Good morning, and welcome to today's webinar. Our speaker today is Sean Hutchinson from Ready for Next Global. Before I turn it over to Sean, I'd like to let those of you who are live with us know that you may submit questions during the webinar via the Q&A tab at the bottom of the screen. This webinar will also be recorded so that you may watch or re-watch on demand at your convenience. With that, I turn it over to Sean. Good morning, everyone. Thank you very much for being here. Our topic today is a really, really important one from the viewpoint of optimizing the value of the business and reducing risk. So what we're going to cover today is really how owner-dependent is your business. We'll go through a few really, really key points, and I'll give you some tips toward the end, some things that you can do to start moving your business out of owner dependency if you feel like that's where you are. So let me tell you just a little bit about myself first. I am a partner in Ready for Next Global. Ready for Next is a business advisory firm, international here in the US and also in Canada. We help businesses optimize their value. We work with owners to create transition readiness for them. Our mantra is a transition-ready business is more valuable by virtue of the fact that you have been doing transition-readiness work. Not all of our clients are immediately ready to transition their business, transition the ownership in their business. Some are 15 or 20 years off, some are within 18 months when we start working with folks. That event horizon is really important. If there's a long period of time before you think you're going to transition your business, either internally or externally, then we have some runway and we can do more. If it is on a very short timeline, and I would put that at 18 months or less, there's only so much we can do and we're going to help you make good decisions under the circumstances, whatever they may be. I am a Certified Exit Planning Advisor. That's what SEPA stands for. I'm also a Certified Merger and Acquisition Advisor. That's what CMAA stands for. And I'm also a third-generation family business heir. So our family business, which is manufacturing back in Oklahoma City where I grew up, is about 68 years old now. My dad owns it outright. He's almost 80, turns 80 on Friday. And we've been working on a transition plan and some succession and owner dependency in our business for quite a long period of time. No question. And I can tell you in a small business, there is usually a certain amount of owner dependency. It's understandable if you're in a small business, you don't have that many employees to work with. That said, to the degree possible, you should really work to make your business independent of you as an owner. We have to be realistic about it, but we also have to be systematic and intentional about it. So let's talk about what we want to get at today, some of the things that we want to answer if we can. One, what is owner dependence? How does it show up in an organization? I think that's important. We can talk conceptually about it all day long, and it's important to get your head around what it is from the viewpoint of an investor, but also how does it show up on a daily basis, right? What to look for, what to work on. What's the impact of owner dependence on the business value? Also, how owner dependent is your business? So we're going to give you access to an assessment tool that you could use, very simple, to score yourself on owner dependence and get a sense of where you stand. And then what are some of the practical steps that you could take today to start reducing the risk of owner dependency and the value impacts in your business? So let's get started. What is owner dependency? Well, first of all, it is one of the top three value killers in any business. And I would put it tied for number one, maybe number two, just depends on your perspective. I can tell you, here are the top three. One is concentration of some kind. So customer concentration, more than, say, 20% of your top line revenue, depending on one customer, right? That could also be profit concentration, it could be industry concentration, it could be geographic concentration. But typically, where an investor or buyer would look first is going to be on customer concentration. Why would they work? Why would they look there? Well, I think it should be pretty obvious. If that customer were to leave for any reason, you'd lose a significant amount of your top line and presumably a lot of your profit. So they want to make sure that you have a diversified customer portfolio. Number two, maybe tied for number one, is the level of owner dependency. Why do they care about that? Well, they're not buying the owner when they buy a business or invest in a business. They're buying the team, the team that stays behind to actually run the business. And that will almost always be the case. There is a myth, particularly in private equity investments of some kind, that their intent is to buy the business and then fire the management team, get rid of the owner, get rid of the management team, install their own. Absolutely not true. It would not be a good idea. It doesn't make any sense. Logically, it doesn't, you know, kind of line up that an investor would come in and terminate and replace the very people that know the most about the business, how it operates and what the future of the business, the potential of it might be. So the leadership team is a core issue for any kind of investor. I was on a panel the other day talking about some of the things that really drive a high level of transition readiness. One of the panelists was a managing director with BlackRock. BlackRock is the largest private equity group in the world. Now, they make mega investments, but I asked, I was moderating the panel, I asked the private equity managing director, hey, what do you look for first? He said, well, we do some screening on, you know, is it a good fit for us, industry location, things like that. And of course, we're going to look at the financials and see if it kind of lines up with our investment expectations, they're not going to do a deep dive, but where they immediately do a deep dive is on the leadership team, its quality, how it, how have the owner or owners of the business develop that leadership over a period of time, and will that leadership be able to carry the business into the future in a way that meets the expectations of the investor. Now, a light bulb moment for a lot of our owner clients is when we encourage you as the owner to take a look at your business through the eyes of an investor. Don't look at it from your point of view. Your point of view may be a little bit biased, right? Everybody's a little emotional about their business. Having a second opinion, so to speak, can be very, really valuable. That second pair of eyes and ears, so to speak. But if you telescope it out and look at the business through the eyes of an investor, you're really looking at it from a financial and operational standpoint that may be difficult for you to see in an unbiased way. So that's important. And if you telescope out and look at owner dependency as a major risk, then you got to start making some moves if it's too high. So it is one of the top three value killers. The third, if you're curious, is really an inability to produce good financial information, good, accurate financial statements, good, accurate financial analysis, using the financial characteristics of your business to optimize your balance sheet, optimize your income statement. Those three really are at the top of the list. Now I can tell you, from an investor point of view, the first two questions are going to be, is there a customer concentration and how dependent is the business on the owner? If the answer to either one of those is, yes, we have customer concentration and or yes, the owner really is kind of at the heart of the business and it would hurt for that owner to not be there, there would be some risk. Most equity investors will walk away. They won't even go further. They will just simply say, nice to know you. It's not a fit. So this is a core issue. Now often owners of smaller organizations, as I kind of mentioned earlier, there may not be a huge number of employees. Maybe there's only 20 employees or 30 employees, even less than that. So your choices for, you know, creating owner dependence and leadership can be a little limited. And of course in smaller businesses, you don't have as much cash or maybe as much cash flow. So it's hard to go out and invest in leadership sometimes. So that's a reality. The situation has to be acknowledged, but in smaller organizations, owners often play kind of a crucial role in the daily operations. And if you look at the organizational chart, so to speak, if you just kind of put that up, the owner could be in like three or four boxes. Well, when you see that, that's a good indication that the owner is doing too much, that the organization is too dependent on the owner. And there are other implications to just that picture, right? The owner doing too many things at one time. One, the organization may not be operating optimally because, you know, let's face it, no one can do three or four jobs well, so you've got some weaknesses there. The chances are good that because those boxes are filled by the owner, there may be some leadership weaknesses outside of the owner. And importantly, and this will be seen by an investor buyer right away, you are getting a false financial result on your income statement. The business is actually not as profitable from an operational standpoint as might be represented because you have one person doing more than one job. And if the company were properly staffed, then it would show a different result. A buyer will come in, they'll see it, they'll adjust for it. No matter what your earnings say, they will essentially bring those earnings down because they know after they own the business, they're going to have to make some investments in people that are not reflected either in your operating budget or your income statement. At the end of the day, this might actually reduce the profit and increase the payroll, but the owner ought to be able to take a vacation for quite a period of time away from the business and not worry so much. Now I really feel like you have to be on your phone and on your laptop the entire time that you're gone. That's kind of one indication of a reduction in owner dependency is when the owner can actually step away. Look, I've had clients that have said, I'm 30 years into a business. I have to be honest, I've never taken a vacation. It's been a kind of a 24-7 thing for me and I'm tired. Well, yeah, I can understand that, but it doesn't have to be that way. So we need to be more intentional about what we're doing, the way that we're thinking about it. How does owner dependence show up in a lot of organizations? Well, it can show up in a lot of different places. So let's just kind of cover some of them. I'm not going to sit here and read the slides here. I just want to pick a few things out and clarify them. First of all, decision-making. One indication of a low level of owner dependence is that, one, people in the company can make good decisions quickly. So by making good decisions quickly, there are two indicators. One, they have the authority to do it. So the owner and even the leadership team have essentially said, hey, you guys out there on the floor in a manufacturing business, you're going to be closer to this than I am, even though I have a title that indicates I'm chief operating officer or whatever it may be. I trust you to assess the situation and come up with a solution and come up with it quickly and also on the fly be able to make good decisions. A basis for operational excellence, in our opinion, is the ability for everybody in the company to make good decisions quickly. So if that's not the case, if these key decisions are kind of floating up the chain and ending up on the owner's desk every time because everybody in the company thinks, well, I don't want to make that decision, or maybe I think I don't have the authority to make that decision, I'm going to kick the can, right? And all of a sudden, this stuff is showing up on the owner's desk that really shouldn't be there. First of all, because it's had to kind of climb the ladder. But the second thing is, you as the owner might be sitting there going, why am I looking at this again? Well, why am I having to weigh in on this? It just seems like the process of decision making is probably broken. The chances are good that the company doesn't have training programs that are adequate for it to support growth in the future. And by the way, there is an indication, there's a lot of evidence that suggests that companies who invest in training during a downturn roar out of recession compared to their peers who didn't invest in training. And that competitive advantage lasts a long time. It gets them out of the gate, gets them way ahead into the leadership position. And the companies that didn't address training during the downturn are always behind for years in some cases. So training is worth investing in. But the chances are good that the organization may not have those programs if all of the knowledge, if all of the key processes are kind of vested in the owner at the top. Roles and responsibilities may not be well defined. You're going to have weaknesses in operations management. But here's the core, knowledge management. The chances are good in your organization, if there is owner dependency, you have what we call knowledge puddles. You have these little puddles of knowledge that are kind of all over the organization, but they're not connected. Information is not being shared among employees. The owner has a lot of stuff in their head. It's valuable, but it's not really getting out into knowledge and training programs. So you have these little, you know, this series of kind of isolated good knowledge. There's good knowledge in these knowledge puddles, but there's no way to relate them. There's nothing in systems or documentations or processes that kind of ties it all together. And if that, what we call owner dependency, if we see any of these things, it moves both directions. If we see owner dependency, the chances are good that it's a canary in the coal mine for a lot of other stuff. We can also go the other way and say, all right, well, we know that there doesn't seem to be any training or knowledge management in the organization. We can do root cause analysis, which is really asking why five times. Why don't they have any training programs? Why? Right? Well, there is no money for training programs. Okay. Why? Well, it's really not valued in the organization. We don't think it makes a difference. All right. Why? Well, we had a bad experience with it in the past and we decided not and so on and so forth. But generally speaking, the road will lead back to owners who believed that they are so core to the organization that they're the only ones in the organization that should or can make key decisions. And so they under invest in the things that are going to matter in terms of continuity and succession long-term. We also see in almost every organization that has a high degree of ownership dependency, no succession planning. It's just not valued. Well, if there's no succession planning, and the idea is, hey, something happens to the owner, there's nobody to step in, right? Or we've got people that we think can step in, but they're not really well prepared. Again, training, roles and responsibilities, knowledge management, so on and so forth. The two are directly tied together, right? Lack of succession planning and owner dependency. I can tell you, succession planning is kind of a, we could do a whole series of webinar on succession planning, but the idea has changed a little bit over time. So instead of succession planning, now it's referred to as succession management. And it ties two things together. One, who would move into key roles in the organization? It's not just about the owner leaving or being deceased or permanently disabled. Any of those things that can happen, right? A forced transition, in other words. But if there is dependency in the owner and a lack of succession planning, that usually means the roles and responsibilities, how people kind of move into key positions when they're open is not clear. But also, there's no leadership development. And the sort of premise now is that you cannot have a good succession plan without good leadership development. The two are directly tied together. So I've been saying to our clients, you don't have a succession plan if you don't have leadership development. The two can't, they're mutually exclusive, right? They're completely tied together. So that's how some of the things that, you know, how it shows up in an organization. So what's the impact of owner dependence on value? It's very heavy. I can boil it down. One, it may be 100% discount because the company may be completely untransitionable, right? It may not be transferable for anything other than maybe the discounted value of assets if there are any fixed assets. You can imagine in a professional services firm that doesn't really have fixed assets that if there is owner dependency or high-level dependency at the top levels for all of these things that we just talked about, then something happens to the owner, there is no discounted value of assets. And if the company is untransferable, I can make the argument that it's not worth anything at all, even though it may have some financial returns in it. And that the only option for getting at those returns at that finance is to liquidate the company over a period of time, right? So that's a shame because that's a heavy valuation discount. Now, what's the discount for a company that has done preparation for transition but has not been able to achieve, really manage the risk of owner dependency? It's probably at least 40% on market value. So if you have a $10 million business, if someone says, all right, I think we can solve this problem over a period of time, I'm willing to take some risk, but I'm not going to pay full price for this. I'll pay you $6 million, and I'm going to spread it out over time, and I'm going to make it contingent on developing good leadership and making sure that the organization is not fully dependent on you. That's pretty difficult, right? And difficult to swallow, at least. I can tell you, just from the statistics, 70 to 80% of businesses that go to market to sell to a third party fail to sell or sell at a lower value on disadvantageous terms that the owner is kind of lukewarm on, but unfortunately has to accept because the risk is just too high for the investor. So you can very easily with owner dependency get stuck in your business. And I think for most business owners, look, you're probably making some good money, you're taking income out of the business. But if you look at it from as an investment asset, you want to build the enterprise value and then be able to harvest that value at some point down the road, whether it's again, as I said in the beginning, short term within the next 18 months or two years, longer term, maybe three to five years, or even beyond that. If we start thinking now about what it's going to take to harvest that value out of the business, owner dependency is going to rise right to the top of our priorities. We need to fix the problem if it's there. Being too dependent on one person or a limited number of people, it can reduce the value of the business, but it also limits productivity. It creates some morale and culture problems because it can disengage important people in the company from the company itself. You will also find that if all of the authority and the knowledge is vested in the owner, they're not going to be able to really recruit or retain good leaders. It becomes very difficult. They want to grow. They want their development to be vital and vibrant. Those kinds of things just simply don't exist in companies where the owner has an iron fist over strategy and some other things. Now, I told you, and I'm going to leave this up for just a minute, I told you that we have a owner dependency assessment that we provide. It's pretty simple. It's 10 statements. You rate yourself from one to 10, and then you get a score of best being 100. Nobody scores 100. Then you can look at everything that maybe rates under five becomes a priority just to pay more attention to it. You can take this QR code, get your phone out, you can take a shot of it. It's going to take you to the website. All you need to do, it'll take two minutes to do this assessment. Then you're going to get a report back to your email that's going to have some really good analysis and actionable tips for you that can get you started on the pathway to reducing this kind of important risk regardless of how large or small your business may be. It's going to give you a lot of good ideas. Some things that are on the assessment would be things like, I'm comfortable taking a three-week vacation and I don't have to take my laptop or my phone with me. I'm not going to check email. I'm not going to work on anything that was kind of on my list before I went on vacation. I trust my team. Trust is an important aspect of this, by the way. In companies where we see a high level of owner dependence, we generally also see a low level of trust between the owner and whoever the next group of people in that chain may be. The owner feels like they can't give over some control or knowledge because they're not sure they're giving it to the right people. Now, it goes the other way, as I said earlier. If they've created a culture of owner dependence, the chances are good that they may not be able to recruit and retain the best leader. There's this sort of Chinese thumbscrews where you're trying to solve a problem and you're pulling against yourself. You're acting adverse to your own interests in terms of running a great company, building value, being able to harvest it in the future. Think about the level of trust that you may have with your leadership team or your management team. Do you, as an owner, feel super comfortable that you would be able to pull away and you can trust them 100% to run the company without bothering you for three weeks, or do you feel like you're having to hold on to things and protect things because they may not be able to handle it? If there are trust issues, there are going to be owner dependency issues, and you need to work on that. It's culture, and it's knowledge, and it's sharing, and it's transparency, all that kind of stuff. Feel yourself holding back. The chances are good you've got owner dependence in your organization. How can you reduce the risk of owner dependency? This takes some time, by the way. This doesn't happen overnight. This is a really tough thing, and we need to be realistic about the kinds of investments that you'll have to make if you're in a smaller company. It's not like you're probably sitting on a ton of cash that you can say, okay, I'm going to peel all this money off my balance sheet, and I'm going to invest it all in a year. You really need to develop a plan, a process for getting to a lower level of risk in the organization. That's one reason why, if you're on a short timeline to transition ownership, reducing owner dependence takes years, potentially. You may not have enough time to really knock it down. That's going to create continuity risk. That's going to be seen by a buyer or an investor. They're going to discount the value. Not investing in owner dependence comes back to haunt you. It's going to cost you in the end. There's a high return on investment and a very large discount headwind against value if you don't make the investment. You got to figure out how much money you can spend and when you can spend it, and then really make those investments. Again, it's going to depress your earnings for a while, but then once you see productivity and culture and retention and knowledge start to work in your organization, it's going to bring the earnings back up, and you're going to get a pop on value. It's kind of a double return on investment because your earnings will come back up over time, but you'll also, in terms of a multiple of earnings when the company is valued in the marketplace, the multiple will be higher, and ultimately that really benefits you. You kind of get an exponential result. It is definitely a high ROI and a big pain point if you wait. So here's some suggestions, and these are super simple, but things that you can do right away. You can go back tomorrow and start this process. So choose a client. Choose a supplier who's reaching out only to you because they have the primary relationship with you. They trust you and they reach out to you for everything. Now let's face it. I'm an owner of a business. Makes me feel pretty good. When my top customer reaches out to me because they know I can solve a problem or I can give them information. So I feel good. I feel a little stroked by that, but it's not a good thing in terms of creating value in the organization. It's a major risk. So it can be uncomfortable and it can almost kind of, my ego can get in the way of letting go of that sort of relationship, but at the end of the day, it is an absolute must. So choose somebody that you're comfortable with. Doesn't have to be the top client, doesn't have to be the top supplier, but begin to transition that relationship over to another team member in an appropriate department, right? Wherever that might be. It could be a salesperson. It could be an operations person, procurement person, but you're giving up something to get value. And it doesn't mean that you go in tomorrow and you say, okay, hey, John, this is yours now. Good luck. You're going to transition over a period of time. So sit down with a piece of paper and say, all right, what do I need to do first and when am I going to do it? Hold yourself accountable for those milestones. It may take you a year to kind of move that over. It might take you two weeks depending on the nature of the relationship, but you got to get used to transitioning and the people who you're transitioning to have to be well prepared to kind of catch that baseball, so to speak, and be ready to do what they need to do. So be fair to them. You don't want to just kind of toss it over and say, yours now, you're setting them up for failure. It'll be back in your lap before too long. And you might feel okay about that because again, the ego, but it's ultimately going to hurt you because during the period of time that was over with another person, the client didn't have a good experience. The vendor didn't have a good experience. So sit down, write it up, make sure that the transition has all the details in it and also give yourself enough time to do it. Now that means in one case, you're going to have to pull that person in and go meet with the client, right? Go meet with the supplier, say, Hey, I'm pulling back a little here and here's John. He's absolutely capable. Let's talk about how for you as a client or supplier, how this process can work in a way that's comfortable for you too, so that you kind of match up and align the interests. So you don't get a whole lot of pushback or you don't get the client or a supplier being surprised by the move. That's why it really is a transition that takes time. So the second thing that you could do is just find a process, right? Some kind of key operational task that's still on your desk that you feel like you can move to somebody else. Not entirely facetiously here, we use an example of the special way that the printer needs to be closed so it doesn't jam, right? That seems like a super small example, but if that knowledge or anything like that rests with you, if you're the person in the organization, or quite frankly, maybe it's your executive assistant or somebody else who kind of has that information, Hey, how many of us have been frustrated by not having a working printer, by not having a working copier? It always jams. It takes time. It reduces productivity. Everybody gets upset about it. It's one of those flashpoints in an organization, but that's a good example of a little bitty knowledge puddle that has a big effect. It's like a butterfly effect. It just kind of ripples. What's happening in your organization is that people are saying, well, what's going to happen when the tough stuff happens? They can't even fix the printer, right? We can't even fix the copier. Simple stuff, easy problems to solve, but often mixed. Hand that responsibility over to someone first to fix it, but if it does happen, who's responsible for addressing it immediately, right? You're going to teach someone else how to do things that you've done for a long time. I'm going to go back to my own example. In our family, dad knows everything about the business. He's super good about it. If something happens to him right now, I really feel like the business would be at risk. We have a very high level of owner dependence. Now, I'm not moving back to Oklahoma City. I live in Colorado right now. I'm not moving back to Oklahoma City to run the business. I've been transparent about that. He's okay with it, so on and so forth. What skills, what processes, so on and so forth, do we need to pass to somebody else to make sure if something happens, we at least have time, right, to recover perhaps, or at least mitigate the risk so it doesn't destroy the value of the company. This is a step-by-step process. A good example is right now, he does a lot of the accounting for the business, and he's super good at it. My dad is a very detailed engineering mind, but he's also the person who kind of does all the accounting for the business, right? He likes controlling the money. He likes controlling the accounting. It's very attractive work to him. He loves it, but if something happens to him and there's kind of a forced situation, we would be in trouble. I would have to call in a third-party accountant. I would have to do some forensic work just to make sure that we understood it. Now, one way that we're mitigating that is we set up a family board of directors, and then there are two people within the company that are non-family members that sit on that board of directors, and we've been learning and distributing that knowledge to make sure that it's not all part of dad's knowledge base. Nobody else can do it. Hey, probably 50% of the time, a business is forced to transition for one of five reasons, and we call them the five Ds, so death is a big one. Disability is an even bigger one. People are more likely to be permanently disabled than they are to die while they are owning and running a business, so those are the two big Ds. There's also divorce. Divorce can be a huge disruption if the process for protecting the business asset is not very clear and very well-documented, and you don't want your business asset falling into the hands of someone that you've been married to but decided to divorce. These things happen. The other two are a dispute with a partner. You may or may not have partners, but a dispute with a partner can also disrupt and cause problems, continuity problems in the business, and then also some type of dissolution, a forced dissolution, so it could be bankruptcy or something like that. We need to be attentive to all of these things that could happen and plan ahead as though they will. That's kind of the message of succession planning and owner dependency work. Nothing's off the table. Assume that something that you think is remote is actually going to happen and come up with a plan. In the meantime, do the work that's necessary to kind of create that process of knowledge transfer, authority transfer, process transfer. At the end of the day, you as an owner are going to feel so great if your organization is fully owner independent. You're going to be able to sit back and go, wow, I can own this thing. If I want to stay in, I can own this thing, and it's going to run like a top. What am I going to do with my time? Okay. That's an important question. You've got to answer that independently, right, separately. But at the end of the day, you could be in the office. You're going to have less stress. You're going to know the organization can succeed if something happens to you. You're going to have great people. You're going to be able to retain great people. You as an owner are going to feel better. Your stress levels are going to come down. And at the end of the day, wouldn't you be proud to build that kind of organization? Wouldn't you look at it and say, look, I did all the right things. I built the best organization that I can. And I know if I choose to exit it, I'm going to harvest the highest value that I possibly can. Why in the world would you just accept a 40% discount on value? Or as we said earlier, we could argue you've accepted 100% discount in some cases. I just don't see an argument for that. Why would you work adverse to your own interests? Now, we put some really good resources together for AED, and AED is sponsoring and has created something called the Owner Readiness Hub. There are really great tools and information on this and other topics that can help you reduce risks and optimize the value of your business, including other scorecards beyond the owner dependency scorecard. Those are kind of fun. There are a lot of them are in there. You can go and you can rate yourself. You can get a score, and then you get a report back. So, we've got tools and resources to help you build the value of your business, the assessments, the scorecards. There's education in there in the form of short video-based micro-learnings, and we're talking about three to 10 minutes. So, if you don't have very much time, it's a great way to just watch something over lunch or off hours whenever you do that kind of thing. Here's a QR code to get you there. I'm going to leave that up for a minute. And also, just the website. If you want to go there, it's got a dedicated URL, aeredreadinesshub.com. Really encourage you to try it out. One of the nice things, I think, about the Readiness Hub is that if you are sensitive about kind of exploring information about transition potentially, then this gives you a very safe and private space to do that. And you could do it as an owner. You could get your team involved. You can get your family involved. You really have the opportunity to explore confidentially. And my experience with owners over the last 20 years of doing this kind of work is confidentiality around these issues can be really important. I've had owners say, I really want to go to that seminar or I want to be in that webinar. I just want to make sure that it's anonymous because what if I walked in and one of my competitors is there and I don't, they could misinterpret my interest in, you know, value building and transition readiness. I just don't want that to happen. So, here's an opportunity for you to learn about it, you know, independently and privately. Here's a quote from someone that you're probably going to know, Bob Henderson, Executive Vice President and COO of your organization, AED. And I think it's important to know that Bob, if you don't know, Bob transitioned out of his business some years ago. I've talked to him about it. He says, look, I could have done it better. There's no question with better education, better advice, then this probably would have been a better experience. Who knows whether we would have gotten more for the business, but maybe, maybe not. So, education is a key part of it, awareness of the issues. You can't really argue against having too much information, right? That's fine. I would rather have too much information than go through this process, potentially sell my business and go. Well, looking back, I wish I'd known that. The Owner Readiness Hub can really help you fill in those gaps. It is free, again, sponsored by AED. Great thing to do for the membership. I'm glad they're doing it. So, here's the QR code again, if you didn't have a chance to grab it that first time around. I really want to thank you for your time today. I hope this has been helpful to you, informative. I would encourage you to think about what you can do tomorrow, next week, soon, so that you can keep the momentum around owner independence, reducing the risk in the business. It's a goal to work toward over a period of time, if you're having trouble with it and worried about it. If you have that sort of feeling in the pit of your stomach and you're anxious about it, that's a really good, that's a sign that you need to do some work. We're here to help you. If you need to talk to somebody after you explore AED Readiness Hub, or you just want to talk to us at RFN Global, we're happy to do that. Just reach out. My email address is sean at readyfornext.com. I'd be pleased to hear from you. So, take care. Thanks for attending. Hope it was useful. Happy to talk to you again. Thank you so much, Sean. I don't see any questions in the chat, but if anybody has any questions, you can email Sean at the email that he provided. Thank you for joining us today, and Sean, thank you so much for speaking. My pleasure. Thank you.

owner dependency

business valuation

operational efficiency

succession planning

Ready for Next Global

owner readiness

investor perspective