Why Advisors Join Business Advisors of America

Who tends to do well here

The people who do well share a habit more than a résumé. They are comfortable on the phone with a stranger who owns a machine shop or a staffing company, they ask a second question after the first answer, and they do not need to be handed a script. Beyond that, the backgrounds differ quite a bit.

A commercial agent already knows how to talk to a landlord, read a lease and sit through a slow negotiation. What the agent often has not done is explain to an owner why their earnings, after adjustments, mean something different from what the tax return shows. That part is learnable, and it goes faster when you have a colleague to ask. An accountant arrives with the opposite profile. The numbers are easy and the conversation with a nervous owner at a kitchen table is the new skill. Someone from M&A or a finance job usually has both ends of it but has been working on larger companies with a team behind them, and now has to do the small-company version where the owner is also the best salesperson, the bookkeeper and the person who knows where the keys are.

Owners who have sold a business are the group I enjoy talking to most. They have lived the other side. They remember who called back and who did not, they remember the week of diligence when the buyer asked for something they had never kept, and they can say so with a straight face to the next owner. That is worth a great deal in the first meeting.

What does not seem to matter much is whether you have a long history of selling this exact kind of company. A person who has never touched a dental practice can still sit with the owner of one, learn what the buyers look at, and bring in someone who has seen it.

What the day looks like

Some of it is talking to owners. An advisor spends a good part of the week in conversations with people who are thinking about selling, some of them seriously, some of them only curious, and a few who have not yet told their spouse. Our own outreach produces many of these conversations, and referrals produce others. The outreach is letters, email, calls, and relationships with people who know owners. You are not expected to find every one of these on your own, though you are free to bring your own contacts and most advisors do.

Then there is valuation work. Before an owner can decide anything, someone has to work out what the business would plausibly sell for and explain how. That means reading three years of statements, finding the expenses that belong to the owner and not the company, and sitting down to say what the buyers in that industry tend to pay. We have valuation tools built for this, which cuts the hours it takes to get a first number in front of the owner. You still have to be the person who explains it, and the explanation is where owners decide whether they trust you.

Buyer calls take up a growing share of the schedule once a listing is live. A buyer asks about the lease, about the second-best employee, about why the numbers dipped in one quarter. You answer, or you go find out and come back. Some buyers are serious and some are collecting information, and a lot of the craft is telling them apart early and politely.

Closing is the last stretch. It is a dull and important part of the work, a long run of signatures, loan paperwork, landlord consents and last-minute questions from lawyers. You are the person who keeps everyone moving in the same direction. When it goes well nobody notices you. When it goes badly, everybody does.

What you stop doing alone

Prospecting alone is the first thing to go, or at least the first thing to shrink. A solo advisor who needs new owner conversations has to make them, usually by mailing, calling and networking in the hours around the deal work. Here that machine already exists and keeps running whether you are in a closing meeting or on a plane.

Building tools is the second. Plenty of advisors have a folder somewhere with a valuation spreadsheet they made years ago, a checklist copied from a seminar, and a document request list that grows each time a buyer asks for something new. We have already built valuation tools, document rooms for diligence, and a CRM that keeps track of every conversation so none of them slips. You use them. If one of them gets in your way, you tell us and it changes, since the people who built it also use it.

Chasing paperwork is the third, and I will be honest that it does not disappear. Owners still forget to send the file. What changes is that the request, the reminder and the place the file lands are set up, so you are not holding the whole chain in your head. A document room organized in the same order for every deal means a buyer finds what they need without calling you at night.

The thing we built that advisors tend to like most is the buyer database. It is a single place that holds every buyer we have talked to, along with what each one wants to buy. When a new listing comes in, it is checked against all of them. An advisor does not have to remember that a buyer mentioned an interest in a packaging company eight months ago on a call with someone else. The system remembers, and you get the match.

Two founders who work deals

The firm was started by Yogi Shmuel and me. We both work on deals directly, which means that when you ask a question about a lease assignment or a buyer who has gone quiet, the person answering has dealt with a version of it in the last few weeks. We are not managers who stepped away from the work in order to run the company. If you have a hard call to make with an owner, one of us will usually take twenty minutes to talk it through, and sometimes will get on the call.

I am a licensed advisor in California, and the firm is a DBA of Michael Ventures II LLC. Yogi and I talk through most decisions together, and you will see that in how the place runs. It is a small enough team that people know each other and know what each is working on. That has costs too. There is less hierarchy to hide behind and less cover when something goes sideways, and some people prefer a larger structure with more layers around them. If that is you, it is better to know now.

We serve owners in all fifty states. Licensing differs by state, and an advisor works within the rules of the state where the business is located. How your own license and the firm structure fit together is something we walk through in the first conversation, with your situation in front of us, because the answer depends on where you are licensed and where the deals are. I would rather not guess at it in a blog post.

How advisors are paid

Advisors are paid when a deal closes. What you earn depends on the size and the number of deals you close. That is the honest short version, and it means that the work you do in a slow month does not turn into income until a sale completes, which is true across this entire business and not specific to us.

I am going to stop there on purpose. The details of how advisors are paid are covered in a first conversation, with you, and I do not make promises about income in writing to people I have not met. Anyone who tells you what you will earn before they know the kinds of deals you can bring in is selling you something. Ask us how it works, ask to see it on paper, and ask how it would work on a deal you have in mind.

What to ask before you join

Ask who will take your call when a deal gets complicated, and ask for a name. Ask what happens to a conversation you started if you step away from the firm. Ask how new owner conversations reach the advisors and how those get divided, since the answer says a lot about how the firm sees its people. Ask what you will be able to see about a deal you are not on, and what you will not.

Ask how the technology works in practice. Request a look at the document room, the way a buyer is matched to a new listing, and the way a valuation is built. A tool that looks good in a description can be clumsy in use, and you will be working in these every day. If you do not see how a piece of it would help on a deal you have in mind, say so.

Ask about the state question early, particularly if you hold a license in one place and expect to work deals somewhere else. The rules vary, and the person who can answer for your case is the person you want to hear from. We will tell you what we know and where we would want your own attorney to weigh in.

Ask what we expect of you. We expect that you return calls, that you tell an owner the truth about value even when it disappoints them, and that you treat the buyer side with the same care as the seller side. Owners come to us at an uncertain time in their lives and many of them have never done this before. The advisors who last are the ones who stay steady in front of that.

Ask us what is hard about the work, too. Ask what advisors leave over. If the answer you get is all good news, keep asking.

Next step

If you have read this far, you probably have a few of your own questions already. The page on how joining works lays out what happens after you reach out, and the first conversation is where we cover pay, licensing and fit in detail. We operate under eXp Commercial, which gives advisors an established platform to build on. Bring a deal you have worked on, or a kind of owner you would like to serve, and we can talk about how it would have gone here.

This article shares our opinion and general information. It is not legal or tax advice. Always speak with a licensed attorney for legal advice, and a qualified tax professional for tax questions, before you act.