Paul West - Good Busy vs Bad Busy. Why Business Owners Get Stuck in the Trees and Not the Forest

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To match with a licensed therapist today, go to Talkspace.com and enter promo code. Hi everyone, it's Bill Black, the exit coach from the Exit Coach Radio show. You know, one of the biggest questions I get on the show is what exactly goes into a business exit plan and when should I start creating mine? Well, I always tell people that the best time to start was 5 years ago, but the next best time is now because you never know when you might need it. So we put together a free report that describes what an exit plan is and what you should know. You can get it free by texting exit plan with no spaces to 44222. That's exit plan to 44222. Again, text exit plan to 44222. Welcome to the Exit Coach Radio show, the show for baby boomer business owners who are looking for cutting edge information as they plan their 3 to 10 year business succession and exit. Every week we interview top professional advisors for their best tips, strategies, and precautions so you can be well planned. And now here's your host, the exit coach Bill Black. Hello everyone, thanks so much for joining me once again today. Pleasure to have you with me. My guest today is Paul West, and he is the managing partner at Carson Wealth, which is a Barron's Hall of Fame firm, and it's quite an honor for that that designation. Paul also holds both the CFP and CAP designations. His clients utilize his services because of his team's ability to communicate complex matters. In simple language along with creating mutual accountability to achieve confident financial decisions, and Paul works closely with clients to develop an in-depth understanding of individual and family wealth management needs and works with a team of specialists to provide tailored solutions for investment management, wealth transition, trust services, credit, and proactive tax strategies. And you know, Paul works with business owners, so you're in the right place if you're listening and you're a business owner, of course. That's primarily our audience. Today we're going to talk about good busy versus bad busy. Why business owners get stuck in the trees and not the forest. Paul, welcome. Thanks so much for joining me today. Yeah, glad to be here, Bill, thanks so much for having me. Paul, before we get too much into the subject matter of the day, um, tell us a little bit about you and your background and how you, uh, how you came to start your firm. Yeah, so I've been a professional over 20 years, but more importantly, I have a beautiful wife, 3 lovely children, um, and they of course matter the most, uh, but getting in the business, I, I, I did like most people. You're not sure where you want to go with uh 2. 122 year old, so I started working for a corporate enterprise, uh, started my own firm 10 years later and now 13 years later, plus I'm part of a, you know, very large, as you shared, uh, Barrons and Forbes and other successful firm, but what has taught me along the journey is in working with CEOs across the country is their most important asset is time, and that's why I like the phrase good busy versus bad busy. You know, if I ask you, Bill, how's your day going, what a lot of people say, oh, I'm so busy, I'm so busy. But is it busy are you doing the things you wanna be doing and most effective for you. So I, I, I, when I'm part of my background is I've learned, uh, I traveled all the time, but was it the highest and effective use of my travel? Was it the highest and effective use of my time and how do I rank that. Um, that's why I love the phrase whenever somebody says, am I busy, my immediate rebuttal is, well, are you good busy or bad busy? I love watching their face bill because you can immediately get them to to think, what am I really doing? Yeah, and you're, you're, you've got your your finger on something there, I think, because a lot of owners are, especially when they've been doing it for quite a while, they started their business with one set of ideas of what they would be doing with their time and their day, and this happens in all kinds of professions like doctors especially, you know, and then they find themselves over the years things have gotten more complicated. They're doing more of the administrative stuff that they hate to do, and they've gotten away with it. Um, so, uh, this is, it's pretty common to find burned out business owners because they're not doing what they love to do. Is that fair to sum it up that way? Yeah, I mean, just a quick example, most of them get up, work out, um, or go straight into the office, beat most of their employees, work all day, go home, have a quick dinner, and then most likely start working again or or or thinking about work, and the next thing I know, a week, a month, a year, and now all of a sudden 10 years went by and things move so so quickly for them. And that's why I ask them about doing good busy like what do they wanna do in their next chapter and chapter doesn't mean have to be a business sales just means the next chapter of their journey is it hiring their successor? Is it, uh, spending less time on the business? Is it doing an acquisition just get them to focus on those, those key um items and, and it's really we all write out our to do list right? or at at home we call them the honeydew list. But really what are those top two things that they could be working on right now versus uh the inundation right of the bad busy? That happens to all of us right? in email for all of us is the culprit, right? Emails a transfer of uh responsibility from one person the next. That's why I personally I'm not a fan of email because all you're doing is trying to transfer information on someone else's plate, but that doesn't mean something that it's important and viable for you to be working on right now. Yeah, that can pull you away from, from your, like you said, your, your top to do list when you, when you, you know, when you were in a quiet place and you said, all right, tomorrow I'm going to tackle these things and then you get in. I had one owner say it's like I'm playing whack a mole all day. These, these, these things keep popping up and I keep whacking them down and it doesn't stop. So what are the top 2 to 3 mistakes that you see business owners making today? Yeah, so I, I like to say they're just they're stuck in the trees there and they're solving. Individual problems, so I'll give you an example, um, when, when you ask a business owner what's most important to them, they're gonna tell you family first, business second. And then personal passions, priorities third. But if you look at how they spend their time, business is always ranked number one in front of time. So then when you get them to think about their own personal, you know, financial plan, their personal picture, they feel like if they spend 10 minutes, 15 minutes on the phone with their CPA, their attorney, their trust officer, their PNC person. They like almost infer their brain that that's automatically transferred to all the other professionals. But the reality it's not, so they end up creating a hodgepodge plan of their journey in life here, um, without actually ever collaborating it and yet they would never allow that in their business. They're not gonna let their operations department not talk to finance or HR or IT, right? They're all gonna have to talk to each other, yet for some reason in most CEO's business life, they don't allow that form of collaboration. Mhm, mhm. I'm with you. Um, so, so what you're saying is that they, um, they, they don't collaborate with, with others well or or they don't see that as a as a fruitful activity. Yeah, but they don't, or they just assume like, hey, everybody's got uh their independent interest and his or hers at best of heart, but the reality is, is those people maybe don't have all the information, um, and so if they don't, so how, how can their CPA recommend if it's writer them to not to get an ESOP unless they understand all these other elements of their business, right? but has the. Business owner actually spent time explaining all of those, you know, key value drivers for them, uh, what's important for them, or, you know, got another CEO I just talked to last week doing a fantastic job running their business. Um, you know, we, we help them look at their, uh, disability policy, and the gap is so severe, but they're never going to spend time to look at it, um, and to think about it. So the mistakes we see made are if actually, and I heard this phrase once from a gentleman named Colonel Athens. Arthur Athens that you know sometimes to um uh to be selfless, you have to be selfish and I love that phrase because Bill, if you have to spend time on yourself and your family, and if you make those things work and you help protect your family and make those right decisions, you're going to be so much more confident and capable in all of your business endeavors as a CEO. Yeah, and you know, in that communication that you just communication you just made, certainly when a business owner starts to think about the future transition or succession or exit, if they're not communicating that with their tax and legal advisers and others in a very particular way. they're not going to get good advice because most of the time, and you can comment on this, but most of the time I see business owners where there's no succession plan agenda out there. They're just operating from year to year, and the CPA's job is to kill taxes. Not to create value for the business, not to create a transaction value for the future value of the business. Generally it's to kill taxes, and they'll they'll continue to operate that way unless they're given a directive by the owner that, hey, I want to sell in 3 to 5 years. How do I make it more valuable for that transaction? Is that fair to say? Yeah, super fair to say. I mean, be like you're you're out looking at the ocean, right? Well, if you're pointed to the right and just looking that direction, you only see what's happening there, so maybe that's the tax lens, but you're missing all these other things if you turn to the center, you turn to the left, and as you're looking out on the ris and each one of them is different. And so you're only gonna take advice as the business owner on whichever lens you're uh pointed to and so I always like to, you know, imagine for if I'm a business owner and I'm running my business is I need a bunch of trusted people who are helping me. Uh, in all elements, right, tax, trust, estate, you know, uh, financial planning, uh, investment management, all those features that like, you know, an exit planning bill is who's helping them see the forest versus the trees and helping them what I like to call is optimize all of those key decisions. I know many business owners that are listening today and you just alluded to it, uh, they're like, oh, I'm never gonna sell my business, I'm never gonna do anything. Well, you're gonna leave your business at one point whether you like it or not, because life happens. So, um, I will tell you and, and we work with a lot of families. If you're on your deathbed. No one's talking about how much money you paid an attorney or your performance or your business, your fees. They're talking about you as a person. What you did, how you treated your family, kids, grandkids, so why um scrutinize um all these other little things when the reality is, is you're trying to live out your best life, and so business owners today, they get so focused on, OK, well this fee or that cost is X or Y. But I, I, I can assure you when they're looking back later in life, they're gonna say to themselves, I wish I wouldn't have uh. Spent so much time focusing on that little detail or I wish I would have hired an exit planner. I wish I would have hired a wealth planner that would have helped me a lot sooner so that they could advance into that chapter stage of their life. Very good point. I guess another way to put it is that someday, someday you will exit your business like you said. I mean, there's no, whether it's good news or bad news, you know, that that caused that. But the other thing is that someday you'll be remembered, uh, either for your planning or your lack of planning. and we've seen, yeah, you don't want to be front page Wall Street Journal, right, for your lack of plan. You don't want to be and you don't want to, you don't want to leave behind like I've seen and you've seen, I'm sure, situations where the widow or the widower is just saying. What do I do now and why aren't, why aren't there some simple instructions for what I should be doing and why is everything such a hornet's nest of mess? That's no fun for anybody. So, so, uh, being really clear and intentional in in these areas of planning and and not assuming that your advisers all know what you're thinking now, um, those are really good, those are really good pointers and tips for our listeners, I think, um. You know, I had a question for you that how do you Yeah, go ahead. There's I, I would add, so right, the business owner, often, you know, especially if they're married, um, you know, their spouse trusts them inherently, or maybe your spouse is in the business with you, uh, but usually someone's taking control of just the overall picture. Uh, but when that person's not here again like you said, whether, um, good or bad or intentional or unintentional exit is they have to have some central collaborative platform place not only just for document storage but also um to carry out the key beliefs. Value vision um and somebody can help put all those pieces of the puzzle together besides what just usually happens right now, right, at dinner or a glass of wine or sitting having coffee on the front porch, those, those are, those are short brief moments in time, but they're not the full, you know, comprehensive picture. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So it is a, it's critical for owners to communicate properly and do that in a way that makes sense for all their advisers. How do you help business owners know when enough is enough? That's a question you posed to me. So tell me what you mean by that, and let's talk about that. When is enough enough for a business owner? Yeah, so the number one, right, most people lean towards financial, OK, so I'll give you an example. We're working with a family, uh, they have offers to sell their business in the high 8 figures, but the range is, is big. And so the question is, alright, I gave you an offer right now. Let's just call it for high we'll call right in the middle right there, 75 million and you have the offer somebody to to walk in under the terms today. Would you do it? And the person I was talking to paused. And I said, you know what, you don't know when is enough enough because you don't have in your mind the financial comfort that if that was enough for you, and let's get, get a, get a set aside the qualitative measure, right? Well, a lot of people answer, well, I don't know what I'm gonna do next. And that's fine. That's also part of the decision making processes is you reach this comfort at a point you're ready to move on to your next journey whether uh financial based, family based, or business based. OK, I get it. OK, so yeah, I was thinking there's the other interpretation of that is like I'm so tired of the BS like we talked about early on that, you know, so many people are like, I'm doing so many things I don't like to do enough is enough. And you know that is a turning point too, Paul. I think you'll agree that at that, that's a point when someone like yourself can come in and say that's because you're doing too much of everything. And by the way, if you're going to exit your business and you're not going to stick around after that, then you need to start peeling off all of those tasks anyways. Let's start doing it now and you might find that that business owner's a lot happier person within a short period of time, right? Yeah, for sure. I mean, that would, right, we all as business owners get fatigued and so the easy thing is to say, hey, I get fatigue and enough's enough, uh, but then you probably haven't optimized what you could sell it for, and that may not be important. It may be more important for you to get back control of your life, or get more time with your family, but for me it's both the qualitative and quantitative helping people figure out when is enough enough. Yes, yes, financially they need to know that's certainly an early point they need to figure out, OK, what do I need to get out of this thing and am I there? If I'm there maybe I should be accelerating my timeline if I'm not having fun anymore. So all good points. Let me ask you a question. I see you're, you're a chartered adviser in philanthropy and also a certified financial planner. Why do you think those designations are important in exit planning? Yeah, so I, I think it's super important is one you brought up earlier, Bill, that uh the tax professionals, the CPA are right, they're trying to ax um taxes. So when people, especially that have financial assets, think about taxable ways to um or taxable techniques to minimize taxes, charitable giving becomes an important part, but again, that's only half of the equation. The other is the qualitative and what what I tell people is, is, and this is a big reason why I'm a charter adviser in philanthropy. I have yet built to find a person. That gifted money and said they did it too soon. And the reason why is, is because the psychological benefit they get or we, we, we sometimes call it that return on psyche is yeah there can be some taxable impact, but actually the emotional feeling they get, um, maybe involving their children and talking through how they're doing some gifting, um, and how they're approaching it. Uh, the business owners, you know, we have opportunities just in simple things, right? We get asked to give gifts to charity events whether it's for silent auction items for corporate tables, but we have, we have an incredible ability to influence other people, and philanthropic endeavors is a big way to do it. And just for me personally and the business owners I work with, that's an important part of our conversation. I don't mean they have to be the most charitable people out there by any way, shape, or form. But I do want to help influence their mind on what can we do now versus later, uh, because if you don't get a chance to experience it, you maybe won't get uh the enjoyment side of the qualitative uh half of this equation. Excellent, excellent. And you know, exit planning is complicated. The more arrows you have in your quiver, the more diverse knowledge you can bring to a client, the more valuable you are. And I know you have two special offers as we wrap up today an election protection portfolio defense review. Say that three times fast. Election protection portfolio defense review, if you're concerned about the election. An impact on the portfolio. Paul and his team can share a complementary risk analysis and also a complimentary business owner exit planning assessment where his team will help you assess your long term readiness approach. Paul, what's the best way for our listeners to get in touch with you to take advantage of those offers? Sure they can send an email directly to me at pws@carson Wealth.com. You can also just direct message me on LinkedIn, Paul West or also on Twitter at Paul West coach three simple ways to get a hold of me and we're all concerned about the election coming up here. So what I've seen is business owners aren't protecting their personal assets because they don't have time so we're helping show them how much risk they're truly taking at the moment. Really appreciate you taking the time to share these tips with our listeners today, Paul. It's been a real pleasure. I really enjoyed the discussion with you and hope you'll come back again and share some more tips with our listeners in the near future. All right great thanks Bill stay good busy not bad busy. Thank you for listening to Exit Coach Radio. Hey friend, I know how this feels. Waking up exhausted after multiple trips to the bathroom and feeling embarrassed by sudden leaks. 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