Exitwise Productions

Andrew Lassise Episode_2n.txt
English (US)

00:00:00.000 — 00:03:26.899
Hey everyone, it's Steph from exit wise today. Todd and I sit down with Andrew Lacy's. He's the founder of tech for accountants, which he grew into the dominant cybersecurity provider for the accounting industry before being acquired in 2023. In this episode, how a failed exit in 2019 made his 2023 sales strategic Slam Dunk Sports.

Pun intended. Why niching so hard that clients legally could not hire you as the ultimate moat? And the bumper sticker he'd had every founder heading into a sale, which is they will destroy it, and you have to be okay with that. For Andrew, that experience was actually one of the things that led him to create Sober Founders, a nonprofit community for entrepreneurs and recovery.

I hope you know that Exited Founder Podcast is full of real insights and lessons from the field. Just for you to make your exit journey smoother. You can see how Andrew can help you on your exit journey on our website, and learn more about his current initiative at Sober Founders. Dot org. Great to have you on.

Let's dive in. I'm Stephanie from exit wise. Todd say hello. Hello. Hello, Andrew. Thank you for being here. Yeah, thank you for having me. So, Angela, Cece's here. We're going to dive in. There's a great story here. There's lots of stories, actually. So just to start, not at the way, way beginning. Not at Genesis.

Genesis. But you always seem to have a love for computers. You said you're an entrepreneur at heart. So I guess just to take it back a little, where did this love of technology start and knowing you would always be an entrepreneur? Yeah, the the love for technology will go like maybe six years old to call it like 93 ish.

My granddad was like, here, here's a floppy disk and we're gonna play SimCity 2000 and start playing that. And it's like, oh, I really enjoy this. And then other video games and it's like, oh, and you know, you could like run these commands and then make all these things happen. And so I'm doing like air quotes, hacking in like the console in Half-Life to get things going.

So like the tech stuff kind of came naturally to me. I had never thought of any sort of career or work out of it. And my father was a stockbroker. My mom was an investment banker, so I always understood money and finance just because that's how I was brought up. So first entrepreneurial endeavor, I was selling random things on eBay, and then I was like, you know what?

Wouldn't it be funny if I sold an air guitar and I put it up for $5? I was like, This is Jimi Hendrix air guitar, the same one that he used. And then it sold right away and it was like, okay, so I just started selling air guitars, Literal Air on eBay. So that was that was my first hustle. And then it was like, oh, I could sell pirated.

Oh wait, my air guitar. You really mean nothing. An air guitar when people go. No no no no no no. Yes, yes. When people go. No no no no no. With no physical thing in their hands. But did you. Did you actually ship something to the house like an empty package? No. This was this was a pure zero cogs. Zero service.

Zero anything. It was just, I guess, the novelty of zero value. Dang. Yeah. No, it's not zero value. Because why would people pay for it if there was zero value, I guess

00:03:28.020 — 00:08:56.570
money on their hands. That is awesome. Okay, in a nutshell. And I remember in a previous chat you spoke a bit about the air guitars on eBay and I was like, oh baby, I can't wait to get into that. So computer guy, tech guy, you worked for a few startups and then you decided to start your own. And it definitely was a bit of a roller coaster ride.

So can you tell us a bit about the company you started? Yeah. So as you mentioned, I was at a startup before. So some friends said, hey, we're starting a startup, you should come run our IT department. And I said, no, startups are risky. And they were like, okay, you're 27 with no overhead. If ever there were a time to take the plunge, this would be it.

So we managed to get 500 customers despite ourselves, but went out of business in three months. So I got like a taste of startup entrepreneurship. I made an agreement with the owner since I was basically the product that they were selling, and I just told them, hey, I'll run the company for free for you. And then after two months, if the phone rings, I collect their money.

But you keep collecting everyone that doesn't use it, so it kind of works both ways. It's kind of like the gym membership model, right? Where they make money off people that don't go to the gym. Yeah, that was the sort of intuitive idea that I had. And it worked out well for him. It worked out well for me. So year one, just in my living room.

Don't know anything, just waiting for the phone to ring and a friend said, hey, you should call these people. And, you know, kind of fast forward went from 36,000 the first year to 1.7 million in the second year. It wasn't only just, hey, call these people, but it sort of got the ball rolling and hiring people.

So we went from just me as the employee to I think 30 some after year one, we had several offices just through like acquisition thing. So it was a quick roller coaster into it. And this is 2014, 2015. Then I start thinking I'm God's gift to entrepreneurship. I'm just going to do nothing. And wouldn't you know, we'd gone from like 4 million to 2 million to 1 million.

And it's just like, wasn't this working? It's like, well, if if you keep doing work, it'll keep working. But if you do literally nothing, your employees who get paid the same, Whether or not it works are pretty happy to be doing nothing with no new work coming in. And no, we grill out through acquisition.

It's like, well, if we don't acquire anyone, it wouldn't just normal attrition cause us to not be in business anymore. And that was the case. Covid gave us some free money with PGP, idle IRC, things like that, so we were able to take some big swings. In the beginning, we were sort of it for everybody. You could think kind of glorified Geek Squad managed service provider.

And then thanks to Covid, giving us free money and the IRS made new laws in cybersecurity that people had to have this thing called a wisp, the written information security plan. And I happen to be the only person, apparently, that saw this law and was like, I could really capitalize on this. And so we just became the de facto IT company in the accountant world.

It was a small pool, but big fish in a small pool. And I became sort of the poster child of, you know, it says you have committed perjury if you renew your license and don't have it, so don't commit perjury. And the FTC made a law that said you have to hire an IT person. And so it was just like, we can point to all these laws that basically make it illegal to not hire us.

Was that specifically for accounting and no others for tax accountants or tax law? Okay. Got it. So rush tech essentially niched down to become a solution just for accountants. Yeah. Line in the sand called it tech for accountants. So it was very, very specific for accountants. There's a lot of different questions I have there.

Also a bit about like today's landscape I kind of want to look at jump quickly to today. There's a lot of things we really need to cover in this conversation. We'll see how we do. I guess I'm wondering, would you recommend entrepreneurs who are building now to be niching down? Because it's kind of okay, because some are saying, well, Claude will be able to do this for the law firms and they'll be able to do this for this kind of consultancy and this for that.

So what's the case for Niching down today, in your opinion? Well, you're correct that AI is going to democratize pretty much any sort of common knowledge or book knowledge that you can get. So no longer will it be. Well, I'm the best lawyer because I know so much, but it's going to be the proprietary information.

So I think the larger organizations that have a large pool of proprietary information are going to really be the ones that actually have a moat and a differentiator, because before it was, well, we are the best. Look at our track record. Our people are all Harvard grads and they're all brilliant people.

And now that's not really a differentiator because everyone is a Harvard grad and everyone has. Not everyone. Todd.

00:08:58.450 — 00:19:55.180
Sorry. I'm really obnoxious about Todd's Yale ness. I'm gonna leave that alone. It's good. All right, I'll replace it. Ivy League school. Something like Yale. Oh, my God. Todd's gonna hate this. That I bring up Yale in every call. Sorry. That's where I see the future of where you will have a unique advantage.

And so you can look at even with tech for accountants, right? We had 6000 clients on the wisp product, so 6000. We were the industry leaders by so far. Like second place, I don't know what they had, but the company that acquired us that was 40 times bigger had 32 at the time of acquisition. So just to paint a picture of how far ahead we were in that space.

But that was it for us. And then it turned into like further down the value ladder, and we would sell managed services through that. That was sort of the entry. It wasn't even a loss leader. It was really profitable. But because we had so much experience in that realm, we could point to very, very nuanced things that at least as of recording today, ChatGPT and, you know, insert AI wouldn't have that proprietary information.

It also helped that since I was the face of Wisp, I also invented all of the things. So kind of like in the Gary Vaynerchuk, if you hire van or SEO or Vagner Media, it's like you're kind of hiring his face and his brand, and that's the moat. That's really where I see the future with intelligence sort of being democratized.

Andrew, can I double down on that so that that may be a great way to to build a business today? And that's the question Stephanie is asking, is that the advice we give is to go very niche. When it came to M&A. I also think that it's super interesting because now you become like the the best solution for a particular product, like an arrow in a larger quiver of a bunch of arrows that are targeting an industry.

I'm wondering how that affected or opened up the door to be purchased, and how that helped to negotiate your negotiating position to be in that kind of leadership space in your industry. The company that acquired us to sort of our positioning was security first. And if you wanted to get cloud hosting, sure, we can do that too.

And theirs was cloud hosting. And sure, if you want security, we can do that too. So our go to markets were sort of opposite. And because we were in such a small pool, the people that acquired us, basically, if you bought QuickBooks desktop at that time and said, I want this hosted in the cloud, that's who bought us.

So they worked very, very closely with accounting firms. And accountants are usually pretty low slow to adapt. New technology. So QuickBooks desktop I've always used it. So I'm just going to get desktop and I need it in the cloud. Click the button. They're in the cloud. So because we worked with so many accounting firms and so did the organization that acquired us, we already had a relationship with them.

I already knew the CEO because when people came to us for cloud hosting, it was like, are we? We aren't really built for it. Can we just do a rev share with you guys? And it didn't really work out, but we were on their radar and really in the cybersecurity for accountants world, there were only really 4 or 5 big players, so they always saw my face because they were niched.

In the accountant world, we were at all the same conferences talking to the same people, so they knew who we were. Despite at the time we got a car, we only had 12 employees and they had 700. You know, we should not have been on anybody's radar, not to mention how large they were in comparison to us. And it was a strategic acquisition.

We weren't for sale. They came to us saying, we will do whatever it takes to get you out of the equation, basically. So a lot of leverage because there was only a handful. Was it really like get you out of the equation or, you know, hey, you're having these important conversations with our customer. You're approaching them with a solution that they have to have.

You're dominating that space. And we see that is a very strategic asset for us to own and then, you know, improve the, the, the sales on the other products that we sell. It seems to be very synergistic, not just take you off the table. Yeah. That was the conversation. Um, then once we got into the machine, yeah, it really leaned more towards the former position of, okay, we're going to hire some new salesmen for your team.

And it's like we had 4 or 5 full time salesmen, and the new people they hired became number six and number seven as far as performance. But my whole team got fired basically as soon as I quit, which was the three hours after I got my retention bonus. Yeah, my boss is like, I can't say I didn't see that coming, but it would have made a lot of sense in a synergy position.

Yeah. The struggle and challenge was and I mean, I'll take responsibility on this too, that I'm Andrew, the entrepreneur. Move fast. Break things. Who cares? Let's try to make as much as we can. And they were very corporate backed by VC and it was we need stability for the investors. So let's kill off a autopilot e-commerce self-checkout that generates over $1 million per year.

Let's kill that because we don't have an e-commerce solution. And I just couldn't wrap my head around that. Why you would acquire us and not just keep something that already exists. So it turned into a lot of head butting, and it's hard to have the ego of everyone in this industry has declared me as the expert here.

You all have been saying I am the expert here. That is why we are going to work so well together. But in reality, you know, I take a step back and it's why would you hire or fire every important key employee and kill off things that automatically make money? Yeah, I really appreciate you describing that. Stephanie and I were talking about this topic before, and it's very hard to get the truth out of the buyer and the seller while the seller is still working there.

So the typical talk track is, if we were talking to you while you were still there, you're like, oh, this is great. I love being here. The team's awesome. I'm fully supported. I get to do the things that I want to do. And the second you get your bonus and or your burnout or whatever and you leave, it's like, wow, that is a totally different world for an entrepreneur to be living in and the firing of all my people.

And you start to hear the actual motivations and truth behind what happens. And to me, it's a scary thing because unless the person representing you in that sale knows exactly who they're selling to and knows that playbook, it's very hard to describe what your life is going to be like for the next couple of years.

So that frustration is completely normal, and I think we need to do a better job. And we're we're really starting to to help people understand what their life is going to be like on the other side and fully prepare them for it. And more importantly, if they're not going to be happy in a situation like that, how do you avoid it?

Right? How do you how do you choose a buyer that that can let you live the life and the professional role that you want to live? So thank you for for sharing that because that's honest. Yeah. We appreciate the honesty. We're trying to keep it real and share these insights. And I guess, Andrew, if I had to say give me wording for a bumper sticker like approach with caution or something to give to founders during the selling process.

What would it be? They will destroy it and you have to be okay with that. Wow. Yeah. It's more often than not. Right? Right, right. I mean, I had heard from so many people during the process, and it sounds almost cliche to the point of know what you're going to do after the acquisition. Entrepreneurs don't work well in corporate like these things that everyone kept saying to me, but in my head it was this strategic acquisition is going to be different.

They lead with cloud hosting. We lead with security. Now they get to lead with both. So a lot of it made sense on paper. But the fast moving entrepreneur and I noticed it day one. They they announced the acquisition at the biggest conference of the year. Now because it's a small pool, we had to keep it very, very hush hush of of our team.

The only other person that knew, and she only found out two weeks before the acquisition. That was my VP. And just because I needed her to get me some of the things that we needed to get to the finish line. But it made a lot of sense on paper. Day one, they make the announcement, and so none of the employees at either organization knew this was happening.

They had the, you know, the big booth. All of our customers are there, all of their customers asking questions. The salesmen don't know anything about us other than we take their clients and like, we're competitors. That's all they know. And they bring it up in a meeting. They're like, yeah, no one knows anything.

And I was like, I'm just gonna throw together a quick calendly, give them a QR code, and they can just talk to my people. After the conference. No one wants to talk to a salesman during the conference anyway, so QR code, it's not the best solution. We've got this solved. And then her response was, oh, this isn't a solutions meeting.

This is a problem discussion meeting. And I was like, well, I got the solution. It's like, no, this isn't the meeting for like the conference ends tomorrow. When when do we solve this? And they're I'm like, no, we don't solve this. That was sort of the tone of the next year. So people had people had told me be okay with it.

And my problem, as bad as it sounds, was I cared too much or as cliche. You know, when you hire someone, it's like everyone has downfalls. What's yours? Oh, I care too much. I work too hard. But but that was my truth. As the founder that, you know, I had poured my soul into this for the last decade and

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no one cared. No one wanted to see it go anywhere. My team did, but they had buy in, and it was such a small team that everyone had a relationship and everyone was moving in the same direction. So being okay with that, I wish I had known or I had heard. Rather, I wish I had listened to that and not think my situation is different because this acquisition makes so much sense.

Can I can I ask would, if you had really internalized it and really had the crystal ball saw what was going to happen? Would you have gone through with that acquisition sold to that buyer, or would you have said, you know what, I'm going to we're going to keep going on our own, or we're going to look for a different buyer with a better fit.

They were the perfect buyer. So I, I don't regret that the financial side of it didn't have to work. Again at age 37. So it put my family in a we can check the box of we can do, for the most part, anything that we want forever, which opens up a new post exit problem of I can do whatever I want and have no idea what I want to do, because what I wanted to do was build my company.

So then there was a huge identity crisis the next year and people say, what do you do? Well, what I do is I used to run a tech company because I have no identity anymore, and I don't regret the sale. I don't regret the buyer. And they were very nice people. They all meant well, but it just wasn't a good fit for someone like Andrew.

So the other piece, I'm very, very happy I sold when I did because there was this thing coming out called ChatGPT. And it took maybe a 5% in my decision of who knows, maybe. Do I actually see my clients utilizing AI to not have an IT company anymore? It'll never be good enough to do what we do. And now it's like, yes it is.

It is way better. I really appreciate the honesty and all the senses and especially about the identity Crisis. And I thought about this idea of an existential crisis. And it seems like every founder has one. When they sell their company that there's some shape or form of an existential crisis. And in your case, and in many cases, it sounds like it's an identity crisis like it used to be.

I'm the founder of this company, and I'm the guy who used to be running that company, or I was the founder of the company. And it sounds like. Did you have anyone to turn to during that challenging time? Did you have an advisor or resources or someone to help you in the exit? No, nothing. I wasn't aware of peer groups either, so things like IPO and EO and post exit founders.

None of this stuff was on my radar at that time either, so I was very much alone. And granted, it's the best problem in the world, right? But, you know, my friends who are doctors are like, okay, we're tired of hearing about how your problem is you don't have to do anything anymore. You know, you make more than I do as a doctor, and I work all day, every day.

Your complaint is you're not given enough work to do. So the existential crisis is a great is a great term. I had never heard that, but that's exactly what it was. But I had no one to guide me through it. Some people on Reddit said the cliche stop caring. We were the, I think, the seventh, eighth, ninth acquisition from this company.

So there were other post exit founders that worked in that company, who also told me immediately I was like, oh yeah, how's it working here? And the one guy was like, I'm going to give you some advice. Just stop caring. Don't care. Wow. We went from 10 million RR to 5 million RR. No one bothers me. I just had to stop caring.

So I don't answer messages. That's crazy. I've never thought about that cohort of other post exit founders in the company that acquired you. If they're doing multiple acquisitions, that's really interesting. We do have to keep things moving along. But I'm normally like the drill sergeant. I'm like, let's go.

And, um, we really want to talk about what you're working on today, which is sober founders. So I read that you started your company when you were one year sober. So I'm a bit curious about how those two things came together. And then we would love to hear more about what you're doing today. What is sober founders?

What's your mission? Yeah. So during that existential crisis and the timing worked out perfectly, I had jokingly said, I hope I figure out my next thing right before my burnout. So I'm excited about it and then can just quit. And so my burnout say it was September 15th, something like that, and Halloween.

So two weeks before that, we had run the first Sober founders group. So during this existential crisis, someone had told me about this thing called an ikigai. Ikigai. And it's sort of the Japanese finding your purpose, something that's uniquely you. So at this point, I had maybe ten years sober. So it was a big part of my life, a big part of my identity.

And. Okay, I've built a company from nothing, had an exit. So I'm, I am sort of a unique position of a sober entrepreneur. And I know there's others like me, but it's kind of hard to find us. So I just sent out a thing on LinkedIn and Facebook said, hey, let's all just have a group and get together. And some strangers who followed me from the accountant days were like, oh, this is a great idea.

When's the next one? And I was like, I guess just next week and I'll quit my job and see what happens. And so what started off as just a quick zoom meeting. It's evolved over the last 18 months and now we have multiple cohorts in multiple cities. It's done mostly online, but there's in-person meetups and just building that community of like minded people that are all sober entrepreneurs.

We all have these sort of unique circumstances in our life. But the ikigai saying, Andrew, that's your thing. And then what went from just sort of my side thing to real nonprofit 501 C3 Dada. There were some other people in my life that were saying, you don't have a company, so

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this is your next thing. This is the next mountain for you to climb. Don't play small. And here we are. So it's it's been so fulfilling to. That's amazing. And it's so inspiring and encouraging to hear about And we've spoken to some other founders who are speak very publicly about dealing with addiction.

They're currently sober. And I wonder if you think, based on your own experience and other founders in your network that you work with, do you feel like there's this prevalence of addiction in founders? People talk about workaholics and a workaholic. That's very real, and you're addicted to your work.

And I guess I'm wondering, do you feel like the entrepreneurs who are go, go, go and chasing and doing it? Do we see more cases of people dealing with addiction? I believe the statistic was founders are three times more likely to be an addict alcoholic, because it's just how we're wired. We're kind of crazy.

We jump at something that we like, we find something that we like, and then just keep doubling down on it until it stops working. And so even if you are sober, you can just replace the addiction with work and it's a much healthier thing. You know, I'm not necessarily ruining Christmas because I was blackout drunk.

You know, I'm not ruining Christmas because I worked too much. And you know, you can make the argument for your missing family things for work and stuff. But the acceptance publicly for workaholism, especially in this hustle grind. Elon Musk doesn't sleep 24 over seven culture where it gets romanticized.

It's difficult to pump the brakes on it when you are addicted to something, and you're encouraged to be addicted to it, so it is a very real thing. It's very prevalent. Some people are vocal about it. Other people are sort of in the shadows and have come to me saying, I identify with everything that you do, but I am not going to publicly be part of anything that you do.

I'd like to make a donation anonymously and tip my hat to you, but I do not want to be involved. And, you know, there's a stigma with it. In the last ten years, it's become more acceptable. Actually, funny enough, I think the Apple Watch kind of is what really moved people into getting sober, because you get the sleep score when you wake up and people are like, oh, I shouldn't drink, my sleep score is bad.

And maybe not the addict alcoholic that can't stop. But the people that are like, maybe I should tone it down so sobriety doesn't have as much of the negative connotation as, say, the 1930s when AA started, where it was like, we need to be anonymous because I'm a doctor and my patients can't know that this exists.

So it's it's a different type of world now, right? Wow. That's amazing. You're breaking the stigma. This is something you didn't have. In addition to having, you know, a guide, an advisor, when you're going through your exit, it doesn't sound like you had a community and a cohort of other business owners who were dealing with the roller coaster of sobriety and everything.

So big kudos to you. Role include the website offer sober founders in the show notes. So you're paying it forward in a lot of different ways. You're paying it forward by creating these this community, these resources, these assets for sober founders. And now you're also paying it forward in the exit side with us as an exited founder on our exited marketplace.

So why are you excited about helping other founders on their exit journeys, and why do you think you rock at it? Well, I, I can say I'm excited about it just because part of this mission has been I have been blessed way more than I deserve, not only with the exit, but just the things in my life Family and the opportunities that have.

Literally fallen into my lap some of these Grand Slams, right. My my plan wasn't five years into the company, the IRS will make a law and no one else will discover it, right? It literally fell into my lap. My accountant just said, hey, here's a thing I need to do. And then that's really what made it take off.

So I am trying to be the person and build the resources that I wish that I had during my journey, and I think it would have been a little different in my exit journey if there were people alongside me that could say more than the M&A broker who would say, well, this is what usually happens. On the M&A process for the financial side of things.

Here's what to expect in the journey. But for someone to say, here is what happened to me, and here is how I navigated it and that shared experience. And that's kind of the foundation of 12 step recovery, the A.A., NACA, all those different anonymous programs. It's not just a therapist saying you need to do this, but someone saying, I have been in this hole before and I'm going to jump in with you and show you how I got out.

Whether or not you choose to follow me is up to you, but I'm going to show you a way that worked for me. So with the exit side of things, I think it's just incredible to be able to connect exiting founders, especially if it's the first time exit with someone who has been through it before, who can just share. When I was in your position, here's what I did.

Here's what I was told. So basically this whole episode is is in a message to myself three years ago and then it was late May 23rd. So, I mean, it literally was three years ago of here is what may happen. Here is my experience. And everyone told me this would happen. And I said, my situation is different and it wasn't.

So just having someone to bounce things off of and just the you're not alone. I've been through this. I understand the great problems that are on the other side. I also understand that because these problems are great, you will not get empathy from the people that you usually turn to when you're struggling.

And my wife included, I mean, I remember we were on vacation, I was talking about it, and she's just like, you have the best problem on earth. Everybody wants to not be doing anything and getting paid well for it. Like you, you have hit the lottery. You don't get to complain. And it wasn't a lack of gratitude or wanting to complain, but just.

I am a built in problem solver and I cannot solve this problem. And I don't know who to talk to. And I get ostracized because the problem's too good, which I recognize. But just being able to help others, which is the whole point of sober founders, my my salary is $0. So it's not a I'm going to build this and make a lot of money.

It's it's really the opposite. So it's just another opportunity where in that realm, most people, not all of them, there are a lot of people that have come to me, hey, I'm thinking of exiting. Here's my thoughts and I can share my experience there. But for people that are going through it and maybe a larger sum than some of the ones that I've been speaking with to be able to say, here's what happened, here's how I got out.

And just now. No one feels sorry for you. You may need to find a different group of people to speak to this new set of problems that you haven't faced before, that also, a lot of other people can't empathize with it, you know? And like the 12 step recovery world, I think AHS helped 2 million people get sober.

Nars helped, I think. I don't know the number, but you know, these 12 step fellowships have helped millions of people, even if you're not an addict alcoholic. Everyone's heard of these things. But the exit is very, very specific problem that I wish someone had been able to talk me through it, and the value that I would have had in that would have it would have helped.

Fast forward the next year of 2024, where everything was great, but everything was horrible at the same time is maybe the best way that I could put it. Andrew, that it's a great answer. I really appreciate your humility as an entrepreneur saying things landed in your lap, but I think what I'm taking away from all of that, while you're going to be great as an exited founder helping somebody during M&A, I don't think you're giving yourself enough credit in that.

When you found that opportunity. You said just Wisp falls in your lap. I will use my sports analogy. You've been taking a lot of shots on goal, right? You know how to shoot. And so for an entrepreneur to be able to say, I've been doing this, something's wrong, I see an opportunity. You're going out and taking another shot, because I know a lot of people would listen to this story and be like, oh, I wish wisp had fallen in my lap.

Well, you're going to go execute against that. And because you took all those shots on goal, when one a puck ends up in the slot, you know where to go, right? And you took that shot. So I feel like that pivot can be really helpful to business owners as they're building, as they're thinking about positioning for sale.

And then certainly you have the the lens of what is an M&A transaction. How do you court a buyer? What do you hear when something is being said to you? How do you internalize that? What is true, what is not? I think you're you're not the first to think about it, but you're verbalizing the post exit Life as well, where you can be really supportive.

Right. And we're we're both part of P.F. and that is a group started by exited founders who want to support each other around, like, who are we? What is next? Why do we feel lost when you can't voice that problem? Because you now have money, right? And so other people will think, oh, you know, that's that's just a crybaby, right?

When these were wired in a certain way and our identity has been stripped. So I'm so glad we got a chance to talk to you today, because now I can see your value for another business owner on a continuum. It isn't just dropping you on an M&A team where you're going to be helpful. It's before and after as well. So really, really appreciate that explanation.

Yeah. And the you know, we didn't really touch on it, but I had tried to sell in 2019 as we went from 4 million to 2 million to, you know, lower and lower. And the reason I couldn't sell is basically we didn't have contracts, we didn't have a whole bunch of things in place that a company that is trying to exit should have.

We also didn't have a good story. Why do you want to leave? Uh, I just had a kid. I want to be home with my family. And it's like. And also, our revenue is down so much, and I can't find a way out of it. But when the accountant opportunity came, that was a very fresh wound of every potential buyer saying why we weren't a good company.

And then because we essentially got to start over, we built everything. We need contracts in place. We need recurring revenue. We need to to prioritize our offering even though it doesn't really fit into a box. Let's put it into a box as much as we can. Let's remove me from the equation as much as we can. So all of these things that I learned just through a failed exit put us in a great position for when the better opportunity for a life changing exit, as opposed to a nice to have exit, because we were built wonderfully and built to sell.

You were built to exit, right? You knew how to do that. Super valuable. Um, and we had a ton of leverage because I loved working in my company. I was like, oh, I don't have to worry about cashflow because we have contractual MRR and, you know, all these things that, oh, that's why someone who would want to buy the company would want to see these things.

So it also gave me a ton of leverage because it was a strategic acquisition. And they came to us. I told them, I don't care if this happens or not. I am perfectly happy running a company that runs itself without me. I travel the world nonstop with my young family and everything grows without me. So you have to make me a great offer and not try to pull something on me.

For me to consider this conversation. And to their credit, they they did that and held up their word. And you know, I can't complain with the terms and how they courted me during it. It was very respectful. And that doesn't seem to be everybody's experience, but getting it ready for the sale, even though it wasn't intentionally built to sell, like you said, it was built to sell.

And thankfully it happened exactly when it did. Thankfully, we uncovered that nugget at the end of the conversation because that is freaking huge, man. I mean, that's everything, because of course people want to hear about your successful exit story and you know, you your truth baring and telling us the painful parts of it.

But the fact that you had, as you described, a failed process, a failed exit process beforehand. I mean, that literally informed how you set this next one up. That was a slam dunk, home run, whatever, you know. But Andrew, we really appreciate you taking the time and sharing. But we're really happy to have you.

And it's just so awesome to hear from you and hear your story. And you're very inspirational. And we love the pay it forward mentality and keep doing the good work and keep paying it forward. And keep using your experience and expertise and the personal shit you went through to help other people. That's what it's all about.

So thank you very much. Thanks, Andrea, and thank you for having me. Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of The Exited Founder Podcast. For business owners who are looking to sell or want to ensure their exit ready. Our team is here to help you maximize your outcome. So connect with us at exit today.