The dirty businesses that create quiet millionaires
“Shenar Wood built an underground power business by taking on personal risk. He eventually sold and it had nothing to do with demand,” shares Sam Thompson, a Minneapolis business broker and the president of M&A firm Transitions In Business. “In this episode we discuss how to negotiate an earn out, separate assets from value and how to stop confusing more revenue with more value.”
Some of the richest founders don’t run trendy companies. They run dirty ones. The kind of work you’d never brag about at a dinner party, but that quietly throws off real money because it’s hard, risky, and most people won’t do it.
This Built to Sell Radio episode follows Shenar Wood, who built an underground power business by taking on personal risk, earning trust job by job, and eventually selling when he hit a ceiling that had nothing to do with demand.
In this episode, you discover how to:
- Recognize the hidden ceiling that has nothing to do with demand and everything to do with your balance sheet
- Stop confusing “more revenue” with “more value” when margin and risk aren’t improving
- Build a reputation flywheel where customers feed you better work because they trust how you operate
- Separate assets from value so you don’t overestimate what a buyer will pay for “stuff”
- Fix the financial story before a buyer forces an expensive cleanup under pressure
- Negotiate earn-out terms so the buyer can’t hit your results by moving costs onto your books
- Decide when it’s smarter to sell now than grind for years just to add a rounding error to valuation