Hello and welcome to the exit presented by flippa.com the number one platform to buy and sell online businesses flippa manages over a billion in deal value annually and combines expert buy and sell side advisory with its market leading valuation tool deal room off market offering market insights and AI based deal by deal matching engine now for the exit the exit is a 30 minute podcast featuring amazing entrepreneurs who have been there and they have done it.

The exit talks to operators who have bought and sold businesses of all different sizes you learn how they did it why they did it and get exposure to the world of exits it's a world occupied by a small few but accessible to many now on this episode I sit down with Marty funky is an awesome entrepreneur who talks about his experience through exiting multiple businesses and his story of basically going to their competitor at the time

and they were doing about a million and a half in revenue their competitor was doing about two million reselling their product with a higher margin on top of it back in the day with Yahoo being the number one sort of grounds for this sort of market and what happened next was the CEO at the time who has a fantastic story by the way about using boxes around the office and all this really fantastic information about it.

The story there in the interview what he does is he calls his competitor directly and says hey have you ever thought about selling your business they say yes they merge and do 30 million in revenue within two years.

And that is an incredible example of just the power of M&A and the really fun story about the boxes that I mentioned a minute ago is that the CEO of the company that they acquire is basically saying they have all these boxes they're not going to spend eight dollars on a trash can.

And they're cutting costs so much and watching the nickels and dimes that they could tell when they're doing their diligence that this team really was monitoring their margins so closely that they said give us your back office give us all the things you don't want to do you crush it and making money to go out there and just take the whole market.

And they go on to do hundreds of millions in revenue and they go and they actually go fully public.

So coming through Marty all the different stories that he shares is really incredible from start to finish he talks about the deals that he's done the diligence and at westbound road his current company where he's been buying and selling businesses for a long time now.

It's a really cool just to unpack his level of expertise around when the right time to sell is when you know to get prepared and how to prepare your financials.

And there's just a plethora of really great information here and stories from Marty when it comes to what it takes to go through and exit so without further ado let's sit down here on the exit podcast with Marty to walk through his exits.

All right everyone today I am joined by Marty fun key and he is a partner westbound road how's it going Marty.

It's going great how you doing Steve I'm doing good I'm doing good I'm excited to unpack your multiple successes here but before we do let's talk about your background what got you into business and entrepreneurship.

Well I've always been an entrepreneur from the time I was a young kid I was a little small businesses bike rehab and refurbishing selling business and lots of other things from the time I was I was young which was kind of an anomaly in my family because most of my family was either military or like you know government work where you stay there 40 years and put in your time and retire and so I was just always drawn to entrepreneurship and working with entrepreneurs pretty much my whole life.

Nice so let's talk about the first success like how did that start and what types of things were you were you using to define success.

So from from the standpoint of the the audience for this which is not exiting right so my first access success was actually completely accidental couple of guys and I started a business that we thought we could make some good money on one of the guys had come up with an idea for an invention basically and we worked together to bring it to market and I was in charge of the marketing one of the guys was in charge of kind of production and manufacturing.

And the other one was kind of the money guy and the idea guy right we brought it to market we did really well we've got it on television.

A couple different places we got on QBC wound up on QBC in Japan and we really didn't have a clue what we were doing exactly but we were doing really really well and a year and a half later somebody came along and offered to buy our company from us and we thought it was we thought it was that easy that you just start up with an idea and put out there and people come along and offer you seven figures for your company.

So it gave me a very distorted view of exiting a business but say it was a wonderful experience and learned learned a lot through the process but it wasn't intentional to you know start it and sell it it was intentional to start it and generate revenue really was it and it wasn't we didn't go out and shop it we didn't go and look for a buyer and that we never talked to anybody else we had a buyer that was a clear strategic buyer came and offered his cash and we just said yes and sold the business which was.

In hindsight it turned out to be a mistake because we sold it for cash and what I didn't know at the time was that had we asked for maybe a hybrid deal with some equity in the buyer or some sort of participation on the deal I went back and did the math we took a million a half dollars cash but if we were to take an equity after about 20 years it would have been worth about 24 million because the company that got.

The company that got the bought us got bought got by anyway through several iterations I was looking up stock prices and going man that would have been a lot of it just take it equity instead of the cash but we never even knew that was an option back then yeah wow so quite the 20 X over the course of about 20 years that's insane that's a really important thing also for anybody listening you know the the opportunity cost when you're thinking about deals like this where.

That you know seven figures change your life your perspective your mind around business how you operate everything and you know looking at what it could be is fantastic but ultimately you know it set you up for success multiple times here so that's a good segue into what what happened after that was the next venture successful or were there a couple swings before you had another success what did that look like no actually the next one was also success.

But it wasn't my idea I was working at the time for a company who was we had basically started one of the very first comms that had ever advertised on television and I was actually the very first person to put a URL on an informer show which is at the time pretty controversial because crazy enough people back then thought well if I if I take away the telephone number then I lose all the control and they're going to be wandering around in this vastness of the of the the Internet and.

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