Scaling a business is one thing, but building one that’s sellable – and for millions – is a whole different game.

In this episode, I’m joined by my good friend Nick Bradley, who knows exactly what it takes to turn a business into a valuable asset that buyers want.

We’re getting into the real questions: is your business even sellable? What makes it attractive to buyers? And how do you build it so it runs without you at the centre of it all?

If you’ve ever thought about what’s next for your business – whether that’s scaling, selling, or creating more freedom – this conversation will get you thinking.

Highlights:

(3:11) Understanding Succession Plans and Sellable Businesses

(8:02) Lifestyle vs. Growth Businesses

(11:04) Types of Businesses and Marketability

(13:28) Preparing for a Business Exit

(17:37) Challenges and Opportunities in Scaling Businesses

(28:34) Financial Management and Due Diligence

(34:36) Embarrassing Business Stories

(40:17) Final Thoughts and Takeaways

Connect with Nick:

Connect with Nick HERE

Connect with Dawn:

This podcast is in association with @HerPowerCommunity – The #1 Female Founders Global Community where connections flourish & growth is intentional.

Transcription:

 Dawn McGruer

Hey, it’s Dawn McGruer, the business growth coach.

And welcome to Dawn of a New Era, the podcast where we talk all things health, wealth and happiness and where founders share the good and bad and ugly of being an entrepreneur. Welcome to Dawn of a New Era with myself, Dawn McGrewer, the business growth coach.

And today we have Nick Bradley, good friend of mine, who has joined us to talk about how to scale profitable businesses that thrive without the business owner having to be there. And I think one of the things that I talk a lot about with clients is that what do they actually want?

Like what does it look like, you know, in terms of selling a business? Do you want to exit? And this is a question that a lot of people don’t know the answer to.

So, Nick, tell us a little bit about you and your background.

Nick Bradley

It’s a pleasure to be here, Dawn. So thank you for having me on the show today. I’ll try and keep this succinct.

You can probably tell by the accent that I’m not necessarily from the UK by origin. I’m Australian. I moved to the UK in 2003. I was supposed to be coming over for a nine months a convent.

I was working for a big media company at the time and as luck would have it, I met my wife and now 20 odd years later, two young daughters, I’m here. So my background is pretty mixed and varied.

I started off with my own business as an 18 year old, a gym business that I had in Adelaide, South Australia and it was actually focused on personal training. One to one training, and back then we’re talking early 90s, no one knew what a personal trainer was. It’s quite common these days.

So most of my clientele were high net worth individuals. It was very much a luxury to have a personal trainer. So I scaled that company to sell it at 21 for 3,000 Australian dollars. So much money, right.

I often say that I redeem myself, I don’t know, three, three thousand. I joke and say it’s a Starbucks coffee these days. Right. With exchange rates and everything else, there’s a lot of things that happen.

So by starting a business and understanding what that felt like, I, I didn’t really want to do that again.

So I went into the world of corporate for the next couple of decades and I worked for some of the biggest media companies in the world, including News International under Rupert Murdoch and another business called Getty Images out of New York. So I had this amazing career in what I call the world of corporate.

And then that opened up the world of private equity, and for those who haven’t heard of that, that’s an entity in its own right. We can go into who that is and what that is and things like that if you’d like.

But effectively you go and buy companies, you scale them, you sell them for a lot more than what you paid for them. So I did that for over a decade and got involved in something like 117 acquisitions and 26 business exits over that time. So that was a lot of fun.

Not without its peril as well. And then in 2018, I decided, you know what, I can’t be in that world anymore. It’s quite toxic. It’s very much about the money.

So I decided to leave that and work solely on the side of the entrepreneurs and business owners, helping them really understand and learn what private equity does successfully to scale companies so they can apply that to their businesses from the outset to create freedom and financial independence.

 Dawn McGruer

Yeah, I think so many people listening to this will be in a position where they have built something that has been their passion and their dream, but they may not have a true idea of where that business is actually going long term. And how many of us actually think about what is our succession plan, like what we do with the business and is the business even sellable?

So can we dig into, first of all, how do we, we start to identify, like what our succession plan is and what is categorized as a sellable business.

Nick Bradley

Let’s start with the idea of entrepreneurship and what that’s about, because it will lend itself into the question. Because I think a lot of people start businesses for different reasons, but a lot of it is the belief and understanding and vision of freedom.

And sometimes, you know, it’s by necessity, you know, they might lose a job and they can’t get a job safe to start a business. But either way, you know, you want this idea of having more control over your life and your lifestyle and all those sort of things.

And as people lean into that and try and build something that creates that, sometimes people find that easier than others, but more often not. It’s a journey, it’s never a linear process.

But there is a point where I suppose the epitome of freedom, right, is having something that, you know, potentially could be acquired by someone else for what I call life changing money or total financial independence. And not everyone has that as a goal or an outcome. I mean, everyone has to exit their business the thing that they’ve created at some point.

There’s no argument against that, even if that’s by, you know, you die one day still having your business, but either way you have to exit. The thing I pose to people is how do you do that on your terms?

So whether that’s having someone that takes over your business, so some form of succession plan, whether that is having a business that can be sold for millions and millions of dollars. What I like to impress on people is that these are just outcomes based on what you are trying to achieve in your entrepreneurial journey.

And any possibility is possible. Right?

Anything that you kind of create is possible as long as you understand the mechanics of what you’re trying to build towards with clear vision of what you’re trying to create. There are eight different exit options, dawn, if you really want to get into the mechanics of it, I’m intrigued to.

 Dawn McGruer

Know what they are. So yeah, definitely.

Nick Bradley

Well, without sort of delving into the kind of, you know, having to sort of leave your business because of disability or death, we’ll park that one for a second. But there is a piece within that you’ve got four internal options and you’ve got four external options.

So the internal options are things like I’m going to sell the business to a partner, I’m going to sell it to employees.

There’s things like management buyouts and management buy ins and things like that where you’re selling it to a cohort of the leadership team, giving it to your family. All of those sort of things, they’re internal sort of options.

And normally when a business has a certain amount of scale, normally a smaller business, they’re the only options that you have. Okay. Other than, you know, sort of closing the thing down, which we’ll get into. External options.

This is where you can sell the business to a financial buyer like private equity. So my background, you can sell the business to a strategic buyer like a competitor of yours.

So another company buys your company, you can create what is called an ipo.

So a public offering where you effectively sell your business, even though it’s more of a capital raise, but you’re kind of having the public buy shares in your business. And then there’s things called liquidation and recapitalization. And liquidation is obviously the closing down of a business.

So you bring a liquidator in to effectively sell off the assets. That’s not a. You usually a great exit for people. It’s usually when there aren’t any other options.

And recapitalization is where you have other financing go into your business so you can take money off the table over time, but you still have shares. So they’re all different types of exits. Some you’re giving away full control, other times you’re keeping some control.

But really, if you unpack all of that, there are options for that entrepreneur to create whatever that freedom and financial independence goal is for them.

 Dawn McGruer

I think the thing is, is a lot of people will have a desire to create something that’s a lifestyle business. Some people will create a business where their maybe team is lean and they’re in a position where they are the actual person delivering the.

The service or whatever. How does somebody decide whether actually becoming a sellable business is right for them?

Because there’s many different things you could do at any point. And, and I guess is. Is the timeline.

Like if someone’s in their 20s or 30s, they’re probably not thinking about what they’re going to do when they’re retiring, but they probably should be. If we start number one with how does someone decide on if having a sellable business is right for them? Is that a process that you can go through?

Nick Bradley

There’s a predictable journey of entrepreneurship. Think of it like stage gates. There are points where you can jump off if you want to or stay where you are and all that sort of thing.

And there are certain decisions that you make through that journey which actually take you down one path that you can’t really go back from. And I’ll explain that because I think it’s important for people to understand who are listening to this.

So obviously every business starts up which is technically a startup, and that tends to be, you know, a fun time. It’s creative, it’s chaotic, not too much complexity.

But there’s a point where, you know, people start to struggle when they want to kind of make it bigger. Because the sheer definition of scaling is really about bringing more people and process and complexity into your business.

So I often like to say that there are two pathways, but like, choose your own adventure. You’ve got the lifestyle pathway and you’ve got the growth pathway. Okay, sometimes called performance.

But either way, the lifestyle pathway is where you’re not really building a business to sell. You’re building a business that’s going to create income and cash flow for you to have an extraordinary life in whatever.

That definition again is for you.

And the reason that’s an important distinction is that if you’re building a lifestyle business, it’s not really going to normally be something that becomes complex because that’s going to ruin your lifestyle. As soon as you have to work more in the business, that’s going to reduce your freedom. The Other thing also is you’d like to take money out.

So often people have a lifestyle business, they’re thinking about their income, not what that money could be used for to grow the business.

So in that pathway, and I often encourage people to build a lifestyle business first because the lifestyle business normally has to create profit for them and they can get enjoyment and freedom. But the other side of the coin is the growth business.

And the growth business is where that entrepreneur or that team is investing every profit that they possibly can back into the growth. So they’re probably not paying themselves very much.

They’re probably putting like years and years and years of kind of sweat into their businesses on the premise that one day someone’s going to buy the business for a lot of money and that’s when they realize all the fruits of their labor. Here’s the distinction. If you go and raise money, certainly institutional money, like you might go to a friend or family, that’s slightly different.

But if you start to bring in angel investors or venture capital, as soon as you do that, no one’s putting money into an entity unless it’s a growth business because they expect to get the return usually when the business is sold.

So if you ever kind of think, hey, I’m going to build a business and raise all this money and I’m going to have all this fun, realize that you might be bringing in a boss earlier than you thought.

 Dawn McGruer

Yeah, definitely. And having authority to abide to.

Nick Bradley

Yes, exactly. So you can go from lifestyle business to a growth business. You can make that transition at some point that does happen.

Sometimes people start a business with no intention of selling it. It becomes very successful that they go, well, hold on, maybe I can now, you know, have this kind of thing that can be sold.

But if you start with the whole grow, it’s a growth business and then I want it to become a lifestyle business. It depends on the choices. Some choices, as I said, take you down a path that you can’t come back from.

 Dawn McGruer

And I think it’s interesting because I’ve got multiple businesses and I’ve talked to you about this in terms of obviously what to do. And it’s definitely a choice that is not for the faint hearted.

I know a lot of obviously founders who have started the businesses, some have raised all of the money themselves and then they’ve got, you know, investment further down the line. Some people have started off with the sort of incubator funds and things like that.

I would say a majority of people probably listening are in businesses where they have started With a passion project. So if you think about the types of businesses, obviously there are service based, product based things like that.

Service based businesses, are they more difficult to or are they less appealing for people to buy because the service maybe relies on the person versus like a product where the brand is in its entity. How does that work with the different types of businesses?

Nick Bradley

I think they’ve got different strategies around them.

So I like service businesses and in terms of acquisitions and things like that that I used to do in private equity, the majority were service businesses. And the reason for that is they don’t normally take too much capital intensity to be able to grow and scale.

Like I don’t believe in the idea that everything should be a service. I believe in the concept of a productized service.

So you have this idea that things can operate within a box even though the, the actual delivery is some form of service to the end user. But the problem with a product based business is that you normally have to have the management of cash flow.

You’ve got to buy the product maybe first and then try and sell it. You’ve got all these different kind of things going on. So if you think about what does an investor like.

Investor like something which is low risk and high margin. And so you can create that from both entities. But the other thing about risk is starting a service business is not that risky.

You just need to know how to scale it. If it’s all about you, then it’s not sellable. Right.

So that’s why you have to kind of make that leap from lifestyle to a scale up like we just talked about.

And that’s where some people become unstuck and certainly where I’ve built my whole, I suppose advisory and mentoring niche is around helping people make that jump.

 Dawn McGruer

Yeah. And I think the thing is, is with my academy, I was talking to you about this before.

Obviously when I first started it was very much around my brand and me and as a personal brand. And then as it grew into sort of a private university became its own corporate commercial brand.

And then at that point I could start to see more, you know, how it would be a sellable asset. So it can start one way and obviously go another. How long do people normally need to prepare and do all the due diligence and everything?

So if there someone’s listening to it now, thinking, do you know what in the next sort, three to five years, I want to exit. Like is that the sort of time planning they need to be at or.

Nick Bradley

Yep. I say minimum. Well, it depends on how, how well the foundations are of the business and the size and scale based on what it’s going to be valued at.

So I say between 12 and 36 months is ideal. Sometimes it’s more if the business foundations aren’t there.

Sometimes you, you kind of find a business that’s doing extremely high net profit or ebitda. It’s built beautifully, everything runs with systems and processes. The culture is great, the brand is great.

And in that situation, you know, you can assess that company based on what its value would be if it went into the market and also have an understanding of who would buy it. And that might be a number that that business owner absolutely wants to achieve.

What’s more typical though is someone will come to me and they’ll say, okay, I want to sell my business for X amount of money. You know, in most cases it’s an eight figure number, you know, 20 million, 30 million, 50 million or more.

And I’ll go, okay, well if that’s your number, let’s firstly understand is that what you’re actually going to take out? Because sometimes people get confused. They go, well, hold on, I want to sell my business for 20 million.

And I go, you realize that’s not what you’re going to take. That might be the enterprise value.

Then you’ve got the tax piece, you’ve got how much someone’s going to actually buy you when they first acquire your business and not going to give you all that money upfront. And so people have to understand that. So what often happens is they’ll say 20 million, but then all of a sudden it’s 30 million.

Because the amount that they want to have as their wealth. Right. Is different. Yeah. So without going into too much of the detail, unless you want to on this, you, you start, in my opinion, with the number.

Right. What do I, what, what does my wealth need to be for me to kind of have financial freedom?

Then we work back on what the financial gearing and the strategic gearing of the business needs to look like in order for that outcome to be achieved. And within that there’s different components.

 Dawn McGruer

Yeah, I think that’s really interesting. It’s got me thinking and it’s probably got a lot of people’s minds going.

See, I see a lot of people talking about these milestones and figures they want to get to. So they’re like, dawn, you know, I want to get to 100k, 200k a month, whatever it is. But really in my eyes that’s less important.

It’s more about profit margin.

And I specialize in working with like agency models and also bringing kind of service based businesses in line with that so that there are profit margins of like, you know, 40 or 60 or even 80% in those businesses.

So if someone is obviously building and scaling their business to a profitable scalable entity, is it the amount of revenue that they’re taking in that kind of gets them to the point? I mean, like, do you sell businesses that are six or seven figure or do businesses have to be a certain size to kind of go down this route?

Nick Bradley

So here’s the thing, right? The value of a business is based on the size and scale of that business to some extent. Right.

So the bigger the business generally, the higher the multiple that someone will pay. And the multiple is usually based on its profitability, not its revenue. Here’s a kind of really interesting distinction.

So people who focus on revenue, I mean, obviously you’ve got to sell something to then make, you know, cash flow from it. But when someone like me comes in to assess a business, I’m more interested in the cash flow.

 Dawn McGruer

Yeah.

Nick Bradley

Because it’s the profit that’s going to be the difference between how I then scale that company. So you mentioned the question about, you know, can a business that’s worth six or seven figures sell?

Yes, it can sell, but you’ve got to understand what the marketplace of business acquisitions look like.

So there’s a certain threshold of when a private equity firm in particular would start to look at a business and that’s usually around 2 to 3 million of net profit or EBITDA. Once you get up to about 5 million, so it’s a reasonable business, then you open up the full, what we call mid market.

And the thing that’s interesting about that is if your business is below those thresholds, it’s like trying to sort of sell anything. When there’s no buyers, there’s no real supply and demand tension.

So you can sell it, but it’s going to be lower value, there’s going to be less buyers, and the chances of selling are much, much more reduced. So so much so that if you don’t hit those thresholds, most small businesses have a 2 in 10 chance of ever selling.

So that’s why they get given away to employees or whatever, or they get closed down. Once you go over those thresholds, you have something like an 8 in 10 chance of selling.

 Dawn McGruer

Well, that’s really interesting.

Nick Bradley

Yeah, and that’s because there’s something like, I forget the exact figure. I think it’s something like 8 to 9,000 private equity firms operate in the mid market.

So as soon as you broke open up that market, you’ve just opened up 8 to 9,000 potential buyers which don’t exist unless you hit those thresholds.

 Dawn McGruer

I think one of the things that’s really stuck with me and I hear a lot of people talking about this is that so many businesses I talk to, they’re like, oh, you know, I’m going to, you know, sell my business and whatever, but they are very focused on what cash they’re taking out right now.

So when I talk to people who have, you know, startups, businesses that may be in like more like the SaaS or FinTech, they’re like literally running on base costs, like what does it cost to run their life until they get to a point. So it’s a very different market. I see.

Nick Bradley

Well, there’s something just on that. Sorry to jump in, but this is important, right?

If you’ve got a business that is really profitable and you’re taking the cash out and you’re spending it or whatever else, that’s not necessarily a problem because remember when someone buys it, let’s say you’re taking out all the cash, let’s say it’s 2 million a year. If I buy the business off you, I’m not going to put someone in who’s going to expect to take 2 million out.

I might put in a CEO on a couple hundred grand a year, but then I’m making 1.8 million. So it’s not an issue about spending money, it’s about whether the business can make money.

And the reason why the SaaS businesses or the technology businesses really struggle is most of them are not profitable. I sit on three boards at the moment of businesses that are moving towards profit, but they’re very capital intensive.

One is a fintech, the other one is kind of more product based but they just haven’t got the cash flow. The idea of hey, I’m going to build a technology business and sell it for a billion dollars.

Like Elon Musk, I often laugh at people and say, hey, listen, if you want freedom and financial independence, if that’s the goal, that ain’t the path.

 Dawn McGruer

Yeah, a lady I know, Sunira Madani, sold her business for a billion. There’s a lot that goes into that, but only 1.8% of investment actually goes into female led businesses.

And you know that I’ve set up her power community to really dismantle the stigmas around that.

And I think the most shocking thing that I still can’t get over is how many female led businesses in the UK or even globally are actually generating over a million. What’s your thoughts around this?

Nick Bradley

I’ve thought about this question a lot based on more of kind of the interactions that I have with founders and it is quite crazy. It feels to me, it feels to me like it’s less than 10%. Yeah, right.

You know, so one in 10 entrepreneurs that I come into some form of conversation with or whatever else is a woman. And I kind of, I don’t know the answer as to why that’s the case.

I definitely think in my old world of private equity it’s extremely male dominated and it’s very masculine and very aggressive and assertive and all those sort of things.

And maybe that’s intimidating because I think some of the, some of the what you would perceive as successful female founders that I do meet are quite masculine in their outreach and their way of looking too.

 Dawn McGruer

Yeah. I mean on the other side only 14 of VCs and angels are women, which is interesting.

You know, on the flip side, I don’t think there is a like a hard and fast answer to it. I just think it’s interesting. I think a lot of people have tried to get funding.

I also think there’s probably an element of perception out there that women, because maybe they will, you know, start a business and then also have families that they will sacrifice their passion or business and things to, to then go into a different thing, a different passion. I don’t know, there are many, I suppose, reasons out there. I definitely want to see how things change over the next year.

So for entrepreneurs then who are looking to scale profitable businesses, one of the things that we’ve talked about before is business model. And I said that 80% of people that I meet, their business model is not actually scalable.

They get to a point where they have kind gone through the turbulent startup, they’ve got to an element of success and they find it really hard to, to grow. And one of the things that I see is that the business model relies on them.

So what is your advice around then switching into something that then they are not the central person responsible for that. They could go away on holiday, the business would run perfectly well. I mean I’m guessing it’s around team.

Nick Bradley

I look at it in terms of three levels of the call it again similar to stages that someone has to go through. And the first level I call operational freedom. And that’s where there are three main components to operational freedom as far as I’m concerned.

One of them is the Clarity of what you’re building.

So the vision piece, the second is making sure that you have the right team around you to build to create that vision and within that the right processes of how they interconnect and interoperate and any automation or technology that can make that more efficient. So that might be where the business model piece starts to come into play. And then the last piece is understanding your numbers.

So if you want to create any level of operational freedom, and my definition of that by the way, is that you don’t have to be there every day. The business runs without you. You can take, you know, a six week sabbatical and you’ve got the right structure, the foundation for that to work.

You’ve got to have those three things super clear.

If you don’t know where you’re going, then you, it doesn’t matter how good your team is, they’re going to build something you don’t want or they’re going to not know what to do and it’s going to be very inefficient if you can’t measure the score right?

If you don’t know what winning looks like, if you’re not clear on those things a your team doesn’t know and there’s no way you can go away and sort of be able to have an arm’s length view of performance. So that’s the first sort of most important piece.

So in answer to the question around, you know, freedom, whatever else, the first piece of that has to be within those components. The second thing I focus on is what’s called the profitable scale piece. And there are three elements of that as well.

But the key thing here is cash flow generation through recurring revenue models. Yeah, so you don’t want to have a business where, you know, to use the analogy, every time you want to eat you have to go hunting. Right.

You want to have something that is predictable, repeatable and sustainable because you know, you’ve gone out hunting once and that entity continues to produce. Someone crudely said once. It’s a bit like the cow. You can get the cow for the steak or you can get the cow for the milk.

Steak tastes fantastic, but it only lasts once.

 Dawn McGruer

On this recurring revenue. But so many business models rely on things that are a one off sell and it’s very hard then when there is a turbulent change in the market.

During COVID obviously, I think every single business changed its operational structure in some way.

Do you think businesses became leaner and more aware of their operations because of COVID and became better businesses As a result of what was enforced on us.

Nick Bradley

I think it, it made people think about their business models. Right.

So whereas some, particularly some of the, the businesses that had a lot of, let’s call it fat in their businesses, so they had, you know, very expensive offices, they had all sorts of different policies around kind of how traditional work needed to be done through high supervision, whatever that means. Right.

Whereas, you know, I know businesses that have gone from a very, very heavy cost infrastructure to super light and massively profitable because they had to change the way they were operating. The idea that, you know, we can only do a deal if we meet face to face. Well, that, that might have been true.

But if you can’t do it anymore, what are you going to do? Right.

So I do think that has caused other people to be able to create better businesses because of that, but also it’s caused a lot of businesses to go bust.

 Dawn McGruer

Yeah.

Nick Bradley

Because they were too slow to adapt or too slow to see that actually there was a different reality to how they could operate.

 Dawn McGruer

And is there anything you want to add on the original? Just before I dived in about my Covid piece, you were talking about the structure and the different elements.

Nick Bradley

There are 15 things that I’ll go through some of them.

I have a thing called the Exit for millions blueprint, which is the 15 things that if I was coming in to buy your business as a private equity firm, I would be assessing against so people can get a copy of that. It’s quite interesting because it talks about owner reliance.

So if you are responsible for all the marketing, selling and delivery in your business, that’s unsellable.

 Dawn McGruer

Yes.

Nick Bradley

It talks about a thing called customer concentration. So let’s say 80% of your revenue comes from one or two customers. That’s pretty much unsellable. It talks about a toxic brand or a toxic culture.

Pretty much unsellable, although it can be fixed. Talks about things like audit ready financials. Right.

So those 15 elements are what I call the foundational pieces of a business that has transferable value.

And the idea there for anyone listening is that my business is an asset that can change hands to a new owner and not only run well, but continue to grow under new ownership. And if you understand that. So you know how I talked about operational freedom, profitable scale. The third part is transferable value.

And so if you want to create your perfect exit, whatever that looks like, understanding those three components is critical. And what they are just for, again for context, is what I learned those things in private equity.

This is how private equity would Think about an asset when they acquired a business. So as a business owner, if you can understand those now, it sets you up for multiple different options around what an exit could be for you.

 Dawn McGruer

Yeah, perfect.

Nick Bradley

With or without selling. Just to be super clear.

 Dawn McGruer

Yeah, I was going to say that. So there’d be a lot of people who have probably sparked interest in terms of thinking, oh, you know, I want to kind of move forward.

I would say that the biggest thing that people worry about when they talk about like getting the business ready is the financials.

I think it’s changed as, as time has gone on because if you think about it, things like Xero and having these online accountancy, I think it’s revolutionized the way that people actually do their accounts. I mean most businesses now have their own account or they’d have some. The business.

What are some of the, like horror stories or funny stories that you can share about businesses that you’ve met that just so that we can put a bit of context in here. Because people are probably doubting you’re like, this is an accurate. But you know, we love to hear.

Nick Bradley

Kind of like, I’ll give you a couple. Yeah, I’ll give you a couple. I mean, I think anyone listening to this is probably going to cringe at this point.

So I remember, I remember I was going to buy a. This was actually pre Covid, so I’m kind of glad I didn’t do it in the end. But I was going to buy a cafe.

I do, I do my own sort of acquisitions as well as. As kind of mentor and advise businesses. And it was in Tampa Bay in Florida. And fantastic cafe, like it still exists, thank God.

Post Covid and everything else like that had five separate sites around the area. And I remember going in to have lunch with the owner and the food was fabulous, very organic, very natural, fresh, all that sort of stuff.

And we were chatting, chatting away. And then I had a sort of site tour, if you like. And we went into the office and I was asking questions about, oh, so where’s everything filed?

Because you kind of again, systems, processes, all of these things are either adding value or subtracting value. And when you’re trying to buy a company. John Santa. Anyway, I said, oh, you know, talk to me about your financials. And she goes, oh, they’re all here.

And she opens up, I kid you not. Like a cabinet.

 Dawn McGruer

No.

Nick Bradley

And papers falling out of the cabinet. I’m like, what’s this? Because all that’s invoicing, it’s supplier things, it’s whatever you’re joking. She goes, no, no.

What happens is once a month, you know, my accountant comes in, my bookkeeper comes in and takes all the paper and I’m like, well, where’s all that put? And she goes, I don’t know where that goes. I think it’s in a spreadsheet somewhere.

 Dawn McGruer

Oh, my goodness.

Nick Bradley

We couldn’t. We couldn’t actually. So we got to a point. Everything else about this business, there’s a thing called business attractiveness versus exit readiness.

And business attractiveness is from the outside in. So if a business looks great from the outside, whereas exit readiness is the inside out.

And so if we were scoring this business from the outside in, spectacular, like celebrity clients coming in, like all sorts of stuff like that, but inside a mess. And so we couldn’t get to evaluation because we had no idea what that business was making per year.

 Dawn McGruer

Wow, that’s going to make people feel really good right now. Because anyone, hopefully, it’s like, I’ve got half a chance. Got half a chance.

I’ve actually got things digital and things like Hub, Dot and Dex have been a game changer because I remember talking to people and again, seeing businesses that looked amazing and me saying, like, you know, where are you at, like, with the financials? And they’d be like, oh, you know, I keep all my receipts in this tub. I’m like, what happens to the top? You’ve got to keep it for 10 years.

And I was like, oh, my goodness. And then what happens to them? Oh, don’t know. I just keep them. So I was like, they’re not even going through the business.

And they’re like, do you have to do that? So I think as business owners, when we actually set up, you know, what we’re not bought, is how to do the financials.

So is there any tips again around any of these horror stories? Feel free to share any more that people can kind of like check into and think, like, I’m not making that mistake.

Nick Bradley

The only other horror story I can, I can sort of give you is around raising sort of debt and borrowing money and things like that. So I. I’m not against businesses getting a line of credit and using debt to grow.

In fact, I think it’s very, very smart when the cost of capital is low and interest rates are low. But again, everything centers around the idea of not knowing your numbers, which is like, as I said, it’s that third pillar of operational freedom.

Right? Know how to keep score.

The trick here, if you like, is if you’re a lifestyle business And I would I say this with a slight caveat because I don’t believe it, but I think you can get away with it a bit more.

If you’re a lifestyle business and it’s about you making money and it’s a small business, you’ve got a tiny team or whatever else, you know, you can get away with things being less precise.

I still think you need to have metrics in the business and all that if you want to grow it at all and keep, keep it working, but you can get away with it.

The issue is this, as the business starts to grow, as you get to sort of 15 to 20 employees or more, as you start to bring in more customers, whatever else, it’s like that whole saying about it’s best to kill the monster when it’s small. Right. So you should be bringing in, you know, finance capability and escalating financial capability as you scale.

So you might start with a bookkeeper, then you go to an accountant, then you start to bring in a finance manager, then you might bring in a fractional CFO as you get into the millions, then you might bring in a full time CFO as you get into eight figures. And so what you’re really doing is you’re moving away from counting to being financially aware on what we call the strategic planning.

So it’s called financial planning and analysis. So that’s the journey. So if you’re depending on where you’re at, the trick is to bring in that capability as you need it.

But don’t be afraid to increase your investment in it because it’s going to be crucial, not just for a sale of your business, but just so, you know, kind of everything that’s happening and you know, whether you have a business that’s actually working properly or not financially.

 Dawn McGruer

Yeah.

One of the things I always encourage people to do is to kind of get management accounts and understand kind of on a monthly level like where things are going and, and plan according to the financials, just plan, because this is what we want to be doing.

Because the thing is, is that often when I look at a business, I can cut at least maybe 10,000, 20, 30,000 out immediately just by looking at some of the things that they’ve got subscriptions or they’ve got things they didn’t know or things paying for that actually they don’t need.

So, last part of the puzzle, because obviously we’ve had some of the horror stories in every podcast I do, I always like to ask the entrepreneur because we like to share the good, the bad, and the ugly. What was the most embarra in your business? Entrepreneurial journey.

Nick Bradley

I’ve got. I’ve got a personal one. No, I’ll do a bit. I’ll do. I know that the personal one very quickly was.

I remember when I asked my wife to marry me, I called up what I thought was her father and it was her brother. And I hadn’t asked for the hands, you know, the kind of traditional, you know, is it okay if I ask your daughter to marry me?

It was very late one night, I was calling from New York and he was back in the uk. And afterwards I found out that I asked the wrong person. So that’s. That’s kind of the most.

 Dawn McGruer

Pretty good.

Nick Bradley

That’s pretty. That’s not bad, is it? That’s not bad. I still. Every Christmas it comes up, it’s like, do you remember that night?

We’ve been doing this for 20 years, man. Can we just drop that story?

 Dawn McGruer

Like that’ll be. That’ll go to you to the grave for sure.

Nick Bradley

Yeah. The interesting thing about, particularly when I was in the world of corporate, I made lots and lots of mistakes.

And I remember, see if it was embarrassing or not. Probably the most embarrassing thing. I’ll share this with you. Back in the day in media used to be able to get away with anything.

And I was the marketing director for a. Most of your women listeners are going to hate this, but I was the marketing director for a magazine called fhm.

 Dawn McGruer

Oh, yeah.

Nick Bradley

Do you know what that is? Yeah, yeah. Not quite Playboy, but pretty, pretty out there.

And the most embarrassing thing that happened once was they decided to throw my 30th birthday by bringing. Let’s call it talent in for a lunchtime. Let’s call it a lunch and learn. And I remember no one told the CEO of the media group that that was going on.

And so he had someone come in for a meeting, an external person come in for a meeting who walked past the boardroom that had glass windows up and down and saw this thing going on. And I got this close to losing my job. Now, had I lost that job, what happened after that?

Because we sold the company and I had all this amazing career that could have been the turning point, like what they call a sliding doors moment. So whether it’s embarrassing, whether it’s misguided, whether it’s whatever else it was, what it was like back then in the early 2000s.

 Dawn McGruer

Nick. But funny as it is, I know that you are releasing a book, so tell us a little bit about that.

Nick Bradley

Yeah, so we Covered.

I think some of it today, actually, it’s called exit for millions, and it’s the private equity blueprint to scaling and selling your business for maximum value. And it’s coming out at the end of January, and it’s going to. It’s going to cover a few different things.

It’s going to cover a little bit of my story in a bit more detail, and, you know, the horror stories around that and also the good things about it.

Talk talks about what private equity is in detail, but then it talks about a methodology called scale to sale, and it’s really all the things that I learned in over a decade in private equity about how you can build a business that creates that. That value and that freedom. So it is for people who do want to build a business that can be sold one day into one of those entities.

But there’s also a lot in there about scaling, which is valuable as well.

 Dawn McGruer

Yeah.

And I think even if someone isn’t even at that point or isn’t even sure where they want to go, the fundamentals and principles, it’s not going to serve them in a bad way. It’s just good business practice.

Nick Bradley

Well, exit strategy is good business strategy in my mind.

And a lot of the people who come into any of my mentoring programs and things like that, they haven’t made the decision to sell, but they like the idea that they have the choice. So everything I like to talk about is, hey, listen, if you want to sell your business for millions, that’s an outcome for sure.

But if you don’t, you just want to get halfway along the journey and that gives you an amazing life, then that’s. That’s an exit. Right. It’s just a different terminology of it.

 Dawn McGruer

And your podcast, we can see the sign in the back called scale up.

Nick Bradley

That’s right. Scale up. Bingo. It used to be called scale up your business and has fantastic guests like Dawn McGrew on it.

But, yeah, that’s been going for a long time. So, yeah, people can tune into that on itunes or Spotify. And then the place I hang out, probably similar to you, is LinkedIn.

So I always say if people want to message me, just find me on LinkedIn. It’s real. Nick Bradley is the kind of link to it. But you’ll see me there and send me a message, say hi. Always like to have people reach out.

 Dawn McGruer

Yeah, definitely. Well, thank you so much for coming on. And I think the thing is here, it’s food for thought, and I really want to kind of leave with this takeaway.

That what you just said there is.

It’s regardless what you’re doing in your business, where you’re going with whatever direction, all of these principles, all of these techniques are the foundation of best business practice for scaling. So it gives you options.

And if you start now, it means that you’re not going to have to think about doing all of these things, you know, if you do later decide to do it. So thank you so much for joining us and thank you for sharing your embarrassing story.

I’m sure people will reach out, message you in relation to that.

Nick Bradley

That’s what they’ll ask about now. That’s the only thing they’ll remember is fhm. Wow. What?

 Dawn McGruer

Oh, well, thank you so much. And yeah, remember, you can get Nick’s book, where is it going to be available on website? Amazon.

Nick Bradley

It’ll be on Amazon. And we, I think we’ve got exitformillions.com as well. So once that’s all live and everything else like that, we can get the details.

But yeah, it’s becoming out towards the end of January, start of February next year.

 Dawn McGruer

Oh, well, congratulations. Thank you.

Nick Bradley

Thank you.

 Dawn McGruer

Thanks for listening to Dawn of a New Era, the podcast brought to you in association with the Her Power Community.

This initiative was founded by myself and it’s all about empowering female founders to recognize their limitless potential and pursue their ambitions with confidence. Now there is less than 1.8% that goes into investing in female founded businesses and we are here to make positive changes.

So come and support us on Instagram at Her Power Community and find out more about what we’re doing to support female founders to scale and grow their businesses.

 

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