High Performance Mindset | Learn from World-Class Leaders, Consultants, Athletes & Coaches about Mindset - 602: Build, Prove, and Sell Your Business with Ellen Long, TedX Speaker & Exit Advisor

Episode Date: February 23, 2024

Ellen Long is a seasoned professional, guiding business owners to build, prove and sell their highly profitable companies. She is a “Women to Watch” award winner, investor, and board member. Ellen is also a TEDx speaker, in which she delivered a talk on her passion entitled, “The Journey to Enough: Finding Your Minimum Viable Happiness", which focuses on the theme of entrepreneurial happiness and well-being. Her expertise serves as a compass in an unpredictable world, offering business owners the assurance of a well-thought-out plan when they need it the most. In this episode, Cindra and Ellen discuss:  3 components of building, proving, and selling your business story  3 main drivers of business value  How early should you start thinking about an exit The biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make when transitioning their businesses   HIGH PERFORMANCE MINDSET SHOWNOTES FOR THIS EPISODE TO LEARN MORE ABOUT ELLEN FOLLOW SIGN UP FOR THE FREE MENTAL BREAKTHROUGH CALL WITH CINDRA’S TEAM TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE MENTALLY STRONG INSTITUTE Love the show? Rate and review the show for Cindra to mention you on the next episode.  

Welcome to episode 602. This is your host, Dr. Sindhara Kampoff, and thank you so much for joining me today on the High Performance Mindset. I'm grateful that you're here, ready to listen to an episode about proving, building, and selling your business. My name is Sindhara Kampoff, and I'm the founder of the Mentally Strong Institute, where we help purpose-driven leaders and athletes play big and achieve their most audacious goals so if you want to achieve your goal quicker up level your confidence and increase your influence i invite you to sign up for a free coaching call with one of my team members at freementalbreakthroughcall.com we will help you create a breakthrough a moment of more clarity and understanding to help you practice the high performance mindset. Again, that's freementalbreakthroughcall.com to sign up for your free mental breakthrough call. Now, today in the episode, I invite Ellen Long on the podcast. She

is a seasoned professional and an exit advisor focused on helping entrepreneurs navigate the often uncharted waters of the business sale. Her expertise serves as a compass in really an unpredictable world, offering business owners the assurance of a well-thought-out plan when they need it the most. And so she is a Woman to Watch award winner, an investor herself, and a board member, and she is a TEDx speaker. In this episode, we talk about these four big ideas through the lens of mindset and high performance. We discuss three components of building, proving, and selling your business story. And what is your business story? We talk about three main drivers of business value, how early you should start thinking about exiting your business,

and the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make. Without further ado, let's bring on Ellen. Welcome to the High Performance Mindset Podcast, Ellen Long. Thank you so much for being here today. I'm just pumped to have this conversation with you. So tell us a little bit about what you're passionate about and how your day's going. Oh, that's awesome. I'm really excited to be here, first of all, and I'm passionate about everything. So that will be hard to narrow down. But I'm really excited about this conversation because I have realized how much high performance matters in the business world and not just the business world, but especially when we're

talking about entrepreneurs, founders of companies, not having a high performance mindset, what the ramifications are is incredible. So. Yeah. And I completely agree. I think to myself, like when my mind isn't operating at the highest level, like it's money I'm not earning. Right. And so it's different when maybe you have a salary job, but it's when you're really like earning the money and, you know, leveling up your mindset continues to help you level up your business. Yeah, exactly. I think about we're both in Genius Network, obviously, together.

And one thing that we talk about constantly is treating yourself like a resource. And I love that concept for what you do, because if you're not treating yourself like a high performance athlete, you're not giving your best to your company, to your employees, to your clients, and really to the world. I mean, when we think about high performance, really it's, it involves everyone in your life. And I think that's something I've been learning a lot recently is if you're not taking care of yourself, you're, it's really a detriment to the people around you as well. Absolutely.

And I think about there's so many different ways to care for yourself, eating, sleeping, eating right, not eating junk food or not a lot of junk food. And also like the mindset and how you're making sure that you're really fueling it every day. I was just on this, I work with some school administrators and we were on this cohort

meeting this morning and I was talking about the power of mindset and they all were just, they were on it because they want to continue to be high performers. And they know that if they can get unstuck quicker, it just helps them serve their district and their community at just a higher level. Yeah, absolutely. And thinking about what I do. So I help entrepreneurs build, prove and sell their business story. And when you're sitting across from a buyer, you know, a lot of entrepreneurs have, you know, maybe three or five years from now, I want to sell my company. And when you're sitting across the table from the buyer, what I've realized by doing this for almost 10 years now is you're really selling that story. So what is your business story?

And so much of your business story is what you have done as an entrepreneur and a founder over those years to build value into your company. So I was thinking when you talked about, if I'm not high performing, I'm not bringing in yearly revenue and all those sort of things. But even on a bigger scale, if you're not high performing when it comes to the business sale, you might be leaving millions of dollars on the table. Because when we think about how much a business is worth, it's an easy math equation is profits times your multiple, right? So $100,000 times a five or six times multiple, well, now we're talking exponential value. So I think it's even bigger than most entrepreneurs realize. It's not just, I'm not showing up day to day and I'm not making

the yearly income. It's if my profit isn't to a certain level, you know, it can be an exponential difference based on your multiples and all that. So I love, I loved your book. It was fun to read. I actually read it on the plane from LA to Charlotte, where I live. And I thought, oh my gosh, every single entrepreneur needs to be in this mindset when they're showing up for their clients, when they're showing up for their employees. Awesome. Thank you for reading it, Ellen. I appreciate that. And the book covers 10 practices of high performance. And you're right. You know, if I'm not focusing on what I can control, or if I'm not living and letting go go or if I'm not staying passionate and purposeful about my work, it's I can't build the business the way I want to. So, Ellen, I love what you said about building, improving and selling your business story. Maybe let's just kind of do a high level first.

And I know you're really passionate about helping other people understand their finances in general. And I'm curious about where that passion came from and what makes you so passionate about helping people understand their finances? Because it's so important. It's something we're not taught when we're growing up. At least I wasn't. Absolutely. Well, it's funny that we're talking about this because I just am working with someone to work on my origin story. And I, and one of the questions he asked me was, when did you know you wanted to be a business consultant? And the answer, truly, this is going to sound ridiculous, but I wanted to be a business consultant in middle school.

That's fun. I knew in middle school, I was going to go to high school. I was going to get my business administration. And then I was going to get my MBA. I had it all planned out, even from when I was in seventh grade. And he was like, where in the heck did that come from? And I realized I grew up in a really unique community where. Almost all the people I knew were entrepreneurs, which is different for a lot of people, you know, I didn't really know a lot of people that worked in corporate. A lot of the people I grew up with were actually farmers and not small town farmers, massive, massive packing sheds,

100,000 square feet under roof. They were Walmart's biggest fruit producers, their fruits all over the world, honestly. And so I grew up in this community of people starting their own businesses, doing their own things. And I think I just was a part of all those conversations and absolutely loved it. And even in my family, my dad is an entrepreneur. He was a lawyer and a wealth manager for all the entrepreneurs in that area. And all his brothers are entrepreneurs. So they all own their own businesses too. And he's one of six. So lots of entrepreneurs. And I think I just grew up with this love for what it can provide you. Number one, the freedom to be able to create your own life. And I think at the end of the day, what I've realized is I'm really a creator and a teacher. I love being able to help entrepreneurs

create their life and the business that they really want. And I love being able to show them all the things that we've learned over those 10 years to help them reach that. So it's funny, I really started at a really young age and I've never, I never thought I would want it to do anything else. That's awesome. I think about my passion started actually kind of in a similar age. When I was in seventh and eighth grade, I loved running in cross country and I loved, my mom got me a magazine called Runner's World. And the first article I would always look at was the Mind and Body article, you know, and then I loved going to the bookstore and reading about psychology. And, you know, when we go to the mall, I'd always spend some time in the psychology section.

And my dad is also an entrepreneur. And I think about why I do what I do. And very similar to what you said, Ellen, is, you know, I just saw him building something that he was really excited about. When I was growing up, they had a restaurant in our hometown. And then he had his own business later on, right? Like, you know, after they sold the restaurant. But I just loved, he had this book on his bookshelf that was like the world's greatest salesman, which was, you know, he was studying like psychology of sales and all the psychology stuff. And then he would teach me it and helped me be a better cross country and track athlete,

you know, the same skills. So basically that's what we're talking about here, that the skills we're talking about on the high performance mindset are similar to what you'd need to thrive in business or as an entrepreneur or in sport or in life. Yeah, absolutely. Actually, my psychology professor in college tried to get me to switch majors because she was like, you love this stuff, but I love self-improvement. I love self-development, but I love it because of how we can apply it as entrepreneurs. I think we have the ability to have a massive impact in the world. What I love about entrepreneurs is they're problem solvers. They see a problem in

the world and they say, hey, I'm going to be the one to step in and create a solution for that. And so I think self-development and all these high performance mindset things we're talking about are so crucial when we're trying to literally change the world. Yeah, absolutely. And so let's dive into building, proving and selling your business story. Why did you choose kind of these three components to get us started? And what are the three components? Yeah. So I think number one, what I realized was when you get to the end, I really think of it keeping the end in mind. So if you start with the end in mind and you think, okay, I want to sell this business story. Then the question is,

what are the components that make a really good story? And what I've learned from helping sell businesses, we've sold businesses from, you know, 4 million up to, you know, over a hundred million dollar companies. And what I've learned is there really are a couple components to that. And I think of that as people, profit, and process. So if you think about people, what I love about what we're talking about is it's not just you becoming a high-performance entrepreneur. It's also about

helping your team do that as well. And I think there's so much leadership that needs to happen for someone to have a really good story at the end. Because what a buyer wants to know at the end is, do you have people that are running this business without you? If you want to sell your company for a lot of money, if you're not necessary in the day-to-day, you're the one just doing the strategy and the vision and the high connections, really leveraging your time and your energy and your effort. If you have those people in place, your business is going to sell for a lot more money. And so when I think about people, when we're building a really good business story, we need the people in our organizations to also have a really good story. So are we developing

our people? Do we have good leadership? Do we have good culture? All of these things are intangibles that really add to the end. So people profit process in the build category. And then of course, profit. What are we actually buying? Future cash flows. When you think about what is a buyer really buying, he's buying the opportunity to make more money on your company in the future than what they pay today. It's as simple as that. So how can we work on the profit side? What are the things that we can do on a day-to-day basis to help our profit be a bigger number? And then finally process. I think that's so important when we're building value is can someone step in? Is this a turnkey business?

Can someone else step in and run the business? You know, as far too often we hear business owners say, oh, well, you know, it's, it's voodoo. It's a special thing that I do. No one else can do what I do. And while we all have unique gifts and abilities, we really want a business to be running with proper like processes and procedures. If it's running like a well-oiled machine, people are going to pay more money for that. Absolutely. I love that people process and profit.

And I was just thinking about the mindset of an entrepreneur to be able to sell their, you. But I hearing what you're saying is that for you to be able to sell it, you can't be the one that is running it all. And so what have you found, Ellen, in terms of like the roadblocks for that? And I think it can be really hard for entrepreneurs to let go once they've built something. So what have you seen with your clients in terms of, you know, what gets in their way and how they work through that? Yeah, I would say the number one thing is there's a huge roadblock, like you were saying about this is who I am.

And I think part of the thing that we work with entrepreneurs is your business is not who you are. It's what you do. And so the first thing is, do you have, where is your identity? If your identity is in work, it's going to be really hard to let this thing go. But one thing that I've seen help a lot is entrepreneurs have ideas for everything. And usually this isn't their only idea. So we really ask them two questions.

The first one is, do you have something else that you would like to do after this? The last thing we want an entrepreneur to do is sell their business and have no plan for what they're going to do afterward. Because let's be honest, we become really depressed as entrepreneurs when we have nothing to do. So the first thing is, you know, do you have another vision? Do you have another goal? Do you have something else that you want to create outside of this company? And then the second question that really helps entrepreneurs is, you know, have you taken this company to the level that you can take this company? You know, is the next level something that maybe you yourself can't get, but you would love your people, you would love your company to reach the next level. And sometimes it's just coming to this

realization, like, I've done everything I can do for this company. I've reached my ceiling of complexity and I would love to be able to do something else. And so when you feel like you've really done everything you wanted to do in the business, you've reached the level that you want to reach. And that next level, either you don't have the time or the energy or the attention or the skills, and you've decided you don't want to up-level your skills, you're ready for something else. So if you can come to a buyer's table saying, I've done, I have this amazing business story. I've done all these things. My business is amazing. It's running like a well-oiled machine. My people can totally take this business over

and I'm ready for the next thing. Buyers love that. And I think as entrepreneurs too, we have to realize that you pick the buyer. As much as the buyer picks you, you pick the buyer. And so the best transitions we've seen have been buyers, or sorry, sellers who see a buyer and say, hey, that buyer, like, that's an amazing company. They're going to take my business to the next level. And you don't have to give away everything, right? We have entrepreneurs that still a second bite of the apple. They have a stock in the new company. And so there's just a lot of different ways that you can sell your company. And so I think keeping in mind that there are options, there's flexibility, and at the end of the day, you get to pick the buyer, which I love.

Yeah, I love that, especially when it's your baby and what you've developed. It can be really hard to take a step back. And so, Ellen, what you do is help people build, prove, and then sell their business story. Let's kind of dive into each of those. And I'm curious about for those people who maybe have their own business, but, man, they can't even imagine selling it. That's actually probably where I'm at right now where, you know, I would like to sell my company at some point, maybe like 10 years from now. But, man, I have so much work to do. So when I'm hearing you, I'm like, man, there's, that feels really overwhelming. I'm like so much. So, and then

maybe I'm focusing on the outcome, which obviously creates some anxiety for me, but how do you help people like build value? And what would people, what would you tell people who are listening, who maybe want to sell their, their business someday? And how do you keep growing, you know, keep growing that enterprise value? Yeah, I would say a lot of people will say, oh, I'm not ready for 10 years. But I think when you come back to maybe a runner, right? When's the best time to work on your running technique?

Well, tomorrow, right? The better that you run. Every day. Every day, right? So the better you run, the better you train, whether the marathon is 10 years from now or a year from now, you still want to get better. And so I always tell people, you know, don't wait until you're ready to sell your business to have something that you love. I think about it in terms

of real estate. So a lot of people they'll decide, Hey, I want to sell my house. So they bring someone in and they say, you know, what can I do to change my house so that a buyer will love this. You know, it might be changing the kitchen or the bathrooms or painting. And so often people will be like, oh man, I love this house now. I really wish I would have done these renovations before I sold the business or sold the house. So I think of it in terms of that. There's actually a TV show. I don't know if you've watched it, but it's called Love It or List It. I haven't seen it. No, but tell us about it. So the concept is a person will say, Hey, I want to sell my house and they'll, the TV show will come with a real estate person. So they'll say, okay, great. You want to sell your house? I'm going to go find other houses

that you would like to buy. And then they bring an interior designer architect in and she upfits the home. And at the end of the show, the person gets to decide, are they going to buy a new house? Are they going to live in their house because they love it so much now that it's completely renovated? And I think that's really what we do, which is come in, totally renovate your house. And then at the end of it, you say, do I love this so much that I want to keep it? Or am I ready to sell it? Cause I'm ready to go on to the next thing in my mind both of both of those are better than where you are and so we always tell business owners do you want a really good business story now or do you just want to sell a really good business story and what I love that we do is we help people build really good business stories

now so they can enjoy it I would much rather you live a really good business story now and then decide to sell it for a lot more money than wait until the very end to do all the stuff that I'm talking about. Because when is it a good time to invest in your people? When is it a good time to up your profit? When is it a good time to update your process and procedures so your business runs really well? In my mind, tomorrow, right? So I wouldn't wait for those things. I would learn as much as I possibly can in those areas to really help my business be the business that I want now and a business I want to sell. Excellent. That's really inspiring as I'm listening to you. It's like, okay, start now and thinking about the end in mind. When you're talking about your business story, and I heard you say something a few minutes ago about that it's, you know, the, where you've come from and why you've built it and tell us what other components would be in your business story as people are thinking about their business story. Yeah. So, I mean, we've talked a lot about build. One thing that a lot of people forget is the prove side. So remember when we're sitting across from the buyer, they're going to ask us about this

business story and we're going to tell this amazing story. We're going to talk about how we've growing the company and our people are in place and these amazing processes. And then of course, what is the buyer going to ask? Well, can you prove it? And so often we have seen, if you are not ready for that question, you can lose a lot of money. We had a client who we've actually, we don't do this anymore, but we had a client who decided he didn't want to do this anymore but we had a client who decided he didn't want to do the build prove sell story process he just wanted to go straight into selling so we get into this we're talking to buyers we have a letter of intent which is basically saying this is how much money we want to pay you and they had never done it's called a quality of earnings but it's basically having an accounting firm make sure that all your numbers are correct. Well, it turns out that a lot of the numbers they had put up were

not correct and their profit was actually a lot less than they had said it was. And so of course, the buyer pulls out because instead of having, you know, for example, a $2 million profit, if you have a $1 million profit, everything changes, right? It was a huge difference. It was almost, I think it was 40% of their profit was actually not true. And so when we talk about proving it's when a buyer comes to the table, do we have all of our ducks in a row? Are we ready to show that the story that we're telling is actually true? And there's the quality of earnings is one of the things that we do to help buyers. I'm sorry, to help sellers be able to know these answers, have this all ready so that when a buyer comes, we're like, here, I'm sorry, to help sellers be able to know these answers, have this

all ready so that when a buyer comes, we're like, here, here's all of it. Here's our story. Here's our awesome story. And we can also prove it by the documents and everything in place. Yeah, that's excellent. And I could imagine that that deal didn't go through because it's also like, well, if you can't be very honest with us and maybe it's like a little ethical issue, right? If you're not being open and honest, you know, like why should we trust you? And what else are we going to see once we buy your company? Exactly. We always say capital is a coward, meaning that when someone is putting capital into a project, the last thing they want is risk, right? So everything in the deal that we're trying to do is prove the story because we're trying to lower the risk. The lower the perceived risk, the higher the money that the

buyer is going to pay you because the safer deals are worth more than really risky deals. So yeah, so much of what we do is making sure that when we get to that point, we're not just telling a really good story. We're also able to prove that. And like you were saying, can we be honest? And really, it wasn't even honesty and ethical. It was just that they didn't know, right? And so then, of course, the buyer is thinking, what else do they not know? One of the things I really appreciate about when you talk about selling your story, you ask these questions like, what is your business story? What's your financial story? If your employees and your customers wrote your storyline, what would the story be about? And I think that last part is really fascinating. Like if your employees and customers wrote your storyline,

what would the story be about? And that might be very different than what you might tell. How do all of those components, like how you tell your business story and then how other people tell your story, how does that connect in the process of like building, proving, and then selling? Yeah. So I think we go through each of those components, your customers, your employees, and we try to think about what is the story that we're telling now? What are our clients? Because when we get to the end, right, when we're selling the story, what are we selling? We're selling that we have awesome clients. We have amazing lifetime value. You know, we have employees that love working here. We have low, when you think about turnover rates, right? It's how long do our clients stay? How long do

our employees stay? And the better that story, the more valuable your business is. And so I like to think of it, again, keeping that in mind, when I'm telling the story about my customers, when I'm telling the story about my employees, and also one thing, just pause on the employees. Buyers are going to interview your management team because if your management team, you've claimed that they're the ones running the business, a lot of times the buyer will want to interview the employees. And so when I talk about what, what story your employee is telling, they're going to tell that story at the end. So again, back to this leadership component of people profit process,

having really good leadership, having a culture, all those things matter. So I really challenge if you are a business owner to sit down and take two hours and write out what are the numbers tell about my customers? What are the numbers telling about my employees? And am I telling a really good story? Because especially in the leadership category, we see this all the time. We ask business owners, would you hire your management team again? And they're like, usually they'd hire half of them back and they would fire half and they wouldn't hire the other half. And so again, when we're keeping the end in mind, if you have people on your management team

that you wouldn't trust to run the day-to-day operations of your business, you have the wrong people in place. Like the time to change these stories is right now. So I really challenge you, go through your company and ask what are the stories I'm telling about my clients? What are the stories that I'm telling about my employees and just myself and my vision for what the future is going to be? And then I would say, what's the worst story you're telling and fix that. Look at that and say, okay, where am I really? Because usually we have one area that we're

totally succeeding in, right? And we have a couple of one or two areas that we're totally succeeding in, right? And we have one or two areas that we're absolutely failing. And so really being honest with yourself and saying, what is the one thing that I need to change? Is it people? Is it profit? Is it process? And then really focusing on that and changing that and one by one changing those stories so that at the end, you're really proud of the company you're built.

You're really proud of your employees. You're really proud of your customer process, right? You're really proud of your procedures in your company because at the end of the day, the prouder you are, the better story you're going to sell. Love it. And so what have you seen in terms of when you're working with people and you say, what's the story you're telling and then fix it? What are some of the examples that you can give us? Obviously without breaking confidentiality, but what examples do people have to change? Yeah, I would say the leadership team is a big one. So we actually just came back

from a client meeting and the leadership team had a lot of toxicity in it. They didn't trust each other and they weren't having the conversations, the hard conversations that needed to be happening. And it was just so interesting because we got hired to build company value, right? That's why people hire us. How do I build value in my company? And when we came in and did two-day strategy session, we spent most of the time talking about if your leadership team is not on the same page as you, right? As each other and with you, you cannot win the game if your team is fighting against each other. I think about sports. I played a lot of sports, volleyball, soccer, softball.

I was team captain, I think in all of them. So I know what it's like when you have internal friction is what we call it. So when you have internal friction inside your team, you're not gonna go out and play a really good game against the competition. The idea is the less internal friction you friction inside your team, you're not going to go out and play a really good game against the competition. The idea is the less internal friction you have on your team, the more powerful your team is against the competition, against what I would call external friction, right?

So it's, are we all facing the same direction? Are we all fighting together? Are we thinking together and planning together? And so first I would ask, really looking at your leadership team, are they on the same page? Do they know what the goal is? So often, you know, I think as entrepreneurs, we think, yeah, everybody knows what the goal is. Everybody knows where we're going. And so often we come in and we ask the leadership team, where are we going? What's the goal? And they're like, oh, I have no idea. We're just every day, we just do our jobs.

And it's like, no, where are we headed? What's the goal? Is it the state championships? If it's the state championship every day, we should be talking about the state championship. Right. Because if nobody, if there's, if it's not defined, you know, where, where are you going and how do you know how to get there if it's not defined? Yeah, exactly. I think even your marathon training, I think, right. What's the time I want to run my marathon in? And then once we have that goal and those parameters, then we break down. What do I need to do to get there? And really breaking that down as a leadership team. But if everyone's fighting against each other, it doesn't matter what your vision is. It doesn't matter what the goal is. It doesn't matter if you have parameters. Absolutely. Hi, this is Cyndra Campoff, and thanks for

listening to the High Performance Mindset. Did you know that the ideas we share in the show are things we actually specialize in implementing? If you want to become mentally stronger, lead your team more effectively, and get to your goals quicker, visit freementalbreakthroughcall.com to sign up for your free mental breakthrough call with one of our certified coaches. Again, that's freementalbreakthroughcall.com to sign up for your free call. Talk to you soon. What does mindset have to do with these three components, right? Building value,

proving the model, selling your story. And I'm curious about that. Like, what do you think, how mindset and high performance mindset relates to these? And then I'll share kind of a few things I'm thinking about as I'm listening. Yeah. I mean, I think it, I think it matters paramount. I mean, we've even seen, I'll just tell a story of my own life. I do not believe now that if your health isn't, if you're not focusing on your health, you're not performing at the highest level. And I last fall, I had this crazy travel schedule. I was go, go, go, go. And I was thinking about your red, yellow, green. Oh, yeah. I can literally plot my health as green, yellow, and then absolutely red. I actually got

I got back from a I actually went to Mexico for my birthday after traveling all over the US. I was basically traveling straight for three months. I think I had like one or two day turnarounds in between. It was insane. And I went to Mexico, had a birthday party, whatever. And I ended up in Tampa and I get to Tampa and my body shut down. And I was supposed to be giving a presentation. I was, I was giving an hour long presentation. I was on a speaker panel and the night before I have 103, I think I even had 104 fever.long presentation I was on a speaker panel and the night before I have 103 I think I even had 104 fever I should have gone to the hospital but we're entrepreneurs so we're stubborn and don't I wake up in the morning and I'm actually at JJ Virgin's house what an

angel by the way and I'm like JJ I think I'm gonna die like and she goes all right we're gonna get you an IV I'm gonna take you to my doctor friend let's go. So I go to the IV place and the doctor looks at me and she's like, um, so are you going to rest after this talk? And I'm like, not really a three days I'm in Tampa. Like I don't have time to rest. And I'm literally, I'm getting an IV. I'm in my pajamas. I'm carrying a blanket because I'm basically shaking from this fever. And two hours later, I'm on stage in my high heels giving this presentation. And I'm supposed to be speaking for an hour and I'll never forget it because I can literally see the time at 12 minutes and 53 seconds. My brain goes, get off the stage. Like, get off the stage. You have a fever. You, you don't even know what you're talking about. I literally thought to myself, I don't know what I'm saying. Yeah. Like my brain was so dead. And I give this hour long presentation. I get off the stage and I'm like, oh my gosh, I just bombed

that. Like that was, that was the worst speech I've ever given. And now thankfully I knew my material really well. And people didn't even know I was sick, which still blows my mind. Right. And you're the hardest on yourself. I'm sure everyone in the audience is. That was amazing. Oh, yeah. I heard people come up.

They're like, oh, great speech. But I came away from that experience thinking, wow, I really did a disservice to the person who asked me to speak by not pausing. And for the next month, I basically didn't get out of bed for the next month. Like my body went into absolute and complete shutdown. I had horrible, like horrible inflammation. I spent the next two months just trying to get back. And I just say that because I think as entrepreneurs, we think it's go, go, go. It's do, do, do. It's finish, finish, finish. And if you don't have this green, yellow, red for your mental health, for your emotional

health, for your physical health, if you're not in top tier condition in those areas, you're not going to be a high performer. You're not going to build a company that you really want to build. And also, you're not going to be a good leader to the people who are looking at you and following you. I'm really impressed by the entrepreneurs I've seen who really take their health. But I was just, I was listening to Tommy Mello and he was talking about how he decided to get his physical fitness in shape. And he goes, all of a sudden, all my leaders are now into fitness. They were, you know, they're waiting for me to lead them and I'm out of shape

and I don't care. And I'm trying to build a billion dollar company. Right. And I'm not taking care of myself. That's not how this is going to work. And so I think that is such a huge thing for me of really taking care of yourself and really treating yourself like the racehorse, like the athlete. If we treated ourselves like athletes, I think we would be much better entrepreneurs. Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Ellen, for just sharing that vulnerable story. And I think we can all relate. You know, I think of in my world, my book is called Beyond Grit. And sometimes people think that grit is like grind, that we have to just, you know, grind, grind, grind, grind, grind. But grit really is about sustained excellence over time and staying passionate

and excited about what you're doing. And you have to feel yourself along the way. And of course, there are times where we have to grind maybe, right? I had a similar last week, I gave an, I spoke for six hours one day, and I was just, I was toast, right? And then I had to drive home for four hours. And by the time I got home, I just had, I just had to go to sleep, you know. But I had to go to sleep right away and just care for myself throughout that day because I had another talk the next morning. And you're right. It's like when you think about the people, it's like, well, we got to care for ourselves so we can deliver for the people that are there. Yeah. And we've all been there where we've pushed ourselves too hard.

Exactly. Appreciate you say that, yeah, of course. But I think what you said was so powerful that it's sustained excellence over time. And so many entrepreneurs, I know I'm totally, you know, this is a huge barrier for me is I'm a sprinter. I think about, I love to sprint and it's like, you know, really quick sprints and be done. But really, this is really a marathon and I've been having to train myself to think that way. This isn't short sprints, you know, and then crash and then short sprints and then crash. It's if I can continue this

marathon with a really good pace. Uh, I think about the British cyclists. You've probably heard the story, but they decided to change 1% of everything. Right. And so they came there like, we want to win the Tour de France, I think. And they said, we're just going to get 1% better at every single thing that we do. And it's like, 1% is not very much. So they did 1% better tires, 1% better sleep, 1%. And they just tried to fix 1% of each thing. And of course that ends up being a massive change. But so often as entrepreneurs, we think, OK, I'm going to overhaul my entire process and procedures. You know, I'm going to completely change my leadership culture. And we put so much energy and time and effort into this like huge, you know, moment. But it's

really that sustained over time. I even think about the culture, right? You can tell your culture, this is how we're going to change. We're going to do these big changes. And you have this huge strategy session and then nothing changes, right? Because you're not changing every single day. You haven't changed the habits. I've really been struck by that in really excellent companies, how things change a little bit. If you just change a little bit every single day, it can have a massive impact.

Yeah. Well, isn't that so true? And I think of when you were talking about the racehorse and caring for ourselves like a racehorse, I think about recovery and, you know, elite athletes know that they have to recover. They can't go hard all the time or their body starts shutting down. And it's the same for us. I've been trying on the weekends and even in the evenings, like spending more time on recovery, doing things that just like, you know, because I, you know, I know when I go, go, go, go, go and I'm working on the weekends or whatever, like that, that doesn't help my mental health. So how can I exercise, spend time with my family? Those are the things I do to make sure I recover. Yeah. And I just want to touch on that because that's actually a huge part of what we do too, is also the family story. So one thing we always say is we want the business to support the family and the family to support the business. And we don't want to sacrifice our family for our business. And too many people sacrifice their

family for their business. And so when we talk about recovery time, it's mental recovery time. You know, it may seem, you know, it may seem like showing up to your son's football game. Oh, you're there. Like, check, I'm there. But if he looks up in the stands and you're on your phone or you're on your iPad or you're talking to a client on the side, it's not the same thing. And so really prioritizing mental recovery and time where you're fully present with the people that you care about. We, our favorite thing that we do in our work is build a family because a lot of times entrepreneurs, the stress of the business easily, right. Translates into broken family situations when you have so much work stress and you don't know where, what's my roadmap? What am I doing? You know, I, I think a lot of what we do is just try to be a coach on here's how we rest. Here's how we recover.

Here's what we're trying to build. You know, here's the end goal. Here's the parameters, you know, you pick the end goal and then we build a roadmap on how we're going to get there. And so often the family relationships are a hundred times better. It's my favorite thing is, you know, marriages become stronger. Fathers and mothers become much better parents because when you have a business that works for you, you're not just working for the business. It's completely life-changing. Absolutely. And so as we're thinking about

these three components, right, we were talking about building value, proving the model, selling your story. You know, let's say people are in the building phase still. What are some of the best practices to build the business from your perspective? Yeah, I would say, again, I would challenge you to write the end story. Sit down, take an hour or two and write your end story. What do you want the story to be? So have a vision, cast that vision. What do you want the story to be? And then going back, what we always do is, okay, what are the things in my company that are holding me back? So if there's any bottlenecks in the company, what usually when you look at a company,

there's something that's holding you back. It's either, you know, your billing takes, you know, if your billing is taking 90 days to get bills out, okay, well, that's something we should work on. If it's, you know, your customer service process isn't great. If you ask your customers, what do they love? I mean, I love doing customer interviews where you literally call your customers and you say, hey, thanks so much for doing business with us. What are, what do you love about my business? That's your marketing material. What are the things I need to work on? There's your internal work stuff. And what else can I offer you?

If there's anything else I could do to really support you, that might be another channel to make revenue. So I definitely think you should be doing regular customer interviews, especially with your best customers to make sure that you're really providing value for them. So yeah, if you're in the building stage, focus on your people. Look at, are there ways where we're just wasting money? And then how can we improve

the customer journey? How can we improve the marketing process? Because anything that makes those processes more efficient will make your business more money. So ask them what you love about it, what they can keep working on and what else could you offer them? Yeah. So a couple of questions I have for you, Ellen, a couple more. I wanted to know how early should people start thinking about selling and, you know, start thinking about the exit? What would you tell people to do? Yeah. I mean, I would say the first answer to the question is tomorrow, you know, when's the best time to plant a tree? Well, you know, tomorrow or what's the best time to start with a marathon

training tomorrow, today, but I mean, I think in the same way of training for a marathon, the reason we built this process, build, prove, sell is because we really believe if you have three years, you can do an amazing amount. And the reason I say three years is because buyers, when they get to the final, you know, when they get to the table, they will ask for the last three years of your financials. And if they can see a growth curve for the last three years, that gives them a really good probability that the next year is going to be really good. So we tell people, you should really start thinking and working on your exit three years before you want to sell. Now, we have seen this over and over again where people say, oh yeah, in three years, I'd love to sell. We've worked through this build,

we worked through proof, and they actually end up selling earlier than they thought. And there are times when we go through it and they're like, I love my company. Now it runs so well. My employees love me. You know, all these things have changed and I'd love to keep it. So if you're in that building stage, even if you just went through a year of build, it would change your life. If you want to sell, then I would say three years before is the right time to think about it. We also take into account, we haven't even talked about this. We haven't taken into account the actual sales cycle. You know, every 10 years there's a sales cycle. So sometimes we change our timeline based on when is there a lot of money in the market to buy companies and when is there not, because that's going to change how much your company sells for as well. There's an internal component of how well your company is

doing. And there's the external component of what's the sales cycle in the M&A world. So. Oh, and I just wanted to be clear. Sorry. Yeah. Keep going. We do not. We're not brokers. We don't sell companies as M&A advisors. We walk through the process with you and we help you find those people. We help you find your deal lawyers, all of those things. So I just want people to know that we're all about the pre and walking you through the process, but we're not the ones actually selling the companies. Well, I couldn't imagine how much you can see people grow in that building phase, right? And I love how you're talking about that some people make the changes and they say, well, actually, it's something that I really want to keep.

Or if it's so gratifying to see that, hey, just by taking one year, you can really build it to something that you can sell. What do you think are the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make as they're thinking about building, proving, and then selling their story and just transitioning their business? Yeah, I would say really looking at it through their eyes versus the eyes of a buyer. So it's so easy to look at our company through our eyes, but when you look at your company through an eyes of a buyer,

so if you were to buy your company tomorrow, ask yourself that question. If I bought my company tomorrow, what would I change? So not I'm coming to work tomorrow and I'm doing the next thing, but if I bought this company tomorrow, who would I fire? Who would I keep? What would I change? That's going to give you a huge answer to what are the things that I need to do. And really just getting a new perspective. One thing I think is so powerful about someone like us coming into your company is it's just really nice to have a third-party perspective. It's really nice to have someone come in and say,

no, we can do that. We can change that. We can make a difference in this area. Last year we sold a company. It was a blue collar company. They were in there. We started working with them five years ago. There were 65, I think when we started working with them and they were working like 60 hour 70 hour weeks you know and they had a quoting system where it was just the entrepreneur and he said you can't build a process quoting like it's all in my head it's experience i've learned it and we just said you know what let us try we're gonna try because of course we know that we could do it and so we come in and totally automate that whole thing. He, his personal assistant now does all the quoting and we went from a company where $2.9 million and we were able to sell it for 14. And part of that

is because when we focused on people profit process, he ended up working 20 hours a week versus 70 and his company was a lot more valuable because now he has a whole system and a personal assistant just checks a couple boxes and can do, you know, 10 times the amount of coding that the company, then the company can produce. So again, like what is the bottleneck? It was the quoting process. It was taking him forever. And the whole company was waiting on him to get these quotes and finish the sales process. Last year too, we helped a company go from 18 million to over a hundred. And part of

that is just having someone from the outside say, Hey, this is what buyers are looking for. Hey, this, these are the things that you can change. Every single person. I truly believe this should have a coach. If we think of ourself like a high performance athlete, you had a coach. You had really good teammates and you had coaches. And I think one of the big mistakes that we see is business owners and entrepreneurs will do it all on their own. I think you get to where you want to go quicker when you hire a coach. Absolutely. And it's a lot of money. We always say we're investing in the company. You should be setting aside money every single year for investing in the company and investing in you. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs think, well, investing in me is

not investing in the company. Absolutely it is. If you're the entrepreneur and you're the founder, you should be setting a percentage of your income every year to reinvest into you, which I would say is coaching. Well, Ellen, thank you so much for giving so much value today. And I think you gave people and entrepreneurs a lot to think about, like to take a step back and think about how are they taking care for themselves like a racehorse? How are they recovering? But also, what do they need to change right now in their business? And I love kind of thinking about the end in mind. How can people reach out to you, follow along with your work,

and just, you know, if they're, if they want to inquire about what you do, how can people do that? Sure. So our website, the Braveheart Business, there is a little tab there, work with us. If you want to fill, there's a little survey out that you can fill and we would love to meet. I love meeting entrepreneurs and talking to them. And then my personal Instagram, if you want to shoot me a DM, Ellen Long style, I'd love to hang out and chat with you there. That's awesome. And I'll put that link in the show notes for people who are interested. You can just scroll down and find that link there. Well, Ellen, thank you so much for just your vulnerability and sharing, you know, the example that you did of when you push yourself too hard. I think we can all relate to that.

I love what you talked today about your business story and really thinking about that and the three components we talked about, building value, proving the model, selling your story, and the three drivers of business value, people, process, and profit. And just this idea of like how your mindset really is what helps you grow your business. And as you were talking about selling your story and building your value, right, I was thinking about how as business owners, we have to continue to change and evolve and be open to feedback and be open to looking at ourselves and looking at our systems. And I think that starts with, you know, being open to change and growth and getting outside your comfort zone. So thank you so much for being on today.

It was a pleasure to have you and keep up the awesome work. Oh, thank you. I had a great time. So hopefully a lot of people got value out of it and I wish them all the best. Way to go for finishing another episode of the High Performance Mindset. of people got value out of it and I wish them all the best. community for high performers where you get access to videos about mindset each week. So again, you can head over to Dr. Sindhra. That's D-R-C-I-N-D-R-A.com. See you next week.