In this episode of the Creative Dealmaker podcast, Carl Allen interviews Nicole Spencer, one of his business partners. Nicole shares her journey, discussing how she moved, got divorced, and sold her business all within three days. Despite the challenges, Nicole reflects positively on the experience, highlighting how it led her to where she is today. She delves into her background, starting as a high school teacher, transitioning into personal training, and eventually opening her own fitness studio, which she later sold.

Nicole explains her motivation behind starting her company, Authentic Conversion. She noticed a gap in the fitness industry, which was heavily dominated by aggressive marketing tactics that didn’t resonate with her. Nicole aimed to create a more empathetic, relationship-driven approach to coaching, primarily for health and fitness professionals. Her focus was on building businesses through human connection, a philosophy that contrasted with the prevalent “spammy” marketing strategies. Despite facing challenges and learning lessons from previous business ventures, she successfully built and sold her fitness studio, which laid the foundation for Authentic Conversion.

The discussion shifts to the concept of buying and selling businesses. Carl emphasizes the importance of strategic alignment, systems and process fit, and cultural fit when acquiring businesses. He and Nicole reflect on their experiences of selling businesses and the importance of finding the right buyer who aligns with the company’s values. They highlight the benefits of acquisitions over startups, especially the ease of stepping into an established business with existing cash flow, customers, and reputation, as opposed to starting from scratch.

Nicole also addresses the challenges many face when investing in coaching programs. She notes that a lack of self-belief and the willingness to commit to the process often hinder people from succeeding in the coaching industry. Authentic Conversion aims to change this by focusing on nurturing relationships and providing a supportive environment that encourages clients to take action. Carl and Nicole discuss the importance of mindset, purpose, and values alignment in achieving success, both in coaching and business acquisitions.

In the end, Carl encourages Nicole to consider acquiring more businesses in the future. They explore the idea of her expanding into other industries, such as health, beauty, and fitness, leveraging her passion and expertise. Carl offers to coach Nicole through this process, emphasizing that acquisition can be a strategic and rewarding way to grow without starting from the ground up.

Full Transcript:

The three most dramatic things in life that people do are move houses, get divorced, and sell companies. And you did all of that in three days?

“Yeah. But I loved it. My ex and I, we signed the papers. We went to dinner after. We were on such good terms, and we still are to this day. I was so ready to move back to my hometown, and I was so happy to have the cash in the bank. It was the most money I could have ever imagined at the time. I had a lot of trauma from that relationship for a long time, but now I can actually just look back on it and think I’m really grateful.”

A very warm welcome to the Creative Dealmaker podcast. I’m Carl Allen. I’m your host, and I’m going to be interviewing expert guests sharing investor strategies that will completely and utterly disrupt the market when it comes to buying and selling businesses all over the world. Hey, guys. It’s Carl Allen. Welcome to the Creative Dealmaker podcast.

I’ve got a very special guest with me today, one of my own business partners. We did a deal a few months ago, which I’m sure we’ll talk about a little bit as part of this conversation. But welcome to the show, Nicole Spencer. How are you?

“Yes. I’m wonderful. Thank you so much for having me.”

So, obviously, I know everything about you because I acquired your business, and now we’re partnering in a much bigger roll-up in the coaching and education space. But, just for the benefit of my listeners on the podcast and my viewers on YouTube, give us your backstory. Who is Nicole? Where is she from? And just kind of take me up to the present day.

“Oh my goodness. Well, I’ll keep it short. Yes, I’m Nicole Spencer, and I reside in Asheville, North Carolina, which is an amazing place to live. I hike all the time with my dog, and that’s my favorite thing to do. I’ve been in online education now for almost ten years and in the coaching space for much longer than that, so about fifteen years. Falling into coaching was fairly accidental. I actually went to school for teaching. I was a high school English teacher for three years.”

You’re a natural-born educator then, aren’t you?

“Yeah, totally. Except I like to teach adults who want to be there. Even in my student teaching, I knew that wasn’t going to be my life. So I did that for a few years. I always wanted to actually go get a PhD, and the stepping stone to that was a master’s. I found a master’s degree in Holocaust and Genocide Studies. So I actually have a full master’s degree in that. I wanted to be a professor. Once I got into grad school, I thought I wanted to work for an NGO or the UN, and that was really my dream. Long story short, I was living in New York City after graduate school. The UN wouldn’t hire me, and I didn’t want to wait tables anymore at, I think I was like twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old at the time. I had a master’s degree, and I was like, this is crazy. So I went and became a personal trainer, and it was the best decision I’ve ever made.”

“I worked corporate fitness for a few years, ended up moving down to Southeast Georgia, in a very tiny town where I didn’t know anybody. There wasn’t really anything else to do there, so I decided to open a fitness studio, which had been my dream in New York, but fairly impossible if you know anything about rent in the city. I made it happen despite having a lot of people who were just huge naysayers about it. Everyone was kind of like, ‘Well, it’s a great idea, but no one’s interested in that here. Not a great idea here. Love the idea, but just not here.’ Fortunately, I met a fitness business coaching company, went to one of their events, and saw people all over North America like me who were doing what I wanted to do. It built my belief. About six months later, I opened my gym. We had fifty paying clients in the first three months, and I didn’t even know anyone in that town six months prior. I actually sold that business within three years and one month from the date that I opened it.”

“I worked for three and a half years for another company, the one that I hired, and I was hired by them to do fitness business coaching and consulting. Like many jobs, it was great until it wasn’t. I broke away and started Authentic Conversion now six years ago, and here we are today.”

Wow, interesting. So the ones I want to talk about. Let’s get into that first deal. So you found the fitness studio, you grew it, and then you decided to take an exit. Just walk me through that. Walk me through that experience of your first acquisition as a seller. How did it go, and what did you learn through that journey?

“Well, I learned that the buyer has to be right because I sold a very profitable, very successful fitness studio that was closed within six months. So that was a huge lesson to learn. I can’t say that I regret the decision because at the time that I, well, even before I opened it, I was married at the time, and that’s why we ended up in this tiny little town. My ex-husband, who was wonderful and supported every dream I had and is really such a huge reason that I’m here today, took a job as a federal agent, teaching at the federal law enforcement training center where we were. His position was going to move us every three to five years. So I already knew when I was getting started that I either needed to be able to sell the business or run it remotely within three to five years. So I went into it with that mindset.”

“I would say about two and a half years in is when I started having thoughts of selling, and I just thought it was too soon. At that time, I was like, well, it’s not even close to its potential. But in a pretty quick period of time, he and I separated. I hated where we lived. So I moved up to Savannah, Georgia, which was an hour away. Now I’m running this remotely. I was already doing fitness business coaching, full-time working for this other company, and there was nothing tying me to Georgia other than him. So it ended up being a case where within a few months, I listed the business in May of 2015. We signed the papers the first or second week of July. I signed the sale papers, the divorce papers, and moved from Savannah back to Asheville all within a three-day period.”

Oh, my word.

“It was exciting, though. I loved it. It was great.”

So what you just talked about there. The three most dramatic things in life that people do are they move houses, get divorced, and sell companies. And you did all of that in three days?

“Yeah. But I loved it. My ex and I, we signed the papers. We went to dinner after. We were on such good terms, and we still are to this day. I was so ready to move back to my hometown. I was so happy to have the cash in the bank. It was the most money I could have ever imagined at the time, and not to have the stress of that anymore because running a gym is actually, as your partner, Chris knows, quite stressful. But I am always someone who has loved change. I think it’s really fun. I think it’s really exciting. It doesn’t scare me. I’m like the opposite of my parents. I don’t know where this came from, but it was such an invigorating time in life. I had more money than I’d ever had before. I was moving back to where I wanted to be closer to my mom and my hometown and entering a whole new phase of life, and it was great.”

That’s so amazing. Right? Because I think there’s a lot of different reasons why people sell companies. One is they want to retire or go into a new phase of life. Two is they just get stagnant in the company or get bored, and they get frustrated. Or there’s a lifestyle change, whether it’s breaking down a marriage or they want to move to a different location, which is kind of okay. We know what an online business like Authentic Conversion, we’ll talk about that in a minute, that we acquired, but now we’re partnered with you on. That business can run pretty much anywhere. And I think one of the challenges with brick-and-mortar businesses is, if you want to have a lifestyle change, often, the business can’t come with it. Whereas a digital business, like, you know, we’re partners now. We’ve only met once, yet we’re remote, and we’re doing all these crazy things.”

“So then what drove you? You sold Business One, you moved, you had the lifestyle change, you were back to the place that, I guess, was where you wanted to be. And then what drove you to create Authentic Conversion, which is an incredible company, and you did an amazing job building that? But what drove you? What gap in the market did you figure that, you know, I’ve got to go and fill?”

“There was the gap in the market piece, and there was also the personal piece. Really, when I was coming up in building my gym and really learning about marketing and sales and all of those things, it was such a masculine-dominated industry. You remember, like, all the seven-page sales letters that you’d get in the mail. I always called it the ‘punch you in the face marketing’ where you feel like you’re being yelled at. There was so much of that, and it just never resonated with me. I never wanted to do it. Anytime I followed someone else’s instructions and did it, it never worked. So I felt like there was a real need. When I started Authentic Conversion, it was only for health and fitness professionals. It’s not anymore. It’s for all types of coaches.”

“I really felt that there was a need specifically in that space for more human connection, more empathy, and for learning how to build businesses based on connection and relationships. That’s where it came from, bringing that energy into a very, and I don’t mean masculine like just men, but just that really in-your-face approach. Really wanting to teach people how they can get people coming to them. That was a big part of it, which I think, in hindsight, I didn’t even realize how important that would be because of all the gross tactics that are out there now. It’s not the seven-page ‘I’m yelling at you’ sales letter, but it’s the spammy DMs, pitching people without even knowing who they are, all of those things. The need for it is always going to be there, and I think it’s ever-evolving.”

“So there was that side of it for sure. The side of it that was more personal was, even though the relationship did not end well, I am so grateful for the experience that I had working for this other company. First, being a client of theirs for three years and then working for them for three and a half years because I got to teach fitness business all over the world. It was mostly online, but I was teaching in-person workshops once or twice a month. They sent me to host and MC events from Australia to the UK and everywhere in between. There was so much networking that happened there. I mean, we still have people in our program that I met through those opportunities. I met great friends and connections, and I learned so much.”

“But about a year and a half before we parted ways is when I really wanted to. Then it got to a point where I felt like I was in an abusive relationship. I actually ended up getting an apology email from the owner of the company a couple of years later for how he treated me. The falling out was that I was not willing to do something that I felt was really unethical. I couldn’t get a reason from them why they wanted me to do this thing or a justification. So I just refused, and it wasn’t going to work beyond that. I had a lot of trauma from that relationship for a long time, but now I can actually just look back on it and think I’m really grateful. So this business was essentially born from a place of personal pain first. I had to change my life but then also really recognize that I had a valuable solution to offer.”

That’s so powerful. Right? I’ve been through a very similar process in a company that I sold. So I sold the business to a massive corporate where it was a great business with a great brand, but a lot of their tactics and things they did didn’t resonate with me. This was a deal I did just before COVID, and I was locked in for a period of time, partly living in the states. I knew very early on that this wasn’t going to end well. Fortunately for me, I got the business back in a very creative way at a significant discount and was able to build it back up and make it super successful again. I still own that business, which is fantastic.

But oftentimes, when you look at mergers and acquisitions, I learned how to do this as a Wall Street guy. I learned this in corporate America. When you’re doing the big deals, and a lot of this translates down to small acquisitions, which are the bulk of all the deals that happen, three things have to be true for a deal to work.

Number one is it’s got to have strategic alignment and fit. When company A buys company B, there’s got to be a reason. A chiropractor is not going to buy an auto repair shop. Like, Dealmaker Wealth Society buying Authentic Conversion, massive synergy, massive strategic fit. We’re partnering on that new entity together. Strategic alignment is really important.

The second thing is systems and process fit. I won’t bore you with stories of massive deals that I’ve worked on in the past where just simple things like their IT systems wouldn’t work. You had business A on a mainframe, business B on a client-server platform, and they couldn’t talk to each other. So you couldn’t get the synergies and all the different things and the process alignments that you need.

But the third thing, and this is probably the most important thing that I think caused me pain in my deal and caused you pain in your deal, is cultural fit. Cultural fit. And you mentioned before about often in deals, it’s not just about the best deal in terms of price and terms, which are negotiation points. What I think is often more important for a certain type of seller is that cultural fit. It’s that safe pair of hands. It’s buyers and sellers whose values align, that their beliefs and their principles align. And you know that something you’ve built and you care about and you love and you adore that for whatever reason you don’t want anymore, you want to exit, it’s making sure that the buyer knows that and they’re going to treat it with respect. It almost goes back to legacy.

If you think about Authentic Conversion, that to me is a transformational company that has gone a long way to change the way that people are marketing online today. And I think it’s really important when you sell an asset like that for whatever reason, you find a buyer that’s got the same values as you, and we don’t see a lot of that in the world. But thank you for selling me your company and agreeing to partner with me on its next evolution. Right?

“Absolutely. I think we all aligned in what we wanted to do with the business. And hopefully, you’ll agree in the three short months that we’ve owned it, we’ve done some pretty amazing things. We’ve taken a beautiful diamond company and just started to put the afterburners on a little bit. And whilst it’s a work in progress, as a board, we’re all thrilled with what we can do with the business next year and beyond.”

Right? And, you know, we’re putting these programs out there, whether it’s me on the business acquisition side or whether it’s you on the online coaching side, growing online businesses. We’re teaching our experience. We’re teaching what we know to be true to make things work. And it’s like recipes when you’re baking. Right? If you follow the recipe step by step, you get the right ingredients, you combine them at the right times, and you do the things that the person’s telling you to do, there’s no reason why you can’t get the same result.

Now in online coaching, one of the biggest frustrations I’ve always had is why people just don’t pull the trigger. Right? Why they’re only there to educate themselves. They’re not there to actually execute and do the work that they need to do to get the results that they’re looking for. And you and I both know that all comes down to kinda mindset. Right? So in your experience, authentic conversion, like and we’re going to go through, like, statistics of people that went big and didn’t. But, like, what do you think is the biggest thing that kinda holds people back from investing their hard-earned money into these programs, but then just not doing anything?

And I’d be guilty of that in stuff that I’ve invested in, and I’ve never even logged in. I once dropped fifty thousand dollars in a crypto mastermind, and I went on one call. The biggest waste of money ever. But, like, why do you think it is that people come into these programs and they invest, but they just don’t pull the trigger? They just won’t do the work.

I think it can be so many different reasons. I mean, statistically, you know, we at authentic conversion, we coach coaches. Statistically, eighty to ninety percent of coaches don’t even make it the first year in the industry. So most are just in and out before they even start. And I think that the primary reason for that is, well, the result of the reason is that they don’t make any money, and who wants to spend time doing something or saying you’re gonna do something when you don’t make money. And I think that goes back to the fact that most people don’t, I would say, they don’t believe in themselves enough or trust their vision enough or trust themselves enough to go do the work.

Because I always say to people, look. If you trust yourself to do the work and you are willing to follow the game plan we’re gonna give you, this is not, like, an expense in any way. This is going to return so much more. I mean, we’re promoting a program right now where people literally need one client, for the rest of their life for this to return a positive investment. One client for the entire rest of your life. And there are a lot of people who are like, I just can’t invest that much right now, and I’m like, you’re not gonna make it. There’s a very distinct thought process for people who are going to make it and who aren’t. Sure. The dream of working for yourself and all the time and financial freedom and location freedom and all that is great, but there’s a requirement of investing time, energy, and money before you see a return.

And that’s, I think, what most people just can’t get over. They don’t perhaps they don’t even know what’s possible for themselves, but they don’t believe in themselves and what’s possible enough to actually pull the trigger on those things. I think that’s the biggest problem because if they fully believed that what they wanted was not only available but inevitable if they do the work, there would never even be a hesitation when it comes to doing something uncomfortable, putting yourself out there, investing the money, all of those things. It’s the doubt that keeps us, I think, from making that decision.

And I think this is one of the things I love about your business, right, is that I think you’ve intentionally figured out how to fix that problem. So I think it’s like, people come into programs. I look at all the people that we vets come into Protege. Right? They’re all at different levels in their experience, and they’re all at different levels in their journey. And oftentimes, there’s no one size fits all kind of path to nurture them to a certain point where they’ve got the confidence and the assurance and the belief that it’s worth pulling the trigger to kinda do this. And I think a lot of it comes down to what I call dimensionalized benefits.

When I look at deal maker, and I say this all the time on the coaching calls, actually, nobody really wants to buy and own a business. Think of that as the feature. Right? What they want are the benefits that becoming a business owner will give them. Right? Which can be wealth creation, cash flow, legacy, freedom, work-life balance, assurance, pride, ego, you know, whatever it is. Right? Because our brains, our two-million-year-old subconscious minds, make decisions through emotion. There are emotional triggers that we have to go through in our minds to make those buying decisions, and then our logical brain backs it up. Well, how much is it? And what’s my ROI gonna be? And how many hours a week do I need to study? And how do I log in, and all of those kinda crazy things.

But, you know, what I saw in your marketing material, which is very, very different to a lot of other marketers that have mentored me in the past, phenomenal marketers that are now my dear friends like Caleb O’Dowd, Todd Brown, Frank Kern, all these amazing guys. And they’ve figured it out as well. And I think in marketing, if you’re truly prepared to help the student understand their why and then create a path to nurture them to the point where they’re ready to pull this trigger, that’s gold. Hohemoezy does that so well, and I know you’ll know him because, you know, he really got his chops. You know, come and get this from the gym and the fitness space.

But, like, why doesn’t anybody else do this? Right? You know, you look at all these other people like, you know, I got on these lists because I look at stuff, and then you’re just absolutely bombarded with emails. Like, hey. You know, I’ve saved a spot for you. Like, I got a DM. I got a Facebook DM from somebody the other day, and it was actually the owner of the business who DM me and said, hey. I’m running a Black Friday special, my six-thousand-dollar course. I’m gonna let you have it for three thousand dollars. I got one spot left, and I want you to have it. Here’s the link sign up.

And I replied back, and I said, I actually have no idea what your course is. Like, tell me about it. Well, let’s get on a call. And I’m thinking, well, no. I don’t wanna have a sales call with you where you’re gonna close me. I have absolutely no idea what your program is, how it’s gonna benefit me, and what are the results I can expect if I pull the trigger. It’s like, just tell me what they are, and then we’ll have a call. No. No. No. No. That’s what the call is all about. And it drives me crazy. This scarcity, BS. I got one spot. It’s an online coaching program. Right? Where there’s one person in or a million people in it, doesn’t matter. Like, you don’t have to lie to be an incredible marketer and position what you do so effectively to truly convince a prospect that if they pull the trigger and they dial in their purpose, they’re gonna get the results. Like, why is the rest of the market so scamming? Like, I don’t get it.

Yeah. I mean, I think there’s a few things. Right? I don’t know how many people would do that if they’ve been doing this any substantial length of time with any experience. I think the people who resort to those, like, kinda quick spammy tactics just don’t know that there’s a better way. And I think that just comes from either maybe what they’ve been taught or observed or just lack of experience and, you know, the concept of authentic conversion. Right? There’s the authentic piece and then there’s conversion, which is sales. And so the whole concept of that is to where it should really feel good for both parties. So the marketer like, we never like, no one wants to go send that DM that you received. Like, that doesn’t feel good to anyone, but they just think they have to do it because they wanna make the sale. So it should feel good to you as a marketer to do. Even if it feels uncomfortable because you haven’t done it before, it’s different. But, like, it should still actually feel genuine, and it should feel good to the person receiving it.

I still get messages all the time that ask me how my fitness business is going. I’m like, you didn’t even, like, click my profile. I’m like, it’s very clear that that’s not what I do and haven’t for almost ten years. So, you know, so there’s that component of it, but I think that the real thing that detracts from the genuineness and the authenticity of marketing today is that everyone’s more concerned with themselves than they are with the person that they’re talking to. Right? And I think that’s really what I’ve always led with. And, you know, we’re working on really amplifying sales and our sales team and everything here at Authentic Conversions since Chris has come in. But really, like, up and it’s gonna feel the same way, which I’m excited about. But really, up until then, I have shown up and delivered value and nurtured and done that in a way to where the people who want what I have always come to me. I’m sure I follow up, but I’m never the one to send the cold DM. I’m never the one to, you know, try to hunt someone down and do those things. And they’re just not things I would ever personally be willing to do because that really violates the integrity that I have.

And that’s how you get to be spammy and sales-y is when you’re trying to do something that’s good for you, but not for the person you actually want to pull the trigger. Yeah. I think that’s so important. And, like, we went through that process with our own sales team inside of DealMaker is when we hired them. They were all from a world where they were used to that scarcity, not scammy, but scarcity all about them, not about the student. And we flip that by saying, hey. So, you know, ask them two questions. Number one, you know, why do they wanna do this? What’s their purpose? What’s the fuel that’s gonna drive them through when this gets challenging? Because it doesn’t matter whatever you do in life. Whether you wanna lose weight, lose a relationship, buy a business, grow a business. Sometimes it gets tough. Right? And if you’ve not got the purpose or the why to power through, it’s why most people give up in life. Right? They’re not dialed in as to why they wanna do it. So we always ask that question.

And then the second question we ask them, and this is really genuine, is we have them pitch us on why we should let them into the program. Right? So one out of every two or three people that applied to come into Protege, we let them in because we believe that I’m massive on values alignment. Right? I have my values. The DealMaker business is completely mirrored to my values. And when I look at people, either businesses I’m gonna buy like yours or people that I wanna coach, if my values are not aligned, I don’t want them in the program. And sometimes that drives people crazy because DealMaker could be, you know, it’s an eight-figure business now, but it could be even bigger than that. But it’s like, I don’t just want to coach everybody.

And, like, hopefully, soon, you’ll start coming on the Progyny calls and you’ll see just the absolute power in that community and how it’s grown to so much more outside of me. And I think that’s come down to our sales and nurturing process. There are people that go through, you know, our front-end ten-day business buying challenge, and they join the protege program or they apply within the first hour of the ten days? They’re like, this is amazing. You future pace this for me. I know now what I need to do. Yeah. I don’t just wanna dip my turn in the water. I wanna get stuck in. I wanna apply. Right?

And that pitching is really hard to come into the program. Like, I’d rather have a business where the customer’s pitching me than the company is pitching them, and I learned this from Apple. Right? This is what Steve Jobs did with Apple. He turned Apple into a business that was just it was like social currency. It was like people just they weren’t buying the product. They were buying what the product did for them. Right? And but I never see that. And that’s why I saw that in your business, as did Chris, which is why we want to buy it for sure.

Love that. Yeah. Yeah. I think, that’s I think, you know, with the way the market is today, I think that’s one of the things really required to win and to be one of the standouts. Yeah. Whatever you’re in. Perfect. I got one more question for you. Yep. And I’m a let you go. So you’ve obviously we touched on this before. So you’ve been through a couple of exits. So you understand how the process works. You’re, you know, you’re a master at this now. And, like, for you now as an owner-investor, so, you know, I I’m a partner in, like, twenty-six companies now including yours. And, you know, I don’t really work in any of them. So I I’m the consumer-owner investor, chairman of the board, I think, and I coach. Right? That’s what I love to do.

So I think with you now, we’ve freed you up a lot to the point where you can think and coach with regards to authentic, but now you’ve got a bunch of time where you can do other things. I would love you at some point, and I will personally coach you through the process. I would love you to go and acquire other businesses and be able to leverage yourself with teams. Go and find other Chris’ that can run your businesses for you and have you build a portfolio across deals that you’re really passionate about. Right? So, like, what would that look like for you if we did that? What other businesses could you see yourself being an acquirer, but not having to do any of the day-to-day work?

Yeah. I don’t know. I mean, I haven’t had a like, to this point, to be fair, I have not had a whole lot of space to think about it. We’ve been working really hard, you know, with the transition. I’m still very involved in quite a lot of so I haven’t gotten the space quite yet, but it’s funny because, you know, when, I obviously had already sold the business before, but when I was thinking about this process, I was, talking to one of my friends and actually one of your former students, Evan Lindsey. He knows you. He knows Chris. Great. He was in town. He actually owns a gym here, lives in Cayman Island. So he was like a great example of someone who’s acquired businesses, runs them remotely very successfully. And so we were having a drink together, and I was talking to him, and I was like, who would wanna buy this business? And he’s like, who would wanna start that business? So it’s, like, really different perspectives. You know?

I think I’ve always just kinda thought that, I had to start something from the ground up for it to work or for it to be valuable. But, you know, clearly, that’s not the case. So this whole idea of, like, wanting to buy businesses is actually, quite a, like, a new concept for me. I think it would be something that is a little bit less. I don’t know if relational is the word. I think I’ve I being a coach for fifteen years, you know, and a teacher before that, I feel like I need a little less, like, you know, human, emotion. I’m involved.

So, yeah, I’m not I could see you doing very well in anything to do with, like, kinda health and fitness. Right? So you’re obviously you’re very passionate about fitness. You know, you’re very intentional about your own health. I could see you buying, you know, supplement companies, yoga businesses, any businesses involved in, like, health, beauty, and nutrition for women. I could see a lot of that stuff. And, like, you touched on something, and we’ll talk about this, very briefly before we finish, is it is a mindset shift for people. Right? And the market data kinda really backs this up.

So every year in the United States, almost seven million people will start a company from scratch according to the SBA. Seven million people will start a brand-new business. They get that entrepreneurial itch or as my good friend Michael Gerber calls the author of the E Myth, they have an entrepreneurial seizure. Right? And a lot of people start businesses because they’re very good at the technical work that the business does. Right? So the mechanic goes out and starts his own repair shop. The chef goes out and starts her own restaurant. The coach, the great coach goes and starts her own coaching company. And what’s really interesting is the skills you need to have to run a business are completely different from the skills that you need to have to do what the business does.

It’s like the CPA that’s a great CPA and goes and starts a CPA firm, and they fail. And, like, the statistics are terrible. Right? Ninety-six percent of all startup businesses will fail within the first ten years. Only four percent survive, and half of those businesses will fail within the first year. And when you think about it, when you start a new company, you’ve got no cash, you’ve got no credit, you’ve got no customers, you probably don’t have a product. You’ve got an idea. Right? It’s a piece of paper. And you’ve no, like, you’ve no reputation yet in the market. You’re just a brand-new company.

And people wonder why so many businesses fail. It’s those two reasons. One, technicians try to become business owners, and it doesn’t always work. And number two, you’re trying to push water uphill. But becoming a business acquirer solves both of those two different problems. Right? So it’s like me. You know, when I looked at the roll-up of DealMaker in the coaching space, the one business that I really wanted to buy was a company like yours, or one of the things I wanted to own was a business that would teach people how to build businesses online through marketing.

And I could have started that business. Right? You know, I can do marketing. Chris can do marketing. We could have started that business, and it might have taken us five years to get to the point where you’re at. So by acquiring a business that’s already successful and has achieved the things that you wanna achieve, it’s you’re walking into cash flow. You’re walking into customers. You’re walking into products. You’re walking into people, and an acquisition has all of the things that startups don’t have, and this is how big companies think. Right? So think of Amazon. Right? So Amazon is one of my favorite businesses.

And, like, do you think, like, all those years ago when, Bezos was sat in his office and, one of the guys ran in and said, Jeff. Jeff. Like, you’re not gonna believe it. There’s this company. It’s called Audible. They’ve created a product that allows you to listen to a book while you’re walking the streets or driving the car or in the gym. Right? Did Bezos didn’t sit down and think, well, dang. Well, I gotta get my r and d team in here. Let’s figure out how to build this, and let’s figure out how to go to market with it, and let’s figure out how to price it. And no. He just bought the company. Right?

So big businesses will acquire everything that they need to be successful. They might wanna buy market share. They wanna buy more revenue. They wanna buy more EBITDA. They wanna buy more employees, more customers, more products, more services, more locations, more IP. Everything that you want as a business owner, you can buy, and you can get financing to help you make that acquisition. So you’re not having to put all of your money down personally to make that. Like, it’s like buying a car. Right?

If you wanna own a car, do you build a car? Not really. Do you buy all the components on eBay and then go on YouTube and think, well, how do I where does the steering wheel go and, like, how do I where does the battery go? Like, no. You don’t buy it, and then you can finance that purchase oftentimes without a lot of money out of your own pocket. And entrepreneurs don’t get that. Right? Entrepreneurs don’t get that. They think they have to pay cash for everything. They think that they have to build everything from scratch because it’s cool.

They look at Facebook. They look at Google. They look at all these incredible businesses that we have now that were startups and became monster companies. Someone’s gotta start businesses. Otherwise, there’s no businesses to buy. But if you think that ninety-six percent of businesses fail, go look at the four percent that survive and then just go buy them because those owners are gonna wanna transition, you know, at some point, and you can buy those businesses. And the better they are, like your business, the easier it is to go and finance the purchase of that.

It’s just crazy. So, hopefully, in the future, when you’re ready, we’d love to get you into some more deals, and it would be an absolute honor and privilege to kinda coach you through that. So I’m open to learning. I’m getting into some heavy equipment operation stuff. Yeah. Yeah. I heard about that, actually. Excited, and I’m actually quite excited about that. Never thought I would be. I don’t even know what the heavy equipment’s called, but the structure is really cool. But, yeah, I’m open to learning everything, so I look forward to it.

Yeah. I was with those guys yesterday in Dallas, by the way. I went over there to see them on some stuff. But, but no. Well, hey, Nicole. Thank you so much for your time. Really enjoyed the conversation. Love riffing with you on all the stuff. But have a great rest of your day, and I will see you soon. Until then, bye for now. Bye.