4th Time's the Charm: 3 Broken Deals to Buy a Great Business

just it affected everybody uh the way it affected him is he realized hey i can't do this forever and what's my plan i don't have an exit strategy so after covid he actually started the process of stepping away from his business which is really unusual if you're going to do a buy side transaction most of these guys

this is the first or second time they've ever thought about selling their business not to mention having a plan where they've been you know systematically stepping away from it so that was appealing to me and i wanted to learn more about that he had also offered the business for sale to some of his key employees and they had just said no

And there's also situations where it's like, hey, my daughter's in the business and we want her to keep 20% ownership, you know, blah, blah, blah. So you've got to kind of watch for those strings attached, if you will, that are not always visible up front.

And so tell us more about ECP, Extra Credit Projects, the business itself.

So Extra Credit Projects is a creative ad agency based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. They've got a satellite office in Detroit. But it is a truly...

fundamental if you will marketing agency meaning they all of the employees are full-time in person we don't have any remote workers here and we do have folks that work 1099 outside of the studio but all of our employees come to work every day five days a week

and it's a collaborative environment and i've worked with a lot of teams over the years and and like i said i've i've had to turn around situations and take over messes and so i'm used to my dose of humanity and i i know if you get a handful a group of people in a room just things are going to happen right um

And when I stepped into this environment, I was just amazed at the fact that we're in an environment where ideas are being critiqued on a daily, if not hourly basis. My ideas to you, your ideas to me, our ideas to the group. Lots of opportunity for aggressiveness, defensiveness, passive aggressive behavior, all that stuff, you know, the human stuff.

this team has found a way through their culture to go through all those processes without that heartburn without without all of that um

humanity if you will we just kind of we just they're able to elevate the idea to a level that it's not attached to their ego and the feedback that's given is also carefully crafted that it's it's very direct and it's very helpful to the to the concepting but none of it's personal and none of it is is vengeful or attack or anything like that so it's it's just a It's an amazing group of folks.

And when I said I bought a Super Bowl team, I meant it like that is my soup. The results and the financials and all that stuff look great. But the real the real secret to the business is that culture.