Top Advice for CEOs Thinking About an Exit with Todd Sullivan

Intro: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. Each day, we welcome transformational executives to share their real- world experiences and practical advice about scaling yourself, your team, and your business.

Matt Blumberg: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. I'm Matt Blumberg, founder and CEO of Bolster. I'm here today with Todd Sullivan. Todd is a multi- time founder and CEO. His current company is called Exitwise. Great to have you on, Todd.

Todd Sullivan: Thanks, Matt. I really appreciate you having me.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah. First question is what is Exitwise? It sounds like a business every founder needs to know about.

Todd Sullivan: Yeah. We hope so. We're a platform for business owners who are interested in selling their businesses, really to learn about M& A and the M& A process and then get introduced to really the top industry- specific M& A experts around the world to help maximize the outcome of an exit.

Matt Blumberg: All right. I'm going to have to study up on that. My question for you, since that is the business you're in and you yourself have had several successful exits, is what is the top piece of advice you give to a founder, a CEO, a business owner thinking about an exit?

Todd Sullivan: Sure. I mean, this comes just from personal experience. I've had four exits. I've made a lot of mistakes along the way. Really, the number one thing... It leans right into what we do, is that if you are going to sell a business... You have never done this before. Maybe you've done it once before. But there are professionals out there that do this for a living and do it extremely well. It is not only that you want to hire professionals in an M& A transaction. You want to hire industry- specific M& A professionals, investment bankers, M& A attorneys, tax accountants, quality of earnings. All of these people should be very, very familiar with your company, your very specific industry. In fact, they should have sold your type of business previously. When you can identify those people, you are building, essentially, an M& A dream team.

Matt Blumberg: That's really interesting. My follow- up question is why? Obviously, yes, it's intuitive. But if you had to boil down the essence of why.

Todd Sullivan: Sure.

Matt Blumberg: What is that?

Todd Sullivan: We have a lot of analogies, I think. Something that resonates well is that when you have to have a brain surgery, you don't ask your family doctor to do it. You find. You interview. You ask lots of questions. You find the best.

Matt Blumberg: You don't do it yourself.

Todd Sullivan: You don't do it yourself. You find the best neurosurgeon in the world. What we do at Exitwise... I love sports analogies. I was a hockey guy. We ask you. We say, " You built your business. You went in. That's the regular season. Now, you are going into the playoffs. Ask yourself the question,'Do you want to win the Stanley Cup?' Because if you do, I can get Connor McDavid, Sidney Crosby. I can get Vasilevskiy and Ned. You will have the best possible team to win you the cup. That is what we do. The reasons we do it is that you de- risk this transaction because lots of them fail. If you go with an industry- agnostic investment bank, they fail 70% of the time. This is an absolute way to de- risk the transaction. You maximize your outcome. In this model, we sell 30% above market. Really, the last piece is that if your investment banker really understands the buyer pool, they've transacted with them before, they can create fit. That is really important because it's not all cash. There's usually an opportunity to go work at this acquirer, and you want to be happy.

Matt Blumberg: It's great advice. It mirrors something I tell founders all the time when they're doing financings. It's like you do three of these, and your VC does a billion of them.

Todd Sullivan: Exactly.

Matt Blumberg: Get people on your team that know what they're doing. Great advice. I am looking forward to learning more about Exitwise over time. Thanks for being here, Todd.

Todd Sullivan: Thanks, Matt. Really appreciate it.