increasing the value of the business through strategic initiatives.

Build a team.

Building a team of advisors is crucial to optimize the business plan. While individuals don’t need to be experts in all areas, their advisors should understand their goals, priorities, and what is important to them.

Understand the numbers.

Understanding the numbers and financials of a business is essential for growth and success. Many businesses have done well with good intentions and a vision but faltered due to a lack of financial understanding or mismanagement.

Increase business’s value.

Increasing the value of a business involves creating sustainable, predictable, and transferable cash flow. Systems like Ken’s Value Opportunity Profile (VOP) and other methods help identify the areas that contribute to sustainable growth and increase the value of a company.

Keeping a separate identity.

The balance between passion for the business and maintaining a separate identity and life outside of it is crucial for long-term success and personal fulfillment.

About Ryan Tansom

Ryan Tansom started his entrepreneurial career at his family business where he was the executive vice president and responsible for the strategic, operational, and financial strategy of the $21 million company.

Ryan helped turn the company around and bring intentional focus to the right strategies which enabled it to be sold for 8 figures to a local competitor in 2014.

Ryan took his experience and founded Arkona to create the Intentional Growth™ Framework which helps owners grow the value of their company – with the end in mind – through educational training, fractional CFO services, and strategic planning.

Ryan also hosts the popular Intentional Growth™ Podcast, which has 280+ episodes and 380k+ downloads. His co-hosts include Todd Herman, Bo Burlingham, Jack Stack, Gino Wickman, John Warrillow, Dan Martell, and Alan Beaulieu.

Read the Transcript

Allison: Welcome back to the Deliberate Leaders podcast, I am your host and executive coach Allison Dunn. Today we are going to be talking about how to increase the value of your business. By beginning with the end in mind, our guest is Ryan Tansom. He started his career at his family business where you help them turn the company around, and ultimately sell it for eight figures. He took this experience and founded Arkona to create the intentional growth framework, which helps business owners with educational training, fractional CFO services and strategic planning. Ryan is also super cool and has a popular podcast about the name of intentional growth. Ryan, thanks so much for joining us here today.

Ryan: I am pumped very excited.

Allison: Me too. So I love to kick these off with a deliberate conversation. What would be your number one leadership tip for our listeners today?

Ryan: Getting alignment on the long term goals that are not just the surface goals, oh, hey, we want more revenue and a point in time, but like actually, like a multi-dimensional goal, that’s at a point in time. So we understand how all of our decisions today, like are making us, you know, getting us closer to that goal or further away. But we have a way to course correct because it’s clear where we’re going.

Allison: Yeah, I. So I just feel like alignment in general, inside of a business is really critical and important. What is the most common thing that you feel people are misaligned on.

Ryan: So there’s a bunch of these topics that I can unpack. And a lot of this comes from to it like with that family business, I was the I ended up being the executive vice president. So like I was the key employee, my dad was the owner. And all of this was convoluted as all get out. And so my family business, just like it’s just every topic hit the blender swirls together. And you know, again, as we’re rolling in the turkey day here, it’s like hopefully, we have good things, but some of these concepts earlier like that I like to unpack that have helped me in essentially wish I would have known this stuff back in the day.

It’s like this, when people had need alignment, it’s what is the separation or not what is making sure you’re clear in the separation between your ownership in the equity of an asset that you own.

And then your W two wage leadership role. Like, you got to separate those two before we even have any conversation, because I get dozens of calls every single week la people going, Ryan, I want out my responses a little What’s your job, your asset, and then they just stare at me. And it just the the final point. And this is why that is so necessary. LA is because how you handle what you want with this asset and what you want from it is different than what you want from your job that you have duties for. And like with my dad and I or any you know, executives at the very, very top in every boardroom, every conversation, every executive room that they’re having these conversations, if we don’t tie where we’re going to target equity valuation and a point in time, then it’s not clear of like, let’s do it a million dollars in cash flow other than Minnesota. So you got like, let’s say 350 grand in taxes?

What the heck are you going to do with the rest? Like are you going to take money out and buy a boat, cabin, cars, investments, whatever, or you’re going to reinvest it for an ERP system? You know, this, that or the other thing? If we don’t even know how much money is available for us next year? How are we going to have a good conversation?

Allison: Right? Okay. I appreciate that distinction. And also like the question, do you want to be out of it? Do you want to be out of a job? Or do you want to be out of the asset itself? Which, you know, is, is an eye opener when you ask the question and the answers are different? Yeah, very different often. I would super appreciate it if you would kind of just walk us through and sharing a little bit about your story. I think there’s the compound of the complexity of the family business. But obviously, you were not the succession plan. So there needed to be an exit plan of some sort. So tell us about that. And then what has brought you to where you are today.

Ryan:

And the complexities of family business. It’s just people and emotions, just like any other business with people and emotions.

And it’s like, again, the convolution the convolution convolution of like the job in the asset. So like what happened was Alice my dad started a family business in the early 90s. He mortgaged her house and bought 250,000 cars with the old can’t can’t old Panasonic copiers super sexy one the boy and then scaled the business up. We hit about 21 million in revenue. 115 employees three locations. I worked in another business my entire life. Way back before copiers even networked Then in oh nine, I joined full time, he had been very distant from the company he had some personal stuff going on he had that the GM at that point just keep the thing going because there was a lot of cash flow involved at that point.

oh nine happens the you know, everybody had their own story from oh nine the market really there was a huge margin compression if not elimination of the margin on the equipment, which was about a third of the revenue and 20 million in revenue. So when I started full time in oh nine, I ended up like I had a blissful like six months of just being a salesperson. And then I ended up getting dragged into all the CPA, the bank meetings on stuff, and I’m suing my dad at the end of oh nine and we lost like nine or $50,000 that year. So my dad and I, I mean had no choice. It was like, Okay, well, we can fold shop here and figure out what we want. But we did, what everybody probably listening would do is we doubled down. And we spent the next five and a half years turning it around. And from the point of like, I’ve replaced about 50% of the employees, but it’s almost 25, you know, we sold a couple of branches for cash, build out the document management and IT services, rebranded.

So we could go head to head with all the other tech providers and got to this point, Ali, where we’re sitting in again, and those conversations in the boardroom, quote unquote, boardroom, I mean, it was just a conference room. But like, he’s like, I want out, I want out, I want out I hate this blah, blah, blah. And I’m like and you know, rightfully so a lot of people get exhausted. But we have meetings with CPA firms and banks and attorneys and Vistage and all these places. And like, we get like these little fragments of information. And all that sounds like really cool. It’s like a puzzle piece of a strategy, or come up with what does that mean to us? I don’t know, just sell more stuff. And so it was just that a lot of three dimensional view of like, what does this all mean to Ryan and Cory.

So we felt so trapped from the repeating conversation with go back to my first comment, we didn’t have clear visibility into the cash flow, what my dad wanted for distributions, what we wanted for reinvestment and how that was tied to target goal. So me and my dad didn’t have alignment. So ownership and executive team didn’t have alignment. So then it was like we’re selling, we’re selling, we’re not selling we’re selling. We’re not saying oh, we can do that ERP project or not, are we gonna hire those people we’re not. And it’s just like that whiplash. Finally, we ended up selling it in 2014, which is a very difficult, difficult transition period. And I’m happy to share more about that, but kind of led up to the 2014 event.

Allison: Okay, so do you consider the sale of that to be successful? Did you feel successful?

Ryan: Being able to sell it just kind of ties into what is the what is your or anybody’s goal? And this is the multi-dimensional goal, like, you know, usually people say, Well, my B hag, or my VTL, from EOS is 10 million, 20 million or 50 million in revenue, whatever, I had to 20 million, our business at last nine or grand. So I don’t care if you have 20 million in revenue, I really heard a $2 million company that kicks off a million dollars in cash.

So first of all, it’s like, what’s that long term target? For us? What we ended up wanting to say is it wasn’t successful. If you looked at the deal, and just at the net proceeds waterfall calculation, and you talk to all the suits involved of the transaction, everybody the gay killed it. But if you’re only talking about the purchase price of the sale, what about what did you want from your legacy? Would you want with your employees? How about the community? How about the baby that you built and all the strategies that you had? By the way, I had to lay off 60 people when we when we sold, paid a lot of taxes paid a lot of debt? And what’s your definition of success? It would be like how I would rebuttal with that question.

Allison: Well, I appreciate that. Because I feel like sometimes people end up going like we sold it for eight figures. And it’s like, who cares? Seriously, what, what does that mean? Right? You don’t lean? It’s no, it’s the impact in the impact?

Ryan: Oh, and I’d also like, first of all, I could be sitting there and I watched a panel a couple of weeks ago, too, because all the people were talking a lot. I mean, people talking about exes all the time. But like I sold it for 20 million bucks. So what if you owed $30 million? You owe someone 10 million with no company. So like, how many partners did you have? Like, again, there’s so many questions to ask.

Allison: Yeah. So I appreciate that. I think that this is the part that most people there’s an ego involved where people go what they sold it for versus like, really, what did you end up with at the end of home? sure that those are in unison as, as every other blood sweat and tears that you put into it, so So congratulations on the sell of family business, I guess I would say that has now brought you to creating Arkona. So can you tell us what, what are? I guess there’s some fundamentals that are you’ve kind of built this around. Can you kind of share with that intention is about?

Ryan: Yeah, and just as a side note, that deliberate word and intentional like when I asked everybody on my podcast like what’s your definition of intentional I bet you half the time they use the word deliberate So, we’re very much aligned here. Yeah, no, I love it. So what ended up happening was like, I mean, when we sold, I actually had to call everybody back into the office. And then we ended up, you know, they the buyer only took 33 out of this night, 90 people or something like that. Very hard, I lasted 60 days. So it kind of the do a couple of like hot hops to where we’re at now. And because it’s all the why of what we’re doing now.

So I could have gotten into investment banking, private equity, have to people end up going into like, Oh, now I get it, then they become, I don’t want to say it’s part of the problem. But they become like investors in private equity firms where they go out and I Google, by other people’s firms, or whatever it is, but it’s like, I was sitting there talking all my friends from Vistage or other entrepreneurs, and like, what the hell happened here, like, I had no control over the biggest event, after 20 years of building this business. And then it’s like, all these suits are talking to each other and telling us what’s happening, and then all of a sudden, I’ll post out pops a result. And that was like, it’s like going to the slot machine and just like hoping for the best. And so what I was like, I really, as an entrepreneur, love control. That’s why I’m willing to take all the risk, because I want autonomy and control with risk. And I had none of that, at that at the at the deal table or for my outcome.

So what I started doing is I was like, and this is as EOS is kind of taken up, speed, steam and ceiling up and all these different systems. And I was like, you know, I like after, after a lot of conversations early, I realized that I was having to spend a disproportionate amount of time with my buddies or friends or entrepreneurs or executives, giving them the level of understanding of like, okay, like, let’s get you up to speed of all the stuff I dealt with, with how valuations work, how do structures work, how financials work, how, like, you know, the systems and processes and procedures, and people are valued inside of a company, like what truly creates value, once we get up to speed, then we can finally get to the heart of the good conversations of high level strategy. But I couldn’t do it until they were talking the same language.

So what I what I wanted to do is is truly like teach people how to fish like in the spirit of I want control instead of becoming a consultant where I did like, suck off the cash flow of some other entrepreneur that built something really hard.

Like, I’d say, like, here’s how to do it. Truly, like, here’s how valuations work, here’s how to grow value, here’s how you can monetize it. Like, here’s how you can step away, like, here’s how it all works. So I love creating simplicity out of complexity, it’s like one of my favorite things to do. I mean, that’s what I did when I built the managed IT services and productizing services. And so it really no skip to after nine years figuring out the messaging, it was not easy at the beginning. But you know, intentional growth, the program, le is helping people view and run the company like a financial asset. And there are three outcomes. There’s five principles to help people think like this and through a lens.

Allison: Can we cover just I wanted, like for people to go, okay, these are the five outcomes, and these are the three lenses. And then then you know what I mean, if they need to get more educated on that, that they may know, some of them. So what would be the five outcomes?

Ryan: So there’s the five principles, and there’s the three things that helps you know, if it’s okay, so the three things that these five principles do is they help people understand what they want from the business and why. The second one is help them clarify a target equity valuation at a point in time, and the income they want along the way. Because if you’re not going to take a salary distributions for 10 years, and then I mean, like you get the income towards that equity valuation is crucial. And then the third one is how do you want your leadership role in the business to evolve or transition out? These five principles help people think about it. And so there’s, there’s five and I’ll just do a quick light fly by if you want. That’s great.

So the first one is your vision. What do you want from the business? And why? The second one is your financial targets? And there are three of them? What’s your target annual income, what how is what is your outside net worth, just because it’ll help understand your options. And the third target is your the equity value of your company now and into the future. The third principle is your exit options, because there’s five of them between internal transfer search funds, besides private equity strategics, every one of those exit options will impact the first two principles. It’ll impact what you want, it’ll impact your financial targets.

So we have a lens now to view the horizon. It’s not about someone, but it’s saying like, hey, if I have if I’m building an asset, I want to know how to monetize it. So then the fourth principle is grow value. And it’s truly about focusing on growing the equity value of your company by creating sustainable, predictable transferable cashflow. The fifth principle is your team of advisers. You don’t have to be the expert and all this stuff, but all of the people around you need to know where you’re going and why and what’s important to you. And then they can be the ones optimizing your plan along the way.

Allison: Okay, love that’s what do you what is of, of the principles? What do you think is the most challenging for your most typical client that you’re working with? Where are they stuck?

Ryan: I don’t know, it’s a really good question. We’ve had 450 people over the last 36 months go through them. And the five principles there, we call them a framework, because if you pull one principle, they don’t work. And I mean, like, so it’s really, really like, if you were to go through it, you might be a financial wizard, but like, have no idea what you want. And then like, Sally could go through the podcast and go through the training, and have, like, so much clarity on what she wants long term and have no idea what it means. So like, it, the interesting part is like a net, it’s a catch all of helping people, like round out what their gaps might be, and truly shift their mindset. So like someone that came on, it’s like, hey, it’s like I took the pill in the matrix. So you can be like, almost conscious. But like, you’re kind of like completely like, Oh, I get it is the only way I would describe it. So that’s I don’t know if that’s a couple from answering your question.

Allison: No, no, I think it’s fair. I think it’s obviously unique in each one, I wasn’t sure if it was just more common on the on the financial management side, or if it was on, like, the really just the visionary of where it is we’re trying to go.

Ryan: Okay, fair enough. And so with that clarity, I would say like, the I mean, so we started our business in early 2019, with the training program, and we digitize it with COVID, obviously, and then the so what happened was two more clarifiers are clearly answered question is, like, almost every time people would walk on me like I get it all now, what the hell do I do with the numbers? So the financials, actually, the market pretty much demanded that we build out our Financial Dashboard offering and the CFO offering.

So like, we had no intention, which is ironic enough, because of the the name of our business and program, a building that out because we were an education company, but so many people needed help on the numbers that like, almost we were forced to, because that was the first step to actually get into clarity that they needed.

Allison: Yeah, I think, in my experience, I found that a lot of people can do a lot of really great things with good intentions, and even just division, and maybe added just a bit of luck, not really understanding the finances of it, and they sometimes do it really well. Or hire people who can help them do it really well, or that is their downfall.

Ryan: I agree. And I also think that the last 12 years of complete bull run, like, realistically, and we’re not going to get into this on the show, but like, so like when I do my keynotes now and conferences, or visitors or whatever it might be, I’m like, Okay, so like, you know, as we’re talking about planning and numbers, and I make this joke, and you have like you like comedians, like when they when a lot of people laugh, you can kind of know, there’s a universal truth there, Alli, some like, who, you know, I used to run a $20 million business.

And I used to do like this revenue, gross profit checking account revenue, gross profit checking account, and every month you just go, what’s the revenue was the gross profit was what’s in the bank account, and then you just keep going. And it’s so like, one dimensional, two dimensional, and you didn’t need to know anything in your cash flow statements, because everything went up for 12 years.

And now you got supply chain issues and inflation issues and interest rate issues in labor is using like, it’s like, there’s all these cross currents, like you need to know your numbers because like, if you make the wrong choice, like you could, like you said, if you’re just paying attention to the vanity metrics, I mean, it could be pretty ugly.

Allison: Yeah, it can be okay, so in your framework, you have created a dashboard that provides optics so that aid owner can know where what direction each of their principals are heading in essentially that’s fantastic. Can you talk through and share some of the main ways for a business to increase their value?

Ryan: So this in principle for Think about it like when we say grow value it’s truly a concept first and this consequences a lot of different systems of how you like the tactical HOW TO THE BIGGEST cat sent heavily is the more sustainable predictable transferable your cash flow is the more your company’s worth Period, end of story. So you can have two companies and we have an entire training on this to companies with 10 million in revenue million dollars in normalized EBITDA. We’re not getting into that right now but called proxy for cash flow.

One goes for double the value of the other one, same industry same everything. Well, why is that? Well, one has more sustainable predictable transferable cash flow in there. So there are a lot of different systems alley that people can go into to think like figure out okay, how do I actually create sustainable, predictable transferable cash flow? John worlds value Builder System There’s core value, there’s something called mouse, there’s this value opportunity profile, I can send Janerio. I tend to like his the most. And then every private equity firm and investors can have their own way of uncovering your due diligence in your risk, they’re going to be talking so like it. I’ll go into Ken’s VOP, specifically, because I like how the concept is about having these eight functional areas in balance. And these eight functional areas are planning, leadership, sales, marketing, finance, legal and operations, and culture. I think it’s the eighth one, it’s already always hard.

But essentially, Alli, these are, whether you have a lemonade stand, your Pfizer, Apple laundromat, you have these eight functional areas, just like a house has a foundation, could be a church could be a skyscraper, I don’t really care what it is. But you need people, you need operations you need like these things.

And so if you think about this truly a baton enough le like if you said, Brian, I want to buy our Kona, and I handed you a Dropbox set of financials, a strategic plan that says here’s where we’re going over the next five years of three financial statements tied together, integrating that financial or that strategic plan. By the way, here’s my management team, they all have tied compensation plans and KPIs to that strategic plan, tied to the financials, the three financial statements and the target equity value.

And by the way, then we have to figure out, you know, going back to my example, about how your million dollars in cash, so your pay your taxes, if we had a half a million dollars leftover, we’re gonna say in 2023, we’re going to roll out a new website, and ecommerce platform, an ERP system, hire an executive recruiter for this person, because we have the cash and every one of those things creates more sustainable, predictable and transferable cash flow. So it’s truly growing the equity value by increasing that multiple by de risking the cash flow. And we deliberately chose those projects because it de risked the cash flow and grows the value.

Allison: Cool. I think that that is a really fantastic lens for people, because I know that they get to the end of the year, and they have cash, they have profit, right?

Ryan: And then they don’t do things that invest in the predictable, you know, part of the equation and you can’t say like the worst thing ever to do at the end of the year right now.

So if your CPA says hey, by the way, Alli you have a huge tax burden, go buy some cars or a building, like I say that so tongue in cheek and because like, obviously, taxes suck. But when you don’t have a foresight in visibility, with all three financial statements tied together tied to that future equity value.

Again, we’re gonna I don’t want to get to the geekiness. But the working capital needed to fund that growth. Right, Elliot, like I have a client, no joke. Last year, their CPA told him to do this, they bought a $1.5 million building, put $4 million into it. So they can mitigate some of these taxes. They ran out of working capital for payroll in May this year. How are you like that? CPAs? Like, you know what? All it is, is like, hey, it’s so short sighted, it’s like, but they’re in construction, if they’re growing, they need people and stuff that they need to buy for next year. So it just is all of those things should be tied to that long term plan.

Allison: Yeah, yeah. Such a horrifying example. Thank you for sharing.

Ryan: I got I got dozens for every one of those events.

Allison: Let’s talk about the kind of the flip side of the coin because they you need to have both sides. So what would be some exercises that someone basically can go through to help them understand truly what they want and why out of their business?

Ryan: Um, some of the exercises from our, from our training that are not anything crazy revolutionary, but like, I have this like exercise, and you’ll probably get a kick out of this because your gig is like, I have like a leadership. So it says leadership role. And there’s a left hand column that says, Put shit you don’t like doing? What do you hate doing? Like? And then on the right eye on the right hand side? What do you like doing? Because all like so many founders or even executives think that they just have to be doing what they’re doing all the time. But it’s like, if you’re growing and you see that cashflow growing, it’s not a matter of in my mind, being forced to do all this stuff. It’s like when can I get rid of this? So as an owner, when can I get rid of my CEO title and hire a CEO?

Oh, when my distributions I can maintain my annual income through distributions and afford that person. So I think it’s really like one of the exercises like what do you want from your role and how you’re going to spend your time separate from your asset.

And also like, not just the activities but like, we have this thing called division we’ll which is how integrated into the business as your identity Your sense of passion, your sense of purpose, your sense of community, your sense of, you know, social life. I mean, Ali, it’s real man. I like when I talked about when I saw it was like somewhat extracted part of my identity, everything I was good at all my friends, all my vendors, all this stuff, like I wasn’t able to talk to anybody do anything after that.

So I had to, like completely reinvent myself, which sucks. So I think it’s about understanding the role identity and fusion as well as like, what do you want from your role, and just then certainly, honestly, spend some time people like you thinking about it. Because I think the thing that you probably do a really good job is like helping people think through that, then put a plan in place. I’m just acknowledging, like, you need to figure it out, because I can’t build a plan until you figure it out. But like, it’s kind of stopping there, it’s kind of given to the like, Hey, here’s some rough exercises to think through it.

Allison: Right? I think you bring up a really excellent point that they I mean, we talked about, like their identity association with business, at every level, but especially at the founder level. And so I’m hearing you say, like, I would think like, you know, make sure you are passionate about it, and you are committed to the community. And like, I would like be plugging people into making sure that that is like solid. In your and I’m hearing you say that it’s really important to actually have it be balanced and not entirely associated with it.

Ryan: I actually when I when we do the that exercise in the training, I truly say there is no right or wrong answer, answer. All I’m trying to do Alli there’s this, I can’t remember for the life of me what podcast I was listening to where this was on there. But there’s this. So if for the people listening, I’ve got my hand that’s kind of like, like the horizon and then one that’s like slightly above it. And it’s like, the delta between the bottom hand which is, which is reality, and the top one, which is expectations, we want to shrink that. So expectations and reality are like in sync, then we’re happy. And so going back to your point, like I want people to be happy. And so by being aware, then you don’t do things that are going to make you unhappy. So if I would have known that I had a big role identity and fusion, I love my people love my culture, I wouldn’t have sold to a third party that gutted the company, I would have probably grown more value, didn’t done an ESOP and participate in the business for the next 30 years.

Allison: So appreciate like saying, like, what would you have done differently? Knowing what you know, now? And having the opportunity to have hindsight, right? That’s painful. Well, I think, another part of your story, which is just so incredibly real, is that, you know, you’re you, you build this asset, and then you do get the room with a bunch of suits. And it’s like, it is literally like gambling, and then what you’re what you end up with, then the government takes its portion, the broker takes its portion, the attorneys take their portion. And it just goes on debt. And then like any mean everything from there.

Ryan: It’s Plinko alley, it’s like, you know what I mean, like at the very end, you they kind of sit in there going to hell, man, we’re the ones that built all of this, and everybody got their money before us. And I there is a way to actually measure monitor. So if you actually build your statements, your three statements like a private equity, firm one, income statement, balance sheet, your cash flow, see if you could actually build in your normalized EBIT, that you could build in a hypothetical multiple enterprise equity value, and actually have a range of net proceeds on a monthly basis. So like, you can always say, like, you know, out of the blue offers are happening all day long, you probably have it with your new clients, too. It’s like, well, how do you know which one to entertain? Well, it’s like, I know that I want 10 million, our equity value company 2030. And my net proceeds are going to be eight. And if someone gives me an offer, I can say like, here’s what I need. And like, here’s the plan. Should I entertain this or not? It’s just a quick, easy. No, yes or no? And keep going. Yeah.

Allison: And I think I think there’s also like a very convoluted understanding of what goes into a valuation itself. And it’s actually rather simple. It is not that complicated. It’s the due diligence part that’s complicated.

Ryan: In So do we have enough time I can describe I’ll just be quick on this a couple minutes is I agree with the ally and like I think about like, fair market value, book value, equity value, enterprise value, discounted cash flow, multiple revenue. I mean, like that huge. Yeah, fire sale acid sale. Like it was like stock sale, like all this jargon. But like, that doesn’t do anything for us to be able to make actual decisions today to get alignment with the ownership and executives and like, what are we marching towards?

But what we can actually plan on in I don’t know if this is where you’re going with your comment is like, so I like to compare to like a framework of thinking about valuation. So there’s the intrinsic financial value of a company, which is the value of the company as it stands. Today, as an owner owns it without selling, that is the value of the business based on the risk of the cash flow, we can absolutely figure that out through the discounted cash flow and like just truly saying, like, Hey, what is the risk of this asset? As it stands based on the things that we were talking about? Knowing that you don’t have a buyer there. So like, I want to eliminate people’s narrative of like, I’ll never know what my company is worth until someone’s willing to write a check. And that’s totally BS.

Yeah, private equity, the whole industry and Aesop’s, have proven that it’s not true. And so like, we can do that as other founders. And then I want to compare the intrinsic financial value, which is different than the strategic transaction value, when a buyer and a seller come to the deal table, and the human emotions and strategies are wrapped into it. And there’s a purpose of the deal. And that is going to inflate the intrinsic value for a premium or deflate it for and at discounted for different reasons that the premium could be like what I did get the company and you get a premium, because of various reasons, or family estate planning, they discount the company and gift it to the kids. But it starts at that noble number, like you were saying, which is 100% ROI based on the risk of the cashflow.

Allison: People I hear it all the time, I have no idea what’s it what it will be valued at. And it’s like you can know you can know your value now and align it to where you want to be going. So thank you for that. What I have super appreciated this conversation, I actually have a ton more questions. But I am going to I’m going to do a wrap up and make sure that people know what the best way is to connect and or followed.

Ryan: Website arkona.io. It’s AR K O N a.io. And there’s 325 podcasts, there’s videos about the training, there’s more information that they could ever consume without ever talking to us. So let me just go and then LinkedIn is the easiest way to get in touch with me.

Allison: Outstanding Ryan, thank you so much for your time today. It’s been truly a pleasure speaking with you.

Ryan: Oh, thanks so much for having me on the show. I appreciate it.

I'm Allison Dunn,

Your Business Executive Coach

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