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

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:

• EO Wisconsin
• EO Accelerator
• Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO)
• Dr. Jeremy Weisz on LinkedIn
• Rise25
• Dan Gramann on LinkedIn
• Cultivate Advisors
• Cultivate Advisors – Exit Assessment Tool
• Casey Clark on LinkedIn
• Hayden Fulstone on LinkedIn
• Lee Leonard Podolsky on LinkedIn
• Petra Coach

Related Episodes

• “[One Question] Living with Purpose with Rabbi Mois Navon from Mobileye” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “Pipedrive: Brain Surgery, Married, & Moved Company from Estonia to U.S. All at Once – with Urmas Purde [Inspiration]” on the Inspired Insider Podcast

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

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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…

At Rise25, we’re committed to helping you connect with your Dream 100 referral partners, clients, and strategic partners through our done-for-you podcast solution.

We’re a professional podcast production agency that makes creating a podcast effortless. Since 2009, our proven system has helped thousands of B2B businesses build strong relationships with referral partners, clients, and audiences without doing the hard work.

What do you need to start a podcast?
When you use our proven system, all you need is an idea and a voice. We handle the strategy, production, and distribution – you just need to show up and talk.

The Rise25 podcasting solution is designed to help you build a profitable podcast. This requires a specific strategy, and we’ve got that down pat. We focus on making sure you have a direct path to ROI, which is the most important component. Plus, our podcast production company takes any heavy lifting of production and distribution off your plate.

We make distribution easy.
We’ll distribute each episode across more than 11 unique channels, including iTunes, Spotify, and Google Podcasts. We’ll also create copy for each episode and promote your show across social media.

Co-founders Dr. Jeremy Weisz and John Corcoran credit podcasting as being the best thing they have ever done for their businesses. Podcasting connected them with the founders/CEOs of P90x, Atari, Einstein Bagels, Mattel, Rx Bars, YPO, EO, Lending Tree, FreshBooks, and many more.

The relationships you form through podcasting run deep. Jeremy and John became business partners through podcasting. They have even gone on family vacations and attended weddings of guests who have been on the podcast.

Podcast production has a lot of moving parts and is a big commitment on our end; we only want to work with people who are committed to their business and to cultivating amazing relationships.

Are you considering launching a podcast to acquire partnerships, clients, and referrals? Would you like to work with a podcast agency that wants you to win?

Contact us now at support@rise25.com or book a call at rise25.com/bookcall.

Rise25 Co-founders, Dr. Jeremy Weisz and John Corcoran, have been podcasting and advising about podcasting since 2008.

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.

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