Amy Walker’s Exit School: Making Million-Dollar Business Ownership Accessible to All

Intro  

Welcome to another edition of inspired stories where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes, how they’ve overcome adversity, and explore current challenges they’re facing.

Anthony Codispoti (00:00)
Welcome to another edition of the inspired stories podcast where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes and be inspired by how they’ve overcome adversity. My name is Anthony Cotaspodi and today’s guest is Amy Walker, the CEO and founder of the exit school. Her organization helps entrepreneurs, small business owners and six figure employees successfully buy and sell small businesses.

They believe business ownership should be accessible to all, and their mission is to ensure no business ever has to shut its doors when retirement approaches. Since founding the Exit School in 2023, she has helped countless clients plan for sustainable growth and a fulfilling retirement. Amy is a highly sought after speaker, executive coach, and author known for her energetic presentations.

She has transformed many sales and marketing strategies for different companies and her accomplishments include being recognized as a certified body language expert and having her work featured in Fast Company, US News and World Report and American Express. Her background also includes hosting a popular radio show and coaching teams to achieve significant growth. She brings.

years of experience in motivating owners to overcome challenges and thrive in competitive markets. Now, before we get into all that good stuff, today’s episode is brought to you by my company, Adback Benefits Agency, where we offer very specific and unique employee benefits that are both great for your team and fiscally optimized for your bottom line. Imagine being able to give your employees free access to doctors, therapists, and prescription medications in a way that puts more money

in your staff’s pockets and the company’s too. As an example, one recent client with 450 employees boosted net profits over $412,000 a year. Results vary for each company and some organizations may not be eligible. To find out if your company qualifies, contact us today at addbackbenefits.com. All right, back to our guest today, CEO and founder of The Exit School, Amy Walker. Thanks for making the time to share your story today.

Amy Walker (02:17)
so grateful to be here. Thank you for inviting me and giving me a platform.

Anthony Codispoti (02:22)
All right, let’s jump right in. So before we get into the exit school, which is where we’re spend most of our time, I’d like to set the stage for what qualifies you to be in a position of advising people on buying or selling a business. Can you kind of give us a little bit of your past track record so people can understand?

Amy Walker (02:43)
Absolutely. I have been in the business value growth space for about 12 years. And that’s where we’re looking at how do we make the company worth more in the future than it’s worth today. So that involves things like driving your top line revenue, but also increasing your profits, better operations, ⁓ better leadership team, just really developing a better company so that it’s not so owner dependent. And I’ve been in that space for a long time.

But I’m going to be honest with you, Anthony. I think people assume you need to be more qualified than you are to buy businesses. I’ve helped people buy businesses where they’ve been a stay at home mom, raising six kids and now owning a multimillion dollar company. I’ve helped people transition from being software developers to buying the software company. There’s a lot of opportunities out there.

And one of the things that we joke about with our clients often is that far stupider people than you own businesses today. It’s not, you know, it’s really not rocket science. I think it’s a lot more accessible than most people assume it is. And the funny thing is when my business partner reached out to me and asked if I wanted to, you know, start acquiring businesses with him, at first I said no, because I didn’t see how my experience was going to translate into this new space of buying businesses.

And I think we just need to give ourselves a little bit more credit and open up that as a possibility because it’s not as hard as we think it will be before we get into it.

Anthony Codispoti (04:18)
I’d like to hear you say a little bit more about that because you whether you’re a software engineer that’s worked for a company and now you’re stepping into a very different role of being an owner or a stay at home mom that is now, you know, running, owning a multi-million dollar company, both of those sound like they’re pretty big leaps. Tell me why I’m wrong.

Amy Walker (04:42)
Well, when you think about running a small business and you run a small business, most of it you learned through the doing of the business, right? Like you kind of grew into it. And when we buy businesses, we don’t buy solopreneur businesses where it’s one person who does everything and knows everything. We’re trying to find a business that has a team in place and they have operations in place. And now the owner…

sits in a seat on the bus usually, like they have a job, they have a role that they do, and they’re going to train you on how to do their job. But what we try to do is help people figure out what their earned secret is. So for example, I’ll give you Marie, stay at home mom, who she, when you look at her experience and what she was really good at, she was good at two things. She was really good at managing teenagers.

And she was really good at shopping and managing costs because she’d been running a family of six on a budget. So her business that she bought was for crumble cookie locations that were already existing, already had cashflow. Who works for them? A whole lot of teenagers. What is the number one thing that she needed to do to make the businesses more profitable? She needed to save them on their food costs and on their labor costs.

and she took that business over and she increased them from a 10 % profit margin up to a 30 % profit margin. So huge, yeah, huge. And she’s worth it.

Anthony Codispoti (06:09)
And this was mostly

or completely focusing on food costs.

Amy Walker (06:13)
Food costs and labor costs, those were the two things. So they had a lot of teenagers just hanging around, talking with their friends when they weren’t busy. And it was like, okay, if we’re not busy, people get cut, they go home. And that’s not abnormal for jobs like that. My 20-year-old son, well, sorry, my 18-year-old son is ⁓ working for a restaurant right now and he’ll come home early. like, yeah, I got cut, we were slow. Normal in that type of an industry. So she really got them to like utilize their labor costs better.

The way they had run it before is each of the managers of the stores had a credit card and the owners told them, buy whatever you need. She was like, give me back those credit cards. Tell me what you need. And so she did all of the ordering herself. She shopped for better discounts for where they could buy things. ⁓ She ordered in bulk. She got them sent to her house. She distributed them to the stores. So she was able to increase the profit margin by, you know, 20%, which is huge. Yeah.

Anthony Codispoti (07:08)
That’s incredible. Yeah,

I love that. Because sometimes the best fixes are the simplest ones.

Amy Walker (07:15)
Yeah, absolutely. You don’t have to be overly complicated. And, you know, I was telling you about ⁓ our software engineer right now. He’s getting ready to buy this company. He knows this industry so well. He’s been working in it for 29 years and he’s been in so many different aspects of the industry and different roles. And so when we got on a call with the business owner, you could tell that his broker and me were just sitting there like,

We understand very little of what you guys are talking about, but we can tell that you both really understand what you all are talking about. And they really hit it off. And I was just this morning, because he’s actually under contract. I was going over his business plan with him that he’s going to submit to the SBA. And he knows all the levers of what it’s going to take to make this business successful. He’s ⁓ got a ton of contacts in the industry as well from different companies that he’s worked with over the years.

where he can reach out to them and see if he can get contracts with bigger organizations. He’s so well primed to be able to run this business. Now, does he have stuff to learn? Yes, he absolutely does have stuff to learn, but he’s smart, he’s capable, he’s learned new things before in his life. This is just the next set of new skills that he needs to learn.

Anthony Codispoti (08:33)
Is your company set up to help steer him in the right direction to, I don’t know, find mentors or courses or things that can help him develop those skills that he still needs?

Amy Walker (08:46)
yeah, for sure. ⁓ Nobody buys a business in our program without having a really solid business plan and being aware of what we call their leadership gap. And everybody has a leadership gap. I have one, you have one. Wherever we’re going next, we’ve never been there before. So we don’t have to know it all. We just have to know what we don’t know and have a plan for how we’re gonna manage that leadership gap.

So that’s an important part of the process is you got to have a game plan for how to run the business once you take it over. And then we also stick with our clients for the first 90 days after transition as well, make sure that things are going well, that they’ve been thoroughly trained by the exiting owner, that they feel really confident. And ⁓ if they have areas that need improvement, we also…

identify that before we buy and we set aside budget for that so that once they walk in, if it’s like, all right, you’re going to need some operations help or you’re going to need some marketing help or you’re going to need to hire an executive leadership coach to teach you how to be a CEO, you set aside those funds and you make sure that the business has the cashflow to support it because the worst thing is buying the wrong business or buying a business where you have all these ideas for how to grow it, but you have no cash to grow it. So you need to make sure that the numbers all line up.

and there’s budget for it.

Anthony Codispoti (10:04)
So I want to dive more into your, I’m going to call it unique business model because you’re not traditional business brokers. But before that, I want to hear about how the company came to be. Cause I think there’s an interesting story there.

Amy Walker (10:19)
That is kind of a fun story. So I have a business partner and we’ve been friends and colleagues for 12 years. We’d pass clients back and forth. ⁓ Just whenever one of us had a big idea, we’d brainstorm with the other person. And so we’d just been supporting each other for the last 12 years. And he reached out to me and he said, I’m getting ready to sell out my shares in my marketing agency.

and I want to brainstorm an idea with you.” And so we get on the phone and he’s talking to me about this idea of raising a fund, purchasing $100 million worth of companies and he’s asking me to poke holes in the idea. We’re talking it through and then he said, well, what do you think? I said, I think it’s really exciting. I am happy for you. This sounds like a great plan. And he said, what would it take for you to do it with me? And I initially said no. I was like, no, thank you. I’m not interested.

And I got out of my car, we were talking while I was driving and I was walking into a meeting and this meeting was fascinating because it was community leaders who were coming together to talk about a problem. I live in a really rural community and for the first time ever, we had school buses that were picking up children at tent cities and in the national parks because we have this new problem of homelessness that we’d never had before. We don’t have shelters.

There’s just really not a lot of resources. And so all of these community leaders were coming together to talk about how do we solve this problem? And while I was in that meeting, I just got this huge overwhelming sense of like, okay, you got to do this because the problem in that meeting was not lack of the right ideas. I think we had great ideas. ⁓ We had the right resources at our disposal. We didn’t have money to fund it.

So we had the people who had the right ideas that could do the right things to solve the problem of homelessness. Nobody had the funding to get it up and started. And I thought, you know what? I’ve just been given an opportunity, like literally handed in my lap to go out there and build massive amounts of wealth. And along the way of me buying a hundred million dollars worth of businesses, I’m going to be partnering with people who wouldn’t otherwise have access to business ownership. And we’re going to be building millionaires who then can go and

build in their local communities. And so I texted him under the table. I was like, just kidding. I’m in. have no idea what this looks like. Yeah, I was like, I’m in. I don’t know what we’re doing. I don’t know. And I remember the interesting thing was I disqualified myself because I didn’t know if I would be good at it.

Anthony Codispoti (12:46)
⁓ That was a quick turnaround.

Amy Walker (13:02)
I just really quickly was like, don’t have a hundred million dollars to start this fund. I don’t know what buying a business entails. I’m not sure if I would be good at it. And I just disqualified myself from it. And, you know, I look at it now and I think I just lacked so much information. But I think anytime somebody has the confidence in you to open a door for you, you should walk through. You might fail, but you also might be great at it. And you really don’t know.

Anthony Codispoti (13:32)
Okay, so we’ve touched on it a little bit, but explain more about this unique approach that you guys take to business ownership.

Amy Walker (13:39)
Yeah, so we don’t like startups anymore. It’s kind of a dirty word for us, which is funny because I worked with startups for years and years and it’s so hard. Such a grind. It’s such a hustle and you’re constantly fighting against time and money. It’s like, well, if I had more time, I could do that. If I had more money, I could hire somebody to do that. You know, so it’s this constant battle. So our approach is we find really great businesses. They’ve got good cashflow. They’ve got

teams, they’ve got some systems in place, they’ve got contracts, they’ve got clients, and they’re too small to appeal to private equity. So these businesses are usually between one and 10 million is their enterprise value, which private equity, when they go out and they raise a fund, they will raise $200,000 or sorry, $200 million and need to deploy it in a short period of time. So they’re not looking for real small businesses that are going to take

⁓ a good amount of work. They’re looking for bigger businesses that are going to take a little bit of work. So that’s what we focus on is those businesses that they’re big enough that they really should transfer. ⁓ But they’re just small enough that there’s not a lot of competition in there. We find a lot of off-market deals. We find that’s where we get actually the best deals is before they’re actually listed with a broker. And then we help find operators who have always wanted to run their own business, but they just can’t.

quite unshackle themselves from the golden handcuffs of their paycheck. They don’t want to take the risk. They don’t want to step into insecurity. We also work with a lot of ⁓ existing business owners who are trying to grow their business, but they just don’t have the time and they need a big infusion of cash to grow. It’s almost always less expensive to buy another business because you use the cashflow of that business to pay for the acquisition.

So their own business doesn’t have to shell out big amounts of cash. The business they’re buying, that cashflow pays the debt service. And they can immediately double or hire their enterprise value because they’re worth more together than they’re worth alone. So that’s the game that we are playing every day, all day. I’m constantly looking for businesses, constantly talking to people that might want to sell, constantly. ⁓

talking to people who’ve wanted to be a business owner for a long time, but they just couldn’t quite stomach the risk of startup, which I get, and trying to find that match, that beautiful match between the two.

Anthony Codispoti (16:19)
Okay, so some follow up questions for you. Because there’s a few things that you need, right? You want to find the deal, you want to find the business owner, and then ⁓ somebody somewhere needs to find funding to make this happen. So let’s go with the first. How do go about finding these deals? You say a lot of them that you find are off market deals, so they haven’t been listed with a broker yet.

Amy Walker (16:26)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah, so we have to go back one step before that, which is you need to figure out what your buy box is. And your buy box is, there’s some things that don’t move in your buy box, like how much money you need to make, where you’re looking to buy a business, if you’re looking to buy a business where you are working in person versus remotely. Those are some of the factors that you’ll figure out, like, do I really want? What would it take for this to work for me? Then industries shift a lot. ⁓

There’s, you know, when someone comes in, they tend to start off by looking at everything. It’s a little bit of shiny object syndrome, anything where the numbers look good. They’re like, I’m interested in this, I’m interested in this. And then it narrows down when you start to match that with what your earned secret is. So we wanna know what you’re actually good at. What’s your skillset? What’s your background? What are industries that you would be a good candidate to buy with? Because once we skip ahead to the financing part,

your banks and your investors are going to want to know that you’re the right person to run this business.

Anthony Codispoti (17:46)
So do you

start with who the buyer is and then look for something to fit them? Okay. So then let’s start there. How are you identifying ⁓ potential buyers or how are they finding you?

Amy Walker (17:49)
Yep.

Potential buyers usually find us through ads or workshops or classes that we’re teaching. That’s usually where we find potential buyers or recommendations like referrals from friends that are already working with us. So that’s the first thing we have to figure out. What’s the right type of business they should be looking for? And then we start, once we’ve identified the industries that they want to search in, then we are definitely looking at the public listing sites. I don’t want to make it sound like we don’t. We look at Biz by Sell.

We look at SMB market, we look at ⁓ LoopNet and I mean, there’s so many different places. ⁓ We build relationships with brokers. We build relationships with &A firms. I love &A firms because the deals that we want are what they don’t want. So someone comes in that’s sub 10 million and they’re like, it’s not worth it for us. We’re not gonna make enough money for the cost structure to make sense. So I’m like, great, send all of them to me.

I’ve got a pool of hungry buyers, send me all of those deals. So we do a lot of networking. We also do a lot of ⁓ industry specific networking. So joining the associations, joining the local chamber of commerce, going to the annual conferences. You need to build relationships inside of that network because like let’s say for example that you wanted to buy a, I don’t know, Anthony, if you were going to buy a business, anything strike your fancy?

Anthony Codispoti (19:28)
⁓

boy, I think I’m super unqualified for so many things, but that’s something that you would help talk me through and help me identify what my strengths are. ⁓ like unsexy businesses that have longevity. So I’m thinking like home services maybe.

Amy Walker (19:35)
for sure.

Okay, great. So let’s do like, let’s say I don’t like HVAC right now because it’s, the multiples are crazy. They’re going for like five to eight X multiples and they’re getting, even the small ones are getting nabbed up by private equity right now. But let’s say that we’re gonna go with someone, something like a doors and windows installation company, okay? So.

What you’re going to do then is you’re going to join, where are those, you’re say where are those people at? Well, a lot of them are networking with construction because they want to meet the builders who are gonna be installing doors and windows. They’re also gonna be trying to create relationships with ⁓ realtors because when they sell an old home that needs new doors and windows, they want that recommendation. So we look at where they are and then we go and start attending those events and networking with them.

And then we also start ⁓ looking and fortunately with AI, it’s really easy to pull up a list of all the doors and windows companies within your geographic region. And then we reach out and we ask them if we can take them out to lunch and interview them because you know, we’re looking to get into their industry and would love to learn from their experience. And it helps if they’re a little bit older because then they’re more open to starting to think about retirement and they also feel a little bit more secure. ⁓

The funny thing is though, everybody thinks that ⁓ it’s going to be the easiest thing will be to buy from these like near retirement age guys. I can’t tell you how many guys I meet that are in their seventies and eighties. They’re like, I still got another 10 years in me. Whereas you find somebody in their forties and tell them you want to buy their business. They’re like, sure, let’s talk. If the price is right, I’m good to go. So.

But that’s really how we meet them. And then it’s a lot of networking. It’s a lot of relationship building and just letting people know, know, if you’re not ready now, that’s great, but keep me in mind when you are. I’d love to get first look. And those relationships do circle back around.

Anthony Codispoti (21:48)
Okay, so help me understand ⁓ sort of the business model side of it for the exit school because in my experience, it’s traditionally ⁓ there’s a fee that goes to the seller’s broker, right? And ⁓ I don’t have as much experience with ⁓ buyers having their own broker kind of like in a home real estate deal. But you guys are putting in a tremendous amount of time to…

to sort of be that matchmaker and do this networking and find ⁓ a good fit for them. So how do you guys benefit from this?

Amy Walker (22:24)
We co-op services, and I’ll be honest with you, the number one benefit that we have is we get to see a lot of deals and decide which ones we want to invest in and be a part of. Because we’ve been a part of the finding, we’ve been a part of the due diligence, we’ve seen the quality of earnings report. And so when they get to that point of funding and finding investors, we get to participate in some of these deals. We don’t want to participate in all of them, but that’s our

primary win is we’re building our portfolios through partnering on deals. But we co-op services and the way that I like to describe this is that we’re the transaction team. So when you’re doing an acquisition, you really should be paying an attorney. You really should be paying an accountant. You really should be paying a business analyst. And we have that team and so everybody is sharing the expense of it.

⁓ we save more money than we cost, which we love, but there’s definitely a fee that people pay to have us be their transaction team. It’s just, yeah, it’s a fixed fee. And the thing that I love too is I’ve talked to people who are like, I’ve already spent 80 K on deals that haven’t actually gone through. We couldn’t push to the finish line and we will, for one fee, we will work with you until you get to the finish line, until you close.

Anthony Codispoti (23:29)
Is it a fixed fee? Is it a percentage of the deal?

Amy Walker (23:48)
So if that takes three rounds of due diligence with three different businesses, then that’s what it takes to get it done. But we’ve hired the best of the best and put them on salary. So instead of you paying their hourly rates, we’re paying their salary and you have access to them.

Anthony Codispoti (24:07)
And so let’s say you meet a prospective customer. Let’s say that you meet me and I’m looking at getting into a home services company. Are you putting me through some kind of an interview process? It’s like, Anthony, do you have any experience in home services? It’s like, nope, I can’t even swing a hammer myself. OK, maybe you’re not a good client for us. Like, is there a filter process there?

Amy Walker (24:30)
There’s definitely a filter process, but the interesting thing, here’s the interesting thing, to actually run a home service business, you don’t have to know how to swing a hammer. You have to know how to manage subcontractor teams because the vast majority of these businesses run off of subcontractors. And so what you do need to know how to do is how to market, how to sell, how to manage teams, and how to coordinate projects.

So that’s where our experience of working in a lot of different types of industries makes us really good advisors. Cause there are times when I’ll tell people, this is a good business. I don’t understand why you’re looking at it. It doesn’t fit with your, it’s not in your wheelhouse. And what will happen is if you continue to pursue that business, at some point the SBA or the investors are going to tell you that you can’t buy that on your own.

and they’ll tell you specifically that you need to bring in other people to get the deal done, in which case you’re going to lose some of the equity. And that might still be the best option, right? Like it might still be the best option for you to go forward, but now you only own 30 % of the company instead of, you know, 80 % of the company. Those types of things do happen. But if you’ll take the advice early on, you don’t get yourself in quite as many of those scenarios.

Anthony Codispoti (25:55)
Okay, and then let’s say that, okay, we’re getting close, we found a deal that seems good to me. How is the funding side of this equation working? Is that kind of on me and my banking relationships, or is it something that you guys can help out

Amy Walker (26:10)
It’s definitely something we help out with, but it also depends on you. So for example, not everyone’s a good candidate for the SBA, right? They want you to have a 700 credit score higher. You have to be for at least six months a legal resident or citizen of the U.S. You have to have 10 % down payment plus two months of operating cash in your bank when you apply. So it is a fit for some people. It’s not a fit for everyone.

So we do have relationships with a lot of bankers. And this is one of my secrets. We apply for 10 different banks every time we’re trying to get one. The reason why is out of that 10, the SBA is so fascinating because it ⁓ is this nationally run program, but every bank sets their own parameters over the top of it. So you could find a deal that one business would be excited to do and another one would have zero interest in.

So if we apply for 10, what will happen is we’ll probably get term sheets for like four. Then we look at the term sheets that are the best and then we move forward with the ones that are the best. And they’re not the same. It’s not like when you apply for a mortgage with a house where your offer is gonna come back really, really similar, no matter who you’re doing your mortgage with. They’re pretty different. The terms and what they’ll ask for are pretty different. And so we’re…

we’re going to apply for a lot. And that’s where our banking relationships are very helpful. And also knowing how to go through the process and submitting a really good application. You have to look like you’re the right person to run that business for the SBA to approve you. If they look at it and they say, think the deal is good, we think the numbers are good, we think you’re not qualified to run that business, they will not approve it because that’s a risk. So learning how to make yourself look qualified.

Oftentimes, it’s not even because you’re not qualified, it’s because you didn’t make it look like you were. Your resume, so to speak, was not good, and so you’re not getting the callbacks. So you have to actually present yourself as a qualified buyer. I would say our favorite way is seller financing, but you’re not going to get 100 % seller financing. That would be…

ridiculous for someone to say, here’s my multimillion dollar company. I’m turning over the keys. Pay me later. That’s not going to happen. But we are very successful at negotiating a good bit of seller financing on the vast majority of our deals. So we always try to see if we can do that. And there are benefits to the seller as well. It allows them to mitigate some of their tax risk so they can spread that out over a couple of years versus all of it at once. ⁓

We also work with a lot of private investors as well. So one of the things that we’ve done quite often is worked with private investors to help raise the 10 % for the SBA. So that’s something that we’ve done a good bit, but it’s usually not just one of those three. It’s usually a combination of those three. Like, you know, if you’re doing some seller financing and some investor dollars or you’re, you know, finding investors,

and you’re using the SBA, but there’s usually a combination of a couple.

Anthony Codispoti (29:39)
I mean, what do you look for in the deals that you guys actually want to participate in?

Amy Walker (29:45)
that’s a great question. We like to buy it a 3X multiple, which is aggressive. know, most of the businesses that you find that are listed are going in this size range, you know, one to 10 million. Most of them are going to be listed between four and five X multiple. The problem is most of them don’t have the cash flow to actually support those debt service payments. So we like to buy it a 3X multiple ⁓ or lower. We also, the operator

is a huge part of who we say yes to and who we say no to. So when we look at business partners, we look at communication. Do we communicate really well and can we communicate about hard things? Because sometimes business is hard. ⁓ We also look at trust. Do we trust this person that when we pass the ball to them, they will take that ball, they will run with it, they will pass it back and communicate when it needs to get passed back. We also look at trajectory.

which is, you for us, are we going the same place at the same speed? Because if we’re not going the same place, we’re gonna end up with a lot of conflict. And if we’re not going at the same speed, then ⁓ one of us is gonna feel like they’re getting dragged behind a moving train. And that’s not pleasant. ⁓ And then we also look at values. Like, do we share the same core values? And do we want the same things, are we trying to create the same experience?

So the operator itself is a huge thing for us. And the great thing about how we work at the exit schools, we already know these clients very well. We’ve been working with them through the whole process. And so we’ve seen how they show up when they get disappointed. We’ve seen how they show up when they get busy. We’ve seen how they show up when they get sick. And you’re allowed to be busy. You’re allowed to be sick. You’re allowed to be disappointed. ⁓ But when you own a business,

you still show up for that business even when you’re all of those things. You might show up differently, but do you communicate that like, hey guys, I’m sick this week. Here’s what you can expect from me. Here’s my plan for how the rest of it’s gonna get managed ⁓ versus just not showing up. And then after the fact saying, yeah, I was sick, sorry. So we’re just looking at all of those things and making sure that, ⁓ and I would say the last part is are we actually the right people to partner on it?

So if we are not a good fit for that business or that industry, then we’ll be like, hey, honestly, I wouldn’t include us in this deal. I would look for somebody like this and then we’ll facilitate introductions for somebody who would be a better partner. I just had a client bring me a business and as soon as she showed it to me, I was like, I know who you should be reaching out to. Let me introduce you to the expert in that industry.

Anthony Codispoti (32:26)
because they’re an expert in that industry or what?

Amy Walker (32:30)
What the growth lovers are for that business is exactly what they specialize in. And it just makes more sense than it would for us to do it. And I think it takes a ⁓ fair amount of humility because when we first got started, we just had this like, yeah, we could figure that out. We could figure that out. And now it’s like, we shouldn’t figure that out. We don’t know enough in that industry to actually be an asset on their board of advisors. And if we don’t, then why would we put

our money into something that we’re not actually feeling confident that we know what needs to happen with that business. So it’s all about getting the right people on your team to successfully run it.

Anthony Codispoti (33:13)
So what are the right industries for you, for the exit school?

Amy Walker (33:17)
We really love business service companies. So anything that’s B2B that helps business owners run a more profitable, successful business. So like we own an fractional operations company. We own a marketing agency. We do, we own a business growth valuation agency. We also really like Discretional Medical. We’ve both consulted with a lot of Discretional Medical companies.

And we also love service-based businesses. We’ve done not, I mean, not owning them, but we’ve done a lot of consulting with service-based businesses. So when there’s a model that fits into one of those, you can show me the business and I can tell you what’s going to work with sales, what’s going to work with marketing, because I’ve done it a lot on the consulting side. And so those are kind of mine that I’m most interested in. What I’m not interested in right now, I’ll tell you that,

I’m not interested in laundromats. They’re so overpriced right now because they’re trendy. Yeah, you’ll see these laundromats and they’re asking for like 6X multiples and the cash flow will not support that. So I’m not interested in those at all. I’m not currently interested in HVAC companies because most of these HVAC companies, you have to have a license.

Anthony Codispoti (34:21)
Really?

Amy Walker (34:38)
And the owner is the one who holds the license, not the employees. There’s nobody on the team that holds the license. So you’d have to go spend two years getting licensed. ⁓ And also they do have really high multiples. So I’m not super interested in those. ⁓ I am also currently very wary of any e-commerce businesses that have been shipping their goods outside of the U.S. I think just with the current tariff situation and who knows where it’s all going to land.

But I wouldn’t be looking at those right now. I might in the future, but right now that’s a no-go for me as well.

Anthony Codispoti (35:13)
You know, we mentioned in the intro about how important it is to you that businesses not have to close their doors because of retirement. Say more about that. Is that something that happens quite frequently?

Amy Walker (35:22)
Yeah.

Yes, actually of all the businesses that get listed for sale each year, only 20 % of them find a buyer. So you have a lot of businesses that just close their doors. And even when you look at family businesses, the amount that transitioned successfully from first generation to second is pretty small. There’s a lot of businesses where like their kids don’t want it.

And when you look at the second to third generation, it’s a fraction of those businesses. It’s like in the teens that actually transitioned from second to third. So there’s a lot of people who just closed their doors. Now, I will say this. I think that number, the number one thing we could do to change that isn’t actually inspiring more people to buy, although that is needed. think the number one thing would be helping business owners, existing owners know what it takes for a business to be sellable because

A lot of people that I talk to, they’re like, yeah, I want to retire. Cool. When do you want to retire? Like, I don’t know, six months. Okay. Tell me about your business. They’re like, well, I’ve been kind of slowing down over the last few years. I’m like, oh, that slowdown is going to cost you so much money. Or they’ve been, you know, like cutting down the team and cutting down the workload. So now they’re back to having this really owner dependent business that they just have to run.

those types of businesses are not very sellable. And so I think people need to understand that the time to sell is actually like three years before they want to retire because that’s when they’re still pushing and their foot’s still on the gas and they’re still going. That’s when you need to sell to get the most out of it. And you can find ways to sell where you don’t have to fully retire yet. You can still stay on in some capacity.

and let that be your slow down is now you’re more of an advisor or now you’re just fulfilling a certain role within the company. But you really should sell earlier and you also should start planning for the sale three to five years before you want to sell. So it’s not a short game. It’s not something that you get to the end and you’re like, okay, cool. I want out. Let’s sell. It takes time to sell. It takes time to transition. It takes time to make sure your business is ready.

And you want to know what those red flags are earlier so you can start getting rid of them. Cause whenever someone tells me they want to sell it, they want to retire in six months, I’m like, Ooh, I have a feeling the story is going to get worse. They start telling me more. I’m like, yeah, it’s definitely getting worse.

Anthony Codispoti (37:54)
You

⁓ Amy, let’s shift gears a little bit and I’d love to hear about a serious challenge that you’ve overcome. Whether it’s personal or professional, what did you learn? How’d you get through it?

Amy Walker (38:13)
would say the first few transactions we did were really hard. ⁓ Number one reason, we did them all really close together. So we bought three businesses within about three months of each other. The second thing was, this was early days and we didn’t know then what we know now. We bought too small.

So we were really focused on businesses that we could buy without having to put in any cash. And as a result, bought the first two, especially were very small and they required a ton of work. And so there was a point about six months in where we were looking at it going, I don’t know if all of these are going to fail. They could, they could all fail. There was problems in every single one. And I remember talking to my husband one night and just being like, Hey, ⁓

just need to know like would you be okay if all of this falls apart and I have to start over from scratch and he is such a wonderful wonderful husband he was like I’m 100 % okay with that because I know you I’ve seen you pick yourself up time and time again and you’ll figure it out like if this isn’t it you’ll figure it out and that permission to fail really was like huge weight off of my shoulders and then

we were from that point, was like, okay, failure is an option. It’s on the table. And we started really making the right changes because we had been, you know, when they talk about you’re playing not to lose versus playing to win, we had been playing not to lose instead of playing to win. And we had to make some pretty significant changes in each one of the businesses. We had to fire people. We had to hire new people. We had to change.

Anthony Codispoti (39:51)
Yeah.

Amy Walker (40:04)
the way that we were positioning ourselves as companies, we had to change our operations. Like we really bought too small and they were not strong cash flowing businesses. So you were always like an inch away from running out of cash. And it was so stressful. We made it through, fortunately, all of those companies are now doing really well. It’s so fun to each, I used to dread our monthly finance meetings where it was like,

We were in the red this month and this isn’t going well. And now we look at it and I’m like, I love those meetings because it’s just so fun to see how far we’ve come. But it was touch and go there for a minute. I really wasn’t sure if we were going to make it or not.

Anthony Codispoti (40:49)
You mentioned having to let some people go and hire new people. there other levers that you pulled to help really turn things around?

Amy Walker (40:59)
⁓ Both my partner and I had to get back in operator seats. So we had to actually work in the businesses very hands-on, spend a lot of our time. We had to figure out, and each of the companies was different, but we had to figure out what the levers were that we needed to hit. And so every business, we really kind of put on like EOS type systems.

where we created KPIs that we knew. And I’ll take my operations company as an example. So one of our KPIs that we watch is ⁓ how many, like our client retention is one. So we watch client retention, how many months are they engaging with us? ⁓ Another one that we look at is our profitability. ⁓ Another one that we look at is our ⁓ sales. So those are our three KPIs that we look at.

And I had to actually get involved and do all the sales for that company. was like, okay, I’m driving sales. And so, you know, for a year, I was the only one that was driving sales. And then I had to train the next person and I’m still, I’m still involved in sales in that company. So what we learned from it was you need to buy bigger and you need to really understand what the business will require of you.

before you jump in and smaller is not easier. Like we just really went into it and this is what a lot of people do on their first ones. They think, yeah, buy smaller. It’ll be easier. It’d be easier to get the money. It’s actually not. It’s everything about it is harder. It’s harder to run it. It’s harder to fund it. ⁓ It’s harder to do all of it. yeah, yeah. Like one bad month and all of sudden you’re like, are we gonna make payroll? ⁓ Versus a company that’s bigger, you have more of a buffer and you can

Anthony Codispoti (42:41)
There’s less margin for error is what I’m hearing you say.

Amy Walker (42:53)
you can ride the waves a little bit better.

Anthony Codispoti (42:55)
So you were too small before. I heard you say that ⁓ now you look at deals that are a million to 10 million in size. is that ⁓ annual sales? Is that EBITDA? What does that number represent?

Amy Walker (43:03)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

That’s enterprise value. So EBITDA would be less than that. So like, for example, a $10 million enterprise value would probably have like $3 million in EBITDA. A $1 million enterprise value would probably have $350,000 in EBITDA.

Anthony Codispoti (43:30)
So how small were you going before?

Amy Walker (43:32)
Do you even really want to know? bought one that had, actually the first two that we bought, both had 250,000 in annual sales. Tiny, tiny. And we were like, okay, we’re going to buy them. And then we believe in the potential and we’re going to grow them to, you know, $3 million enterprise value and then combine the whole portfolio to a $10 million enterprise value. And they were just.

Anthony Codispoti (43:42)
Okay, these were real small. Yeah.

Amy Walker (44:00)
They were just so small and they’re great companies. They’re great at their service. ⁓ They’re growing. They’re doing well. They’re just small and it’s a much heavier lift if you buy too little.

Anthony Codispoti (44:14)
And so is your goal still to kind of get multiple companies in sort of the same sector, roll them up and then position that for a secondary sale?

Amy Walker (44:25)
So the interesting thing about our business services portfolio is the reason we bought these first was that we wanted to be able to do acquisitions at a rapid rate and know that we had built the marketing, we had the marketing agency we trusted to run the marketing. We had the operations company to come in and do the integration after purchase and to get all of the SOPs written before the exiting owner leaves.

⁓ We wanted to have the CFO, the fractional CFO that we could come in and that they would understand like we didn’t have to retrain on the process. Like we understood their process. They understood what we needed. And so the business services is not so much a buy and sell as it is a buy and support. But other ones that we’re working on are absolutely like right now we’re under contract for an aggregate trucking company. And that one, the goal is to buy other trucking companies to roll them up.

and then to resell and exit. But we’ll be using the business services in the process.

Anthony Codispoti (45:26)
What’s your superpower, Amy?

Amy Walker (45:28)
You know what’s funny is I’ve never questioned my superpower so much as I have in the last two years of doing acquisitions. Sometimes I’m like, I know my superpower and other times I’m like, I don’t know. Because I’m constantly living in my growth zone where I’m constantly doing things that are new and they’re a stretch. I would say though, I think that as of today, this could change in two months.

But as of today, I feel like my superpower is actually ⁓ aligning people to the strategy and getting people in the right seats, doing the right things with the right level of accountability. I think it’s implementing the plan.

Anthony Codispoti (46:11)
And I want to give a little bit more attention to the first part of your answer there where you’re sort of like, I don’t know, man, I’m still pretty uncomfortable. I’m still growing because this isn’t the kind of thing that you were doing before. And the exit school is still relatively new. And so every day you’re showing up, I mean, I want to hear it from you, but you’re still doing a whole bunch of stuff for the first time. You’re still figuring out a lot as a lot as you go along.

Amy Walker (46:24)
No.

Yeah.

Yeah, I am. there’s things that I thought I was like the best at that now I realize somebody else is better at and I’ve passed those things on. Like if you had asked me two years ago, what I got hired to do over and over again was help people increase the revenue in the company. So was a lot of sales and marketing and building sales teams and sales systems. And now I have somebody on my team who’s better at that than I was. And so there’s a lot of stepping into the new and unknown.

⁓ where I am still, you know, like right now I am personally under contract. This is not like a client deal. I’m personally under contract for a mold remediation company and I’m going through every aspect of the due diligence process to learn it. Because normally when we do due diligence, like the accountant does the quality of earnings report. ⁓ Our MBA on the team does the pro forma. I do the business growth plan. ⁓

if somebody else helps with the financing part. And so I’m going through the entire process and I really am doing parts where like I understand it cognitively, but I haven’t had to do it because that’s not been my seat on the bus. But I really want to learn all of the aspects. So there’s constant newness. And then when I look at the companies, you know, when we close and it should be closing in the next month or so, I would say within six weeks, we’ll be closing on this trucking business. It’ll be my first time owning a trucking business.

And while I have consulted on businesses like this, owning is very different than consulting. And so then we’ll be learning a whole lot of new things again. So one of the things I had a friend ask me, a friend from church asked me, she said, you know, are things finally starting to slow down? And I said, no, but I am getting better at going fast. And I think that’s an important mindset shift.

Anthony Codispoti (48:31)
Hahaha

Amy Walker (48:34)
that most people look at the world and they want it to be peaceful and they want it to be calm. I’m just not really wired that way. I’ve always been wired for growth and what comes next and I’m really driven. But what I’m learning to do is to be calm in the middle of the race. That we can be running fast but my mind can be centered and grounded and ⁓ that’s been a big learning opportunity for me.

I can’t say I’ve been winning at that all the time for the last two years, but I’ve been definitely working on it and it’s getting better every day.

Anthony Codispoti (49:11)
Amy, what’s something you’re thankful for?

Amy Walker (49:14)
⁓ you know, this is, this is kind of a personal moment and I will try not to be emotional about it, but, ⁓ we had a, we had a family experience this week where on Friday afternoon, ⁓ my husband texted me, I was upstairs working in my office and he, he texted me and I, didn’t quite get right back to him. So he called me. I answered and he said, Hey, can you, can you like,

take your next call from the car and drop me off at the hospital. And I was like, no, I’ll reschedule my next call and I’ll go with you to the hospital. And we got there and by the time we drove to the hospital, his left side had gone immobile and he couldn’t get out of the car. And so we went in and I had to go in and say the words to the person. I think my husband’s having a stroke and he did, he had a little stroke and…

like thank God it was not super serious, but he couldn’t walk, he couldn’t get up, he couldn’t sit up, know, like he would try to sit up and he would fall back over. ⁓ I just, it was ⁓ one of those moments where you look at it you say, don’t know what tomorrow is going to look like, I can’t plan ahead. And as we were in this trial, and it’s been a week, and as of this morning, he actually got to use the cane for the first time. So he is recovering phenomenally well.

Like every day he gets stronger. ⁓ Yesterday when I took him from the hospital to the rehab facility, he actually got out of the car and I just like, I just kind of wanted to cry. was like, that’s amazing. It’s such a miracle that in one week he couldn’t get out of the car and now he can get out of the car. That’s a blessing. But within that, there’s a million things I’m grateful for. But one of them is my dad reached out to me he said, aren’t you glad that you’ve created and designed your life in a way

where you’re gonna be okay no matter what. And then I was talking to my son about, know, how we’re gonna, our insurance plan is like a high deductible plan. So I need to pay $10,000, but then he’s gonna be able to have unlimited surgery from now till the end of the year. And then the beginning of next year, I’ll pay another $10,000 and then he’ll have, sorry, did I say surgery? I meant therapy. He’ll have unlimited therapy next year as well.

Anthony Codispoti (51:32)
Okay.

Amy Walker (51:33)
And they think this is really a year long, like a year long therapy type situation to hopefully get them back to a hundred percent. And when I was talking with my son about this, he was like, you know, feeling a little overwhelmed or stressed, like, well, what can we do to help? And I said, here’s the thing, I’m not saying this to be brazen at all, but it is easier for me to make $10,000 than it is for most people. I’m not worried about this. And by the next day I had it figured out.

And so I’m super grateful right now in my business that the hard decisions that I made in the years past to really step up and lean in to doing the uncomfortable, that now it’s putting me in a place where literally the most uncomfortable thing that I can imagine just happened and we’re moving through it. And if the worst happened, you know, the absolute worst that I lost my husband, I can provide for my family.

and I can provide for all of our needs. Would we be emotionally so distraught? Yes, but we wouldn’t be having to look at now moving my children. We wouldn’t be having to look at not being able to pay for funeral expenses or all of those different things. We’re so covered. And ⁓ even when he comes home, I work from home. I can go downstairs and I can help him with the things that he needs. Like I’m just very grateful that

we did the scary things before so that this scary thing doesn’t feel nearly as scary.

Anthony Codispoti (53:06)
And this feels like it kind of fits into the bigger mission that you had when starting the exit school is giving people as many people as you can, financial independence, the structure and the opportunity that they probably didn’t think was available to them before.

Amy Walker (53:19)
Yeah.

Yeah, I remember when I was very first getting started as an entrepreneur, ⁓ coming up with this phrase, which was, I want to be able to make decisions based on what’s best for my family, not based on what we can afford. Because when I was growing up, like the college I went to was based off of what we could afford. The ⁓ cars we drove, ⁓ literally everything we did was based on what we could afford. And that was always the primary decision maker.

And I had forgotten about that until this week. And then when we were thinking about it, my sister reached out at one point because we were having a hard time. We just don’t have a lot of acute rehab centers in our area. So we were having a hard time getting my husband into one because they’re all out of network for insurance and there’s just not very many close by. And she said, well, what are you going to do if he doesn’t get in? Are you going to send him anyway? And I thought about it I was like,

Yeah, because that’s what the physical therapist have said is the best option. and she and the, you know, the person doing intake was like, we’re not going to let you know, we’re not going have you come and then get a surprise $30,000 bill. And in my mind, I was like, okay, so if it is a $30,000 bill, I would need to do this, this and this. Okay, got it. You know, but just like everything that came up, I was able to look at it according to what is going to be the best for him. they’re just financial stress was not one of the stresses.

There was a lot of other stresses, but financial stress was fortunately not one of them and I’m so grateful for that. ⁓ And I don’t even feel like we are like super wealthy. We’re pretty firmly in upper middle class, but we’re not super wealthy. We don’t drive fancy cars. We don’t live in a mansion, but we’ve created financial security and we’ve created financial options.

Anthony Codispoti (54:54)
Yeah.

Amy Walker (55:19)
that I think a lot of people who are still working for somebody else, I don’t think that they have the ability to say, know, like for example, my daily rate, if somebody’s just hiring me to come in as a consultant, it’s $5,000. And so I looked at that, was like, okay, this many days, I could do two per month, it would take me this many months, got it, we’re good to go. You just don’t have those same options when you’re not a business owner. And I’m so grateful, I’m so grateful for that. Like, can’t even express it.

Anthony Codispoti (55:44)
Yeah.

Amy Walker (55:49)
incredibly grateful.

Anthony Codispoti (55:52)
I appreciate you sharing that. What’s the future of the exit school?

Amy Walker (55:57)
We, know, what’s funny is I feel like it’s ever evolving and ever moving. So I’m trying to decide if I’m legally allowed to share this. I mean, it’s not legal. It’s just, we haven’t really started talking about it yet, but this is on the horizon. Uh, we have a banker that we like to work with and he was like, listen, I find I have great deals come to me all the time. And the reason why they can’t fund is because the person just doesn’t have the 10 % down payment.

could you guys, like, could we send you deals and you could help them raise the 10 % down payment? We’re like, yeah, I think we could do that. So that would open up, I mean, so much business that we would be expanding our team really rapidly. So that’s something that we’re looking into. This year, we have been small on purpose.

and really fine tuning our process, really making sure that we have a high success rate. Like right now we have 50 clients that we’re working with and 13 of them are under contract. So we want those success rates. And the rest, there’s some that are every week we have new people submit LOIs. So we want a very high completion rate of deals. And that’s what we’ve been focusing on this year is fine tuning the process so that we can support the high completion rate of deals.

Last year we had 20 clients and 12 of them bought within that year. So, you know, when you look at the, competitors, one of our top competitors has 12,000 students and they’ve done a hundred deals. So we definitely want to be completion focused and we want to make sure that our clients are moving towards the finish line. And that is top priority number one. And then after that, we’ll look at expanding.

Anthony Codispoti (57:48)
That ratio difference between you and the competitor you referenced is enormous.

Amy Walker (57:52)
Yeah. Yeah. And you know, the other thing is we work with our clients until the deal is finished. So even the ones that like didn’t finish last year, a lot of them are real close to finishing finish line right now. The ones who aren’t under contract yet, they’re making progress towards getting under contract. So we’re just very, very focused on client results right now and fine tuning our process. But then once that happens, we have some really great opportunities to maximize.

⁓ and just open up a lot of doors. So we’re actively working on increasing our relationships with investors so that we can get to that point where the 10 % for the down payment is never an issue. That’s the goal.

Anthony Codispoti (58:36)
That’s amazing. Amy, I just have one more question for you. But before I ask it, I want to do two things. Everyone listening today, pause for just a second. Go to your podcast app that you’re listening on right now. Hit the Follow or Subscribe button. It helps to make sure that you get more great interviews like we’ve had today with Amy Walker from The Exit School. And it helps other people find our show as well. ⁓ Amy, I just want to let people know the best way to get in touch with you directly. What would that be?

Amy Walker (59:05)
Yeah, I would say Instagram is a great place. So I’m amyexits on Instagram. Reach out. I answer my messages and would love to be able to hear from you.

Anthony Codispoti (59:17)
Last question, you and I reconnect a year from now, Amy, and you’re celebrating something big. It’s a big thing. It’s a year from now. What is it?

Amy Walker (59:27)
Hmm, that’s a great question.

I would say the thing that I want to be celebrating a year from now is 40 transactions done. I want to have closed on 40 businesses. It’s lofty. It’s lofty. Awesome.

Anthony Codispoti (59:43)
All right.

We’ll follow up. We’ll

follow up and get the update. Amy Walker from the Exit School, I want to be the first to thank you for sharing both your time and your story with us today. I really appreciate it.

Amy Walker (59:56)
Thank you so much for having me. It’s been just a pleasure to chat with you.

Anthony Codispoti (1:00:01)
Folks, that’s a wrap on another episode of the Inspired Stories podcast. Thanks for learning with us today.