Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 14:06
Well, I know you’ve talked, Corey, when I’ve heard you speak of the goal is not to win. Right. I mean, that’s not and you talk about that 100%.
Corey Kupfer: 14:19
I mean, so the goal is to achieve your objectives. Now some people might describe that as winning. But the thing is very often with negotiators the need to win is, is, is something beyond just achieving the objectives. There’s an ego thing in there, right? There’s a and and and number one, if you can let that go, right, you will be so much more successful in negotiating. And by the way, if the other side has that need to win, you can use that really, really, really effectively, right? I mean, one of the examples of that is, you know, a crazy deal I did years ago. Okay, where so this was this was back in the early 90s, right? The Soviet Union was just breaking up.
Okay. And Russians were just starting to do business internationally. And most of the deals back then were barter deals. They didn’t have any, they didn’t have any currency. Right. So they were doing barter deals. This one Russian company had some currency. They were able to actually do cash deals, and they were coming to us and they were filling a ship like a tanker ship. Purdue was filling it with tons of chicken for half of it. I wasn’t involved in that part of the deal. The other half of the tanker was being filled with all kinds of other goods that my client was sourcing for them in the US.
And it’s kind of hysterical to think about it like, think about any stereotypical good that you think the Russians would want back then. Blue jeans, cigarettes, electronics. Right. Like, just like classic, you know, American goods, you know, that they couldn’t get under communism, right? My guy was their source for that. Right. So, you know, the Russians were so we’re in a negotiation with them over all kinds of points. And one of the key points in the negotiation was what we thought was a very typical clause, which is what we call a non circumvention agreement. Hey, my guy is essentially a broker, an introducer. We’re going to introduce you to all these folks that are going to be able to sell you blue jeans, sell you cigarettes, sell you, know, electronics.
You can’t go directly to them in the future, right? Because you got to go through me, right? The Russians would not do it. Why won’t they do it? Because they were no longer under communism. They were now capitalists, and they were going to have nobody telling them who they could do business with or not. And here’s the interesting part. It wasn’t a negotiating tactic like they really I mean, you got to think about the times we’re in, right? They really, really, really believe that. And their ego was so like, you know, they were not, they were free market capitalists now and they were not going to be prevented from, you know, from.
So my client has a problem, right? Because sure, he’ll make money off this deal.
But then if they, you know, this is a hugely lucrative opportunity, then if they go directly to the suppliers, once he makes a distributors, once he makes those introductions, he’s out. So he was getting very upset, you know, in the negotiations, whatever. And I said to him, Jerry, listen, I want to calm down. Let’s. So I said to her, I said to the other side, let’s table them. Let’s table the issue. Right. We go and we’ll pick it up next time. So we scheduled another negotiating session for a week out. In the meantime, I said to my client, Jerry, listen, I know you usually get these non circumvention from the side of the buyer, right? Or the receiver of goods. I said, but first of all, they’re a Russian company. Yes.
They set up a US subsidiary, but the odds of being able to enforce this against them anyway, you know, are ridiculous. So I was going to suggest to him any way that we go to all his relationships on the distributor and supply side, manufacturing side, lock them up. They were all US companies we enforced against them. Anyway, I was going to have them do that anyway. So in the week in between the negotiating sessions, we did that right. And then the Russians came back in. This was their big issue, right? We put up some more fight to make it, to make it look good. Right? And then we were able to use that kind of ego, that demand that they have to give in and give them that point in exchange for some other stuff we really cared about.
But meanwhile, we had locked everything up on, you know, on, on the back end against parties that we had much more ability to and to enforce it, you know, with and they were happy to sign it because they were getting this new market they were going into. And we were providing that access to them, you know, through my clients. So that’s an example where you can use somebody’s need to win, you know, in a way that gets you where you need to be. And if you let go of your need to win on that point and find a creative solution, there’s a huge opportunity.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 19:12
That’s a great story. I love that and I’d like to talk about the reasons you’ve talked in, I think in the book, in other places, reasons. I know there’s six reasons why negotiations fail. You know, and you just mentioned something which makes me, I quote unquote like a bad negotiator. I think sometimes I’m like maybe two giving of a person. And you just mentioned an exchange, like sometimes I’ll just do it just because.
And I’m like, in a negotiation, that’s probably a bad thing to do. Like, oh, you, I could use it in exchange for something else. Right? And so they can, you know, with in that situation, you recommend your client, they conceded this point, but then since they conceded it, we’re going to use that in exchange for something else that we want, right? So maybe talk a little bit about reasons why negotiations fail. You mentioned one probably ego, but what are some other other pieces of that?
Corey Kupfer: 20:14
Yeah. I mean, so a lot of times it is the humans involved, right? You know, I mean, listen, if a negotiation, I don’t consider it a negotiation failure. If a deal doesn’t get done, if you know it’s true through due diligence or it’s the example I gave before where, hey, I’m clear on my objectives, your learning objectives, they don’t just meet at this time, right? Just doesn’t work, right? That’s not a negotiation failure. That’s just the fact that there wasn’t a deal to get done. Right? But if the negotiation fails because somebody is in ego or upset or anger or reaction or fear, right?
And by the way, a negotiation failure could mean the deal actually did get done.
But it was a bad deal, right? Or it could mean it, you know, it doesn’t get done. So, you know, so for example, if you are so desperate or afraid of losing the deal that you do a really bad deal, you know, one of the things I often say is that there is people think there are there are, you know, good, right? There’s like, the best thing is you get a deal done. The worst thing is that you don’t get a deal done. It’s actually no, the best thing is you get a deal done. If it’s the right deal. The second best thing is you don’t do a deal if it’s a wrong deal. Right. I mean, that’s actually the second best thing.
The worst thing is you do a bad deal, right? And a lot of times people do bad deals because of, you know, they’re either in scarcity, right? They feel desperate or they’re in fear or maybe they’re a pleaser, right? They, you know, they, they, they’re afraid that somebody’s not going to like them and they give up too much. Right. So those are, you know, these human factors. And it’s why I say like, you know, listen, not to like, like I said, Chris Voss is a great example of a book I love on, on this other level, but people are willing to do things on the tactical and counter tactical level. They’re willing to learn frameworks and strategies. The harder body of work is this internal body of work. To get yourself in the right state, coming into a negotiation, it.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 22:18
Could be emotional. You know, it’s very emotional.
Corey Kupfer: 22:21
100% and, and, and, and, you know, and you can get triggered and you can be, you know, in fear or scarcity, or somebody says your company’s not worth half that and it triggers your ego, right? As opposed to just saying, you know, okay, you know, your opinion, I disagree. And if we and if we can’t meet, we can’t meet. And I trust, I trust they’ll be another buyer.
Or maybe it’s not my time to sell or, you know, whatever. It’s that that’s the detachment piece, right? So that, you know, that work. Most people screw up negotiations because of some because of their own like limitations or reactions or, you know, lack of ability to, you know, to stay centered and stay clear and, you know, and not let their reactions either kill the deal or give things that they shouldn’t that they’ll regret later.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 23:10
You know, you said something in the story, the, the, the Russian story that that hit home for me, which was and maybe you could talk about some of the ways that when something does get heated, what do you do? Because what I observed in that story from you is you really de-escalated the situation by just pausing and even just putting in the future, like a separate meeting until things calm down. So I’m wondering some of the other ways that you and, and by the way, this applies to business.
It applies to personal. Right? I mean, if you’re married, I’m sure you’ve never had a fight with your spouse, right? And like, and or kids know, they know how to push buttons, right? Or family. So I think what you’re talking about definitely applies to that. But what are some ways that people can counteract because things are gonna get heated. Emotions do run high. What do you do when that happens? Yeah.
Corey Kupfer: 24:09
Well, I think the first thing I would say is that the amount of pre-work you do, including this internal body work that I keep talking about, right? I mean, that’s the starting point for minimizing, not only minimizing the times that it does happen where things get heated, but also giving you some place of grounding to come back to even. Listen, we’re humans, right? We get triggered, emotions come up. So the question is, in that case, how quickly can you reset? How quickly can you reground? Right? And if you haven’t done the preparatory body of work, there’s there’s what are you regrounding to? So you know, this in the book, you know, I talk about I mentioned it briefly the CPR context, purpose and results tool.
That’s a grounding tool, right? It gets clear on the results. You get very clear on the why. Why are you even in this? The purpose and then the context is the being part, right? Like, are you going to be calm, you know, open whatever, or are you going to be reactive? Right. To put oversimplification. Again, there’s details in the book. But the point is, what I tell people is, listen, if you’ve done the CPR work as an example, right, you should memorize it, but also have a copy with you, right? So if you feel yourself getting triggered or getting thrown off or whatever, right. And you can’t just use, you know. So the first thing I say to folks is, what do you normally do in life when you get triggered?
Right? You know, some people, you know, breathe, right? Some people meditate, some people take go for a run, right? Obviously, you’re not going to some of those things you can’t do. You’re not going to suddenly go out for a run in the middle of a negotiation. Right? But by the way, you might go out for a run or do a meditation session or do some breathing before you go in to the to the negotiation, right? Just to get you more centered. You may, you know, call for a break for lunch or even just the, hey, I got to go to the restroom, right? You, you go to the restroom, you do some deep breathing, or you pull out your CPR document and get regrounded on your purpose and your results, right?
Like that. Pause that break. And then having some, whether it’s, you know, something I have in my book or just some way that in life you calm yourself down, right? Maybe it’s a visualization. Maybe you call a friend, right? You know, like whatever it is for you, just just know what it is or what the options are for you because everybody’s different and then know that you could. I mean, the biggest thing is to be able to take a break somehow, right? Again, it could be a restaurant, it could be a lunch break, could be let’s meet next week. And then even table like, like once you see things, right. And there’s always a lot of different points in a negotiation, right?
You don’t have to deal with all of them in every session, right? So something is getting heated, like just parking it for another time to say, hey, listen, listen, I know you know what challenged on this one for now, but why don’t we put that aside for now? Not only does that give you a break and bring down the temperature, but maybe you can get on to some other points where you can come into an agreement. So now you’re building this relationship right, you’re getting points of agreement. And when you come back to that other point, you might be in a different place energetically. People might be more encouraged because you’ve made progress on some other issues. So that’s another, you know, advantage of holding off on the tough issue.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 27:20
Yeah. No thanks for sharing that. You know, you’ve helped with a lot of deals over your career. We talked about the Russian deal. I know, you know, maybe talk a little about private equity and roll ups and you’ve done you’ve seen that in a number of different categories.
Maybe talk about one category, but others that you’ve seen it in.
Corey Kupfer: 27:43
Yeah. So, so let me say this, you know, it’s interesting, like I, you know, I’ve been around for a while, so early in my career when I was a very young associate, you know, a lot of these roll ups started back in the 80s. Right. And part of the problem with some of these roll ups and why roll ups got a bad name is because, you know, in the boom boom 80, you know, like, you know, mid 80s to late 80s, right? Basically roll ups were done. And you still see it sometimes in a way that in a lot of cases, that was like the way not to, you know, not to do it right the wrong way. Right? Which is, hey, we’re just going to aggregate for size. We’re going for speed, we’re throwing money at it. We’re going to aggregate a bunch of stuff, and we’re going to bet that because we’re bigger, we’re going to get a multiple arbitrage, right?
So the classic thing is, hey Jeremy, you know, for any other buyer, your company’s worth whatever, you know, five times EBITDA, okay, we’re going to come in and give you eight times EBITDA because we say our company is worth 12 times EBITDA now. And when and when we grow and exit, it’s going to be worth 20 times even, right? So it’s all a multiple arbitrage game, right? And we’re paying you more than you are now because we’re worth even more than that. We’re betting we’re going to be worth even more than that, right? The problem with that is that sometimes that quote unquote works, meaning that they hit their goal is because they happen to hit the timing of the market, right?
They happen to beat out the competition to that exit event, whether that’s a big purchase or that’s an IPO. Right. But you are, you know, like you’re not adding any other value. You’re not. You’re basically playing a multiple arbitrage game. That depends on speed, you being one of the few winners and you hitting the market, right? Okay. And so many of those blew up because those factors weren’t all there. Right? What the smarter folks that are doing roll ups or PE aggregation or whatever you want to call it, have done, is they have a much more strategic view of value add. Yes. Some of it is taking expenses out, creating efficiencies, but some of it may be the ability to cross promote, right. To be more competitive against bigger players. Like there’s some strategic value involved where in the ideal scenario, you can, even if the market goes bad, you can run these things profitably, wait out the market, right?
And then and then go back, you know, into, into an exit or IPO cycle. So for example, You know, like we, we did stuff we were involved in stuff in the ophthalmology, you know, field, for example. And that was, you know, that’s a good example. And you’ve seen it now in a lot of the trades. More recently, you’ve seen it in dental, but, you know, ophthalmology was, was, you know, probably 25 years ago, it was one of those examples where you had a lot of these different little small shops. Right. And, and, you know, this is where we see, like, I, I’ve done a bunch of the, I had some clients in the backup space when there were a lot of these backup providers before everything went to the cloud, right?
This is when people were backing up their servers. Right? In any, in any disaggregated industry where there’s a lot of small players, which for example, in ophthalmology, there was back then somebody comes in and says, okay, there’s some really, you know, sort of good small entrepreneurs, but they don’t have the capital of the systems to either create technology efficiencies, operating efficiencies, stronger marketing, right out. Brand brand identification and awareness and things like that. Right. And we have an opportunity, you know, to, to, to bring folks together and, and have them leverage. Right. And the promise of the ones that do well is to say, hey, listen, you know, ophthalmologists, backup companies, dentists, wealth management is going through a cycle right now.
We did 25 plus deals in the industry last year. We’re going to roll you into this big old place. Not only do we have this multiple arbitrage opportunity, and we’re going to give you some rollover equity and give you cash and some rollover equity and the buyer. But also we’re going to help you grow because we have a broader range of services we can provide. So now you can cross sell. We have marketing support for you. So now you can. We’re going to take some back office middle office and administrative and compliance headaches away from you. So it’ll free you up to go get more business. Like there’s a business model of internal success and growth that’s not part of the promises is the model of arbitrage.
And by the way, even in the good ones, some of those people will hit the multiple arbitrage. Some won’t. Right? But at least if there are other synergies and growth etc., there are other financial and other benefits that come even if the multiple arbitrage is not hit. So yeah, we see, I mean, they did it pretty effectively in ophthalmology space back in the day. And, and, you know, we see it now. Now listen, in every one of these situations, there are always people who are going to push back and say, you know, oh, these evil private equity folks, you know, and you know, the thing I always say to folks is, listen, P is not I mean, there are bad people and good people in every, you know, industry. P is not evil. You have to understand P is just what P is.
P has a playbook, right? That playbook is that they’re going to come in. They’re going to gobble folks up. They’re going to try to force systems in integration because they’re going to go up the sponsor ladder, right? Bigger and bigger firms, eventually they may get to family office institutional wealth, like in wealth management. There’s some that have gotten sovereign wealth fund level, right. They got Middle Eastern or Asian sovereign wealth, you know, money or whatever it is, European sovereign wealth, money. And then eventually they may sell out to one of the big players or the real goal is to IPO, right, and get that bigger arbitrage. And only so many of them are going to make it and be successful at that. But that’s the game.
So what does that mean eventually, what the IPO market, what the public markets want is a very integrated systemized single brand rinse and repeat ability to be able to hyper scale. Right? So if you are in an industry that’s consolidating through private equity and you’re considering selling, or you consider raising private equity and being the aggregator. You just have to understand that’s the game that everybody’s playing. So if you are an entrepreneur who’s selling and you don’t want to be forced into a more integrated model where you have less discretion over what you can do, then that’s probably not for you. But if you’re okay with that, then the upside, you know, economics could be huge. Even though there’s examples of p roll ups failing, you know, you’re betting on the upside.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 34:32
I’m wondering, Corey, what are the red flags? Have you seen it in your experience? Like one is if someone comes in from like a P roll up and they’re just talking about the arbitrage side, they’re not thinking of the other things. Are there any other red flags you’ve seen? Like if someone’s thinking of selling to PE that they should be aware of?
Corey Kupfer: 34:53
Yeah. So a few things. I mean, and this is, by the way, a comment that applies to almost any deal, but it’s, you know, certainly applicable here. Don’t just look at the top line multiple promises, right? Because you really got to look at what the deal structure is. And this is again true in any deal. Like there’s no joke in deal making. Give me a price. I’ll give you a structure. Give me a structure. I’ll give you a price. Right. You know, if you want, if you want to get ten times what your company is worth. Jeremy. Right. You might say that’s impossible. Deal. No it’s not. I can structure that, have that make sense for me. But page, over 100 years with no interest, that would be I mean, I’m picking an extreme example, right?
But the point is you could always structure in a way to make. So the top line number is, is, you know, what’s the structure underlying that? How much in cash are you getting? How much in cash are you getting now? How much of that might be contingent upon retention of business? How much of that is really, you know, top line multiple really in an earnout where you need to hit 15 or 20% growth to get that money and you’ve only been growing at 3%. So can you really hit that? Are you really getting that money? Some of that is in rollover equity at a certain, you know, price. Is there equity really worth that price? Right. They’re telling you it’s worth 18. But is it really right?
And will it monetize later. I mean there’s so many factors in that. So the one red flag is if there is only one person, you know. Top line multiples, you know, and they’re not willing, you know, usually if you push them, you’ll get, you’ll get answers. But you know, you bet you better be asking, you know, questions, right? The next one is where are we in the PE cycle? Right? Because, you know, there’s, there’s a, there’s a phase that I, you know, I call the land grab phase, right? Where, you know, when PE money starts coming in space, people want to get a foothold, right? So they speed to close, they rush. Right? They may be overpaying for firms, which if you’re on the sell side and you’re looking to get top dollar, that might be great, you know, but also they can get ahead of their skis, right?
The ability to integrate these firms in that land grab phase, sometimes that’s where the trouble comes in, right? And then you lose clients. Business employees aren’t happy because it’s a mess on, you know, on the integration because they’re in speed to close. They want it because they’re afraid the competitors are going to grab up the key companies, right? So you gotta, you know, are you in that phase, if you’re in a later phase and, you know, they have their integration teams, great. And that’s going to go smooth. Then the question is, okay, are they overpaying, you know, for these deals because they’re still competing, which might sound good to you. But if they’re going to continue to overpay for a bunch of folks that maybe are the less attractive firms as the market gets more competitive, right?
Is that really going to help you down the line? Because they can dilute, you know, dilute your equity and then, you know, the other the other ones are. Yeah. I mean, this big thing about, hey, what is it like if you can’t really get clear on what life is going to be like for you, right? Especially because a lot of these roll ups, you’re not, you’re not selling them and disappearing, right? Maybe if you’re a senior guy and you got a great executive team or the next generation, you can do that. But in a lot of these, you’re hanging around for a while, right? You know, and, and you’re not going to get your retention or your earn out, you know, like you risk it if you’re not there.
So can you, you know, can, can you really figure out what the culture is going to be and whether you’re willing to work there? And frankly, if you’re an entrepreneur, even at great places, one of the things I talk about with my entrepreneurs is, listen, you gotta, you gotta do that. Going back to the eternal body of work, you’re not going to be the king of the queen anymore. You gotta make sure you’re like, even if the place is great, it’s no longer yours. No matter how much freedom they tell you you’re going to have, it’s not going to be the same as running your own thing. And you really need to do that work to make sure that you’re going to be able to live with that. We see so many examples where, you know, people roll out before their contract is up because they’re miserable.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 38:56
I’ve heard you say, you know, like there’s an app for that. There’s a deal for that. You could talk about that. I always think that there’s a podcast for that. You mentioned an ophthalmologist that people get. There’s a Cleinman Connect Podcast. It’s their business consulting for optometrists, you know, so maybe, maybe you should talk to them at some point. I don’t know, they probably know a lot of people and who, who maybe they’re, they’re dealing with or going to in a roll up situation. But when you say there’s a deal for that, what are you referring to?
Corey Kupfer: 39:30
Yeah, yeah. So the way I approach it is this, I mean, so let me start with a premise. Many, many entrepreneurial and growing companies, they grow mainly organically. And by the way, unless you’re formed as an acquisition company or something, you better be able to market and do sales and provide great products and services and get customers and clients and have them refer and all that great organic growth stuff, right. But too many firms don’t understand that there’s this whole other way to grow inorganic growth through deals. Or if they or if they think about that, they only focus, oh, I just want to raise capital. I’m just going to acquire companies. There are so many different types of deals you can do.
Right. And it’s a whole other set in the toolbox. And the way I approach it, as opposed to saying, oh, you got to learn about these 25 different deals is I do a talk or a workshop, I’ll say, okay, think about the biggest frustration issue or challenge you have in your business, whatever that is, there’s a deal for that doesn’t mean you should do it, but means you should be aware. Classic easy example, having trouble hiring, getting talent, right? So many industries where the bottleneck is talent, right. Tough to get great talent. So sure, you know, you’re posting on the job sites. You’re going to recruiters, you’re paying your existing people bonuses for referrals. Sure do all that. But you know what? You can also many, many acquisitions these days are driven to get talent right.
They’re not buying them. Some. In some cases, the less. They care a lot less about the customers, the client list or technology they want. They’re caring for the people. Right? Well, there’s something called an acqui hire, which is not even an acquisition. It’s just it’s positioned after the market like it was an acquisition, right? Because it saves the ego of the entrepreneur. Like the entrepreneur doesn’t want to say, oh my God, I, you know, they, they were an entrepreneur and now they gave up and took a job, right? So, you know, you can present it out like it is, you know, a merger. We merged our firms or whatever. But behind the scenes, it’s really employment. Maybe they get some revenue. Whatever it is. There’s licensing, there’s joint ventures, there’s strategic alliances is white.
White labeling deals is an under utilized thing. You create this amazing thing that maybe you’re using internally, right? You may be able to market that out to other competitors. And, you know, whether it’s a technology solution, whether it’s content, whether it’s whatever. So the point is that any kind of, you know, you’re trying to have this conversation all the time. You want to expand geographically or into a new end or into a new industry, right? A lot of people try to do that organically. Well, I always ask them, ask the question, who already has access to that demographic, that geography or that industry? Right. Okay. Well, maybe if you have somebody you know already has access to that.
We should consider doing a joint venture, a subcontract agreement, a distribution agreement, a marketing agreement, a joint, an alliance. Maybe you set up a joint venture company with them, right? It should at least be on the table because it could take you years to get in someplace organically. But if somebody has access to that market and they can cross sell your product, right, or you can integrate it with their existing product or whatever that, you know, that’s a way, you know, a way to get there much more quickly. So this question of like to say, any business frustration issue or challenge I have, there’s a deal for that.
It shifts your mentality. And one of the things that I talk about in this talk is that there’s so much content out there on the difference between the employee mindset and the entrepreneur mindset, but there’s also a difference between the entrepreneur mindset and the deal maker mindset. And not every entrepreneur is a deal maker. And I think a starting point for starting to shift to that deal maker mindset is to assume there’s a deal for any frustration or issue you have, and then talk to people who know and say, oh yeah, you can do it. There’s three different ways you can do deals that will help you solve that problem.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 43:16
Cory. It makes me think of, you know, Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy wrote Who Not How. There’s several books, but I feel like that’s your next book instead of Who Not How. I don’t know how it is with some deal in there, but like, every problem can be solved with a deal.
I mean, I had a podcast guest, the one of the founding engineers at Mobileye, Mobileye helped fuel the autonomous vehicle. And they were, I think, out of all the chips in Who Not How, they were one chip in Intel was looking at purchasing.
And they evaluated. Should we just do this in-house or should we buy it? And that one chip to Intel was they paid $13.2 billion for Mobileye. Now like well, 13 billion. Could they save 200 million by. I mean, it was like you said, it was just enough for like, we don’t want to mess around. We just want to buy it, make it happen, integrate it into our process and company, etc. so even at those larger levels, they’re still thinking, do we buy it, build it, and sometimes just easier to buy it, right? Short cutting time, energy, everything.
Corey Kupfer: 44:26
No question. I mean, that built by decision is a classic decision. And obviously bigger companies, right? They’re in a position to buy and they’ll do it more often, you know, and then on, on, on the smaller company side, you know. Yeah. I mean, there’s that opportunity to sell a big company is probably going to want to buy it totally. But if it’s someone else who comes to you, that’s not as huge. Like you may want to consider, okay, do I want to sell this? Or maybe I want to license this?
Maybe I don’t want to sell it outright. Maybe I want to license this. Maybe I’ll give them an exclusive license for a period of time or in this particular industry, because I can also use this technology elsewhere. So I don’t want to sell it, you know? So that’s again, like even in that scenario, it’s like, okay, wait, there are several different types of deals you could potentially do. You know what, learn what’s on the table in those situations.
So, you know, you know, you know your options.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 45:18
Corey, I know we’re right at time. I have one last question and I want to talk about your podcast. Do you have another minute to talk about? Okay, I want to pull up your podcast. People can check out Deal Quests and I’d love to talk about, you know, it’s hard to choose, but some of the fan favorite episodes throughout the years, I’m gonna pull it up here so people can check it out. And you can see here, I mean, he’s got hundreds of episodes. Who are some of the some of the fan favorites that people should check out out of the over 400 episodes?
Corey Kupfer: 45:51
Sure. So, I mean, there was a pretty early one that was with Brian Smith, who founded UGG®, and he has a great story of coming over from Australia and selling sheepskin boots out of the back of his car and how he how he actually lost all the equity his company at some point and bought it back. That’s like a fun early one. I actually love the one we just put out this week, which is a whole different take on, on, on M&A. So Hannah. Is created an ethical marketplace for like B Corp socially conscious companies that want to get into M&A.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 46:30
Yeah, yeah. Okay.
Corey Kupfer: 46:31
Yeah. With Hannah Sandmeyer. Yeah, exactly. Because you know, like for socially conscious companies and, and, and B Corp, like M&A really hasn’t been in the conversation and they have all this view of it, right. So, you know, that’s a cool one that we literally just did this week.
Let me think what I’m there’s so many, there’s so many to choose from that I, that, that I love, you know, and we’ve had folks, I mean, you want to talk about, you know, real estate investments, law franchise, a lot of M&A, capital raising, you know, yeah, I’m you’re scrolling through here, I see, oh yeah, this recent one with Babu. I mean, he founded some of the amazing tech companies. He was like an early co-founder of stamps.com back in the day, you know, so he had yeah.
He went from nine rejections to two IPOs. You know, he’s a fascinating guy. That one was just episode 417 there. I do just so you know, the format like I do, I do three guest interviews and then then a solo cast. And then recently, this is a cool thing we’ve started doing quarterly where the episode for 412 is one of them that we did most recently with myself and my two partners doing a quarterly deal roundup where we talk about, hey, what’s going on in the market the last quarter? Brian does this cool segment on, on like deals in history where he does a little thing on, you know, going back on negotiations and deals in history. So those have been fun that we, we just added those in. This is the second quarterly one we did. So that’s a new feature. I love that.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 48:08
Yeah. Like John Warrillow, people know his book Built to Sell. He’s got the podcast Built to Sell. So I was at a time we were doing one a month and I was interviewing him. This was on his podcast and we talk about the four previous episodes because like you talk about this, actually, Corey, on one of your episodes, I was like, you know, John, you’re not really talking about your expert. I mean, you’re interviewing these people. And so we draw out his expertise from the conversations of deals. And we got his take on each of the interviews of the previous month. And so there’s several on there. I feel like you do the same with these thought leadership ones. I wonder if there may be some crossover of some of the people you’ve worked with, etc., on, because John only has people who’ve sold their business. So maybe you guys cross, cross refer some guests for each other. But Corey, first of all, thank you. Thanks for sharing your knowledge and your lessons. There’s so much more we could talk about, but I know you have deals to do. So everyone could check out KupferLaw.com and CoreyKupfer.com as you’ve seen it, and more episodes of Inspired Insider. And we’ll see everyone next time. Thanks, Corey.
Corey Kupfer: 49:19
Thanks, Jeremy.
