Creative Dealmaking in M&A with Jim Stevenson

[00:00:00] On today's episode of The Exit Plan, I talk to James Stevenson, who shares his extensive experience in M&A, fundraising and business turnarounds. We talk about various things, including some of the challenges he faced during a turnaround of a marketing services business, the sale process and the importance of creative dealmaking. Hope you enjoy today's conversation. James Stevenson, I split my time between LA and London. I have two or three different businesses.

[00:00:29] I do a lot of strategic advisory work, which helps companies getting prepared for exiting. And I'm a partner in a company in London which does M&A and fundraising. So pretty much my entire life revolves around helping companies to prepare for an exit or actually go through the process of exiting. So what's the LA connection? The weather, to be perfectly honest. It is as simple as that. I've always wanted to be here.

[00:00:55] When I split up with my ex-wife, I thought, well, why not? Now's as good a time as any. So you have business interests over there as well? No, not really. Or you just live there? I live here. I live here because I choose to live here. And what I do mainly is remote, so I can kind of live anywhere. So why not live somewhere near the beach with nice weather? I think yesterday it was 26 degrees and in London it was probably eight or something.

[00:01:20] Yeah, no, it's absolutely miserable here and it's nearly the shortest day. So it's dark outside already. Yeah. So yeah, it's pretty depressing. Yeah. It sounds like you're, yeah, it sounds like a nice lifestyle, but tell me a bit about how you got into the M&A world. M&A actually came through fundraising. So I'll give you a broad background of me. I can go on for hours with my background, so I'll try not to bore everyone.

[00:01:45] I started out life in Scotland in construction and I was a quantity surveyor. And it's not a good description, but an easy description of it is you do all the legal contracts for construction projects. You do all the finance for construction projects and then you do the construction part. And I like the legal and the finance space and they should never have let me near a construction site, to be perfectly honest.

[00:02:06] Jumped from that into technology, writing code, worked as a project manager within technology, took a couple of companies through Y2K, moved from that to doing front end stuff and then moved from front end technology into marketing and what is now digital marketing. Worked my way up to being the global digital director for Bicardi, which I did for a couple of years. It was a fantastic role. It was amazing people, amazing company actually.

[00:02:30] Moved from there and did a little bit of work with Selfridges and then launched the Guardian into America, worked with Marks & Spencer's, helping them to readjust their e-commerce teams, which was pretty awesome. And then moved to a company in Switzerland, helping them to essentially restructure themselves.

[00:02:49] They got bought into by KKR. KKR bought into them for 300 million valuation and 18 months later, we sold it or they sold their shares in it for 850 million. Went back to the UK and started working with some smaller companies, which included the turnaround of a marketing services data analytics business.

[00:03:08] It was turning over 25 million. We joined on the 26th of October and the first week of November, it was very obvious that the company was insolvent until we didn't like to use that word. So I turned that round after 8 months, sold the UK divisions after 6 months and then left that business. So yeah, that's a long, long way of kind of saying I've always been in and around businesses, helping businesses to grow, opportunities to grow, expand, restructure.

[00:03:35] And about 10 years ago, I got into helping companies to do fundraising. And that led me to a company called Spark International, which I'm now a partner of in the UK, which does M&A. So we help companies to buy and sell themselves. Okay. So I'm interested in that marketing services businesses, that business that you did the turnaround on. Because I think in terms of the audience for this podcast, it's all kind of creative agency owners. So I think that's kind of a nice relevant little case study there.

[00:04:05] But yeah, so can you tell me a bit more about that and what problems they were having and what you were able to do really to help turn it around? What problem? I'm not sure how many of the problems they had I'm allowed to tell you about. Yeah. In general terms. I'll run through a brief history of the company. Yeah, I'll run through a bit of history of it. And the company was bought into by private equity. And they did a bunch of acquisitions to kind of grow the business as a bit of a roll up. And the plan was great.

[00:04:34] The company was okay. The company ultimately had a lot of cash restrictions. So they bought a company in Romania. Romania, I think. Bulgaria. I think it was Romania. Which is a fantastic company. And ultimately that was the cash cow for the entire group. But they bought it mainly using debt. So they over leveraged themselves with debt. And that was where the problem started. We couldn't service the debt. It was just a constant struggle. The company ultimately wasn't growing quickly enough to service that debt.

[00:05:03] And it just became a big problem. The previous CEO. I won't get into lots of details for. But he left the business probably six months before I joined. But there was a three month window after he had left. But before I became the group CEO of that business. Where I was asked as a consultant to go and do a strategy. The private equity firm owner wanted to exit the business. Gave himself a year to find a buyer and exit the business.

[00:05:33] And wanted a good story to tell. So that he had something to settle on with the business. And he liked the strategy so much. He said, do you want to do the group CEO role? Help me sell the business. And we're off and running. And I was up for that. I had never done a group CEO role before. So it was quite fun. And I was a for like I say, I was formally appointed by the board on the 26th of October. Can't remember which year. It was six or seven years ago, I think. And then the first week in November, it became very obvious that the company had no cash.

[00:06:03] We were meant to have something like 3.2 million in the bank that was going to fuel my growth strategy. And we just didn't. So we spent six months trying to figure out where the money had gone. The accountants system, they put a new accountancy system in that wasn't quite configured correctly. So we weren't getting the information out of it that we needed to get to run the business. Sales within marketing services, if you're in the world, if your audience is in the world, is really difficult.

[00:06:30] You don't get long term contracts unless you're UPP or something. And so we were very much going month to month with a really aggressive sales target, which didn't overly help us. We had never figured out how to integrate the company. So we had a couple of companies in the UK. We had one in France and one in Bulgaria. Or Romania. I can't remember which. That's terrible. I should remember that. I'll have to apologize to everyone in that company when I get off this podcast. We'd never integrated them very well. So they were all doing their own thing.

[00:07:00] They weren't leveraging the value of the clients that we'd brought in. They weren't leveraging any kind of technology base. So we had to go through a whole integration to get them to be much more efficient at what they were doing and much more collaborative so we could service clients better. We had to have a whole new sales playbook because we did have a broader sense of the services that we were working with. And we weren't telling all of the clients all the things that we could do. So we were just underselling ourselves. We weren't efficient. We didn't have the cash in the bank that we wanted.

[00:07:30] We had a huge amount of debt that we didn't think about when we took that company on. So it was just a really, really problematic point. Heads were down in the company. People weren't really motivated. I was then brought in and that was a change that made people nervous. I think I'm a nice guy, but any changes makes people nervous. And so it became a real challenge. So yeah, that was kind of where the company was.

[00:07:56] If you want, I can kind of move on and tell you how we kind of did the turnaround. Yeah, no, I mean, just how did you come to? Was it through the private equity firm that you did that initial bit of consultancy? So that's how you came across the business. Okay. I was introduced to the private equity firm. The guy that runs the private equity firm is amazing. He's a really cool guy. I was introduced to him. It was very obvious. I think it was very obvious to him that I could kind of jump in and help. I was willing to jump in and help.

[00:08:26] So it was entirely through the private equity guy. Okay. Yeah. So then what, I mean, what do you do in a situation like that? Yeah. I mean, it's not easy. I've done a few of these now. Starting with that one, to be honest. I don't know why I've seemed to have been sucked into a couple of them since. The first thing you do is you stop the rot. You cut back. You start saving as much cash as you can. You go into delaying things. There's a very clear process and you try not to use the word insolvent if you can avoid

[00:08:54] it because that does bring a lot of legal obligations on you that very often can actually do more damage to you than help because that process itself is not designed to help you recover from insolvency. It's there to help the creditors get money back from you through that process. So if you can avoid officially being insolvent, then you absolutely should. And there is a sort of slightly woolly definition, isn't there, where you can be balance sheet

[00:09:19] insolvent, but as long as management have a reasonable plan to be able to meet their obligations to their creditors, then you can carry on trading without being illegal. I was just, yeah, I was just going to come and say that. Yes, it is slightly woolly and I don't use the word reasonable. I use the word credible. I'm not sure what the law says, but similar thing. If you've got the backing of your investors, if they say that's fine, we want to keep trading and you have a credible plan, then you can keep trading.

[00:09:48] But you do have to be very wary that you don't tip over into that. We are insolvent. Our plan is no longer credible. And we know are just insolvent and we're just not noticed. So, yeah, I mean, the first thing that we did was we started having weekly meetings. So kind of like monthly meetings are fine with the board, but the management team had weekly meetings. We brought in an external consultant who was very efficient at all of this. And every week we would go through all of the debt that we had and we'd decide how much money we had,

[00:10:17] who we could pay this week and actually do it that way. And you would delay everything as you're going. And that sounds a bit brutal. And to be honest, it is. But that's a recognized process to go through this. And what you're doing is you're stretching your cash flow. And if you can stretch your cash flow, then you can live tomorrow and you can maybe find a plan or a new client that will help you move this all forward. The other thing that I did in that situation was, thankfully, the investors in the business were supportive.

[00:10:46] So they did give us a bit more money, not as much as I would have liked, but they did give us a bit more money. So we were able to pay the salaries. My first month in the business, we couldn't pay the salaries at the end of the month, which is a big red flag for having a problem. And it's very noticeable that if you're not paying anyone at the end of the month, there's a big problem. So we managed to get some more money into the business quickly to resolve that problem. We got a bit more money into the business to keep us going once we had the plan to move forward. And then it became very much a sales focus.

[00:11:15] We wanted to do a lot of the other good stuff that would make us more efficient. But we were so driven by sales that if we didn't get the sales, nothing else really mattered. And thankfully, the team that I had was fantastic. They stepped up and we put a new process in place. We understood the clients better. We were, I don't think we actually ever implemented it, but we were putting together a proper CRM system so we could manage the clients better. And because we had some fantastic clients.

[00:11:43] I mean, the business was turning over 25 million a year and we had some big clients, some great clients. We did some work. We beat Twitter at a competition on a machine learning algorithm. It was a fantastic agency. It just had been slightly mismanaged and over leveraged in debt. And through all that process, just focusing on the basics of the business, get clients coming in every month, try and extend them, try and get three month contracts rather than projects, six month contracts rather than projects.

[00:12:12] Looking after the cash flow. We managed to get the business to turn around and we made profit. I think it was eight months later. Actually no, it was more than that. It was 10 months later. It went from the November to the August. So the UK divisions made profit in the August. The other two divisions in France and Romania. I'm going to say it's Bulgaria actually. I'm going to start calling it Bulgaria. Sorry for that. That's terrible that I've forgotten that. That's so shocking that I've forgotten that. Yeah. So France had a different problem.

[00:12:41] France was profitable, but had cash flow problems. And the French laws are very different to the UK laws for that. But like I say, Bulgaria was a fantastic little cash cow for us. That kept the cash flow going, kept us running, kept us taking over. So we, in the August, the board made the decision to sell the UK divisions. Which we started that process. We appointed external advisors, and took us through that process. And we found a company to buy it.

[00:13:09] And I think the sale completed in February of the following year, about six months later. And roughly how big was the UK division? When you say big, what do you mean like big? Well, I guess just in terms, like it was, was it kind of 10 million or something and you were selling a team of 40? It was about 8 million that kind of dropped down to about six, I think. Okay. So it was a sizable chunk with our focus on sales and profitable sales. And the revenue did drop slightly. Yeah.

[00:13:39] Yeah. Okay. And, and, and, um, that process of finding a buyer, how long did, how long did that take? And how did it go? Finding somewhere. Well, we, we appointed external consultants for it. And so they very much ran that process rather than me being involved in it as I would typically do. So they, they, they went out, found it. We collected a group of potential buyers, including other private equity firms, strategic buyers who might want to buy it. They did all the outreach for us.

[00:14:08] They did all the initial negotiations for us and came back to us with the most likely candidate. I'm going to say that, and I completely disagree with this. And I, I disagreed with this in one of the board meetings. I felt that with the UK divisions, we got to the point that because we had had so much problem with the company, we viewed the company as a problem company. But an external buyer coming in actually didn't see the problem company.

[00:14:34] They actually just saw a bunch of really cool people, a great bunch of them capabilities, a nice client list. But I think ultimately our own internal perceptions meant that we undersold the business. So we've pretty much viewed it as a fire sale. That's fascinating because it's almost always the other way around where you have a founder who kind of believes that their business is far more beautiful and valuable than it actually is.

[00:15:02] And the buyer comes along and looks at it and goes, well, hang on a second. There's all these problems with it. Yeah, no, I think, I think that's the subtle difference, a difference between whether you're running a genuine business that's got the basics going well, and you're the founder and you've put in 10 years to make it work and it's your baby. Then, yeah, I come across that all the time. But I think if you're going from an insolvency, then I think the internal belief is, wow, we'll just dodge a bullet. Let's sell it as quickly as we can. Anything that's above zero is a positive.

[00:15:32] Let's run. And it's just one of those subtleties of where you start. Well, I suppose you, as you were an external group CEO and you didn't have the emotional attachment to the history of the business in the same way that a founder was. Yeah, completely. Absolutely. The previous CEO to me was the original guy. He did the buying build around about it. So he was a bit more emotionally attached to it.

[00:15:59] But at the same time, I think he viewed it more as a job after a while. He'd bought three or four businesses, plugged them all together. So it was no longer kind of his baby. It was more just a vehicle for doing things. But yeah, no, I had, I had zero attachment at that point. I wasn't emotionally attached to it at all. I could see the value in it. I could be emotionally attached to the people. So I genuinely didn't want the company to fail because across the entire group, we had 350 employees.

[00:16:28] I was appointed 26th of October. November, you're literally six, eight weeks away from Christmas and you're thinking this is not good. And while 350 employees had no idea what was going on, because you've got to limit the communication, you want to be open and transparent. But there's a lot of things in that situation. You can't be that pressure was on me. Probably a bit of it was on my leadership team. And who I inherited, I didn't get to choose them particularly.

[00:16:57] So yeah, that, that, that, that emotional attachment was there more as a human being, not wanting to kind of say to people, 350 people just before Christmas. I'm sorry, but you're not getting paid. I've been there before my previous life, a company I worked for back in 2000. It was very famous. It was in the newspapers because it made everyone redundant the Friday before Christmas via text message. And it sounds terrible. And I know it sounds terrible and it is terrible. But I spoke to the guy who did it afterwards.

[00:17:27] And he said, I'd just come out of a board meeting the Friday before Christmas. It was Saturday, Sunday before Christmas. Everyone was going to be doing Christmas shopping. I couldn't phone 300 odd people over the weekend. And I didn't want people to be buying presents that they might not be able to afford. So from his point of view, I had every sympathy for what he did in the newspaper. It was the heartless swear word. Um, who made all these people redundant over a text message the Friday before Christmas.

[00:17:56] And genuinely that was in my head. And I thought, I can't handle that. Um, I don't want to be that, that guy. I don't want to be in that position. So I did a lot of pressure to get us over the Christmas hump and get the company working at some level that we could sustain. And as you said, in the insolvency world, come up with a credible plan that would allow us to keep trading and work our way out of the problems that we had. Fantastic. So in terms of what you're doing now, what kind of, is it mainly working with companies on preparing them for a sale?

[00:18:27] A lot of what, a lot of what I do at the moment is actually fundraising, which is not too dissimilar a process to, to the, the exit process. You've still got to groom the business. You've still got to be the business prepared, um, to maximize your valuation. So you're not giving away equity unnecessarily. Um, we've got two or three businesses that we're trying to, um, resolve issues with and to say, uh, and to sell. Um, so if you know anyone that wants to buy a business, give me a shout. What kind of business?

[00:18:53] And then, then there is a, there is a, oh, we've got, actually we've got a marketing service business out in Asia that we're currently looking at selling. I think it's eight or 10 million or something like that. I'm entirely wrong in that, but if anyone's interested, I'll happily share details. Um, and then a lot of strategic advisory. So just helping companies to kind of figure out how to move forward, the best ways of moving forward. We do have a couple and it is very relevant to your audience. The founder has sold the business two, three years ago.

[00:19:21] They're working through their earn out. The new buyers haven't worked out. So the earn out is now at risk. So we have founders coming back to us after two years, three years saying, I don't think I'm getting my earn out. This is all gone wrong. What do we do? And for those businesses, we're actually looking to find the acquirers for them to help turn them around, get the new, get the old owner, the old founder back into the, the driving seat. So you can actually start to work with the business again.

[00:19:49] So a lesson that I'm experiencing at the moment that will be relevant to all of your, your listeners is it's not just about selling your business. It's about making sure that the integration of the business goes well. It's about making sure that you get your earn out in two, three years, whenever your period is. So we're making sure that you maximize it. And a lot of what we do is what I call creative deal making. You can go into this very, very vanilla.

[00:20:13] And it's my business is EBITDA's 5 million, 10 million, 50 million, whatever the number is. The multiple is X. And that's what my valuation is. Or you can go into this in a much more creative way and understand the drivers of the new owners. How can you align the deal structure to that new owner? And therefore, how can you maximize what you get out of it? Even if it means that you're there for two or three years as part of your earn out doing something slightly different.

[00:20:41] But be creative about how you go into those deals to make sure that actually everyone's winning. And if everyone wins, then generally you win more than you would have before. Absolutely. I mean, over the past couple of years, I've bought five businesses, I think three substantial ones and two much smaller ones. But each one of those deals was completely different. Yeah. That's interesting.

[00:21:08] So with the fundraising side of things, talk me through the sort of different options. Like what sort of level of fundraising are you going for? Are you talking about bank debt? Are you talking about equity or yeah, tell me what the landscape is. Well, of the above. Part of the creative deal making is I have this term, good money versus bad money. And I think far too many people go straight into, I want to raise money. I want to fundraise. I need to go and speak to a VC or a private equity guy. And very often that's not what you want. That's not what you should be doing.

[00:21:37] It's not good for your business. Don't get me wrong. It's not bad. I'm not downing on VC and private equity. But if you can get good money, customers paying you, why give away your equity? So if you can actually have a credible plan that says, rather than going away and getting private equity money, we'll just grow the business and we'll get to where we want to get to, but we'll do it without giving away equity. That's good money. Versus the not thinking through the options, factoring your invoices. I'm not a huge fan of that.

[00:22:06] But if you can do that for six months, nine months, and that gets you over a cash flow hurdle, and you're very confident the business is growing, then again, you're not giving away equity. Debt. Preferably without a personal guarantee. Again, it's very often a better option if it's very specific. So it's having the presence of mind to know what challenge you're actually trying to do. You've got how you're trying to get over it and then apply the right financial solution to that problem.

[00:22:35] And don't get me wrong, venture capital or private equity, I love it. But it's very much a go big. What venture capital and private equity really want you to do is accelerate your growth. And you can't normally do that just by winning new clients unless you're open AI and you've got billions of new clients every week. So if your plan is, let's go big, then VC and PE money is ideal. But if that's not your plan, then have us think about what is the good money for you?

[00:23:03] What is the best way to fund your ambition as you're going through? And with those deals that you're working on with founders who are not necessarily meeting their earn out, who's your client in that scenario? Is it the founder that sold or is it the business that's acquired? It's normally the founder that sold with the expectation that as soon as we find a buyer, our engagement would change over to be the company. So the company would ultimately be us.

[00:23:32] But it's normally the founder. It's the founders interest that we are looking after. But the founder paying us once we've done a reasonably big deal and the deal could be, and the one I'm thinking of actually the deal was 180 million. A founder doesn't want to pay us our fee for that. And that will go through the business once that deal closes. Okay. So just thinking this through, so the founder sold the business, but then you continue to work for the buyer. Is the buyer then dissatisfied and looking to offload that business?

[00:24:02] You know, because presumably it's got a new owner. So yeah. How do you then go about selling it if it's already just a new bought? The one that I just kind of mentioned there that's in my head, what happened there was the founder sold the business, was still part of the business, but in a much more relaxed role. He was working through his earn out. The new owner came in, it was actually private equity. They put in their own business leader. I think he actually took the role of the CEO. Didn't fully understand the business.

[00:24:30] So the business didn't grow the way it wanted to. In fact, it actually came contracted. They'd also plugged a modern business into a legacy business. The legacy business being a bigger portion of it. So the business fundamentally was not performing. We knew that the new owners, the new private equity firm, were struggling to find a plan. And the plans that they had suggested really weren't good. But the founder had a plan.

[00:24:59] He kind of knew what happened to the business. He knew all the problems with it. But he wanted to make sure that whoever he gave his new plan to, he was protecting his earn out. He wanted to make sure he was getting his money. And it was a sizable chunk. It was several million. So he wanted to protect his earn out. So he came to us and said, the new owners are struggling. They've had a couple of years. They've actually done, made the company worse rather than better. What I'd like to do is find someone to buy the private equity firm out. And I'll take over running the business again.

[00:25:29] I've got this plan. This is a plan I want to kind of go back to and do. And therefore what you could do is actually rather than just protect his earn out, you could grow the business again and have another bite of the cherry of selling the business again and getting a whole new whack of forfeit in his pocket, which was a brilliant idea. And in that scenario, would the private equity buyers, would they be out of pocket or would it still be sold for a bit more than they bought it for? Yeah, just a bit more. Right. Okay.

[00:25:59] We tried to make it. I mean, if you're telling someone that they're going to take a huge haircut, then they're going to fight against you no matter what you do. So if you can, if you can do creative deal making so that they can walk away with something, maybe not the profit they would hope for, but at least it's not the negatives that it could be. Then actually what you can do is align everyone to making the deal happen. Okay. So I like, I like this idea of sort of creative deal making that you talk about. Yeah.

[00:26:27] Have you got any kind of examples that spring to mind of interesting deals that you've done that are sort of non-traditional? The best one that we've done actually didn't go ahead, but the creativity in it is still like to this day. And I still tell people about it because it's a really good idea. It was a marketing services business. We were trying to find a buyer for a marketing services business. And to be fair, we did find a couple, but the marketing services business had a number that they needed to get to for their valuation.

[00:26:55] Otherwise their existing owners wouldn't be happy to exit. And the leadership team wouldn't get all their bonuses that they were waiting for. So we had a number we needed to get to, and we just could not get the company's valuation to that number. And so we came up with a plan that said the new buyer will lend to the company some money. That money will allow them to go away and buy two other businesses.

[00:27:22] Now, when you add the main business with the two other businesses together, you get to the number and some. The and some went back to the original or the new buyer who'd lent them the money as well as he was getting his principal back. And therefore, everyone was happy because we got above that valuation number that they needed. But it was the new owner that was actually funding that to make it all work.

[00:27:46] But he got like, I can't remember what it was, that the plan was he was going to get 20 million return on an 80 million investment. But the 80 million was only being invested for six weeks. So it's a not bad return on your money as you're doing that. And he got to buy a business that he wanted.

[00:28:04] Okay, so the presumably there's, I mean, you've got to be pretty sure about what type of business you want to buy, how available it is like what, as in, I think the sort of the key piece there is was the seller of that business who couldn't get the valuation they want to do. Did they know what businesses they wanted to acquire and did they know how to do it? They, they, they'd already bought five or six businesses. They had a really strong pipeline of businesses that they knew would, would link in.

[00:28:33] They'd done a bit of due diligence on the, that pipeline of, of acquisitions that they wanted to do. So yeah, that, that was very simple for us. In this case, it was already lined up. We kind of knew that as soon as they got any money, the next business was going to be this one. Then the next one after that would be this one. And we identified that if they just bought both of those, they would be well above their valuation mark. So how did we fund them buying both of those? And the obvious way to fund buying both of those was from the new buyer out to the coming in and allowing them the facility to do that.

[00:29:04] Okay. So any sort of tips, advice for people at the beginning of their, their business selling journey who are kind of, you know, just starting to think about how they might exit one day. And, you know, sometimes with sort of smaller businesses as well, like what kind of things do people need to be thinking about to prepare their business for a sale? Yeah. I mean, I, I, I work business, businesses way down at kind of like a million, 2 million. So I work a lot with small businesses.

[00:29:31] I'm actually working with one at the moment, which isn't in marketing services. It's actually a small drinks business, which goes back to my Bacardi days of, of all things. And it's, it's run by two amazing young women. They are fantastic. They set up three years ago. They're very clear in their exiting. They want to exit by 2028. They've got a number in their mind that they want to exit by. They're very, very focused, but. Everything they've done in the last three years is how do they get to that exit?

[00:29:58] They're talking to me now about how do they get to an exit in 2028. So be very clear of why you're running your business. People kind of fall into the default of I'm running a business and I would get up on Monday morning and I run a business and I do the same again next week and next week. But having that strategic plan or not just what the business is trying to achieve, but what you want to achieve via the business. Do you want to have it until you retire? Do you want to exit it in three years, five years? Is a key part of all of this.

[00:30:26] But the surprising thing I think that most people forget is when you're selling a business, everyone gets involved in how do you present the business in the best way possible. And don't get me wrong. I do that as well. And it is hugely valuable to every business. But two, three, four years out. It's not about how you present it. It's about running a good solid business, but getting the business basics right. You've got your cash flow working. If you've got a good sales pipeline of customers coming in.

[00:30:55] If you've got a well motivated team that understand what's happening. If you can go on holiday for a couple of weeks and not have to worry about your business because it's running without you. You've got the fundamentals of a business right. And that's a great place to start when you get to talk about preparing for exit. Thank you very much for listening to the exit plan podcast. If you enjoyed it, please leave us a review to help other people find us. If you would like your question answered in M&A Q&A or are wondering what's next for you in your business and want to chat about an exit plan.

[00:31:25] Drop me an email on Barnaby at foxcogroup.com or get in touch with me on LinkedIn.