Pete Mohr On How The 5 P's Are Your Gateway To Business Success And Prosperity (#129)

[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.

 Pete Mohr helps entrepreneurs transform their frustrations into freedoms by using a variety of frameworks that help them cut through the chaos and overwhelm of running a business. With over 25 years as a business owner, he's refined many of his tips, tools, and techniques in the trenches within his own businesses. You own your business. It shouldn't own, you. It's time to start using frameworks that allow you to have a turnkey business so that you can live a life you deserve.

Welcome to The Sell My Business Podcast. And I have a terrific episode and guests lined up for you and for all your business owners out there, I have a question. Do you have those golden handcuffs?

You know what I'm talking about? You started a business for a lifestyle and for some freedom. But before, you know, it, your business is really controlling you and the business owns you. Not the other way around. Today with our guests, we're going to be talking all about that and you're going to love him because he is a fellow business owner.

He's a former broker. So he's really speaking from the trenches, but let me not get ahead of myself. Pete, welcome to The Sell My Business Podcast. An absolute pleasure to have you with us and Pete, there's always a story behind the story. What's your story? What got you from where you were to where you are today?

[00:02:59] Pete Mohr: Well, we only have a few minutes and it's been a lot of years, Jeffrey. So you know, I've been a lifelong entrepreneur. I started young. I only ever worked for somebody who is actually my dad's best friend for about six months coming out of university and his name was Peter as well. And you know, I love Peter loved his business, really cool business, but I also did find out that, working for somebody else really wasn't for me.

And I've never looked back, I bought my first franchise. It was what I could afford at the time as a 23-year-old kid. I'd had some other little small businesses before that going through university and what have you, but you know, this was my first real business. So I bought a franchise flew down to Atlanta, Georgia.

I learned all about it, did my training came back and I'm like, okay, what did I just get myself into? And then, built that business and owned it for 15 years. It's still going strong today, which is great to see. During that time we also bought another franchise, which was a cleaning company.

And we bought it, it was underperforming. It only had 30 clients and we built it up to 300 clients and we sold it. And I became a business broker, went back to school, took my executive MBA thinking I might go into work. Maybe now I should go and work for bigger business, learn what they do. Take it back to my own business later.

But that was in 2009 when the crash happened. And there wasn't a whole lot of work for grads at that time of MBAs. So I jumped back into business became a business broker, a realtor, and helped other people buy and sell businesses, which is where I found one of the businesses that I still own.

It's called Shoetopia. We owned shoe stores here in Canada. It's shoetopia.ca and it's been a great 12-year period since we've had those. And there's been some ups and downs and some stories along there too, but that's the journey of an entrepreneur. And I wouldn't change it for a minute, you know, I've had a lot of other businesses and startups and different things along the way and love what I do right now.

Cause I don't spend a lot of time in my shoe stores these days. I've got them set up where I want them to be and they're running in that turnkey sort of fashion. And I spend most of my time having great conversations with people like you Jeffrey these days and coaching clients.

And I have my own podcast too called The Simplifying Entrepreneurship Podcast.. But love working and talking business and love working with other entrepreneurs, trying to help them free themselves up. And like you said, in the intro, you own your business, it shouldn't own you. And if you're feeling like your business is owning you, then there's always some work to be done.

[00:05:24] Jeffrey Feldberg: Wow, Pete so much there and a lot to unpack, but before we do. I'm just curious, curiosity got the better of me, just a trip down memory lane. Let's go back to when you were a business broker, because as you know, here at Deep Wealth and the Deep Wealth Experience, this is our wheelhouse of preparing for a liquidity event.

And that's really what the focus is. If you can think back to those days, because I'm sure you saw it all. Maybe we can look at both sides of the coin here, the common mistakes that you saw business owners make when they went to sell the business. And then the ones that really did it well, they hit it out of the park, what they did well.

So I'll leave it to you where you want to start with that, but we'd love to hear some of your insights from back then.

[00:06:06] Pete Mohr: Yeah I won't spend too much time cause I know you guys have covered all of this ton of times work through a lot of things, but a couple of things that make me think, but one is that most people thought that they would just get a check and they'd be out of their business.

And that's not often the way that it actually happens. Through the negotiations and the different stuff, there's just, there's much more to it than that. It's not just that usually here's your check.

See you later. So that was a big one. Another one was this idea around well, their own opinion of what their business was worth versus what we determined it to be worth after, looking through the books, going through all the different stuff, doing the comparatives, all of those things often, weren't all that close.

Which was interesting. You know-how, you know, people have a certain valuation in their mind just like you do in your house or anything else, you've got this valuation and then you come in and it's like, Hmm. after we've done some work here, it's wow, I don't know that we're quite there.

So what are we going to do about that? Because if this is your magic number, we've got some work to do and you know what? That's going to take time to do that work in order to set it up so that you can get this magic number that you want. And sometimes that timeframe is a little bit longer than they're willing to put up with.

So that becomes the negotiation. If you don't want to put in that time and you don't want to do this stuff, then how much are you willing to sacrifice off the sale? And so it's always these little negotiations, the back and forth between the buyers and sellers and what does everybody want and really finding out where we can marry this, that I think was in my opinion, one of the exciting things and one of the interesting strategic because I love strategy.

So one of the interesting strategic things around that. It's like trying to get in the heads of the buyers and the sellers, and really digging out what they truly want out of this deal. And how can we mesh this together in order to make something happen for the both of them and have them both win?

[00:08:10] Jeffrey Feldberg: Peter, I love that and it really goes to what you do today with the simplifying entrepreneurship, finding that clarity. And so before we dive into that, we were talking about what not to do, which I found both personal and business, knowing what not to do oftentimes can be more important than knowing what to do, but flip it.

So back in the broker days, You must've seen some businesses that they just did everything right. And things worked well, And they got top dollar in terms of enterprise value. So what would be maybe a few of the one, two, or three things that you commonly saw out there of what businesses were doing right?

[00:08:47] Pete Mohr: Well, It rules around our conversation around the five five-piece really, you know in having, I'll give you quickly the five-piece because it really rolls around this, having their promise aligned with the right product, the right process, and the right people. When you get those in alignment, you have the right profit.

And once you have all of those five things in alignment, that's when your business is going to get maximum dollar, you're going to have the right product that's aligned back to the promise that you're making to your clients. Your processes are all in place, and this is a big one. And one that takes some time.

 If they aren't cheaper. So I don't know Jeffrey, but there's been a lot of owners out there that their processes are all up in their head. They know how to get everything done, but nobody else does, you know, those owners, and the problem there is, it doesn't become a sellable business then, because somebody else has to come in and know all that stuff.

And how are you going to translate it over to them? And if they can't, if they don't know that stuff, then what's the value of what they're buying. So all of the process really big piece. All of the people really big piece, not only the clients. Yeah, I break people into three, there's the clients, your ideal clients, there's the team.

And then there's all of the other people that help deliver your promise. So your outsource suppliers or wholesalers, any of those partners out there? We have shoe stores. So our brands and our shoe stores are I consider partners. Our salespeople that we work with those brands and stuff like that.

So having the right relationships in place for all three of those are so important. How much nepotism is in the business, if your business is entirely run by your family and you, as the principal is going to leave, is everybody else going to vacate as well? That's a problem because all of the power, the intellectual power of the business may be voided.

And what does that do? It voids literally zeroes off of your price.

[00:10:48] Jeffrey Feldberg: Yeah. It's crazy and for all our listeners out there really hope you're paying attention with Pete and his 5 P's because I guess Pete, you're the sixth P in the equation here, as I think about this, but really the promise, the product, the process, the people, that's the foundation for the profit. And if you're not having that, then the profit isn't going to be happening.

And really Pete, I just love how you separate that out because going back to what you and I were talking about earlier, particularly on the people side, does your business run with you? And that's all people and that as business owners, that's our biggest challenge. Does the business run without us and unfortunately more times than not the answer's no. No, it doesn't.

[00:11:33] Pete Mohr: It's crazy. We were just chatting before we hopped on. I know you have a place in Florida. And I was saying I'm going to Florida this week too. And I told my team about six weeks ago. I said, you know, I think I'm going to go to Florida for a month. And what did they say back to me?

Have a good trip.

[00:11:49] Jeffrey Feldberg: Nice.

[00:11:52] Pete Mohr: So, you know what I've set the business up that way and can stuff happen. Yeah. Stuff can happen. And I'll tell you where this all you know, years ago, I was telling you earlier on about having those early businesses. And I had a young family and you know, I did have a manager in place at that time for our bathroom remodeling business.

And he knew I was going away with my family. We were taking the family to Florida. We were going to go to Disneyland. We're going for 10 days. He actually quit three days before we were leaving on vacation. So, What did I do? I drove my family down because we had committed to driving down. Cause we didn't have enough money at the time to fly all the kids and all this stuff.

So I drove the kids down to Florida. I dropped them off at Disney. I hopped on a plane in Orlando. I flew back to Ottawa where my business was. I stayed for six out of the seven days that they were down there. I flew back down, had one day in Florida with them, and then drove them back home.

[00:12:49] Jeffrey Feldberg: Wow. Oh my goodness.

[00:12:50] Pete Mohr: You know, that's a little quick story that when I did have a manager in place. Can stuff go wrong still? Yeah. Stuff can still go wrong and you know what, we're still the owners of the business. And we still have to be ultimately accountable for things like that. But if that kind of stuff's happening to you all the time, not once in 20 years, then you've got some work to do. If you're feeling those kinds of things that are like, why does this keep happening to me?

Why does this keep happening to me? It's because some of these things aren't aligned and you haven't got your business running on rails and when your business is running on rails, those kinds of things happen, they happen. Sure. But usually, they're not as big as that. And you can deal with them in a much more sort of structured fashion that just doesn't seem as big.

[00:13:41] Jeffrey Feldberg: And so Pete, let's talk about that because I know this is really one of the areas and I'm going to use two F words that are near and dear to you, frustration and freedom because you're transforming, owner's frustrations into freedom. So if I'm a business owner and I'm resonating with what you're saying, Yeah.

That's me, you know what? I can't leave the business. And if I would have booked that family trip, guess what, Pete, I would have been doing the same thing. And I'm now working with you as my business coach, what are you telling me as a business owner? Where do I start? And what do I do to begin that process of not having the business reliant on me?

[00:14:18] Pete Mohr: Well, we kind of go in. I like my little words and catchphrases and stuff, but, you know, we kind of go in and we do what I call the three A's. We assess we address, and then we advance. So we're going to assess where you're at with things, we're going to address the things that need to be addressed so that you can advance into doing what you want to do.

And I think that's a big thing. When leaders are cramped down into doing the things that maybe they're good at, but they don't really want to be doing them. So I call it, love it or leave it. So with that kind of stuff, you should be working, especially as the leader of the organization, you should be working in the areas that you truly love and are most beneficial for your business, and by the way, so should everybody else, but you've got to get to that point and then you have to help your team members, all those other people get to that point too, because that's when you have a really powerful business that everybody's aligned. Everybody knows what they're doing. They're working in these Lovett zones. You know, other people will call it your unique ability, like Dan Sullivan from Strategic Coach, we'll call it unique ability or your zone of genius or whatever the case is.

But really having everybody working in those as much as they possibly can just bring so much more to the business. So how do we do that? First of all, we need to get you there and we need to know what it is that we're going to start parsing off and how we again, we go back to the P's, we need to have the right process in place.

It's got to come out of your head and onto video, out of your head and onto paper, whatever the case is, we have to lay out these processes so that you can then hand them over to somebody else. And the biggest part is assign accountability to them because when these things are happening and decisions are being made at let's call them lower levels of the organizational chart, it frees up your time.

There's only so many decisions that you can make as a leader in a day. Like we only have certain amounts of decision-making qualities every day. And if you're making them on lower-level decisions, you don't have enough time, energy, or passion to make them on the ones that you'd need to be when you're leading your business.

[00:16:35] Jeffrey Feldberg: Makes a lot of sense. And again for our listeners, I hope you're picking up on these things because Pete you're walking the talk, you're simplifying things. You have the five P's and now you have the three A's and you're just taking these things and just making it so simple. Pete, let me ask you this a little bit of a topical question here.

So again, as a business owner, I've bought into what you're saying. Okay, got it. I'm going to begin that process of writing everything down or recording everything down. I'm committed to bringing people in that. I can effectively fire myself. But as we record this episode where really in what people are calling The Great Resignation, people are leaving companies.

It's hard to find people, talent is expensive.

[00:17:17] Pete Mohr: What an opportunity.

[00:17:19] Jeffrey Feldberg: What an opportunity. So what am I doing? To really take advantage of this on the one hand. And I guess I can talk myself out of this. I was going to say, how can I afford top talent, but how can you not afford top talent? I know this is going through people's minds as they think about this.

So I would love your insights on this.

[00:17:34] Pete Mohr: You can't afford not to pay what people are worth. That's the base of it, but not everybody's in it just for the money. And you have to understand that people I mean, these days, we run business in our shoe stores are in small town, you know, what I'm like, I'm just going to put it into the framework of our shoe stores.

Like my management team could go to work in a bigger city, bigger metropolis for more money than what I'm paying them. And they know that, and I know that. don't want to. They want to be five minutes from home.

They like what we do. They're all bought in. Like, I mean, this is that idea of, do you believe that why we start everything with is your promise aligned when you buy into the promise and the leaders communicating the promise at all times and if they buy into what you're doing. Then that's a big piece.

What sort of flexibility are you offering them? Some of them want four-day work weeks. It's okay, you can work four day work weeks. I mean, things aren't as cut and dry as they used to be. And they don't need to be in most cases. So you, it's like that big thing of trying to find out what it is they want and are they aligned because if they aren't aligned with you in the first place, it doesn't matter how much money you're going to pay them.

They're not going to stay. And for me, I look at every team member I have, whether it's a salesperson on the floor, whether it's our bookkeeper and management, marketing, and all that sort of stuff. Every one of them is a crucial piece to what we deliver to our clients. I mean, retail is one of those businesses where you often find a lot of turnovers.

We don't turn our team. Our team stays and if they have left, we have two people working with us right now that have come back to us. After trying something different, not even in retail, and saying, I just love the flexibility of my job. I just love what we do. I love working here. I don't really can't.

Sometimes they can't even put their finger on it. It's just like, I want to come back to work at Shoetopia and it's awesome. Then we know that we're aligning all of this stuff right. And that things are working the way they should. So how are you doing that? And often it's got to do with improper communication from the leadership as the people that are working on the team don't really know what their piece of the puzzle is. They don't really feel as though they have authority. And when we talk about assigning accountability, people want accountability. They want to make the decisions, they want to feel as though they're a piece of the puzzle.

And if you're not allowing them to do that, they're going to leave.

It's amazing and with the pandemic. Again, there's always two sides to the coin, but the pandemic for all the negative, and our hearts go out to the people that were so adversely affected by the pandemic. On the flip side, though, we now have remote work. That's where the great resignation came from.

People were leaving terrible bosses and long commutes. Because they wanted meaning and purpose in their life. And so Pete, what I'm hearing you say, when you get your first P down, when you get your promise down of really, what your mission is, what are you doing out there? Why are you different?

What are you about? That you can then go and attract the kind of individual who wants to work in a company with those values that would resonate with them. And you're just playing off of that. And one leads into the other. And so let's revisit something that you were talking about with the mindset, the mastery, the momentum, and you take the overlap of those three and you're getting to the empowered entrepreneur.

So can you talk to us about that? What is that all about and why is that important? Why should I care about that as a business owner?

Well, If you're a business owner, you want to surround yourself with that. You want to surround yourself with the mindset and the momentum and all the mastery. You've got to become a master of being an entrepreneur, not just a manager, there's a difference. A lot of people that maybe are new business owners were great managers.

Taking manager into owner is a transformation. And that transformation is, what, if you're going to manage every little thing in your business, then you're never really going to be a great owner. And you're not going to be able to allow yourself some of the freedoms that we're talking about and you're going to misplace and not align with some of the opportunities that are in front of you as well.

Cause you're busy managing the business and you know what? There are wonderful managers out there. Awesome managers. I am not a good manager. I'm a good leader. And I think it's understanding where your position is because if you're a true manager and you're the owning the business, and you're a true manager, then you may have to look for somebody that's going to help you with the visionary side of your business, and if that's your zone of genius and that's what you truly love to do that sort of stuff, then just understand that's what you love to do, but you still need to have this other spot that's got to be filled in your roster. And all of these different things aligned so that you have the best business that you can have, whether that's for yourself or whether that's because you want to sell your business because the new person wants to buy a business that's running on rails.

They want to buy that business that they can step into. I call it the turnkey business so that they can really step in and they can sit down at their desk or whatever the case is. And feel as though the business is going to run itself for the first couple of months until they get their flavor until they get their touch until they understand a little bit more about it, all that kind of stuff.

And if your business isn't quite there yet, and you're owning the business, then you just have to shuffle around these things a little bit and take a sort of an overall look at this to see where you position and how everybody else is positioned, because it's often the biggest thing that promise that starts everything off.

I love putting a promise into these three simple steps, which is what do you do? How do you do it better than anyone else? What problem are you solving for your client? The second thing is how are you doing it uniquely compared to your competitors? If they're solving the same problem.

And the third one really revolves around what does their life look like after they've used your services? Once you've taken them through the transformation, what does it look like? So when we take it back to the idea that the empowered entrepreneur is in the middle, and you have mindset and mastery and momentum all around that, and we have clarity and confidence and community around that too.

Clarity is where it all starts. The community of who else is involved. All of the people involved, all of your mentors, all of your team, all of your clients. And all of that, the confidence in business owners, we talked about decision-making and all that sort of stuff.

So important that we continue to have our confidence so that we can go ahead and make the decisions that we need to make. That's what business owners do they make decisions every day.

[00:24:23] Jeffrey Feldberg: Yeah. I love that. And really when you take what you're saying and you're applying it, right now.

From a business owner to a customer, but let's take a step back for a moment because it's the exact same thing, Pete, when you're thinking about a liquidity event, which could be a partial exit, a full exit, something in between, maybe you're going public, whatever that may be as an example in the Deep Wealth Experience, our 9-step roadmap, step number two x-Factors.

What differentiates you from your competition? What makes you a world-class in what you're doing? What problem are you solving? But then when you take that into step number three, and that's really mastering the art of thinking like a buyer. What problem are you solving for your buyer? How are you making their life better?

Why are you so world-class in one particular area that your buyer not only wants the business but is going to pay a premium because you've had the clarity and the ability to communicate that. And so for the business owners out there, just think about this for a moment. When you started your business, did you start it with not the beginning in mind, but the exit in mind?

No one lives forever. What's it going to look like for you? Maybe it's going to be a family business. Maybe it isn't. But if you don't know where you're heading big picture-wise, what that final exit is going to look like, then how in the heck are you going to run the business day to day? You're not going to have alignment.

So, Pete, what would you say in your coaching process and when you're simplifying entrepreneurship and you have a business owner who perhaps has lost sight of what that exit is, and they're just bogged down in the day-to-day. How do you help them get that clarity back in place so that yes, at one point they can have a liquidity event, whatever that looks like or means for them, and get back their freedom and lose that frustration and all those good things that come with that?

[00:26:18] Pete Mohr: You know Jeffrey, it all starts with what you want out of life, really does. Every conversation when I start with a client. We usually start off our first conversation with I've developed a plan and I'm happy to share with anybody here to we didn't really talk about it, but it's called the one-page planner.

And the one-page planner is a series of one-page documents that goes from your life to your ten-year structure, one-year structure, quarter, week, day. But basically, it's designed for entrepreneurs and understanding what you truly want. And that's the whole thing with the business. I think a lot of people, 10 years have passed and they look back and they're like, oh my God I got into business 10 years ago.

I can't believe how quick it is. I didn't see my kids grow up. I didn't, all this stuff we didn't do this. All I've done is work 70 hours a week. If you're feeling that way, it's time to reset and go back and look at those reasons why you started your business because you started your business.

Everybody starts a business. Everybody buys a business. Every single person starts or buys a business because they want a better life.

So what does that life truly look like? So we got to step back a little bit and understand what we want out of life, our relationships, our wealth, our health, our mission, our purpose, those kinds of things, and dig, it's a little bit lofty, let's say at that level, but then we take it down into structures so that we can actually accomplish some of those things.

You know, we talked about, I wanted to go away for a month well that was on my plan. It didn't just happen. It kinda did. But all along, I've known that's what I wanted to do. So all of these different things that you want to do, you have to put into place with a structure and a lot of business owners just have their head down and they're like, okay, what's the next marketing campaign?

What's the next new product. And they don't even think about their lives, but the business is there to support your life. You're not there to support the business. It's gotta support your life as the entrepreneur. You're not working for the business like the rest of your team is. That's the difference between being an entrepreneur and in working for someone else.

And it's not for everybody. I told you about the risks, like having to fly back and lose my family vacation. You know what, here's another one we had to sell our cottage because we had some bad stuff go down with one of our businesses. That's not fun, but there are lots of rewards as well.

And some of those kinds of things, it's just such an interesting way of doing business. And there's a reason why there's only sort of 7 to 10% of the people that are small business owners because not everybody's okay with a lot of that stuff that we've just talked about.

It's a choice. And I think that's what we need to look at and you need to go back. If you're at that sort of stage, you need to go back and really determine what it is you want out of your life, so that you can set your business up to deliver that. And sometimes that's exiting. Sometimes that's Hey, I'm really ready just to take it to the next step.

I've bought and sold businesses. I've exited businesses. So not always are you going to have a business for your entire life and that's okay. But knowing what you want as the next step is an also important piece if you're ready to think about moving on from your business. Why am I doing this?

[00:29:23] Jeffrey Feldberg: And Pete, what's beautiful about the preparation which is really, if you want to simplify our conversation, it really comes down to preparation of everything that we've been speaking about. A business running without you, getting clarity, what your vision is, what your mission is. And with that preparation, it's really the gift that keeps on giving.

And you and I spoke about this because imagine for a moment your business runs without you. It's fully prepared. Congratulations. You have a thriving and profitable business. So what do you want to do with it? Do you want to maybe keep it forever? Do you want to sell it tomorrow? You have a choice and the point is you have a choice, but Pete, going back to something that you said because it's sometimes not so intuitive.

It's counter-intuitive and entrepreneurship combined with leadership. That's really where we're at. Let's leave the managing for somebody else because there needs to be a mindset change. If the mindset and the traditional mindset is, hey, the harder I work, the more successful I'll become. And I'd love to hear your thoughts on this notion that when you take time for yourself, you're taking time out of the business. You're relaxing. You're not thinking about the business per se chances are, you'll get some of your best business ideas in that downtime that will take your business to a whole other level.

Maybe even create a market disruption that you never would have had if it was just nose to the grindstone working these 80-hour weeks with no rest, no break. Talk to us about that. We'd love to hear your thoughts.

[00:30:54] Pete Mohr: Yeah part of the one-page planner that I was talking about, I've got some setup times and I frame it as free time focused time and flex time. And you need to have some of each, and if you're in retail, you can also include one more F which is floor time. You actually have to spend some time on the floor as well.

And whether that's in manufacturing or whether you're selling insurance, you have to actually sell insurance every now and then, too. So as owners, we need to have floor time in whatever industry you're in, but setting it up is free time is such an important piece of your mental health.

Think about health for example, if you, as the owner of the business are struggling mentally or physically, how well are you going to lead your business? It's ultimately the most important thing for your business is that you stay both mentally and physically healthy. The most important thing.

And if it isn't already think about the change that would make for your business, if your mind and your body was set up to live its maximum every day, when you're in your focus time. So cause when you're focusing and you have that mental energy and you have the physical stamina to focus, holy cow, how powerful are we?

It's whoa, we can get a lot done in a short period of time. And then the flex time is the time that you're either using to enhance your focus time or enhance your free time. It's that sort of in between time and just understanding what that means is an important thing. When you think about the structure.

And so flex time, I try not to book myself any more than three to four things in a given day., Like this interview is one. I had another interview earlier in the day, and I had a coaching earlier that I was coaching earlier in the day. And the rest of the time is flex time around that. Because if you're back to back to back to back, you're not giving yourself the mental space to do what you need to do in order to move the thing ahead.

[00:32:53] Jeffrey Feldberg: And I love that Pete and the irony around all of this, particularly on the mental health and mental health has really, as it should be front and center now where, before it was more in the background, the irony of the whole situation when you're prepared. When you have that clarity, when you do these one-pagers that you're talking about, you know, where you're heading, what you're doing, when the business runs without you, your mental health is taken care of because you're removing the unnecessary stress.

Maybe you're stressed out because you choose to, that's, a whole different conversation, but you don't have to because you have people taking care of things for you, and you're giving yourself some of that flex time and just that enjoyment of life and why you got into this whole world of business in the first place.

So I really love how you position that in what you're talking about in terms of doing that.

[00:33:43] Pete Mohr: You know Jeffery, one other quick thing there is that the way you layout your free time. People are used to working Monday to Friday and taking Saturday and Sunday off. That's sort of the typical. But you're an entrepreneur, you control that. We chatted a little bit earlier before we hopped on live here.

Typically I work six days a week and take one day off and then I take a whole week off every month. So I work three weeks like that because I like to stay in the flow and I'm good with that. It feels comfortable to me, but then I take a week off. And so now I'm taking a month off next month for the most part.

I'm going to inject a couple of things that I just have to get in within that month of coaching clients and stuff like that. That I have commitments with, but everything else I've sorta turned off for the month. And so how can you align your free time? Cause that's the beauty of being an entrepreneur.

That's some of the freedom that you enjoy. You control your own schedule, somebody else isn't controlling it. So think about how you can maneuver and manipulate. When are you best? I start my day at 5:30 in the morning. I'm focused in the morning. So later in the day, I don't want to be doing focused work.

How are you structuring that stuff? And you are able to do that as an entrepreneur. That's one of the benefits.

[00:34:54] Jeffrey Feldberg: Absolutely. And with technology and now the social norms have changed because of the pandemic doing this remotely. Granted, most of what we're talking about is for what we'll call knowledge workers. If you're in manufacturing or in the plant or something, that's a whole different story, but for knowledge workers and just being out there in terms of thought leaders and entrepreneurs, founders, the technology, there's no excuse to not be able to do this.

You could be anywhere in the world at any time. Just doing this. And it's now socially accepted where it wasn't before. So all the gates are opening. You have green lights just to do this, and it's a choice. So make the right choice.

So, Pete, let me ask you this we're at the point in the podcast where we're starting to wrap things up and I have one of my favorite questions, now you shared offline that you listened to a few episodes. So you have a bit of a competitive advantage here, but we'll go through it anyway. And here's the question, imagine the movie Back to the Future where you have the magical DeLorean car that can take you to any point in time. So it's tomorrow morning, you look outside your window Pete and lo and behold, it's the DeLorean car.

The door is open and it's waiting for you to hop in. And you're now going to go to any point in your life, Pete, as a child or a teenager, a young adult, whatever the case would be. What are you telling your younger self in terms of lessons learned or life wisdom or, hey, Pete, do this or don't do that. What would that look like for you?

[00:36:23] Pete Mohr: I love this one and I just saw a DeLorean the other day, as interesting as that is. You don't see too many of them anymore, but I'd go back to simple times, simple times and that's, sitting at my grandparents' table at their farm having a roast beef dinner with my family and my grandparents as a kid growing up and enjoying some time with them and laughs and conversation and the wood stove burning and game a Euchre after.

And good fond memories of family and relationships. And I mean, we've talked a lot Jeffrey, about people, whether it's your team, whether it's your family, whether it's your clients. I like to surround myself with people that I want to be around. And I can't be around my grandparents anymore, and my parents are getting older and just gone through some cancers and different things like that.

And so I find myself as much as we're chatting about this. I find myself reminiscing a lot about yesteryear, but very anxious and very excited about what's ahead. I reminisce about those things, but that's where it ends. I don't go on about it. It's like, hey, I'd love to do, I'd love to have a meal with my grandparents again.

That would be really cool, but ultimately I'm a very future-focused person. And I'm one of the people that feel that our future is very bright and very forward and abundant. And I'm anxious to live a long life and I'm anxious to see what's ahead. So I'm just as interested to take it you know, a hundred years down the road.

[00:37:57] Jeffrey Feldberg: I love that. And so many takeaways from that, Pete, and one big takeaway that I'm hearing you say is really enjoy the present moment. And as you're sharing your story, what was running through my mind is if we took a snapshot if we took or today a digital picture, but we took a picture of what we would consider an ordinary moment, whatever that would be.

And then we fast-forwarded 30 years and we looked back at that picture. If there are people in that picture, I suppose some of those people may not be with us today and times have changed. And as people, we've changed and we will look back at that picture of that today, we would just consider an ordinary moment, not even giving it a second thought.

And we would say, wow, those were the days what I would do to be able to have another day with those people or another day back in the day like that. But from what you're saying, it's here right now for us to just enjoy it, relish the moment, the present moment, and make the most of it. So I think that's some terrific wisdom to be sharing with everyone.

[00:38:58] Pete Mohr: The future is just something that we can think about. And the past is something we've already done. It's all about now.

[00:39:05] Jeffrey Feldberg: It's all about the present moment, all about now. Speaking of the now, in our show notes for our listeners, I'm going to have all your links. So all the resources of where people can find different things, but Pete, if someone wants to reach you online, what would be the best place or the best way that they can do this?

[00:39:22] Pete Mohr: Easiest way really is to Google Simplifying Entrepreneurship that's my business, simplifyingentrepreneurship.com, and my podcast. Best social channel really I'm on LinkedIn, Pete Mohr. And you can email me at pete[at]mohr[dot]coach. com.

[00:39:37] Jeffrey Feldberg: It doesn't get any easier. Thanks for being so transparent and putting that out there. Pete, as we wrap up this episode, a heartfelt thank you for spending part of your day with us here on The Sell My Business Podcast. And as always, please stay healthy and safe.

[00:39:50] Pete Mohr: It's been a pleasure. Make it a great day.

[00:39:52] Sharon S.: The Deep Wealth Experience was definitely a game-changer for me.

[00:39:56] 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.

[00:40:06] Kam H.: If you don't have time for this program, you'll never have time for a successful liquidity

[00:40:10] Sharon S.: It was the best value of any business course I've ever taken. The money was very well spent.

[00:40:17] 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.

[00:40:32] 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.

[00:40:55] 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.

[00:41:05] 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.

[00:41:18] 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.

[00:41:37] 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.

[00:42:03] 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.

[00:42:22] 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. 

Click here to subscribe to The Sell My Business Podcast to save time and effort. You’ll automatically receive the latest episodes in your favorite podcast app.

Your liquidity event is the most important financial transaction of your life. You have one chance to get it right, and you better make it count. 

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 50% to over 100% of their deal value in the buyer's pocket and don't even know it.

Our founders said "no" to a 7-figure offer and "yes" to a 9-figure offer less than two years later. 

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? 

Are you leaving millions on the table? 

Learn how the 90-day Deep Wealth Experience and our 9-step roadmap helps you capture the maximum value for your liquidity event.  

Click here to book your free exploratory strategy session.

Enjoy the interview!