275: Know and Make Your Number with David Shavzin

https://youtu.be/NPxN5HDgqHs David Shavzin, President of The Value Track, is driven by a mission to help business owners know and make their number when exiting their companies—maximizing financial returns and securing their legacies. We learn about David’s journey from corporate leadership to founding The Value Track, where he helps business owners strategically prepare for and execute their exits. He explains the What's Your Transition Looks Like Framework, which guides business owners through understanding the M&A process, estimating transferable value, refining their advisory team, conducting due diligence, and enhancing business value before a sale. He highlights the importance of early planning, maintaining business momentum, and avoiding common pitfalls that can derail a successful exit. --- Know and Make Your Number with David Shavzin Good day, dear listeners, Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast. And my guest today is David Shavzin, President of The Value Track, which helps business owners set out an exit strategy and then sell their companies by optimizing price and sale terms so that they can monetize their life's work. David, welcome to the show. Thanks, Steve. I appreciate you having me. Looking forward to it. It's great to have you and we have good topics to talk about. So let's start with my favorite question. What is your personal “Why” and what are you doing to manifest it in your business? Yeah, for me, it really has been helping people. That's sort of number one. And of course, we tend to do that in the way that we know or our background or our experience. So for me, that has come through decades of working in the business world, more generally, a lot of large organizations, and so helping the smaller business owners and the smaller companies in that lower bid market, I get to be pretty rewarding for me. Well, definitely, you're projecting that enthusiasm about helping people, which is awesome. So what was the defining moment that led you to starting your business? It's interesting. It came really at the tail end of my large corporate career and was transitioning out, looking at what I wanted to do exactly. And early on, ended up helping a friend with their business, just kind of went in to see what was going on. And I realized that while they had a good business, they'd been working really hard, they did not have all that help around them for either maybe outside advisors. They didn't have all the resources in all of the companies that I've had, the experience. And there was so much that they could be doing to make that company run better, stronger, faster, more valuable. And that kind of triggered it for me. And I just got engaged and started working more with, like I say, those smaller companies because there was just so much I could bring to the table. That's really what kicked it all off. Yeah. So you basically helped them with their exit and you actually have developed the process to do that because it can be quite complicated. There are many moving parts. So what does your transition framework look like and can you walk our listeners through what you do when you meet with a new client and kind of help them figure all these things out? Yeah, it really starts out, Steve, with just a lot of conversation. We want to understand not just the business in depth, but what their personal goals are. So they've been often at this business for 10 years or 20 years, 30 years, and haven't taken the time often to think about, okay, what's next whenever that is? What do they really want out of, I'll say, the company, but also out of life after that? Some people might go that traditional retirement route. Some people might be thinking about another business venture, but they're just kind of running day to day. So we want to understand what those goals are, when they want out, how much money they might need, what they want to have happened to the company,