David Hauser

But I would suggest thinking about all of these categories for how you can make your business most valuable for yourself and then how we, on the other side of it, think about these things.

So a few of the stuff that's not on the matrix necessarily, but I did want to talk about from an M&A standpoint.

First, like I mentioned at Grasshopper, we got out of the business.

We had a management team.

This was tremendously valuable to the acquirer for so many reasons.

First, the transition was easy.

They actually paid more because they didn't have to find expensive positions for me and my co-founder to be in and stupid titles, right?

So they paid more cash upfront to not deal with that.

And I think this is true of most acquirers.

Like if you're working in the business, it's a big concern.

Build a strong and independent team.

And that means people that can operate without your oversight, right?

So you can provide high level strategic direction, but they can operate the business without your insight.

Or you being there, right?

Document all your systems and processes because it goes into the next point, which is you should be actively building what is like a data room.

It doesn't have to be as structured, but all of that stuff should be there.

It's good business practice to do it, one.

But two, it will show you the gaps and weaknesses in your business that an acquirer will look at and say, hey, I'm going to devalue this part of it.

Hey, your legal contracts are not all in the right place.

You're not able to assign them on acquisition.