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(music playing) You're listening to
the OLLI at UNT alumni spotlight series,
presented by the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at
UNT and the UNT Alumni Association.
The Alumni Association is open to
all friends of UNT who are interested in serving,
supporting, and celebrating the university.
To learn more, visit untalumni.com.
To learn more about OLLI at UNT,
please visit our website, olli.unt.edu.
Now, let's join our host,
OLLI at UNT member, Susan Supak.
[Susan Supak] This is Susan Supak speaking at
the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at
the University of North Texas in Denton,
Texas, known to most of us as OLLI.
We are spotlighting UNT alumnus Steve Conwell.
Steve is an exit advisor,
CEO, and owner of Final Ascent, LLC.
He is an accomplished entrepreneur with over 25 years
of business advisory and financial consulting experience.
He is a certified value builder and
an expert in getting companies build to sell.
Steve was the past president of
the Fort Worth Institute of Internal
Auditors and national board member
and Dallas Advisory Council
Chairman with the American Lung Association.
He is an accomplished speaker
who presents on several topics on
business and entrepreneurship to
business leaders and college students.
Steve has worked for Ernst and
Young in public accounting,
business advisory services,
and technology auditing,
and at Whitman Heart,
where he served as
the COO of the Dallas office and Global
Director of business operations across a 72-Office,
$2 billion management consulting firm.
After graduating from the University of North Texas with
a bachelors and masters of Science in Accounting,
Steve founded ECC, a national
consulting and recruiting firm
prior to founding Final Ascent.
Welcome, Steve.
[Steve Conwell] Thank you for having me, Susan.
[Susan Supak] Thank you for joining us.
You have a very impressive background
in the business and financial world.
I can imagine that the services you
provide now must be extremely valuable
in preventing people from losing
much of what they've worked so hard to build and grow.
You work with people who are
ready to sell their companies,
either because of retirement or
transitions to another phase of life or business.
Here is a two-fold question.
How do you do that,
and why is it so important to prepare
a company before you put it on the market?
[Steve Conwell] It's such a great question because
oftentimes we talk about
maximizing the value of a business.
How do we get a business
to go to markets where they're going to get
the most money from a buyer and
transition into retirement or
what they'd like to do after the sale.
Oftentimes,
these skills that it takes to build a business,
so those entrepreneurial hats and growing
the company are different
from when you take a company to market.
There's key things that buyers look
at when they're searching for a company to acquire,
and oftentimes those things are not
necessarily things that a business owner
is going to focus on.
You get two things. You get maximizing value,
which is super-important, failing to limit losses,
which is another challenge.
Somebody goes to markets,
comes to find out they're going to get
$0.50 on the dollar
because they should have sold the business, let's say,
two or three years ago,
and because of the economy or
because of a shift in business practices,
they ended up actually losing
a lot of value to their business.
Then the other thing is just
preparing their business for sale.
I always say, getting that company built to
sell in a fact so that when they take it to market,
they attract multiple buyers.
You get that kind of feeding frenzy
on wanting to buy the business,
and then they've got options to
decide which offer they'd like to go with.
[Susan Supak] How do you go about
figuring out what a company needs to do?
[Steve Conwell] We follow what we call
our reach your peak system.
It's six phases.
I don't want to go and dive into consultant speak,
but we rely on a lot of systems and technology,
what we call the power of the tribe,
to help business owners prepare their businesses
for sale and really transform their company,
if you think about it, into built to sell businesses.
It's all about aligning the goals and visions of
the business owner and helping
maximize that business value.
The other thing is,
oftentimes they want to build a legacy.
They've spent their whole life building this company,
they want to inspire that next-generation
of business owner and
see their business build and grow beyond themselves.
To do this, I call it the foundation,
but they're accounting records.
I mean, flat off the back,
we're going to go and do
an accounting risk assessment and
determine their strengths and weaknesses.
Oftentimes, businesses on what's called the cash basis
and buyers want their companies
and the accrual basis as an example.
They also want accurate and complete financial records
so they can compare
their company apples to other apples with
other businesses that they're thinking about acquiring.
I would say 90,
95 percent of the time we're going to clean
up the financial records and get them squared away,
and then we'll implement month-end close processes,
monthly financial management,
review meetings, forecasting cashflow,
and just a lot more.
We're really getting their business from
a financial records standpoint,
ready for the next step.
This is a vital step we take our business owners through,
and that's engineering
their financial performance by building projections.
Now granted, some companies will
have gone through this process,
but we take them
through this from a coaching perspective and
helping them think about how to build
projections that are challenging but attainable.
But we're also concentrating and building
their business value from
a financial perspective as that is getting executed.
We're looking at things like,
how do we look at
the market and continue to grow their top line,
but also look at it in terms of
improving their gross margins like their gross profit,
so they're selling more profitable items that
are easily teachable to their employees and repeatable,
meaning that customers are
going to want to buy more of it.
Then we'll work on cleaning up.
They're getting lean and mean,
if you will, with their operating expenses.
A lot of times they just spend a lot so that
we can grow their bottom line net profits,
which then has an effect on their value downstream.
Once we get that going in those two phases, I mean,
there's a lot of coaching and consulting going on,
and we're what we're doing is we're prepping them for
some of the heavy lifting is fixing the column.
What we'll do is we'll work on things
called key drivers of value.
Those key drivers of value are what
buyers look for when they're hunting for company.
These are these non-financial things that are important,
and what we want to do is like selling your home.
You don't just go put a sale sign in the yard and say,
bang, we're selling our company.
You're going to get a realtor,
they're going to come in,
and they're going to take out half your furniture,
they're going to reorganize things.
They're going to have your desktop, the paint,
maybe put some flowers in the front,
and just position your company
to sparkling shine in the market.
It's the same thing with the business.
We work on things that a business owner may
not necessarily think about
if they've never sold their company.
This is super valuable because it's going to
affect the multiple that the business sells for.
We'll talk about this later.
What do I mean by all this stuff?
Obviously strong for financial performance is critical.
They want the business to be thriving,
not surviving when they go to market.
Because if I'm going to buy a company,
I want to see 30 percent year over year revenue growth,
I want to see 20 percent growth in their net profits,
so you're coming into the market on a big upswing.
But I also want to say,
if I'm a strategic buyer,
I want to see this business has the potential to
scale and it has significant growth potential.
A buyer can come in,
bring the capital and the resources that it
needs to take that company to the next level.
There'll be hunting for that.
Obviously, uniqueness and competitive differentiation is
super important because if a buyer is looking at,
let's say your industry and companies in your industry,
you want to be able to stand out from that competition.
Strong, positive cash flow,
you want more money coming in than it coming out.
You want it coming in faster,
then it goes out so that the business can in
affect operate itself from a cash position perspective.
Then the list goes on.
I mean, recurring revenue streams.
You have what's called automatic customers.
Every month cash is just coming in and
automatic basis is really valuable to business owners.
We can dive into things like
customer satisfaction and the net promoter score,
which is a score that's
a global index on
a company's high potential for growth and there are
buyers that hunt for
companies that have high net promoter scores
specifically because they know that they can really
grow their businesses and the list goes on.
I'd say another huge one is reducing
what we call the owner's involvement in
the business in effect you proofing
the business free from owner dependency,
that becomes a huge issue when buyers buy companies,
if the business is in effect synonymous with the owner,
oftentimes it can be considered worthless.
What we want to do is in effect,
have the owner be the owner and have a CEO or
a manager and other people
executing the business without them.
Now that doesn't mean obviously they
disappear but at the end of the day,
that becomes a huge thing for a turnkey business.
That is, hey,
you buy my business, I give you
the keys and it can operate without me.
There's a myriad of different things,
but that's in effect what we do to
help companies go through our cycle,
and really it's about value
maximization and making sure they're
prepared for sale so they can attract multiple buyers,
create that buyer attention,
and then ultimately sell
the business the way they would like to sell it.
[Susan Supak] Well, it sounds like other
than the owner dependency,
which makes so much sense
when someone's taking over business,
you don't want it dependent on a certain person that
won't be there but the other aspects of
it sound like such important elements
of a very successful business.
It sounds like someone could go through this process
without even being ready to sell
and their business would benefit from it.
[Steve Conwell] I'm so glad you mentioned that
because when we go through this process,
most of the business owners will say,
gosh, I should have been running my business this way.
[Susan Supak] I can imagine.
[Steve Conwell] Absolutely. I mean,
offers, sometimes they'll come out of nowhere.
If a company is really built to sell,
they can take advantage of it or they can just say,
no, don't want to do it right now.
[Susan Supak] Well then that makes me think
about someone who's first
starting a business and coming up
with a good business plan,
it must be a crucial part of a good business plan to be
able to maximize your business
at the other end of things,
when you're actually ready to sell or ready to retire,
whatever you're ready to do.
[Steve Conwell] It's not about, hey,
how much revenue do we have coming into the business.
It's how much value are we creating with the business.
I've seen time and again where you have,
let's say a $10 million company and
a $5 million company in the same industry and
the $5 million company sells for
more because they're more efficient.
They don't have, let's say customer concentration issues.
Let's say the $10 million business has got
40 percent of the revenue coming from one customer.
That's a significant risk to a buyer,
because what if the customer goes away?
Or they may be a $10 million company,
but their net profits are $450,000,
where this $5 million company has
net profits of $1.2 million.
They're smaller from a revenue perspective,
but they're much more valuable than the larger company,
and that's thinking in terms of creating
value and improving the value of your business.
If you think in terms of that,
you think about these non-financial drivers
that I was talking about and
those key elements that buyers look
for when they're hunting for a business to acquire.
Right off the bat, running
your business that way just from the beginning,
entrepreneurial stages going forward,
you're way ahead of the game from
somebody that doesn't take that approach.
[Susan Supak] This sounds like something that a person
or a business wouldn't be able to accomplish overnight.
I'm sure there are many elements
that have to go into play.
Do you have a normal timeline for this process or does it
depend on how well organized the business is originally?
[Steve Conwell] Yeah, that's a good question.
Usually we'll work with businesses that want to sell
inside a two years with
a minimum of about 12 months of work.
If you get shorter than that,
depending on some of the things that we need to work on
specifically to maximize their value
you don't have enough runway,
and some of that's going to be dependent on
the owner and their selling requirements
from a timeline perspective.
They may have, let's say a couple of
parents in another state getting dementia,
they absolutely have to sell the business.
That's one of those really sad situations
where if we had the bandwidth
and time to really help to grow their value,
we could double or triple
what they're going get when they sell the company,
but they need to sell now.
The other situations that will come up and I always
say it depends what we follow
a set of reach your peak system,
but there's areas of focus depending on what they need to
strengthen to improve the value
of their company and get them built to sell.
Each company, we take them through the same system,
but we evaluate it and look at
it and then we work backwards.
If you want to sell at,
let's say, what are we in?
July, 2020, they want to sell two years out we say,
okay, it takes on
average about nine months to sell a business,
so we'll back that up.
Then we'll say it takes about 2-3 months to really get
the business ready to go to market.
There's a whole process
that we have to go through to get them ready to
go to market and market them out on the web, etc.
Then from there we can see that's the amount of
time that we have to work with to maximize your value,
and then we'll continue working with them
through the sale but that
gives a good visual timeline and their mind to say,
okay, I don't have two years
to get my business ready for sale.
Let's say I have 12 months to do it.
[Susan Supak] Well, I know that it might be a
little too soon to ask this question,
but I'm very curious with
all the recent devastation that's
gone on with so many businesses,
small or otherwise,
we've read about it in the paper all the time.
I talk to people about it because
of this COVID-19 situation,
things have definitely changed in many marketplaces.
Have you noticed that in terms
of what you do for businesses and do you
have any advice for people that are in
businesses that are affected by this situation?
[Steve Conwell] Yeah well, I'll tell you. It's really
been a blue swan event.
[Susan Supak] Yes.
[Steve Conwell] Reminds me of the tech and Internet
bubble crash back in,
was it 2001, 2002 timeframe.
The mortgage meltdown brutal came out of
nowhere but really hit hard for the economy.
I'll tell you, all the things that we tell
business owners to do to maximize their value is
the same thing to help mitigate the effect of
downturns in the markets and that hit to their value.
The tough thing is all of
those things that we tell business owners to
do got hit all at
once through nothing they could do about it.
Businesses boom, shut down,
work from home, it was brutal.
What we've done, I guess it's been like
a crash course in surviving
during a really unique time in our history,
so what we've told our
customers and what we've worked on,
of course we've spent a bunch of time filling
out the payment protection plan, loans,
the programs are getting
those applications square root away and all that,
but getting to brass tacks on
looking at their projections this way.
What is happening to my revenue?
What's happening to my labor costs?
How is it going to affect
my business when we come out of this thing,
because it's not going to be that all of a sudden,
let's say, the economy completely
opens up on July 1st as an example,
and they're going to double
their revenue for the next three months?
It's going to take time,
let's say could take 4-6 months,
maybe a year for
their business to get truly back to where it was,
and so we'll project for that.
We'll project the SBA loans coming in,
the forgivable part, the
potential part of that that would have to get paid back,
get lean and mean and their expenses,
which I tell every business owner look,
this is an interesting,
if they get anything out of this comment of
this podcast here, it's this.
For every dollar that you save by not spending it.
Let's say you sell a 4X multiple,
you're getting four back.
If you save $10,000 a year,
you're getting 40 grand back.
If you can increase your net profits by 100,000 a year,
you're getting 400,000 back.
Getting lean and mean is super-important.
[Susan Supak] Now why are you getting that back?
If you save 4,000,
the example that you just gave,
Steve, why is that?
[Steve Conwell] Well, if you think about it just from
the profit and loss statement
and you've got your operating expenses,
they're going to get subtracted from your gross profits.
Just to keep it really simple,
we have $1,000 in gross profit and we had,
let's say, $600 in operating expenses,
that would mean your net profits is 400 bucks.
Instead of my operating expenses being in 600,
I can make them 500.
My net profits went from 400-500,
which is that a 25 percent increase
in our net profits just by getting lean and mean.
What that's doing is that from a valuation perspective,
if they were to sell it like a 3X multiple,
you would go 400 times 3 is 1,200,
where 500 times 3 is 1,500.
You just increase the value of the company.
[Susan Supak] Well, that sounds like very good advice
and it sounds like something that
will very much speak to people
in this situation they have right now.
I'm going to say, what are
your top challenges when you're advising business owners?
I can say lean and mean,
that's got to be difficult for some people.
Do you have some top challenges when you're advising
people on how to manage their transition successfully?
Do you find that there are some things
that a little bit challenging?
[Steve Conwell] Yeah, absolutely.
Each business is different
or they have their own set of idiosyncrasies and
challenges because
the small lower middle market there are
underserved and they don't have
whole accounting teams and a full CFO, etc.
The accounting side always seems to
be something that we spend time with
to educate them so that they
understand that operating decisions that they may make,
how it affects their financial statements.
That's always a challenge.
I would say the owner dependency thing
is a huge one because
you've got to figure that when
a business owner starts his company, it's their baby.
They've spent all this time
building it and then when they go to sell,
it's like a family member.
But if you think about it,
when they start the company,
they'd been the expert.
As they grow and expand,
they know how everything operates and works.
One of the biggest things is to get them to understand
how you proofing their business,
like taking them out of the operations of their business,
will increase the value of their company,
and will have conversations and do
exercises until that light clicks off.
Then once it does,
then we can start to work on instruction manuals,
delegating what they do to other team members,
cross training, so that
the business if they went on vacation,
went around the world for three months,
when they got back, it could be
doing better without them.
That's an important thing.
Positive cash flow can be
an interesting challenge sometimes
because you'll have business owners that look,
I always pay my bills
and I get my bills are paid on time.
Then they may have payment terms for
their customers like net 30 or something like that,
we have to teach them to flip that model and say,
how do we get cash coming in
faster and quicker from our customers,
either in advance or 50 percent upfront?
Then how do we pay our vendors slower?
Now, I'm not talking about, hey,
I've got net 30 terms of
my vendor and I'm going to pay him and net 90,
but how do we slow cash going out in speed at coming in?
When we get that squared away,
you won't believe how many
business owners just a sigh of relief because they see
their cash balance continuing to increase. Cash is king.
[Susan Supak] Cash is king. This sounds so important.
It really does to many businesses.
Are most of your business owners getting ready to retire
or are they perhaps moving on to some other area?
[Steve Conwell] Well, it's a good question.
I have the gamut for the clients that we work with,
but if you talk about like the baby boomers and
we've got a very unique time in our history coming up,
the baby boomers own 12 million businesses right now.
It's the equivalent of 10 trillion in assets,
and that's 10 trillion is going to change hands.
The one great equalizer is time.
Every successive year they get older
and it is bigger than everybody.
In matter of fact,
it's the largest transition and wealth in
the history of the globe of all time.
People that do it, we're going to need so many more of
them to help because
you've got to figure of those 12 million businesses,
80 percent of them are
small and lower middle market companies.
They don't have the expertise to go through this process.
They haven't sold multiple companies.
They can't hire a massive team to go do this,
and so I'll tell you, is truly going to be unbelievable,
and I talk a lot about
saturation proofing your business
for when you go to market,
you don't want to go to market,
let's say 5, 6,
7 years from now,
and there's an army of
companies in your industry also going to market.
What can you do now to make sure that your business
truly stands out so that
you can still attract multiple buyers?
Right now it's a seller's market,
but as we continue to press on,
it will shift into a buyer's market
and you start to see prices go down.
[Susan Supak] Do you say a buyer's market because of
all the millennial companies that will be up for sale?
Is that why you're saying that
or are there other reasons?
[Steve Conwell] I think it's just a classic supply
and demand principle.
Right now, there's an army of buyers.
Of course, this is a unique time
with COVID-19 and all that,
it's been strange what's happened with
the buyer's market and sellers market because we've all
had to be very tactical right now,
but when you look at
the supply as the baby boomers get older,
if you just target that sector of our population,
there's going to be more and more businesses go into
market and it's not like the buyers are going to keep up.
They're going to become more selective,
there'll be able to be more selective,
and then you'll have some more price
sensitivity that will kick in.
It's going to be vitally important for businesses to get
built to sell and do the things to maximize their value,
and they're really going to need to leverage
expertise to help them with that.
It's a pretty tough thing to try to go this alone.
There's a lot of things that sellers
aren't going to know,
and buyers with Harvard negotiation tactics
going at them to buy their company,
you really want that advice and expertise
to take it to that next level.
[Susan Supak] That makes sense. It sounds like
these elements that you've been talking about,
they have to be critical across the board.
It wouldn't be just in one sector of the business.
It sounds like these are elements that would be
critical no matter what your business is about.
[Steve Conwell] Yeah, their industry agnostic,
these are just time-tested principles
for building a valuable company.
Not a company that's got tons of revenue of
valuable company and if you implement these principles,
and if you have a runway to do it,
because if time is on your side and you can
work on that and implement these principles,
you're going to be really happy
when you sell your company.
When I talk about options,
it's nice when you get 10 offers to buy your business.
[Susan Supak] Absolutely.
[Steve Conwell] It's just a fantastic thing.
A lot less stress and pressure versus I've
got one offer at 70 cents on the dollar.
I really needed the 100 percent,
but we're not getting any more buyers or interest
in your business because you haven't got
your business prepared in a way that's going to
attract that multiple buyers scenario.
[Susan Supak] Makes sense. If I'm a buyer,
I want to go into a business that's going to be
simple for me just to step in and run.
I don't want to go in and have to straighten things
out and work on different aspects of the business,
so it makes excellent sense.
I got to ask you this, what's
your favorite part of all of this,
do you have a favorite part?
[Steve Conwell] Yeah, I'll tell you.
I can't tell you how much
I love working with business owners. I really do.
Just the multiple industry,
it satisfies my entrepreneurial juices
from building companies.
I get super excited.
It can be a business that
I've got an electrician company that I work
with and they've got this awesome idea
for recurring revenue stream,
and I get all excited about it too.
That's what I love about it.
I just have a small lower middle market companies
have a really special place in my heart.
I have worked on Fortune 2000 and
Fortune 500 Global consulting and all that,
but I love the small entrepreneurs
that really run our economy.
They provide all the jobs and
how many times those people have had to
forego salaries while they're growing
their business and they're making nothing,
just trying to get there to achieve
the American dream and I get to be part of that.
I'll tell you, to me it's very serious. It's really is.
I treat it like it's my company and what can I do to make
their retirement after or life
after the sale butter is all that I'm focused on.
But it's just working with
the business owners and really everything about it.
I love it, the challenges that come up,
the issues, the talks that we have.
It's fun to me.
It's maybe not fun to everybody,
but to me it's just a lot of fun going through this.
[Susan Supak] I can hear that, and that sounds great.
If I owned a business,
I would want you to help me.
(laughing) You mentioned your business, ECC,
that you sold in 2008,
the national consulting and recruiting firm.
Is that what led you to found Final Ascent?
Was selling your business
to help people to reach their goals or
was there another way that you
went around to forming the company that you're in now?
[Speaker 2] It was a combination.
We sold ECC back in 2008 and got an offer out of
the blue from a top 10 public accounting firm
that wanted to build a presence in the South.
Luckily, we were highly systematized and
leveraged technology and just we built that company.
My wife and I starting it we had 30 employees,
60 contractors and we were people all over the country,
work in and even in the world,
and started another company.
Those entrepreneurial roots, they just
kept coming back to them and now we
started to see the seller
and buyer community just picking up and
recognizing that small businesses just they did not have
the help that they needed to achieve that American dream.
How many of them were either selling their companies for
a fire sale or sadly,
just close shop because they just
didn't feel there was a way.
I felt like uniquely positioned with
my background with IT and business and strategy,
consulting and audit, and
then the entrepreneurial side to help.
We started it in 2017 and just
been hitting the ground running and
just super excited to help.
[Susan Supak] This has been terrific.
Steve, is there anything else that
you would like me to ask you?
[Steve Conwell] Oh wow, that's an interesting question.
I would say the only thing is that from this COVID-19,
unique time that we found ourselves in.
I wanted to say that one of the things that's
important during this time frame is to
focus on the positive.
Now's the time.
Now granted, we're kind of far into this thing,
but document your processes
and create instruction manuals.
Now's the time to really look at
your business theme. What do you provide?
What markets do you serve?
What new markets could you go into,
to grow and expand?
Looking at the products and services,
what's the most profitable that's the
easiest to get your employees to execute and deliver?
Then repeatable the customers
that want to buy more of it.
How can you serve your customers
better to provide more value?
I just feel like it's
so easy for all of us being just inundated with
this in the media and
just the constant discussions
about COVID-19 to focus on the negative,
but focus on the positive and focus on
ways that you can provide
additional value because when you
come out of this on the back end,
you're going to find those companies
that you may have competed with,
they're just aren't there anymore.
You're going to find that you may actually capture
more market share and be more
valuable coming off the back end of that.
That's just something that there's
always two sides to a coin,
and I just believe you have to
look at things holistically.
We have to do damage control and do
the tactical things to get
through a strange event like this.
But we also at that time have to then say, okay,
how do we become a stronger company
to survive because there's
going to be another blue swan event later at some point.
Let's just roll up our sleeves and do what
we can and be the best that we can be.
[Susan Supak] Well, I've thought about that.
This has been such a unique and extreme time.
I've thought about it in
so many areas and certainly in business.
The downside has to have also created
some really unique opportunities
that are presenting themselves that weren't there before.
Some real positive things.
[Steve Conwell] You look at the sad side
of the equation is that you do have
some businesses that were very limping along.
That this is bottom five percent
that just they went away and you see,
everybody sees it, strip malls, etc.
But there are incredibly unique opportunities
out there. Think about Zoom.
I've been using Zoom as an example,
the web conferencing for a long time.
It wasn't anything new to me.
But think of the millions and millions of companies,
businesses, and people that suddenly
are doing video conferencing all the time.
Zoom's business went from wherever they were
at to 10 times their size.
You had businesses that were in
the manufacturing industry that
immediately retooled and were producing products to help,
whether it's the protection equipment
or masks or ventilators.
They just reinvent themselves.
You have businesses saying, okay,
we always did things in person.
But maybe here we have found a way
now not have to go travel all the time,
we can actually do this with a video conference.
I'll give you a great example.
I have a business that I work with
that owns some autism clinics.
They work with students on
the spectrum to the very extreme.
The clinics, they always have the kids there and
it's just a great phenomenal environment.
Well, when the business
obviously shut down because you couldn't have
the kids in all close proximity and
especially autistic kids because
you can't tell them, "Don't go off there."
They said, okay, we can do like tele sessions,
we can do at home nursing visits
directly and still maintain
the distance that we need to,
and we had conversations.
Well, these are new service offerings.
When we build out the capacity on a clinic,
we can augment the revenue by
adding these two new revenue streams to it.
By doing the projections,
we increase the revenue by,
it was like 30-35 percent.
Just offer the new service offerings that
got created by thinking outside the box.
It's such a great question because there's
just a wealth of opportunity.
You just have to put
your entrepreneurial hat and think out of
the box on what can you do to be
better because of (music playing) what can be oftentimes
a very scary and unsafe type environment
that we found ourselves in,
especially early in the game.
[Susan Supak] That's right. Thank you, Steve.
This has been fascinating.
You obviously have expertise
and knowledge in so many areas of business.
It's been very interesting to hear
how you can go in and help
these businesses and present
them in the best way that they can go on
the market and be ready to go as well as other
people that are just trying to grow their businesses.
I thank you very much for joining us.
It's been fascinating.
[Steve Conwell] Thank you very much.
The pleasure is all mine.
I love doing things obviously with UNT and
the Alumni Association and just super
appreciate the opportunity to speak with you.
[Susan Supak] Absolutely. Thank you so much.
This has been Susan Supak speaking at
the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute
at the University of North Texas,
with Steve Conwell.
Thanks for listening.
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