323 - "Which Dress Should I Put On?"

0:00Which dress should I put on? Okay, that's an interesting question, and I will explain that as I go forward, because I don't usually or ever wear dresses. But I wanted to pass on some thoughts that recently I've talked to some mentees, some of which I haven't spoken to a while, and it reminded me of those people that are successful in some of the things they do, and then some of the things that if you want to be more successful, you should do. And one of the big mistakes is just having the same approach over and over and over again. And that might be that I pick up the phone and I call a business and I say, do you want to sell your business?

0:48Well, that could work, I guess, if you make enough calls. But the truth of the matter is that people do things for different reasons. and you want to separate yourself from the bots, from the people who are unsophisticated, not putting much work in, lazy, all those other things, and just pick up the phone, make a phone call, and say, do you want to sell your business? The person on the other end of that may not know and probably doesn't know who you are, doesn't know if you are someone that they want to be in business with, that they want to sell their business to. Maybe you're a business broker.

1:29Sounds like a pretty interesting way that a business broker would say, have you an interest in selling your business? And that's not you. So the most successful mentees that I know of spend some time to separate themselves from the bots. And so how do you do that? One of the things is you find out who the person is that you're talking to, and if you're good enough to introduce the idea of, you know, have they thought about a transition, or are there plans in your future when perhaps you'd like to step back a step, those kind of things, or whatever the scenario is that would lead you into a discussion of why they might want to sell their business, usually those results are better.

2:19And so those can be a lot of different reasons. Those can be, if you look at something called the seven Ds, why would somebody want to sell their business? Death, you know, there's an unexpected passing of the business owner, so the heirs would want to do something if they don't want the business. Divorce happens a lot, and they need to split the business up for a division of the assets, certainly that's one. Disease, the owner can be diagnosed with a serious illness and needs to step away from the business for treatment or other health reasons. Disability, sometimes they've worked a long time, they've got a long-term disability, or maybe they haven't worked a long time, preventing active business management, certainly.

3:09Dissatisfaction or dullness, they just they're bored. They're burnt out. They've done it a long time. They're tired of doing it. And maybe a disagreement. There's a dispute between the business owners or family members involved, and they need to resolve it. And one of the ways to do that is just to decide, you know what, we're better off splitting this up. Be careful when there's tons of disputes, though, because there can be problems with the business left behind. And then lastly, debt. There can be a lot of problems with the business. Again, be careful with debt. Be careful that you understand what those obligations are, particularly with something like seller finance.

3:53If there's too much debt, that makes it difficult. But those are what I call the seven Ds. Death, divorce, disease, disability, dissatisfaction or dullness, disagreement and debt. Now, what you're doing there is you're looking for those things where your offer can match up with the person who's potentially wanting to sell it. And a lot of times what you find there, and it's the beginning of how I opened this, which dress should I put on? There's a mentee that I didn't speak to in a while, caught up with him this week. He's done some deals, had a rough go of it to be sure, but that's not unusual.

4:37But that all worked out in the end and he's loving what he's doing. And he was good at talking to an owner, very good, talking to an owner, understanding what's important to them, asking the questions if they stepped away, what would a perfect sale look like, what are their goals, what do they want to achieve from that sale, etc. And he said, in his words, the reason I ask those questions is, I know which dress I should put on. And I thought that was a brilliant way to say it, because what he's doing is identifying the need and identifying his benefits, and then he's marrying those two up so that the offer he makes fits with what the owner.

5:19Now, if you go about it in that way, you will be much more successful than if it's, do you want to sell your business? Yes, no, click. And so I would encourage you to think about that. I would encourage you to think about continuous improvement. We get stale if we do the same thing over and over. You just think about what's happened in the last five years, AI, all the social media changes. There are things when I first started doing this totally different than today. And keep step with those things, which you can use, how you can use them, because your competition is using them as well. But if you follow the seven Ds, understanding what's important to the seller, your competition is going to pale in comparison to you.

6:13If you don't know what to do, that's part of the continuous improvement. Continue to learn. We are going to be in the sixth week of the Seller Finance Mastery Program this week. The first five I did live, live Q &A. They've been recorded up in the Kajabi account, so they're there for on-demand viewing. But the sixth one, which is going to be live, that's going to button it up. And so that's been so far about nine hours of content. Great feedback. We did role plays in it, which I think are incredibly powerful. But if you don't know what to do, you need to learn what to do if you want to be effective.

6:56So I would encourage you to take a look at the details around that Seller Finance Mastery program. Not too late to join us. In fact, in some ways it's better because while you can't ask questions in the Q &A, you can go through those first five weeks very quickly, and you don't have to take five weeks to go through. So you go over to brucewhipple.com and the boot camps and courses, you'll see that. If you want to just get there directly, go to brucewhipple.com forward slash seller finance. But remember, separate yourself from the bots, and remember which dress should I put on. And that's a great reminder of you remembering not all people do all things for the same reasons.

7:42Some people care about their legacy. Some people could care less about their legacy, certainly. So I hope you think about that. I hope you put that into action. I hope you look at continuous improvement differently. If you want to see a book that will help you with that, The Goal, who was written by Goldrat, Excellent book on that. But those things will help you if you put them to action and I hope you do that.