346 - Investigate Before You Invest!

0:00One of the best pieces of advice that I was given was from the mentor who has had the most influence on my business career. And what he said to me was, investigate before you invest. And that's certainly true, and we all know that when it comes to deals. Do your due diligence and make sure that you are understanding what the pluses and minuses are. Don't fall in love with the deal. Objectively look at it unemotionally and make sure that it fits your criteria. So we know that. But investigate before you invest can apply to other areas of what you're doing. For instance, when you look at your board of directors, and this is borne out in an email that I was sent within the last month, someone asked me to look at their board and here is my website.

0:54And I don't answer emails, although I did answer this email, except for people who are in the VIP Mastermind. But when I looked at his website, I noticed someone on his board that rang a bell, and it rang a bell with me for all the wrong reasons. So I spent literally three minutes, found what I found five years ago and a little more, and I didn't want to point him to that person. But he also, in his email to me, said that he was in the process of interviewing law and accounting firms. and I said to him, I hope that you have done background checks on your board members because the law firms and the accounting firms will not only do conflict checks, but they'll also do background checks as well.

1:45And if for some reason you got past that process with the law and accounting firms and then you were in the middle of a deal, and if the seller had any brains, They would do their due diligence as well and find that essentially one of the board members on your board is a crook, con man, whatever you want to call it. You will have spent a lot of time. You will be embarrassed. You will lose money. You will lose momentum. The other people on the board don't want to be associated with people like that and will wonder why you ever put someone like that and associated us with someone like that on your board.

2:25So about two weeks later, he comes back to me and he says, thanks for that advice. I did do background checks and I ended up finding that he had a bunch of judgments against him that he hadn't paid and essentially Ponzi scheme, etc., etc. Well, I knew that. I knew what he was going to find. But I wanted to see if he would go through the process of doing that himself. He did that. But he said to me numerous times, he knows what he's doing. And I said, you don't know what you're doing. You know, you don't know what you don't know. This is a pretty good example of how you could have totally self-sabotaged yourself by not understanding investigate before you invest.

3:11And so I suggested to him that if you're going to do this business acquisition, you better surround yourself with people who know what they're doing, that have integrity, and you better understand the process. And so he said, well, I'll join group coaching. And I told him, I don't think you're ready for group coaching. Go through the Acquisition Advantage 2025 edition boot camp, learn the steps, understand the templates, understand what you need to do and why. I think it was about 10 hours of training in that boot camp that are now recordings. And to his credit, he did that. So if you are in a similar situation, if some of these things you hear and you go, oh, I never thought of that, you might not get the solution to everything, but you will get a lot of solutions that will save you a lot of time and a lot of money.

4:05So go over to brucewhipple.com, take a look at the courses that are there that might help you, and then specifically the Acquisition Advantage Bootcamp, which I think if you don't know the steps, that would be a great place to start. So good luck, keep pushing, and keep taking action.