Building Scalable and Sellable Businesses With Dan Gramann

Dan Gramann is Co-founder of Cultivate Advisors, a business growth advisory firm that helps entrepreneurs scale their businesses, increase profitability, and prepare for eventual exits. Under his leadership, Cultivate Advisors has grown to work with businesses of all sizes, from startups to established enterprises, across diverse industries. With experience launching and leading hundreds of franchises across industries, Dan has supported thousands of entrepreneurs in achieving measurable growth through tailored advisory strategies.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [03:47] Dan Gramann explains how Cultivate Advisors supports entrepreneurs
• [07:25] The unique advisory methodology Cultivate Advisors leverages
• [09:32] How to avoid common sales mistakes and boost conversions
• [12:36] The biggest marketing mistake business owners make and how to overcome it
• [17:14] Identifying ideal partners to drive business growth
• [24:09] The niches Cultivate Advisors has focused on over the years
• [30:32] How Cultivate Advisors trains and supports new advisors joining their team
• [33:38] Best recruitment practices for accelerating growth
• [38:00] Key considerations when preparing for a business exit
• [41:58] An overview of Cultivate Advisor’s growing portfolio of brands
• [43:31] How to structure a deal during business acquisitions
• [47:41] The future of tech innovations in business growth and advisory practices

In this episode…

What does it take to build an agile business that can capitalize on future opportunities? From scaling operations to preparing for a potential sale, how can entrepreneurs position their businesses for sustainable growth?

According to Dan Gramann, a seasoned entrepreneur and advisor, building a scalable and sellable business starts with mastering the fundamentals: clear systems, strong leadership, and a focus on measurable growth. He highlights the importance of defining precise processes for sales, marketing, and talent acquisition and creating systems that ensure long-term profitability. Dan also recommends aligning operations with long-term goals, ensuring the business can function independently of its owner and stand out to potential buyers.

In this episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz sits down with Dan Gramann, Co-founder of Cultivate Advisors, to discuss how entrepreneurs can create scalable and sellable businesses. They talk about the key components of a successful business growth strategy, the importance of aligning leadership and talent, and tools for entrepreneurs to measure and improve their business’ health.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Dan Gramann on LinkedIn
• Cultivate Advisors
• Cultivate Advisors’ Exit Assessment Tool

Special Mention(s):

• Casey Clark on LinkedIn
• Hayden Fulstone on LinkedIn
• Lee Leonard Podolsky on LinkedIn
• Petra Coach

Related Episodes:

• “[One Question] Living with Purpose with Rabbi Mois Navon from Mobileye” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “Pipedrive: Brain Surgery, Married, & Moved Company from Estonia to U.S. All at Once – with Urmas Purde [Inspiration]” on the Inspired Insider Podcast

Quotable Moments

• “If it’s not a ‘hell yeah,’ it’s a ‘no.’ Don’t ever settle for just better than the rest.”
• “70-80% of business owners who list their business don’t sell — it’s a terrible stat.”
• “Recruiting talent should be as high a priority as getting more revenue in the company.”
• “Sell the next step — don’t sell the service or product. It’s about building relationships first.”
• “We hire entrepreneurs who’ve exited successfully to help scale or prepare for an eventual sale.”

Action Steps

1. Conduct a comprehensive business health assessment: Identify areas of improvement and ensure your business is scalable and potentially sellable.
2. Develop a clear sales process: Create and document a consistent, metric-driven sales process that focuses on understanding client needs and selling to the next step rather than just pushing the product.
3. Implement a strategic recruitment plan: Treat recruiting as a high priority, equal to generating revenue, by developing a clear process for identifying, attracting, and retaining top talent.
4. Regularly evaluate marketing tactics: Don’t spend money without clear results — make informed decisions that maximize your marketing ROI.
5. Foster strong leadership and alignment: Avoid misalignment and lack of clarity in roles, ensuring your team is empowered and moving in the same direction toward common goals.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:01 

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr. Jeremy Weisz.

Jeremy Weisz 0:22 

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here, founder of inspiredinsider.com where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders today, is no different. I have Dan Gramann of Cultivate Advisors. Dan, before I formally introduce you, I always like to point out other episodes of the podcast people should check out. This is a great journey. I mean, Dan and I actually were chatting at an EO entrepreneur organization event. He’s got a really cool, crazy journey, some other crazy journeys that were on the podcast. I had one of the founding engineers at Mobileye. Mobileye was acquired by Intel for $15.3 billion and but what struck me about the story was there were points in the journey where they had to sacrifice. He had to go back to his family, tell his wife and kids, I’m pulling out of all extracurriculars. There’s no more eating out because there was ups and downs of that company. There was probably points of the company where they didn’t know if it would survive, all right. And so Dan, I know your company helps people with this journey.

Another one was Pipedrive. The co-founder of Pipedrive actually talks about having brain surgery, getting married and moving from Estonia to the us all in the same year. At the time, I think I interviewed one of Pipedrive. When they had them on they had like, around 10,000 paying customers. I think now they have over 100,000 customers, so they’ve grown a lot and many more episodes on inspiredinsider.com check them out. And this episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25 we help businesses give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. How do we do that? We do that by helping you run your podcast. We’re an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast, and we do the strategy, the accountability and the full execution. So Dan, we call ourselves the magic L’s that run in the background and make it look easy for the company so they can create amazing relationships, really create amazing content, and, most importantly, run their business. For me, the number one thing in my life is relationships.

I’m always looking at ways to give to my best relationships. I’ve found no better way, over the past decade, to profile the people and companies I most admire and share with the world what they’re working on. So if you thought about podcasting, you definitely should. Dan and Cultivate Advisors has a podcast. You can check it out on their page. If you have questions, go to rise25.com, or emails that [email protected]. I am excited to introduce Dan Gramann, he’s the Co-founder of Cultivate Advisors. And Cultivate Advisors helps eliminate the guesswork when it comes to growing your business. So what they do is they match you with an expert Business Growth advisor for monthly, maybe more frequently, one-to-one advising designed to help you identify the opportunities in your business and really build a path for sustainable growth.

And also they help companies prepare for an eventual exit or just scale whatever I guess their goals are. Dan went from his teenage days helping his parents business in the basement to franchise owner, to franchise general manager, to college corps painters, to restoration to now they own multiple companies under Cultivate Advisors, and we’re going to talk through that as well. Dan, thanks for joining me.

Dan Gramann 3:35 

Thanks. Jeremy, happy to be here.

Jeremy Weisz 3:37 

I’m going to if you’re listening to the audio, there’s gonna be a video I’m gonna pull up Cultivate Advisors, but just start off, Dan, tell people about Cultivate Advisors and what you do.

Dan Gramann 3:46 

I think you did it on your own there, Jeremy. So at the end of the day, we typically — so Cultivate Brands has numerous brands, but Cultivate Advisors are the core of where we started 11 years ago. And what we highly focus on is so we hire entrepreneurs that have already exited their business successfully, and now they’re looking to do that entrepreneurial buzz and support entrepreneurs in the future that are looking to scale or prepare for an eventual sale down the line. And so when they go through our process, which is complimentary on the front end, we identify the best advisor for them that fits their biggest need inside of their business, and then they go through a road map, meeting with them.

And if they feel at the end of that event that they’re going to go way faster with that advisor, they can enroll into a subscription model, typically meeting with that advisor twice a month for two hours at a time, getting really deep into building the strategy processes and the model for the business to be ready for further scale. Increase that revenue, increase, profit, increase people, the right people, just really make sure the business is ready to roll. And so it’s really about getting those business owners a lot more confidence around how they’re going to continue to execute into the future.

Jeremy Weisz 5:00 

What are some of the goals these businesses come to you with?

Dan Gramann 5:04 

Well, I’ll tell you what kind of the top line and end goals happen from it. So results would be so, we’ve overseen 3,000 business owners at this point, and our last year, our last 12 month, client in 2023 did 43% revenue increase and 65% profit increase. So we’re always watching numbers and KPIs. But what I’d say is everything always starts with the end goal, their vision, like, why are you doing this? Ultimately, what’s the end goal of this? What do you want to do with the business? Where do you want to take it? What does that look like? And then how do we put measure to that for it to actually create that for you and your life. And then from there, we’re going to break down and make sure we understand what KPIs are going to result in that. And so every business owner’s challenge is different. And so if you were to dive around into the website and understand our methodology a lot more, you’d understand that there’s a lot of businesses that are highly focused on really getting their marketing and sales engine correct, so that that’s more scalable for revenue.

They might be really looking at the financial engine of the business, because profitability is one of those things you want to really hone in on the entire financial model for the future. There’s a lot of businesses that, as we grow the revenue, they’re also going capacity. How do I manage it and continue quality control with the right people? How do I recruit the right people, and how do I make sure I’ve got the right leadership systems to make sure that happens? And all-encompassing, there’s all these systems that can be implemented into the company. And I don’t know about you, Jeremy, but when it comes to making decisions on which vendors to use for what we get bombarded as entrepreneurs every day, on which LMS to use and how to actually implement it into the company. How is my sales process and model going to build into all this? And so it’s also about identifying which vendors in the marketplace are going to actually execute on these goals for the future. So if you think about our role as an advisor, typically, we act like a partner in the business without taking equity on a simple subscription model.

Jeremy Weisz 7:04 

Right here, this is one of my favorite parts of your website. We’re here at cultivatedvisor.com. We’re looking at the unique advisory methodology. I love how these different pieces can highlight and I can open them up. Can you talk a little bit about, maybe touch on a little bit of each of these pieces, and what we’re looking at here from the methodology?

Dan Gramann 7:25 

Yeah, and if you want to get into the more specifics, when you visit the website, you can click into sales, you can click into marketing and actually build out more of what does that mean? So I’ll use sales as an example. But sales is not as simple as just going like, hey, go sell more, right? We go out there as entrepreneurs, or have our sales team going and doing that, and it’s really identifying what is my go to market strategy. Have I actually identified the right ICP for my product or service. It’s also getting down to really understanding what KPI is within the current process. What is your sales process? Do you have a sales process? Do you have a mediocre sales process? Or do you kind of fly at the seat of your pants to sell what you sell?

And so to really create a systemized method to selling, so that whether you’re doing it as the owner yourself, or you have a team, how do we make it so can be replicated and turn it on as an engine in the future, so it’s so consistent that whether you’re looking to sell scale for today and make sure that you’re increasing conversions and closing a lot more revenue, or proving in the future, when you eventually want to exit your business, that when a buyer looks at your business, they go, wow, you’ve got a very consistent metric driven sales process, and it looks like it’s very scalable and turnkey as we hire more and more and more reps inside of your company. So that would be an example with sales. I could go into a lot more.

Jeremy Weisz 8:46 

I want to stick on sales for a second. And you said something in — to unpack that a little bit, because people are thinking, Well, how do I boost sales? Or looking at KPIs. And then I’ve been in conversations where someone would ask, just like you did, well, what’s your sales process? And they don’t really have a sales process, so they have to start there before they even get to the end result. So I’m wondering, maybe we’ll hit each topic, and maybe what you see is a big mistake people make from some of the companies you’ve worked with yourself and also with Cultivate Advisors and so sales. What’s a big mistake people make in this category?

Dan Gramann 9:32 

I would say one would be that they, most people listening here today, know this is that we catch ourselves sometimes feature dumping, talking about what’s so great about my company, what’s so great about my service or my product, versus coming in more to go understand what are the true needs and goals in what I am potentially going to sell to you, because I don’t know if you’re a good fit, right? And really slowing down to actually be picky on both sides. Needs and not try to force them in the funnel and try to sell them something. It’s actually going like, I don’t know if you’re a fit. So, let’s slow down. Here is my process. This first meeting we’re going to cover this day today, if this makes sense, after I understand your needs and your goals, then let’s talk about what the next meeting would be and what we’re going to achieve in that next meeting.

So one would be, is be transparent in your process. Make sure you do a lot of discovery and validation of like, what is it that I’m hearing you say, is your needs and goals? And then I can share, if I’m hearing a fit, and share more about what it is that I’m selling. And then, if it makes sense, I think the big mistake that we do in these processes assuming you have a good, clear sales process, step-by-step meeting, the meeting is that they’re not selling to the next step, they’re selling the product or the service, right? So it’s no different than when you go online and you check out a car and then a rep calls you right from the auto dealer, right? They’re not asking you to pull out your credit card and buy the car now, or if they ever feel like, if you feel like, they’re pitching you like, this is the best car. It’s for you. Now is not the time. I need to understand more about like, what are you looking for? Does this car?

Jeremy Weisz 11:15 

They could be looking for a minivan. They’re pitching you a sports car, right?

Dan Gramann 11:19 

Yeah, I saw that. You looked at the sports car. Tell me more. Okay, now that you’ve shared that, I actually don’t think this car is right for you. I actually have two in mind. I don’t know if those are really correct or not. The next step is not you buying the car. I think you really should just stop in, walk around the car, and then if you want, take it for a test drive, and then if that makes sense, from there, we can continue the conversation. So sell the next step. Don’t sell the service or product. Yeah. So transparency and what your process is, what the steps are, making sure that the needs, finding is happening, versus just pitching them. And then are we actually selling to the next step? Not jumping too fast the way I say it is date before you get engaged, before you get married.

Jeremy Weisz 12:04 

Love it, yeah. And in the good fit part, I love what you said about there, because that could have saved me a lot of heartache over the years. Because just knowing, not just from a business perspective, but also personality perspective, certain personalities are a fit to work with companies as well, and so that good fit is so important. Let’s talk about the marketing piece. What’s a mistake you see people making on the marketing front? And I’ll pull up the marketing page here so people can check it out too.

Dan Gramann 12:35 

Yeah, if you want to scroll down, you can see more of like the bullets behind it. But yeah, I mean, I’ll just give you a couple examples. They really haven’t slowed down to break down currently. What are all the marketing tactics that I am doing? What is the cost of acquisition per tactic? Do you actually know how many dollars you spend on that tactic to acquire one lead? Do you actually know how many dollars you spend on that tactic to get to the end of your sales process and actually sign a contract, right? And so knowing that cost of acquisition on top of going when I spend X money on that tactic month over month, year over year, how many leads do I actually get, and how many actually land from that source or that tactic. And so just even slowing down to truly map out the history of marketing, what is it saying?

But then also, like, what are things that we’re not doing that is working really, really well in a space like yours, that we should consider as we look at the future, and if we might need to tweak and readjust where budgets go in the future, we might want to test some of these that have been proven in the market, in your business model. And so I think sometimes we spend money hoping for revenues just kind of magically appear, versus being very thoughtful and what tactics make sense and really narrow down to your top three beyond just kind of testing a lot of stuff out and not measuring. So measuring is obviously, if you talk to any sales coach, marketing, like, marketing company, like, they’re going to talk a lot about measurements, like, you got to measure the past so you can create metrics and goals for the future.

No, I was gonna say like, even like, there are, there are other tactics that would be viewed as sales, but they can also be viewed as marketing. Those are, like, more assertive marketing tactics, like referral partnership or strategic partnership engines as well, right? And when it comes to measuring like, I could tell you, if we were to have a separate call Jeremy, I could tell you actually, how many partners we need to talk to, potentially to partner with, to how many are going to become a partner, and then from that, how many leads or referrals we’re going to get from them on an annual basis, down to how many actually would close. But again, like you got to start back at square one and really understand, like the tactics, the cost of acquisition, and where there is success on decisions moving forward.

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