EP 151 - Maximizing Your Business Value w/ Tom McElwrath

Your business is not worth what your revenue says it’s worth. It’s worth what a buyer believes will keep working after you’re gone and they’re willing to pay up or discount hard based on risk.

We sit down with Tom McElwrath of Kandem Services Group (KSG) to unpack what actually drives business valuation and enterprise value for high-income business owners. We talk through the risks that quietly destroy a sale price: founder dependence, customer concentration, undocumented processes, weak bench depth, and relationships that live only in the owner’s head. Tom explains why the smartest move is starting three to five years before a sale, because once an LOI shows up, diligence begins and negotiating power shrinks fast.

We also connect operations to financial clarity and tax planning. If you don’t trust your books, you can’t forecast cash flow, manage EBITDA, or plan taxes with confidence. We dig into why a fractional CFO can be a game-changer, how clean financials make buyers more comfortable, and how tax savings can create liquidity to reinvest in systems and growth. Then we get tactical on valuation multiples, deal terms beyond purchase price, and one overlooked concept that can add real money at closing: adbacks.

If you’re building toward an exit or simply want a company that runs without you, listen through and take notes. Subscribe, share this with a fellow owner, and leave a review with the biggest risk you’re going to de-risk first.

Next Steps: for a free assessment of how advanced tax reduction can help build your wealth, go to:https://prosperlcpa.com/apply

Connect with Tom at:Tom@kandem.com 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:09

Welcome

Welcome And Why Exits Matter

SPEAKER_01 0:10

to the Mark Pearlberg CPA podcast. I'm really excited to be joined by Tom McElrath because many of our clients are high income earning business owners, and we talk a lot about taxes. And if you are ever planning to sell your business, the sale of your business has the greatest tax implications, most likely of any other event in your life. But it's not just about tax planning, and it's just not just about that one event, it's also about the events leading up to that event. And what are you going to do to prepare for this situation? Optimize what you could potentially sell if you wind up selling. And even more importantly, here, how can we optimize the enterprise value of our companies? So before I introduce Tom, we're going to dive into these concepts and a little bit on the tax implications along the way. Tom, can you introduce yourself? Tell us a little bit about yourself.

What Actually Moves Business Value

SPEAKER_00 1:10

Sure. Mark, thanks for having me. My name is Tom McElrath. I'm a managing partner at KSG, which is Candom Services Group. And we help business owners uh define their intrinsic value of their companies. And we also help them identify risks that will help enable them to start backing away from their company, or more importantly, just improving their overall uh operational capacity or growth. That's a terrible run with it.

SPEAKER_01 1:44

Absolutely. Tell me, what is the greatest challenge that you see for business owners in optimizing the value of their company?

SPEAKER_00 1:55

Not knowing what moves the needle. So think of it this way. I want, I'm a business owner. I do $5 million in top line revenue. I automatically think that, oh, I'm doing $5 million in top line revenue. My company's worth a lot of money. Not the case. This is the this is the mentality, right? So if you have a company over here, your competitor is over here, and both of you have a $5 million top line revenue, uh, one is going to sell for a higher multiplier than the other. Why? Because the risks, the the risks that are involved, right? Founder centric, or 30% of your customer or 30% of your revenue come from one customer, right? These little bitty things. And it goes all the way down to uh making sure that your processes are all documented. Does everybody carry everything in their head? I could go down the list, but it's just I've knowing what drives the value. How do they know? Either, well, we share it with people at KSG, but it's finding out what really moves the needle. And if you're not in the business, it's really hard to uncover without just talking to somebody.

SPEAKER_01 3:10

Yeah. And you know, we we talk a lot about companies are relying on the owner to do so much. And, you know, I heard one person say, if you're valuable to your company, then your company isn't valuable. And while that may be an overstatement here, what we need to think about as business owners is how do we turn this thing that probably with many of you, if you started a business from ground up, you were probably working like a dog, and you probably were the business at one point. And how do you go from owning an expensive job to having a company that functions even without you there? And while this can be incredibly valuable, there are also tax incentives to doing this. So there are tax incentives to offering fringe benefits, there are tax credits that'll help you with the financing of retirement accounts for your staff. There are tax credits for hiring staff. And there's something called a qualified business income tax deduction, which could give you as much as 50% of your wages paid in the form of a deduction. Now, there are all these moving variables. Now, that may not be the amount when we run it for your business. But there are some very strong tax incentives to be an employer. And we'll touch later on. When you sell the business, there's a million things we could do to eliminate the taxes on the sale. But even becoming a business owner, there are ways that you can mitigate your taxes. But at the end of the day, what's most important here is that we're building the value of our company, we're driving profits and systems, and you don't pay taxes on the increased value of your company because you haven't sold anything yet. So, but tell me, Tom, uh tell me about um you we talk about building the systems, moving the needle forward. Give me

Start Exit Planning Three To Five Years

SPEAKER_01 5:06

some specific examples of some of the most impactful things that you see your clients and these business owners do.

SPEAKER_00 5:14

Well, let's let's start with just someone what is selling their company. How can they you should start three to five years before you plan to sell? That's that's something that's very, very important. If you do want to sell or you're thinking about selling, start three or four or five years before the actual event. You'll do yourself a big favor. What you'll be doing if you start early enough is you'll be able to de-risk your business. Because once you're once you receive the letter of intent for somebody to buy your company, if you get one, you've lost your negotiating power because all the new diligence will start coming through and they'll start discounting your value. So that's if you sell your company. If you're inside your company and you just want to be less involved, but still be very impactful. Uh, that's improving your processes, improving your bench depth, and documenting all of your processes and procedures. So if you're gone, there's somewhere that your staff can go uh to get a question answered. And getting people the appropriate authority to make a decision, uh, that's a tough one. Right? Like you have an authority up to X amount of whatever. It's just important that people know what the their thresholds are, what their approvability is so they can get their jobs without having to run it by you for everything.

SPEAKER_01 6:38

Yeah, you know, I um I listened to a really good presentation by someone in the military, and he said, if you do anything more than three times, you should document it. And I think a lot of people, and even people in my profession, and I would say in particular, one of the challenges is they feel like, oh, only no one else can figure this out but me. And I've learned, I mean, that was what how I used to think in the earlier days, but now we've learned to really to find a players and train them to do what we do. What are some of the particular activities that you think business owners have the hardest time letting go of and should be letting go of?

Letting Go Without Losing Relationships

SPEAKER_00 7:21

Relationships. It's the relationships, it really is. I mean typically business owners have been there from the beginning. Most people that own businesses, they they're not part of a buying group. You know what I mean? They don't they don't buy and sell companies, they don't buy companies, they just built a company that's worth you know a ton of money today. So it's one thing if you are if you bought a company and you're uh you're trying to extract the relationships and have that translate to you as a buyer. That's really, really hard if you're selling. That's really hard. That's something you have to get ahead of, of course, if you're if you're going to sell. If you're going to keep your company, then that those transitions, those relationship transitions need to start happening three years before you start to back out. Does that make sense? It has to be everything. It's all about that transition. Can you transition everything that you do? 90%, 70%. Can you transition that to a buyer? Can you transition that to someone within your company that could do that? So you're like, I want to operate at 30% on my current capacity. Okay, well, you have to figure out where 70% is going to be managed. Who's going to do it? And that's a that's a big one. Outside of relationships, of course.

SPEAKER_01 8:52

Yeah, you know, I um I have clients that I've been meeting with every year since, you know, past seven years or so. And what we're doing right now is what I'm finding is because I have to be a business owner and do so much, I don't even have the bandwidth to give them the attention I would like. So what we're doing now at our company is for those legacy clients, is I'm including other staff members in the calls. And they're taking notes, they're helping out with setting up some of the follow-up requests and some of the analysis. And gradually we're building the trust between my other staff and our clients. So my clients can step in for me and fill in for me and take on more and more of those relationship responsibilities. So when I'm not there, because I can't be in while growing a business to its greatest capacity, now I have staff who can help out along the way. It's been helpful.

SPEAKER_00 9:55

Oh, yeah. I think that's exactly what you should be doing. I think that's extremely valuable. Um, so have you thought, Mark, have you thought about um identifying,

Identify Protect Fix The Business

SPEAKER_00 10:06

you know, what's what what's what are your strengths in your organization and what are your weaknesses in your organization? So if you're thinking about how do I how do I do this, if you if you identify, then you can protect the things that are working. So you identify, you can protect those things that are that are working and you want to repeat those. But you're more importantly, you're gonna identify what's not working. And you get to tweak those, fix those, right? So identify, protect, fix. So being able to look at it in that way certainly helps. It sounds simple, and frankly, it kind of is, but it's slowing down enough to actually have the the conversation with yourself or with someone else. Are you asking yourself the right questions? Right? So that's where I got that's where I got hung up years ago. Am I asking myself the right questions? I'm even asking the right question. I don't know. So those that's where advisors come in and people that you trust.

SPEAKER_01 11:07

Give me some examples of some of the clients you've served and some of the changes you made with them when they start thinking like this. And they start thinking about uh topics such as, you know, transferring of relationships, building processes that have never been documented and just in the heads of the owners for years. What are some of the things that you've seen?

SPEAKER_00 11:30

That's where the intrinsic value really starts to come in because you can't change those things in six months, right? Those things take a while, they take a few years to transition. So here's a case. We have a customer that was trying to um sell their company. First, that first go, they they weren't able to sell because they were getting discounted out, primarily because everything uh landed on the business owner, right? So document your processes. Um, that's number one. And that's not really that hard to do, by the way, is to pull information out of people's head. It's a time thing, it's not a difficult thing, it's a time thing. But that's a big one as far as the relationships are concerned. Um try not to say this person's name because it's so easy for me to do that. It's it would be one thing just to be able to pull, um, to pull someone off the street. But if you can identify someone within your organization, which is what he did, uh, we started to transfer those relationships over. So specifically vendor relationships, not necessarily the customers, but the vendors were the important relationships for him. And getting him uh involved in that process uh was is really beneficial to his ultimate sale. And every every use every risk, every every de-risk that he did has a dollar figure associated with it. So if you're not founder centric, meaning that the company is not dependent on you for everything, um, your value goes up and there's a dollar amount that's associated with that particular de-risk. So we like to go through and make sure that we're coming through everything. So we'll say, look, here's everything that you do well, here's everything that uh is

Roadmaps That Raise The Multiple

SPEAKER_00 13:20

at risk, just to get clarity around where you're at. But more importantly, as a plan. And the plan is really where things would fall apart for people. Because where do I start? What's the most important thing I'm supposed to pay attention to? So, what we do is we put together a 30, 60, 90 day low-hanging fruit. Knock all this stuff out, and you can increase your value and your productivity, but then a one-year, three-year, five-year uh roadmap, what to do, when to do it, and how that changes the value of your company. That type of insight is hard to get off the internet.

SPEAKER_01 14:01

Oh, I bet. Even with, I mean, AI is great, but you know, the analogy I've been making on it is like people still need us to interact with the AI. Like, you know, like the chainsaw was great, but they still need lumberjacks to chop down the trees. It didn't replace the lumberjacks, it just made them more impactful. And uh so, so when you're you're thinking about this along the way, you're building your enterprise value. And you know, you probably had a lot of conversations on, you know, let's say three to five years down the road, we got the SOPs, we've transferred relationships over the company no longer relies on ourselves. We went from being a company that I was, you know, it it was pretty much just a nick a piece of me to now I have a different role. So that role I think you talked about earlier is where it doesn't, it's not as dependent on us, but we still have an important level of importance at the company. What what what kind of what do you see as like an optimal role as someone who's approaching a more mature phase of their company look like?

SPEAKER_00 15:13

You have to have a transition plan. You can't wing it and expect to get a good result. You have to have a transition plan. So when you start to back out, I back outs maybe a bad word. When you start to transition less to less responsibilities, how does that work and how do you do that? What is a timeline connected to that? Well, if you have someone that could be your successor, or one or two, but primary people that have primary positions in your company make your company risky to uh to a potential buyer, especially if they if this person leaves, you know, that's difficult. So when you when you start thinking about uh transitioning to a lesser uh role, you start out by once a week interaction, once a month, once a quarter. I would do once a quarter for a while, and then uh possibly biannual, but I would definitely stay involved in the financial aspects of things at least every quarter, if not wrapping up and due diligence of your financials every month. I would stay involved in that for sure.

SPEAKER_01 16:26

Speaking of financials, much yeah. Sorry, go ahead.

Fractional CFOs And Clean Financials

SPEAKER_01 16:33

Speaking oh, well, I was saying speaking of financials, one of the things that I was touching on is we see a lot of clients where you own a robust company, let's say three million and up in revenue, could be less for this to be important, but certainly when we see three to five and up in revenue, there's so many moving pieces. And there's a there's a really I really think that a CFO is one of the most underappreciated professional skills. So we have these clients that are trying to fix their own their own uh to their own adjusting entries and and oversee their bookkeepers and their bookkeepers off. They don't know how much money they make, they don't know what their profits are looking like, they can't use their financial information and even non-financial information to understand the health of their business. And so often we'll recommend hey, get a CFO. We don't even do it, but we really we can benefit so much from the CFO so they can adjust, they can identify what's their percentage of profit on different service lines or where what what is driving profit? How can we make decisions based on all this information? Because you just can't do it when you're doing a million things as a company owner. Not only is a CFO super valuable and underappreciated, and I wish more of our clients would hire them, but also when you understand your profitability more, we can help our clients more by doing advanced tax planning. Because if you don't know what your profits are looking like, and sometimes you don't even know what your profits are looking like when the books are closed, because you may need like 30 adjusting entries, and you may find your profit is twice as much. It becomes really hard to mitigate your taxes. So you may find that the tax savings we create by having a productive relationship will pay for the CFO or the increased profitability. I don't sell CFO services, so I'm just saying some of you guys out there, you know, this is a non-biased look, and we've seen people with and without CFOs, and it is so much easier when you have robust financials to have someone like that. Um what what are you seeing? Uh what kind of conversations are you having about your clients and them trying to make sense of their financials?

SPEAKER_00 18:47

It's it's not just well, they're their financials, of course. CFOs, you get a part-time CFO. That's what a fractional CFO is, right? Fractional CFOs are that's to me, that's where it's at right now. Right. And you know that we have we know financial CFO people, you know, Mark, you do, we do. Uh but the idea of your company as a whole and what really affects your your margin, your profitability, right? What drops to the EBITDA line, we have a table of um advisors that through KSG, you have access to all of these people, right? So you need a C marketer on it, right? You have a CPA, you have a advisor, and you don't if you don't know uh how important taxes uh is, you know, stroke a big, big check every year and it'll start to get your attention. So it's not uh a one-year thing, it's repeatable year after year after year. So what are you doing to mitigate that, right? That's a huge risk to you and your family. A tax line is is very, very expensive. Do you agree?

SPEAKER_01 19:59

Oh, yeah. And that's you know, and we have a we have a lot of ways to mitigate taxes. And when you pay taxes, that's money you'll never get again. That's money you'll never get back. So, you know, some of our strategies are as simple as a tax election or just changing the entity structure, timing. Others are gonna um involve investments. At the end of the day, um what you can think about here is if you look at the tax savings, that's money that could be reinvested into the growth and compounding growth of your company and your net worth.

SPEAKER_00 20:38

Well, Mark, you know.

SPEAKER_01 20:39

So it's all it's all tied together.

Turning Tax Savings Into Growth Cash

SPEAKER_00 20:42

You helped one of our customers recently, and I didn't know you could do these things, right? I mean, what was it like a half a million dollars they had uh he paid, something like that? It was a lot.

SPEAKER_01 20:54

Yeah, it was a lot. It was a lot. I mean, we're going back three years. Yeah, we're going back three years to capture some miss RD credits. We're also gonna accelerate the depreciation on his office, and those are like that's low-hanging fruit because they've already incurred the expenses, but they didn't report it optimally. And then what we're gonna do now is we're gonna we're gonna have ways that they can create tax savings where maybe imagine spending a hundred imagine spending a dollar to save two dollars and fifty cents in taxes with tax advantage investments, potentially. And that's gonna give them more liquidity to help build out their company and build these systems and or at the very least have more liquidity set aside so they can live the life that they want to live here. So when you get to a certain level of profitability, the tax savings can can certainly help you in in this goal as well. Because now you can you just simply have more cash. Do stuff with the cash that'll build your what your your company.

unknown 21:59

Um

SPEAKER_01 22:00

Um what I'm what I'm wondering here is when so let's say we we we get to this point now where we have the the right role in our company, right? We're not doing the things we shouldn't be doing. This company is capable of being handed off. What's the next step?

SPEAKER_00 22:20

You said you are doing what you should be doing, or you're not?

SPEAKER_01 22:24

You are. So you've you've gone through the processes, you've built the leadership team, and you're ready to get out at some point. Or maybe it be sell to a third party, private equity. It may even uh be hand off interest to another employee. What what do we do at this point to make the most of this opportunity?

Know Your Value Before Going To Market

SPEAKER_00 22:48

You want to know where your value is. At the end of the day, I mean if people say, well, I don't know what my value is, or um here recently I had one uh earlier this week that said uh it's industry standard to have a seven multiple on top line revenue. And I don't even know what he was talking about. I haven't even heard of that. Because at the end of the day, um, do you know what your value truly is? So if you want to exit, you've been doing everything the right way. Um, I would take one last uh comb through it and have a strategic advisor go through bookend to bookend and make sure that your scorecard scores really, really high because that moves the multiplier. Let's say, for an example, you do uh you're at 10 million top line revenue, as an example, a million dollars top line revenue. You're bringing in a million dollars, and the multiplier is say, uh, for your industry, let's call it a three to a to a 10, right? So if you're doing a million dollars, you think you're doing pretty good, $10 million think you're doing pretty good, and you probably are, but you want to know how much money you're leaving on the table. Because if your scorecard lands you on a multiple of a number three, as an example of EBITDA, let's say your EBITDA number is 300,000 and your multiple is three. Yeah, obviously that's $900,000, right? But without even changing your top line revenue number, it can stay the same. And your sales price could go way up. In other words, here's number three, here's number 10. If by de-risking your business, you slide across the scale and your value goes up a lot based on those multipliers because you de-risk the business. Now you're more attractive. So that's why I was uh, I think I've talked to you about this, Mark. You've got one business and another business right beside it, the exact same business, go to this exact same top line revenue. One's gonna sell for a hell of a lot more money. And the reason is because they de-risked it. It's it's really that simple.

SPEAKER_01 24:57

So some of the things that I see that you should be doing as well is when you eventually go to the market, prospective buyers are gonna want to inspect your books. So you want to make sure there is nothing questionable in your books. And then by this time, you're also gonna want to have conversations in advance with your tax advisor and think about what is going to be the tax strategy. And not just before the sale, during the sale, understanding the tax implications of the transactions. There's so many different ways to structure a sale. It could be an owner finance sale where they buy it over time. There's all sorts of fancy things like F reorgs where you're deferring the gain and it's rolling into another company. There's so many different ways to sell a company, and you could sell the assets separately. You could 1031, the building of the company out, and then sell the company separately. So there's so many ways to do it, and the tax implications are so significant that you really want to engage early. And what here's something I would say to some of you guys is the first question I always ask when people are selling either their companies or even other assets or real estate is what are you going to do with your cash? Like, what are you looking to do? And then you create a tax strategy that backs into that overall outcome. So if you want to buy rental real estate, we can find a way to use real estate to offset the gain. Or if you want to pay off debt, we can find a strategy that gives you enough liquidity to pay off the debt and not pay taxes. So lots of different things on the tax side as well. But obviously, but first you want to make sure you sell it for a good price. So I got some um Tom, I have some rapid fire questions for you here.

Rapid Fire On Multiples And Timing

SPEAKER_01 26:40

We're gonna go through these. First one, how actually we put this here. Yeah, how do I know what my business is actually worth?

SPEAKER_00 26:52

Uh, you don't. Not in the beginning. I mean, if you think about it, your value is largely a function of uh cash flow that's sustainable and predictable, right? That that's important. You want to de-risk it and you want everything to be able to transfer to a new owner. So if you take those three items, um it's easier to figure out uh where you're at in terms of uh being able to sell a company. If you don't know what your value is worth, you need to talk to somebody that can tell you what your value is. And you want the value that is you want to know what the post number is. If you get an LOI for, say, a million dollars, and then at the very end, after they discount everything because of all the risks, you end up with $300,000. You're not gonna sell. But if you knew what those risks were beforehand, you would have fixed them all, and you probably would have gotten more than what you originally wanted to sell it for because your multiplier goes up. So how do you know? Next question here sorry, it's only worth what somebody will pay for. Okay, great.

SPEAKER_01 28:02

Yeah. Okay. Next question. What eBit duh multiple should I expect when I sell my business?

SPEAKER_00 28:12

That comes up a lot, actually. So like I mentioned before, this company I was talking to earlier or later of last week was in the industry, they think it's seven, a multiple is seven on top line revenue. Well, that's that's really um it's not true. Because there isn't a universal uh multiplier, right? Although it's respectable, let's say that you know you take a multiplier of of five uh as an example, and you think five is an industry standard against uh EBITDA. You know, it's um it's probably not the uh the truth of your particular company, but uh your EBITDA is very, very important against the multiple. So let me see here your company size, industry, recurring uh revenue, growth rate, management, death, all of these are great, but you want to have strong, predictable cash flow. There's no set, there's no set multiplier. Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_01 29:19

Yeah, it really depends on a lot of factors for sure. What are the top five things that increase the value of a business?

SPEAKER_00 29:28

Wow. Cash flow, predictable cash flow. Forecasting is is important, is it not? We were talking about CFOs earlier, and uh, you know, predictability, that's really what you're after. So predictable cash flow would be one. Reduce owner dependence, we talked about that. Uh diversifying customers, we talked about that. Was that three? Diversifying customers being less than 30 percent, excuse me, is one customer, and that's important. Documented processes, everything we've just basically been talking about consistent, profitable growth. But there's one there's one uh overwhelming headline between those five. I think I mentioned five, and that's risk. That's it. So again, it's risk, risk, risk. So the top five I just mentioned, uh, those would be the top five that I I address more than anything. But it's really risk.

SPEAKER_01 30:31

How can I increase the value of my business before I sell it?

SPEAKER_00 30:36

Ooh, yeah, we're gonna be a broken record here, aren't we? So we have to make sure that we de-risk your business. So here's a good example: a roofer, uh framing houses one day, does a side job, gets more work. Uh, now he's doing track homes and he has three crews and uh however many guys working, right? And he's killing it. Stop line revenue is fantastic, but he wants to sell his business and he wants to know how he can maximize his value. Well, you start by looking at it through the buyer's eyes, right? If it is everything that you're doing right now, can it transfer to me? Right? Can I can I do the same things that you're doing if you're not there? Right? How can I increase my value? So I'll pay more for your company if I don't have to rely on you, right? So that's that's number one. So how you increase the value, you de-risk everything. Founder centric. You know, so you're not the one making all the decisions. That's attractive. Value goes up, or at least it's not diminished, right? Customer concentration, the top five things I mentioned a moment ago. You have to de-risk all of those, and that will help you increase your overall enterprise value.

SPEAKER_01 31:59

How many years before selling should I start planning for the sale? At least three of my business.

SPEAKER_00 32:06

At least three years, five, really. But at least three years. Think about it. What we just talked about, you have you need to transfer relationships as an example. You don't do that in six months. You know what I mean? I mean, you have to identify who the person is that's taken over, right? So, and those relationships have to transfer, where it be with vendors, with customers. Um, how are how's the dynamic of the culture within the organization of new leadership if you were to go that way? What does that look like? So those are the things I would uh really pay close attention to. So three to five years, it takes time to throw the Titanic underwater.

SPEAKER_01 32:48

What should I do before putting my business up for sale?

SPEAKER_00 32:54

Everything I just

Offer Terms That Change The Outcome

SPEAKER_00 32:55

said. No, I'm just kidding. I know these are doing like segment thing, right? So if you're putting your business up for sale, you have to de-risk uh your business. It is so, so important. If you don't know what your risks are, talk to somebody. 100% talk to somebody. It's worth it. Think of it this way: if your your if your top line revenue is say a million dollars, right? And a red flag for a buyer would be, well, everything runs through the owner. Uh, I don't want to buy that because that's a job, right? Or all the relationships are through the owner, or all of the relationships are through one key person uh within the organization. That's a risky for me because that person leads or the owner or whatever, right? Then then I'm gonna be stuck with it. So that's not transferable. So three to five years out, start looking at your risk. You know, we do that here at KSG. Uh we can tell you exactly where all your risks are at the end of the day. What's the number at the end after negotiation? Right? Not the beginning.

SPEAKER_01 34:10

If I receive an offer to buy my business, what should I look at besides purchase price?

SPEAKER_00 34:17

Terms. Absolutely terms. Think of it this way. Let's say that you were offered uh $10 million for your company, and then you're you're saddled with a number of conditions, right? So do I get the $10 million? How much do I get to keep? What do I have to do to get it? Right? What am I gonna really gonna put in my bank account? What does that look like really for me? So it's important that you pay really close attention to those things. Did I answer your question?

SPEAKER_01 34:56

Oh, absolutely. Tell me, um, so we're about at time. I want you so can for for those of you guys listening who think you may want to learn a little more about how Tom has helped people add millions in value to their companies and walk through their exits. Uh, you know, there's you know, Tom can share with you how to get started. And he's been very generous with his time and talking to some of our clients and reaching out. And I think Tom, one of the things you could do is help them in assessing their current value. Or why don't you tell everybody if they want to start a conversation with you, how they can get in touch?

SPEAKER_00 35:33

Sure.

Adbacks And How To Get In Touch

SPEAKER_00 35:34

You want to get in touch with me, it's real easy. You can you can call me or email me, or just go to our website at www.candom. That's k-a-n-d-e-m.com. You can call me directly, 253-740-8400. Uh, they're a friend of Mark's, they're a friend of mine. There's there's one thing I would like to add here, Mark. I think it's really, really important for uh for self-employed people, and that is uh adbacks. So those aren't talked about with owners very much, and I know we're almost out of time, but this is really valuable. If you leave the company and you're paying yourself $100,000 a year, right? And they don't have to replace you, that $100,000 is an ad back. If your multiplier is five on sale, that's a half a million dollars. So adbacks are huge. Interesting. Anyway, it's more to leave you with that because that's a every dollar is a multiplier.

SPEAKER_01 36:33

Right. So uh that's that's really interesting. I never thought about that. Um, so I'm gonna put your email in the show notes. I know you gave us, did you give us the email? I know we have the URL, um, but I'm gonna give you your email in the show notes. So if anyone reaches out, tell me you know where you heard from uh you heard of Tom. And um, you know, he's been doing this for a while. He's seen a lot of companies. So if you feel like you're stuck, I think Tom will be great. Um and also if you guys are facing big tax problems, go to prosperalcpa.com slash apply. Prosper with an lcpa.com slash apply, and I will send you a personalized video illustrating how much we can save you in taxes with our strategies. Anything else, Tom, before we head on out?

SPEAKER_00 37:23

Uh nope. Uh I have I've received those emails from you, by the way. They're awesome. I really appreciate those. Awesome. Uh, but my yeah, my email address is simple. It's Tom at Candom with a K, K-A-N-D-E-M.com. That's simple. So we don't charge anything. Wonderful just discussion. Let's just kick it around, see if we can be a resource for you.

SPEAKER_01 37:47

Wonderful. Tom, thank you so much for your time. And thank you, everyone, for listening. Really hope you guys enjoyed the conversation.