The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Secrets To 10Xing Your Business: And Cashing Out Tax-Free by Marc Adams

Episode Date: October 12, 2024

Secrets To 10Xing Your Business: And Cashing Out Tax-Free by Marc Adams Amazon.com Marcadams.io Experience a Business Revolution That Propels You to New Heights Imagine reshaping the destiny of your business with strategies proven to not only multiply its worth but also to ensure a lucrative exit when the time is ripe. "Secrets to 10Xing Your Business and Cashing Out Tax-Free" is your guide through this transformative journey. This book doesn't just promise exponential growth; it hands you the roadmap to a destination that many entrepreneurs only dream of but never reach. Dive into the critical first steps with the Introduction: Laying the Groundwork for a 10X Exit. Here, you'll align your vision with precise exit goals and begin the process of scaling your empire. But what comes next is a deep dive into the nitty-gritty of explosive growth. In Chapter 2: The Power of Digital Marketing, discover the secrets of turning online marketing tools like Facebook and Google ads into your profit-making machines. The social media labyrinth no longer needs to be confounding. Instead, let Chapter 3: Social Media Mastery unveil the potent strategies that can build your brand into a viral sensation. From YouTube to TikTok, you are guided through each platform with a clear plan to harness their unique strengths. And as for expansion, wrap your hands around the concept of rapid growth through strategic acquisitions in Chapter 4. Your journey to a colossal business doesn't only rely on external growth but also internal efficiency. Learn how in Chapter 6, as it disrupts conventional thought and opens your eyes to harmonizing operations—preparing your enterprise to run like a well-oiled machine, ready for the ultimate tax-free cash-out. The closing chapters, particularly Chapter 11: Tax-Free Selling: Preparing for the Exit, are the pièce de résistance. This is where you transition from business operator to a financially secure investor. Step into your new future with a strategy, plan, and peace of mind. "Secrets to 10Xing Your Business and Cashing Out Tax-Free" isn't just a book—it's a catalyst for the reality you've been striving for. Take the helm and accelerate your business to 10X triumph. This is more than growth; this is a complete transformation.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show. The preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from the chrisvossshow.com. Ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, that makes it official welcome we certainly appreciate you guys being here as always the chris boss show the family loves you but doesn't judge you so that

makes us the wonderful part of the family but we also don't loan money so please stop asking damn it you go to goodreads.com fortes chris boss linkedin.com fortes chris boss chris boss one on the tick tockety and all those other crazy places on the internet As always for 16 years, 2000 episodes We bring you the most smartest, brilliant people None of them are me That's why we have guests on the show, darn it See what we're up to there? That's the secret

The smart guest with the dumb most Anyway guys, he is the I just maligned myself on my own show What is going on? He is the author of the newest book That came out recently, January 8th, 2024 just malign myself on my own show. What is going on? He is the author of the newest book that came out recently, January 8th, 2024. It's called Secrets to 10Xing Your Business and Cashing Out Tax-Free. Mark Adams joins us on the show today. We'll be talking about his book and his insights.

He spent nearly four decades in corporate as an entrepreneur, transforming and adding, and as an entrepreneur, transforming and adding value to businesses along the way, taking them from where they were and driving 10x plus the value with a view to some exit at some point. Notably, 0 to 30 million in sales in less than 18 months in Asia from London with no budget, over 140 and over a billion evaluation over a three-year period, and most recently an exit for 30 million and evaluation of five. He was well rewarded, got equity in the businesses, and at his 10-year point decided to do something else that he wanted to do. And some of the darker moments that came from COVID and stage four cancer given six months to live.

So he's now he's got his book out and willing to talk to us about all of his secrets, if you will. Mark, welcome to the show. How are you? Hey, Chris. Thank you very much for having me. And with a bidding like that, I'd better damn live up to it, don't you think? Oh, yeah.

We put the pressure on all of our guests. That's what we do. Give us your dot coms. Where can people find you on the interwebs? Yeah. Easiest thing for people would be either mark Adams dot IO. So mark with a C Adams dot IO. And then there's,

there's a free link to the book there for anybody that would like it. And, and my, and my details are there. If anybody wants to reach out to me or acquisitions for use, that's acquisitions figure for why are.com and then there's there's linkedin and there's twitter and there's facebook but you'll get all of those links from those two places all right so give us a 30 000 overview what's in your new book yeah no thanks for that

so it's kind of it's one of those things chris where it was it wasn't a book i wanted to write and sort of bringing together some of the things that you very kindly introed with. I guess I would say my career is in, let's say, two halves for the purposes of this conversation, where I went through sales and marketing, working for other people, stepped onto the dark side of entrepreneurship and then started working through the ranks that way and wound up in private equity and the thing about private equity is in the small and medium-sized enterprise space it's a sad reality that in most cases nine out of ten companies that come to market are still on the market in the zero to 50 million revenue range sector 15 months after they've been put on the market and if you go back to so what private equity does or private investors do is they're waiting until the price comes down and often you find that the price that an owner or shareholders would want for the business

absolutely reflects the blood sweat years and tears that they put into it yeah but sometimes the market's a bit mean, and it will look at the financial performance of the business, and there's a big gap between what they need and what the market says it's worth. And there's a couple of reasons why that might happen. A lot of small businesses would be put on the market by a broker, and they really work in many cases. Not all.

I don't want to give brokers a bad name but it's a sad reality that some of them will value a business a bit like a realtor will value a property you put a property on the market and it's still there a year later you're probably going to reduce it in price or add value to it in some way to get the price you want or if you put it on the market and you've sold it a day later, then it went on probably too cheaply. So normally, you know, eight to 12 weeks into contracts to complete a little bit later is about is about the mark that most people would be aiming for. And a business is very similar. So in private equity, you sit and wait for the price to come down. And that's what I was doing back in 2020 21 um we had 91 companies in a pipeline that we'd love to have done something

with that were profitable businesses but the price points on those companies was just too high and so around that time just as part of that to one side at the moment and the reason for change was if you remember back to 2020 we're in the grip of that pandemic. Do you remember that? Oh, I certainly remember it. I just got COVID three weeks ago. Yeah, I heard. And congratulations for him. I hope it wasn't too difficult getting through it. It was pretty difficult. It was the worst ever. And I was in the hospital, I think. It was the most miserable flu ever. Oh, my God. I'm glad to see you're back on the show.

That's for sure. But if you go back to 2020, the vaccines weren't in, and we were in the original strain, and we were all in lockdown all around the world. I don't know if you remember, but we were certainly looking at league tables every bloody day. Oh, excuse my language on the show. Oh, you're fine.

And it was death and how many people died in America, how many people died in the UK, etc, etc, and how many new infections. So unfortunately for me around that end of 2020, I'd been diagnosed with stage 4. And I'd been given an outlook of 6 months to live.

So you kind of get into a very focused view when you're in that scenario and so going into 2021 I was lucky enough to get a place in a private hospital in the UK in central London one of the only places that they could treat me to have the cancer removed but while I was there unfortunately I picked up the original strain of COVID so So you and I, you know, I know what you've just been going through and I don't want to go back to where I was. So you come out of that. And so my time horizon, Chris, went from sort of fairly strategic corporate boy and private equity investor to six months is what I've got to get my affairs in order. And then I've got a little boy whose name is Thomas,

who at the time was age 10. He's a teenager now. He'll never admit to having these conversations with me because he speaks a language that I don't understand anymore. But at the time, he'd be knocking on the door at 7 in the morning and then at 10 and then at lunchtime, then in the afternoon, then in the evening, just to check from the doorway because we were all in isolation, right, how dad was doing, and I'm trying to get

through into him, three decades of entrepreneurship in about, in that COVID period, do you remember, we were, we were all going through it for the first time, and it was like a 12, 14 day cycle before you realized if you were going to go left or right. And vaccines weren't in at this time. So it was a big unknown for everybody. And so as I'm going through this journey, my time horizon goes to six hours because I'm looking at YouTube every morning to what do I do on day three? What do I do on day four? And on the first half, it was getting worse before I turned the corner and started to improve. So I'm telling Tommy, nine out of 10 companies that go to market don't sell.

And he said, how does that work? A lot of the time, there's this reason or this reason or this reason. And if you can get those things to come together, then the business will sell. But the other nine don't. And remember, he's looking at the news reports of all these people that are dying all around the world as we all were and and he just as quick as a flash said to me you're working in the wrong area dad and i said what do you mean he said you should be helping the nine companies that don't sell and i went okay why do you think why do you think that he said because what happens if their parents get covid or get ill and die how are they going to take care of their

families? They weren't his exact words, but they were pretty close, you know, given that this language of a 10 year old. And it started to make me think as to what would you do? And the answer took me some time to figure out because I'm not that bright. But it was the answer was hiding in plain sight. And that's what you do as a private equity investor is you wait for a company to get cheap enough so that you can buy it. You grow it over a period of time to make it more valuable, say over five years, and you hope that you're going to sell at a profit. Well, if you follow the principle of my 10-year-old son, why don't you partner with these companies so that you can together utilize the skill of private

equity and the skill of the owner of the business to do the thing that they've been doing which they've been doing brilliantly for 20 or 30 years in many cases to grow that business's value over time in ways that they might not see which would include buying other companies to bolt on which would include thinking about how they're going to exit that business for no tax or a very small amount of tax. Now, you can't always exit somebody for business tax free. But a lot of the time that you a lot of the time you can in the US or in the UK, but you can't always do it. But the idea is, if you can 10x the amount that goes into the owner's

bank account, you're putting them in a position where they can get much closer to that price point that they wanted for the company but couldn't get, which is why it was on the market for a year. And so everybody's happy. But as an investor, you're partnering with me, which means you don't own all of the business, but you don't need to own all of the business. So my next thought was, how would I do this? And that's when I started writing the book, because in working with other companies for such a long period of time, there's kind of a formula to the things that you might look at, where there could be opportunities to improve. Everybody's different. But I thought, if I don't start trying to do something, I'll never get good at doing that piece. I'll never get good at trying to think about what my son suggested that I should do and so that was the beginning of how I started to think about putting it down in a book

because I'm never going to meet all the people in the world that own businesses that are going to be in this situation it's not a US problem it not a UK problem. It's a problem for many small, medium-sized enterprises all over the world. And the principles are the same in terms of improving the value and getting a price point that you'd be comfortable with if you then sold it and minimizing your taxes on exit ethically and legally.

And that's how the book came to be an idea. And so I thought if I can write the book which I did as you can see and then publish it that could be you know that would get into the hands of a lot of business owners and they could self-help now I've never written a book before and so one of the things I've learned along the way is that probably 70% of people that get a book put it on the shelf and don't read it. So I've turned it. So I did the book and I did the audible version. And so I've then broken it down into small chapter size chunks that people can get a free version of. I was on a podcast recently and I said to people, look, I'm going to do something I've never done before. And if anybody's listening to the podcast, they can get a book. I'll send them a copy of the book for free.

The first 12 people that asked for the book live in Sydney so that cost me a fortune I thought there's got to be an easier way to do this of course when you publish a book you need a summarized you need the book in pdf format to go to the publishers so I made that available in chapter pieces so that people could follow it along as a audible chapter or they could read a chapter or they can just get a five minute summary or two minute summary of that chapter so there's no excuse if you want to sort of see how you might pick up some easy things to do that might help you improve the profit in the business and therefore the value of the business and then position you to take advantage of an exit with you know paying much less tax than you would have done otherwise. And you'd be surprised at how many people just don't know Chris.

Isn't that insane? Isn't that insane? It's just a sad indictment. It is. It's completely insane. I don't get it, but I do get it. We all kind of start a business from the love of an idea, let's say, and we get really, really good at the thing.

But there are so many things that go around it that you don't even think about or don't get exposed to that when you come to think about potentially selling a business, you can find yourself in a position where you're just not going to get the money that you need. when somebody sits down with their financial advisor or their CPA or their wealth manager and they're discussing the potential of retiring and selling the business they're going to say how much do you need to retire on let's imagine that they're going to say you need five million in order to get five million you're going to have to gross it's not 10 million but it's just easy math at the moment you're going to have to gross 9 to 10 million so that after you've paid your taxes and fees and everything else, which in California would be up to 40%, in other places in North America,

it wouldn't necessarily be quite as high as that. You're at least going to get 28.6, call that 30% for the moment, in terms of what's going to come off the top line that leaves you with the money that you're going to retire on. And that's not the most efficient way to do it if you want that cash to last you for a significant period of time. So yeah, it's a big, big deal. And we're in the age of baby boomers retiring. And they say 10,000 a day, I can't back that figure up and tell you what exactly is because I don't have the stats, but it's a big number. And so it's, you know, it's a big issue that I think is important to solve. And I'm trying

to do my bit to get that information out to people so they can self-help along the way and pick up three or four things from the book that would make a difference and help them get to that end game faster with more money in their bank account. More money in the bank account. That's what it's all about. And, uh, you know, one of the things we've had some other authors on the show that have talked about some of the same things you're talking about, where you basically looked at 10X your business, but you also prepare from the start of that business to lay the foundation for exit, right? A 10X exit. Talk to us about that because i i was shocked by this i i always built my companies to be part of a future empire and and collected them and you know was if you wanted

to buy them from me i was not interested and i never thought of building companies from this point of get it prepared to sell for example it's a little hard to sell the Chris Voss Show podcast because without me, it's the Chris Voss Show. Naming properly so that you can sell it, business modeling properly, whether it's an S Corp, C Corp, et cetera, et cetera, designing all that. Tell us a little bit about why entrepreneurs that might've been in the dark like me for a long time need to prepare their businesses in like me for a long time need to prepare their businesses in that way for a sale so i'm i'm controversial compared to some of the other people that you've had on the show because i do that stuff late late in the game oh dear okay

yeah and here's what it's not just about what kind of structure you've got you make a very fair point on you know when you are the face of the business, it's difficult, difficult to sell. Now, you're in a, I would say a more privileged position than the than the average small, medium sized entrepreneur, somebody that's an electrician or a carpenter, or, you know, is the face of their business or something like that. The way I get around that with business owners is to is to put it lower down the list of things that need to be done. Here's why. First of all, if I had a choice, I would be looking for ways in which we can enter the bottom line without them spending very much money. So one example, people always say to me,

give me an example of that. The first thing I'll say was, when was the last time you increased prices? Now, everybody went through a price increase when the pandemic came around and inflation came around after that but still there are lots of businesses that are frightened to increase the prices incrementally and then they're always leaving money on the table and going in the wrong direction

because their cost base is certainly going up and i've got a list of a hundred or so different things that you can look at like that which you know you probably get three or four that are relevant to your business but do move the dial for that particular business now the next thing i then start to look at is okay what level of ebitda do we have in the business and what's the assets that you've got in on the balance sheet does that allow us to potentially buy a business and bolt it on because when you do that if you bought one of a similar shape and size you're going to double the profit in your business in an afternoon but you could significantly

improve the value of it here's why and i'm going to answer your question you've asked a great question but i'm setting these two pieces in place as to why i do it this way if i can so if you're doing roughly half a million in EBITDA, in most industries, Chris, you're probably going to be valued at half a million in terms of your sale point. So you want to get over a million. And if you can get to 1.3, 1.4, 1.5 million, in most industries, you're going to get a five, maybe a six X multiple on the value of the business. Why is that so important? It's important because just by doubling your profit, you could make the difference between a valuation of half a million

and a valuation maybe as much as eight or nine million. That's huge. So how are you going to get to that? If you could incrementally increase your profit organically by increasing your prices and maybe five or six other things from the list of things that I would normally go look at, you go from, say, need to write a big check when they do that and they don't feel they've got the pockets to do that. But if you can bolt another business on the side and take that jump from half a million, three quarters of a million to maybe 1.2 or 1.3, then your multiples start going up. And that's the first two quick things that you can do. Now, when you start looking at the potential to buy a business, you're going to ask all the questions of that business owner that you see as concerns, that you see as risks, that you see as opportunities. And that's fresh in your mind when you've completed the acquisition. with somebody to go through that process it's at that point i'm going to say of course chris you know that if we're going to sell your business everyone's going to ask you exactly the same questions that you've just been asking and at that point i've got a willing mind to spend the

money on what is a cost center not a revenue generator in the business to start preparing it from the pain that they've just been through trying to find out information about a business that they bought or didn't buy and it's an easier pitch for me at that point to get people on side to do it with it doesn't mean that it has to be done then I just choose to do it then because it's a softer sell so that's when you start coming into if you are the face of the business how do we put Chris Voss in a position where he's not actually needed and so he could retire from the day-to-day operating of the business or could retire from the board still as the principal shareholder and that takes some time because you're going to need to keep bringing people over in your case it would be difficult but over a probably a protracted period of time

you might end up co-hosting and then fading out over a period of time so it becomes the mark adams show in in over a five-year period which allows you then to sort of if that were possible to exit or another another opportunity may be if there is a big group out there buying up people like joe rogan chris voss and other prominent podcasters that might form a different opportunity i'm making this up i don't know if there are people out there doing that where collectively yeah well right so joe rogan yeah yeah no i know joe got more but but if they if they were a group of you then the collective of the group would be worth a hell of a lot more

than the individual and so it might be a situation where you could all benefit less likely but it's but you've got to put yourself in a position where you've got some systems processes and procedures which really reduce the risk for a potential purchaser but also that you've got other people around they're running the business now though you're the face of the business i'm pretty sure that you're not running around doing everything operationally inside the business. There's just too much going on. But there's a lot of value. You're a great example, but you're a bad example, too, because when you bring it back to corporate America,

when you bring it back to the, you know, to the folks running more traditional businesses, that's possible for them to do. But they still got to go through the same steps. They still got to make themselves redundant in the business, which does require a level of revenue and profit to afford it. So the other reason I go through acquisition with them first is because quite often, if you're selecting the right company to buy, and you're successful in buying it, you've got a fresh leadership team that could come in and step into that and the combined entities providing you don't damage the culture and the good name that's been built up because your people are your most important asset every single time in my opinion so the reason i'm controversial is you hear a lot of people say in preparing for exit you've got to do this this and you have but actually for me there's a softer

approach to doing it because i'm coming from the point that the business isn't going to get the value that the owner wants in the marketplace for them to do the next thing they want to do so we've got to do some other things first and then fix that as we go is that that makes the way the way that i look at it but not everybody agrees with me and you don't have to do it that way you can do it in any way you want but just from my perspective it's easier to do it that way yeah it's important to stick with things that work i mean that's that's really a case what are some other things that are in the book that maybe we haven't fleshed out to tease people to pick it up yeah so there's a bunch of things that i see that that not all businesses do and this is less the case in North

America but it's still we're living in an age where people will build a website and they think that everyone's going to find them and they and they lose sense of the you've got to drive traffic to it you've got to drive people to it so they can hear your message and pick up on it and so that one thing makes a big difference when you're talking about so i look at business owners in in three categories chris so they are under 35 so those guys are normally growth growth growth not really thinking about an exit most of the time but over 35 up to 55 and the further along that curve you go the more you're beginning to think about the growth and a potential exit. And then the over 55s and up are thinking more about an exit, the older they get and less about growth. So in those scenarios, you've also got some

different demographics. So in the baby boomer era, when you've got business owners of the late 50s 60s and 70s they are less inclined to be involved in the free distribution platforms for their messaging for themselves and their companies like linkedin facebook instagram twitter and and tiktok and they might be consumers of it but they but they're reticent in many cases to get their message out on it. And it's really a big shift that I see makes a significant difference in how well a business is known

and how much business it can pull in. Because if you look at the big companies these days, all the big personalities, when you look at Tesla, you automatically think Elon Musk because he's over the media all day every day and people feel connected to him and they know him and it's the same with less so with mark zuckerberg but he's still very connected with his personal brand and it's the you know and i think increasingly in the world that we live in today it's a really important thing that the middle-aged and older generation

probably should really be getting a hold of a lot more than they do a fabulous example of someone that does that who's an older older gentleman is grant cardone the absolutely absolutely brilliant at doing it but too many of us in the sme space and i've been guilty of this myself don't do that so i would encourage people to pick up the social media and the website and the digital digital aspects of the book as things they might look at another big area that is not always possible which is why there's you know there's 11 chapters in the book and you don't need all 11 chapters you just need two or three things for many of the chapters to make a difference so one of those for me has been outsourcing So one of our clients outsourced 30 positions with us.

Now it is a bigger business. They were costing 100,000 a year. But the same skill set overseas was 25 grand a year. And there's some onboarding time and so on and so forth. But that put quarter of a million, 30 positions. That put 2.25 million back on the bottom line which was free growth because they employed four sales people with that which put 20 million on the top line at 60 percent gross profit i don't know what their net ebitda on this on those four people are don't have those level of figures

but it's it's free savings for free growth on the sales side to boost your business by just looking at different areas that you might be able to pull some money back in. Now, coming out of the pandemic and into the recession, a lot of people were tightening the purse strings because they had to. But there's still a lot of stuff that could potentially be done or it's time to revisit it. And another area that I'm seeing now people are starting to venture back into do you remember how all the prices went up for all of us all around the world yeah i still am experiencing that so what but in some areas some of the prices are starting to come down it's time that we went back on the offensive as business owners looking to our suppliers to start reducing prices for us because in too many cases they put

them up their cost base for all materials potentially is coming down a bit but it's not always not being passed through quick enough and if you don't ask for these savings you won't get them necessarily but if you and if you do it doesn't mean you're going to get them but there's three core areas that you could look at to make a significant impact on the bottom line so another one that we've touched on is acquisitions. A lot of people that are business owners are really, really good at doing the thing, but they've never thought about acquiring another business. So don't bring in a specialist that does that and work alongside them in partnership to go and get the first business bought,

bet that one in, and then bring in a specialist, the same one as they do a good job, and go and get the first business bought, bet that one in and then bring in a specialist, the same one that they do a good job and go and get another one bought so that you're boosting that profit. It's about boosting the amount of money in your bank account. And if you try and grow organically, Chris, and it's taking you seven years to get to, let's say half a million in profit,

the likelihood is it's going to take you four to five years to do that again organically the faster way to do that is to is to grow with an acquisition or two and they don't have to be acquisitions of the same size you could do two acquisitions of quarter of a million each providing they add value and so other things that that get overlooked but are really the juice is definitely worth a squeeze if you have a customer list and subscribers, go and find a complementary partner out there that does something similar to you to the same or not to the same, but to a slightly different client base that isn't competitive and do a contra deal with them where with permission, you are able to position your message and offer through them to their customers. Maybe not directly.

Not many people are going to give you their list. And you can do the same for them. And that could add 15%, 20% in sales that you didn't even know you had. Even better, if you can bring their product and your product together as a bundle and then push that out to market, there's some quick wins that don't cost a lot of money they don't cost a lot of money at all they just they cost a bit of time but once you've exhausted all those then you could start to look at the other avenues of generating sales if it's appropriate and what i mean by that is take a company in the meat and poultry space and they're doing organic poultry one of the things about

organic poultry is you need a certain what they call standing room which means the bird has got a a certain amount of space and they don't have any less and they can have more so there's a limit on the and the ground is looked after in a particular way which means that there's a limit on how how much how much product you can get because there's a limitation to how much land anyone's supplier's got and there's probably not an abundance of suppliers that can just pick up the demand for you because they'll be supplying other people as well. So it's one thing to double the order book.

Another good example will be in the roofing sector. It's easy to double the order book from a sales and marketing point of view but if you can't supply because you can't get the people because they need particular licenses or they're just not available or you can't get product and because of this example i give you with meat and poultry then you've got to find other ways to grow and so you might go from organic growth straight to acquisitive growth because you're buying the whole company with this customer base and revenue stream when you don't have enough people to make the order book that you've just pushed out into May next year with the

marketing that you just did. So you've got those things to consider. But normally in the round, there are some different things that you can do, which is why I say of 11 chapters, you probably need three or four things to move the dial to the next level regroup reconsider and then move it forward again right and go from there god am i boring you yet chris no you're giving me a ton of data and oh my god book now do you have a website where people can work with you and and get coaching from you on top of the book? Do you know what? I'm embarrassed to tell you.

Oh, my God. Do I really want to reveal? Chris, this is not something that... So the answer is yes, but I have to be full disclaimer. I'm not a teacher, a trainer, or a coach. I just do this stuff. Okay. And so it was my son that started me down the path of,

you need to be a better human, Dad, basically. You don't sit well in private equity doing what i did i sit very very well knowing that i can help a lot of other business owners that i'm never ever going to meet get a better return just with a bit of knowledge sharing and yes some of those companies absolutely we are consultants or i think of it more as mentors and we will work with businesses directly for sure so people reach out to you for that they just if they come up through markadams.io.io and click my linkedin my link tree they'll find all my details there so markadams.io or acquisitions4u.com but a lot of people asked

me i started to give people free training on this based around the book so they could go and help other people and i did it for free and then a lot of people said do you teach do you train do you coach and i went no because i've never done it before and then eventually i i gave in and said okay if enough people want it i will try so i don't come at this with a whole slew of marketing courses and death by powerpoint because i've not done any of that. What I've done for these people is I've gotten in there and done the same with them that I do with clients. And you sit down and you take a look at what it is that you're going to do to add value and you get on and do it.

Now, for these people, I've recorded it all. And so that's why I say to you, look, I'm not your traditional trainer. I've been trying to get a message out to help a lot of people I'll never meet. I can work with a limited number of clients and anybody that wants to talk about what their business is doing. I'm quite happy to try and help them for free until it gets to a point where I know they're going to need some help, at which point we can have a discussion. And helping them for free means WhatsApp chats and things like that. It doesn't mean me jumping on planes and doing that kind of stuff. There you go.

Does that make sense? How did you, yeah, it definitely does. How did you overcome the six-month death sentence of cancer? Yeah, so that's a really, I still don't believe it now, and I consider myself to be incredibly, that's a miracle as far as I'm concerned. So you get diagnosed with stage four,

you totally got six months. They reckon, chris that covid is what saved me and yeah they do and so the guys that treated me have been doing this for 35 years so they know their shit and they do think that i've had a better outcome than just about anybody they've ever had in that period of time and one reason for that definitely is i have a is I have a pretty positive mindset and and I think that really helps but what they say is this they can't prove it because they're not going to put the cancer back in me and give me the original strain of COVID and say let's see if we can do it again and neither would I really want them to do that but what they think is this they think so actually I'll tell you a funny story when I went back in April 21 having had the operation in January 21 I didn't give the cancer any thought between January and April because there was nothing I could do about it.

So my next benchmark was April. They did some tests on me before I went to see the consultants. And when I sat down with them, they went, do you want the good news or the bad news? And I said, let me take the the good news and they said we you're undetectable and and i said what does that mean they said we can't find any sign of the cancer in you whatsoever it's gone and i went what's the bad news and they said bad news is we got no idea why i said so you must have some kind of idea they said we yeah i was thinking that but i did want to know and eventually i said give me your best guess and they said the only thing that they could think of is around april 2021 chris you were beginning to see in medical journals around the world some examples of or some cases being reported of people that had late stage cancer and then all of a sudden they'd gotten covid and they didn't have cancer anymore.

And nobody can explain it other than by saying they think that COVID in some situations might push the immune system into overdrive. And the immune system is actually one of those things. If you're basically fairly healthy. And I was pretty healthy and fit when I got this, I had no symptoms. I had no chemo. I had no radiotherapy, nothing. It's just, we found out that I got this. I had no symptoms. I had no chemo. I had no radiotherapy, nothing.

It's just we found out that I had it. It had to come out. And then, so there wasn't time for chemo. But the reason I went back in April 21 was because they were then going to say, okay, how do we treat and what do we do for the localized residual cancers that remain anywhere else?

And the reason I think they do a pathology report when you're in theater to confirm what you've I think they do a pathology report when you're in theatre to confirm what you've got and they confirm stage four but they do a PET scan before the operation and it was a PET scan that lit up like a Christmas tree to say we think you've got it elsewhere and there were just too many of them for them to potentially be all false positives they could have been but highly unlikely and then the pathology report in theater theater confirmed stage four so they think that covid pushed my immune system into overdrive and the immune system doesn't say oh i'm going to deal with the cold or i'm going to deal with this it just blitzes whatever it can get hold of to make you well and in my case they think it was really

instrumental in and was the thing that got rid of the residual cancers once they've taken it out and it wouldn't have happened if I hadn't had COVID. Go figure. Now I can't say that's true. I'm not a medical professional. I am just giving you what they piece together for me is the explanation. And I've never been back to ask them since, but I'm cautious sometimes about talking about it because,

you know, most of us have got absolute horror stories of COVID and, you know, and it's just, and so have I. But I've been incredibly lucky, I'd almost say bordering on, you know, a miracle to survive without having to have radiotherapy, without having to have any of those nasty things like chemo or any other drugs. And to be in a position where I'm one of the few, at that time, there were about 20 cases that were reported at that moment in time that potentially could have been cured as a result of having COVID and the immune system going into overdrive

now I've got to stress again I can't go back and prove this and I'm not going to go back and have it put inside my body just to test it out but I'm just grateful to be here and that's really a driver behind with whatever time I got left I've got to do a less selfish job with the second half of my life than I did in the first half of my life. Because I knew a lot of this stuff before I wrote the book, but it was really Thomas that was the trigger to thinking about things in a slightly different way and trying to help more people. And I still run a business, so I'm doing it profitably. I'm not a saint. But if I can help some people along the way, then why shouldn't I be doing that?

Definitely. Does that make sense? Yeah, I love your attitude and your're giving back that's some really really important being grateful so i'm lucky to be here to be in a position to give back chris so i consider it a duty and i you know i'm not i'm really lucky man that's very inspiring to a lot of people who you know we we all you know we think we're immortal i think a lot of times i know i've had times in my life where i'm like maybe i'll just live forever you know, we think we're immortal, I think, a lot of times. I know I've had times in my life where I'm like, maybe I'll just live forever. You know, it's just delusional.

And so, yeah, the, you know, these are important aspects to think about. So as we go out, pitch people on how to pick up your book, any dot coms you want to take and have people go check you out at. Yeah. If people want to find me, they can find me at Mark Adams, M-A-R-C-A-D-A-M-S dot I-O. Or they can find me at markadams.io or they can find me at acquisitions4u.com. So acquisitions4u.com. Those are my, I could do LinkedIn and Twitter and Facebook, but those are the two easiest ways to reach me.

The book is called Secrets to 10Xing Your Business and Cashing Out Tax-Free. But if you go through to the markadams.io site, you can pick up a copy of the PDF version of the book for free. And it will come to you on weekly email so you don't have to read the whole bloody lot. So it's 114 pages. It's not a big book, but it's going to take a week or so to read. So you'll get a chapter every few days summarized with an audible file so that you can either listen to it in the car if you want to, just read a two-minute summary if you want to, or you can read the whole chapter. And then at the end, you'll get the whole book all bound up and that you can print and put on the shelf with all the other books that you might have. Thank you very much for coming to the show. We really appreciate it, Mark.

No, thank you for having me. It's a privilege to be here here and i'm so grateful to just share the message i just want one person to do something with it and if they do that that'll be a result and by the way we have a mutual friend in carl allen he asked me to send his regards okay all right so order of the book folks wherever fine books are sold secrets to 10x in your business and cashing out tax-free out january 8th 2024 by mark adams and yeah you definitely want to think about this stuff when you're exiting when you're building a business uh i never used to think about ever selling my business and it really is a smarter play really yeah you want you want to way before exit start start thinking about this five or six

years before because then you're not in a hurry. Thank you for coming on the show. Thanks so much for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, 4sayschrisfoss, linkedin.com, 4sayschrisfoss, chrisfoss1,

the TikTok, any of all those crazy places on the internet. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you next time. Take it easy, everybody. Thanks for having me.