Joe Coppola with Premier Business Brokers

Intro: [00:00:07] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Buy a Business Near Me, brought to you by the Business RadioX Ambassador program, helping business brokers sell more local businesses. Now, here’s your host.

Stone Payton: [00:00:32] Welcome to another exciting and informative edition of Buy a Business near Me. Stone Payton here with you this afternoon. Please join me in welcoming to the broadcast with Premier Business Brokers Mr. Joe Coppola. How are you, man?

Joe Coppola: [00:00:49] I’m wonderful, Stone. How are you today, sir?

Stone Payton: [00:00:51] I am doing well. Really been looking forward to this conversation. Delighted to have you on the program. I’m thinking probably a good place to start. If you could articulate for for me and our listeners mission purpose, what are what are you and your team really out there trying to do for folks? Man?

Joe Coppola: [00:01:10] Well, I’ll keep it very simple. We are here to help people buy and sell businesses and we work with people every day doing just that. We guide them down the path and show them a lot of different opportunities and kind of give them a different way to look at things from a different lens. Sometimes on both sides, both buyers and sellers for that matter.

Stone Payton: [00:01:31] So I’m operating under the impression that you probably find yourself quite often working with first time, only time kind of kind of buyers. Is that the case? And if so, what kind of counsel do you give them and might you give some of us who are thinking about it?

Joe Coppola: [00:01:49] Well, I’ll tell you, I would say probably 90% of people who do come to us at some point, this is their first rodeo. So and, you know, with that being said, they have a little idea about what I do, but a lot of times they have no idea about the benefits. And really the the reason why they would start with working with a business broker and kind of part of that is just to help them put a plan together and then kind of help guide them through those steps.

Stone Payton: [00:02:20] There’s just so much that we don’t know, right? I mean, you need someone that has experience, expertise, can lean on other people on the on the team as well to provide, you know, examples and precedent of what they’ve seen, what they might run into. There’s so much we just don’t know. What we don’t know.

Joe Coppola: [00:02:37] Right? Oh, absolutely. And one of those things, too, when you go to a firm that’s got a team of brokers like my company premier that I work for, you know, I’ve got 15 other people that I can bounce ideas off of and they’ve got 15 different points of views as well as 15 different Rolodexes. So when we list a business, when a seller comes to us to list a business, you know, that’s 15 different people working for you. And likewise, when people come to us buying a business that’s 15 people out there looking for those opportunities for you. So, you know, you get a team and a lot of times it’s like anything, you know, 15 heads are better than one, right?

Stone Payton: [00:03:20] Absolutely. So what’s your back story personally, man? How did you get into this line of work?

Joe Coppola: [00:03:26] Well, what’s kind of funny, a lot of brokers come become brokers from actually being buyers or sellers. And that was kind of my story. I was a buyer looking to buy a business, and that’s kind of how I even found out about brokers. I honestly thought, you know, you would just find a guy selling a business in the paper or online, you know, nowadays and you just buy it from them. But working with the broker actually opened up my eyes to the process and I thought it’d be a great opportunity. And I found a place that was looking for brokers and I’d actually worked with them on buying a business. So it was kind of a perfect match.

Stone Payton: [00:04:01] So I suspect you find probably buyers and sellers alike if they’re first time buyers or sellers, there are probably some misconceptions or myths or they maybe they go in with with some assumptions that just really aren’t the aren’t the case. Is that accurate and or are there a couple of those kind of things that maybe you could set the record straight for us?

Joe Coppola: [00:04:24] Well, and one of the things and it’s just like, again, one of those old sayings, you got to do your homework. You really do. But what you can also see is you might look at five businesses. They could be five of the same businesses on the same busy street, but they all make different amounts of money and they all are ran differently as well. All of them have their warts and bumps and some of them have they’re great pros versus their cons, but you have to really look at each one individually to kind of gauge if the opportunity makes sense for you. One of the biggest things I can tell people is, you know, it doesn’t necessarily you know, not every business needs somebody to have a 20 year track record of success in that industry. But if you like it, if you’ve been doing it, if it’s something that speaks to you sometimes, maybe it’s an opportunity that you’ve never, ever thought about. But based on your background, say, your guy that’s done sales or even a guy that’s done operations and all of a sudden you see an opportunity to where, well, hey, I could do that based on my background, but I’ve never thought about selling this type of product or this type of service. I have a true story where I had a gentleman that had worked in the automotive industry for 20 years running cruise and running a large facility, and he got laid off and he didn’t know what his next opportunity was going to be. And he was sitting in his backyard kind of depressed and bummed out watching the neighbor have a tree cut down. And he was watching the crew leader run the cruise. And he said, you know, I could do that. And he started looking for a business and he found us and found a tree cut business. So it wasn’t something directly in line with what he had done, but it was something that he could wrap his head around and say, hey, no, I could run cruise. I know how to do that. I know how to do this.

Stone Payton: [00:06:13] It sounds like incredibly rewarding work to me. What are you enjoying the most at this point in your career? What’s the most fun about it?

Joe Coppola: [00:06:21] Well, so a lot of what we do is a very linear process with regard to paperwork and documentation, and there’s checklists that you have to go step by, step down. But when it comes to, say, the deal itself, and once you have two parties that want to work together, everything’s kind of open at that point. And it’s a very malleable thing at that point as well, where, you know, if you’ve got two parties, if the seller is in love with the buyer and the. I was in love with the business and the seller. You can get a lot of things done. It’s just that’s the fun part is where you get two people on the same page and they want to work together and you know, things pop up and you know, there are roadblocks and obstacles that come along. It’s trying to figure out how to get through those and showing both sides, you know, the different opportunities again, and maybe how to mitigate this, this obstacle, how to get around it and so forth. So that, to me is probably the most rewarding and fun part of the business.

Stone Payton: [00:07:21] Well, let’s talk a little bit about deal structure, because since I started hosting this series, I’m learning that I guess it was one of the misconceptions I had going into this. My picture was, you know, I hand you a check, you hand me the keys to the business, and there’s just so many different ways you can get really creative in how you structure the deal, can’t you?

Joe Coppola: [00:07:43] Oh, absolutely. And you know, the two biggest differences. I tell clients that my business is different than real estate is. Number one, we always work confidential. Very rarely do we ever list a business with its name. Every once in a while, depending on if it’s a legacy business or a real well known brand or something along those lines, people might say, Hey, let’s use the name because it might attract the right attention or more attention. But 99% of the time we don’t list the business. And for instance, we don’t put a sign out front saying for sale. The second part that is pretty different is usually when you sell a home to somebody, you never see that person again unless it’s a family or friend or something along those lines. But with this, there needs to be some transition period between the buyer and the seller. And again, depending on the buyer’s background, if they’ve been doing the same thing for 20 years and now they’re just going to buy a business to do it for themselves, they may not necessarily need quote unquote training, but they do need a little transition. I sold an automotive shop to a guy that had a background running shops. He was a regional supervisor for a big company. And when the seller looked at his resume, he said, Oh, this guy doesn’t necessarily need me to show him how to use an impact gun. And the joke ended up being, No, we just need to know where the coffee filters are and how to turn on the lights at the end of the day.

Joe Coppola: [00:09:07] And, you know, and that’s what it can come down to. I’ve had we usually do like a mandatory two weeks training. We always ask the seller, can you do at least minimally like, say two weeks? And we’ve had cases where three days in the buyer looks at the seller and goes, you know, I don’t need you anymore. I think I got it figured out. And again, it’s really based on the buyer’s background and then obviously to just kind of depending on what the seller’s goals are, a lot of times we have guys that they want to stay on and maybe do one thing. Maybe they love sales. I’ve had a couple of those instances where the seller wanted to focus just on doing the sales and maybe letting somebody else do the back end of the business and control the day to day and the operations. And we had a buyer take it over and basically say, Hey, if you want to go out and work four days a week, 4 hours doing sales, that’s great. I’d love to keep you on. And that seller was in his mid fifties, so, you know, he felt like, Hey, I’m still young enough to get out here and pound the pavement, but I wouldn’t necessarily want to work six, seven days a week like I’ve been doing. So.

Stone Payton: [00:10:11] Well, and you can get pretty creative, or at least there are a number of options available to a buyer in terms of financing the the purchase as well. Right.

Joe Coppola: [00:10:21] Absolutely. In a majority of first time buyers will use the SBA program, which is a great program. But again, you’ve got people that you know, they can be cash buyers, they can use conventional means, they can refinance. There’s all kinds of different options in that place. But a lot of people do come in using the SBA program.

Stone Payton: [00:10:44] All right. So you’re helping people market their business on the seller side. How does the whole sales and marketing thing work for you and your business? How do you get the new interest, the new clients?

Joe Coppola: [00:10:57] Well, and again, that can be a challenge as well. But for the most part, we sell I’d say 80% of the businesses we sell are the people that we sat down and talk with, buyers that have came to us. Maybe they’ve looked at a business and it wasn’t in the right area for them or just wasn’t the right fit. They’ll see maybe an email blast that we do internally, or maybe they’ll see a listing even on a site like Biz by sell and see our name attached to it and go, Hey, I talked to Joe a couple of weeks back about a business that’s similar to this. Just be a great opportunity. And then myself and my fellow brokers, we always keep a Rolodex, if you will, of what buyers are looking for. And if I’ve got a guy that says, Hey, I’m looking for an automotive shop and X, Y, Z area, and if I run into a guy looking to sell, well, there you go, You go, Hey, you’ve got a guy looking to buy a business in this area. Are you interested in selling? And you kind of start with low hanging fruit, if you will. And then as you kind of branch out, we use social media, we use sites like I mentioned biz by sell, and you get a lot of people from all walks of life and all backgrounds. Those means as well. And you kind of start the process over with them. You introduce yourself, you meet them, you walk them through from the buyer’s side with the buyer process looks like. And one of the biggest things that we always do is make them sign a non-disclosure slash confidentiality agreement that states that any of the confidential financial records, anything that we disclose to a buyer, they obviously don’t disclose to the general public.

Stone Payton: [00:12:33] Well, and it sounds like you’ve had the benefit of one or more mentors probably very early on when you were making this pivot and getting in this into this arena. But yeah, you’ve had the benefit of one or more folks to help you navigate this terrain, haven’t you?

Joe Coppola: [00:12:51] Absolutely. And that’s been key to the success that I’ve had. Also, having a background, I’ve been a business consultant for almost 20 years on some level. So I’ve worked with small business owners, I’ve spoke their language, I know their pain points. And when I go in to sit down with them, you know, I don’t obviously know everything about their business, but I try to do as much research as I can. I try to get an idea of of what their business model looks like, what some of the challenges are in it, what some of the problems that we can obviously talk about and figure out right away, because there’s a lot of challenges with selling specific types of businesses. If, for instance, a guy needs a background in it, you know, it’s like you’ve got to find the right person with that right background then. So you’ve got to advertise it and obviously market it to that type of person or try to find that type of client. And that can be a big challenge.

Stone Payton: [00:13:45] Well, And I believe I saw in my notes that you have a passion for teaching. You actually teach both the business and marketing courses and have been doing this for some time now, haven’t you?

Joe Coppola: [00:13:56] Absolutely. That’s kind of one of those things where sometimes it doesn’t feel like a job. You know, you’re sitting around with a group of like minded individuals talking about business. I mean, what what more fun can you do? And you’re getting paid for it. You know, I’ve taught people from every age range, every demographic, every background. And when you get a group of people with ideas that want to share them openly in that format, I mean, I’ve been able to teach students at like the 101, the general, how to write a business plan. But I’ve also had those students later on in the 201 or the 301. Type of courses where now you’ve got to know their business model, you know, what they’re looking to do. And in that group setting, you can have more of a conversation and you can say, Hey Steve, this is a great opportunity for what you’re looking to do with your restaurant or Hey, Stone, this would be a great thing to market for your opportunity. And again, it becomes a much more open conversation versus your structured traditional. All right, guys, let’s go over chapter one, page one out of the book, etc., etc..

Stone Payton: [00:15:04] You obviously have a lot of irons in the fire, a lot going on at any given time. The teaching, the working with the buyers and the sellers. And you clearly have a real passion for the work. And I know you’re a human man. Sometimes the tank has got to run a little bit low. The batteries need charging. What do you do? Where do you go? How do you get how do you recharge, man?

Joe Coppola: [00:15:27] Well, you know, again, even when you when you’re talking to business owners and you’re talking to people that are passionate and like minded individuals, again, you get recharged on the daily sometimes. Now, again, you know, you get beat down from the battle of the day to day, there’s no doubt. But when you sit down even something like this and have a conversation, it recharges. You get you back out there, get you back in the fight, and then, you know, you’ve got a disconnect sometimes, too. I see that a lot with people that have been doing this for a while to where they go, Hey, you know what? For the next couple of weeks, I’m going to unplug and try to get back to some of the fundamentals and then re approach their attack. You know, you can you know, you can spend hours cold calling, knocking on doors and trying to get things going and just not get any progress. And that can be frustrating. Sometimes you need to just recharge, take a week to kind of figure out what the next steps are and then go back to the to the program.

Stone Payton: [00:16:23] All right, before we wrap, I’d love to talk a little bit about exit strategy. Maybe a couple of pro tips on helping someone get prepared to sell their business because there are some you got to get your ducks in a row to do this the right way. Yeah.

Joe Coppola: [00:16:39] Well, I’ll tell you, the number one thing I can say is have one, right? Number one thing I can recommend is have one and you’ll be again. As you can appreciate, there’s a huge percentage of people that come to me that they didn’t have one. You know, a lot of business owners, especially if maybe an older demographic, don’t necessarily start a business to exit it. Now, you know, you’re meet more people nowadays, especially maybe in the younger demographic that actually think that way and they run their business in order to sell it one day. But there’s definitely a difference between a person that starts a business to run one and a person who starts one to sell one. And that’s going to be key because when you exit, we tell people it can take up to a year to sell a business and the average is nine months. Now, personally, I’ve seen them sell within a month or two, but I’ve also seen them take nine months, ten months, a year, a year and a half. So the further out somebody calls me is better. I always tell people the guy that’s 2 to 3 years out or even 3 to 5 years out is in a better position to have a conversation with me to build that exit strategy and to build that long term plan versus the individual that says, hey, I need to move in six months or I want to sell a business in less than a year.

Joe Coppola: [00:17:56] A lot of times we tell people up front that we can help you as much as we can, but we can’t guarantee success in a short timeframe. It’s just something that we can’t control. Now that being said, the more together person has an exit strategy, yeah, the sooner that business will sell and the more together the business is, yes, the more likely it’s going to sell faster. But we always say again, give us a little more time because you just never know how long it’s going to take to find that right person. And we also always say to a client, it only takes one. So if we can find that right person, it may take some time. But if we find that right person, that’s all we need.

Stone Payton: [00:18:36] All right, man, where can our listeners get in touch with you? What’s the best way for them to connect with you? Tap into your work, whatever you feel like is appropriate. Website, email, LinkedIn. I just want to make sure that that they can if they if they so choose, that they can have a conversation with you about some of these topics. Man.

Joe Coppola: [00:18:53] Well, you can find me and my fellow brokers on premier business brokers, and I can also give you guys my direct email. It is Jay Coppola, Ink jc02 P’s, Ola I and C at gmail.com. Feel free to reach out to me any time and I can answer any questions you have.

Stone Payton: [00:19:17] Well, Joe, it’s been a real pleasure having you on the show today, man. Thank you for sharing your insight, your perspective. You’re doing important work. To me, this is so critical to just the foundation of our of this good country of ours, this great country of ours. So thank you for what you’re doing and thanks for investing the time with us this afternoon, man.

Joe Coppola: [00:19:38] Now, I appreciate you two stone Thank you for your time as well today, sir.

Stone Payton: [00:19:42] All right. Until next time, this is Stone Payton for our guest today, Joe Coppola with Premier business Brokers and everyone here at the Business Radio X family saying, we’ll see you next time on Buy a Business near Me.