[EO Wisconsin] Building Scalable and Sellable Businesses With Dan Gramann

Dan Gramman Dan Gramann is the Co-founder of Cultivate Advisors, a business growth advisory firm that helps entrepreneurs scale their businesses, increase profitability, and prepare for eventual exits. Under his leadership, Cultivate Advisors has grown to work with businesses of all sizes, from startups to established enterprises, across diverse industries. With experience launching and leading hundreds of franchises across industries, Dan has supported thousands of entrepreneurs in achieving measurable growth through tailored advisory strategies.

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

[03:38] Dan Gramann talks about how Cultivate Advisors supports entrepreneurs
[07:17] The unique advisory methodology Cultivate Advisors leverages
[09:24] How to avoid common sales mistakes and boost conversions
[12:28] The biggest marketing mistake business owners make and how to overcome it
[17:05] Identifying ideal partners to drive business growth
[24:00] The niches Cultivate Advisors has focused on over the years
[30:25] How Cultivate Advisors trains and supports new advisors joining their team
[33:44] Best practices for recruiting the right talent to accelerate growth
[37:56] Key considerations when preparing for a business exit
[41:53] An overview of Cultivate Advisor’s growing portfolio of brands
[43:26] How to structure a deal during business acquisitions
[47:36] The future of tech innovations in business growth and advisory practices

In this episode…

What does it take to build an agile business that can capitalize on future opportunities? From scaling operations to preparing for a potential sale, how can entrepreneurs position their businesses for sustainable growth?

According to Dan Gramann, a seasoned entrepreneur and advisor, building a scalable and sellable business starts with mastering the fundamentals: clear systems, strong leadership, and a focus on measurable growth. He highlights the importance of defining precise processes for sales, marketing, and talent acquisition and creating systems that ensure long-term profitability. Dan also recommends aligning operations with long-term goals, ensuring the business can function independently of its owner and stand out to potential buyers.

In this episode of the Rising Entrepreneurs Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz sits down with Dan Gramann, Co-founder of Cultivate Advisors, to discuss how entrepreneurs can create scalable and sellable businesses. They talk about the key components of a successful business growth strategy, the importance of aligning leadership and talent, and tools for entrepreneurs to measure and improve their business’ health.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Related Episodes

Quotable Moments

“If it’s not a hell yeah, it’s a no. Don’t ever settle for just better than the rest.”
“70 to 80% of business owners who list their business don’t sell. It’s a terrible stat.”
“Recruiting talent should be as high a priority as getting more revenue in the company.”
“Sell the next step; don’t sell the service or product. It’s about building relationships first.”
“We hire entrepreneurs who’ve exited successfully to help scale or prepare for an eventual sale.”

Action Steps

Conduct a comprehensive business health assessment: This approach helps identify areas of improvement and ensures your business is scalable and potentially sellable, addressing common issues entrepreneurs face when planning for growth or an exit.
Develop a clear sales process: Create and document a consistent, metric-driven sales process that focuses on understanding client needs and selling to the next step rather than just pushing the product.
Implement a strategic recruitment plan: Treat recruiting as a high priority, equal to generating revenue, by developing a clear process for identifying, attracting, and retaining top talent.
Regularly evaluate marketing tactics: This step tackles the challenge of spending money without clear results and allows for informed decisions that maximize your marketing ROI.
Foster strong leadership and alignment: This addresses the challenge of misalignment and lack of clarity in roles, ensuring your team is empowered and moving in the same direction toward common goals.

Sponsor for this episode…

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Episode Transcript

Intro 00:02

Welcome to the Rising Entrepreneurs Podcast, where we feature top founders and entrepreneurs and their journey. Now let’s get started with the show.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 00:12

Dr. Jeremy Weisz, here Founder of inspiredinsider.com, where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders. Today is no different. I have Dan Gramann of Cultivate Advisors. Dan, before I formally introduce you, I always like to point out other episodes of the podcast people should check out. This is a great journey. I mean, Dan and I actually were chatting at an EO Entrepreneur Organization event. He’s got a really cool, crazy journey, some other crazy journeys that we’re on. The podcast, I had the one of the founding engineers at Mobileye. Mobileye was acquired by Intel for $15.3 billion. And what struck me about the story was there were points in the journey where they had to sacrifice. He had to go back to his family, tell his wife and kids, I’m pulling out of all extracurriculars. There’s no more eating out because there was ups and downs of that company. There’s probably points of the company where they didn’t know if it would survive. All right. And so and you kind of, you know, Dan, I know your company helps people with this journey. Another one was Pipedrive. The co-founder of Pipedrive actually talks about having brain surgery, getting married and moving to from Estonia to the US all in the same year. At the time, I think I interviewed one of Pipedrive. When they had him on, they had like around 10,000 paying customers. I think now they have over 100,000 customers. So they’ve they’ve grown a lot. And many more episodes on inspired Insider.com. Check them out. And this episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25, we help businesses give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. How do we do that? We do that by helping you run your podcast, or an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast. And we do the strategy, the accountability and the full execution. So do we call ourselves the magic elves that run in the background and make it look easy for the company so they can create amazing relationships, you know, really create amazing content and most importantly, run their business. You know, for me, the number one thing in my life is relationships. I’m always looking at ways to give to my best relationships. I found no better way over the past decade to profile the people and companies I most admire and share with the world what they’re working on. So if you’ve thought about podcasting, you definitely should. Dan and Cult Advisors has a podcast. You can check it out on their page. If you have questions, go to rise25.com or email us at support@rise25.com. I am excited to introduce Dan Gramann, and he’s the Co-founder of Cultivate Advisors. And Cultivate Advisors helps eliminate the guesswork when it comes to growing your business. So what they do is they match you with an expert business growth advisor for monthly, maybe more frequently, 1 to 1 advising, designed to help you identify the opportunities in your business and really build a path for sustainable growth. And also they help companies prepare for an eventual exit or just scale whatever I guess their goals are. And Dan went from his teenage days helping his parents business in the basement to franchise owner, to franchise general manager to college coach painters, to restoration to now they own multiple companies under Cultivate Advisors, and we’re going to talk through that as well. Dan, thanks for joining me.

Dan Gramann 03:25

Thanks, Jeremy. Happy to be here.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 03:27

I’m going to if you’re listening to the audio, there’s going to be a video I’m going to pull up Cultivate Advisors. But just start off Dan, tell people about Cultivate Advisors and what you do.

Dan Gramann 03:38

I think you did it on your own there, Jeremy. So at the end of the day, we typically cultivate brands, has numerous brands, but Cultivate Advisors is the core of where we started 11 years ago. And what we highly focus on is so we hire entrepreneurs that have already exited their business successfully, And now they’re looking to do that entrepreneurial buzz and support entrepreneurs in the future. They’re looking to scale or prepare for an eventual sale down the line. And so when they go through our process, which is complimentary on the front end, we identify the best advisor for them that fits their biggest need inside of their business. And then they go through a roadmap meeting with them. And if they feel at the end of that event that they’re going to go way faster with that advisor, they can enroll into a subscription model, typically meeting with that advisor twice a month for two hours at a time and getting really deep into building the strategy, processes and the model for the business to be ready for further scale and increase that revenue, increase profit, increase people, the right people, just really make sure the business is ready to roll. And so it’s really about getting those business owners a lot more confidence around how they’re going to continue to execute into the future.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 04:51

What are some of the goals these businesses come to you with?

Dan Gramann 04:56

Well, I’ll tell you what kind of the top line and end goals happen from it. So results would be. So our we’ve overseen 3000 business owners at this point. And our last year our last 12 month client in 2023 did 43% revenue increase and 65% profit increase. So we’re always watching numbers and KPIs. But what I’d say is everything always starts with the end goal, their vision. Like why are you doing this? What ultimately what what’s the end goal with this? What do you want to do with the business? Where do you want to take it? What does that look like? And then how do we put measure to that for it to actually create that for you and your life. And then from there we’re going to break down and make sure we understand what KPIs are going to result in that. And so every business owner’s challenge is different. And so if you were to dive around into the website and understand our methodology a lot more, you’d understand that there’s a lot of businesses that are highly focused on really getting their marketing and sales engine correct, so that that’s more scalable for revenue. They might be really looking at the financial engine of the business, because profitability is one of those things. You want to really hone in on the entire financial model for the future. There’s a lot of businesses that as we grow the revenue, they’re also going capacity. How do I manage it and continue quality control with the right people? How do I recruit the right people, and how do I make sure I’ve got the right leadership systems to make sure that happen? And all encompassing, there’s all these systems that can be implemented into the company. And I know, I don’t know about you, Jeremy, but when it comes to making decisions on which vendors to use for what we get bombarded as entrepreneurs every day on, you know, which LMS to use and how to actually implement it into the company. How is my my sales process and model going to build into all this? And so it’s also about identifying which vendors in the marketplace are going to be able to actually execute on these goals for the future. So if you think about our role as an advisor, typically we act like a partner in the business without taking equity on a simple subscription model.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 06:54

I right here. This is this is one of my favorite parts of your website. We’re here at CultivateAdvisors.Com. We’re looking at the unique advisory methodology. I love how these different pieces can highlight and I can open them up. Can you talk a little bit about maybe touch on a little bit of each of these pieces and what we’re looking at here from the methodology?

Dan Gramann 07:17

Yeah. And if you want to get into the more specifics when you visit the website, you can click into sales. You can click into marketing. It’ll actually pull out more of what does that mean. So I’ll use sales as an example. But sales is not as simple as just going like, hey, go sell more, right? We go out there as entrepreneurs or have our sales team going and doing that, and it’s really identifying what is my go to market strategy. Do I have I actually identified the right ICP for for my product or service? It’s also getting down to really understanding what KPIs within the current process. What is your sales process? Do you have a sales process? Do you have a mediocre sales process, or do you do you kind of fly by the seat of your pants to sell what you sell? And so to really create a systemized method to selling so that whether you’re doing it as the owner yourself or you have a team, how do we make it so it can be replicated and turn it on as an engine in the future? So it’s so consistent that whether you’re looking to sell scale for today and make sure that you’re increasing conversions and closing a lot more revenue, or proving in the future when you eventually want to exit your business, that when a buyer looks at your business, they go, wow, you’ve got a very consistent, metric driven sales process, and it looks like it’s very scalable and turnkey as we hire more and more reps inside your company. So that would be an example. With sales, I could go into a lot more.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 08:38

I want to stick on sales for a second. And, you know, you said something and to unpack that a little bit, you know, because people are thinking about how do I boost sales or looking at KPIs. And then I’ve been in conversations where someone would ask, just like you did, well, what’s your sales process? And they don’t really have a sales process, so that’s they have to start there before they even get to the end result. So I’m wondering maybe we’ll hit each topic and maybe what you see is a big mistake people make from some of the companies you’ve worked with yourself and also with Cultivate Advisory Advisors. And so sales. What’s a big mistake people make in this category?

Dan Gramann 09:24

I would say one would be that they most people listening here today know this is that we catch ourselves sometimes feature dumping, talking about what’s so great about my company, what’s so great about my service or my product versus coming in more to go understand what are the true needs and goals in what I am potentially going to sell to you. Because I don’t know if you’re a good fit, right. And really slowing down to actually be picky on both sides and not try to force them in the funnel and try to sell them something. It’s actually going like, I don’t know if you’re a fit, so let’s let’s slow down. Here is my process. This first meeting we’re going to cover this day today. If this makes sense. After I understand your needs and your goals, then let’s talk about what the next meeting would be and what we’re going to achieve in that next meeting. So one would be is be transparent in your process. Make sure you do a lot of discovery and validation of like what? What is it that I’m hearing you say as your needs and goals? And then I can share if I’m hearing a fit and share more about what it is that I’m selling. And then if it makes sense, I think the big mistake that we do in these processes, assuming you have a good, clear sales process step by step meeting the meeting is that there’s they’re not selling to the next step. They’re selling the product or the service. Right. So it’s no different than when you, you know, you go online and you check out a car, and then a rep calls you right from the auto dealer right there, not asking you to pull out your credit card and buy the car now. Or if they ever feel like if you feel like they’re pitching you like this is the best car, it’s for you. Now is not the time I need to understand more about like, what are you looking for? Does this.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 11:07

Car. It could be looking for a minivan. And they’re pitching you a sports car, right? So. Yeah.

Dan Gramann 11:11

Yeah, I saw that you looked at the sports car. Tell me more. Okay, now that you’ve shared that, I actually don’t think this car is right for you. I actually have two in mind. I don’t know if those are really correct or not. The next step is not you buying the car. I think you really should just stop in and walk around the car and then if you want, take it for a test drive and then if that makes sense, from there we can continue the conversation. So sell the next step. Don’t sell the service or product.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 11:36

Yeah.

Dan Gramann 11:37

So transparency in what your process is, what the steps are. Make sure making sure that the needs finding is happening versus just pitching them. And then are we actually selling to the next step. Not jumping too fast. The way I see it is date before you get engaged. Before you get married.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 11:55

Love it. Yeah, and the good fit part. I love what you said about there, because that could have saved me a lot of heartache over the years, because just knowing, not just from a the business perspective, but also a personality perspective, certain personalities are a fit to work with companies as well. And so that good fit is so important. Let’s talk about the marketing piece. What’s a mistake you see people making on the marketing front? And I’ll pull up the marketing page here so people can check it out too.

Dan Gramann 12:28

Yeah. If you want to scroll down you can see more of like the bullets behind it. But yeah, I mean, I’ll just give you a couple examples. They really haven’t slowed down to break down currently. What are all the marketing tactics that I am doing. What is the cost of acquisition per purse tactic. Do you actually know how many dollars you spend on that tactic to acquire one lead? Do you actually know how many dollars you spend on that tactic? To get to the end of your sales process and actually sign a contract? Right. And so knowing that cost of acquisition, on top of knowing when I spend X money on that tactic, you know, month over month, year over year, how many leads do I actually get and how many actually land from that source or that tactic? And so just even slowing down to truly map out the history of marketing, what is it saying? But then also like what are things that we’re not doing that is working really, really well in a space like yours that we should consider as we look at the future and if, if we might need to tweak and readjust where budgets go in the future, we might want to test some of these that have been proven in the market in your in your business model. And so I think sometimes we spend money hoping for revenue to just kind of magically appear, versus being very thoughtful in what tactics make sense and really narrow down to your top three. Beyond just kind of testing a lot of stuff out and not measuring. So measuring is obviously if you talk to any sales coach marketing like marketing company, like they’re going to talk a lot about measurement, like you got to measure the past so you can create metrics and goals for the future. So I you know.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 14:15

I like.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 14:15

Yeah go ahead go ahead.

Dan Gramann 14:16

No I was going to say like even like there are there are other tactics that would be viewed as sales, but they can also be viewed as marketing. Those are like more assertive marketing tactics like referral partnership or strategic partnership engines as well. Right. And when it comes to measuring, like I could tell you, you know, if we were to have a separate call, Jimmy, I could tell you actually how many partners we need to talk to you potentially to partner with, to how many are going to become a partner. And then from that, how many leads or referrals we’re going to get from them on an annual basis down to how many actually would close. But again, like you got to start back at square one and really understand, like the tactics, the cost of acquisition and where there is success on decisions moving forward.

[Continue to Page 2]

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 14:59

There was one example, Dan. Now I can’t remember because I think I binge watched a bunch of your past videos somewhere. And one of them, you were saying, I forgot how many partners you actually talked to. And then you realized there was a segment of those that were really good. You know what I’m talking about?

Dan Gramann 15:17

Yeah. I think that might have been that might have been one of the webinars we did inside of our EO community. And we had a lot of friends on there that were looking to also build their own, you know, partnership engines. And so the story I shared is when we initially initially made the commitment to invest into a strategic partnership team. The reason why we wanted to do it was, you know, there’s a difference of getting an online lead and there’s versus a referral lead. We all know that and we believe in that. But when you pick a referral partner and you really hone in on who is the targeted ideal referral partner, where they know, we know and their clients know, there’s this win win win that is so important to identify and figure out. Because once it becomes clear and day, you can really focus in on that niche or that target, because those conversations go faster, where they just get like their service or their product that they deliver to their clients is far more propped up and even more successful if for us, you know, if cultivate is also boosting that client and they’re moving faster with revenue, profit and people as well. So identifying that win, win win. But I think what you’re referring to is how many is in that first year, I think I shared that we kissed 1200 frogs. You know, it was us learning to like, who’s a good fit, who actually wants to talk to us, who do we want to talk to? Is their client community a good fit? And that allowed us to narrow down to two core focuses that we know that the partnerships truly it makes so much sense for them, their clients, us as a as a trio.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 16:53

So so if someone’s listening, obviously Dan, who is a good partner, who is a good partner for you, that maybe, maybe should contact you if that you’ve discovered are a good fit on both ends.

Dan Gramann 17:05

Yeah. I mean I’ll, I’ll share the our top two. So one would be private wealth wealth advisors that they have, you know, a portfolio of clients that are entrepreneurs. You know, for them they’re supposed to guide these clients towards success and their managing their assets and getting their their wealth set up for retirement and all that stuff. 80% of most entrepreneurs wealth is wrapped up in the business, right? What most people don’t know is that 70 to 80% of business owners when they list their business on the market. 70 to 80% don’t sell. It’s a terrible stat, and I will share with you my father. My father in law both had non exit events with two successful businesses right. And so that stat is very real. And so the goal.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 18:00

For yeah I mean there’s there’s like I know in the community there’s been restaurant. They’ve been there for 30 years. You’d think someone would buy it right. And take it over and they just shut it down. It’s it’s to me it’s still baffles me.

Dan Gramann 18:12

It. Yeah. There’s many instances and reasons why this happens, but I think we we build our business out of passion or like the love for the trade or skill or what it is that we can offer, and then we forget to look and get into the future and go like things happen in life, things happen. And at one point you might be forced into the corner to make a dramatic decision on the business, and those are common reasons where they move moved to. You know what I actually want to list, I list. I want to get I want to sell the business like something’s going on in life. You know, marriage is hard and distress and, like, it almost feels like I gotta sell the business to keep, you know, my spouse or I can name many millions of reasons why, but this is things that people go, oh, that would never happen to me. I’m going to be doing this forever. Or when I get to the point of sale, this will be easy. It’s doing $10 million today. Anybody’s going to buy it, not the reality. The other thing it’s I’m hearing it more and more on podcasts and everything. I’ve been saying it for a while is baby boomers are coming up to a place where they’re going, I have to sell, you know, they’re they’re they’re getting tired or they’re just going, I want to sell. You know, I’m at that point in my life. And so no different than the housing market when a ton of inventory all hits the market at the same time. Guess what happens, right? The buyer is in control, and there are a lot of houses that sit on the market for far too long and sometimes don’t sell, and they have to almost do a fire sale on it. And 50% of United States businesses are owned by baby boomers. So it’s going to be a lot of businesses up for sale in the next ten years.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 20:01

So Private Wealth Advisor is one. Well, what’s the other one?

Dan Gramann 20:06

M&A professionals, business brokers for them. If you’ve ever been contacted by a business broker or an M&A professional, you know they they’re in it to support you and hopefully helping you do an exit on the business majority of the time for their conversations. They get on the phone with entrepreneurs and they’re part of that statute of majority businesses not ready to actually go to market. Your business is not ready. You don’t have enough EBITDA. There’s so many reasons why. Unfortunately, traditionally what it’s been is they put them into an email campaign and that’s the nurture or they call them once a year. How’s it going now? And that relationship is pretty cold. So many of them, what they’re doing now is they’re going like, I actually want to take care of these people. I just don’t have the time to advise them on their business while I’m taking care of my clients that I’m preparing for exit. So they’re actually bringing us on their team and then offering our free resources to all those nurture prospects to take care of them. And then if they become a client with cultivate or either of our brands, we can actually keep them in touch with that rep or that M&A professional so that we can go, hey, we’re at this EBITDA now. We have gotten to this place. I think it might be time to just get ahead of the conversation. So if it is time to go to market, we can make this entrepreneur super successful. And so that that would be another awesome core area where we just find a ton of win win win opportunity there.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 21:39

And talk about define M&A for a second. What does that include? Like when you say it for some reason my mind goes to private equity. And then I want to talk about some of the niches. So someone’s out there like what niches are they in? I know you have a number of niches, but what type of professionals are under kind of that M&A category for you?

Dan Gramann 21:58

I mean, there there’s there’s so many different categories to go down and exactly where people specialize. But there’s commonly a lot of M&A firms out there that will specialize on the sell side of things. Right. Like they they they work with business owners directly to help them do the sale. Right. And they will also line up a large network and have those relationships.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 22:20

With different like brokers.

Dan Gramann 22:22

They’ll know all the private equity firms, they’ll know, you know all the family offices. They’ll have the relationships, and they’ll be able to truly market the company when they take it to market. I mean, they are the realtor. They’re not selling a house. They’re a professional. They know how to crush it in selling a business. And they’ve got the relationships to identify the best buyers for the seller. And there’s M&A professionals that work on both sides by side, sell side, where they’re actually trying to find acquisitions for clients looking to accelerate. Like I watched one of your podcasts, I think it’s a train marketing. And he started to grow through acquisitions. And so he he might want to, you know, use a M&A professional that really works on the buy side where it’s like, keep an eye out. Here’s what I’m looking for as I grow through acquisition. So I’m not here to speak on their behalf. They could probably share way more than me. The M&A professionals. But it’s important to to date 2 or 3 and really understand the benefits of all the different styles out there and where they’re actually going to help you acquire what you’re trying to do.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 23:26

Yeah. And we’ll go back to, you know, thanks for that sales mark. We’ll go back to recruiting and leadership. but I do want to stick on the niche thing for a second. I’d love to hear the evolution when you start to Cultivate Advisors, talk about the evolution of the niches. I don’t know if you started with one and kind of grew from there. How did that work? Right now I’m looking at the site. Obviously there’s retail, tourism, real estate, human resources, education, high tech, manufacturing, construction. There’s a lot of health care. Where did it start?

Dan Gramann 24:00

Oh, I guess why don’t I just share my backstory and actually how it got to this place of being industry agnostic? Because what I’d say is we have a lot of confidence that we can really support any business owner, fundamentally, if they’re really are hungry for growth, because what we do is the fundamentals of a scalable business model. But my background, you shared, you know, when I was I was in my parents business in the beginning, I was employee number one. But when I went off to college, what was your parent’s business? It was a basically like a tech progressive imaging consulting, which is no longer open today. Was a courtroom consulting and, you know, digital documentation for for law firms, right. So back in the day, lawyers would take boxes of papers and carry them into the loft, into the, you know, to show the jury. Exhibit A, exhibit B, right. And then eventually it’s like we got this stuff called technology today with screens, you know. And so what, they were kind of in the front end of that was taking paper documents, scanning them through, making them digital. And then that way you could pull them up on in monitors in front of the jury. And it was that that was the beginning. Different industry today, considering most of us live in the cloud and digitally anyways. So paper documents are kind of a dead thing to be scanning, but it’s still out there and I’ve got friends in EO that actually own some of those firms.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 25:28

Yeah, I mean there’s there’s a lot of industries that shot off from there. I knew there was very successful ones, like in the searchability like now they’re online and they did like the searchability of the online stuff. So as I know, there’s a bunch of offshoot companies that are very successful from that.

Dan Gramann 25:44

Yeah, it moved into like how to manage cloud space for law firms and moved into data mining, like how to like dive into hard drives where they wipe the hard drive, but they’re going to open it back up and get documents that were wiped out. But they’re actually in there still, and there’s all sorts of stuff, but we don’t need to get into that today. But anyways, after that, after that I went off to college. I was paying my way through college, you know, I had those couple experiences where my landlord would call me and say, you are overdue on rent and I’m going to be kicking you out of here. And I know some good lessons. While I had like multiple jobs while going to college full time, but I had I owned my first business. I acquired a painting franchise near my college campus, and that’s also where I met my co-founder today. And that went so well. I made more money doing that in the summertime, owning that painting business than I was going to make after college. And I was going to be a school teacher. Right. And then I’m switching my major to business marketing graduated a couple years later than expected because of that. But, you know, my parents didn’t take on that burden. I was paying that whole thing. And after that, the franchisor called me and the other co-founder to cultivate and basically said, you guys did so great in your franchises. We would actually love to bring you to the main office on the franchisor side and launch franchises with us, train them, consult them, scale them, and then after that, then a large restoration franchisor out of Florida called me. So then I was traveling North America, launching those franchises from zero revenue up and consulting and consulting them. And what I realized, going from one industry to another one, right. One was putting wet stuff on a wall. Another one was extracting sewage out of a basement and cleaning smoke items and handling insurance. And I knew nothing. And I felt so uncomfortable at first, like, I don’t even know what I’m talking about. To all of a sudden, realizing what my role was was not mastering the industry. What I had and what I knew a lot of us have had is like with the experience of launching so many businesses before moving into this new industry, was, how do you scale a business? How do you build a scalable model for selling, marketing, recruiting, the right people, leadership, running the financials, all these things that if you do that really, really well as a owner of a business, and then we implement that into the people, you’re going to crush it, you know. And so I called Casey the co-founder, and I said, I’m telling you, I didn’t know what to expect moving into this, but I’m just realizing, like, this is something great and can be done for any business owner. And I’m pretty confident any industry needs what this is. So we tested out our first few clients and industry wise, because we started this conversation on what industries or niches we tried. Everything at first had lots of confidence to go to home service businesses. That was really easy based on our history to get our first few clients. And then I somehow got an immigration attorney firm, and then I got another immigration attorney firm. And now I was going, okay, now I’m entering territory I’ve never been in before. And it worked really, really well there. And so all that did was build the confidence that the methodology of truly, we’re not going to tell somebody what to do in their industry. We’re not going to be an industry guru. We know how to scale businesses. So that’s why you see so many core industries on there. And what we do is because we track so many numbers with our, our clients, we can pull up by industry on the back end and actually see which ones have the fastest pace of growth for revenue, profit. So while all of them typically move up on an average, we know which ones absolutely crush it, which ones are a little bit slower paced, but it’s actually kind of common with their industry after research. And so yeah, I, I recommend people kind of click in deeper in there into the different industries. There’s a lot of stories of what we’ve done.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 29:45

So talk about the growing the advisors piece because obviously you created a specific methodology. And these advisors come on, they’re all sounds like successful business owners who sold their business. But everyone kind of takes their own path when you bring. And I’ll pull up the advisory page in a second. When you bring someone on, how do you train them? So there’s, you know, there’s a structure, right? Because I’m sure people came in, they sold their business and they may not have the same really defined structure that you’ve figured out through advisors.

Dan Gramann 30:25

Yeah. So it’s I think the beauty of what we’ve built is that when you take the methodology and the structure of, like how to onboard a client, the structure of how to handle the meetings with the client, how to continue to make sure that we’re measuring the right ways they get fully trained up. It’s pretty intense training with our our advisors to make sure that they’re equipped. And there’s a lot of shadowing they do with our seasoned advisors to make sure that they’re good. And we measure Net Promoter Score with our clients like crazy, just to make sure that we’re making sure that we’re measuring how well they’re doing with the clients, which I do believe is what attributed to our 450 plus Google five star Google reviews. It’s allowing them to be the person and the entrepreneur they are. So there are things and there’s personality, and there’s their own wisdom that comes out a lot in the meetings, so they get to be who they are. As an entrepreneur, that grows a business. But when you apply the structure around like kind of the skeleton structure around them, they just feel it just builds a lot more confidence around. Like, if I follow this process too, will I be myself as an entrepreneur? I can really crush it into the future with these clients.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 31:44

Can you talk about, I don’t know who would be a good story of one of the advisors, because I’m sure they all have a lot of interesting backgrounds and what sticks? What’s one that sticks out of? They sold this type of business and then how they made it to you?

Dan Gramann 31:58

Sure. If you stay, if you stay on this page here. So like, Yanni had a very high end restaurant on the East Coast that he sold before he moved to Colorado with his family. And so he’s awesome, like, just an amazing guy. And so he doesn’t only advise people that own restaurants. He owns all sorts of he he’s just a fantastic advisor. And again, it’s it’s not about industry Advisors. It’s about advisors we know that crushes entrepreneurs and growing in the space here. And then if you back out again. So now you got a restaurant owner on one side, the right side there. Hayden. That’s the Co-founder of Liquid I.V. Right. So you know, very different stories. Right. And we did that by for a very specific reason. Like we wanted a very wide array of, of talent, skill, the right personalities. I think when we interview advisors to be about our team, it’s it’s about do they have that right entrepreneurial drive. Do they have to have to have the history? Do they match our core values? And if we all come together, we’re we’re on the same path, vision and mission. It’s really easy to move forward into the future. And I know our page is actually outdated as far as the advisors. We actually have to get some faces on here still. But but yeah, so but that’s a couple examples for you.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 33:17

Love it I want to go back for a second Dan. So we talked about leadership or marketing and sales. Let’s talk about leadership for a second. And maybe a big mistake or two that you’ve seen from from this perspective on leadership.

Dan Gramann 33:36

Yeah. I mean I will actually start back at recruiting first.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 33:40

Okay. Let’s do that.

Dan Gramann 33:41

So one would be recruiting the right people.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 33:43

I gotcha.

Dan Gramann 33:44

And how do you do that. And then I think there’s a lot to dig into the leadership side. And people read about it all the time. It’s in so many different books and it’s like, but how do you go implement that is a different story. So recruiting, I could talk about that for days because I feel like whenever we get into business, we show them that recruiting talent should be as high of a priority as getting more revenue in the company. And if you do that right, it’s actually going to reflect on the growth and scale of revenue. And when you hire people, if it’s not a hell yeah. It’s a no, right? Don’t ever have three candidates. And you’re like, well, this one’s better than the other two. Does that mean that they’re actually the right one? Do they actually fit the the role and the responsibility and the attributes? Do they meet these deal breakers that this person must have these things? And if they don’t have these top deal breakers, it is a no right. And so it’s identifying who that is and what they have as far as capabilities, skills, whatever it may be mostly soft skills. Right. Because because you can you can train your industry and all that stuff with talent. But really getting that clearly laid out no different than like building a marketing campaign and going like, who’s my ICP? How are we going to find my ICP? Building a marketing plan on the recruiting side. What is our sales process? It’s a recruiting process. How many interviews do we do? What do we do at each point of the interview? realizing that also the best talent out there, you’re not just qualifying people, you are also selling the best talent because they have great options out there. If they’re the best people, they have other options that they can go take jobs. So it is a mix of qualifying and selling to the recruiting process to get them bought in and actually start the journey from back in the recruiting process. So then when you do that on the leadership side, when you move into that, it’s like, how clear do you have the onboarding process and how clear are we getting our team aligned on vision mission? I know we all hear about this. We read this stuff all the time, but putting it into action is a very different thing, right? And so getting a plan laid out on how we’re going to do that, I think there’s usually a lack of alignment around the structure of who does what and the leadership side. And I think there’s a lack of expectations from leadership down of truly what it means to what is your role? What are you supposed to do in your role? What is the what are the goals KPIs, and what are the expectations? And what happens if we don’t hit those? And talking about that stuff up front and then having your cadence of the right leadership systems and meetings ongoing to keep track and support them and train them and coach them and serve them. Don’t just hold them accountable like you didn’t do this. It’s like, okay, we can’t just talk about goals, hit or miss. It’s also going to be about what do they need? How can we serve them, coach them, advise them to be better in their role so they can hit their goals too. It’s not all on them. So and it’s there’s there’s obviously an art to that whole leadership process and system. And so anyways, that’s like a very macro view. I’d say one of our other brands that we acquired, Petra Coach, is the best of the best when it comes to executive and leadership coaching. I mean, they absolutely crush it.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 37:21

So we’re going to talk about some of the brands, Dan, in a second. But I do want to talk about you were mentioning the process onboarding process. I want to talk about the Cultivate Advisors process a little bit and and how it works. So if people are interested in kind of learning more about their own business and, you know, moving it forward. I’m pulling up here because there’s a lot that’s baked into your process that’s helpful for people to go through. And we’re at Cultivate or exit.cultivateadvisors.com/submission and talk about what we’re looking at here.

Dan Gramann 37:56

Yeah. And the I just dropped it here in the chat in case you want to bring that up instead. So this is the this is a 15 minute online business health and value assessment. Right. So at any time. So first of all our clients take this every single year as we measure enterprise value and health scores within the business to continue to build the right roadmap areas of the business of what are we going to work on to continue this scale? So when they fill this out, they get this PDF that I dropped in the chat, and it’s a 24 page report. And that basically talks about, you know, if you’re looking to sell, it will educate on exit readiness, whether you’re looking to sell or not. But then it actually gets into the health of the business and the 24 health drivers that apply to any business for it to be a scalable business and a sellable business if you’re looking to sell at some point. So those 24 core health drivers, ironically, not ironically, apply to our methodology of financials, sales, marketing, recruiting, leadership and productivity. So four simple questions. And then that health score plops down to the bottom where we took 77,000 actual businesses that exited. We took the data and An organization, organize it by industry so that on page 20 you can actually learn about what are the common multiples in your industry high and low, based on revenue or profit. So you can actually start to just understand that whether I’m looking to sell in the future or not, understanding and starting to measure measure, the enterprise value of business is really important. So you can make decisions on how do you scale that and where’s my health today and how do I get it over 85 to 100%? 100% is perfect score over 85%. So that my business is not only experiencing much greater scale, it’s also more enjoyable to have a healthy business as an owner. And then at the end of the day, if you ever do sell, when a buyer opens the hood, they go, what a freaking fantastic business. I like this one over all the other ones I’m looking at right now. So that is that is the process. They that was step one of 15 minute assessment. They then have an assessment review with our strategist. That’s an hour long call to really review this assessment make sure we really understand like really what are your goals. Why how does this impact the future of your goals? After the strategist leaves that meeting, they identify which advisor and their team they think is a really good fit based on their top skill sets and their advising style to then move into the next meeting. All this is complimentary. This allows us to meet a lot of entrepreneurs, figure out which ones we think are a really good fit, and they think we’re a good fit for them. So the assessment strategist meeting to do the assessment review, and then they meet the advisor and do a 90 minute roadmap meeting. That’s where they take all this learning so far and their goals for the future and what their desires are to then break down and build a strategy roadmap for the next one, three, five years to go. This is they’re basically saying, if I was in if I was you, this is where I’d really highly focused on initiatives and roadmap for the next 12 months. Next two years. Like this is where it should start. And if they leave that meeting and they go, wow, I love this advisor. God, if I got this twice a month, two hours at a time and had them as a partner in my business, I’m going to go so much faster and I think I believe I’ll hit it. They can then talk about moving into subscription.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 41:34

Got it. Thanks for that. I want to do. I do want to hit on a little bit about some of the Cultivate brands. And because you’ve made acquisitions over the years as a company and maybe start with the bookkeeping and how that integrates and how that works, how that come about.

Dan Gramann 41:53

Yeah, that that’s a fun one. You know, Lee is the CEO of breakwater still today, even after the acquisition that she’s the president of that organization. And she was a client of ours. Right. So we took her business and we tripled it in two years. And over that time, not only were we experiencing the growth together for for what we were doing to advise her, we loved Lee. We loved her team. We also found ourselves naturally going like we actually trust her service so well. She does such a great job. We had so many clients that needed their books cleaned up or outsourcing, so that they got off of all the mundane work on a month to month basis. AP all that stuff that we were referring our clients to her. She was starting to refer clients to us, and it was such a natural, like, we’re in the same space, we’re crushing it in the growth so far, and we loved the culture fit. And so eventually we had a discussion around acquiring breakwater, and we saw the future together and we made it happen. And so Lee is still a big part of today. And they are they’re absolutely crushing it. So the story continued from the three times or over those two years, and it’s been three and a half years now, I want to say.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 43:12

Yeah. I’m curious from the acquisition you have to show specific numbers, but how do you tend to structure it? Do you go out and get money from the bank or you put it? How do you how do you structure a deal with from an acquisition?

Dan Gramann 43:26

I can’t give specifics on the podcast here today. What I’d say is we spent a lot of time with private equity professionals to make sure that we are fair in the process of like, what are the options? Typically, what would make sense? That’s fair to the buyer and to the seller. And so we we went through all those options to identify what’s going to make sense for cultivate and for breakwater to, to make that decision before we moved forward on it.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 43:53

Yeah. I don’t I don’t need exact numbers. I’m just curious if you go out and you get, you know, the person rolls some equity into it and shares in it. Not not like specific percentages but or.

Dan Gramann 44:06

Yeah, we definitely rolled a piece of the Cultivate brand’s equity into the deal so that, you know, Lee could join in the mothership and all that stuff. And and then just like a, you know, the five year term of, like, all that stuff, how that works out and what I’d say is not specific talking about hers, depending on the size of business, that really makes a difference of how the deals have to be structured to, you know, a 1 to $4 million business is going to be structured very differently from a 5 to $10 million business versus a 10 to 30. You know, it’s so things get different. On how money has to be upfront over the different pace of revenue and profit. So again, I think I don’t know if you had an M&A professional on here or a broker, but they can speak a lot more to like the the terms on those.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 44:59

And then what about Petra Coach.

Dan Gramann 45:02

Petra Coach you know it. That’s an interesting one. We’ve always kept our our ear to the ground as far as just understanding. Is there any other advising firms that are doing the tailored advising like we do? And growing and scaling at the pace we are. And so what was happening was we we were hearing about somebody kept mentioning Petra to Casey, our CEO, Mike, the other Co-founder, and I think Petra heard about us. And so it happened a couple times. Eventually was like, let’s just have a call. And then we found out that the CEO was at a place in his life where he was kind of going, like, I’m looking to find the right buyer. Legacy was really important to him. He’s built such an incredible brand. The values and mission and vision of Petra is just it’s really top notch. And so for for him, he wasn’t just going like, let me just find a private equity firm that’s looking to spend the biggest dollar. It was going, money is important. But I want to make sure like, you know, this is a strategic buyer. This is like there’s legacy and really like making sure the brand lives on. And so so for Petra coach, if you think about Cultivate Advisors typically working with businesses between 1 and 15 million in revenue, where the owner is owning a lot of the functions and hats in the company, and then as they graduate into larger revenues, Petra’s usually like 10 to $1 billion where they are delegating and they have a leadership team, like an executive team that’s running more of the function of the company. And so while the CEO now on the Petra level is getting a strategic coach, they also get an accountability coach in there as well. So there’s a hand hold of really setting up these operating systems on the leadership side and getting the the whole leadership process, meetings and systems in place. And it’s a high touch business where, you know, every month they’re getting attention and then quarterly on site for alignment on the team. So as our businesses graduate to much bigger businesses and they’re going like, I want you to work with my team and just make sure they are so freaking aligned and we’re all rowing in the right direction. And just make sure that strategy and accountability and performance culture is moving in the right direction. Petra is hands down the top notch.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 47:23

Let’s talk the future for a second, Dan. I know on the tech side, I know we’re right about Gen. I want to make you late for your next appointment. I don’t know if you have time to just talk about the future of the tech side.

Dan Gramann 47:36

Yeah, I’ll give you the. I’ll give you the the long story short here. So we got to a place where we wanted to get out of all the technology pieces that we’re kind of piecemealing together of when we were advising clients. Like what? What were we using?

Where did Google Drive and what documents and how do we we wanted to make sure we built a SaaS product that really was built out of the the brains of the methodology, but also what our advisors were asking for and going like I could crush it if I had like this system to advise and be aligned and have transparency both ways between me and the entrepreneur as we grow their business together. And so we built a SaaS product and I won’t be able to get into the details today. We launched it this year and we we have that. And then we have all of our methodology, all of our tool kits. There’s a lot of stuff that I could get into. We’ve had so many coaching firms that kind of they’re they they live and breathe kind of the same vision and mission as us. They’re trying to have the same impact and be a tailored advisor out there. And their firm is typically between 2 and 10 advisors at this point. And they’ve been reaching out to us asking like, how did you guys get to this place that you’re at? Because we’re approaching 150 employees at this time, and they’re going, how like, can you just kind of talk? Are you open to talking about it? And we’ve always, you know, had open discussions, eventually got to the point where one, you know, really wanted to partner with us and we were like, we actually want to partner with them. So we’ve now moved to a world where I won’t give it away because this is new in 2025, we’ve had three that have partnered with us so far. As we launch it at the end of this year, we’re going to be selecting 20 coaching firms next year that we believe in, and they believe in our methodology, and we’re both trying to achieve the same thing, and they want to scale faster at the pace that we’ve been scaling. We’re going to be, you know, housing all of our methodology and technology into that and partnering with them so we can grow together and have the same impact together. Some of those are very niche. You know, some of them are going like we only advise and grow restoration businesses or we only do this for female based entrepreneurs. And so it’s really cool, like this big open market right now of coaching firms that are because there’s so many entrepreneurs that want to scale or prepare for sale. So anyways, it’s a bit of a teaser that it’s already in motion. And next year we’re we’re moving into it with a lot more folks that we’re identifying of who we want to partner with.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 50:13

On the coaching side, from a SaaS model, I’m curious and probably still work in the progress of the. Do you tend to charge? Will you charge like a license fee for each person on it, or will you. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. That’s cool. Dan I just want to be the first one to thank you. I feel like we can talk for another couple hours, but everyone should check out cultivateadvisors.com to learn more and check out more episodes of the podcast. And Dan, thanks so much and we’ll see everyone next time.

Dan Gramann 50:43

Awesome. Thanks, Jeremy. Take care.

Outro 50:46

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