Brad Jacobs

But in the first year or two, sometimes it's undisclosed liabilities.

Sometimes there's things in the company that you really weren't aware of because buying a company is a little bit like getting married.

You don't really know who you got married to until after you've been married a little while.

Fortunately, in my case, that's worked out really well.

But sometimes people get surprised.

And when you buy a company...

particularly if you buy it in a process.

If you buy it in a banker-run process, you don't get the fulsome amount of due diligence that you really need in order to responsibly buy a company and confidently think you're not going to have a lot of surprises.

It becomes temporarily insane and develops an access to personality disorder for a short period of time.

And those times are when their spouse tells them, I'm divorcing you.

And another time is when your boss tells you, you're fired.

And it's just people have a very bad reaction to that and they can just lose it.

And I've noticed that.

I've noticed those two examples in many people.

But I'm going to add a third to that as I write in the book.

Thank you for reading it.

which is when people sell a business.

When people sell a business, particularly if they've spent decades building it up and they have family in the business and they're prominent in their community and their identity is associated with that business, they get really nervous and they get very anxious and they're very stressed out.

And it's extremely important when you're buying a company to be

very understanding and very respectful and very empathetic towards the seller.