Kison Patel On How To Master The M&A Lifecycle Today So You Can Prosper Tomorrow (#136)

[00:00:00] Jeffrey Feldberg: Welcome to the Sell My Business Podcast. I'm your host Jeffrey Feldberg.

This podcast is brought to you by Deep Wealth and the 90-day Deep Wealth Experience.

Your liquidity event is the largest and most important financial transaction of your life.

But unfortunately, up to 90% of liquidity events fail. Think about all that time, money and effort wasted. Of the "successful" liquidity events, most business owners leave anywhere from 50% to over 100% of their deal value in the buyer's pocket and don't even know it.

I should know. I said no to a seven-figure offer and yes, to mastering the art and science of a liquidity event. Two years later, I said yes to a different buyer with a nine-figure offer.

Are you thinking about an exit or liquidity event?

If you believe that you either don't have the time or you'll prepare closer to your liquidity event, think again.

Don't become a statistic and make the fatal mistake of believing that the skills that built your business are the same ones for your liquidity event.

After all, how can you master something you've never done before?

Let the 90-day Deep Wealth Experience and our nine-step roadmap of preparation help you capture the maximum value for your liquidity event.

At the end of this episode, take a moment to hear from business owners, just like you, who went through the Deep Wealth Experience.

Kison Patel is the Founder and CEO of M&A Science with a passion to drive the M&A industry forward. He was an M&A advisor for 10 years in which he sold larger companies, such as commercial banks and hotel chains. In 2012, he noticed teams lack efficient technology to manage details and created DealRoom. And created DealRoom an M&A lifecycle management platform.

In 2016, he started the M&A Science Podcast devoting his time to creating a platform where all the best practitioners could share their best practices and lessons learned from real-life deals. Kison then created the M&A Science Academy in 2020 to offer step-by-step training to those, looking to master M&A featuring courses created by top-level practitioners.

Through developing technology, educational content, and industry training, Kison aims to bring better practices to an industry with growing market pressures, transaction values, and competition.

Welcome to The Sell My Business Podcast. And for all of our listeners, I have a bit of a rhetorical question for you. How can you win at a game if you don't know the rules? Of course, the answer is you can't. Well, today, we're going to unveil that cloak of secrecy that tends to be around this crazy and wacky world called mergers and acquisitions with and our guests has been on both sides of the table. He's doing some amazing things out there. But let me not get ahead of myself.

Kison, welcome to The Sell My Business Podcast. Such a pleasure to have you with us. And you know, there's always a story behind the story, Kison. What's your story? What got you to where you are today?

[00:03:28] Kison Patel: Hey, thanks for having me. Well, I started in a career doing M&A advisory where I worked with privately-held businesses that were looking to buy or sell. Started from tiny little deals in the early days, and progressed to doing corporate work with some of the hotel brands like Kimpton, Extended Stay America.

Then I got into working with small financial institutions, like community banks for raising capital, buying, selling as well. And then the recession happened around 2006, '07 that threw a big curveball in the practice I was building. I was at the time, very interested in getting involved in the technology space and found my way to working with the team to start a finance marketing type of platform.

And it didn't pan out the way I wanted it to, but it exposed me pretty early to the way software engineers would utilize project management tools to manage developing software, which was the early inspiration for later starting DealRoom in 2012. DealRoom is a project management tool for managing M&A.

We started focusing on the diligence problem. When you acquire a business, there's a lot of information that needs to be exchanged, where the buyer wants to review documents, contracts really represent whats being represented. Understand or validate what's being represented as true and accurate. Identify the risks in the transactions, get comfortable to close the deal.

And there's a whole series of information that gets requested, submitted, follow on clarification questions. It gets pretty cumbersome when the industry typically manage this in Excel. So we started building a solution for that. Then it progressed when we realized the investment banks weren't early adopters it was actually the corporations.

And the way of this big task. Once they buy the company to integrate it and hit the target value they intended on. So we started building functionality to support that. And then over time, we added functionality to support the front of the process, the pipeline management, when you identify these companies, cause there's definitely a long cycle for a company's prepared or ready to sell.

So that led to the product becoming a full lifecycle management solution. And along that journey, one of the things we realized was the industry itself was so fragmented and siloed that it lacked best practices, standardization. And seeing that every company has such a unique way of approaching M&A.

So that along with inspiration, from a friend of mine in marketing, that was encouraging me to start a podcast. We started M&A Science around 2017, utilizing a podcast as a platform. So practitioners can share lessons learned. We can then in turn, identify the patterns, the proven techniques, and we've evolved that to hold digital media business.

We published a series of content publications. A notable one is a book called Agile M&A. That is based on case studies with Google and Atlassian, and particularly how they utilize agile techniques stemming from the engineering culture with their MNA approach with great success. We've published that book as a framework that has helped quite a few other companies move from this old waterfall approach to an agile approach, which is very relevant with today's time and shift and how we're acquiring more tech-oriented businesses to enhance our capabilities.

And this things would get into, but that's where our business is really involved then we ended up starting an academy program. We operate an online school to help practitioners at all levels get access and advance their skills. So the business has really evolved to having several business lines but generally themed around education and technology.

[00:07:11] Jeffrey Feldberg: Wow. This is the full gamut that you covered here. So you started off in the industry yourself as an advisor, you saw the ups, you saw the downs. And you saw what was working, what wasn't working, but Kison what's key and for listeners, I hope you picked up on this. You found a painful problem that you were passionate to solve.

You found some inefficiencies and some frustrations, and then you jumped in there and you began slowly but surely marching your way to where you are today, which is an incredible story in and of itself. Let me ask you this because the deal flow that you must see and what you saw even beforehand sitting on both sides of the table. For the business owner, who is new to the world of mergers and acquisitions.

Those are going to be some kind of liquidity event. It doesn't quite know when that's going to be or what that's going to look like. What would be, I call them those little industry hidden secrets that generally the investment bankers, maybe the buyers don't want business owners to know. Any insights, any thoughts that you can give on that in terms of what you've seen.

[00:08:13] Kison Patel: Yeah I think there's people tend to default to certain directions where they say, oh if I'm going to sell my company, I have to go right to the banker. I think you can broaden your scope. One, you can do a lot of research online and you can get a sense of what related businesses they are out there. You might be able to see that there are some common valuation metrics in your industry and identify that through some online research.

There's a lot you can do through those means. Then from there, I would look at starting to socialize or network with the lawyers that are focused in your industry, have M&A experience with similar types of companies. They're going to be critical. You've got to have a good lawyer, a hundred percent. Then check out if there's anybody that's been involved with M&A, maybe they're not a banker.

Maybe they've sold a company before. Maybe they've been part of that executive team that's on the acquiring side or selling side. I think it'd be valuable to get somebody with experience, even if they we're on a contract or joined your company for a period of time, knowing the goal was to prepare your company for sale because the preparation is key, the earlier the better.

I've seen organizations that prepare a good year ahead of time before they start taking the business out to market. And it allows them to present the business much better. It's just like selling a house. You want to have something nice and clean to present with a business in the very variable of sophistication of buyers that you're going to entertain.

You want to have clean financial structure put in place good operations and presented well. I think those are some of the key areas to really think about. Like I said, there's a lot you can do with networking in the industry, getting to know people that have an experience, and see how you can leverage that, know your options.

And the bankers are good too. They'll give you a good sense of valuation and you want to spend your time to get to know that ecosystem as well. Because if you go down that route, you want to make sure that you're working with the right firm. That's got the industry experience and it's the right size, you know, on firm is too big and your deal's not important or it's too small and your deals much more bigger than they can actually handle. I guess other one Jeffrey is the view in this process is getting clarity on what your strategic goals are of the exit.

Is it purely objectively to maximize your exit dollar amount, your an exit return that your getting? Or are there other factors in place? Is it continuing the legacy of the company? Making sure the employees have a good home, they can continue to grow? The organization grows and you got to prioritize one.

Cause there are different approaches. I think if it's more about having a real successful transaction, there is value in taking a long view, taking the time to know who those potential suitors are. Building relationships with them because there's often large corporations and taking a view from the buyer's perspective on what they would do with their business.

And there may be some of them that you're already familiar with getting, talking to them, connecting with their executives, connecting with maybe they have a corporate development function that typically runs in organic growth or M&A getting on their radar. Maybe even starting with the small partnership.

You know, Those things I think go really well in the transaction. If you have a relationship established that you're building and it leads to an acquisition and the short view, let's run a very competitive process, which we would typically work with an investment bank that may have existing relationships and use third-party database to identify a wide scope of potential buyers.

And bring them in to identify who would be interested in acquiring the business and build a very competitive auction process. That's another route, but then, in turn, you may deter some of these other buyers that prefer not to participate in an auction process. And there's reasons for that, sometimes you compress the timelines, you end up not doing as much diligence.

You ended up with less time to do integration planning for all these post-close activities. And you're taking a lot more risk on those deals. So some buyers won't participate in those. They prefer to have those deals when both parties are working together on the terms. I think there's those kinds of considerations or things that don't necessarily get brought up when the founders when they're selling their company. Here's all these things to factor in the prep and getting to know the variety of different people, the lawyers, potential advisors, bankers, maybe even a CFO that's got experience with exits.

And then also getting, starting to think of the strategy. If you wanted to play the long view and start talking to potential buyers directly, or if you want to take the short route and really work with a bank and have a competitive process.

[00:13:04] Jeffrey Feldberg: Wow. Kison so much to unpack there. And for our listeners, I really hope you were paying close attention because as I like to say here on The Sell My Business Podcast. Kison, that wasn't gold that you were spinning out there that was platinum in terms of the insights and the wisdom, and at the heart of what you're saying, you're really preaching to the choir here at Deep Wealth and our 90 day Deep Wealth Experience.

Because we're all about the preparation and Kison to your point, and for the business owners out there, again, winning at a game, you have to know the rules and Kison just sharing well, don't just rely on an investment banker per se. Get to know the other people in the industry. Have people help you have that experience.

At Deep Wealth, we call that the Chief Exit Advisor. Someone who isn't necessarily an investment banker, but he's onto your point. Perhaps a business person, maybe it could be a strategist, a former buyer or seller, whatever it is, who can come in and is really loyal to the business owner, just to give that holistic view, those insights of big picture-wise, hey, here's what you need to look out for.

And I really like and appreciate what you're saying of get to know some M&A lawyers earlier rather than later because I know for us in step four of our 9-step roadmap, the internal due diligence audit, before you even start with an investment banker, start with an M&A lawyer. Have that M&A lawyer help you prepare for that future liquidity event.

As we like to say, remove the skeletons in the closet and find those hidden rembrandts in the attic, you put them out for public display, but Kison, let me ask you this because from your vantage point having something that a lot of people don't have in particularly business owners. As you look at deal flow, as you look at DealRoom, and even on the analytical side with what you're finding there, what are some strategies today that future buyers, for if I was selling my company or raising capital, whatever the case may be, we'll call it a liquidity event. What is that investor or buyer looking for in a company to have them say, yes, I'm not only interested, but I want to find out more and this is potentially a terrific investment or acquisition for me.

[00:15:08] Kison Patel: This market has just been on a tear for the last 10 years, and it keeps gaining momentum. Evaluations are soaring high. You can't just buy a business in this market and expect it to run and make money. You have to have a well-defined value creation plan. How are you going to create value? Once you buy this company, what are you going to do to grow it? How are you going to make the business more efficient?

You have to have those things really defined. In a lot of times, we're putting a lot of ambitious assumptions into our model. Around cost, energies, revenue, synergies, to be able to make the numbers work, to get the deal done. And that's a big emphasis on being able to execute so that's where buyers are really looking for is a clear path for them to create value in the investments that they're making.

I think for somebody that's selling, it's trying to get in that lens, try to really ask questions. Understand how the buyer's thinking about your opportunity to acquire your business. What do they plan to deal? Is it the technology they're looking for? Is it your existing customer base?

What's really driving that then dig into it. Because when you start understanding how they're going to justify, the value of the investment that they're making. See how well they have that defined how are they actually going to execute? What are they going to be in?

But what's expectation for you. Cause a lot of times they're going to want you around to help with the transition or maybe even lead some of the activities for integrating the business, understand what that's going to look like. So really asked the myriad of questions to get that full breadth of understanding.

And it'll probably help you identify, which buyers are a better fit in that regard. When you start putting the price aside and then also gives you a better feel of the broader sense of two organizations with distinctly unique cultures coming together and becoming one. But sometimes that gets overlooked where we have one organization that's a very traditional top-down management culture and we have this newer, very techie startup culture it's' more bottoms up and those come through cultures don't just calm together that seamlessly. Is there something that we can understand these unique differences and build around it? Or maybe they are stark differences that this deal wouldn't work well together.

These teams aren't going to work well together. They're going to have friction and it's going to lead to value destruction instead of value creation, which does happen in our industry. So I think digging into those questions, like really understanding what the buyer's thinking, where they're coming from.

That's the key thing cause it's different buyer to buyer. Every buyer has their own approach of identifying value. And that's what the value of your business is on is based on what the buyer's going to pay based on their unique perspective of your business and how they're going to create a value from it.

[00:18:04] Jeffrey Feldberg: Once again, Kison incredibly wise words and the examples that you were sharing, they're really right out of our playbook at the Deep Wealth Experience in step number three, our Future Buyer, because there, you're talking about a few different things and one is, as we like to say, The world's favorite radio station is WII.FM.

The what's in it for me radio station, but not from a seller's perspective because as sellers, we tend to be selfish, but to put ourself in the shoes of our future buyer, what is your future buyers world look like? What would be interesting to them? How can you help them achieve those goals? And then you also spoke about well sometimes the highest number doesn't guarantee that it's the best deal. So how do you find the best cultural fit for a buyer? If you have many different offers in a competitive process, how do you find the best buyer that long-term wise things are going to work out and then for our listeners, again, I really hope you're paying close attention because Kison, really address something you don't hear a lot about in the sellers world. For the sellers, I have my liquidity event. It closes, the wire happens and I'm riding off into the sunset. And for the seller, that journey ends for most of them, some will stay on in the business and continue. But for the buyer, it's a whole new day.

And in the world of sellers, we don't hear one of the fear of the buyers is what you talked about Kison, that's a high failure rate of integrating the new entity into the buyer's company. And so the more as a business owner that we can understand that and ahead of time help the future buyer solve those issues, the higher the deal certainty and the enterprise value.

So Kison, if we take a step back for a moment and we talk about the facts, the figures, all these things that are going on, how can DealRoom help with that process, regardless of whether we're on the selling side or on the buying side, what would that look like for us?

[00:19:51] Kison Patel: It's a combination of practices that you apply. And then the tech stack helps standardize those practices. So for us, the value of the tech stack we enable for our clients is the information management it. When you can replace the typical email, Excel trackers, virtual data rooms, it's pretty manual.

A lot of people are spending their time doing these tactical activities to manage the information and track it instead of focusing on the strategic value-creating activities. So just having this portal, that's really designed for M&A, a single database that you can run through the whole life cycle.

Manages all the parties involved, internal teams, external teams, counterparty, and then allows those teams to really be able to collaborate in this real-time environment. It'll help them move along things faster. You're not sending 300 item checklist and waiting for all the responses. You can actually do things in more of an incremental way and keep the priority focused or all teams focused on the priorities and they'll be able to iterate on the most important things.

And we have some interesting data that we found about 20 to 40% of the requests for information never get looked at. And it just tells you that it really wasn't that important to begin with. So you can build that model in and more of that agile type of practice, where you keep your list in a descending order of priority.

And everybody clearly sees what the priorities are and they're working on those and they're responding to those and then getting them completed faster, the deal process moves along faster. It's more comprehensive, people are aligned and that same approach applies as well after you purchased the company in terms of keeping the teams aligned on the priorities so that they can execute better.

 But again, you got to lead it with the practice. If we're still following this old-school waterfall approach of having these Meredith checklists and things are disconnected, the planning doesn't happen early. We're focused on creating this list and then once new information comes in, we're not ready to update and make changes, taking more of an agile approach where you're focused on responding to changes as they happen creates much better results. Because the M&A process is like that. You get a little bit of information in the beginning and you keep continuing to get additional information. And if you have a management approach allows you to update your diligence reports, your integration plans. As you get this new information, it allows you to have a more comprehensive tailored plan to what you actually need to execute when it comes time to close.

So it takes both, the technology is very helpful, but you got to be on your toes with a practice that allows teams to work together. And it's just a big shift overall. The industry itself is moving in a totally different direction. We're getting away from a pure finance-focused M&A approach to a people-focused M&A approach.

And this is where we realize in the industry at the end of the day. What creates value is people and people need to be aligned. You have a clunky process that doesn't communicate, that isn't transparent. And what I've learned is people can take the bad news. They just can't take no news and take no news that creates an incredible amount of the fud factor. And that's where people really get frustrated and frustrated people don't work well. They're not going to be motivated. They may quit their job. Leave with a lot of value. Happy people create a lot of value. So how can you create a process that encourages people throughout aligns among goals?

So they're motivated to achieve success after the deals completed.

[00:23:14] Jeffrey Feldberg: So Kison this is interesting because with DealRoom, you've created an M&Alifestyle management platform, but you've also shared about the whole focus on people in M&A, and how that's changing. So if I'm a business owner and I've made the decision, I'm going to have professional advisors around me.

I'm going to go that route. I'm not going to do it on my own. I'm not going to have my twice removed cousin uncle's friend who happens to be a lawyer that was with my company, you know, from the beginning, because I got a great rate, do the deal. I'm just going to get professional M&A advisors all the way through from M&A lawyer through to an investment banker and everyone else. As a business owner, when I'm interviewing investment bankers specifically, What kind of questions should I be asking, or what should I be looking for to ensure that they're following an automated flow on the one hand, but having the priorities come first with some intelligence behind that, and then that people focus on the other hand, how do I know?

[00:24:07] Kison Patel: This is where I'll give you a some hard shed tears. Most banks don't do that. Most banks are, you got to think the bankers like a salesperson, they get an engagement letter from you. They get a commission out of that, and that's what they do. They'll hand it off to a team of junior bankers.

They're going to do more of the tactical work. And they get paid at the end. They're not putting a lot of consideration in what happens after the deal. They're not putting a big consideration on the people approach and how well you blend in with the culture. They're going to run a tight process. They're going to get a bunch of buyers, give you several options to look at.

And hopefully, you close one of them was the level of certainty that you are confident in and they get their check at the end of it. Where it gets developed is the company that goes through a series of acquisitions. And they will mature their M&Aapproach and the team that's driving those activities.

And that's when that team becomes more people-focused. They're the ones that are going to be driving it because they're going to learn from seeing what goes wrong and learn the hard way. But they're also going to have these resources, their HR people, the functional leaders that are going to care about that.

They're going to care that, hey, we're putting a ton of money to buy this company. We need to get some real value out of it because we have to take ownership of the results. Now the advisors don't have ownership of that results. They're not going to care. If they're not incentivized to even figure out what the latest greatest approaches are.

Once you get the contract signed, everything else goes out the window. That's what we've experienced, whether it's a consulting firm, the banking firm, the lawyers that inefficiency drives revenue for most of them. So they're not actively trying to find ways to optimize things in the market. It goes back to the organization.

You got to take ownership, especially in the buy-side we see most of that. That's where we end up focusing our practice on. Corporations that do a number of acquisitions, they're very motivated because they want to continuously drive their capabilities to do M&A well that they can make these large investments and extract value.

It's well-known organizations that do M&A end up delivering higher returns to their investors. But that's where it's at. I tried to identify it more with the buyers as you decide from taking a direct approach or an auction approach.

[00:26:13] Jeffrey Feldberg: So Kison what's really interesting. And again, for our listeners really important insight here and I'm going to go back to step three of the 9-step roadmap in the Deep Wealth Experience, the Future Buyer. And so Kison, I don't want to put words in your mouth. What I believe I heard You say is that DealRoom has been incredibly effective on the buy-side.

So all those buyers are looking at acquisitions will use your data. Put that into their systems. It's there people that have to quote-unquote live with the end result after the acquisition. So really what that tells me then is I'm not going to be looking to my advisory team for some of those insights.

I really need to be looking at who that future buyer is. And part of it, again, going back to what you said, are they, people focused on the M&A side? What was my experience with that buyer, where they organized? Was it done in a timely manner or where I getting these emails with a gazillion checklists in them and all these files, instead of having that all organized in one central type of place?

And for me, at least that's jumping off the page loud and clear. That's really something to either avoid or look for depending where that buyer is on that spectrum.

[00:27:17] Kison Patel: You got to let your advisors know that's, what's important to you. When they know that's important and they'll see it when you take the action by asking those detailed questions, to understand that perspective from the various buyers you're entertaining. That's where you'll get an understanding of it.

I think it's just being proactive to get there. You know, the software tool, we do a lot of work with the sell-side firms. A lot of investment banks use our products and it does help with information management between different parties, especially when you have multiple buyers looking at a deal, it can get pretty intense trying to answer everybody's requests.

So it helps with the driving efficiency. When you look at a people-focused approach. It really goes down to the principles of each respected organization. They gotta be aligned. They gotta be putting the people first from the employees, understanding that, hey, there's employees, there's the customers. And each organization has their unique capability and approach to creating value for the customer.

What is that going to look like when it comes together? What's that go to market? Can we start outlining that, go to market together and know what's going to be the key steps for us to make that successful, and that leads to this end state? Can we bring that end state to the very front end of the process?

 Because when you go through this major change management, that's going to happen, which is likely going to be the largest for that company selling that they've ever experienced.

There is going to be tons of decisions that need to be made. And if we were looking at, or one organization that's extremely fast and nimble at making decisions and other one is extremely slow, They're going to have some challenges with that process. But I think these are the components that it takes a lot of understanding upfront.

So you can plan for this transaction, but it's built around the people. You're understanding the cultures the very way these organizations do things, how they make decisions, solve problems, and being able to plan what's that execution going to look like that's going to drive success. When you can dig into that, you have a different meaning.

It's not just about that number and check you're getting at the closing table. There's more to it than that.

[00:29:26] Jeffrey Feldberg: Wow. It certainly, once again, just what you're sharing is really a bright light in what is often a dark room when it comes to M&A, we don't really know that whole world and what's been going on. And so Kison, let me ask you this, the pandemic from the coronavirus has really changed the world as we know it. From your world with M&A, with DealRoom with the research that you're doing, what's changed for you as a result of the pandemic?

[00:29:53] Kison Patel: People are still doing deals that an increasing rate, which is interesting, but they're also adopting means to utilize these different tools, to help them operate their deals in a virtual world. I think with that, because there's an increase of deals, it's more competitive. So that's also becoming a factor where organizations really need to figure out their process.

How do they compare the timelines, their ability to go execute, run through the diligence process while plan for the integration in a very tight timeframe when it's one of those auction processes? How do you do that without sacrificing the quality of doing the diligence? You don't miss something that turns into a big costly risk or mistake later?

That's becoming a big challenge and why we seeing organizations being proactive about updating their approach and toolsets that they're using. We're seeing a lot more firms identify their own ways to find proprietary deals, just so that they can have more of those levers and have a mutual timeline that they can work with a company that ultimately produces better results.

You can probably hear from this interview, I'm definitely an advocate of working the principal so that things can come together better when there's a mutual agreement on the right time and consideration just like any other decision we make in life, you have more time, you put more consideration into it.

You're likely to make a better decision than when you do things impulsively.

[00:31:15] Jeffrey Feldberg: Oh for sure. And what I'm also hearing, and it's really consistent with what you're all about as the technology continues to move forward and people adapt to more of a virtual kind of world with more technology coming into it. I like how you, at the beginning, you used the word lifecycle. That DealRoom is an M&A lifecycle management platform.

And just having the tools and the preparation and the organization to manage the life cycle of a deal. That can be a winning factor. That can be a competitive edge. As the marketplace continues to move forward and become more competitive. So Kison, as we begin to wrap up this episode, I get to ask my favorite question, which I ask every single guest on The Sell My Business Podcast.

And here's the question for you, when you think of the movie Back to the Future, you have that magical DeLorean car, which can take you to any point in time. So Kison, imagine that it's tomorrow morning, you look out your window and there it is, a DeLorean car is waiting for you. The door is open, you hop on in, and now you can go to any point in your life. Kison as a child or a teenager, a young adult, whatever the timeframe would be.

What would you be telling yourself in terms of life wisdom or lessons learned, or, hey, do this, but don't do that. What would that look like for you?

[00:32:33] Kison Patel: You know, If I look at over time, learning evolving has, my philosophy today operates on three core principles. I would go back to early professional when I first started and try to teach as much of this stuff at an earlier age, which would be discipline, learning patterns, and empathy.

With discipline, it's the ability to get comfortable doing the things that are otherwise uncomfortable. It's from the moment you get out of bed, have this drive to execute. It's time to play the game. You're pushing on the things that you need to do, and you have the discipline doesn't matter if you like it or not.

You're going to need to create a desire to do it because the people that have the desired parallel with the effort and they're the ones that get the results. So if you have to do it artificially, you better do it and create that desire. So you can put in the effort and execute. Like that ability really needs to be there front and center.

It's gotta be conscious, create that discipline. And then the learning pattern is looking at the situations that we always encounter, the problem-solving, decision-making. We need to be able to learn as quick as possible. And it's not just one channel there's a pattern whether it's through doing a series of research online with resources, your Wikipedia of long posts, et cetera.

To the long-form, actually reading books, people saying, I want to read books, they gotta read books. There's people that put a lifetime of wisdom in a book, and you could learn from that. So looking at the long-form contents approach and then also subject matter experts, which is why we liked doing interviews.

We liked identifying these experts out there and learning from their experiences. That's also really valuable. That's a key important thing. It's really important to have that ability, develop your neuroplasticity so you can learn quickly. And then last but not least is empathy.

I think this is a really important one that I didn't realize was how valuable it is for leadership, developing professional, personal relationships. of times we enter these meetings and conversations and we have our agenda and what we want to get out of it. And we sort of have the small talk to, we could push our agenda, but really being able to put that aside, even when it goes to enter conversations where we feel, where the subject matter expert in the conversation, putting that aside, assuming what you know is wrong or, you know nothing and listen, be able to spend the time to understand how the other person thinks, how they feel, why they feel that way.

Understand what are their goals? What are their challenges? How can you align yourself to help them? And that's been the other principle that really helps you drive your forward build healthy relationships with people that just leads to good ways of collaborating and success overall.

[00:35:16] Jeffrey Feldberg: Kison, I really liked that with the discipline and the learning pattern. And when you throw the empathy in there, that was certainly unexpected, but as you walked me through that, that just made so much sense. And I think for our listeners out there, what a wonderful model that we can take from Kison and immediately apply that to our life in terms of how we look at things and how we experience life and particular with that, empathy that you put in there at the end, I think it was just so impactful. So thank you. Thank you for sharing that.

Kison, I'm going to put this in the show notes, so it'll literally be a point and click for our listeners. If somebody would like to reach you, what would be the best place online that they can find you?

[00:35:55] Kison Patel: They could find me. Well, if they're interested in learning about M&A we have a website, mascience.com that has tons of content and variety of things. I'm usually on LinkedIn, which is Kison K I S O N Patel.

[00:36:07] Jeffrey Feldberg: Terrific. And again, for our listeners, we'll make this easy for you come to the show notes and you'll just point and click and you will take it to the LinkedIn or to the MA science website. So Kison, we're going to officially wrap up this episode and I really want to thank you so much for taking part of your day and spending it with us here on The Sell My Business Podcast.

And as we close things out, please stay healthy and safe.

[00:36:27] Kison Patel: My pleasure. I enjoyed the conversation.

[00:36:29] Sharon S.: The Deep Wealth Experience was definitely a game-changer for me.

[00:36:32] Lyn M.: This course is one of the best investments you will ever make because you will get an ROI of a hundred times that. Anybody who doesn't go through it will lose millions.

[00:36:42] Kam H.: If you don't have time for this program, you'll never have time for a successful liquidity

[00:36:47] Sharon S.: It was the best value of any business course I've ever taken. The money was very well spent.

[00:36:53] Lyn M.: Compared to when we first began, today I feel better prepared, but in some respects, may be less prepared, not because of the course, but because the course brought to light so many things that I thought we were on top of that we need to fix.

[00:37:09] Kam H.: I 100% believe there's never a great time for a business owner to allocate extra hours into his or her week or day. So it's an investment that will yield results today. I thought I will reap the benefit of this program in three to five years down the road. But as soon as I stepped forward into the program, my mind changed immediately.

[00:37:31] Sharon S.: There was so much value in the experience that the time I invested paid back so much for the energy that was expended.

[00:37:42] Lyn M.: The Deep Wealth Experience compared to other programs is the top. What we learned is very practical. Sometimes you learn stuff that it's great to learn, but you never use it. The stuff we learned from Deep Wealth Experience, I believe it's going to benefit us a boatload.

[00:37:55] Kam H.: I've done an executive MBA. I've worked for billion-dollar companies before. I've worked for smaller companies before I started my business. I've been running my business successfully now for getting close to a decade. We're on a growth trajectory. Reflecting back on the Deep Wealth, I knew less than 10% what I know now, maybe close to 1% even.

[00:38:13] Sharon S.: Hands down the best program in which I've ever participated. And we've done a lot of different things over the years. We've been in other mastermind groups, gone to many seminars, workshops, conferences, retreats, read books. This was so different. I haven't had an experience that's anything close to this in all the years that we've been at this.

It's five-star, A-plus.

[00:38:40] Kam H.: I would highly recommend it to any super busy business owner out there.

Deep Wealth is an accurate name for it. This program leads to deeper wealth and happier wealth, not just deeper wealth. I don't think there's a dollar value that could be associated with such an experience and knowledge that could be applied today and forever.

[00:38:59] Jeffrey Feldberg: Are you leaving millions on the table?

Please visit www.deepwealth.com/success to learn more.

If you're not on my email list, you'll want to be. Sign up at www.deepwealth.com/podcast. And if you enjoyed this episode of the Sell My Business podcast, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Reviews help me reach new listeners, grow the show and continue to create content that you'll enjoy.

As we close out this episode, a heartfelt thank you for your time. And as always, please stay healthy and safe.

This podcast is brought to you by Deep Wealth. 

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Enjoy the interview!