He Sold in Two Years. He Says He Probably Shouldn’t Have.

Baxter talks about the fact that he really didn't negotiate a lot of important things before he closed his deal.

An example he makes is he didn't negotiate the benefits for his team.

So all these things his team had gotten used to, you know, whether it be their healthcare benefits or 401k or just the vacation policy, whatever it might be, those are things you got to get right up front.

Once you take the check, you don't have any control of what's going to happen with that company.

And so ultimately, you need to make sure you negotiate the terms of your team and of your own compensation, by the way.

If you're planning on staying, you might have been giving yourself a low salary all these years and taking your money in profit.

If you're going to stick around, you want to make sure you're paid what you're worth because you're incredibly valuable to the company.

When you take the check, you lose control of the destiny of the business.

And that's the thing is you just don't know what shape that's going to take.

And so how would you, how would you do it differently now? Or would you have done the deal?

That's a great question because when you asked, how would you do it now? I didn't really have an immediate thought, but then your second was, would you have done the deal? And probably not.

I look at where we were.

I know what our pipeline was going to be.

And you look back from 2012 to 2022, I think what would have happened would have been unbelievable.

Now, having said that, I did bring in two partners for the business, two very dear friends.

But there were some partnership things going on that were not going in the right direction either, that were unplanned, unforeseen, that made it challenging at the ownership level, let alone the day-by-day making money level, to where this came along and it immediately solved that.

Another theme we see on this show is this sort of fear of figuring out how am I going to get out of this company? And sometimes it's burnout.

Sometimes it's family dynamics.

But another one that comes up often is it's a partnership dynamic.

Partners are hard.

I see this over and over again that folks come to me and they say, I want to exit my business.

I don't know how to do it.

And when I say, do you want to exit the business or do you want to get rid of your partner? People have probably heard me say this before on the show and that comes up here with Baxter.

And so he leaves a business that actually was growing and it had a lot of opportunity to continue growing.

And he may have left a little bit too early.

Baxter talks about the fact that he really didn't negotiate a lot of important things before he closed his deal.

An example he makes is he didn't negotiate the benefits for his team.

So all these things his team had gotten used to, you know, whether it be their healthcare benefits or 401k or just the vacation policy, whatever it might be, those are things you got to get right up front.

Once you take the check, you don't have any control of what's going to happen with that company.

And so ultimately, you need to make sure you negotiate the terms of your team and of your own compensation, by the way.

If you're planning on staying, you might have been giving yourself a low salary all these years and taking your money in profit.

If you're going to stick around, you want to make sure you're paid what you're worth because you're incredibly valuable to the company.

When you take the check, you lose control of the destiny of the business.

And that's the thing is you just don't know what shape that's going to take.

And so how would you, how would you do it differently now? Or would you have done the deal?

That's a great question because when you asked, how would you do it now? I didn't really have an immediate thought, but then your second was, would you have done the deal? And probably not.

I look at where we were.

I know what our pipeline was going to be.

And you look back from 2012 to 2022, I think what would have happened would have been unbelievable.

Now, having said that, I did bring in two partners for the business, two very dear friends.

But there were some partnership things going on that were not going in the right direction either, that were unplanned, unforeseen, that made it challenging at the ownership level, let alone the day-by-day making money level, to where this came along and it immediately solved that.

Another theme we see on this show is this sort of fear of figuring out how am I going to get out of this company? And sometimes it's burnout.

Sometimes it's family dynamics.

But another one that comes up often is it's a partnership dynamic.

Partners are hard.

I see this over and over again that folks come to me and they say, I want to exit my business.

I don't know how to do it.

And when I say, do you want to exit the business or do you want to get rid of your partner? People have probably heard me say this before on the show and that comes up here with Baxter.

And so he leaves a business that actually was growing and it had a lot of opportunity to continue growing.

And he may have left a little bit too early.