September 18, 2024
00:00:02 – Jacob Koenig
All right, welcome to the show, everybody. Our guest today is Dan Nicholson. He’s a serial entrepreneur. He’s founder of companies across finance, accounting and software, and the author of rigging the game. Dan, thanks so much for joining us today.
00:00:15 – Dan Nicholson
Yeah, very excited to be on today. Thanks for having me on.
00:00:17 – Jacob Koenig
Absolutely. So, look, your book, rigging the game, focuses on achieving financial certainty, navigating risk. Could you speak a bit more about those principles and specifically maybe how that process works when buying or selling a business?
00:00:33 – Dan Nicholson
Yeah. A number of years back, somebody shared with me that the essential question that every small business owner is asking themselves, but really, maybe everyone is am I going to be okay? And in other words, will I have the money, the resources to be able to live the life that I want? And so whether I’m helping someone in accounting, finance, business coaching, whatever it may be, ultimately they’re trying to get to this answer, will I be okay? And it doesnt matter at what level theyre playing. They might be just getting started or they might have hundreds of millions of dollars. Theyre still wondering, am I going to be okay? Gets harder to relate to the person with 100 million, but they often have more houses, more people counting on them. And so the challenge is just the burn rates and stuff grow accordingly. Thats where I got really interested in this notion of financial certainty. I heard this equation that ties back to me to this idea of, am I going to be okay? Anxiety equals uncertainty times powerlessness. Heard that was visceral reaction that I had. I went, okay, well, financial anxiety equals financial uncertainty times financial powerlessness. And so sort of put into an equation and words what I had been trying to do for small business owners for years. It’s drive down that financial uncertainty. And so in order to do that, I had to build a different set of principles to work with small business owners because small business owners are optimizing.
00:02:16 – Jacob Koenig
Right.
00:02:18 – Dan Nicholson
But you learn in finance to maximize, maximize shareholder value, I had to really unlearn a lot of these things I learned in business school about maximizing shareholder value to be able to help small business owners optimize, get closer to the life they want. So rigging the game is my operating system on how to achieve financial certainty using principles that are more based off optimizing for the life that you want.
00:02:43 – Jacob Koenig
Yeah, it’s really fascinating. And I think it’s something entrepreneurs, by their nature, are kind of used to uncertainty, but they feel a sense of being in control of their own destiny. The equation there may be a little bit different for an entrepreneur who has that strong belief in themselves. That’s driving their motivations. But maybe you can speak to how that plays into what that difference is then between maximizing and optimizing, as you say.
00:03:12 – Dan Nicholson
Well, I think that there’s five wealth types and I built an assessment actually. If people want to take it, it’s totally free. It’s wealthtype.com dot. It takes less than five minutes. But what I found in serving several thousand business owners over the last 15 years and some research background that I have is that people aren’t really savers or spenders per se, that it’s a bit more complicated than that. There are hustlers, gamblers, optimizers, savers, and outsourcers. And so that applies to entrepreneurs. That also applies to individual non business owners. It just so happens that most entrepreneurs fall into the hustler or gambler side of things and most non entrepreneurs tend to fall into the saver, optimizer, outsourcer buckets.
00:04:06 – Jacob Koenig
Yeah.
00:04:07 – Dan Nicholson
And so there’s a bit of a difference in kind of behavior. The challenge with the hustler and gambler particular is the hustler thinks effort is the solution to solving every problem. The gambler is like they’re just going to keep betting and they keep taking more risk. And so that isn’t right or wrong, that just is. But they need a different set of parameters and sort of principles to make sure that they don’t blow themselves up. Because as you very well know, 82% of small business owners go out of business because of cash flow problems. 85% of a business owner’s net worth is tied up in the value of their business. So kind of the topic of this show, selling your business. So 85% is going to be tied up in that business. Only 2% of the population of business owners know the value of the company and thats usually because they are selling or closing it.
00:05:05 – Jacob Koenig
Right.
00:05:05 – Dan Nicholson
Theyre driving blind, making a bunch of bets, hustling really hard, but they arent really measuring effectively. Is it actually growing the value and therefore getting me closer to the net worth that I want?
00:05:18 – Jacob Koenig
Preston so then how do you advise them? I mean, how do you bring them that level of certainty that otherwise they clearly are lacking?
00:05:26 – Dan Nicholson
Part of it is getting some fundamentals in place from the beginning. And what we teach people is the nth degree way. That’s the name of my CPA firm and where we do a lot of one on one work with clients. The nth degree way is we want to help you fund your what we call solvable problem. That’s your unique definition of wealth fund that solvable problem. Most business owners don’t have one. They have a bunch of goals and a vision board if they happen to put a date or dollar value to any of those things. So we can’t calculate the most efficient path because we don’t. We haven’t quantified it. It’s unsolvable. So we want to fund your solvable problem, which means we have to know it in the least amount of time. That’s not novel. Most people want to get to their goals in the least amount of time. Where we differentiate is with the least amount of effort, the least amount of risk, and the most amount of options. So we have to implement some new principles and techniques for them to think differently about effort and risk.
00:06:25 – Jacob Koenig
Huh. It’s really fascinating. And it’s so much of this reflecting to me upon the Woodbridge method of how we bring companies to market. You know, a, now we are tied up with Mariner, and we have wealth advisors who can help to give a little bit more of that clarity. What is it that your real goals are here? Putting, as you said, a dollar value to the long term plan, and then when you go to market to maximize the number of options, to try and get as many potential buyers as possible, so that you can see not only where the market is speaking in terms of dollars and cents, but also in finding that right partner, the right vision, the right match, that’s something that we take very seriously. And so I’m curious to hear a bit more from your perspective. How do you optimize and how do you bring those points home to an entrepreneur who otherwise isn’t actively thinking about those things?
00:07:27 – Dan Nicholson
Yeah. And if I could just for a moment, before I answer that, just kind of. Plus a couple of the things you said about the Woodbridge method, I can imagine that when you’re trying to maximize the value of the business, that there’s a couple of things that are going to come into play in terms of that saleability.
00:07:44 – Jacob Koenig
Yeah.
00:07:45 – Dan Nicholson
One effort. So if the business owners are redlining on effort and everything about the company requires the business owners to be involved. Not a very sellable business. Significant impact. If there is a bunch of risk, like concentration risks, 80% of your revenue is represented by 20% of your clients.
00:08:06 – Jacob Koenig
Exactly.
00:08:06 – Dan Nicholson
Not a very sellable business. So there’s some important concepts around effort and risk that directly correlate to maximizing the value of your exit price, but frankly, making running the business more enjoyable.
00:08:25 – Jacob Koenig
Yeah, exactly.
00:08:27 – Dan Nicholson
The volatility that exists. So, in terms of how we operationalize this step one, help them set up a solvable problem, turn those goals into a number. Step two is recover any, recover some resources. So typically they’re overpaying in taxes. Typically they’re because they haven’t done any planning. So step one, let’s recover taxes. Reallocate that towards kind of your goals. How much time does that cut off?
00:09:00 – Jacob Koenig
Right.
00:09:00 – Dan Nicholson
Step two, re engineer cash flow. And we have a method that we developed that looks at what I call metadata. So data about the data. We look at each individual expense and we’re going, is this a transactional relationship or actual true relationship? Okay, well, it’s a true relationship. There’s maybe jv opportunities or ways that we could restructure these agreements that would be a win win. Were looking at something called the rule of three and ten. It’s this idea that every time your business triples or hits order of magnitude of ten, everything breaks one to three people, three to 1010 to 30. And so we’re looking at different departments and going, when are you going to hit that breaking point? So we can anticipate new costs rather than having to pay after the fact when things are broken. So we’re going through every vendor and there’s about twelve different categories that we’re going to look at all to recover resources, reduce risk. So those are the first two levers. It’s just recovering resources. Then you want to take those resources and allocate them towards increasing your cash flow. Maybe that’s acquiring assets, maybe that’s getting growth capital because now you’ve got more free cash flow to be able to afford taking on more growth capital. Unfortunately, people usually take on capital when theyre in a bad place instead of in a growth mode. So lets reallocate that towards growth capital. Then lets look at improving the ROI and all the bets that you have in your business and the Roe.
00:10:39 – Jacob Koenig
Yes.
00:10:40 – Dan Nicholson
Where do we have equity tied up? And then the process repeats itself. Robert?
00:10:43 – Jacob Koenig
Yeah, no, Dan, I love all of this because it is probably the most common of our successful business sellers are those who are been building the business. They reach one of those, as you say, breaking points where where they’ve kind of brought the company as far as they know how and they need that partnership and that growth capital to get the company to that next level. And so a lot of, I think entrepreneurs often, you know, have their ego tied up in the business. And so, you know, going back to the point we talked about earlier of how much involvement the founders have and their ability to, to step back. Number one, getting to that point where the business is not all about you, the individual, but about the company and how it operates. And then to be able to recognize that there’s no shame here. This is about the future of the company, about growing it to the next level, and about finding that right partner who can accelerate and step on the gas.
00:11:45 – Dan Nicholson
One of the big gut check moments that you have to have, in my estimation, is a. As an entrepreneur, is. Is this an ego based business, or is this a business that exists to serve me and living the life that I want?
00:11:57 – Jacob Koenig
Yeah.
00:11:58 – Dan Nicholson
Right. I believe that businesses and investments exist to serve you and living the life that you want. If it’s an ego business, by all means, that’s fine. No judgment for me. But by all means, stay this. You’re the CEO. You make all the decisions, you get all the attention. Right? It’s serving your ego. That’s cool. If that’s as long as you’re intentional about that. Great.
00:12:24 – Jacob Koenig
Yep.
00:12:25 – Dan Nicholson
That’s a very small actual population, percentage of the population that truly want their business to serve their ego.
00:12:33 – Jacob Koenig
Yeah.
00:12:34 – Dan Nicholson
Most of us wanted to serve the. Fulfilling the life that we want. And so you have to make that declaration, and once you do, it will change a lot of your decisions, because there’s a lot of. I call it naming the puppy. I don’t know if you ever. Have you ever adopted a puppy before? Or it could be a cat or any other animal. If you go in and you look at puppies and you give one a name, that’s your puppy. You just gave it a name. You can’t leave the dog there. You just gave it a name. And we have so many decisions, bets that we’ve made in our business, where we’ve named the puppy, where we own it. There’s a bias. There’s many different biases that we’re subject to, but ownership bias. We value things that we own more than. We don’t make sense. Why wouldn’t you? But we own a lot of ideas in the business that are ours, and we’ve named the puppy on.
00:13:34 – Jacob Koenig
Exactly.
00:13:34 – Dan Nicholson
And it’s not generating a return. We compared it to the S and P 500, and we viewed it as an investment. We’d be better served to close it out and just put it into an index fund, but we keep doing it. And if that’s the case and this part of our cash flow engineering process, if that’s the case, you’re running an egocentric business. You’re just doing a bunch of stuff that serves you, that you name the puppy on. Yeah, it’s not helping you live the life that you want. It’s causing you to take on more effort and risk and a ton of obligation. So the simple thing is, stop doing it. Get back in alignment with this business, and investments exist to serve me.
00:14:12 – Jacob Koenig
Yeah. And are there tools or specific questions that you ask to pull out? What are those things that are important to each individual person? Right. And what are those goals that people should be thinking more about?
00:14:26 – Dan Nicholson
So, part of our process is that wealth type assessment. So I kind of know where you’re at. Okay. If you’re a. You’re a gambler, I got a sense of decisions that you’re making. Part of it is educating people on this idea that every system is perfectly designed for the results it’s getting. That’s a paraphrase quote from someone named W. Edwards Deming. And so what I teach people from the beginning is, if you don’t like the results you’re getting, you got three choices. Be a victim. That’s. You can choose that. That sucks. Change the system or change your behavior. And a lot of times, we can’t change the system, so we have to change our behavior. So are you willing to do that? Okay, if yes, step one is to recognize that you’re bias. We’re all biased.
00:15:15 – Jacob Koenig
Absolutely.
00:15:17 – Dan Nicholson
Let’s get control over what are the biases that impact you the most? Is it loss aversion? That’s usually the case, yeah. A loss hurts seven times more than an equivalent gain. So we’ll work really hard to not have to admit that we made a mistake.
00:15:31 – Jacob Koenig
Right.
00:15:32 – Dan Nicholson
A loss. So what are those biases? Understand that it’s part of the human condition to be biased. So let’s design some systems that instead of you always having to perform at your best and set a personal record every day, what if you just had to perform at your average? If you could perform at your average, then any day that you perform at your best is upside.
00:15:58 – Jacob Koenig
Right.
00:15:59 – Dan Nicholson
But most of us built all of our systems or performance around that personal record day. So every. So on average, that’s one to two days a month.
00:16:08 – Jacob Koenig
Yeah.
00:16:09 – Dan Nicholson
That we’re at our personal best. So every other day is actually downside.
00:16:14 – Jacob Koenig
So, yeah, I mean, the mindset and the way of conceptualizing what. What is success and what is, as you said, a productive day.
00:16:26 – Dan Nicholson
Absolutely. Yeah. So once you accept all those things, again, if you’re in an ego centric business, don’t even talk to me about all that stuff. Right. Purpose driven business. Okay. I am biased. That means I need a set of principles.
00:16:41 – Jacob Koenig
Yes.
00:16:42 – Dan Nicholson
So, one, we have a cash flow protocol that we recommend clients implement. It’s based off something called the mental accounting bias. And people could google that. There’s a two to three minute explainer video from Khan Academy that explains kind of how we label things, impacts our decision making. So we implement a cash flow protocol that I would argue outperforms a budget. Budgets only tell you that you overspend. They don’t prevent you from overspending. So implement a cash flow protocol, and then we have 15 key financial rules that we recommend. And what we tell clients is consistency over accuracy.
00:17:22 – Jacob Koenig
I see.
00:17:22 – Dan Nicholson
So consistency is more important than being accurate? Accurate is still important, but not as important as consistency. When I ask people what their rules are around money, they say, almost unanimously, have as much of it as possible. Cool dad joke. But that’s not a rule, that’s an outcome. So we give them set of rules, and they can cross them out, rewrite them, change them. But the thing is, I want you to have a set of rules around how you make decisions. We are on the same page about, because, again, you’re going to be biased. You’re going to get loss aversion. You’re going to name the puppy on things, you’re going to get caught up in fomo. It’s going to happen. So we got to fall back on these set of rules, then we can actually help you once we do all that stuff.
00:18:14 – Jacob Koenig
Right.
00:18:14 – Dan Nicholson
But now we can help you because we have a similar language, rules. We’re not just making stuff up day to day.
00:18:20 – Jacob Koenig
Yeah. And to be able to pull yourself out from that own, you know, the tunnel vision that can often happen. A CEO will have a certain amount of loneliness, of being there all on their own and trying to figure this out and not recognizing. Okay, yeah, I need to. I need to pull myself out from there to be able to see objectively wherever I am biased and how to overcome those, really, it’s an important tool to have.
00:18:48 – Dan Nicholson
I think you made an outstanding point about loneliness, and it’s a not frequently discussed topic in entrepreneurship, but it’s arguably an epidemic that in vulnerable moments, I’ve yet to have an entrepreneur tell me that they don’t experience regular loneliness. And what percentage of decisions are you making that are coming from a place of trying to fill some sort of loneliness void? Or said differently, but arguably a version of the same thing. Trying to prove that you’re capable of it. Trying to prove I’m capable of building an awesome business that can come from a place of loneliness. Got to prove to the world that I’m good enough. Yeah, I’ve had to do a lot of this own personal work. A lot of my really bad decisions have come from exactly that place. People can go to school on my tuition on that.
00:19:44 – Jacob Koenig
There we go.
00:19:45 – Dan Nicholson
Jeff, if you could just reduce the number of times that you make one of those types of decisions that come from despair, where you’re kind of exploitable, where someone can sell you a short term solution to a long term problem, you could reduce that by 50%. Those are the type of things that then ten x your business over a five year period of time. It’s not zero. You’re still going to make sure occasional decisions, but closing those gaps on those biases and cognitive distortions are force multipliers to really scaling business.
00:20:19 – Jacob Koenig
Perfect. Well, I think that’s a great note to wrap on. I don’t have any further questions, but is there anything else that you wanted to give to our audience here before we call it a day?
00:20:30 – Dan Nicholson
Maybe just sort of in alignment with what we’ve talked about thus far is that I believe that the greatest risk in life is not living the life that you want. And so if you believe that it’s time to kind of put aside the egocentric business and move into that purpose driven company that serves you and living the life that you want, perfect.
00:20:52 – Jacob Koenig
No, I think that’s a great message to end on. Dan Nicholson, thanks again for joining us today.
00:20:58 – Dan Nicholson
Yeah, thanks for having me on.