Getting the Most Out of Your Exit With Joe Valley of Quiet Light Brokerage

Joe Valley is the Co-owner of Quiet Light Brokerage, one of the world’s leading online-focused M&A Advisory firms. He helps business owners and entrepreneurs sell and buy profitable businesses. As an EXITpreneur, Joe has mentored thousands of entrepreneurs over the past nine years at Quiet Light. He has a long career of founding companies, including Bedtime Solutions, Inc., JVI Media, Inc., and Abbott Industries.

Joe is the author of the best-selling book The EXITpreneur’s Playbook – How to Sell your Online Business for Top Dollar and is the host of The Quiet Light Podcast. Joe Valley has personally closed nearly 100 million in transactions and touched almost a half-billion in online exits through the entrepreneur-led team of Quiet Light Advisors.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

[3:10] Joe Valley discusses what the outcome of an exit should be for businesses
[5:35] The mindset of entrepreneurs and the importance of figuring out your strengths and weaknesses as a business owner
[9:13] How an exit can provide both an end goal and feeling of relief
[11:01] Joe mentions a story of one man’s journey from homelessness to selling an eight-figure business
[14:13] What is life like after an exit?
[17:59] Why figuring out money is the hardest part of training for an exit
[23:47] Why Joe would have changed his mentality to be more helpful and giving when starting his entrepreneurial journey
[27:55] What should people expect when working with an advisor?
[32:32] Joe explains how everything in terms of an exit comes with experience
[33:52] How to choose the right advisor or broker to work with when exiting your business
[39:50] Where do marketing channels play a part in a company’s valuation?

In this episode…

Are you an entrepreneur ready to make the leap and exit your business? Do you worry about all the moving pieces in the exit process? How can you be sure you choose the right advisor for your company? Joe Valley is here to help.

Joe Valley has been helping entrepreneurs and business owners exit and sell their businesses for most of his career as a self-proclaimed EXITpreneur. As the Co-owner of Quiet Light Brokerage, he knows the ins and outs of how to get the most money out of your exit. He’s here to tell you all his tips and tricks and give you advice for your next exit along the way.

On this episode of the eCommerce Profits Podcast, Joshua Chin talks with the Co-owner of Quiet Light Brokerage, Joe Valley, all about successfully exiting a business. They discuss how to train for an exit, choosing the right advisor, the mindset of entrepreneurs, and much more. You won’t want to miss this jam-packed episode!

Resources Mentioned in this episode

Sponsor for this episode

This episode is brought to you by Chronos Agency.

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Our team of passionate email marketing experts has helped hundreds of brands generate over $70 million in return from email alone, and our clients receive an average of 3500% ROI from our efforts.

Chronos Agency has worked with a variety of brands, including Truly Beauty, Alya Skin, and many more. Our mission is to help real businesses achieve real results.

If you want to take your revenue to the next level using email marketing, be sure to email our team at sales@chronos.agency or visit chronos.agency to learn more.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:04

Welcome to the eCommerce Profits Podcast where we feature top founders and experts in the ecommerce industry and take an in depth look at the struggles and successes in growing ecommerce brands profitably.

Joshua Chin 0:21

All right Josh Chin here. I’m the host of the eCommerce Profits Podcast where we feature top experts and entrepreneurs in the ecommerce industry. And we go behind the scenes of the struggles and successes and growing a brand. Now this episode is brought to you by Chronos Agency. If you run a direct to consumer ecommerce brand that is ready for scale and to double your customer lifetime value, true lifecycle marketing Chronos is your company that helps hundreds of brands scale profits with email, SMS and mobile push marketing, while getting an average of 3500% ROI. From our efforts, we’ve helped brands like Truly Beauty, Elias skin, the Oodi, Dr. Livengood and many more. Now the next step is email us at sales at chronos.agency or you can go to chronos.agency to learn more. Today’s guest is Joe Valley. Joe is an author, author, guest speaker, EXITpreneur. And we’ll go a little bit into that in a in a second advisor and partner at Quiet Light, a brokerage dedicated to helping online businesses exit with an incredible team that has a crazy amount of experiences. They have been there done that every single one of your advisor has some kind of an entrepreneurial experience. Joe himself has also built, bought or sold over half a dozen of his own companies. He has also recently launched a book, The EXITpreneur’s Playbook, how to sell your online business for top dollar. The book shares real life stories of successful and failed exits and teaches you how to reverse engineer a pathway to your own incredible exit. This is incredible. I’ve read the book. It’s such an easy read. It’s available right now on Amazon on Kindle as a physical book, whatever your preferences are. And I highly recommend that it’s such a joy to read. And I’ve just picked up picked a copy of and I’ve learned a ton of stuff already. Joe, welcome to the show.

Joe Valley 2:33

Good to be here, Josh, thanks for having me. 3500% ROI Holy cow. That’s incredible.

Joshua Chin 2:39

That’s that’s a shocker. That’s definitely we’ll probably go with but uh, but yeah, and I guess that’s, that’s a good place to start when we think about kind of the the outcome of an exit. And that’s that’s your game. So tell us a little bit about the outcome that you think about when building a business. Now most people don’t think about an exit when they first start a business. Yeah, but what’s your advice in that? setting an outcome?

Joe Valley 3:10

Yeah. So yeah, like you say, most people don’t think about the exit. They’re just trying to, you know, get that entrepreneurial vibe going, living the lifestyle that they want. You’re doing it now I’m doing it now. I’ve been doing it since 1997. And, and, you know, the, the typical phrase, I don’t want to know, if you were even alive, then Josh, and I go there. You know, the two I think people say you are okay. The the thing that people say is, you know, you’ve got to start thinking about your exit when you start your business. And that would be great in a perfect world. But you and I both know that this is not a perfect world, especially when when we’re in the ecommerce world. We’re just bootstrapping, launching and trying like crazy to keep our head above water, grow the business, not run out of inventory, service our clients do all those different things. So, you know, I think that that’s a bit unrealistic, maybe it can be in the back of your mind and saying, okay, maybe I would sell this someday. What you do want to know, though, is that you’re likely to make the most amount of money that you make, from your business, when you do exit. When you do the math on it, the majority of all the money you’ll ever make will be, you know, the day that you do close and someone else takes over your business. And that’s because, you know, you’re putting so much time and effort and energy and money back into growing the business that you’re not able to take as much out it’s not cash flowing the way you would hope. You’ve got to hold it for a much longer period of time to get that to that tipping point with cash flow is sort of outweighs the benefits of an exit. The problem with waiting that long is is that we promote ourselves to our own, you know, level of incompetence, right. We’re only good at so much as entrepreneurs and running an enormous team and forward thinking years in advance, then things of that nature, maybe strengths of some, like a Zuckerberg or think like that. But it’s really not the typical, we, as small business owners have, you know, a lifecycle a level of expertise. And when we get beyond that the business becomes a lot less fun, and it doesn’t grow at the same pace. And then the value starts to diminish, though. The majority people do choose to exit so that they can take some money off the table and start their next business with more cash in the bank and a little less stress and a little less bootstrapping, if you will.

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