Business
In one way or another, everybody leaves their business. Prepare well for the inevitable by knowing your exit strategy. In this episode, Bob Roark talks with Donna and Gary Thiel, small service business owners who, after more than 30-plus years, has closed the sale of their business. They share their journey and offer great insights about the process, for when you also decide on selling your business. Follow along to learn about who to talk to and what to do during this important business decision. --- Watch the episode here:Listen to the podcast here:[smart_track_player url="" title="The Process Of Selling Your Business With Donna And Gary Thiel" image="http://businessleaderspodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/BLP-SquareLogo-WhiteBlueBG1400x1400.png" background="default"] The Process Of Selling Your Business With Donna And Gary ThielWe have Donna and Gary Thiel. Thank you for your time. This is going to be a little bit different episode. We're going to talk about the journey between deciding to sell your business and the process. First off, tell us a little bit about your business. We own a small service business. Window cleaning was our main function. We did everything from residential to high rise. We also did snow removal services through the winter months. How long had you run the business? I originally bought it in fall 1986. I had worked for the company for about 6 or 7 years prior to that. Donna came in ‘96, ‘97-ish. She came in and helped with a lot of things like accounting stuff. What was the date that you closed on the sale of your business? March 1 of 2019. You ran that for a long time, 30-plus years. There's that ongoing discussion that you hear from business owners. At some point, you're going to exit the business in one way or another. Everybody leaves their business I suppose. What was that thought process like when you started thinking about selling your business? The stress level got high. The economy was good in Denver and stuff, but that brought along some difficulties of finding help and things like that. The salaries had gone way up in the city. It got difficult to compete and finding enough good people to get the work done to stay competitive was getting difficult. I would imagine it's not the everyday person that wants to hang over the side of a high rise. They are a different old breed. There are a lot of them out there. It’s some of the bigger companies and a lot of the construction industry was even taking employees that would normally be doing things in our industry. They had increased salaries much and benefits and it got difficult. I think about the challenges when you're in a full-employment economy. You and Donna got together and made it a decision that it was time to sell the business. Once you had that decision in place, what were your next steps to try to identify how or who you are going to use to help you sell? We were lucky because Marla is one of our accounts in my work in commercial packaging. I'm a broker. We automatically went to her and started asking questions. She comes involved with Keith and Keith was amazing. Marla is a unique individual. She is the CEO of https://raincatcher.com/ (Raincatcher). You were fortunate you had a contact within the industry. You started working with Keith. For that process of going through, what was the process from when you started talking with Keith to when the business was effectively ready to go on the market? What was that like? [bctt tweet="You got to wait until it's completely done and not get wound up." username=""] There was some work involved. There were a lot of things they were asking for that we weren't expecting. We attempted to sell it ourselves. We're probably about 1.5 years before going out and seeking a broker in Raincatcher and such. What was that like? That got a bit frustrating. We had a couple of people that showed interest. We didn't know all the ins and outs of how to deal with them, and all...