E247: Preparing for the ColorIt Sale with Joe Valley – Part 1

Welcome to episode 2 of this 4-part series where I talk about the sale of one of our most profitable brands – ColorIt.com.

In episode 246, I discussed the motivation behind this particular move – from the reason behind the sale down to the brand’s new owners.

A major cog in the wheel with this sale is a man called Joe Valley of Quiet Light Brokerage. Joe has been instrumental in making sure that I was able to pick the right brand to put up for sale (at one point, I wanted to do away with all of them). His insights and advice helped us boost ColorIt’s saleability even before we put it up on the market.

All the specifics of that are discussed in this episode. If you’re planning to sell one of your businesses at some point in the future, give this one a listen. And tune in to the next episode as Joe and I go into more detail about the preparations involved in the sale.

If you’re interested in getting onsite advice from Mike and have your business featured on a podcast, sign up for the EcomCrew Roadshow today!

Catch the latest episodes of the 5 Minute Pitch on YouTube. Join season two by filling out and submitting the application form.

Finally, if you enjoyed listening and think this episode has been useful to you, please take a moment to leave us a review on iTunes.

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave them below. Happy selling!

Full Audio Transcript

Intro: This is Mike and welcome to episode number 247 of the EcomCrew Podcast. Today we're continuing along our journey on the sale of ColorIt. The last episode number 246 was kind of a monologue of me talking about why I decided to sell ColorIt with the things that kind of led up to that and why we decided to put it up for sale and the timeline for selling it. But now we're going to do an episode with my good friend Joe Valley from Quiet Light Brokerage. He is the one that helped broker the deal for me. I can't imagine going through this process without anyone else. So he's definitely a friend of mine. I've known him for a while. And it was an easy choice for me to use him to sell my business. 

So we recorded this back in December, which I think is pretty neat. It was before we actually even listed it for sale. And we kind of go through some of the things that were in my head back then. It's always fun going back and listening to the stuff after the fact. And that's what this episode is. And then in the next episode we're going to fast forward to after the deal was done. So let's get into how we prepared the business for sale, what the circumstances are that kind of went around the sale of ColorIt versus other things, the good, the bad and the ugly of all that. So without further ado, here's Joe Valley from Quiet Light Brokerage. 

Mike: Hey Joe, welcome back to the EcomCrew Podcast. 

Joe: Great to be back Mike. 

Mike: Yeah, so we have a pretty interesting thing going on here. This is the first of a series of podcasts we're going to be doing. And the reason that we decided to put this together, you've been on the podcast before. People know you, we’ll put the episode number in the show notes, but know you as Joe from Quiet Light Brokerage and you obviously help people buy and sell e-commerce businesses. And I've come to the determination it was time to be on the sell side for some stuff. And so I obviously reached out to you. You would be the only guy that I would be interested in dealing with to do something like this. 

And we both got together and thought it would be cool for you to get people exposed to the process if they're looking to either buy or sell. It's obviously good for Quiet Light to get that exposure. And I think it's amazing content for EcomCrew so people can kind of understand this process. So hopefully it'll be one of these rear win-wins in life. 

Joe: Yeah, hopefully everybody will understand how brutal it can be, and from your perspective, how emotional it's going to be. And all the ups and downs and exciting things and like yesterday, we launched it right. You sent me a text. Did we launch it yesterday? All that work and then it's just sort of quiet, here we go. We have to kind of wait and see what happens now.

Mike: That was more of just I wasn't expecting a buyer to be there yet. I was just more wondering if — I had not got – I’m not on your mailing list which I realized I need to sign up for that. So I wasn't sure if it actually had gone live or not. But let's talk about the — I think that the reason we decided to record today, I just think that there's like kind of different chapters to this process. And I think we've closed the chapter on one part and we're ready to move on to the next. But getting to this point was not an easy process. As you mentioned, it's emotional. There's a lot riding on all this. 

And for me, I would say I don't and maybe, I'm just speaking from my own point of view, and I'm ignorant to this. But I imagine you go through a wide range of people that are on the emotional scale. I think I'm probably on the more realistic and more stable because I've been through this before. I certainly wasn't this way when I sold my first business but at this point, I've been through it, I kind of know what to expect. And I know what to expect probably more so because I've also been on the buy side, and I'm kind of the guy that like never wants to ask someone to do what I wouldn’t do myself. So I mean, obviously I feel like full disclosure and helping with the transition and just being realistic with the multiple and not thinking my poop don't stink, and when it comes through this process, probably helps a little bit. 

Joe: Yeah, the emotional side will come, it will be there. It's when you are under contract. And a few ways away from closing the transaction and knowing that the business assets are going to transfer, money is going to hit your account and then you're doing some transition and training and moving on and loosening up your workload a little bit. It's when you're that close, but not quite there, when you're negotiating these asset purchase agreements and some of the clauses that we'll talk about in a few other episodes, that's when it can get tough. Now, really the emotion is really just Joe, why are you making me work so hard, why do we have to do so much detail? 

Mike: And it was a lot of work. And I think that's one of the things I really want to talk about here. And also, I think we should talk about some of the planning that would behoove everyone that's ever going to be in a position that we're in to be thinking about it sooner than later. It's really nip this in the rear end right now because we didn't plan as well as we could have or should have. And I knew this going into it. It's not like I wasn't aware of this, which makes it even more frustrating. But I think as a business what ends up happening, I mean, you only have so much time to worry about so many things. 

And from day one, when we set this thing up, I was like you know what, I've been here before, I know the pros and cons of having everything separate versus together and I opted for putting things together just for ease to have one checking account, one tax return, one credit card, a bunch of shared resources, whether they’re office resources or employees or software, whatever it might be. And during that time, it'll make operating this business more efficient and more cost effective. 

And when the time comes when I'm ready to sell something or whatever, I'll break it off then and then we'll worry about it. And I always thought that when the time came, and I'll be ready to do that, I would have 12 to 24 months to plan that out. But what ended up happening in reality was, I woke up one morning and realized that we wanted to take some chips off the table and a bunch of other things we’ll kind of talk about here. And at that point, there's some adverse consequences. So you want to talk about some of that stuff real quick? 

Joe: Yeah, definitely. Yeah, there's so much to learn here and I'm hoping that I'm not throwing you under the bus in the process. Like you said, you know it, you know what to do. You knew what to do, you set things up knowing that maybe it's not perfect when you go into exit, but it's easier for you along the way. And it just sort of nipped you in the bud a little bit. As you said, you knew that you were going to have to deal with this someday. And in one of the email communication, you said that that someday is here and I'm looking back on, I really wish I separated these things. 

So the first challenge that we ran up against was that you have four brands that you wanted to sell. And so first thing we needed to do was to determine whether or not we were going to sell all four brands together in one bucket or separate them all out. Well, two of the brands are startups, and they're operating at a loss. And so, if you put the really the other two brands into the same bucket as the two that are operating as a loss, then you're selling the overall bucket for less money at pretty substantial numbers. 

So I'm just throwing numbers out. One of the brands, you're really in the growth phase, you're building it up, and you're putting a lot of advertising dollars to it, just building up brand recognition, but operating at and I'm taking these numbers off the top of my head at $25,000 annual loss. When you put that in the same bucket as the others, and then you apply up three, three and a half or time multiple two, two and a half, whatever it might be, that $25,000 loss becomes a $75,000 hit against the value of your business. So, if you go back to when you were a kid playing with marbles, you've got all the marbles in the bag, you don't want all of the marbles as somebody that's buying the marbles from a friend, you're going to take those chipped marbles out and only buy the best ones. 

And that's kind of what we've ended up doing here is separating out one of the brands first. We're going to try to sell the other three off separately. The two that have just inventory value, we're going to work with buyers that are looking for more of a startup operation that will take that over for the inventory value and hopefully a little bit more. 

Mike: Yeah. And that might even be a longer term prospect than we originally had talked about because I think the one brand we are looking to solely talk about is ColorIt here because it is the one that has the best financials, it's the best story to tell, etc. It's just the healthiest numbers. So it gets us as close to our goal as possible, which is just it's just some lifestyle shift stuff, which we'll talk about in other episodes, but it takes a lot of pressure off, allows again to get some of that chips off the table. This will be well on the seven figures of exit for us plus the inventory or whatever hopefully.

Joe: Can we jump right — can we can we name all our…

Mike: Yeah, we'll get there, we will. Yeah. 

Joe: Can we name all the brands here on the podcast? 

Mike: Yeah, we've talked about all of them in the past so I mean it's ColorIt, Ice Wraps, WildBaby and Tac9er are the four. And the ones that produce revenue are the older ones and the ones that we've had time to establish. Whenever you're launching new products or launching a brand new brand as you mentioned, it's hard to generate a profit. ColorIt for instance, in its first year did not turn a profit. So, the revenue ones are ColorIt and Ice Wraps, and the ones that aren't turning a profit are WildBaby in and Tac9er. 

Joe: Okay so throwing all those in together it's Tac9er and WildBaby that we needed to at the very least pull out because they were in that growth stage, development stage and you were willing to lose money. And we're okay with that because you planned on building these up and keeping them for a long time until that day you woke up and said I'm done. I need to lighten my load. That's the problem with having them all in one LLC and then one seller account as well, we’ll get to that in a minute. 

Mike: So we're going to deal with that just moving. I mean, I guess and I didn’t mean to cut you off, I just was trying to think about this thought that you mentioned. I can tell you like from this point forward, so it'll be at least one full year before we discuss any of the other products. We're going to put them in their own LLC and their own Amazon accounts. And we've actually already got an approval from Amazon to do that and we're working through making that transition as easy as possible. So the idea here would be that if and when that time comes for the next brand, we can easily cherry pick off any one of those three or if I even start a fourth one, whatever, down the road. It's here is the Amazon account, just change the name on it, it's yours, see you later, versus the disaster we're about to go through with this one.

Joe: Yeah, it's, you always have to look at it from the buyer's perspective. And they don't want to take an asset that's been in a seller account for a long time and move it to a new one because they fear the risk; they fear the risk of that. And they may not have a seller account, whereas you've done it before. You did it with Ice Wraps, you bought it and then brought it into this seller account, you know it's okay. I've done it once before in a transaction that I did for a German based seller account and it worked out great. We moved the branch to another seller account and it worked out okay. 

But buyers are fickle, and they don't want to do that. They want the seller account that the brand is in, they don't want to risk their life savings and then some on moving it out and having the organic rankings drop. The other issue that we had was the transferability of Ice Wraps right. Can we talk about that just for a minute?

Mike:  Yeah, so we have exclusivity for two brands that we sell for Ice Wraps on behalf of Ice Wraps, and one of those companies was slow to transfer that. And obviously that kind of puts a wrench in things that's for sure.

Joe: Right. So we've got four brands, two are working in that early startup phase, so the numbers are negative. So selling those really doesn't make sense unless we're selling it just for the inventory value. And then we've got one that's not transferable. One of the major pillars to selling your business is being able to transfer all of the assets that generate revenue for the business itself. And in this case, the vendor said, Mike, we love you so much, we don't want anybody else taking this over. We're not going to do that. So we focused on ColorIt.

The second big problem or other big problem is really you always want to cast as broad of a net as possible for potential buyers. And because everything is commingled under one tax return, easily qualifying for an SBA loan is not at all doable. There is something that could be done. We could have your CPA create consolidated financials for ColorIt, go through a tremendous amount of work, labor, money, separate them out, and then provide that as a signed document from the CPA along with the tax returns. But we didn't go there because we're trying to get the business up and done and listed and launched because of the fact that you are emotionally done. You're emotionally tired and ready to move on. 

That doesn't mean you're willing to give the business away. I think we've got it priced. It looks aggressive right now honestly, timing wise. We're recording this on December 13th. We launched it yesterday on the 12th. So we're launching it two weeks before Christmas which I always say a great business is going to sell no matter what time of year it is because it's a great business and buyers are always looking, but there are fewer eyeballs on it this time of year. And because we're running the financials, these are valued on the trailing 12 months of discretionary earnings, and because we're doing this in mid-December, we don't have December 2018 numbers, which we’re expecting to be 40, 50, 60% higher than last year. 

So again, it's the trailing 12 month numbers. We're taking December of last year, which is going to be 40% lower than this year, maybe 50, maybe 60. Who knows, we got to wait to see. So, the value of the business, we've priced it at a certain amount, we're going to leave that amount there, but the multiple is higher right now because we haven't included the new December numbers. When we have the new December numbers, we're going to leave the price the same. So the discretionary earnings will go up and the multiple will come down. 

Again, buyers are fickle. They're funny, too many of them unfortunately, look at the multiple first and then decide to read the teaser and then if the teaser is interesting enough and they're okay with the multiple, they dig in. So we're going to have fewer eyeballs on it because of the time of year, and maybe because the multiple a little bit, but we plan to if we don't have a strong enough interest right away, there's no question about it that we're going to relaunch as soon as we have the December financials up and in the P&L and the new discretionary numbers. 

Mike: Yeah, all that makes sense. And we've talked about that. So I think that's all getting clear. So let's talk about a little bit about why we picked this one, why we think it's stronger to get the higher multiple, we'll talk about what you see that makes us a jam versus a Paula Cole compared to some of the other stuff we talked about. 

Joe: Yeah. Okay. It's well aged, you launched it in 15. You've got 32% year over year growth on the discretionary earning side, I'm sorry, on the on the top line, and 45% on the bottom line on discretionary earnings. This is a trailing 12 versus the previous trailing 12. And again, when December pops up, both of those numbers are just going to get higher. 

Mike: Yeah it should be at least 50% growth once December comes out.

Joe: Yeah, it's a consumable product, not one that you ingest but one that you use, buy another one. They’re coloring books, they’re pens. It's stuff where there is a repeat customer base. Unfortunately, because it's Amazon, we can't measure that very well. But that's something that anybody that's selling products of this nature, I would definitely try to hone in on that. Buyers love to know what percentage of the revenue is repeat recurring revenue, if at all possible. It makes a difference, it makes them feel good, it makes them know that they have a certain cost to acquire a customer and that customer is going to have a certain lifetime value because they're going to come back. It’s difficult to measure unfortunately with the Amazon side of it and the workload. 

Look Mike, you work five hours a week in the business if that you are as you say, I love it, chasing too many rabbits and catching none. I've always said, you're like an octopus being pulled in eight different directions and going nowhere. And you're just not putting your own time and energy into it. And no matter how good your VAs are, no matter how good your employees are, they're not going to do as well at a business of this size as an owner operator, they're not going to care as much. 

And that's shown true in the trailing 12 months profit and loss statement where you had handed over the advertising budget to one of — I don't know if it was an employee or VA off the top of my head and I don't want to throw anybody under the bus, but it got away from them. And they ended up spending too much money and the average cost of an order went up too much and we can see it. We can specifically see the advertising budget go up as compared to the total revenue. And then when you stepped back in, we see it coming back down. So there's probably another 30 or $40,000 that's wasted advertising dollars in the trailing 12 months. 

We do the math for everybody that's listening, that's $30,000 over 12 months that you lost because you took the eye off the ball, your eye off the ball. We put this out at a four time multiple, mostly because of December's revenues because of these other factors as well. So that's 30,000 times four or $120,000 that we cannot put on the list price of the business. That hurts when you take your eye off the ball or you're emotionally tired, you pulled into many different directions. You pay for it when you wake up one day emotionally tired and are ready to sell. And so you never ever want to get to the point where you're just emotionally done. You're always in my opinion always want to plan to sell. 

Even if you set your goals plan to sell and when you hit that goal, you're happy, don't sell, keep moving on. But you know what the process is about and you know it's every dollar matter. The problem here is that we had to push the multiple to four times because of things like this. And now we have to try to get through to the buyers, try to get them beyond that four time multiple and say dig deeper, dig deeper, dig deeper. My email says that, the teaser says that, my follow up email says that, dig deeper, it's there, it's there, December is going to hit 40, 50% and over, maybe more, there's wasted advertising dollars in there. 

There are other things in there that we couldn't really track down because of the commingled statements, cashback credit card statements, right. It's hard to parse that out for this one brand, and we just throw our hands up in the air in a sense and didn't get to it and didn't do it, but it could have been 5, 10, $15,000. Let's just call that five because I don't want you to regret it too much.

Mike: It’s more than that, but it's okay.

Joe: If it was $5,000, that's 40, I mean $20,000 or 15 if we're at three time multiple. I think the thing that struck me, for those listening, what we do at Quiet Light and what Mike did so very well, because he's Mike Jackness, was the interview that we did. We do the written interview, we do very detailed profit and loss statements, but then we do a recorded interview like this, but we do it on zoom and we have the video and audio recording and split them out separately. So you can actually as a buyer, see the person because this is the internet space, you're about to stroke a check for a million, 2 million dollars or even $100,000, it doesn't matter. It's a lot of money. It's your life savings. You worked hard for it, you need to trust that person that you're buying the business from and the broker. 

But with a video, it allows you in this world of internet, where your buyer or seller could be anywhere in the world allows you to see them and get a good feel for them before you move on to that next level and request a conference call. And during the call I had with you Mike, as I told you, I was taking notes, we were talking. And you were just pointing out things that were so valuable to the business that were hard to get across in writing. Some people are better at talking than they are at writing. And I may not ask all of the right questions, its your business, you know more about it than I do. 

So some things came out in the interview, where I just said 3.5 is the multiple that I wrote down. And then we looked at the December numbers and we talked about that afterwards. We went through this whole process without firming up the list price until the very end which is hard for some people. So initially, we did a ballpark estimate on the discretionary earnings. We said a value range, good. Okay, let's move forward and we'll firm that at the end when we get that discretionary earnings numbers nailed down, we know exactly what it is. And then we'll apply the multiple to it when the full package is together. 

And the full package that we put together, it brings those golden nuggets to the surface. And you did that in that recorded interview and you pulled some things out there that made a difference. The repeat customers, the club money, the inventory, cost of goods sold savings, this is where we had to dig so deep. For those listening that are not going to see the package, Mike sells thousands and thousands of gel pens on an annual basis. Well, your sourcing agent found a similar good quality product at a cost savings of a buck 60. And if you're selling 1,000 of those a month that's $1,600 a month. And what we did, it's an add back we chose because you've already ordered a container load of pens at a reduced cost of $1.60.

That higher expense going backwards is not going to carry forward because there's a savings there because it's been done. It's really renegotiated and ordered. So we did the calculation, this is the work that is hard. And this is why good data matters and good documentation. Mike pulled the gel pen sales by month going back 24 months. And we took that number and we applied $1.60 to every month and added back that amount. And that alone in the trailing 12 months added up to $41,963 as an add back. So without that data, without that detail, without that communication, we would have missed that. And that's 41,000 times four, in this case $160,000 added on.

And it's a legitimate add back because it's math and its logic, that expense is going to carry forward. Now, you said in the interview, and this is those golden nuggets that rise to the surface sometimes that your sourcing agent feels very strongly that there's at least another dollar savings and that you needed to place an order. You needed to get that order, that container on the on the water so that you wouldn't run out of inventory. And you just couldn't wait any more to negotiate it down further. And you said that in the recorded interview, and you're likable, you're trustworthy, and we can't add it back because it hasn't happened yet. It hasn't been proven yet. So between now and when we have conversations with buyers, if you get a commitment that that's another dollar savings, we can do an add back, we can do an update. 

So what I have to do is just kind of convey that message to buyers that look, there's another dollar savings here. We're going to save another $20,000 a year or more in gel pen costs on the next order. And that's huge because you take that 20,000 times this four time multiple and it’s $80,000 that could be added to the business or in this case, it's a savings of $20,000 to the buyer, it goes to their pocket in the next 12 months, so to speak. 

Mike: Yeah, I mean, all that is exactly what happened, it makes sense. And it was a long road to get to this point. So I want to talk just for a second about that to kind of wrap up this episode exactly all the things that went into just getting this thing even listed because it was I don’t know, it felt like it was 10 to 12 pages of stuff I filled out, plus the interview and getting all the financial data together. So it isn't like you just snap your fingers and this is done. So let's talk a little bit about that process to kind of wrap things up here.

Joe: Yeah, it was a tremendous amount of work and made harder because one tax return the commingling of seller accounts and trying to pull up and parse out all that data from the P&L. But the client interview, very in depth and very detailed. And we pull it all together in what's called a business summary package where buyers have access to it. And as a seller, buyers want to see a lot of really good, detailed, very thorough, they want to believe in you, believe in the package and not trying to figure out what this P&L means. So we do the same P&L format every time. 

When we launched the business and we'll touch on that because it was yesterday, now the goal that we have in mind and this is going to be interesting over the next three or four podcasts that we record how this works out, but the goal is we put it up on our website and out to our email database all within 24 hours, the goal is to have three to five conference calls with potential buyers within the first 30 to 45 days and get at least one acceptable offer and go under letter of intent. If it's a cash buyer, it's going to take another 30 to 45 days to close. And if it's an SBA buyer, it's going to take another 60 to 90 days to close. In this case, for now, the SBA buyer is out so we're looking at 30 to 45 days from the time we close. And because of the time of year, I think we're going to have to kick in maybe another couple of weeks there, we'll see not 100% Sure.

And I don't mean to say that it's going to be tougher to sell simply because we can't sell to an SBA buyer, or that an SBA buyer, let's make it clear an SBA buyer doesn't mean they only have 10 or 15% to put down. There's one buyer that I'm talking to now, we'll get to that in a minute, but he's got plenty of money to buy the business, but he's choosing to buy multiple businesses and wants to make his money spread further. So we are using SBA loans in many cases, and it's using the 10 to 15% down. So we launched yesterday. Typically we get, oh, I don't know 150 inquiries in the first 48 hours. And right now we're at about 62. We've had three follow up emails, people asking questions, making comments. 

Two of those questions and comments were gee, why doesn't it qualify for an SBA loan. And I've had one call with one buyer, and this particular buyer is someone that I do know well, got a good relationship with him. I sold two businesses to him in 2018 and I sold a business for him in 2018. He is a cash buyer, he has the ability to buy it with cash but he wants to buy, he's building a portfolio and this is tipping the scales in terms of what he's comfortable with stroking a check for the entire amount. 

So it would have been great, I think would be on calls with him now if it was an SBA aspect or an SBA eligible, but in this case what he's going to do is dig deep because he knows me and he knows Mike through his reputation, knows you through your reputation and really understand that the advertising it was a waste of money and it's true dig deep and look. The gel pen cost an extra dollar times to how many thousands did we sell in the last 12 months? That's an extra cost; all those things bring that multiple down. December revenues again, bringing that multiple down. 

I think the case I'm trying to make to buyers, and it's difficult because sometimes again, all they do is look at the multiple first. The case I'm trying to make is that if we had December numbers, if it was January 15th instead of December 13th, the multiple would automatically be at a 3.5 because that's where we felt comfortable. That's what the numbers were. I thought we were launching a month early. But then when we take all those other things into account, I think that the value really to a buyer, if they really dig deep is going to be less than three times because of all of the other things, the money wasted, the sourcing agents, it's got a better cost and the gel pens, things of that nature. 

So it's a long process and we've just begun, you work very hard early on. I remember when I sold my business, I've been through this. Jason here at Quiet Light was my broker back in 2010 when I sold. And I was telling my wife, I felt like I was working harder in trying to get the business ready to sell than I was working on the business. You did the same because on ColorIt, you're working five hours a week and you worked much more than five hours a week in the last couple of weeks.

Mike: Oh yeah.

Joe: And then it's like you're building up all that to launch and then it can get quiet. And it can be quiet for too long. Every listing is different. Sometimes the buyers are right there. I had a call with Walker, one of the other brokers here at Quiet Light and he launched one three days ago and it's multiple offers already under contract type situation. I've been in that situation before. But that happens when it's price right for the buyer and price right for the seller, and sort of all the stars are aligned. Here again, it's December 13th, multiple will be lower. So we're just working hard to get them over that four time multiple hump, but the business is worth it all day long. 

I think you've done a great job with it. I think there's a ton of growth opportunities. We focused on those in the package. You talked about it in the interview. And I think that it's just going to take a little bit of time. We'll find the right buyer to dig deep and see all of those things. And then reach out to me, we're already talking and we get on a call with you. I think that's the most important thing is those three to five conference calls with you, so that you can convey to them the things that are not easily conveyed in writing. And they'll feel good about you and trust you, I believe. And hopefully, you'll be able to move forward with at least one acceptable offer by 30 to 45 day mark. 

Mike: Yeah. That's the plan. Hopefully, it'll all work out that way. Obviously, the fun thing about recording these and this is in the books now. So we can go back and we'll see what happens in episode two, how things progress from here. But I wanted to do this, as I mentioned at the top of one to get this down the day because it's all fresh in our minds how we got to where we are today, which is we just launched yesterday. I thought it was a good way to close chapter one. So and chapter two here, the next podcast about this we’ll be talking about the offers that came in, how long that took to happen, if we had to wait till January to relaunch and if we didn't get enough interest so we have to relaunch in January with the new numbers with the January financials or December financials and approving to show once the books been written. 

But so far, the first 13 days of December have been incredible. I mean it's one of these things where I've been through this before. It's like we're on a high right now because this time of year just it feels amazing. But obviously things get back to reality in January. But I do think that we're going to put down a nice number on a piece of paper there for December's numbers and I don't know exactly where things are going to work out yet but it probably is something 3.5 and below, which should hopefully get more interest.

Joe: Yeah, and you probably scratch your head just a little bit a momentary doubt, why am I selling the business? It's going to do so much in December. And that's just the emotional part. But you're committed, I know you're committed. 

Mike: No, that wasn’t the case. I'm just excited that — I mean for me, it's just hoping that we continue to produce a good of a story I guess. I don't know the right word to put there but just argument for the worth of the business as possible. And, man, all the numbers are obviously there and as you said, there's good year over year growth and both top line and net and I think, we have a really good – you said, is a really good case for how that's going to continue to stay on the same trajectory. It's just that I'm ready to focus more on some other things and try not to have too many irons in the fire because it's definitely proven to be one of the cliché sayings we've been throwing around has definitely been happening. So I'm going to try to correct that stuff. And the best first step to doing that is this. 

Joe: Yeah. I think I said to you in an email something like you can do anything once you stop trying to do everything which is exactly what you're doing with so many irons in the fire. So I'm looking forward to the next episode and the update and moving in the right direction to help you clear your plate a little bit and move on to those things that you're really focused on. 

Mike: Excellent. All right, let's sign off for this one. And we'll be back with part two here when this when this happens on the podcast. It will be thrilling but it'll probably take us a month or so before we record the next one. But it's always interesting podcast time versus real time. 

Joe: Yeah, hopefully it'll be sooner but time will tell. Until then, have a happy holiday.

Mike: Alright guys, that's going to wrap it up for the 247th episode of the EcomCrew Podcast. If you go back and listen to the one right before this, episode 246, that'll give you an idea into my head space as a monologue of why I decided to sell ColorIt. And this episode we went over the circumstances that led to that and just had a candid conversation with Joe. And then in the next episode, episode 248, we're going to do part two with Joe Valley, which is after the sale happened, and going back and reviewing due diligence and the asset purchase agreement and all that good stuff. 

So I think this was a great series for those of you who are interested in either buying or selling a business, everyone really realistically should be listening to this stuff because everything comes to an end at some point. At some point, you're going to want to sell some or all of your business. And if you do some of the stuff that we talk about in these episodes, you can plan better ahead of time, unlike me, who kind of got to a point where I was ready to throw my hands up in the air and do something a little bit different, and probably got a little bit less of my business than I could have If I planned a little better otherwise. 

I was lucky because we had a good business and all those things, but it could have still been better. So anyway, for this episode, if you have any questions or comments, go to EcomCrew.com/247 to get to the show notes. And until the next episode everyone, happy selling and we'll talk to you soon.

Outro: Thanks for listening to the EcomCrew Podcast. Follow us on Facebook at Facebook.com/EcomCrew for weekly live recordings of the EcomCrew Podcast every Monday. And please, do us a favor, and leave an honest review on iTunes, it would really help us out. Again, thanks for listening, and until next week, happy selling.