How Fliteboard Was Built and Sold to Brunswick

Welcome back to the Buy Grow Sell podcast. I'm really excited to present my next guest today, whose name is Geoff Green. I first met Geoff about 10 years ago after I just started the company Exit Advisory Group. I was learning a lot about the industry and I came across this book, The Smart Business Exit. And of course, I thought this guy was really, really smart and I started stalking him in a friendly way, of course. I ended up meeting Geoff later that year at a conference in the US and we hit it off and have been friends ever since. You know what I love about Geoff is that he's a lawyer. He spent a lot of time in M&A and he spent a lot of time as a business owner. He's been a consultant. He has managed and been involved in over 300 transactions. He's got a huge amount of experience here and he's sat on all sides of the table. And it's that kind of perspective that he's going to bring to this episode and this story. Now, Many of you listening to this have probably already heard of the company Fliteboard. They're the company that makes those eFoils, right? The electric-powered flying surfboards that you see scooting around beaches and bays everywhere. Well, Geoff actually knew the founder of Fliteboard from a number of years and having helped him with a number of other transactions. And so when the founder came up with this idea of Fliteboard, Geoff was his natural go-to, his advisor, his confidant. And very quickly became the early investor, the board member, and somebody who sat beside him and helped him build that company and take it all the way through to exit. So today's episode is going to cover the Fliteboard story mostly, but Geoff shares a lot of wisdom around just preparing for these type of events in your life, how to think about your business, and puts one of the most pivotal questions on the table that you as a business owner need to answer, and that is, Who should be the right owner for this business at this point in time? It's a question that makes you reframe your own journey, your own business and what's going on. And it's something that we all really need to answer for ourselves. I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I did. Geoff Green's a wealth of knowledge. Enjoy the show. Hey folks, just a quick message before we get on with the podcast. You know, I think the most valuable stories we share on this show are not the ones where everything went right and it's a beautifully well-scripted story. It's the one where they're honest, open, things went wrong and founders faced challenges and dealt with failures. They're the ones that we can all relate to. So if you'd like to know more and you want to make sure that you're not missing any important stories, please click the subscribe link below and make sure you hit like and leave a comment around any topics you'd like to hear about or other guests you'd like us to interview. There are going to be many, many more stories that we know will relate to you and your business, and we hope you get a lot of value out of them. Thanks for watching. Geoff, welcome to the Buy Grow Sell podcast.

Yeah, thanks, Simon. It's great to be on your podcast.

Yeah, it's really great to have you here. You know, for the audience's sake, I guess, you know, I've been lucky enough to know you for almost 10 years, we were just saying, and, you know, I guess crossed paths many times over those years with different sort of different ways, which has been really great. And I've always just enjoyed, you know, being able to collaborate with you and learn from you. I know when I started Exit Advisory Group, I actually picked up your book as one of the first things I did to get familiar with the industry. So, you know, after stalking you for so many years, it's great to have you on the show. Just to help, I guess, with the audience, maybe you could give us just a little bit of your background and kind of maybe what led you to I guess eventually we're going to talk about the company Fliteboard that you're involved in. So, but yeah, a little bit of context would be great.

Yeah, sure. Over the years I've been involved in sort of a range of areas. So I started off my career as a corporate lawyer with the firm that's now called MinterEllison, which is the biggest law firm in Australia, as I'm sure a lot of your listeners know. Did a lot of sort of classic corporate law stuff there. So a lot of public company stuff, M&A, floats, takeovers, all that sort of stuff. Did a lot of work with private companies though as well at that time. So I had a lot of experience on transactions as a result of that. From there I moved into doing more business advisory work. So sort of consulting and really working with companies around building value and getting ready for exit. And then I fell into investing in a few companies along the way. Fliteboard being one of them. So I've had this sort of career that's had 3 distinctly different flavours to it, but the theme's always been high-growth companies, innovation, building enterprise value, setting them up well for exit, and then exiting as well as possible. So that's sort of been the theme through all of it. I've also dipped in and out of each of those different roles, so it hasn't been linear. At times I've been doing 2 or 3 things at once.

Yeah. And written a few books along the way.

Written some books along the way.

Yeah. Fabulous. So I know we're going to spend a little bit of time sort of focusing a bit, I guess, on the experience of Fliteboard today, that being a business that you were involved in early on and obviously went through to a transaction. How did that whole sort of come about? I mean, that's quite a dynamic sort of business that you sort of probably don't stumble onto every day.

Yeah, so the Fliteboard journey really started with a good friend of mine and business colleague, David Trewern. I'd known David for many, many years and worked with him as a legal advisor, as a business advisor. He invested in one of my companies early on, then I had the opportunity to invest in Fliteboard. So we had this very deep relationship that went back many years. And David is a classic entrepreneur and a classic visionary entrepreneur. He's very creative, he's very innovative, he's very driven, he's very big picture, but he's very practical and he just has an incredible ability to get stuff done. So a classic sort of visionary entrepreneur. So I'd helped him exit his previous business back in about 2014, '15. He headed up to Byron Bay for a sabbatical. Got a place right on the beach there and after a little while started fiddling around with things.

The true entrepreneur can't sit still.

Absolutely, yeah. And his great loves in life of, you know, technology, water sports and so on. So he was a huge kite surfer and he was literally sitting on the beach one day about to head out kite surfing and the wind dropped and he looked over at his board and he said, I wonder whether I could put a motor on that. And that was really the birth of Fliteboard. So for the next year or so, he started messing around with, could I, could I put a motor on it? So effectively, he ended up developing what in simple terms you describe as an electronic flying surfboard.

Yeah.

Or what they call an e-foil. So he spent a couple of years developing that, and he kept sending me slide decks and, and and shots of this thing. And after a while I thought, I think he might be onto something here. So I started getting involved around 2017, 2018.

Was that just in an advisory capacity at that point?

More just as a friend. And because we always bounced a lot of stuff off each other. And then it started to get legs. So he got his Fliteboard to the stage where he had a very good prototype. started posting it on Instagram, and then he started getting people, you know, contacting him saying, can I buy one?

Yeah.

So around that time, this is probably mid-2018, David started looking and go, I think there might be something here. So our first business plan was to sell 200 Fliteboards. That was sort of the extent of what we were aiming for then. And David sort of thought it could be a family-type business. You know, he'd make Fliteboards for himself and his mates. So that was the genesis of it. But pretty quickly we ended up just getting a huge number of people wanting to buy Fliteboards, which we hadn't finished building at that stage. So we did initial capital raising in 2018, your classic family, friends, and fools capital raising. So I put a little bit of money in there. I was the first external investor. And then over the next 6 to 9 months, we really put our foot down and went, we think this is going to be a business. So that was sort of the beginning of it. And then I got more involved as things kept moving.

Yeah, nice. And talk to me a little bit about that journey of growth because those early stages are always quite volatile, right? You're very agile and you probably change directions and ideas many, many times over. Somewhere in there you've gone from that unique, innovative little startup to Starting to operate like a company, I guess. What was that sort of journey like?

It was really chaotic, as often is the case. And so we were operating out of Byron Bay, and in the early days there was literally only 6 to 8 of us in the very early days. So everybody did everything, and we were frantically trying to get the initial version of Fliteboard ready to sell because we wanted to start selling in the 2019 northern summer. So just trying to get it to a point where we could do that. A guy called Hudson Godfrey-Smith, who became our global sales director, we basically said to Hudson early in 2019, can you go over and set up Europe for us? Which I look back at now and go, that was crazy. But Hudson set up a lot of the very early dealers over there who became the backbone of our operations in Europe. So in the early days, it was just really chaotic. But we had, by the time we were ready to launch, we had 300 what we called pre-orders. And we basically said to people, if you put down $5,000, that will buy you a place in the queue. So if we finish building this and it's saleable, you will be in the queue to buy one. And we had 300 people do that.

So So they literally bought the place and the key. That $5,000 doesn't go towards the product.

No. And then we converted the pre-orders into actual orders to buy the product once we— It's confidence, isn't it? Well, it's exactly what Tesla did with their Roadster originally because we just had these early adopters going, this is just an amazing product because it is literally a flying surfboard. So they were prepared to do that and that's where we really sort of kicked off.

Yeah, it certainly is a solid proof point, isn't it, that you've got something that is going to appeal to the market, that people are willing to invest like that?

Yeah. And I think it was probably one of the key drivers of value in the company that David was obsessed with building the best eFoil in the world. And we always talked about remarkable products, remarkable customer experiences, and David just drove that. relentlessly through the organization that it had to be the best. And we were influenced a lot by Jim Collins, the author of Good to Great, who had that great concept of work out the thing you can do better than anybody else in the world. And when we talk more about the transaction, we really did that. And I think we built the best e-foil in the world.

Yeah.

I suspect it probably still is under Brunswick ownership, the company that bought us. But it was just that obsession with remarkable products.

That's fascinating, isn't it? I mean, and I like the link to Tesla too, about, you know, it's an example everyone can relate to. Tell me a little bit about those early stages when you've got those first 6 or so people around the table who are now involved in contributing. One of the big questions I find with early startups is them trying to work out how do we attract good talent, we can't afford to pay them salaries, you know, and I think, you know, you and I have been around this a little while and we recognise there's probably a core set of tools most people use, but can you talk us through that a little bit?

Attracting talent was probably not as hard as you might think because it was such an exciting product that people just gravitated to it and we just had a lot of people approaching us wanting to work for us.

Yes.

We obviously went out and looked for people as well, but it was very interesting doing this in Byron Bay because Byron's just full of young people, including a lot of particularly Europeans who are having gap years and things and surfing and all sorts of stuff. But a lot of those— we recruited a lot of people who were just pouring coffees and working in bars or restaurants. who were highly qualified and you sort of said to them, hey, you can live in Byron Bay and you can have a really cool job as well. So we attracted a lot of people in that way. So it wasn't a huge issue attracting people and we ended up with some incredible people working for us, which, you know, really propelled the company.

Was there a lot of people at that early stage who ended up with some equity as well? Did they come on the journey in that respect?

Yeah, our approach to equity, because we did a range of capital raisings and debt raisings. So each time we did a capital raising, we basically said to the senior management team, if you want equity, you can buy in. But everybody bought in. We didn't end up having an ESOP or anything like that. So if you wanted to have some equity, you bought in. So the very first round, the family, friends and fools round, you know, 2 of those guys played long-term roles in the business. When we did our first sort of more external capital raising in 2019, a number of the management team bought in then. So quite a few of our management team, you know, had equity. And I think even when we did the ultimate deal, there was probably 70% plus of the company owned by David and the management team. So the management team, yeah, had had a large stake in the business.

A big role to play, yeah. Often you sort of see these businesses, people do get watered down a little bit along the way, but that's still quite a solid holding.

Yep.

Without going kind of down too much of a technical rabbit hole, you talked about raising debt and raising equity and I, you know, these 2 levers I think a lot of business owners also struggle with in that growth journey. How did you play those levers? Was debt a big part of that? In my head, debt's always cheaper than equity, so I'm, you know, but it's also hard to borrow when you're a small company and like, was there anything in there that might be useful for people who are on that journey?

Yeah, we did a lot of thinking around that because I think the challenge, particularly with a fast-growing company which requires capital and funding, is just how you manage the balance between debt and equity and not getting diluted too much early on. Because, you know, you can get to points where quite, you get diluted quite quickly. So we always manage that. And interestingly, on the debt side, we basically went back to our shareholders because we had a very cyclical funding cycle because we sold most of our product in the Northern Hemisphere summer. So most of our sales were literally within a 2 to 3 month period. So the rest of the year we had to survive on what came in then, plus we had to build the product to sell the next summer. So quite early on, we had a situation where we went, boy, this is getting really tough. We're going to need more equity. And somebody said, well, why don't we ask our shareholders? Because we weren't paying our shareholders dividends, being a high-growth company. And we went to our shareholders and said, look, we've got a funding gap. We need to build the product now and we'll get paid for it in 6 months' time. And we offered them a good interest rate.

Yeah.

Probably every year we did a shareholder debt funding where they put money in and we paid them back and they got a good dividend clip. So that worked really well, prevented people being diluted, and it was very flexible. I mean, we literally raised $5 or $6 million in a couple of days where if you went to banks and things, you'd be there forever.

Yeah, exactly. Well, yeah, just the compliance alone puts a drag on it. And then of course the premium sort of rates that you'd have to pay.

Yeah, I think the other thing I'd add on that is, I mean, David, as I said, he was a very visionary leader and he was very strongly of the view that he knew exactly where he wanted to take the company and he felt it was really important that he controlled the company as long as possible to make sure that his vision got implemented the way he wanted. Now that didn't mean he didn't listen to a whole lot of other people. He was a very good listener. He was always looking for ideas and so on. But he had a very, very clear vision and he didn't want to be in a situation where he'd lost control of the company or had a private equity firm sitting there telling him what to do or whatever.

Yeah.

So these were some of the considerations going on and I think we did that well. And I think David, His approach to that I thought was really sensible with the type of company that we had.

It's interesting, you sort of remind me a little bit of the whole Facebook story about hanging on to that innovative kind of spirit of the business for as long as possible before it gets corporatized.

Yeah.

By the time they corporatized, they were already big enough that it didn't matter. But yeah, it'd be easy to lose what makes it special.

Yeah, absolutely.

You mentioned North America. I mean, it's funny, we're in Australia here, it's a small market, and I think whenever people do innovative things, they automatically think, I must get to a bigger market, which makes a lot of sense at that surface level. I also talk to a lot of business owners though who completely underestimate what that actually means, and they think it's easy just to, oh, we'll just start going to America and start selling and we'll make it big. And I keep telling them it's actually not necessarily one country, it's 50 different states with different, you know, can you talk me through that a little bit? Because America, Europe, you know, you're on these different areas like that to me just sounds complex and risky and scary and—

Yep, all of the above. So our first primary market was Europe because Fliteboard in its evolution had been very influenced influenced by that sort of Mediterranean culture and style and design and all of that.

It was in the DNA sort of thing.

Yeah, so it was sort of in the DNA. So that was our first logical marketplace. So we really focused on Europe first and really built that as sort of our initial core market.

And that sales director, was he in Europe already?

He was just travelling all over the place, but he spent a lot of time in Europe. So that was our first market. The US, we then, once we'd been operating in Europe for a year or 2, then we tackled the US. And there's a bit of a story about the US. One of our probably key competitors at that time is a company called Lift, and they're an American company based in Puerto Rico. And they came from quite a different background to Fliteboard, but America was their key market. They held a patent, a broad-ranging patent to cover eFoils. And we spent quite a bit of time working with them around, well, can we come to an arrangement to let us go into the US? So we ended up doing a license agreement with them.

Okay.

So we didn't want to go into the US until we had that because we wanted clear water. So we tackled the US next. But David being a great salesman and a great entrepreneur, anybody who wanted to buy a Fliteboard anywhere in the world, he wanted to sell it to them. So we actually sold to over 90 countries. And you're right about the complexity of all of that and to actually tackle both Europe and the US as major markets. I mean, most companies just wouldn't do that.

Yeah, and I think the compliance and regulatory side of it crushes most people.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And one of the real challenges with eFoils was most of the regulators weren't sure which box to put it in. You know, is it a surfboard with an engine on it, or is it a boat, or is it a— so we had regulatory issues, you know, all the way along. Having said that, we worked very cooperatively with a lot of the regulators, and a lot of them liked the product. You know, they probably preferred it to jet skis, to be honest, for a whole bunch of reasons. So they were—

Which is funny to hear because so many people hate jet skis, right?

Yeah, so they were quite keen to have Fliteboards, you know, out on the water for all sorts of reasons. So yeah, but you're right about that. I mean, when I look back and sort of think of all those challenges, including the technological challenges about building a Fliteboard in the first place, yeah, there was a lot.

Was there much of an issue around, you know, product warranty, injuries? You know, I just, I look at the US and think how litigious they are over there as a country broadly. I mean, was that kind of a concern along the way that those issues might present themselves?

Yeah, absolutely. Probably the 2 key things we always were concerned about and focused on was, you know, potential injury to somebody riding riding a Fliteboard or something, or a Fliteboard rider causing injury to somebody else. And also particularly battery fires, because a number of our competitors had a lot of issues with battery fires. And as we know, you know, battery fires is an issue generally in society. And you can't think of a much more inhospitable environment to put a battery than putting it in a surfboard—

Saltwater.

Out in the saltwater. So we spent a lot of time the battery design and development. And we had a very strong track record on that front. On the safety side of things, we did a lot around teaching people to use Fliteboard safely. Now, the reality is you're half a metre above the water going at top speeds, 55 kilometres an hour, which is unbelievably quick. Not that many people do that. So there's a level of inherent risk in that as there is in surfing, snowboarding, any of those sorts of things.

I was gonna say, your customers are probably already at a certain end of that spectrum of comfort. Yeah.

So there was a lot around helping people learn how to use it. And part of that was learn how to fall off the board safely, you know, just things like that. So one of the things that we did was we ended up with over 4 years, 200 commercial partners. So they were flight schools, they were resellers, there were Fliteboard repair businesses, and they were all independently owned businesses. And we effectively helped create those businesses. But the flight schools in particular were to make sure when people first went on a Fliteboard, they had a good experience. Yeah, yeah. And a safe experience.

Makes sense. Um, come back to the, to the business journey again for me. You know, I always find when I've worked with clients over the years that regardless of the industry or the business model, businesses go through these cycles of growth and they typically kind of hit these ceilings where, you know, and sometimes it's indicated by broad revenue ranges or whatever, but actually what sits below that is the complexity of the business.

Yeah.

And its ability to push through natural barriers and go to that next stage. And sometimes there's multiple stages, Ryan, and I'm just kind of curious about that journey for Fliteboard from idea and innovative small team, were there natural thresholds that you guys kind of grew to and went, okay, kind of what got us here won't get us to the next stage?

Yeah, absolutely. And I think we used to often say we've got a tiger by the tail because no matter how many Fliteboards we built, there were 10 times more people wanting to buy one.

Nice problem to have though.

A great problem to have, but it really really drove the business really hard. So you go back to the team and I remember after the first year we sold 1,000 Fliteboards and we had our end-year strategy meeting. We said, okay, next year we're going to sell 2,000. And I could just see the team going, that's impossible. But David had this great ability to sort of set these goals and then work out how to get there. So we had a very clear philosophy of we've effectively got to— if we go on this growth journey, we've got to reinvent ourselves probably literally every year, sometimes even quicker. So we were very flexible about how we did things, how we managed things, and also how we used people. So, you know, if I think of our first employee, Rachel, Rachel started as David's executive assistant, which meant she did a massive range of stuff.

Everything.

She then did logistics. And then she headed up HR.

Wow.

So we had people doing very different roles and we were, you know, very flexible about trying to move people around to cover gaps. But we also had, and we talked briefly offline about this, we had this interesting concept of at times we called it yin and yang, sometimes we called it our battlegrounds. And it was this concept of if we want to make the best eFoil in the world, so make these remarkable products, we have to be innovative, creative, fast-moving, take risks, break things and do that. But then at the same time, if we want to scale, we've got to have this efficient, robust, certain set of structures and things in place.

Predictability.

So we were trying to do both at the same time and they're not compatible. They conflict with each other. But we had this framework of explicitly talking about we're trying to do these 2 at times contradictory things. And I think, and it's not to say at times it didn't get a bit willing, but I think that helped us go, okay, I understand you need to do that for the product development right now. But at other times it would be, well, if we want to say something like intellectual property, if we want to have a global brand, brand, we've got to be putting in trademark applications all around the world now. We can't be putting them in after it's a success already.

Yeah, yeah.

So things like that, I think, thought we balanced that well. And we had different people in the business who have probably different natures and different styles. I'm probably more of a kind of integrator type person, saying, you know, traction or EOS type language. David was your classic visionary entrepreneur. And we had a number of people who were more of that sort of integrator ilk who were basically filling in the gaps and putting in the structures which served well when we actually went to exit.

Yeah. So it sounds like you actually had sort of developed your own language around how to manage conflict. That sort of sounds like it's anchored on this topic that says, okay, I'm actually, you know, for somebody who might be feeling frustrated and emotional in the moment and maybe not thinking in logically as they would, oh, okay, I'm in that scenario again. I've been given some terms of reference on how to, I guess, behave here or talk. Is that—

Yeah, absolutely. And David had this concept of what we ended up calling Flite Lab, which was our R&D area. And you wanted it to look and feel and operate like an R&D center, whereas our assembly line, you wanted it done the same the same way every time. So 2 sort of different cultures within the same organisation. And then from a management point of view, it was managing the tensions that would arise from time to time between those 2 different cultures. But both those cultures are really important and became important when we did do the exit.

It sounds like it becomes a real kind of multiplying factor in the growth and the success of the business, that balancing act, that chemistry.

Absolutely. Yeah.

It's fascinating. Where were you manufacturing?

So we— manufacturing was a huge issue. So we assembled the products in Byron Bay, but all the parts for the Fliteboards, some came from Australia, some came from— the batteries came from Taiwan, the boards came from Thailand. A lot of the wings and masts and everything came from China. The motor came from Germany. So all of these parts came into Byron Bay, then they were assembled and then sent back out again, which is probably not the most efficient way of doing it, um, but was probably the only way we could do it at the time. And we had this huge old warehouse in Byron Bay which we never even got around to putting our Fliteboard sign on. That was just manufactured, That was assembling all of these Fliteboards and then sending them all around the world. So it was incredible, it was an incredible period.

Was that supply chain dynamic more about having access to the specific things? I imagine it was probably a quality element.

Yeah, well, we had to find the right manufacturers all around the world to, you know, give us all the sort of parts to make a Fliteboard. And a Fliteboard's got about 500 individual parts in it. Which, you know, a lot of those would come as sort of packaged with things in it, particularly the electronics, but it's actually 500 individual parts. So very complex piece of machinery.

Yeah, sounds it. Yeah. As you're going through all this, I mean, then I think a lot of people who run product-based businesses and might be listening to this, you know, probably thinking, how would I simplify this? And, you know, everyone would be probably thinking, I'll go to China and and say, here, build me one of these. Was that on your mind as you guys were building this kind of competitive scenario and the copycats and the cheaper knockoffs and the stuff like that?

I guess at the outset our focus was, or David's focus in particular, was we want to build the best possible eFoil. So we weren't as concerned about could it be cheaper if we did this, could it be better if we did that. We started to focus on those things later on, but at the outset, because it was a brand new product and trying to work out how all the bits would work together, getting the battery right, getting the controller right. Like, if it was easy, it would have already been done, right? Yeah, all those things were really hard to do first time round. So we focused a lot on trying to get the product at the highest possible quality early on. We targeted a market of people who would go, you know what, I'll pay $15,000 for this amazing product because I can and I think it would be fun. And we had very, very loyal customers, particularly in the early days, but they were all your classic early adopters. So that wasn't a concern. And we were happy to build less product at the beginning so that if we did have problems, 'Cause we didn't wanna do a battery recall for all of our products. We never did a recall of anything. So a lot of it was around getting it right and then we started to focus on, you know, can we make it cheaper and so on. And Brunswick, our buyer, has taken all of that to a new level because of, you know, their resources and so on as a business.

Yeah, and I imagine they didn't buy it just to keep it doing what it's doing, right? They wanna scale and go to that next level again. What was the thinking around exiting and, you know, was it always this idea that the company would just eventually be sold? Was it an— because, you know, David and yourself, you're both experienced guys. I mean, I think there comes a natural assumption about the journey of a business, but was that part of the language from early on?

Yeah, it was, and very much at a board level. So David had built and sold 3, 4 businesses beforehand, so he knew about building businesses, getting them ready for exit and so on. And I worked on all of those with him, so he was very comfortable with that concept. One thing I really liked about the way David thought about this, and we talked about this a lot at board level, was David was really good at separating in his mind, what do I want to do to do personally, what's the right, you know, economic or financial thing for me to do for myself and my family, and what's the right thing to do for this company.

Yeah.

So he would often have conversations with the board around that, and, and he was good at separating those out because he'd say, on a personal level, I just want to be the Fliteboard guy forever. You know, I'd be happy to build Fliteboards and run this company forever. From a financial point of view, it was well when is the right time to sell, and from the company's point of view, we used to talk in terms of who is the right owner of this business at this point in time. And I think our ability to talk about that, you know, both David as founder but also as a board, and I was on the board from the outset. We had a lot of discussions around that, and a lot of the decision around getting, you know, when would we sell and who would we sell to was around what's the right thing to do for the business. And it's one thing I find a lot of business owners don't think about or talk about very much is that the business is separate from the owner. And are you doing the right thing by helping this business be the best it can possibly be?

Yeah.

And David had this great ability to separate out his personal views and desires and so on and say, I want this to be the best possible business. And at what point in time should that result in the business being owned by somebody else? And I think that's very powerful.

I really like the way you put it about who is the right owner for the business at this point. You know, it's a nicer way to sort of context it. You know, you would have seen and met plenty of business owners like I have that become very personally and emotionally invested in their business, and they struggle with the concept of exiting it because they— it's a sense of betrayal or loss, or even a sense of loss of identity and all that sort of stuff. And I was saying to a client just the other day, you know, who was also a parent as I am, and said, you know, nobody has kids thinking they want to raise needy little adults who never leave home, right? We all think we want to raise self-sustaining, good contributing children who will move on.

Exactly.

one day, right, and be themselves. And I think to some degree, you know, your business is the same. At some point, if it continues to grow and it has that opportunity or that potential, there probably does come a time where it might actually thrive better under somebody else's ownership.

Yeah, absolutely. And that's one thing I learned a lot from Michael Gerber. And one thing Michael does is he talks very carefully in terms of how you describe your relationship with your business. And he always is very strong on the view, there's you and there's your business. They're not the same. But everybody will talk in terms of, you know, it's my baby or it's my business or, you know, I'm a business owner as opposed to the business is here. It's got its own life to lead. And at what point are you nurturing and supporting that? And at what point when you're actually holding the business back from being the best it can be.

Yeah, it's a nice little distinction. I'm just gonna hold that up there too. So you co-authored that book with Michael Gerber as well, which I—

Yeah, especially.

Yeah, congrats on that. That's excellent. We'll put some links into the show notes so people can go and pick that up. But I just wanna pick up one thing you just said there, and it's, a lot of people might've missed it, but, you know, this idea of, I'm a business owner versus I own a business is a very different mindset, isn't it?

It's a completely different mindset. It's very subtle, but it's completely different. And as soon as you start thinking differently, some of the emotional stuff actually falls away a little bit, which I think is not a bad thing. As a board, and we had a board of 3 people, David, myself, and a guy called Bruce Carter, who was one of our early investors. And Bruce was chairman, but we used to constantly talk about at what point in time would it be better for somebody else to own this business. And we looked at lots of options in terms of exit, and we had a lot of potential options open to us. But a key driver in all of that is what's actually best for the business. And that may not necessarily have, on a raw numbers basis, been the best sort of thing. And perhaps just spell that out a little bit more. There was a point at which we probably could have got private equity investing in the business, and they might have done that on a higher valuation than perhaps what we sold on. But would that have been the best thing for the business? Probably not, in my view.

Well, it's a hard sort of position for people to find themselves, right? And I know we've had this conversation in the past asked too about wearing the different hats. And, and I know I've been in conversations where I've said to people, I'm actually just taking off this hat for a minute. I'm gonna now talk about it from this perspective. And I sort of encourage my clients to almost think like that, because if you can put fences around who you are in that moment, you can start to be far more objective about the type of conversations you have and the decisions you've got to make.

Yeah.

I imagine having the 3 of you sitting on the board with all of your various experience, it's the discussion around exiting is just a very different one. It's, you know, I use the expression with my clients, we all exit our business one day whether we like it or not. And I think once you accept that as the reality, the way you approach it changes.

Yes. Yeah. And I think because we'd taken on external investors, at some point they had an expectation. we would invest— sorry, exit. They didn't, weren't necessarily pressuring us to exit at any particular point. And a lot of them, they were classic high net worth investors and making an investment in Fliteboard was as much that they loved the company. A lot of them were Fliteboard owners.

Yeah.

So they were obsessed about the product and they just loved the idea of being part of the journey. But at some point they hoped they would get an exit. So Part of what we needed to do was look at the various interests of David as founder and major shareholder, management team, but also these external investors, making sure that we got a good exit for them as well, as well as doing the right thing by the company itself. And I thought we managed to have very good discussions around the board table on all of those sorts of issues.

It's interesting, isn't it? There's so many variables and in business you could zig instead of zag and it can cause other issues and whatever. And there's no straight line of obvious path, is there?

No, no, there's not. And it is the balancing of all those things. Yeah.

So coming into it, you obviously did the transaction. You've obviously been having these board discussions. So somewhere in there you guys have gone, okay, maybe now's the timing. Was there anything in particular about the business or that point in time that triggered that decision?

I think from probably, we sold in 2023. I think probably from 2022 onwards, we were starting to think more seriously about, you know, maybe we should look at exiting. And I guess part of that was driven by, it was probably how quickly the marketplace grew because we went, by the time we sold, we'd done a combined $145-150 million in revenue, which is a huge amount over 4 years for a startup.

For sure.

But also we could see competitors coming into the marketplace, we were having to operate on more scale. We could see other companies that could potentially come into the marketplace, and if they did, they'd have the benefit of looking at everything that had been done already and moving very fast. So we had companies like Waydoo out of China that had a lot of backing behind it, and they were moving very fast, probably more at a cheaper price point than we were operating at, but we could see the market changing very quickly. And when we started to look at options, it was, well, we could have potentially floated. We could have potentially— we had PE firms knocking on the door pretty regularly. We could have done that. But each of those options, all of the core things we needed to do in the business to keep growing would have still been with us.

Yep.

So we started looking more towards potential trade sales, and we had discussions with potential buyers including Brunswick over probably 18 months, 2 years. So there was certainly interest out there and then it was a matter of choosing between those. Around that time too, we brought on a corporate advisor who helped us with our last capital raising round, did a lot of strategic work for us and then helped us with the actual transaction with Brunswick.

Yeah, great.

And all of that helped a lot. He brought a lot of clarity, a lot of skills, a lot of experience in doing transactions of that sort of level. So that made a huge difference as well.

Brunswick sound like they've got businesses everywhere, but are they based in the US or Europe or?

So Brunswick, just to fill in some of the detail there, Brunswick's a classic Midwest American company. They've been around for 180 years. So a huge company, they've got a market cap of about $5 billion listed on New York Stock Exchange. They've been in lots of different industries over the years. They were in 10-pin bowling, they were in billiards, they were major players in those industries.

So themed though in terms of entertainment.

Yeah, and then about 30, 40 years ago they really swung into moving almost exclusively into recreational marine. Marinecraft. So they own huge brands like Mercury, Boston Whaler. They've got a boat club that's got 300 outlets all around the world. So, you know, just deeply entrenched in that whole market sector. So for them, they were very interested in, you know, new waves of product development. They're also very interested in electrification because that's an issue that the maritime, maritime industry are starting to really look at. So they were very interested in the technology behind Fliteboard, both with foiling and electric.

Yeah, it's interesting. I think, you know, being around a lot of transactions, you know, like I do, there are very different styles of buyers, you know, strategic trade players, and there are the investment markets or investors. And it sort of half sounds to me like Brunswick were really a little bit of both, which which is quite common these days. How important was that sort of background and pedigree for you guys when you were considering your options?

Yeah, when we looked at our options, we looked at very, very closely what we thought a buyer would bring to the table, particularly in terms of, you know, taking this amazing company that we built from nothing and their ability to take it to the next level. So we were really encouraged by you know, the approach Brunswick were taking, their strategic drivers, because they did really want to move towards electrification of a lot of their products. And they saw going into something which was a pure electric product first was something they really wanted to do. Also, we had similar views of the marketplace. I mean, by the time we sold, the eFoil market worldwide was probably 250,000 $150 million, and we'd done a lot of modelling together with our corporate advisor, and we thought, you know, it could potentially be a billion-dollar market by 2030. And it was interesting because when we sat down with Brunswick, their analysis was virtually the same. So from their point of view, they could see that this as being a, you know, a real growth market for them.

It's funny, you sort of touched on Something I say a lot with anybody who'll listen, you know, doing deals is hard, really hard. You know, there's lots of reasons why deals fall over, but, you know, willing buyer, willing seller, form a lot of trust in a short period of time. I think that trust piece, when you're sitting down and you're both seeing the same stuff and talking that same language, must go a long way to engendering that trust and helping push the deal along.

Yeah, a huge way. And we were very— I thought we had very transparent discussions with Brunswick around all of that and sharing our views of the marketplace and where we thought it would go, why they wanted to do the deal. One of the drivers for them was they didn't go into the jet ski market decades ago, which they always regretted, and they saw this as potentially, you know, a new product category that could do very well. So they wanted to make sure they were a player in it. But also it's not It's not just eFoils, there's a whole lot of innovation going on in and around all this sort of stuff. So they wanted to make sure they're a player. It was also very synergistic with the rest of their business because they sell a lot of big boats. A lot of people with big boats want fun toys on the back of the boat, and Fliteboard, you know, really ticks the box on that front. So very synergistic.

Yeah, it sounds, it sounds like they were just the ideal partner in the end. Talk to me a little bit about the process itself. You've got a corporate advisor in and I want to come back to that little piece in a minute. But when did you sort of, from the moment you guys said, okay, this sounds like it was more of an evolution rather than let's go sell. But how long did the process take?

So we probably talked to Brunswick for probably 18 months. And that was mostly David and some key people at Brunswick. And they'd always said to us, we'd like to buy you. They literally looked at every eFoil company in the world and they settled on they wanted to buy us. And then it was around, well, do we want to sell? And then if we do, what are the terms? So early 2023, we started talking more seriously. So we signed a heads of agreement 31 May. 2023, and we settled the deal 31st of August 2023. So it was a short timeframe, but we'd done a lot of work beforehand, as had they, and we were both committed to doing the deal, you know, quickly.

Yeah.

Because it was a complex deal. I mean, it's a very hard company for them to do due diligence on in that period of time. You know, there were obviously levels of risk which were probably hard to fully quantify. You know, with a brand new product category and so on.

Yeah, I think the takeaway from that, certainly for me, and certainly what I'd encourage business owners who might be listening, is what they need to hear is the 18-month term. Because, you know, the end piece got done quickly because you'd spent so much time building trust and the transparency and the sharing of the data, and all of that makes the end piece easier because you've already established everything you need, right?

Yeah, and things like, say, the data room. I mean, by that stage we'd done 3 capital raisings, 3, 4 capital raisings, sorry, 4 capital raisings plus, you know, multiple debt raisings. So we effectively had a live data room.

Yeah, you were organized.

The whole time. And we had a lot of experience within the company and with our advisors.

We had some, you know, really good technical advisors outside the But that idea, this idea, I use the analogy of having match fitness. You know, like you guys were match fit. You'd been through all this stuff numerous times, muscle memory's there, you know, you've got serious people at the table who've done this many, many times. You weren't walking into something blind going, wow, this is the first time I've had these kind of conversations.

Yeah, exactly. And that's where we ended up with a huge amount of talent in and around Fliteboard as I mean, we had some incredible investors and they were fantastic at being there and helping when we needed it. And we kept them really well informed. We had good shareholder reports and all that sort of stuff. So it was a combination of all those things that made a huge difference.

Yeah. You know, one of the things I'm seeing at the moment, Geoff, is there's so much private capital out there looking for a home that What I would have called PE 20 years ago has really evolved. It's broader and deeper. Because there's so much capital looking for a home, there's a lot of people running around tapping business owners on the shoulder saying, hey, do you want to sell? Do you want to sell? I would say, and I'm roughing in a number here, our team's managing probably 12 transactions at the moment. I reckon probably 50% of those clients come came to us after having been tapped on the shoulder, completely unprepared, decided to just work it out themselves. I'll just negotiate because I'm pretty good at working stuff out. They end up spending 9 to 12 months being peeled like an onion, and sometimes they get lowballed at the end of that. Sometimes the buyers go, actually, we don't want to buy you anymore. And yet here I am talking to you You had a board full of people who've done this many, many times, an enormous amount of experience, and you guys went, let's get a corporate advisor to manage this for us. That's a really interesting difference here and how important and what, you know, like you could have quite easily probably said, look, I'll do this, I'll run it.

But you didn't. Well, potentially we could have. And we did our early— we did all of our early capital raisings in-house. With just a little bit of external help. The difference in having a corporate advisor was he'd done a lot of work at the top end of town and then was working more in the mid-market space. And I think it was Chris's ability to take a lot of what we were saying and then translate it back into, you know, language and approaches that a bigger market would, you know, understand and appreciate and expect. So he played a key role in that. He also drove the deal enormously hard because it was a complicated deal because we— it was a scrip deal because we wanted to do that for our shareholders. It had warranty insurance. So we actually did all of the warranty insurance, which is basically like doing the deal twice.

Yeah, absolutely.

So we got all of that done in 3 months and settled. It was a cash settlement. And it needed to be that because we were almost— it was almost like exiting a private equity fund where we needed a clean exit. And we worked through all of that with Brunswick right at the beginning. Said this is the way the deal needs to work for it to be, you know, work at our end. And they accepted and understood that even though it made some aspects of the deal a bit more complicated. But it was a very clean exit. for all of our shareholders.

I think the analogy I'm trying to draw for people too is that this idea that managing this stuff yourself, it's a little bit like the lawyer who represents themselves in court. You know, you can be a very smart person and very capable and great at working things out, but this is possibly going to be the biggest deal you'll ever do in your life, and maybe that's not the time to wing it.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And look, Chris had an enormous— and his team had an enormous enormous value to the process. And, you know, I never had any reservations about whether or not we should have done that. You know, it clearly added a lot of value.

Yeah, no, that's perfect.

Probably the one thing I wouldn't mind coming back to is that concept of selling a growth story to a buyer, particularly a trade buyer or a PE firm or whatever. You have to do a lot of work for it to be a real growth story. And right from the outset in Fliteboard, David was very, very good at seeing the growth opportunity and articulating it well.

Yep.

And we did a lot of work looking at the marketplace. We talked to our competitors a lot. We talked to our customers. We looked at a lot of adjacent industries and went, well, how do we— how does our product compare with those?

Yep.

So we spent a lot of time on the growth story, and that's where the right buyers will actually actually pay you well.

They've got to engage with that story, right?

Yeah, but you can't just go and sell your business and say, well, we're just going to spice it up and say there's a growth story here. I mean, savvy buyers just see through that in a heartbeat. So you've got to— and look, the reality is for a lot of businesses, they don't have a growth story to sell. So advisors out there who are sort of saying, look, we're going to position you for a strategic exit or something, you've got to really Think carefully about that because they're few and far between.

Yeah, that's a great point. I had lots of people sitting opposite me almost convincing me of the value of their business, you know, trying to convince me of the value of the business to sell it for them. And, you know, one of my favorite sayings, Geoff, is for every complex problem, there's a simple answer that's wrong. And often that's it. It's, oh, this is so simple, this growth story. It's just so simple. So if it was that simple, why haven't you done it?

Yeah.

And, and I think so, so partly I think there's the story of where it's going, the growth, and is it backed by data and is it backed by, like, does it, does it kind of smell and feel right? But I think too that's usually coupled with the proof that's already in the pudding, right? Like you've grown $150 million in 4 years is huge in terms from a revenue perspective. Like that story kind of reinforces the message quite well.

Exactly, yeah. Because the businesses where people try and sell them, they say, well, we've flatlined for 15 years, but now it's going to be a hockey stick. Well, it's a pretty hard story to sell to a buyer.

Yeah. And even if you do get a deal over the line, you've just tried to shift this enormous amount of risk to the buyer and they're going to shift it back to you via an earn-out. So, you know, it's— I think it's for business owners who might be listening to this and thinking about selling their own company. I think one of the key things to take away with all this is understanding how risk actually works through these things. It's, you know, in the right deals, typically both parties are taking a little bit of risk. They understand what that risk is and they're going in with their eyes open.

Yeah, and we spent a lot of time talking with Brunswick around, well, how do you see this operating afterwards? Because they kept virtually the whole Fliteboard team. So a handful of us like myself decided it was the right time to move on. I'd already hired a replacement for me in the company and also there wasn't as much need for my role for the company going forward. And that was the case with probably a handful of other people, but most of the team stayed on.

Which is a testament to the business and the culture.

But also important for Brunswick because, you know, it was a business that once they had the keys, they needed to run it and the best people to run a lot of aspects of the business, at least in the short term, with the existing Fliteboard team. Now over time they've played a bigger role in things like, you know, the distribution and doing some of the stuff that we were starting to find really hard. So things like financing dealers so they could buy Fliteboards, you know, that's the sort of stuff that they were very good at and had been doing in their other businesses for a long time. That sort of stuff was very hard for us to do.

Yeah, yeah, it makes sense. I mean, that's— this is the comes back to this point of who should own the business at this point, right? It was probably somebody who knows how to navigate that next part of the journey.

Yeah, because if we might have done a deal with, say, a PE firm and they would have gone, well, we'll give you a chunk of money, but you guys all stay in the business, we would have still had all those problems to deal with. And the PE firm might have helped us a bit, but not in the way that a company like Brunswick or some of the other similar Similar companies out there can really be able to do.

Yeah. Talk to me a little bit about deal structure and stuff if you can. I mean, you mentioned it was cash, which is amazing. Without necessarily crossing over some line that might be sensitive here, I'm curious about how they might have come up with the valuation. You know, I think in sort of lower to mid-market land, you know, people talk a lot about multiples of EBITDAs and, you know, there's other methodologies of course that pop up that might be specific to certain industries, but how did they kind of articulate the number?

Yeah, as is often the case, there was quite a bit of argy-bargy on the final number, and you do have discussions around, you know, are we going to do it on a multiples basis, are we going to look at forecast future revenue or profits and all the rest of it, do we look at the amount of stock you've got on hand, do we So there are a whole lot of things that are in the mix. We probably had a target number that we were looking for and it was probably working with Brunswick to get as close as possible to that target number.

We're okay with how you come up with the number, but that's the number.

Yeah, exactly. And it was a good number. It was a 9-figure number, which is pretty good for a 4-year-old business. I think some of the discussions I have with people about, well, what multiple did you sell for? I've always been of the view, by the time you've done the sale, the multiple almost becomes irrelevant because there's been so much argy-bargy back and forth. And particularly with an early-stage company because, you know, you can run your financials in a lot of different ways, particularly if there's a lot of capital investment and so on. So your books can tell different stories depending on how you want to present that story. You know, in our case, we funded all of our R&D and all of our business development all out of the business. We didn't pay dividends, so any profit we made— we were profitable from day one— all of our profit just got churned back into the business. But how you deal with that from a financial perspective can be different. Yeah, definitely.

Yeah, it's fascinating, isn't it? You know, and I see people, a lot of people, they'll start the discussions and be very happy with a number. And I mean, we all hear about buyers retrading deals and changing their view on value. But I've seen business owners change their mind through a deal lots of times and try to move the goalposts and, hey, we're doing it on this multiple here, but now that we've moved in the multiple, I expect more now. And it doesn't always work like that, right?

Yeah, well, we effectively had all of that argy-bargy. before we signed the letter of intent, and the key elements of the letter of intent didn't move through the deal. It was a tough deal because there was a huge amount of due diligence just because of the complexity of the business. They had a lot of external advisors going through things, but the fundamentals of the deal didn't really change after the letter of intent.

Which is probably a comforting factor because you can then focus on what you need to get through, right? You know, Geoff, I mean, congratulations. I've said that to you already. We've had a few dinners and wines and whatnot, but it's a fabulous story. It's easy for people to kind of go, oh, wow, we started a company and 4 years later we sold it for 9 figures. And it's that overnight sort of success thing. But you've already articulated how challenging this kind of journey would be. I'm curious, looking back, was there decisions that were made that you might go in hindsight maybe would have we would have zigged instead of zagged?

Yeah, I think when I look at this deal, I've probably over 4 decades worked on about 300 exit transactions, either primarily as an advisor, either legal or business advisor. Some of them I've been invested in them, some of them I've, you know, played a key role in the business. So I've done a lot of deals, and if I look back, there's a lot of deals I look at and go, well, that didn't go so well because of this and so on. I've got to say, generally Fliteboard went really well. We did a lot of things right. But in hindsight, you know, there were some things I'd say, yeah, if we're doing it again, I'd do it differently. So some of those would be, and we talked about this a little bit earlier, we took on a major bank in our last capital raising. And as it turned out, that wasn't a great move. It was so much easier doing debt funding through our shareholders. And we wanted to, I suppose, go to the next level and we thought, let's get a bank. And I think just the traditional banking model with high-growth businesses, it just doesn't work very well. And it wasn't the bank's fault. It was just in hindsight, we probably should have gone a different way on the debt side. The equity side of that capital raising went fine. But the debt side was, it just wasn't optimal for us moving forward.

Was it just not the right fit, too much structure or stuck in a certain way of doing business?

Yeah, and too much complication about the terms and what you could draw down at particular times and all the rest of it. Plus also that was complex because we're a global company, you know, then taking security over all sorts of things. So compared with doing unsecured do it alone without shareholders. It's a world of difference. So that was one decision. The other thing we did, which probably comes back to your point about expanding into global markets, I think we made some bad decisions about where we set up at times because we were basically looking for people in the US and Europe and going, can you help us? And, you know, our first European office we set up in Venice of all places, which was crazy. And it just was the guy happened to live near there. So a year later we bit the bullet and said, well, let's do this properly. Where's the best place to set up? And then let's hire somebody to run that office. So we ended up in Amsterdam, much better for, you know, shipping and all that kind of stuff.

Yeah.

Same in the US, you know, we ended up in New York because a guy who did a lot of early work for us there was based in New York, probably not the best place. Then we set up in San Francisco, again, probably not the best place given what we're doing. There were better centers for bringing product in and out. So I think just being disciplined about making those decisions and not having them led by, you know, people as opposed to where's the right place for this. Because once you've set up somewhere, it's hard to move. Or it's inconvenient to move.

Part of that surely though is that you're flying, I don't want to say by the seat of your pants, it sounds reckless, but you're growing so damn fast, dealing with so many issues. There must be a natural tension there of we just need to do something.

Exactly. And that's why some of those decisions were made, but they took a while to unravel further down the track. So there's probably a couple of things. I think we generally made really good hires and we had good people coming to us. We made a few bad calls, but that's the nature of that sort of business.

That's the nature of being in business.

Yeah. So those are probably the main things, but a lot of stuff went right and that's unusual for so many things to go right, particularly given we ran the business through most of it was through COVID. Which was massively challenging from a supply chain perspective.

100%. I mean, that's a once in a century kind of drama that most people won't live through. Yeah, it's fascinating. I'd love to talk us a little bit more through what you're doing now, where you're going, what's going on, who you engage with. Before we do that, I mean, is there One or two things that, you know, you'd say to a business owner listening now, you know, a couple of tips, things from your experience that you think the average punter out there should keep in mind when they're trying to grow their business to an eventual exit?

I think the key thing I see in the marketplace, and I'm sure you do too, is most business owners don't spend enough time thinking about the endgame, you know. Where do I want this to all end up, both for myself, for my company, for all of the stakeholders in and around my company? I think too many business owners think about this too late in the piece and end up with suboptimal outcomes as a result of that. Now, there's a lot of material around now. I mean, when I wrote my first book, it was one of the early books in this space. There's a lot more material out there now. And there's a lot of podcasts. I mean, podcasts like yours, people like John Warrillow with his Built to Sell podcast. There's a lot of information that's readily available now. And I just think one key thing business owners should do is just start to access some of that information and start to think about these issues.

It's a funny one, isn't it? Because I think most business owners understand this concept of if you've got a, let's say, a business goal, define what it is and then work backwards to work out what you need to do today to achieve it. But when it comes to exiting, people, it's almost like doing a will. People kind of block it out and go, I don't wanna focus on that.

Yeah, they do. And it's that classic, it's important, but it's not urgent. You know, and I'm sure you've heard it over and over. Everybody's gonna be ready to exit in 5 years' time, except 5 years just keeps rolling. I think one thing we did from pretty early on with Fliteboard was we always knew we would exit and it was part of how we built the company and it was something that we talked about and we looked at constantly as we went because we knew at some point we would.

Yeah, it's a very different mindset. I'd love to hear more about what you're doing. I've shown them the book already, but for those who haven't seen, Geoff's got a couple of great books. This one here I read when I first started Exit Advisory Group and it really helped me get started, helped me get myself into the mindset of the people we were serving. What else are you up to?

So I went through an interesting experience after Fliteboard because I was suddenly in the situation that a lot of my clients were in where I went from working 90 to 100 hours a week to not doing anything. And it happened like that. And I didn't need to work again if I didn't want to. So I gave myself a year or two off to go, what do I actually want to do? And I decided after a while that I do want to keep doing things, but I wanted to do things in a different way. So I'm keen to do some more writing. And as I mentioned to you, I'm about to launch into my next book, which is going to drill deeper into that whole whole area of how do you build real value in your business and how do you set yourself up for exit as you build your business, not as something that you do at the end. So that's in the early stages of being mapped out.

Nice.

I'm going back into business coaching. So I'm probably working with businesses more at a strategic level and businesses that are probably in that $5-10 million plus revenue point where business owners are sort of feeling a bit stuck in their business and they know they should be starting to think about exit. They don't know how to lift their business to the next level. So that's— I'm looking to do some more coaching in that sort of space and started taking on new clients in that space. And I've also been doing a couple of interesting books like the book with Michael Gerber. I've recently contributed to a book by Jack Canfield called The Heart of Success. And that was an interesting opportunity to look at, you know, the work that I've been doing around, you know, that whole idea of when you exit your business, you know, is that success? What's success going to look like going forward and so on? So it's been a good opportunity to go back and look at, you know, my body of work through a different lens.

Yeah, that's great, Geoff. You know, it's sort of at the beginning, you know, it's coming up on 10 years I've known you now and it's I've always enjoyed our chats and I've always found you to be a very generous person. You share your knowledge. You know, it's, there's no, none of this sort of scarcity mindset, right? Like we can actually all work together, help each other. It's an abundant world and there's lots to do. And yeah.

And I think in this business exit space, although there's lots of advisors working on a transactional basis and that's important, it's a fundamental part of doing good deals, but I don't think there's enough advisors out there who are looking more at the extra components of exit, getting ready for exit and exiting well.

Yeah, yeah, spot on. And, you know, final point I just want to pick up on here is that piece where you finished working and you had that time off. I mean, that can be, funnily enough, a fragile time for people too, where they suddenly have that whole, well, hang on, who am I? Like, okay, I've got money. I'm not worried necessarily about money, But like there's more of an existential question to be answered. And that's sort of something maybe people don't know to prepare for.

Yep. And I went through that despite the fact I've been talking to people about this for years and years. I went through that, you know, and when I look back, there were stages where, you know, I really wasn't that happy. And there's not many people you can talk to about it because not a lot of people think you've got a problem. That was something that I spent time on. It was actually good doing the book recently with Jack Canfield, which comes out in about a month, because it gave me a chance to sort of reflect on success and what's meaningful and so on. So that's something I think, again, a lot of business owners need to start thinking about that stuff before they exit and start to actually work on things that will help them move into meaningful stuff. once they exit their business. And that might be finishing business altogether and doing a whole raft of other things, or it might be going back in. It could be a whole bunch of different things, but it's good to think about.

Something I'm saying to a lot of business owners is, and I'm curious whether you have a different perspective or not, I think a lot of people think they've— it's hard to get their head around thinking about and planning for that phase of life because they've almost sort of got this impression that they have to have their whole life of that next stage mapped out. And that's a really hard thing to do when you don't even know what that's going to look like. And I've— and I've having this conversation recently to people saying, you don't need to go into that sort of detail. You, you just need something to put, you know, a rail to put your hand on. Hey, I might go and explore that part of my life. And I've got, you know, maybe I'm going to do one day a week of stuff. whatever that is. Yeah, just to give you something to do so that you can then have the bandwidth to explore things without being completely rudderless. I don't know if you've got any thoughts on that.

Yeah, I agree with that. Probably the best advice I got from a couple of people when I finished Fliteboard was don't do anything for a year, which is not literally don't do anything, but don't suddenly take on a whole lot of things because people will come to you and say, can you help me with this, can you help me with that. So just don't do any of that. Have the conversations but don't commit to anything so that when you do, you're thinking about it from a much more structured perspective. I think the thing that is good to think about a bit is outside work-related things. What are some of the things that would be good to do, whether that's, you know, literally playing more golf or or joining a wine club or having more holidays, whatever. It's good to do all of that sort of stuff and to have planned that out a little bit. But yeah, you don't want to overplan as well.

Yeah, it's a funny balance. Geoff, thanks so much for making the time and coming in and having a chat with us. I've really enjoyed chatting to you, as I always do, and really appreciate you sharing your story. I know a lot of people get a lot of value from it.

So thanks for coming in. Real pleasure. Thanks for the opportunity. Thank you, Julie.

Thank you. If you're a regular listener of this podcast, then you know that we're all about straight talk. So here's something straightforward for you. This show is built on decades of actually doing this kind of work. And our book, Exit Like an Expert, is the actual guide and framework this entire show is built on. You know, we talk about how do you value a business? What are buyers really thinking? And what does a sale process actually look like? This is not some kind of motivational book or technical journal. It's a practical guide that's designed to help business owners get real results. To get a copy of the book, go to exitadvisory.com.au or you can click a link in the show notes. What an amazing episode. I hope you enjoyed that as much as I enjoyed actually interviewing Geoff. He truly is a wealth of knowledge. You know, a couple of quick things that I took away from that. And the first is that subtle nuance about how we see ourselves in our own little world. You know, this difference of, you know, I am a business owner to I am somebody who just owns a business. And that might sound like a real nuanced distinction here for most people, but it's, it's really quite powerful when you break it down. You know, how do you see yourself and your role? Role in this business and in your environment. Because the people who see themselves purely as a business owner learn how to wear the different hats, learn how to separate themselves from the identity of the business and how to treat it like the asset that it is. You know, we all exit our businesses one day whether we like it or not. And there is an enormous psychological theme through this that will help you either manage that smoothly, manage it in a way where you get the best outcomes and walk away happy versus tearing yourself apart, struggling and not being able to make decisions because you get paralyzed by the emotion of it. It's such an important distinction that I think so many business owners fall into. And the second thing I wanted to pick up on was just that psychological shift after you've actually exited the business. You know, Geoff was in a wonderful position, right? He said he had the ability not to have to work again or do anything again if you didn't want to. But, you know, most people who've built businesses, they want to do something purposeful and productive and have some sort of contribution to life. But this going from working 80 to 100 hours a week to doing nothing can actually be quite jarring for most people and leave you asking questions that you may not have the answers for. You know, if there's one thing I want you to take away from this episode is waiting to the last minute to plan plan your eventual exit is a real trap. It can cause a lot of stress. It can impact even the money you're getting, let alone the kind of psychological feelings and sort of mental health challenges you may face. You know, exiting is a once in a lifetime thing. It's not the sort of thing you just wake up and do off the cuff. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed the episode as much as I did. We'll see you in the next episode.