Business Brokerage and SBA Loans with Clint Fiore

0:00Hey there, this is Casey with the M&A Launchpad Podcast. I want to invite you to our next conference, May 2, 2026 in Houston, Texas. Now, this is a one day high impact event for anyone serious about mergers and acquisitions. And it's our third one. It's going to be huge. You get to hear from top industry experts about sourcing deals, running new diligence, structuring deals and raising capitals. Plus, you're going to meet our vendors, people that we have used and people that like to help you source fine diligence and get your deal to the finish line. I want to do a special thank you for our podcast listeners. And we're going to offer a limited time discount code launch LAU in CH. This is for a discount on your tickets. Now our past attendees love the conference. We feel like we're going to have a lot of return listeners. If this is your first time, we can't wait to see you there. Mark your calendars May 2, 2026 in Houston. We can't wait to see you. All right, and today's episode we had a reclip fewer who's a friend of ours. And really, you know, dived into what it's like to broker deals, right?

1:01What does it look like for buyers? What does it look like for sellers? And more importantly, what are some of the problems in the industry in this space now? And what is Clint doing to help focus and try to solve those problems? So Casey, what's in your takeaways? You know, I mean, early in my career, I've been broker. I mean, that's pretty much been what I've done as I've done entrepreneurship, you know, and I understand from the level of what it takes to put a deal together. And then to bring a buyer or a seller or somebody's trying to finance together, there's a lot to it. Shroom medicine. And a broker makes good money. But what Clint's been able to do is kind of flip the script, right? Is to come to you and say, Hey, listen, you as a buyer, you pay a fee for me to package a deal, which I have no interest in getting a, I don't get paid for this. I only want to bring you quality. And man, that is a breath of fresh air affairs because I've never heard anybody do that. Oh, sell side brokers, right? But to build a platform and do that stuff, man, Clint just offered some great insight on buying a company ideas about it. Man, that was great. And selling a company, right? And again, transactions happen where both sides get a little bit uncomfortable,

2:04but are both such a reasonable, right? You almost never have the very unreasonable business transaction. And again, we kind of dived into some of those, some of those scenarios and how it works. And again, what it takes to get a deal done. So we'll hop into that on this episode. Welcome to the M&A launch pad podcast with your host, Casey and Ferris with equity launch pad. On this podcast, you will get insights on acquiring investing in and selling profitable businesses in the lower to middle market. Whether you're a business owner, investor or a spa entrepreneur at equity and launch pad, we will provide you with the knowledge, guidance and capital to navigate the world of mergers and acquisitions. Clint, how's it going? Going great. Good to see you guys. Yeah, man, thanks for joining us today. All right. So Clint, your friend, we've known you for years, right? And you know, you obviously come from an extensive background of doing transactions, brokering deals and latously, right, working on delonomy. And so maybe just for the listeners, you want to give a little bit of your background and just kind of your history and what you've done and where you are now.

3:06Yeah. So I kind of, I kind of stumbled into business brokerage about 11 years ago. I was a serial entrepreneur that had started and sold a couple companies and just discovered I like doing deals. And originally I wanted to buy a business. I was striking out as a buyer and I was frustrated by how broken this whole market is. How hard it was to get a deal done. And that's when the light bulb came on of like, I like deals. Other people must be frustrated like I am as a buyer. Maybe I should just help help others, you know, figure this out and make it easier for people. And so that's what I did for about 10 years is started a team that mainly just focused on Texas, sell side representation. So we just did lots of main street and lower mental market deals as a group. And then as you know, about year and a half ago decided to raise money and launch a new platform. And we're now running a company called Delonomy that's scaling across the nation and has kind of an innovative twist on how we facilitate.

4:12Business transactions that takes everything I've learned in the past 10 years and just tries to make it 10 times easier for buyers and sellers to get deals done. Yeah, so maybe you know, this is we wine. So you mentioned you were kind of struggling to find a business, right? Initially and kind of just you felt like the whole experience is broken. What gave you the confidence that you'd not only be able to find a business, you'd be able to find businesses for other people. Right. Because I think that would be the stumbling block for a person that's looking to buy business versus hopping into brokerage. Yeah. Yeah. So it's always about deal flow and it was a it was a challenge. It's always a challenge. And so, but I think success breeds success. And so when I first started as a business broker, I was insecure about it. I was young, inexperienced. And I was like, how is anyone going to let me, you know, broker their business that they took a lifetime to build when I've never broker to deal before. And so I kind of over compensated with education and credentialism and you know, things like that to try to shore up my my confidence.

5:18But I also became a business of praiser. So I got an appraisal certification. I also became a what was called a value builder at the time. I form a consultant that helps people prepare their business for exit. And I was thinking, you know what? I'll at least be able to consult do appraisals while I wait to try to build up my pipeline. And and I thought that those income streams would kind of keep the lights on as I built up deal flow. But what ended up happening is and this has been kind of a a key to my success over the years is I've built up some a pretty good online social media network. And when I first announced I was getting into brokerage. One of my friends from Facebook wanted was like, you know what? I'm moving to Tennessee and I need someone to sell my pest control company. And and then I ended up finding, you know, my first engagement happened within about a week of announcing I was getting into it. And then ended up with a really quick deal by another friend on LinkedIn was looking as a buyer.

6:21And it was like the social media connections were able to to find me the my first seller and my first buyer. I got that deal done super fast. And then it was like once you experience the rush of closing the deal, I just, you know, the momentum started building and people started getting the word out. And once you once you get deals under your belt referrals come in and and it tends to snowball from there. But yeah, I was quickly like, you know what? Screw consulting and appraisals like deals are where it's that I really like doing that. And so only ended up doing very, you know, a pretty small number of paid appraisals and consulting because once that that snowball started rolling on deals, it just continued to pick up and referrals, beget referrals and success story creates a success story. And and that's always kind of kept me busy. Yeah, you know, one of the things that, you know, plays in your favor though is because you know how to value a business.

7:24When you talk to these sellers, right, to help them sell their business, you can get you give them that confidence, right? You can say, hey, man, if you listed that price, you know, you're not one of those brokers. It says, hey, go out. Let's listed it. The what you think it's worth. And let's let bids come in. You're probably giving and being able to give them a good sense of, hey, this is probably a fair range of what you could get on a low and high side. And I bet you that plays a big, big, big role and at least the least favor when you're working with these guys. Yeah, it's extremely important. And I'm getting the appraisal knowledge and credentialing was one of my most recommended moves if you're getting into this industry. Because especially in Main Street, which I would say is the SBA size deals, you know, under 5 million enterprise value. It doesn't do you any good to over price a deal because they always have to appraise anyways. If someone's going to give them SBA loan, an independent appraiser has to get hired by the bank and appraise the business. And buyers literally can't get alone if the deal want to praise.

8:26And so just being able to always look at deals through the eyes of an appraiser has been super helpful. And I can kind of break it down for sellers. I think that's one of my, my strengths is taking the complicated nerd topics of the technical side of business and making it accessible and understandable. To the self-made business owner, which most of them don't come from finance backgrounds. They're just normal people that are good at taking care of customers and employees. And they've never heard of EBITDA. They don't know what all these adbacks and adjustments are. They didn't realize their business may be worth, you know, that you can sell it. And there is real value there, right? Yeah. And so, you know, just I can replace what, you know, their opinion. And most sellers opinion on the value is just either from folklore or what they want, you know, for it to retire at the level they want. But they haven't really been able to look at it through the eyes of a bank or the eyes of an appraiser or a buyer and see what, you know, type of ROI they're looking for.

9:34The debt service ratios, the things that, you know, they need to start thinking about from the other side of the table to make their business attractive. And I can kind of explain that in ways that's easy for them to understand. And the light bulb comes on for them and they get it. And so, you know, often, you know, we'll sell their business right away. But sometimes it's like they just realize, you know what, this business isn't ready yet. But now that I understand how it works, give me a year or two. And I'll get my business looking like it needs to look and we'll come back and sell it then. And I'm always happy to do that. And so I enjoy helping educate the sellers on how valuation works. And if they're ready to go, you know, we give them a very accurate value range. We know it's going to trade in. And if they're ready to get that price, we'll go get it. And if they're not ready, then we'll be ready when they are. So we'll let them go back work on their business. You can get some ideas of how to increase that value I can see, right? Hey, okay, if you're thinking it's worth this, here's what I think you need to go do. How many of those guys that you talk to that you say, hey, go do this.

10:35How many of them come back and do what you've suggested? You know, a decent percentage, but you know, a lot. It's pretty also common that someone will say, okay, well, I'm going to go work on it for a couple of years and then come back. And then they call me back in three or four months. And they're like, I'm not going to change. Like they become self-aware enough that they're like, they just realize it's hard to, you know, there's sometimes it's hard to teach an old dog new tricks. And so it's pretty common. So let's pretend, you know, someone says, Clint, I really want to sell my business for $5 million. And I value their business and I say, man, it's worth about two and a half million dollars, you know. And I say it needs to look like XYZ to get $5 million. But if you want to go make it look like this, you can make it look like that and come back and I'll get you that $5 million. And I'd say some of them go do that. And then some of them eventually just relent and say, you know what, I'm never going to get it there. But I do need to sell for XYZ reasons.

11:39So let's just get get me my two and a half. But what the thing I've always done and will continue to do is I'm never going to just hang a $5 million asking price on a two and a half million dollar value business because that just sets everyone up. It turns off the buyers. You know, they think it's a joke. It makes the listing not sell. It can be a stain on that business's reputation. If you do that and it can really hurt that business owner, if you do that. And I think that's a huge problem in this marketplace is there's brokers out there that are so hungry for for listings and deals that they'll just they'll hang that $5 million asking price on it. And then they're hurting their client because they don't educate the seller and they don't, you know, take the time to set realistic expectations. And so I think that's a critical piece of this whole puzzle. Yeah. And I think I think your business is one of patience, right? I mean, for listeners, what's the average time from you would say from first time you have a conversation with a potential seller to the time that, you know, they're grounded in where their value is and

12:42they're ready to sell. Like are we talking a week or talking six months or talking two years, right? Or is it more than that? Yeah, sometimes more than that. But it's a it's very individualized based on the motivation. And so the first question I always ask when I talk to a seller at any stage is I say, why are you talking to me? You know, like, why are you thinking about selling your business? And that's probably the most important question is that why? Because selling is always a very personal decision. It's usually not a math decision. It's an emotional decision or there's some personal reason someone's wanting to sell. And the answer to that question will determine do we even have run way to work with to fix this business to sell or do we just got to do what we got to do right now? Because if they're severely burned out or if they're going through some sort of crisis, death or divorce or a health scare or something like that, it may just be we got to do what we got to do right now and sell it for what we can get. But if it's just they're curious,

13:44you know, they're thinking about it for a few years out. They have some runway. We're happy to have that conversation too. But it's it's usually that personal side that is the biggest driver. You know, something I find very interesting kind of you and I both have a similar track. You know, I spent in 2000, 2001, started getting on the commercial financing side, right? Do commercial real estate, do in the brokerage. You got to introduce to SBA in 2004. Did a lot of brokering at the loans. And then in 2017, 18, I did some business brokerage. And it led me to making my first acquisition, right? Because you start to learn, oh, wow, look what you can do with the SBA in order to make this happen. And then you start going through all of those phases. And I think for our listeners, right? One of the things it's pretty powerful is, you know, if you're looking to acquire a business and you don't have much knowledge in this area, you know, what Clint just talked about. I mean, what does it take to go out and get your valuation expertise, right? Was it

14:47three, six months? A year? I mean, these are things you can do to get engaged now. Maybe you have your career, you have your job, but you can go get a part of the IBBA. You can go to these conferences and learn and educate yourself on how business transactions occur, especially in this under five million dollar area. And then if you're attracted to go up even higher, then, you know, they have a then the IBBA also have like the the MNA advisory. I mean, there's all these groups that you can move through to get educated before you make an acquisition. And I think that's kind of Clint where you and I have gone in our business careers is, you know, you you learn a little bit of here. You got to you understand this. And now you're starting to put this big puzzle together, which I guarantee you, you may not do a lot of SBA loans, but you understand SBA, probably pretty dang good, because you're helping people get that probably better than a lot of even, you know, mortgage brokers do, right? Because, you know, they're sometimes working the theory versus you're dealing with the realities. Yeah. And when you're a deal maker, you learn all the nuances of the SBA program,

15:51whereas you can talk to a career SBA lender. And sometimes they won't know angles that brokers will know, that business brokers will know, because they'll confuse what they can do at their particular bank with what the program can do. But the program has quite a bit of flexibility and different banks interpret SBA regulations differently. And so you start to learn what banks will do what and and who can do who can do what and and what deal structures are open to and not. And if you just talk to one particular bank, you know, they may just not be comfortable with a certain industry or a certain deal structure and they'll say, and they'll blame the SBA like, oh, the SBA can't do that. But is it or is that just your bank's policy? You know, and so you have to, you know, you start to learn that over time by just getting reps in on these types of deals that there is a lot of a lot of paths to the goal line here. And there is a lot of ways you can get pretty creative within the bounds of the regulations. Yeah, I find with that SBA program, if the

16:55bank is a local bank, right? And they service the local area and they do SBAs are a lot more conservative than as you move up to your regional players. And then when you get to the national players, right? The guys that really aren't even holding the paper very long in the balance sheet or selling it off, they get really aggressive, right? You kind of almost have like a chain of event of different buyers of the SBA know. Well, so I think it's also partially like the grass is green on the other side. So the local guys like, you know, we had that same problem where we were buying something in Atlanta and the guys based in Atlanta, you know, they think they're backyard sucks. And so there are a lot more conservative versus, it's a great deal, great location. And we found that the national guys will do that. Person the local guys won't. And so it's kind of interesting how sometimes the local people aren't the best option, right? Yeah, they're usually not in my experience because, you know, everybody likes to have their their hometown bank be their banker and most hometown banks will say, oh, yeah, we can do SBA loans. But if it's not their real specialty, they always default back to their go-to, which is they're just looking for collateral, you know, and they're looking for,

17:59but they don't really underwrite it the way at the aggressiveness of true SBA specialist it will, which is really all about the strength of the business and the historical cash flow and earnings, whereas the local people, you know, even if they do SBA loans, it still might end up at loan committee and then the old guard that sits around the table, smoking cigars or whatever is going to say, well, if this goes wrong, where's where are we going to get, you know, made hole, where's the collateral? And and that's just the conversation that the experienced high volume national SBA folks like don't have and they can just wrap it up, proving and know the SBA rules and and get it done, you know, so it's a different animal. And I think it's a good point. I mean, whether it's businesses or real estate, from my experiences, whenever we're dealing with smaller local guys, they're the ones that always use the underwriter as the bad guy, right? Even though they're own underwriter, but it's always something underwriting versus, you know, the more national people, it's kind of cookie cutter, right? They already know, they've already screened it beforehand, they know it's kind of fit the box

19:03and you're just walking through the motions, right? It's not this unknown underwriter that just got something that's, you know, out of the field that's blocking the transaction now. So, I mean, there's always somebody and you got to be careful with letting the business development, you know, officer at a bank string you along too long when there's the we haven't cleared committee yet or underwriting yet. Yeah. So, Clay, I follow you on social media. It's got a big following. I mean, you kind of, I didn't realize your first transaction came from that. Yeah, and I read, I read, I read some of your posts and all that good stuff and, you know, talk real quick as we got a few minutes here in our interview, like you, you definitely are educating sellers and you're also educating buyers, right? So, why don't you kind of talk to us about some of the pitfalls you've seen from a buyer standpoint, somebody looking to buy a business, you could advise them today, like, hey, if you're going out to buy your first business, you're these Keith, like we all have our, our like four or five little rule of thumbs. Why don't you share that with

20:03them some of our listeners? Yeah, I mean, you know, first off, it's a buyer-be-where world out there. And I discovered that really quick when I was a buyer, nap trying to navigate this space is, I think that's a real problem in our industry is there's just not quality control. And so, the big marketplaces, if you just start googling business for sale near me and you'll find the major websites, bizbiz buys sells, they 100 pound gorilla, it's the biggest, you know, marketplace out there, but there's a bunch of other marketplaces that are all plagued by the same problem and that's a bunch of overpriced incomplete data, you know, poor deals with poor representation or for sale by owners with cracks-moaking evaluations from sellers, you know, like just weird stuff you got to navigate and I always say it looks like you're looking for a needle and a haystack, you know, when you start trying to find a business to buy. And then there's a whole industries like the franchise industry that kind of they'll try to divert you to buy a greenfield franchise if you're

21:09googling for buy a business and you know, they'll find you and start coming after you get it to seeing their siren song. And so there's just so many hoops to jump through to find a quality opportunity. And that's really what I'm doing with Delonomy is trying to solve that huge problem for buyers, which is who do you trust? You know, how do you find a good deal? And by a good deal, I mean, we have a standard and we actually just trademarked good deals only for our business because that's really part of our philosophy is that a good deal to us looks like there's strong historical earnings that are provable. So you've got, you know, well done financials, you've got a realistic valuation that's going to praise that banks are willing to lend at that price. And so you want good accounting, you want a bank ready to lend on it and you want a seller that's actually motivated to sell that's that's realistic and ready to move forward. And if we can get all those pieces and put a bow on it ready to go, then we'll take that deal to market on our platform on Delonomy. And so what

22:14we're trying to build is for buyers that are just sick of navigating this buyer beware jungle of very low quality stuff and that needle and a haystack feeling is we want to create the preferred marketplace where if you go to Delonomy, it's like you can just trust all the deals are good. They all meet those criteria. And then if you if you can find a deal there, we'll make it smooth and easy to navigate that buy that buy process as much as can be because you still have to, you know, meet the seller and and make an offer and get comfortable with it and do your diligence. But as much as can be done to make that an easy process, we're trying to do that for the buyer. And then everywhere else, it's it's very much like you got to kiss a lot of frogs, you got to get good at sniffing out the BS and and saying no a lot. And it's a much more high volume game. And so I would just tell buyers to not be to just take everything with a big grain of salt out there

23:15and learn quick how to filter through the noise. And and that's going to be your best bet versus don't let yourself get overly hyped up from the initial ad like get good at navigating the NDA process, getting the big questions answered real quick and walking away as soon as you see the first real big red flag because you don't have time to to go deep on a thousand deals. You're going to have to learn get good at filtering. Yeah, and I think it goes I mean, you're talking about the buy side, but I think it's just as valuable for the sell side, right? There's a lot of time wasted in this industry, right? On just trying to not even transact just trying to get movement on a transaction, right? And I think, you know, if I heard you write, I mean, really the the value prop is no, you know, you're there. It's a deal on him is there to get a transaction done. Nobody's going to get some, you know, take an advantage of one way or the other, right? The seller's not going to sell out two X business, you know, let's say a eight X business out of two X and a buyer's not going to get an eight X business out of two X, right? It's, you know, it's hey, this is where whoever's serious about getting a transaction done, right? Both sides getting a fair

24:19deal. This is where you go, right? And in return for that, everyone is saving time, getting confidence and getting, you know, essentially that clarity to get the deal done. Does that maybe sum up in the nutshell, kind of how you approach that? Yeah, so we take an intermediary seat, which is different than every other brokerage. So most other brokers are either their buy side or their sell side. We are working for the transaction, not for one side or the other. And so that's a huge difference. And so we don't actually hang asking prices on our deals. We'll set a range. And so if I say, hey, I think your business is going to sell between three and a half to four and a half million dollars, we won't just say, hey, we're going to price it at four and a half and hope someone pays it. We'll put on there minimum asking price 3.5, but you need to, but we're expecting it to come in between 3.5 and 4.5. And we'll make sure lots of good buyers are looking at it and bidding on it. And we'll let the market set the price. And so we'll, what we want to do is just make expectations realistic on both sides that yeah, there's comps, there's math that shows like

25:22deals like this trade between three and a half to four and a half. And so you guys got to look at it and make your best offer if you want to win the deal. And we just want to facilitate, you know, we believe in transparency and just putting all the cards on the table, putting the best presentation of the business out there to buyers so they can feel very comfortable making a strong offer. But then it's basically up to the market to set the price, not the broker. And so we just package the deals well. We market them well to a strong list of hungry qualified buyers. And we let, and we just facilitate the transaction and made the best buyer win. You know, that's kind of how we think of it. Yeah, packaging is it's an art. And if you do a great job for a buyer, I mean, you deserve your fee. There's just so many times where we've looked at deals where the broker, you know, it just does not do their job. They just don't do their right job. And I obviously that's more, that's more times than not, which is, hey, we've given you some basic information. We put a sim together.

26:25Let me put you in the cellar together. Y'all work it out. And, you know, that's, you know, we, fine. We'll do that. We'll go to the process for the right bit deal. But you and I both know that there's a lot of documentation. There's a lot of data. There's a lot that goes into putting this deal together. And for a broker to make their broker fee, that should all be packaged. It should be nicely nicely put together. You know, the, I shouldn't have to be questioning what, what SDE is and what can be added back. And I shouldn't be like, we shouldn't be on just me. So I think that at the end of the day, you know, when you're providing that on your platform, that's what I think so great about the nominee is, is, is that alone? Is that you're getting a very nice, well packaged. You've got a good, and that's what makes it so, I think, invaluable. So hats off to you on the business that you've created. Yeah, I think any broker worth their salt, they, they kind of make their money at about four critical moments. And if they're not doing their job, you know, it real quick as a buyer or a seller. You know, and so this is advice for buyers or sellers.

27:28But, you know, I think those critical moments are one valuing the company up front and sending appropriate valuation expectations with a seller. So like, that's always a, a sensitive conversation because sellers generally think their business is worth more than it's really worth. And, and you have to show them the math and show them how it works and do it in a way that they still like you and trust you afterwards. I took into that education yesterday with the seller. Yeah, it is definitely, it's, it's, it's, man, it's never what they want, but you got to stay pretty realistic. Yeah. And so like, that's a tough job that is really the broker's job to do. And some brokers don't do a good job at that. And, and that's why, you know, overprice stuff gets to the market is because they're afraid to have that real talk. And, and so like, that's one, one moment. The second is probably the packaging job, just making sure that, you know, the, the quick books and the shoe boxes of data and all the things in the owner's head and, you know, that, that comprise of what am I buying if I buy this business get organized into a presentation that's easy to understand and really shows the buyer clearly. This is what I'm getting into if I

28:35buy this business. And I, I got all my questions answered so I can move forward with confidence. Like, packaging is its own, you know, phase, its own art. And I think the third part is facilitating the negotiation, you know, bringing the buyer and seller together, learning what they both need to make it work and, and finding the win-win. And ultimately, most of these deals don't work if, if it's a win-lose, you know, like one side is never going to be get everything they want. And the other side get nothing that they want. Like, there's going to have to be some, some balance struck there. And something that, that hits the major points for everyone so the buyer can get their loan and they can get the return on investment they like and the seller can get the, the, the, the liquidity they need and, and, you know, the purchase price they ultimately want to get over time. And like, that all has to be negotiated and has its own skill set. And then the last part, and I think maybe even the most important part of a broker is every deal tries to die about three to ten times or sometimes more. But like, if you're not there as the broker between letter of

29:41intent and closing, when a dumb attorney or a dumb landlord or a dumb CPA or a dumb bank or, whatever, like, tries to throw a big monkey wrench in the deal or, or derail it or someone gets cold feet or whatever. It's just random stuff happens. And you have to be able to don your superman cape and calm people down and talk people off the ledge, find a creative solution and solve that problem. Like, that's the real magic of brokers is, is jumping in and rescuing the deal. And so, I think any broker worth their salt, they got to have those four pieces. And, and that's what you're looking for. If you're interviewing brokers is like, you got to see evidence that they're good at those four critical moments. And, and for buyers, like, that's what you want on the other side, to help you get a deal done. And I think it's, and I think it's a general feedback for any buyer seller, right? It's that you cannot be rigid in a transaction, right? It's, there's always a little bit of give and take. And it's an evolving thing, right? And it's not about getting taken advantage of, but it's like, hey, the seller needs to make this change because their tax

30:44issue, but then they will give you this other thing. Or maybe the buyer needs to make a change because they're not getting the debt that they expect it. So you have to be flexible and a good broker is helping navigate that and trying to get ahead of the, the landmines before they hit it too, right? I think it's the other piece of it. And maybe one last question, Clinton, before move on, I mean, you know, you're coming up on what a little nine months into DeLonemy. And how's it going so far? It's going great. Like, I think it's, people are, the lightbulbs coming on when they hear the concept, you know, our core switch in our business model when I switched to the DeLonemy platform was we, we changed our whole monetization model. So we're now the only broker out there where you can sell your business for 0% commission. So we don't charge sellers at all. We'll tell the seller up front. Here's what we're going to sell your business for. We'll give them that value range. And then we guarantee offers in 90 days or less inside that value range. And if we don't hit it, we'll write you a $10,000 check and no harm, no foul. And so we're the only broker that'll sell your business for free that has a $10,000 guarantee. And here we are nine months in. And

31:49we haven't had to write that check yet. So everything we brought to market, we've indeed matched with buyers in the, in the range we said we would and haven't had to fulfill that yet. We're totally willing to. We've had some that took to like day 87 before we got an offer in, but we did it. And so we're really standing by our word on that. And then for buyers, especially ones that have been around the block, at first, they're like, wait, so I have to pay you, how does this work? And they're a little confused by it. But then when they see it, they're like, oh my gosh, this is what this market needs. This is a breath of fresh air because, and they're happy to pay us a success fee because of our good deals, only philosophy of how easy we make it for them and how they, how they finally have kind of a neutral intermediary running the process instead of a broker that's always just only looking out for the seller's best interest. They like working with our transparent process and how we're just trying to find the win-win for both sides. And when it clicks, it clicks. And people are really liking this new way to do it in our new model. And so we're trying to shake

32:52things up and just be a breath of fresh air, something different and a new and improved way to get a deal done. And yeah, I'd say so far so good, definitely for us. All right. Incredible, incredible stuff here, Clant. We're, thank you for sharing that with all our listeners. Now we're going to jump into our favorite part is the rockaround. This is where we ask our guests three questions to get them to know them a little better. Yeah. So I'll fire the first one off. So, Clant, what do you like to do in your free time? Well, I like to travel. I'm always going to travel adventures. I'm a private pilot and that's always been kind of one of my favorite passions and hobbies is general aviation. And we're going to go fly in some time, I promise. Yeah, me and Ferris are going to go flying. But yeah, I'm really stoked about my, you know, I've got four kids. We homeschool them. We always kind of march to our own drum as a family. And we kind of do our own thing. And that's what I love about entrepreneurship is it allows you to kind of

33:53build the life around your values and how you want to do things. You don't have to conform to the pattern of how everyone else does things. And so like right now for my oldest daughter, she's turned in 18. We gave her a budget and she's planning a trip anywhere in the world. But she has to just stay within budget. But it's me and my wife, her and a friend. And just watching her kind of wrestle through like, give her a budget. Yeah, how do I wrestle through that international trip planning and watching her figure out all those logistics that gets me jazzed is just empowering my children to like do stuff that I wish I could have done when I was their age. So big passion about this raising special kids and doing it, you know, a different way. And and we have a lot of fun with that. Yeah, I'm having older kids is a whole different conversation man. It's we've got a 25 and a 20 and man, it's it's actually it's it's it's it's pretty cool to be

34:54a parent. You know, I look at that all the hard work. You actually get the seat at reflection. They will reflect what you put in. Yeah, but I'm absolutely going to steal your idea because I had my daughter planned a trip to Paris, but I mean, she was eight at the time. So, you know, just learning how to use chat GPT and research and pick things and Google Maps. But I think now I'm going to add the complexity of how you have a budget and you know, walk that in and plan and do all the logistics around that. We start them at 13 at 13 you plan a family trip anywhere in the USA with a smaller budget. And if you bust on money, I promise you'll get home safe, but we're only having water and PBJ's the rest of the way home and we're getting we're getting home. So they've got to like, but they're in charge. I never take my wallet out at 13 years old. The family of six goes on a trip and they're in charge of all spending, all logistics and not really prep some for now. We're getting to the 18 year old trip, which is the bigger budget to go somewhere international and do the same thing.

35:54So we're doing a 13 and 18 and with four kids every two years. I'm doing one of those trips about every year and it's a lot of fun just watching them. I'm still in that one. So yeah, cool. It's not exciting. That's great stuff. All right. On to our next question. What's been your most memorable moment in your business journey? I get to say it, but the losses stand out to me more than the wins. I think it's just how we're wired as humans, but I've had way more wins than losses. The most memorable things that stick in my crawl are like, I was forced out of my first company. When we were doing well, I learned some tough lessons. I owned only a small minority percentage. I owned about 20% of a fast growth angel back company. I learned the golden rule and that's he who has the gold makes the rules. Our main investor and a couple of our partners basically bought

36:55me out as a hostile bid. We reached a point to where they didn't think I was necessary to the business or wanted to go a different direction than I wanted to go and handed me a check and said, we'll show you the door and it was something where I didn't see it coming. I spent years of my life pouring into getting this business off the ground. So I learned a lot about partnerships and alignment and the golden rule from that situation. That was a tough one. That happens. All right, last question. What is your favorite tool or resource? I'm going to go with social media, final answer. Like I think, like I said earlier, Twitter now X has probably been my wild card the last four years or so where I went from a relatively unknown Texas based broker to probably one of the most well known brokers in the country now.

38:00And it was mainly from just getting on there and putting myself out there and teaching and answering questions and helping people that ended up putting me on podcasts like this and stages. I'm really getting out there and that helped me develop a national following. The national following turned into national buyer list and the national buyer list turned into the economy and it even helped me raise money and launched something much bigger. None of this would have happened if it hadn't been for social media, but I would say specifically Twitter or an X. That's been one of my favorite tools and it can be annoying sometimes. It can be chaos sometimes, but it's one of the smartest, most powerful, well connected, rich people. They're all there. It's a global conversation. And if you bring your best self there, you're always like one degree of separation from people that can change your life forever. And so I encourage people to not just be doom-scrolling consumers of social media, but to really put themselves out there, display your expertise, show your character,

39:02show your heart, and it'll magnetize the right people to your life that can change your life and kind of bring your tribe together. And so I think that's been a huge X factor for me. I love it. And also, you're just a I've met you person. We've got to know each other. You're a genuinely good guy. You are who you say you are. And that also speaks tremendous volume. So we really appreciate you spending time with us being in our conference, being the moderator. And just doing those things that really make an impact in the community and what we're doing. And so, and I hats off to you, man, I'm congratulations to your success. And I'm really glad you spend some time with us. No, and you've done a good job on social media. And we'll put that in the the show notes for listeners so they can go follow Clint. But I'm going to ask, I feel like your posting has gone increased basically over the past maybe 60 days. You know, are you doing it all yourself or you have somebody else or you have what systems are you using now? You know, for somebody that's looking to get inspired. Video is a team approach. And the text stuff is me.

40:05So like anything you see written is me writing it. I like to just, so like, I like to just work it into my day. So like, I've been really into lifting weights lately. And for me, it's like, you lift for 20 seconds and you've got about a two and a half minute rest before you can really do another hard set. And so I'll just be like posting, you know, stuff that I'm thinking about or replying to people, you know, but I can work it into a workout or I can work it into my day. But videos I get together twice a month with a videographer and we just lay down a bunch of long form video. And then he will chop it into shorts and distribute it and then post the long forms to YouTube. And so that one, I don't have the patience for doing the editing and and, you know, the thumbnails and all the captioning and distributions you have to do for a video. So I just hired that out. But the other stuff is generally, I'm impressed the text that you do

41:07it on the fly. You're not even, you know, hey, I'm going to go queue up what the week looks like. You're just doing them on the way. That's very well done. That's not easy to do. So I'm pretty much a screw around, but it works. Like I just have fun living in the moment. And I'm a little bit ADD. So like in the gaps of my day and stuff, I can just kind of check in what people are doing. And, and when you're doing deals in your business person that's in the trenches, just like doing deals, building a fast growth company, like just stuff happens that's interesting every day. Every day something crazy happens. And I can just tell stories in a real succinct way in a few paragraphs. And people are like, whoa, that's cool. And if you're doing something interesting with your life, you have unlimited content flowing at you. You just got to learn to like grab those interesting tidbits and put them out there. So it's not rocket science. And so I would encourage anyone that's out there like you guys have a life just as interesting as mine if not more so. And so there's infinite content flowing. You just have to have discernment of like what you can share,

42:10what you cannot share. I don't, you know, change names to protect the innocent, you know, or leave off names of businesses. But I still tell stories and stuff like that. And people like here and what's happening. Yeah, I love it. Man, thank you very much for sharing with us. All right. No, client, thank you very much. I think the world that you guys really appreciate the invite and appreciate the kind words and you guys are people I want to do. Spend more time with, do more deals with but you're only doing it right and appreciate your influence on this industry. Now likewise, see you soon. Okay. See you guys. Thank you for listening to the MNA Launchpad Podcast. If you've enjoyed today's podcast and would like to support us, please leave us a rating and a review after you listen. If you're looking for guidance on your next business acquisition or sale, capital to support your next business transaction or to invest in a private equity opportunity, visit equity launchpad.com to learn more and to connect with our team. If you know of an individual, you would be a great guest for the show head over to equity launchpad.com or slash nominate where

43:11you'll have the chance to refer yourself or someone else to be a guest on our show. I'm Casey and I look forward to talking with you next week.