Kirk Michie on Valuation, EBITDA, and the Trajectory Founders Need to Reach the Exit They Truly Deserve

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. As you listen today, let one idea shape what you do next. My name is Anthony Cotaspodi and today’s guest is Kirk Mitchie, founder and managing partner of Candor Advisors, a boutique transaction advisory and investment banking firm based in Carlsbad, California.

Candor Advisors helps founders of private companies plan and execute life-changing events like selling their businesses, raising growth capital, or mapping out a long-term succession plan. Their team pairs deep deal expertise with a unique pre-diligence process and a national network of specialists all designed to secure the best terms and preserve the legacy of the entrepreneur. Across a career that spans more than three decades,

Kirk has been involved in more than 60 M &A deals as a buyer, seller, or advisor. He’s raised more than $1 billion of capital and since founding Kander Advisors in 2020, has guided founders to more than $1 billion of successful exits. He holds FINRA series 7, 24, and 79 licenses, and he is a sought after speaker and writer on the art of exits and value creation for owner-led companies.

Kirk Michie | Candor Advisors (01:08)
Thank you.

Mm.

Anthony Codispoti (01:28)
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Back to our guest today, the founder of Candor Advisors, Kirk Minchie. Thanks for making the time to share your story today.

Kirk Michie | Candor Advisors (02:33)
Thanks for having me on, Anthony.

Anthony Codispoti (02:35)
So Kirk, let’s go back early days. You started out at Merrill Lynch as a private client advisor for high net worth families. This was back in the 80s. You’ve worked for a lot of other large companies along the way, including AB Bernstein. I’m curious to hear how this early work laid the foundation for the ⁓ &A advisory work that you would later move into.

Kirk Michie | Candor Advisors (02:59)
Yeah, it’s a great question because I’ve actually thought about it a little bit. You know, when you, when you’ve been doing what, what, you know, kind of hanging around corporate finance, the investment markets for like decades. And I’m frequently with much younger people earlier in their career. You know, I try and give a sense of, like how I got here. And frankly, like Steve jobs used to say, it’s always obvious looking back, but only.

obvious looking back because I started out, you know, I came from middle class family and I wanted to move up. so I persuaded my parents ⁓ to let me go to USC. We couldn’t really afford it. And so, you know, I took out student loans and they moved some money around and I could only go there for two years, but they were the two formative years. They were the two final years. And in my first semester,

I had an intro to finance class and all of a sudden, things became obvious to me. I was a business major and then all of sudden I became a finance major because ratios and percentages and compounding just happened naturally in my brain and I didn’t know that before that.

And so, you know, then I felt like I was really, really special and I was going to go out and the markets were waiting for me and the world was waiting for me. And, and, you know, the way it turned out is that, you know, ⁓ I didn’t want to continue on for an MBA. I want to go right into the, the, the kind of world of investments and finance. go to, you know, Merrill Lynch and back then Prudential Bashe and EF Hutton and all these firms and no one will talk to

Nobody will talk to me because I didn’t have sales experience. And I was crushed. The idea that I was in my mind, this brilliant finance guy and the world wanted me to go sell copiers or computers instead. I mean, that, that like talk about idealism that just goes away right away. So I actually kind of came in the back door and I worked in operations for Merrill Lynch for almost two years until I got what was called the sales simulation.

And I got to a three hour live simulation where I proved that I could do the job. And that kind of got me on my way. And I was an early adopter of a lot of things. I was an early adopter of managed accounts when I was in wealth management, early adopter of social media. I think I was in an article in Financial Advisory Magazine back in the 90s about going online without crossing a line.

⁓ I was eager for more. I was curious about more. And when I got to the &A world by becoming a partner at a private equity firm, I loved the &A part of things, but I couldn’t quite shake the idea that we had an unfair advantage over the people who built the businesses. ⁓ holding that notion for a while,

And then, you know, finally getting to the position where I was frustrated enough with what I was doing and desirous enough to make a change, you know, sort of the fear of staying the same ⁓ wasn’t as big as the desire to make a change. So I made a change and that was when I founded Candor Advisors six years ago.

And as you mentioned in the intro, we have been blessed after a lot of hard work with ⁓ just a constant flow of clients who want what we have and are willing to kind of go to any length to get it. And so we keep doing this work. So it’s a little bit long-winded answer, but that’s…

Anthony Codispoti (06:52)
It’s a great

answer. Actually, a nice sort of Reader’s Digest condensed version of a pretty long and illustrious career. ⁓ How did that bridge into the &A world first happen from the world of finance?

Kirk Michie | Candor Advisors (07:05)
Hmm.

Well, ⁓ so, you know, when I, so when I became, when I went into operations, they didn’t want to let me become a broker because they didn’t have sales experience. And I had to break through that barrier. And these look, I’m aware Anthony, that these are not actual hardships. There are people that didn’t have a fraction of the opportunities that I’ve had that have overcome a lot more.

So, know, the small things that I felt like I had to pull volt over, you know, and give myself a rotator cuff injury, patting myself on the back, they were my hardships, but they weren’t necessarily objectively hardships. the idea that I got, you know, buttonholed as an operations guy, and then I finally become a broker, and the idea that…

Anthony Codispoti (07:47)
Fair enough.

Kirk Michie | Candor Advisors (07:56)
I don’t have any sales experience, but I become a top quintile producer within the Merrill Lynch system. I couldn’t get involved in investment banking or private equity or anything like that, because I didn’t have an MBA. And so I had to kind of attack that the other way. And at the convergence point was actually ⁓ I had left the financial advisory world.

had no job, had raised a little money from investors to build what’s called a turnkey asset management platform or what people think of as managed account platforms in the early days of that. And the two biggest investors who were gonna back me both backed away for totally different reasons. And so then all of a sudden I was running out of money and I had…

I was pretty bummed about the trajectory of things, because there had been one point where I felt like I was really on track to do something significant. And now all of sudden, I get nothing going on and no investors. And I go see 310 to Yuma. My escape was to go to a movie in the middle of the day, 310 to Yuma with Christian Bale and Russell Crowe. And there’s a scene in there where Christian Bale’s son is looking at him.

⁓ And he is so disappointed that his dad had once been something significant and now he was this guy that was easy to kind of kick around and ⁓ So I you know, it just kind of clicked for me I walked out and it was you know, yeah, I go from a dark room to literal sunshine, you know, I was in Del Mar, California at the time

It’s gorgeous outside. like, okay, that’s it. I just got to go get a job. I got to set this entrepreneurial thing on track. And there was a message on my phone from a close friend of mine that when I played it back said, hey, there’s a private equity firm in Los Angeles that’s looking for a guy with your skillset. Would you call this guy? And I called that guy and ⁓ yeah, boom, boom, boom, the dominoes fell.

Anthony Codispoti (10:06)
Wow. And that guy was in what? What was he doing? What did he want?

Kirk Michie | Candor Advisors (10:11)
Yeah, he was

buying kind of what we call lower middle market businesses. So call them 20 to $75 million private companies. ⁓ You would call them all bootstrapped, but those entrepreneurs don’t think of having bootstrapped anything. They never considered going out to raise capital from anybody to start their business anyway. And these were ⁓ low tech businesses for the most part, even the technology businesses that we looked at there.

you know, were ones that were not really, I mean, there were nothing kind of approaching the AI that we’re looking at today. These were, you know, kind of practical software applications. These were healthcare services. So not molecules, but, you know, delivering home care, ⁓ hospice services, things like that. Buying, you know, kind of light manufacturing businesses, value added resellers. They were all really traditional entrepreneurial businesses. And they were, these were all people that for the most part had been

you know, at it for two to four decades, or maybe they were the second or third generation of running the business and they were ready to sell. And we were, you know, thanks to, you know, our fundraising efforts, a well-funded sponsor who could assure them that we could close the transaction, we knew what we were doing.

And since I didn’t have actual buyout experience, I was the guy that went out and raised the capital and made sure that we could always do a deal because we had enough capital to do it. And every once in a while, it was dicey. But under my watch, we bought 14 companies and we never came up short on the capital raise. We had to kind of go to any lengths to get that capital, but we did.

Anthony Codispoti (11:54)
And so this was your first foray into the &A space then? You came in on the capital raise side of things and then obviously by being there for so long, you got to sort of understand the landscape better. And you made the comment that one of the things that you noticed being in the &A space was that the business owners seem to be at a distinct disadvantage. Can you say more about that?

Kirk Michie | Candor Advisors (11:57)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, that’s right. So the way I think about it now is that the buyer of your business is a full-time predator and you as the seller are part-time prey. Like you’ll only probably do this once. And the most junior person at the private equity firm or the corporate development part of the strategic buyer ⁓ has done this more times in the last quarter.

then you’ll do it if you have multiple exits. There are recently minted MBAs who are crunching around in the databases and building financial models know far more about ⁓ &A than any of the most sophisticated sellers.

What the breaking point for me was the 14th deal we were doing, we were buying a debt collection business and it was a fantastic model. These guys had figured out that small balanced debt collection would almost always get repaid and they could find a ton of it, you know, essentially getting charged off of bank and credit card and health club balance sheets where like people were getting sent to collections for owing, you

$400 or $2,600. And these guys had figured out that they could kind of robo send these letters from a law firm that was barely even a law firm to threaten to attach people’s wages and stuff like that. they’d buy the debt for like three to eight cents on the dollar.

and they would settle out for at least 25 cents and sometimes almost the whole dollar. So was a fantastic model if you’re a private equity buyer who’s trying to buy the transferable economics of a business. For me, when I wrote the check into that deal and signed the operating agreement, that was my Roberto Duran moment. I’m like, no, Moss, this is not like, we are taking advantage of people when they are at their lowest point.

also that our rich privileged limited partners can make money on this and we can take carried interest and just felt icky to me. I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it. So, you I went to my partners then and I said, listen, guys, I, I know I’m the only person that our investors know and it’s going to take a little bit of time, but I can’t do this anymore. And it took a while, but I got out. lost all my carried interest in the deals that I had done.

⁓ That’s comfortably seven figures, maybe eight. ⁓ But I feel like, and by the way, my former partners are wonderful guys. They’re wonderful guys, incredibly smart and very diligent, and they’re as good a buyer as ⁓ any. Still, for me, it just was not aligned. It just was not aligned.

Anthony Codispoti (15:07)
I mean, talk about putting your money where your mouth is. It’s one thing to say, these are my values. I won’t do this. I won’t do that. But you walked away from millions of dollars because this abutted up against your principles in a way that was no longer comfortable. And was that the moment in which you decided to start your own firm or did you leave and go somewhere else in between?

Kirk Michie | Candor Advisors (15:31)
Well, it would be a much more poetic story if that’s the moment where, you know, this Horatio Alger goes off and, you know, kind of starts his own firm. But here’s the thing. ⁓ I had a lifestyle that cost around $20,000 a month to support, and ⁓ I needed the healthcare benefits, and ⁓ I had…

I was in the middle of a tough divorce and I had two young children that were still gonna need to go to college. And ⁓ then if there was ever gonna be any chance of me retiring, I was gonna have to, in addition to that, build up some money. And so the only other thing I knew how to do was wealth management.

And so even though I didn’t want to be back in wealth management, it was a relatively frictionless way for me to go back to doing something I knew how to do. so I reached back out to the guy who I had handed my book to when I left Bernstein, you know, like 15 or 18 years before that, who was now in charge of the whole country.

And I didn’t even have his phone number, but we were Facebook friends. And I sent him a Facebook message and said, I want to come back to wealth management. His immediate message back was great. Where do you want to be? What do you want to do? And ⁓ like, and.

The interview process while the chairman of the firm was different, because I joined Bernstein the first time around when Mr. Bernstein was still alive. I actually met him. He was like a heroic figure to most of us. The chairman of the firm was different, an impressive guy nonetheless, but a different guy. But all the senior management were people that I was peers with when I left the firm.

And so, you know, the Zoom meetings we had for me to come back to work for Bernstein were like, we’d come on Zoom and they’d say, wow, you got old and you lost all your hair. And I’d say, wow, you got fat. You know, I mean, it was like, you know, it was old home week, but everybody knew that I knew how to do the job. And so I came back and I spent five years not liking the wealth management part, but…

Anthony Codispoti (17:25)
Ha ha ha ha ha ha.

Kirk Michie | Candor Advisors (17:39)
I used my skill set around knowing the &A process and this kind of chip on my shoulder about feeling like entrepreneurs didn’t get the, you know, kind of the right end of the stick to help all of these people prepare for exits. And so all the money I brought into the firm over that five-year period of time were helping people get to exits and reinvesting some of the proceeds. That was before anybody thought about anybody being an exit planner. That wasn’t like, it wasn’t a thing.

Anthony Codispoti (18:03)
interesting.

When did exit planners become a thing?

Kirk Michie | Candor Advisors (18:08)
Bye.

Well, I’m not sure they completely have yet. Most of the exit planners that I meet don’t have much transactional experience. They’ve been through a course, they have a certification, and they certainly know how to help people get their financial affairs in order and get ready for, know, kind of, I’ll call it the administrative and operational parts of going to an exit.

I think sometime in the next five to 10 years, as more and more people pursue that and as more people with transactional experience go after that and that kind of becomes the thing, it’ll become important. But I don’t think it is yet. So for us, we consider doing it. I consider having all my people do it. But every time I look at the materials, I’m like, this is not really what drives transactions and this is not what gets founders to better outcomes.

Anthony Codispoti (19:04)
interesting. So what are you seeing in those course materials that I don’t know is wrong or is missing perhaps.

Kirk Michie | Candor Advisors (19:12)
You know, it’s been a few years since I looked at them, but my recollection is that, ⁓ you know, kind of starting with the idea that the buyer is looking at, I don’t care how differentiated your business is.

They’re looking at the transferable economics of the business. And for the most part, that’s going to be what they would call EBITDA. So just take your net income and start adding back the formulaic things, the interest taxes, depreciation, amortization, but then take the owner economics and add those back and say, all right, this is the cash flow of the business. know, in certain things like in software and a few other areas, they’re going to buy the recurring revenue. But for most businesses, they’re going to buy the EBITDA, the transferable economics.

And there’s not a lot in the exit planning stuff around how you improve upon your EBITDA, professionalize your financials, dig into the databases and figure out, well, like, let’s say you, let’s say, Anthony, you come to me and you say, look, I want to sell my business and I need to get at least $20 million. So on a net after tax basis, I can endow the rest of my life such that, you know, for expenses, taxes and, you know, inflation, I’ll never run out of money.

If I look at businesses like yours and say, okay, well, you’ve got 2 million of EBITDA, but the average transaction for a company your size is five times EBITDA. So you need the market to come like to double.

to exit like in the exit planning materials I’ve seen there’s nothing about how you’re going to improve upon that. There’s nothing about sort of saying, okay, what are some of the other alternatives? ⁓ You know, we try and run through all the different alternatives and we look at all of the things that hold the entrepreneurs back from being able to maximize price terms and legacy control. if you don’t have over two million dollars of EBITDA and it’s not clean

Meaning you’ve got CPA prepared financials that show that you’ve got two million to clean EBITDA. Most of the private equity firms aren’t that interested in you, certainly as a platform investment and maybe not even as an add on investment. So you’ve got a narrow list of buyers. Like you get some of these buyers that, know, entrepreneur through acquisition or ETA or what we would call search funds. ⁓ They’re like bunnies. They are multiplying like crazy.

Keep in mind these are people that have never bought a business and most cases never run a business, but they got some

pools of capital to back them to try and buy a business. So I know I’m a little kind of off topic here, but I would say the exit planners for the most part don’t know how to make distinctions between am I talking to TPG or KKR? Am I talking to Riverside? Am I talking to ⁓ some 29 year old guy whose dad is his primary LP and he’s got some other private equity firm trying to buy the business? Or am I talking

to independent sponsors who have &A experience but they don’t raise a fund and they do deals, you know, kind of deal by deal. All those things are really, really important when you’re going to market because you’re gonna get a deal done if you have an attractive business, but if it’s an eight figure deal, your buyer is gonna take advantage of you by at least low to mid seven figures on structure. If it’s a nine figure deal, it’s gonna be eight figures. ⁓

And unless your exit planner has true transactional experience, ⁓ then you’re probably going to take an advantage of on terms because you’re probably not going to bring the &A lawyer in until the deal’s already negotiated. ⁓ And so you’re really not going to know what you’re agreeing to.

Anthony Codispoti (23:04)
So a couple of questions I want to pull out of there. You mentioned that some of these exit planners are not really familiar with what the alternatives are to increase EBITDA. What are some of those?

Kirk Michie | Candor Advisors (23:17)
Yeah. So look, if you have multiple lines of business, ⁓ the most I will generalize, but I will say that I’m directionally correct about this, even if it’s wrong about some of the buyers. Private equity is the ⁓

is kind of the prototypical buyer. Now, private equity firms, if they’re experienced, are really, really good at buying companies. They’re also really, really good at financial engineering and structure that keeps the risk on the entrepreneur ⁓ and holds some of their capital back. So they’re the easiest one to kind of say, all right, if you’re going to sell to private equity and if that’s the apex predator, understand you need to get your business to look like

there’s a lot of recurring or reoccurring revenue.

that your EBITDA is systematic and that you professionalize the business in such a way that you’re not that necessary. So you’re not a risk factor in the transaction. And if you’ve got part of your business, ⁓ let’s say you’ve got an engineering and construction business. Construction is going to trade at a much lower multiple than engineering services, right? And so what you’ve got to be doing is like, if you’re thinking about selling in the next few years and you’ve got, you

you know, a smaller percentage of the business that is the higher multiple and a bigger percentage of the business that’s the lower multiple, well, you’ve got to start creating traction on the growth in the higher multiple part of the business to be able to tell the story that you’re on the way to something and that you’re ready to hand it over to somebody who’s got deeper pockets and more resources to build it out to the next part of the legacy. You’re not going to get paid for things you

could do with the business. You’re going to sell your business on its trailing 12 months or last year’s EBITDA or revenue. They’re going to want to pay you based on the next year or two’s worth. And so the disconnect in there is that if I get seven times trailing 12 months revenue or eight or 10 times trailing 12 months EBITDA,

But the buyer comes in and they’re only going to give me 60 % in cash and they want me to take back a 20 % seller note, which they’re not going to pay me any cash payments on for a while. And they’re not going to pay me back in full until they sell the company. And then they want 20 % based on an earn out as long as I grow by 15 % a year for the next two years or three years. And maybe I don’t get those payments in cash. Maybe I get those payments as rolled equity or added to the seller note.

at the board’s discretion of which I’m gonna be one of five people so the board can help vote me. Well maybe I just, you know, I did sell my business technically for seven times or 12 times or whatever it is, but I only got 60 % of that number and the rest of it is a jump off. And I’m gonna be the weakest voice in that, like down the road.

So if you haven’t prepared your company so that you won’t get taken advantage of that way, and you go to market with a weak transaction advisor or none at all, you will get taken advantage of that way.

Anthony Codispoti (26:41)
Is that

what you’re talking about when you said like an eight figure deal, they’re probably taking advantage of you by at least seven figures, a nine figure deal, they’re doing the same by eight figures at least?

Kirk Michie | Candor Advisors (26:51)
Yeah, absolutely. Like every solid business should be looking at the cash at close is the only thing that you should wait towards saying, okay, that’s money that’s certain.

Rolled equity, like that’s a common deal thing where I’m saying like, I’m gonna buy your business and I’m gonna value it at eight times your EBITDA. And I’m gonna give you 75 % cash to close and I’m gonna ask you to retain 25 % of rolled equity and we’re gonna go out and we’re gonna add some more agencies around the edges. And your 25 % that you rolled in equity.

you and I will exit together at the same time with all the other businesses that we buy. And maybe that second bite of the apple is even bigger than the first check that I wrote you. That’s the rationale for rolled equity. And that makes a ton of sense if the buyer has a track record of creating those returns.

But if I’m buying your business for say $20 million and I’m asking you to roll 5 million of equity and you say, so Kirk, if I were investing $5 million with a financial advisor, I would be asking for a track record. And I don’t mean a resume. I mean hard data that shows that there’s a multiple on invested capital return or an IRR or, you know, a net return. So

It’s fine to say role equity ⁓ with the right group. On the other hand, the right group is not just a charming group of people that say a bunch of smart shit. It’s like, can they prove that they have created these outcomes? And short of that, can they put me on the phone or on a Zoom with some people that they bought out so that I can ask without them, without the private equity sponsor on the line, so I can ask them heads up questions about what’s it been like?

So and the other the other deal pieces Anthony or you know the contingent payments of like, you know a seller note or earn out They almost never go well. They almost never go well, you know, I it’s anecdotal but but it’s not wrong that you know, I was sitting down with An M &A partner at a big law firm am law 100 law firm

We’re just catching up over coffee. He’s been doing this 25 years. He’s probably participated in 500 transactions over that period of time, maybe more. I said, how often do you see earnouts go the way that they are written up in the LOI or the purchase agreement? And he said, 20%. He didn’t even pause. He just said 20%, right?

doesn’t mean they never get paid, doesn’t mean they don’t get partially paid, but you you should consider that money to be contingent and certainly not certain.

Anthony Codispoti (29:39)
And so, but my understanding is it’s really difficult for deals to get done without some sort of an earn out.

Kirk Michie | Candor Advisors (29:45)
I would say it depends on how attractive your business is. at certain points, like so a really attractive high growth software business with a lot of recurring revenue, ⁓ very close net revenue, net recurring revenue. So very little churn and plenty of logo retention, meaning kind of new, you know, new clients being a large part of the growth. ⁓

An attractive business like that, you might get 20 bidders on it. throughout the process, you are a terms maker, not a terms taker. On the other hand, if you have a business that is ⁓ special and unique from your perspective, but fairly generic from the private equity firm’s perspective,

You know, they’re going to bid maybe, you know, somewhere between four and seven times EBITDA depending on how big the business is, and they’re going to give you a formulaic deal. They will have asked you to do a pro forma on the next two years worth of financials to get an idea of where you think the forecast is going. That’s a trap, but you won’t know it until after you’ve walked into it.

because you will think that if you tell them you’re going to be flat to down, they won’t be interested in the business. And you’ll think 10 % is not quite enough, but 20 % is maybe a little too aggressive. And so you settle on 15 % and lo and behold, the earn out is set at you hitting a 15 % target for the next two years. And then you’re like, holy shit, you know, a big chunk of my transaction is going to be contingent on something that I put together last night after a glass of wine when the kids went to

sleep on an Excel spreadsheet. And so what I would say about earn outs is it depends on whether you’re a terms maker or terms taker in that part of the transaction. You might have to live with it, but I will tell you that everybody who’s negotiating a deal ought to just take the paradigm seller’s price, buyer’s terms. Buyer’s price, seller’s terms.

I say, ⁓ you know, that ⁓ I need you to pay me $20 million for the deal and you say, can pay you $20 million, but I’m only going to give you 12 million in cash at closing. And the other part is going to be what we in the &A world call structure, which might be any of these other things. And

In that case, I then come back to you because the paradigm again is you hit my price, but structure-wise, you put it together in a way that I’m not that thrilled about it. So I say, look, I might give a little bit on price if I don’t have to get an earn out. And what we do usually when we’re talking to somebody about why we don’t want an earn out, because you know,

In the same way that criminals don’t think of themselves as criminals, predator buyers don’t think of themselves as predators. So you can’t say, listen, I’m not going to agree to a 20 % earn out because you’re going to add a bunch of expenses. I’m not going to control the P and L. I’m going to whiff on the earn out anyway. And you’re never going to have to pay me because you guys are awful. They’re not going to acknowledge that. So you say, listen, I don’t want to agree to the earn out.

because we’re gonna have to be working together in partnership because I’m rolling equity in this business, we’re gonna be working side by side trying to grow the business. And if a year from now or two years from now, ⁓ through no fault of mine or maybe even yours, we don’t hit the urn out and you don’t pay me, I’m not gonna like you anymore.

And then it’s gonna be very challenging for us to work together. So the earn out is almost a guaranteed rapport break when it doesn’t happen if there are other contingent payments. So our viewpoint is no one should like an earn out. The only the least experienced buyers will try and put a lot of the purchase price in an earn out. We looked at a deal for one of our clients that’s selling for around $20 million right now.

⁓ One of the buyers put together ⁓ an offer and they put this to us in an LOI and then jumped on a Zoom call with a straight face to explain to us they wanted to buy our client’s business for 12. Now keep in mind it’s going for 20. They wanted to buy it for 12, including 2 million of cash upfront and a million dollars a year for the next 10 years. Right? ⁓

Anthony Codispoti (34:16)
I’m not leasing the

company to you. I’m selling it to you.

Kirk Michie | Candor Advisors (34:20)
No, no, it’s like so

Anthony I want to buy your business, what I’d like to do is use your cash flow to pay you right ⁓ You know, it’s like I can’t blame anybody for trying to get their own pound to flesh and you know trying to you know Kind of structure terms that favor them but sophisticated buyers even if they’re a little bit predatory, you know They know what market terms look like

And the thing that most quickly puts them on kind of market footing is a good transaction advisor. Whether that’s an investment banker or an &A lawyer, a good transaction advisor will get them to comply with market terms.

Anthony Codispoti (34:59)
So Kirk, at what point in the process is a client typically engaging with you and candor advisors?

Kirk Michie | Candor Advisors (35:08)
Yeah, so for us on our consulting business, it’s usually three to five years before they’re selling. We do a 90 day engagement where, we won’t work past the 90 days. They’ll want to, in many cases, have us continue on. And what we tell them is like, look, we’re going to look at the potential buyer universe for your business. We’re going to give you that.

We’re going to look at the potential valuation for your business and where the break points are. Like, do you have to clear two million to get two more turns of EBITDA or do have to get the five million to get to the real rich EBITDA valuations? Or does everything happen at 10? So it kind of depends on where you are in there. ⁓ We talk about the components of the transferable economics. And then we also give them what we call a trajectory analysis that say, the following things. It’s like a covenant.

the following things and you will get to where you want to go. And, you know, let’s check back in with each other in 12 to 18 months and see how you’re doing. We have sold three companies that we did that work for five or six years ago.

In a couple of cases, ⁓ the businesses are now selling for five to seven or eight X what they would have sold for three to five years ago. We’re not magical. These are great entrepreneurs that just took direction about the trajectory they needed to go on. For our investment banking business, it takes four to nine months to sell a company. Four would be the fastest possible. So look, they’re engaging us usually either because they got an unsolicited offer,

And what we do for them is say, we’re going to write an email for you to send to the buyer that says, Anthony, I’m really intrigued by our last conversation. I’d like to progress forward. I’ve never done this before. So I’ve retained a transaction advisor, Kirk Mitchie. He’s copied here. He doesn’t think that you need all of the requests that you’ve made to give us an idea of valuation to figure out whether we move forward. And he’d love to chat. There’s only one good response to that.

That makes a lot of sense. Thanks, Kirk, when can we get on a call? That’s the only right response to that. Anything that’s tepid or hostile, what we did was just smoke out a bad buyer. So a lot of times what we say is don’t retain us, just send this email. Depending on the response, that’ll tell you whether you need to retain us or not. And then ⁓ if you’ve already signed the LOI, it’s too late.

LOI is a ceiling. It is not a floor and don’t expect anything collaborative to happen after you’ve signed that LOI.

Anthony Codispoti (37:48)
You’ve lost all leverage

at that point.

Kirk Michie | Candor Advisors (37:49)
It only

gets worse after you sign the LOI. if like what we will say, if somebody comes to us after they’ve signed the LOI and said, you know, we need you to help us put this to bed, we’ll say, I’m sorry, but we’re going to refer you to a good M &A attorney because you need them to make sure that, you know, whatever else happens, including the purchase agreement, the supporting documents gets tilted your way. But yeah.

Anthony Codispoti (38:15)
So you guys can come in very early, right? Years in advance of them wanting to sell. You do the analysis of the landscape, the valuation. You give them a plan on, you know, do these things. It’s gonna help get you to the place that you wanna be. And then would I also be right in thinking, Kirk, that you can take them all the way through to the end of that transaction?

Kirk Michie | Candor Advisors (38:37)
Yeah, yeah. When we say we’ve been involved in a billion dollars worth of deals, we’re talking about, you know, the proceeds on exit. So what usually happens is that whether it’s responding to an unsolicited offer, making sure it’s market level and maybe creating some competitive tension to drive price terms, legacy control a little bit higher by bringing some other people into the equation or

starting from scratch and saying, all right, you want to take your business to market, know, retain us 60 to 90 days before you’re ready to go to market. My team will start building the confidential information memorandum, the teaser. We might retain an accounting firm to do a sell side quality of earnings to make sure that the buyer can’t assail the financial information we’ve given them. And then we develop an outreach, an FAQ for each client. We do a bid process letter

helps all of the potential buyers understand what’s the expectation and what are the due dates. And we just coalesce all that interest. So what we do is make sure that whatever the best deal is out there right now, we’re getting to all the people that can make the right offers and all the people that are actively investing in this area. And we spend a lot of money every year subscribing to databases to make sure we stay current with that. And then we’ve also got our own activity. We probably have

200 private equity firms and strategic buyers in our own database that want to check in with us once a quarter. If we met as often with all of the private equity firms that ping us and say they want to jump on a call for 15 minutes to hear what’s going on, we wouldn’t have any time to do any investment banking work. We’d just be building rapport with the…

Anthony Codispoti (40:22)
What do they want

to get on a call and chat about for 15 minutes?

Kirk Michie | Candor Advisors (40:24)
And what they want to hear

what kind of deal flow we’re working on. Everybody wants to get in a little bit early. And our standard response to anybody who wants to preempt a process is our covenant we build with the clients is that we’re going to get them the right combination of price, terms, and legacy control that meets their buy for selling. If you want to ⁓

No one would be happier than us to not have to do all the work to go out there, but we know what the market looks like. So if you want to lob in a bid that’s 25 to 50 % above market to make sure that we don’t go to market and you don’t lose the opportunity to buy this business, bring it. We’ll share limited financial information. You give us a range of valuation and we’ll see if there’s any reason for us not to go to market. Otherwise we’re going to market. ⁓ And I’ll tell you, there’s no heads up buyer that

be scared off by a transaction advisor saying, ⁓ listen, we’re going to reach out to 125 other firms because we think this is ⁓ an attractive offering and we want to make sure what the market looks like. Any great buyer will be comfortable with their position in there and they won’t love it, but they also won’t pout about it and not make a bid when the time comes. But sure, they’d like to be in there early.

Anthony Codispoti (41:45)
So Kirk, you’re the founder of Candor Advisors ⁓ back in March of 2020, which is something that I hope we’ve got time to talk about that timing of at the start of COVID. ⁓ And we’re talking to you today and you’re driving a lot of this, but I know from your perspective, it’s less about you and it’s more, you’re proud of the platform that you’ve built. You’re proud of the business model.

that’s in place. Can you say more about that?

Kirk Michie | Candor Advisors (42:16)
Yeah, yeah. Look, our raison d’etre, not just like a mission statement, is we guide founders to better outcomes. And whether that is telling them not to sell, whether it’s chasing away a bad buyer, whether it’s taking a step back and saying the market doesn’t like businesses like yours, and it’s probably better if we do an ESOP so you get maybe a tax advantage transaction.

or the market’s not going to pay you for the kind of economics you take out of the business. And so maybe we figure out a way to get an investor in to help your employees buy you out in something that’s more like a management buyout than an ESOP. Or your business is attractive, let’s refine it and let’s go to market.

Like that’s where we live and I’m as proud of the deals where we’ve told founders not to move forward with the sale as I am the transactions we’ve closed. We do not think of ourselves in terms of the dollar value of transactions. I have a performance coach that I work with and about a year ago,

When I told him that I thought we could keep the level of activity going the way it was, and we’ve done a bunch of nine figure transactions, and for a boutique investment bank, that’s a rare thing to go head to head with like Mollus and Raymond James and people like that and win, right? To get the mandate and…

But we have. And what I told him was that I’d rather do more transactions to a point. I can’t add a lot of value to a $3 to $5 million sale. But let’s say $15 to $25 million and above, we know that we do a really, really good job, probably better than any of our competitors, in making sure that’s handled the way you would handle a quarter of a billion dollar transaction. And even though we make

little bit less money. And even though it means we’ve got to work a bit harder to educate our clients and to work more directly with the founder, we’re going to do six deals this year. And the largest of them is probably going to be around 200 million. But the average taking out the 200 million is probably 30 to $35 million. And those people really, really need the help. And so to my mind,

You know, part of the reason that we try and do more deals and not just bigger deals is that we think the founders need the help. And, ⁓ you know, we created another business called exit well, and it’s not exit planning, but it’s kind of a, ⁓ you know, a mentorship program for founders that want to exit in the future. Because what happens for us is that we got a lot, we get a lot of inbound traffic.

for people that want to sell and they may not quite be ready. They may not be big enough or they may want, you know, kind of more of a trajectory and maybe they can’t afford us from a consulting standpoint. We still want to help those people. ⁓ And so what we’ve done there and what we’ve done on our own site is created candor AI. So, ⁓ you know, you can go to our website.

And what we’ve done, I’ve recorded 200 plus videos in the last five years or so. And what we did is wall off the large language model so it can’t add any input. This just transcribes my 200 videos. And so…

Candor AI answers the question essentially in my voice and will point you to its sources, which will include the videos that go into longer form about how do you think about valuation? How do you pick your advisors? Who should be on your deal team? What are the different kinds of buyers? What are the biggest seller mistakes? What are some horror stories? All that stuff is nested on our website and it’s all accessible either by going to the Insights section of our site or plugging questions into Candor AI.

you’re gonna get my answers, right? And I’ll just add one more thing, ⁓ partly because I ⁓ Preet Bharara interviewing, ⁓ no, it Adam Grant interviewing ⁓ Deepak Chopra, I think. And Deepak has done this same thing. This is not an original idea. Guy Kawasaki has done it, Deepak Chopra has done it. And, you know.

There were a couple of times he asked him questions, the interview asked him questions and he said, you should probably go to trooper.ai because it remembers everything I’ve ever said and I don’t. And I would tell you so, so I am amazed at how comprehensive and short form, ⁓ you know, the answers are from Candor AI, because as you know, when just talking to me for an hour, I don’t do short form very well.

Anthony Codispoti (47:09)
Hahaha

Kirk Michie | Candor Advisors (47:10)
I know I say too much. just don’t know which words to leave out, but Candor AI does.

Anthony Codispoti (47:15)
So

why build this? Why build this tool for folks to be able to get free access to all that wealth of knowledge inside your head?

Kirk Michie | Candor Advisors (47:24)
Yeah, same reason we do a video on LinkedIn once a week that helps to train all of our best competitors. If you look at my feed, you will see people that never used to post video content now post video content that looks just like mine.

And ⁓ my team is sort of like, why are we doing that? And I say, look, it’s going to, if we do five or six deals a year, do you know how many tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs need to get to exits in the time that’s going to happen between me being 63 and me dying whenever that happens? Like there needs to be lots of us. There needs to be lots of us that level the playing field because I will tell you, ⁓

that there are like boot camps with a thousand people and a waiting list for this entrepreneurship through acquisition or search fund buying or how to set up an independent sponsor. The barbarians are at the gate, right? ⁓ They are developing tool sets and the sellers are busy running their business so they don’t have time to develop that skill set. So there need to be more great transaction advisors out there in the lower middle

market to make sure these people just don’t get fleeced by the virus. if we can educate them a bit. Yeah, absolutely. It’s free. It’s completely free.

Anthony Codispoti (48:42)
This is a public service. This is a public service.

That’s wild. All right, I want to shift gears on you for a moment, Kirk, because in my experience behind every success story, there is a time in life that almost broke someone. What is a serious challenge, whether it’s personal or professional that you’ve overcome and how did you get through it? What you learned?

Kirk Michie | Candor Advisors (49:10)
Yeah, so my kryptonite was alcohol and everything that came after it. And so in April of 2006, I got sober. ⁓ so this April, I would say God willing, but I’ve never had an experience that God wasn’t willing. So let’s say Kirk willing. In April, I’ll have 20 years of sobriety. And that matters a lot. That’s precious to me. And it’s the touchstone.

for all the stuff I’ve done since. It took me a while to get my bearings. I was no longer as comfortable. I was no longer as persuasive. And I didn’t quite know who I was. ⁓ So it took me a while to get there. ⁓ But today, I look at who I was at my bottom. I never crossed the line in business.

But that’s a function of having stopped probably just in time and probably a function of some good luck. ⁓ so what I would say is that that…

thing that was in some ways like the worst thing about me became my greatest asset. I’m conscious of it day in and day out. And you know, look, I am still someone who really, really loves, you know, anything I love and I want more of it.

That’s the addictive personality in me anyway. And so I think about it this way, Anthony, that if you look at the Marvel universe, all of the villains have superpowers. They just use them for the wrong reasons. And so what I’ve done is just cut off the character defects. I keep them at bay. I keep working on them and keep focusing on my kind of…

favorite quote from Stoicism, which is effectively my religion, of capital S Stoicism is from Marcus Aurelius and it’s, know, spend no time arguing about what a good man should be, be one. And that like that, that taken together with, you know, the continued sobriety and the desire to be a better and better version of myself. ⁓ Yeah, that, you know, could have been hard, was hard.

But now I look back at it and I thank God it happened.

Anthony Codispoti (51:39)
Are you comfortable saying more about this? I’m wondering if there was sort of a triggering moment where you were like, okay, my eyes are open, I got to make a change.

Kirk Michie | Candor Advisors (51:49)
Yeah, so there are people that have bottoms in addiction and alcoholism that are car wrecks and DUIs and professional ruination, embarrassment, things like that. Mine isn’t really quite like that. I needed…

to have something that made me feel different because I really, really hated what had become of my life and who I had become. And I needed to numb out. And ⁓ so I had life problems and I had alcohol and drug solutions.

And so if we were gonna take those away, I was still gonna have life problems and I no longer had any solutions. So I went into AA to appear to be doing something about a problem someone else thought I had. And I caught alcoholism and addiction in the rooms of AA. That’s how it happened. I started listening to other people’s stories.

Anthony Codispoti (52:52)
That’s when you

realized, this is me.

Kirk Michie | Candor Advisors (52:54)
Yeah, that’s when I realized

that like, you know, I spent a long time trying to look for the differences. Like, I never did that. I’m not bad or I’m not that bad. Right. You know, like, like watching an episode of Jerry Springer, I’d be kind of like, yeah, well, I’ve never done that. You know, but I’ll tell you that.

you know, when I started to, you know, pay attention to the similarities and when I started paying attention to the fact that I don’t have to do what you did to feel what you felt. And, ⁓ like that, that builds a bridge even today. Like, you know, I, I, I connect with people around, you know, the vulnerable stuff. I connect with people around, you know, the, the stuff that’s quieter, the stuff that’s more private. ⁓ you know, that’s why we, when we’re, we’re, when we’re talking to someone who might become a client of candid advisors, it is not.

just do we have the sector expertise they’re looking for. I want to talk to the founder and find out why they really want to sell and I’m gonna push for a real answer not just a well I’m ready to retire and I think I can get a lot of money for my business and yada yada yada and if I

You know, I’ll say really, you sure you’re not just like burnout or you sure you just don’t want to go through one more, you know, HR training exercise. Are you sure you’re not just sick and tired of having a longer to-do list at the end of the day? Or have you been scaling for so long? you think the best risk control might be having somebody else take over the business? Like I want to know, because if we’re going to get the right buyer.

It’s gotta be the one that not only gives the best combination of price, terms, and legacy control to my seller, but they match up with their why. ⁓ Those are the best transactions. And I think all of that flows from my recovery, my willingness to kind of dig in deeper, my willingness to have harder conversations.

Anthony Codispoti (54:45)
You know, and you said that, you know, coming out of that sort of transitioning into a new stage of life, you weren’t as comfortable. You didn’t have as much confidence. How did you work on finding those in new ways?

Kirk Michie | Candor Advisors (55:01)
Well, it took me 15 years to undo all of that. And people around me saw it. Every once in a while, I’d have coffee with somebody I knew back in the day because I was one of Bernstein’s biggest producers. Now, there were a lot of them, but I was up there in call it top 20 out of 100 nationwide.

was cut in a pretty wide swath. And then I went to run the private client business in another big asset management firm. when you take a great salesman and make them a sales manager, usually get a mediocre, bad sales manager. And that’s what happened there. I didn’t appreciate that ⁓ that job was about leadership, not being in charge. And I also was really, really hard on people. I was terrible at it.

And I, you so what happened for me was that I was no longer as confident and persuasive. And that’s important. ⁓ If you don’t have any other skill sets as a salesman, that’s all I had. And that job was about selling. That job was about convincing people. That job was about configuring our offering so that it matched their desire to get whatever they wanted to get. And I was good at that. I was really, really good at that. And then, you know, when I got sober,

you

You know, none of it felt that authentic, which isn’t to suggest that great salespeople aren’t really, really authentic people. It’s just, wasn’t, you know, my being a great salesman was not an authentic thing. I’m an introvert. I don’t like every time I’ve taken Myers-Briggs, which may or may not be reflective. The first letter is always I, I would rather step into a bookstore and spend an hour than return phone calls. I just would. I mean, it was just like, like, you know, I love email.

I love Zoom because, you know, like I’m going to go to an ACG event, it’s Association for Corporate Growth that all the investment bankers and private equity firms go to for the like speed dating of, you know, catching up very quickly with a whole bunch of people.

I dread the idea that I’m gonna walk into this big hotel lobby and there’s gonna be hundreds of people. you know, look, I’m 63, I’ve handed out business cards for a long, long time, so there’s a lot of people that know me and a lot of those people like me and they’re gonna wanna come up and talk to me. And I wanna honor that, but at the same time, like I suck at chit chat. I’m just like.

And part of it is because it’s like, I know I’m here and I appear to want to be here, but get me out of here. You know, so I’ve had to configure it a different way. And frankly, you know, digital marketing, you know, made a big, difference. I launched in COVID as you accurately pointed out.

And that turned out to be fantastic. Because I no longer had to, like, you know, I was in Provisors for a while, and you’d get on the Hollywood Squares and have, you know, 23 other, you know, squares on there of people like talking about, like, even that was too much for me. I’m like, I can’t do this. Right. So I started posting the videos and then ⁓ people started responding. And then I co-created two websites with my web designer and my digital marketing guy, guy named Mike Simpson.

at Variant Media who’s just a genius, he’s fantastic. And then we started figuring out together with my daughter Allie, who also works in the business, ⁓ how we could reach out to lots and lots and lots of entrepreneurs who need to hear these messages. And we get engagement. ⁓

know, of 35 to 80 % weekly on 25 to 30,000 people we send these things out to. We get click throughs that any, you know, kind of e-commerce business would be envious of. We don’t try to do anything with that data. We’re glad that people show up at the website. We see that lots and lots of people are watching the videos. When and if it’s time, you know, there’s a button on the website that says talk to Kirk.

And that came from an &A lawyer with a big firm here in town that told his client, this may or may not be the right investment banking relationship for you, but you should talk to Kirk first. And talk to Kirk first didn’t fit on the green button that we were putting on the website, so it just says talk to Kirk. ⁓ But lots and lots of people dropped lines to us to say, here’s what’s going on.

And what’s wonderful about having done this for a long time now and having so many videos out there is when I meet somebody for the first time on Zoom, not only is my background the same, but they’re kind of like, wow, it’s you, right? Well, you know, what happens is, you know,

Anthony Codispoti (59:52)
They’ve built you up as a celebrity in their mind and now they get to talk to the real thing.

Kirk Michie | Candor Advisors (1:00:02)
In almost all cases they say something like I’ve been watching your stuff for a couple of years and you seem really authentic that’s the most common thing to hear and I Wouldn’t have thought that that would come through in video, but it does you know you do you do this right? You know you know like you

There’s no litmus test. know, nobody’s on trial at The Hague for their authenticism. However, people do seem to be able to pick up on it.

And when I go try and sell them on hiring candor advisors to be their consultant, their investment banker, and just talk to them about their deal and give them free tips, ⁓ you know, it’s, it’s not meant to be a sales process, but what ends up happening is, you know, we’ve got a big, big, big network of people that refer to us and, you know, they were through us, even though they’ve never been clients. You should talk to that guy. sends me videos once a week.

Anthony Codispoti (1:00:58)
It builds up your trustworthiness, is really, it’s important in any kind of a business relationship, but especially in what you’re doing. So Kirk, how would you characterize your superpower?

Kirk Michie | Candor Advisors (1:01:01)
A.

I think that if first of all I have a natural affinity for finance I understand ⁓ like you know the rule of 72 lives somewhere in my limbic system and so I can kind of figure out what numbers are going to compound to I can do math pretty quickly in my head and I can do it ⁓ in public

which I have a close friend that gathers together 500 or so CEOs of financial services companies twice a year. And he proves that even the most, even the people that should be able to do math in public are afraid to do math in public. I’m not.

Right? You know, so I have that as a superpower and I would tell you that the ability to build financial models and the ability to understand a P &L and the ability to look at a forecast and find problems with it, those are table stakes in the &A business.

But I do believe our transactional expertise is up there with a Goldman Sachs or a Molus or ⁓ some of the great middle market investment banks like American Discovery Capital or Trevett up in ⁓ Los Angeles and so many others. I think we’re on par with them on the transactional expertise and the ability to put together things that work and run a good process. But it’s really the idea that I ⁓ am more informed by Brene Brown, Adam Grant.

Dan Pink, Ryan Holiday, ⁓ and a little bit of Tony Robbins in there too. That like, you know, if you took a great middle market investment banker and you said, I want the one that’s more heart forward. ⁓ Look, it doesn’t work for everybody. ⁓ You know, I had ⁓ one of the biggest gun stores in Oklahoma reach out to us and ask if we could. ⁓

you know, help them sell and look, you know, you don’t have like Muhammad Ali and Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen in your background. If you’re all in on, you know, kind of NRA stuff. So there’s a little bit of ideological problem there, but he really wanted to, you know, engage us. I said, you know, I’m probably not your investment banker because the conversations I have with my clients are deeper. like, you know, yesterday morning we had something happen on a deal.

that should have sent it sideways. We had a buyer that signed a letter of intent on a really, really attractive business. And the client’s number two over the last 12 years turns out to have stolen a lot of information for the business to go out and start a competitor. And right after we got the LOI signed, the competitor started attacking the business. And it’s going to have a material financial impact.

I said, look, we have the LOI sign that we could pretend to go through this thing in the right way. But I think the right thing to do is for us to go to the buyer, offer them a mulligan on the LOI, and tell them what’s going on and see if they want to proceed.

And he’s like, what do you think is gonna happen? I said, they’re either gonna say, yeah, sorry, we’re out, or we’re probably gonna have to modify the terms, but we’d like to dig into this further, or let’s move forward and we’ll navigate this together. And somewhere in between there is gonna happen. And he’s like.

Okay, what do you think we ought to do? This guy happens to have a really, really deep faith in a specific religion. I said, I think you ought to pray about it. And I think we both ought to turn it over to our higher powers. And I’ll do what I need to do from an action standpoint. I’ll let them know this stuff.

But it’s up to the universe how this works out, not us, right? Now there are lots and lots and lots of great entrepreneurs that be like, yeah, that’s a bit too crunchy for me, dude. I need more tactics, you know? And that would be fine, but this guy is like, okay, bro. And so the private equity buyer who are really, really heads up people asks some fantastic questions. probably asked 15 great questions after I gave them the news. I told them what I knew. I told them what I thought.

and I told him what I didn’t know. And then I suggested we all get together for a vibe check call because they said they wanted to move forward. Now, I’m not sure whether it was his higher power, my higher power, or just the universe has decided this deal ought to go forward, but I’m positive that it wouldn’t be going forward if I use traditional investment banking tactics.

Anthony Codispoti (1:05:50)
which is to try

to ignore this.

Kirk Michie | Candor Advisors (1:05:52)
Well, we had assigned LOI, we could just go right into due diligence. Why tell them? Because it won’t show up in the financials for a while. But if you had like, this is going to be a meaningful hit to revenue, and there’s probably some legal wrangling that goes back and forth, and that’s going to change even because, you know, we’re going to have some, some kind of ongoing but ultimately one time expenses for legal costs of dealing with this.

We think this is a bad guy, but we’re in California. And California is not going to limit a guy’s ability to try and start a business, even if he did steal a bunch of shit from my client. so, you know, I just think that that, you know, I’m not sure if that quite answers your question about our superpower. I just, think we do things differently enough that that differentiation comes through.

Anthony Codispoti (1:06:26)
Mm.

Kirk, I’ve just got one more question for you today, but before I ask it, I want to do three things. First of all, anybody who wants to get in touch with Kirk or his company, first of all, their website is candor-advisors.com, candor-advisors.com, candor is C-A-N-D-O-R, candor-advisors.com, and his email address, Kirk, is Kmitchie, which is K-M-I-C-H-I-E.

at candor-advisors.com and we’ll have that in the show notes in case you guys missed it. But if you’re enjoying the show, a quick comment or review on your favorite podcast app goes a long way towards helping others discover our show. So thank you for taking a quick moment to do that right now. And as a reminder, if you want to be the hero advisor that shows your clients how to get their employees access to therapists, doctors, and prescription meds that, as paradoxical as it seems, actually increases the company’s net profits,

reach out to us at addbackbenefits.com. Okay, so last question for you, Kirk. A year from now, what is one specific thing that you hope to be celebrating?

Kirk Michie | Candor Advisors (1:07:45)
Mmm. One specific thing. Boy, I gotta narrow down.

I think it will be having my book, Full-time Predators and Part-time Prey, published. ⁓ You know, we’re looking for an agent right now. It’s a business parable. And… ⁓

you know, that would get the message out because even though it’s fiction, every single thing in it has happened. It just didn’t all happen in the same transaction. And it’s configured in such a way that like, you know, if you’re familiar with anything, Patrick Lencioni has written, um, you know, it’s sort of that teaching through parable and metaphor. Um, yeah, I’d like that to happen because I think that can extend our reach. I don’t care about being on the bestseller list, but I do care about trying to get that in a lot of people’s hands.

And one of the buyers that I admire the most, a guy named Brent Beshore wrote a book called The Messy Marketplace. ⁓ I think every buyer or seller who’s in the lower middle market ought to read that book. if I got to a fraction of his impact, that’d be fantastic.

Anthony Codispoti (1:09:05)
Kirk Mitchie from Candor Advisors. I want to be the first to thank you for sharing both your time and your story with us today. I really appreciate you being here.

Kirk Michie | Candor Advisors (1:09:13)
Thanks Anthony, it was wonderful. Really appreciate it.

Anthony Codispoti (1:09:16)
Folks, that’s

a wrap on another episode of the Inspired Stories podcast. Thanks for learning with us. And if one thing stood out, try putting it into action today.