EPISODE 211 WITH MIKE MALATESTA: THE SECRET TO BUILDING AND SELLING SUCCESSFUL BUSINESSES

Ready Yet?! Podcast Episode 211 with guest Mike Malatesta: The Secret to Building and Selling Succesful Businesses 

Transcribed with Descript

Erin Marcus: All right, hello, hello, and welcome to the Ready Yet podcast where I’m excited about today’s guest because if you look at the tagline of this podcast, you’ll never do what it takes until you become the person it takes to do it. And you are looking for a spokesmodel for that topic, right? If you’re looking for an example of embodying both tactical, right, tactical achievement.

Erin Marcus: And just an amazing story and shift and who you were being to take all your achievements and blow it up from there. My guest today, Mike Malatesta is, I mean, you can’t really ask for a better example. So I can’t wait for this conversation before we get in all of it. Why don’t you give everyone a little more formal introduction into who you are and what

Mike Malatesta: you do?

Mike Malatesta: Sure. Well, thanks for the. Compliment, I guess, to getting started yeah, it reminds me of that’s that tagline you have there reminds me of this thing I believe in that commitment comes before confidence, right? So until you, until you can totally commit to something, you have no chance of Becoming good at it or confident at it, or even having the ability to achieve it.

Mike Malatesta: So so I like, I like your tag. It’s not exactly the same, but it’s reminds me of, it’s very similar. Why do I, thanks so much for having me on Erin. I am a, an entrepreneur. I’m a teacher. I’m a podcaster and I’m an author. And I’d say I’m probably those things in that order. I started my first business when I was 26.

Mike Malatesta: So that was 30 ish years ago. And I’ve over those, over those times, I’ve had plenty of successes. I’ve had many, many failures, but what I’ve, what I’ve, what I’ve always had is a consistent curiosity to learn and to be as good as I can be and to help as many people as I can help. And so what’s interesting is it’s like the success and the failures are kind of, less important to me now than my own progress and the progress that I can help other people make in their lives, careers, or whatever ambitions.

Mike Malatesta: So that’s a short, very short version of who I am. Awesome.

Erin Marcus: Well, so just diving into everything that you share. So I was lucky enough to hear you speak at a Young Guns event a few months ago and meet you there. And ownership. Love it. I love my. I have an autographed copy. I just, I have questions as I went through it and why don’t we just dive right in and see where this takes us.

Erin Marcus: In the beginning, one of the things you say in here, because this question has come up for me so many times, people have been asking me this lately, and I know my example, my answer. One of the things you’ve said in here more than once is saying yes to every opportunity. Yes. How do you determine What’s an opportunity and what’s a distraction?

Mike Malatesta: So the origin of that in the book, saying yes to everything, was that’s how I approached life for in the early to mid part of my career, right? And that worked really well because I could always I always felt like I was making myself more valuable in the eyes of other people when I would say yes to something that other people might say no to.

Mike Malatesta: So I thought it was a, it was a tremendous advantage. However there came a time and there probably comes a time in your life and there probably comes a time in everyone’s life where you feel like you’re saying yes to too many things. And all of a sudden you’re. Overcommitted, you’re maybe frustrated.

Mike Malatesta: You want, you don’t want to do things that you signed up for, but you signed up for them and you, so you do them because it’s an obligation, right? It’s really about things becoming obligations. And I found that for me you know, in. And I go into more detail on this in the book, but it, you know, late part of 2003, I had something very significant happen in my life and my partnership at work.

Mike Malatesta: And it really brought to the forefront this whole life that I’ve built around obligations that I created for myself that I was not excited about. That was actually, that. Rather than, rather than them being accretive to my energy and to my effectiveness, they were detracting from it. And so, for me, it was about getting selfish with my and we can go into that later if you want, but ultimately to answer your question directly is how do I know what to say yes to and no to?

Mike Malatesta: I don’t all the time know what to say yes, no to all the time. So I want to be very clear about that now. You know, you hear a lot of people say, if it’s not a hell yes, it’s a hell no. And I say those people are full of crap because you don’t ever know what is a hell yes for you and you don’t ever know what is a hell.

Mike Malatesta: No, for you. However, for me, for me, I’m about, okay, I always try to live my life in the future. What am I? What, you know, what, what do I want to make my property in the future? So those are the things that I’m most focused on now. That’s pretty broad, meaning I have this idea or ideal of what I want my future to be.

Mike Malatesta: And I can be pretty clear about that. I don’t know though, what the path is and what the relationships are and what the opportunities are. They’re going to get me to that. ideal or to that goal. So I kind of put, just put things through a matrix because do these things have the chance to help me get there?

Mike Malatesta: Then I’m going to be probably a yes on that. And if I say to myself, I, there’s just no way then I would say a no to it. And so that’s how I’ve tried to just being clear about what I want has really helped me with my over committing to, to yeses. Yeah, I think

Erin Marcus: that some of the key things that you’re saying that I really want to hit home on is, you know what you want.

Erin Marcus: Right. And I think so many people don’t have the clarity. You know, one of the things I say a lot is, you know, I always ask people when I work with them, what are we building here? What are we trying to create? And they’ll tell me a number. I want a 5 million business. I want a 1 million business. I want a 10 million business, whatever it is.

Erin Marcus: But that’s such an irrelevant piece of information. Right. Because you can have a million different ways to have a million dollar business and they’re going to be very different lives. Yes. And if you’re not clear on what you want, to your point, you can’t, you won’t know what’s a yes and what’s a no.

Mike Malatesta: Yes.

Mike Malatesta: Yeah. That example you, you just gave reminds me of the, you know, that peeling the onion thing. Someone says they want something and you say, well, why do you want that? And they respond to that with whatever and you go, well, why is that important to you? And you just kind of keep digging down because most people.

Mike Malatesta: And I think this is probably rings true with your experience. They think they want something because they’ve equated that something to something else that they’ve observed in their life, maybe not their own experience, but someone else’s. And they want to mirror that. They think that if they think that They think that that’s what they want.

Mike Malatesta: But then, but you’re right. Most when it comes right down to it, it’s sometimes very difficult for people to say, this is exactly what I want and you help them get there. It sounds like, so once you get there, you can start building a path. You can start, you know, really helping them. If it’s just this sort of like, this is what I think I want, because this is what Erin has.

Mike Malatesta: And I would be happy if I was she. Yeah, then that’s going to be tougher.

Erin Marcus: Well, and I think, you know, it’s a mixture of when you were raised, how you were raised, who you’re currently around. Like, there’s all these stories of what things are. Yes. as opposed to what they would be for us or what they actually are.

Erin Marcus: I, I was just talking to somebody, ex Secret Service. I have a new friend in my life. He’s ex Secret Service. He’s very cool and everything that you would apply to that, right? Great guy. And we were talking about how that’s one of those jobs that you think is one thing and you just don’t know what it is until you get there.

Mike Malatesta: Yeah, I mean, I mean, just think of that. Yeah. I mean, I don’t know this guy at all, or I don’t know that life that well either, but it just think to yourself. Well, it looks pretty cool. You wear the nice suit. You got the dark shades. You got the thing in the air, you know, you got to jogging

Erin Marcus: next to the limousine, the presidential,

Mike Malatesta: you know, you’re always surrounded by like the most powerful people in the world.

Mike Malatesta: Which seems really great, but then it’s like, well, you’re on call all the time. You never know where you’re going to be the next day. You know, there’s a lot of just standing

Erin Marcus: around

Mike Malatesta: doing right. Yeah. It’s very difficult to have a life that has meaning. When you have that kind of a job, I’m assuming now the meaning might come from the job and that must be, might be awesome.

Mike Malatesta: But yeah, you’re right. You look at it and you go, Oh, that would be cool. That would be

Erin Marcus: cool. That would be cool. Awesome. So one of the things you, you already said, and I 100 percent agree with you, you can’t have confidence. Until you have commitment. Yeah. And one of the things, I, I have this in my own life.

Erin Marcus: I don’t, I don’t know an entrepreneur that doesn’t go through this. And, and I want to preface this by saying we don’t have time even remotely if we were to do seven episodes of this show to go through the stories that you share. And so I just, if you’re listening to this episode, I highly, highly recommend do yourself a favor, grab a copy of ownership, read it.

Erin Marcus: It is, it’s an easy read it’s stories, but it’s very, very impactful. Go figure out the background of what we’re talking about here, because I don’t know any entrepreneur that. doesn’t go through ups and downs, yours are a little more up and down than average. Okay, we’ll just leave it at that, right? Okay, fair enough.

Erin Marcus: I mean, that is a huge understatement, people. Like, huge understatement, go get the book, dive into it. But even if you want to touch on any of that, I know you share it openly, so I’m not, I’m not hiding anything here. I just, for time, for the sake of time. How do you, and you do talk about this a little bit in here, but I was just dying to know more.

Erin Marcus: So I’m going to ask, how do you, how do you recommend, how can you even imagine creating exuding confidence? And moving forward with, while trying to hold the ups and downs and the downs and the downs and the downs and the challenges, like as an entrepreneur and a business owner, it doesn’t do me as a business consultant.

Erin Marcus: It does me no good to show up and share the background shit show with the audience. Like they don’t want to know this. This does not instill confidence in my clients, but it is my reality and it’s everybody’s reality. Yeah. I don’t like fake it till you make it. It feels like a lie. There’s act as if. You can talk about compartmentalizing.

Erin Marcus: Like, seriously, how do you freaking keep going?

Mike Malatesta: Yeah, well, There’s something, you know, everybody’s got some Something unique about them that that can keep them going in times where other people wouldn’t and whether it’s my stories, whether it’s the entrepreneurial journey, whether it’s having some illness, whether it’s having someone in your family with an illness, whether it’s having had some unbelievable tragedy in your in your life People find we’re, we’re most of us are programmed to just keep moving forward.

Mike Malatesta: In my case, I would say there were two things. One, I had a little bit of that, and I don’t know where that comes from, Erin. But two, I had a responsibility to Other people, it was not just, you know, me and I, that that responsibility mattered to me, like showing up early to get ready for this podcast. It matters to me that I show up and deliver on what I’m supposed to deliver to people.

Mike Malatesta: And. It’s kind of like I learned about this from a guy named Dan Sullivan at strategic coach. He’s you know, he talks about backstage and front stage front stage is you know It’s in a theater environment right front stage is what the audience sees. That’s the production. That’s the performance and there’s not one person In that audience who gives a crap about all the stuff that’s one going on backstage during the performance or two had to go on to make the performance unless, unless it impacts their joy of the front stage performance and they don’t like it.

Mike Malatesta: They don’t like when that gets messed up. So I try to keep even before I heard that now it’s like a. It’s like something I remind myself of because I had this model, you know, from his description, but even before that, it was like.

Mike Malatesta: Bringing whatever’s going on with me to the surface to everybody every day or every minute. How does that help them? It doesn’t help them at all, nor and they don’t care and it’s not their problem. So I think the combination of those two things, I have something built in me that helps me to be able to, you know, keep moving forward.

Mike Malatesta: And and the second is that I feel like I have a responsibility and. That’s important to me to to deliver on what I’ve promised people or what they expect from me. No,

Erin Marcus: I love it. It’s by the way, just Like, have you read this one yet, Dan Sullivan?

Mike Malatesta: Yes. I have. Yep. Literally right here. I like all the marks you got in there, too.

Mike Malatesta: That’s good. Yeah. That was a good

Erin Marcus: one. Right. It’s a mixture of how much resilience. I think you’re right. I think humans are highly, highly resilient. I think social media would have us believing woe is me is the case, but I don’t think that that’s the case.

Mike Malatesta: Yeah. Even, you know, it’s funny you say that because even people who are.

Mike Malatesta: Like like the, the, the you know, the immigrants that are, you know, coming here. We talk, we, we spend a lot of time talking about how overburdened we are as a result and how our policy needs to change and all of those things. But we rarely, rarely talk about, I rarely hear people talking about what the hell is going on in someone’s mind and life that would commit them to a 6, 000.

Mike Malatesta: 5, 000, 3, 000 mile journey into the complete unknown, risking, talk about entrepreneurial, risking all of their stuff because someone has told them or they have seen pictures or they have someone that’s there’s something better for you over here and they actually make it. That’s. That’s just that, that regardless of how you feel about the, right, regardless of how you feel about the politics, it’s like, that’s a person I might want to like, you know, have on my squad.

Erin Marcus: Right. Have a conversation with. Yes. 100%. Yeah. I don’t, one of the things I learned and I, so I grew up in Chicago in the seventies and eighties in public schools with, and we counted once people from 22 different countries. Massive immigration waves. So nobody speaking English and nobody having any money.

Erin Marcus: And you just learn that people are people. And which was, has been helped me immensely in all of my different careers. But the other thing that happened when I was younger. And then you never know what somebody’s going through and you never know how they’re needing to be resilient. And I had met, I was working in apartment complexes because at the age of 26, somebody decided, yeah, let’s give Erin, you know, full reign over our multi million dollar asset here.

Erin Marcus: It used to be a thing, right? Now I look back and go, I was 26. What were you thinking? And we would have these people who are new to our country and didn’t speak English in charge of, you know, doing jobs and you learn about them and you realize they’re chemistry professors back home, but there’s a language barrier.

Erin Marcus: There are architects back home, but there’s a language barrier. And to your point about humans being resilient, we just don’t know. Yeah. And not everybody needs to know all of the details of all of our things in the moment. What are they? I think one of the things you do a fantastic job in your book and just in your conversations is you can learn from my scars.

Erin Marcus: I don’t have to show you

Mike Malatesta: the wounds. Oh yeah. I like the way you say that. Right? Like

Erin Marcus: nobody wants to see your wounds, but they, to benefit them to learn from your scars is a gift.

Mike Malatesta: Yeah. Oh, thank you for that. Yeah. I hadn’t thought of that before. Yeah. I’m going to use that. Use that.

Erin Marcus: Yes. So one of the things I’m curious about is, you know, you get to this moment in your life.

Erin Marcus: where you really do have a big shift, right? Where you really, and you were having successes. Like, we’re not talking about failure, failure, failure. What do I do? There was some huge successes there, but with challenges. Seriously, people get the book, read the stories. You’ll love it. One of the things that I know about me is I would love to tell you that I am inspired by puppies and rainbows and unicorns to do what I do.

Erin Marcus: And that’s just not the case. I make change when I’m sick of my own crap. Like when I can’t take me anymore. Now is when we make the big shifts. And you talk about your four fallacies. and being stuck in your valley. And I’d love to hear more about the catalyst, right? The catalyst that made you decide, I’ve got to change how I’m doing this.

Mike Malatesta: Yeah. You, so that’s funny. You change when you can’t stand yourself. I, that’s something I hadn’t really thought about either, but it fits perfectly with the fallacies, right? So I had these fallacies about who I was and who I needed to be in order to be successful and they were, they were things like, you know, I, I’m, I can outwork anybody else.

Mike Malatesta: So I don’t, I don’t need any help. That’s a big one. I don’t need any help. If you, I thought people who needed help or losers. And I thought that for a long time, like people who hired consultants or they got a coach or they, you know, even admitted that they had a problem. It’s like, Oh, that’s kind of

Erin Marcus: a weakness.

Erin Marcus: We must have grown up in the same neighborhood.

Mike Malatesta: Yeah. Yeah, I get it. But those, yeah. And those, those fallacies. Really? So, so it’s sort of like saying yes for a while. I think they served me well, but then you have to realize that either when you can’t stand yourself or you realize that, you know, you keep hitting the gas and instead of the tires grabbing, pulling you out of wherever you are, they just dig in.

Mike Malatesta: And they just start slipping and you go nowhere and you put more on it. Like this used to work every time I did it and it doesn’t work anymore. You know, there’s some comes a point where you have to admit the truth. And for me that they, the fact that, you know, the fallacies that I was living under, which were mostly like, basically, you know, I’m better than everybody else.

Mike Malatesta: Kind of like fallacies that were running. My life were hurting me. They got me, you know, so like a Pareto principle, right? They got me to a point where. Where password I thought most people could get and I’m they failed, they started to fail me or I started to rely on them. That’s probably better. I probably, I started to rely on them after they, they, they, you know, the expiration date had, had, had passed.

Mike Malatesta: So that’s that’s a fallacy. That’s the fallacy. And, and, and, and, and my, my, my. Realization about those fallacies happened when I was in this valley of uncertainty, as I call it, which is you know in strategic coach language in the, in, in maybe in 10 times is easier than two times they talk about gap in the game.

Mike Malatesta: There’s a whole book about the gap. Well, we all get into this thing that. You, you call it a gap, call it a funk, call it whatever. It’s where you’re basically wishing your life was something else, but you’re ignoring all of the things that got you to where you are. And so. After, after my partner Butch died in a, in a tragic fire, I dropped into this thing I identify as the Valley of Uncertainty, which was really a place where I was still I was still, you know, representing myself, I think appropriately to the people that I felt I had a responsibility to, but on the inside, I was really challenging.

Mike Malatesta: I was really challenged by the thought that I am not sure what to do. And I,

Erin Marcus: I think not knowing what to do is one of the worst mindset places to be. Yeah. Right. Like once you make the decision. Even if you haven’t had the difficult conversation, you’re still better, you feel better than what you’re describing, that valley of uncertainty.

Erin Marcus: To me, nothing is more horrific internally than when I can’t figure out or decide what

Mike Malatesta: to do. And, and so, yeah, that was going on and then, and then it was, it was accompanied by this sort of wish, this hope that someone would come along and fix it, yeah, and lift me up out of this valley and dust me off and say, you know, here’s the road to the promised land.

Mike Malatesta: Just walk down there and that’s where it is. But my time in there, but my time in there. It was painful, but it was ultimately proved to be very helpful to me because one, it allowed me to finally recognize these fallacies that I was living under. And two, it led to this whole path towards what I call getting selfish, which led to me actually exploring my future and understanding that I could make my future something that I own.

Mike Malatesta: And if without a future that I own. It occurred to me. How could I possibly move toward it in a thoughtful consistent way? And even more than that, how could I convey to my team and to the people who were working with me and helping me how they could best serve? This, this mission to get to where this future that we want to make our property, we want to own.

Erin Marcus: And the way you describe it, it’s the way that I believe it. When I first learned about a concept, you know, radical personal responsibility, I call it be in charge. That’s where the tagline for my business came from. I learned very early that if you don’t make decisions for you, people who are not vested in you get to make those decisions.

Erin Marcus: Right? And when you first start thinking about personal responsibility, especially with the stories that you share, it’s like, it sucks because then you can’t blame all the other people, right? It doesn’t start out as something that feels so good, but then you realize it’s the most powerful thing you can

Mike Malatesta: do for yourself.

Mike Malatesta: There’s, so here’s a litmus test that I’ve, that I’ve found. You come up against you, you, you come up talking to or whatever, interacting with an entrepreneur or a business owner or a leader of any kind, and they begin to blame something that’s not going right in their life or their business on somebody else.

Mike Malatesta: You know, you have a problem child there. You know, you have someone who. Is living under fallacies like I was living under and who would very much like honestly put their hand up and say, I’m not equipped to take responsibility for this. How can you help me get back on track? Because without that, you’re not going to make any progress.

Mike Malatesta: And and then getting back to the, you know, if you don’t know where you’re going to go, people will try to take you where they want to go. That’s true, but yeah. But there may be more to that, and it may be like they, they, if they don’t know what you want, they observe your behavior. And when they observe your behavior, they make assumptions about what it is you actually do want, which is what Which is in line with what you’re behaving.

Mike Malatesta: So they try to do that. They try to like, give you what they are interpreting you, you want, even though, and it’s not what you want. In fact, you’re so frustrated by it, but, and they just layer it on more because they think that’s what you want. So it’s, it’s so, so important to, when you don’t have to call it getting selfish, you can call it focusing.

Mike Malatesta: You could call it whatever you want. It’s so, so important. And if you want to lead people. And you want to accomplish big goals to actually know what that looks like so that you can share that, convey that with other people in a way that they understand, and then they can take autonomy. They can bring their, their, their, their talent, autonomy, whatever, to that mission as opposed to just waiting there and saying, well, I know he or she’ll tell me what they want at some point.

Mike Malatesta: And I’ll just continue to do what I think they want until then. Well,

Erin Marcus: and it really does all come together, right? Because you need to make the commitment to build the confidence. You need to know where you’re going in order to make decisions. And going back to, now that I listened to you, going back to the first question I asked you is how do you know what to say yes to and what’s a distraction if.

Erin Marcus: If you don’t have all these things or, you know, no one’s perfect, you’re, they’re gonna be hits and misses, but if you haven’t worked on these things and figure them out, you become susceptible to more bad

Mike Malatesta: decisions. Yes. Yeah. And, and, and, so I have three words that I try to apply to that. So that leads to obligations instead of options.

Mike Malatesta: And I want to reverse that. I want to live a life to the extent that it’s possible of options rather than obligations. And so having that. And you’re right. It’s never like 100 percent you can do or it’s never black. It totally black and white. And all these people who say who, who you might see saying that it is, it’s not, if you looked at their life, it’s doesn’t run anything like that.

Mike Malatesta: Not at all. But the closer you, if you’re in a situation where you can get selfish about your future and most yeah. I mean, certainly if you’re an entrepreneur, you should be working towards that. Then this notion about being able to live your life better and better and better over time guided by options rather than obligations, I think it’s very, very powerful.

Erin Marcus: So how did you, I’m going to switch gears a little bit because I really want to talk about what you’re doing now. So I know that you went through what you went through and you ended up in a situation where you sold what, two different businesses, I think for over a hundred million each that you had started.

Mike Malatesta: That’s right. Not a hundred million each, but over a hundred million Okay.

Erin Marcus: Still impressive. Right. How did you go from

Erin Marcus: job? entrepreneur, small business owner to business owner, right? And you to now you’re really, you know, I’m going to assume it’s your third iteration. If you’re like me, it’s like your hundredth iteration, but where, what you’re doing now with helping folks create their dream exit. One of the things that I talk a lot about, just to give you some perspective here on why I’m so into this is I think most people who start businesses get stuck.

Erin Marcus: At entrepreneur solopreneur because they’re not able to get over the bridge into business owner. Yeah. Right. They’re the business. They’re under the fallacies. They built the business around them. They are the business. They are the bottleneck. Like, hello. Hi, it’s me. I’m the problem. Right. And then they don’t get over the bridge to business owner.

Erin Marcus: And because they can’t figure that out, they retreat. Right? They retreat and end up with the business they settle for instead of the one that they can have. And so those are, this is why I’m excited about this from your perspective. Those are the people that I’m working with. Those are my audience. So now you have something that you call the dream exit, which I love because if you don’t have an exit plan, you don’t have a business.

Erin Marcus: Like, I don’t know. It’s my corporate background, right? Like, bring business tactics and tools and approach to business, not solopreneurship, which is great, by the way, if you’ve chosen to be a solopreneur, as opposed to gotten stuck there. So how did you, you know, your, your story and your journey to there?

Erin Marcus: I’d love to hear about how, how you ended up deciding to do this and more about what it is.

Mike Malatesta: The dream exit you’re talking about or okay. So, so the notion for the dream exit came from me exploring. my talent and experience and trying to think about how I could help entrepreneurs in a way that was different than what I was seeing other people help entrepreneurs with.

Mike Malatesta: So there’s a lot of people who help teach and coach entrepreneurs how to improve. The the strategy in their business, the tactical execution in their business the culture in their business, you know, all of these different things, which are all very valuable. And, and, and truth be told, I could probably do that.

Mike Malatesta: But then I was thinking about all the people, 24, 25 people, plus their partners that I’ve been Involved in the purchase of their business and I started thinking about the two times that I’ve been involved in selling the business and I started thinking about all the entrepreneurs that I know who have either tried to sell their business unsuccessfully or they’ve sold it and have some sort of regret about it and I thought, okay, my And I thought, okay, my Here’s here’s where here’s where I’m going to be most valuable to people one.

Mike Malatesta: I know what it’s like to do both sides of the transaction. So I bring that and I don’t think there are many people who have that who have also been the entrepreneur, right? It’s like there’s a lot of corporate people who buy. Sell companies, but it’s different. There’s a lot of private equity and other investors who bought and sold companies, but it’s different.

Mike Malatesta: And I it pains me to see entrepreneurs work so hard to establish a successful business and not realize what I call and define as the dream exit. It pains me. So there are two things in a dream exit, Erin. One is you get. Maximum value for your business. Now, that doesn’t always mean you get the highest price because you may not want the highest price.

Mike Malatesta: You may want to sell to a particular sort of, you know, competitor or partner, whatever. But regardless, you need to be set up to, to, to, to realize that maximum value. The number two, and more importantly, a lot of your value, you think. If you’re like most entrepreneurs is tied up in you, you as your business, people ask, what do you do?

Mike Malatesta: Well, I own so and so that’s who I am. And to an extent that is without something else to, to look forward to after you sell your business that often becomes a really, really big problem. And I mean, a big problem that can become a financial problem. It can become a dependency problem. It can become a divorce problem.

Mike Malatesta: It can become all kinds of problems and people. So, so, so I want people to understand that if you want to get maximum value and meaning from your business and for you personally, you need to start working on that. You need to understand what. Is involved in getting that and put a plan together. I call it a playbook, which is the first part of what I help people with to start exploring all the things you need to be exploring and getting some different definition, ultimately knowing what you want.

Mike Malatesta: Right. Know what you want. So that’s super important. That whole process I call, you know, buyer’s lens, you know, putting yourself in a buyer’s shoes. So many entrepreneurs don’t put themselves in a buyer’s shoes ever until they decide to accept an offer. And then they’re trying to, going to try to figure out how to do that against someone who’s done this, you know, many, many times.

Mike Malatesta: And the likelihood that you’re going to level that playing field by yourself all alone is It’s low, very low. And then I don’t want entrepreneurs to go through that whole process of building their business, sell it, and for a moment have regret or want to do over or be pissed off or just

Mike Malatesta: essentially. You know, lose the value of everything that they’ve created because in their mind, they’ve, they’ve, you know, messed this last part of it up and four out of five business owners wish they have spent more time working on these two things after they’ve sold their business. Now they don’t even have to admit that, right.

Mike Malatesta: They’ve sold the business. Why would you, but four out of five admit that they, that that’s the case. And I. I think that’s horrible. I think that’s terrible way to end what should be an amazing way to end. And so that’s what the dream exit is all about. I just, I help people. I teach people how to put that playbook together.

Mike Malatesta: I teach them and guide them through the value creation process for themselves and for their business. And then when they do want to sell and if they do want to sell. I offer to help them as they’re sort of the only, the only person liaison in the process who’s 100 percent focused on them getting what they want.

Mike Malatesta: And I feel like there’s tremendous value in that for everybody. Awesome.

Erin Marcus: And truthfully, what I also really like about it is the way to create an amazing business and the way to create an amazing business that’s sellable is actually It’s not a dissimilar process. You, you go through this, you’re still going to end up with something of much higher value than you had before.

Erin Marcus: Correct. Usually just put it on your tax code a little different, right? You can put the money on your taxes a little different depending on what you’re trying to do. But it’s really the only difference.

Mike Malatesta: Yeah. And for all the people that, that you mentioned you know, that they, they start and then they get stuck for some reason.

Mike Malatesta: The reason that most people get stuck in my experience and then stop trying is because they, one, they don’t know what they want to they aren’t able to convey what they want to the people around them. Three, they end up. Getting their nose into, and I know from experience, so don’t end up getting their nose into every single part of the business, not the reason, not the parts they liked that they actually started the business for, but all of them, because they feel like that’s what I have to do.

Mike Malatesta: I have to manage everything. And once they get into that mindset and that habit. It’s very difficult for them to get out of it because they think this is the only way. And all you have to do is look around at all the people who have been able to get past that. And it’s impossible for you to say, this is the only way this is a choice you have a you choose to do that.

Mike Malatesta: And if that’s your choice, fine, but be happy with it. Because if that’s your choice, and you’re not happy with it, there’s only one person who need to talk. Yeah, I mean, that’s responsibility for it. Yeah,

Erin Marcus: yeah. Awesome. Well, I know we’re coming up on time and I want to thank you so much for your stories, your time, your energy, your effort, all your insights.

Erin Marcus: Seriously grab a copy of Ownershift. Really love this. Check out the Dream Exit. I think we have, well, I know we’ll put the link in the yeah,

Mike Malatesta: but it’s super easy. Dream exit. com.

Erin Marcus: Oh, so you look at, you know, marketing one on one dream. Make it easy. Marketing one on one. Make it easy. Dream exit dot com.

Erin Marcus: So thank you again for joining me. I love chatting with you and hearing more of your story. Thank you so much.

Mike Malatesta: Yeah, it’s been my pleasure. Thanks for buying the book, reading the book, promoting the book and having me on your wonderful show. I’m very impressed by what you’re doing and it’s been an honor to be here.

Mike Malatesta: Thank you. Awesome. Thank you.

​

Erin Marcus: All right, hello, hello, and welcome to the Ready Yet podcast where I’m excited about today’s guest because if you look at the tagline of this podcast, you’ll never do what it takes until you become the person it takes to do it. And you are looking for a spokesmodel for that topic, right? If you’re looking for an example of embodying both tactical, right, tactical achievement.

Erin Marcus: And just an amazing story and shift and who you were being to take all your achievements and blow it up from there. My guest today, Mike Malatesta is, I mean, you can’t really ask for a better example. So I can’t wait for this conversation before we get in all of it. Why don’t you give everyone a little more formal introduction into who you are and what

Mike Malatesta: you do?

Mike Malatesta: Sure. Well, thanks for the. Compliment, I guess, to getting started yeah, it reminds me of that’s that tagline you have there reminds me of this thing I believe in that commitment comes before confidence, right? So until you, until you can totally commit to something, you have no chance of Becoming good at it or confident at it, or even having the ability to achieve it.

Mike Malatesta: So so I like, I like your tag. It’s not exactly the same, but it’s reminds me of, it’s very similar. Why do I, thanks so much for having me on Erin. I am a, an entrepreneur. I’m a teacher. I’m a podcaster and I’m an author. And I’d say I’m probably those things in that order. I started my first business when I was 26.

Mike Malatesta: So that was 30 ish years ago. And I’ve over those, over those times, I’ve had plenty of successes. I’ve had many, many failures, but what I’ve, what I’ve, what I’ve always had is a consistent curiosity to learn and to be as good as I can be and to help as many people as I can help. And so what’s interesting is it’s like the success and the failures are kind of, less important to me now than my own progress and the progress that I can help other people make in their lives, careers, or whatever ambitions.

Mike Malatesta: So that’s a short, very short version of who I am. Awesome.

Erin Marcus: Well, so just diving into everything that you share. So I was lucky enough to hear you speak at a Young Guns event a few months ago and meet you there. And ownership. Love it. I love my. I have an autographed copy. I just, I have questions as I went through it and why don’t we just dive right in and see where this takes us.

Erin Marcus: In the beginning, one of the things you say in here, because this question has come up for me so many times, people have been asking me this lately, and I know my example, my answer. One of the things you’ve said in here more than once is saying yes to every opportunity. Yes. How do you determine What’s an opportunity and what’s a distraction?

Mike Malatesta: So the origin of that in the book, saying yes to everything, was that’s how I approached life for in the early to mid part of my career, right? And that worked really well because I could always I always felt like I was making myself more valuable in the eyes of other people when I would say yes to something that other people might say no to.

Mike Malatesta: So I thought it was a, it was a tremendous advantage. However there came a time and there probably comes a time in your life and there probably comes a time in everyone’s life where you feel like you’re saying yes to too many things. And all of a sudden you’re. Overcommitted, you’re maybe frustrated.

Mike Malatesta: You want, you don’t want to do things that you signed up for, but you signed up for them and you, so you do them because it’s an obligation, right? It’s really about things becoming obligations. And I found that for me you know, in. And I go into more detail on this in the book, but it, you know, late part of 2003, I had something very significant happen in my life and my partnership at work.

Mike Malatesta: And it really brought to the forefront this whole life that I’ve built around obligations that I created for myself that I was not excited about. That was actually, that. Rather than, rather than them being accretive to my energy and to my effectiveness, they were detracting from it. And so, for me, it was about getting selfish with my and we can go into that later if you want, but ultimately to answer your question directly is how do I know what to say yes to and no to?

Mike Malatesta: I don’t all the time know what to say yes, no to all the time. So I want to be very clear about that now. You know, you hear a lot of people say, if it’s not a hell yes, it’s a hell no. And I say those people are full of crap because you don’t ever know what is a hell yes for you and you don’t ever know what is a hell.

Mike Malatesta: No, for you. However, for me, for me, I’m about, okay, I always try to live my life in the future. What am I? What, you know, what, what do I want to make my property in the future? So those are the things that I’m most focused on now. That’s pretty broad, meaning I have this idea or ideal of what I want my future to be.

Mike Malatesta: And I can be pretty clear about that. I don’t know though, what the path is and what the relationships are and what the opportunities are. They’re going to get me to that. ideal or to that goal. So I kind of put, just put things through a matrix because do these things have the chance to help me get there?

Mike Malatesta: Then I’m going to be probably a yes on that. And if I say to myself, I, there’s just no way then I would say a no to it. And so that’s how I’ve tried to just being clear about what I want has really helped me with my over committing to, to yeses. Yeah, I think

Erin Marcus: that some of the key things that you’re saying that I really want to hit home on is, you know what you want.

Erin Marcus: Right. And I think so many people don’t have the clarity. You know, one of the things I say a lot is, you know, I always ask people when I work with them, what are we building here? What are we trying to create? And they’ll tell me a number. I want a 5 million business. I want a 1 million business. I want a 10 million business, whatever it is.

Erin Marcus: But that’s such an irrelevant piece of information. Right. Because you can have a million different ways to have a million dollar business and they’re going to be very different lives. Yes. And if you’re not clear on what you want, to your point, you can’t, you won’t know what’s a yes and what’s a no.

Mike Malatesta: Yes.

Mike Malatesta: Yeah. That example you, you just gave reminds me of the, you know, that peeling the onion thing. Someone says they want something and you say, well, why do you want that? And they respond to that with whatever and you go, well, why is that important to you? And you just kind of keep digging down because most people.

Mike Malatesta: And I think this is probably rings true with your experience. They think they want something because they’ve equated that something to something else that they’ve observed in their life, maybe not their own experience, but someone else’s. And they want to mirror that. They think that if they think that They think that that’s what they want.

Mike Malatesta: But then, but you’re right. Most when it comes right down to it, it’s sometimes very difficult for people to say, this is exactly what I want and you help them get there. It sounds like, so once you get there, you can start building a path. You can start, you know, really helping them. If it’s just this sort of like, this is what I think I want, because this is what Erin has.

Mike Malatesta: And I would be happy if I was she. Yeah, then that’s going to be tougher.

Erin Marcus: Well, and I think, you know, it’s a mixture of when you were raised, how you were raised, who you’re currently around. Like, there’s all these stories of what things are. Yes. as opposed to what they would be for us or what they actually are.

Erin Marcus: I, I was just talking to somebody, ex Secret Service. I have a new friend in my life. He’s ex Secret Service. He’s very cool and everything that you would apply to that, right? Great guy. And we were talking about how that’s one of those jobs that you think is one thing and you just don’t know what it is until you get there.

Mike Malatesta: Yeah, I mean, I mean, just think of that. Yeah. I mean, I don’t know this guy at all, or I don’t know that life that well either, but it just think to yourself. Well, it looks pretty cool. You wear the nice suit. You got the dark shades. You got the thing in the air, you know, you got to jogging

Erin Marcus: next to the limousine, the presidential,

Mike Malatesta: you know, you’re always surrounded by like the most powerful people in the world.

Mike Malatesta: Which seems really great, but then it’s like, well, you’re on call all the time. You never know where you’re going to be the next day. You know, there’s a lot of just standing

Erin Marcus: around

Mike Malatesta: doing right. Yeah. It’s very difficult to have a life that has meaning. When you have that kind of a job, I’m assuming now the meaning might come from the job and that must be, might be awesome.

Mike Malatesta: But yeah, you’re right. You look at it and you go, Oh, that would be cool. That would be

Erin Marcus: cool. That would be cool. Awesome. So one of the things you, you already said, and I 100 percent agree with you, you can’t have confidence. Until you have commitment. Yeah. And one of the things, I, I have this in my own life.

Erin Marcus: I don’t, I don’t know an entrepreneur that doesn’t go through this. And, and I want to preface this by saying we don’t have time even remotely if we were to do seven episodes of this show to go through the stories that you share. And so I just, if you’re listening to this episode, I highly, highly recommend do yourself a favor, grab a copy of ownership, read it.

Erin Marcus: It is, it’s an easy read it’s stories, but it’s very, very impactful. Go figure out the background of what we’re talking about here, because I don’t know any entrepreneur that. doesn’t go through ups and downs, yours are a little more up and down than average. Okay, we’ll just leave it at that, right? Okay, fair enough.

Erin Marcus: I mean, that is a huge understatement, people. Like, huge understatement, go get the book, dive into it. But even if you want to touch on any of that, I know you share it openly, so I’m not, I’m not hiding anything here. I just, for time, for the sake of time. How do you, and you do talk about this a little bit in here, but I was just dying to know more.

Erin Marcus: So I’m going to ask, how do you, how do you recommend, how can you even imagine creating exuding confidence? And moving forward with, while trying to hold the ups and downs and the downs and the downs and the downs and the challenges, like as an entrepreneur and a business owner, it doesn’t do me as a business consultant.

Erin Marcus: It does me no good to show up and share the background shit show with the audience. Like they don’t want to know this. This does not instill confidence in my clients, but it is my reality and it’s everybody’s reality. Yeah. I don’t like fake it till you make it. It feels like a lie. There’s act as if. You can talk about compartmentalizing.

Erin Marcus: Like, seriously, how do you freaking keep going?

Mike Malatesta: Yeah, well, There’s something, you know, everybody’s got some Something unique about them that that can keep them going in times where other people wouldn’t and whether it’s my stories, whether it’s the entrepreneurial journey, whether it’s having some illness, whether it’s having someone in your family with an illness, whether it’s having had some unbelievable tragedy in your in your life People find we’re, we’re most of us are programmed to just keep moving forward.

Mike Malatesta: In my case, I would say there were two things. One, I had a little bit of that, and I don’t know where that comes from, Erin. But two, I had a responsibility to Other people, it was not just, you know, me and I, that that responsibility mattered to me, like showing up early to get ready for this podcast. It matters to me that I show up and deliver on what I’m supposed to deliver to people.

Mike Malatesta: And. It’s kind of like I learned about this from a guy named Dan Sullivan at strategic coach. He’s you know, he talks about backstage and front stage front stage is you know It’s in a theater environment right front stage is what the audience sees. That’s the production. That’s the performance and there’s not one person In that audience who gives a crap about all the stuff that’s one going on backstage during the performance or two had to go on to make the performance unless, unless it impacts their joy of the front stage performance and they don’t like it.

Mike Malatesta: They don’t like when that gets messed up. So I try to keep even before I heard that now it’s like a. It’s like something I remind myself of because I had this model, you know, from his description, but even before that, it was like.

Mike Malatesta: Bringing whatever’s going on with me to the surface to everybody every day or every minute. How does that help them? It doesn’t help them at all, nor and they don’t care and it’s not their problem. So I think the combination of those two things, I have something built in me that helps me to be able to, you know, keep moving forward.

Mike Malatesta: And and the second is that I feel like I have a responsibility and. That’s important to me to to deliver on what I’ve promised people or what they expect from me. No,

Erin Marcus: I love it. It’s by the way, just Like, have you read this one yet, Dan Sullivan?

Mike Malatesta: Yes. I have. Yep. Literally right here. I like all the marks you got in there, too.

Mike Malatesta: That’s good. Yeah. That was a good

Erin Marcus: one. Right. It’s a mixture of how much resilience. I think you’re right. I think humans are highly, highly resilient. I think social media would have us believing woe is me is the case, but I don’t think that that’s the case.

Mike Malatesta: Yeah. Even, you know, it’s funny you say that because even people who are.

Mike Malatesta: Like like the, the, the you know, the immigrants that are, you know, coming here. We talk, we, we spend a lot of time talking about how overburdened we are as a result and how our policy needs to change and all of those things. But we rarely, rarely talk about, I rarely hear people talking about what the hell is going on in someone’s mind and life that would commit them to a 6, 000.

Mike Malatesta: 5, 000, 3, 000 mile journey into the complete unknown, risking, talk about entrepreneurial, risking all of their stuff because someone has told them or they have seen pictures or they have someone that’s there’s something better for you over here and they actually make it. That’s. That’s just that, that regardless of how you feel about the, right, regardless of how you feel about the politics, it’s like, that’s a person I might want to like, you know, have on my squad.

Erin Marcus: Right. Have a conversation with. Yes. 100%. Yeah. I don’t, one of the things I learned and I, so I grew up in Chicago in the seventies and eighties in public schools with, and we counted once people from 22 different countries. Massive immigration waves. So nobody speaking English and nobody having any money.

Erin Marcus: And you just learn that people are people. And which was, has been helped me immensely in all of my different careers. But the other thing that happened when I was younger. And then you never know what somebody’s going through and you never know how they’re needing to be resilient. And I had met, I was working in apartment complexes because at the age of 26, somebody decided, yeah, let’s give Erin, you know, full reign over our multi million dollar asset here.

Erin Marcus: It used to be a thing, right? Now I look back and go, I was 26. What were you thinking? And we would have these people who are new to our country and didn’t speak English in charge of, you know, doing jobs and you learn about them and you realize they’re chemistry professors back home, but there’s a language barrier.

Erin Marcus: There are architects back home, but there’s a language barrier. And to your point about humans being resilient, we just don’t know. Yeah. And not everybody needs to know all of the details of all of our things in the moment. What are they? I think one of the things you do a fantastic job in your book and just in your conversations is you can learn from my scars.

Erin Marcus: I don’t have to show you

Mike Malatesta: the wounds. Oh yeah. I like the way you say that. Right? Like

Erin Marcus: nobody wants to see your wounds, but they, to benefit them to learn from your scars is a gift.

Mike Malatesta: Yeah. Oh, thank you for that. Yeah. I hadn’t thought of that before. Yeah. I’m going to use that. Use that.

Erin Marcus: Yes. So one of the things I’m curious about is, you know, you get to this moment in your life.

Erin Marcus: where you really do have a big shift, right? Where you really, and you were having successes. Like, we’re not talking about failure, failure, failure. What do I do? There was some huge successes there, but with challenges. Seriously, people get the book, read the stories. You’ll love it. One of the things that I know about me is I would love to tell you that I am inspired by puppies and rainbows and unicorns to do what I do.

Erin Marcus: And that’s just not the case. I make change when I’m sick of my own crap. Like when I can’t take me anymore. Now is when we make the big shifts. And you talk about your four fallacies. and being stuck in your valley. And I’d love to hear more about the catalyst, right? The catalyst that made you decide, I’ve got to change how I’m doing this.

Mike Malatesta: Yeah. You, so that’s funny. You change when you can’t stand yourself. I, that’s something I hadn’t really thought about either, but it fits perfectly with the fallacies, right? So I had these fallacies about who I was and who I needed to be in order to be successful and they were, they were things like, you know, I, I’m, I can outwork anybody else.

Mike Malatesta: So I don’t, I don’t need any help. That’s a big one. I don’t need any help. If you, I thought people who needed help or losers. And I thought that for a long time, like people who hired consultants or they got a coach or they, you know, even admitted that they had a problem. It’s like, Oh, that’s kind of

Erin Marcus: a weakness.

Erin Marcus: We must have grown up in the same neighborhood.

Mike Malatesta: Yeah. Yeah, I get it. But those, yeah. And those, those fallacies. Really? So, so it’s sort of like saying yes for a while. I think they served me well, but then you have to realize that either when you can’t stand yourself or you realize that, you know, you keep hitting the gas and instead of the tires grabbing, pulling you out of wherever you are, they just dig in.

Mike Malatesta: And they just start slipping and you go nowhere and you put more on it. Like this used to work every time I did it and it doesn’t work anymore. You know, there’s some comes a point where you have to admit the truth. And for me that they, the fact that, you know, the fallacies that I was living under, which were mostly like, basically, you know, I’m better than everybody else.

Mike Malatesta: Kind of like fallacies that were running. My life were hurting me. They got me, you know, so like a Pareto principle, right? They got me to a point where. Where password I thought most people could get and I’m they failed, they started to fail me or I started to rely on them. That’s probably better. I probably, I started to rely on them after they, they, they, you know, the expiration date had, had, had passed.

Mike Malatesta: So that’s that’s a fallacy. That’s the fallacy. And, and, and, and, and my, my, my. Realization about those fallacies happened when I was in this valley of uncertainty, as I call it, which is you know in strategic coach language in the, in, in maybe in 10 times is easier than two times they talk about gap in the game.

Mike Malatesta: There’s a whole book about the gap. Well, we all get into this thing that. You, you call it a gap, call it a funk, call it whatever. It’s where you’re basically wishing your life was something else, but you’re ignoring all of the things that got you to where you are. And so. After, after my partner Butch died in a, in a tragic fire, I dropped into this thing I identify as the Valley of Uncertainty, which was really a place where I was still I was still, you know, representing myself, I think appropriately to the people that I felt I had a responsibility to, but on the inside, I was really challenging.

Mike Malatesta: I was really challenged by the thought that I am not sure what to do. And I,

Erin Marcus: I think not knowing what to do is one of the worst mindset places to be. Yeah. Right. Like once you make the decision. Even if you haven’t had the difficult conversation, you’re still better, you feel better than what you’re describing, that valley of uncertainty.

Erin Marcus: To me, nothing is more horrific internally than when I can’t figure out or decide what

Mike Malatesta: to do. And, and so, yeah, that was going on and then, and then it was, it was accompanied by this sort of wish, this hope that someone would come along and fix it, yeah, and lift me up out of this valley and dust me off and say, you know, here’s the road to the promised land.

Mike Malatesta: Just walk down there and that’s where it is. But my time in there, but my time in there. It was painful, but it was ultimately proved to be very helpful to me because one, it allowed me to finally recognize these fallacies that I was living under. And two, it led to this whole path towards what I call getting selfish, which led to me actually exploring my future and understanding that I could make my future something that I own.

Mike Malatesta: And if without a future that I own. It occurred to me. How could I possibly move toward it in a thoughtful consistent way? And even more than that, how could I convey to my team and to the people who were working with me and helping me how they could best serve? This, this mission to get to where this future that we want to make our property, we want to own.

Erin Marcus: And the way you describe it, it’s the way that I believe it. When I first learned about a concept, you know, radical personal responsibility, I call it be in charge. That’s where the tagline for my business came from. I learned very early that if you don’t make decisions for you, people who are not vested in you get to make those decisions.

Erin Marcus: Right? And when you first start thinking about personal responsibility, especially with the stories that you share, it’s like, it sucks because then you can’t blame all the other people, right? It doesn’t start out as something that feels so good, but then you realize it’s the most powerful thing you can

Mike Malatesta: do for yourself.

Mike Malatesta: There’s, so here’s a litmus test that I’ve, that I’ve found. You come up against you, you, you come up talking to or whatever, interacting with an entrepreneur or a business owner or a leader of any kind, and they begin to blame something that’s not going right in their life or their business on somebody else.

Mike Malatesta: You know, you have a problem child there. You know, you have someone who. Is living under fallacies like I was living under and who would very much like honestly put their hand up and say, I’m not equipped to take responsibility for this. How can you help me get back on track? Because without that, you’re not going to make any progress.

Mike Malatesta: And and then getting back to the, you know, if you don’t know where you’re going to go, people will try to take you where they want to go. That’s true, but yeah. But there may be more to that, and it may be like they, they, if they don’t know what you want, they observe your behavior. And when they observe your behavior, they make assumptions about what it is you actually do want, which is what Which is in line with what you’re behaving.

Mike Malatesta: So they try to do that. They try to like, give you what they are interpreting you, you want, even though, and it’s not what you want. In fact, you’re so frustrated by it, but, and they just layer it on more because they think that’s what you want. So it’s, it’s so, so important to, when you don’t have to call it getting selfish, you can call it focusing.

Mike Malatesta: You could call it whatever you want. It’s so, so important. And if you want to lead people. And you want to accomplish big goals to actually know what that looks like so that you can share that, convey that with other people in a way that they understand, and then they can take autonomy. They can bring their, their, their, their talent, autonomy, whatever, to that mission as opposed to just waiting there and saying, well, I know he or she’ll tell me what they want at some point.

Mike Malatesta: And I’ll just continue to do what I think they want until then. Well,

Erin Marcus: and it really does all come together, right? Because you need to make the commitment to build the confidence. You need to know where you’re going in order to make decisions. And going back to, now that I listened to you, going back to the first question I asked you is how do you know what to say yes to and what’s a distraction if.

Erin Marcus: If you don’t have all these things or, you know, no one’s perfect, you’re, they’re gonna be hits and misses, but if you haven’t worked on these things and figure them out, you become susceptible to more bad

Mike Malatesta: decisions. Yes. Yeah. And, and, and, so I have three words that I try to apply to that. So that leads to obligations instead of options.

Mike Malatesta: And I want to reverse that. I want to live a life to the extent that it’s possible of options rather than obligations. And so having that. And you’re right. It’s never like 100 percent you can do or it’s never black. It totally black and white. And all these people who say who, who you might see saying that it is, it’s not, if you looked at their life, it’s doesn’t run anything like that.

Mike Malatesta: Not at all. But the closer you, if you’re in a situation where you can get selfish about your future and most yeah. I mean, certainly if you’re an entrepreneur, you should be working towards that. Then this notion about being able to live your life better and better and better over time guided by options rather than obligations, I think it’s very, very powerful.

Erin Marcus: So how did you, I’m going to switch gears a little bit because I really want to talk about what you’re doing now. So I know that you went through what you went through and you ended up in a situation where you sold what, two different businesses, I think for over a hundred million each that you had started.

Mike Malatesta: That’s right. Not a hundred million each, but over a hundred million Okay.

Erin Marcus: Still impressive. Right. How did you go from

Erin Marcus: job? entrepreneur, small business owner to business owner, right? And you to now you’re really, you know, I’m going to assume it’s your third iteration. If you’re like me, it’s like your hundredth iteration, but where, what you’re doing now with helping folks create their dream exit. One of the things that I talk a lot about, just to give you some perspective here on why I’m so into this is I think most people who start businesses get stuck.

Erin Marcus: At entrepreneur solopreneur because they’re not able to get over the bridge into business owner. Yeah. Right. They’re the business. They’re under the fallacies. They built the business around them. They are the business. They are the bottleneck. Like, hello. Hi, it’s me. I’m the problem. Right. And then they don’t get over the bridge to business owner.

Erin Marcus: And because they can’t figure that out, they retreat. Right? They retreat and end up with the business they settle for instead of the one that they can have. And so those are, this is why I’m excited about this from your perspective. Those are the people that I’m working with. Those are my audience. So now you have something that you call the dream exit, which I love because if you don’t have an exit plan, you don’t have a business.

Erin Marcus: Like, I don’t know. It’s my corporate background, right? Like, bring business tactics and tools and approach to business, not solopreneurship, which is great, by the way, if you’ve chosen to be a solopreneur, as opposed to gotten stuck there. So how did you, you know, your, your story and your journey to there?

Erin Marcus: I’d love to hear about how, how you ended up deciding to do this and more about what it is.

Mike Malatesta: The dream exit you’re talking about or okay. So, so the notion for the dream exit came from me exploring. my talent and experience and trying to think about how I could help entrepreneurs in a way that was different than what I was seeing other people help entrepreneurs with.

Mike Malatesta: So there’s a lot of people who help teach and coach entrepreneurs how to improve. The the strategy in their business, the tactical execution in their business the culture in their business, you know, all of these different things, which are all very valuable. And, and, and truth be told, I could probably do that.

Mike Malatesta: But then I was thinking about all the people, 24, 25 people, plus their partners that I’ve been Involved in the purchase of their business and I started thinking about the two times that I’ve been involved in selling the business and I started thinking about all the entrepreneurs that I know who have either tried to sell their business unsuccessfully or they’ve sold it and have some sort of regret about it and I thought, okay, my And I thought, okay, my Here’s here’s where here’s where I’m going to be most valuable to people one.

Mike Malatesta: I know what it’s like to do both sides of the transaction. So I bring that and I don’t think there are many people who have that who have also been the entrepreneur, right? It’s like there’s a lot of corporate people who buy. Sell companies, but it’s different. There’s a lot of private equity and other investors who bought and sold companies, but it’s different.

Mike Malatesta: And I it pains me to see entrepreneurs work so hard to establish a successful business and not realize what I call and define as the dream exit. It pains me. So there are two things in a dream exit, Erin. One is you get. Maximum value for your business. Now, that doesn’t always mean you get the highest price because you may not want the highest price.

Mike Malatesta: You may want to sell to a particular sort of, you know, competitor or partner, whatever. But regardless, you need to be set up to, to, to, to realize that maximum value. The number two, and more importantly, a lot of your value, you think. If you’re like most entrepreneurs is tied up in you, you as your business, people ask, what do you do?

Mike Malatesta: Well, I own so and so that’s who I am. And to an extent that is without something else to, to look forward to after you sell your business that often becomes a really, really big problem. And I mean, a big problem that can become a financial problem. It can become a dependency problem. It can become a divorce problem.

Mike Malatesta: It can become all kinds of problems and people. So, so, so I want people to understand that if you want to get maximum value and meaning from your business and for you personally, you need to start working on that. You need to understand what. Is involved in getting that and put a plan together. I call it a playbook, which is the first part of what I help people with to start exploring all the things you need to be exploring and getting some different definition, ultimately knowing what you want.

Mike Malatesta: Right. Know what you want. So that’s super important. That whole process I call, you know, buyer’s lens, you know, putting yourself in a buyer’s shoes. So many entrepreneurs don’t put themselves in a buyer’s shoes ever until they decide to accept an offer. And then they’re trying to, going to try to figure out how to do that against someone who’s done this, you know, many, many times.

Mike Malatesta: And the likelihood that you’re going to level that playing field by yourself all alone is It’s low, very low. And then I don’t want entrepreneurs to go through that whole process of building their business, sell it, and for a moment have regret or want to do over or be pissed off or just

Mike Malatesta: essentially. You know, lose the value of everything that they’ve created because in their mind, they’ve, they’ve, you know, messed this last part of it up and four out of five business owners wish they have spent more time working on these two things after they’ve sold their business. Now they don’t even have to admit that, right.

Mike Malatesta: They’ve sold the business. Why would you, but four out of five admit that they, that that’s the case. And I. I think that’s horrible. I think that’s terrible way to end what should be an amazing way to end. And so that’s what the dream exit is all about. I just, I help people. I teach people how to put that playbook together.

Mike Malatesta: I teach them and guide them through the value creation process for themselves and for their business. And then when they do want to sell and if they do want to sell. I offer to help them as they’re sort of the only, the only person liaison in the process who’s 100 percent focused on them getting what they want.

Mike Malatesta: And I feel like there’s tremendous value in that for everybody. Awesome.

Erin Marcus: And truthfully, what I also really like about it is the way to create an amazing business and the way to create an amazing business that’s sellable is actually It’s not a dissimilar process. You, you go through this, you’re still going to end up with something of much higher value than you had before.

Erin Marcus: Correct. Usually just put it on your tax code a little different, right? You can put the money on your taxes a little different depending on what you’re trying to do. But it’s really the only difference.

Mike Malatesta: Yeah. And for all the people that, that you mentioned you know, that they, they start and then they get stuck for some reason.

Mike Malatesta: The reason that most people get stuck in my experience and then stop trying is because they, one, they don’t know what they want to they aren’t able to convey what they want to the people around them. Three, they end up. Getting their nose into, and I know from experience, so don’t end up getting their nose into every single part of the business, not the reason, not the parts they liked that they actually started the business for, but all of them, because they feel like that’s what I have to do.

Mike Malatesta: I have to manage everything. And once they get into that mindset and that habit. It’s very difficult for them to get out of it because they think this is the only way. And all you have to do is look around at all the people who have been able to get past that. And it’s impossible for you to say, this is the only way this is a choice you have a you choose to do that.

Mike Malatesta: And if that’s your choice, fine, but be happy with it. Because if that’s your choice, and you’re not happy with it, there’s only one person who need to talk. Yeah, I mean, that’s responsibility for it. Yeah,

Erin Marcus: yeah. Awesome. Well, I know we’re coming up on time and I want to thank you so much for your stories, your time, your energy, your effort, all your insights.

Erin Marcus: Seriously grab a copy of Ownershift. Really love this. Check out the Dream Exit. I think we have, well, I know we’ll put the link in the yeah,

Mike Malatesta: but it’s super easy. Dream exit. com.

Erin Marcus: Oh, so you look at, you know, marketing one on one dream. Make it easy. Marketing one on one. Make it easy. Dream exit dot com.

Erin Marcus: So thank you again for joining me. I love chatting with you and hearing more of your story. Thank you so much.

Mike Malatesta: Yeah, it’s been my pleasure. Thanks for buying the book, reading the book, promoting the book and having me on your wonderful show. I’m very impressed by what you’re doing and it’s been an honor to be here.

Mike Malatesta: Thank you. Awesome. Thank you.

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