American Business Brokers & Advisors Founder & President PROFESSIONAL INTERMEDIARY & MARKET MAKER FOR PRIVATELY HELD COMPANIES Author of ‘The Art of Buying and Selling a Convenience Store’ & ‘Hidden Wealth’ Involved in the Sale of 800+ Businesses Advisor • Consultant • Speaker
WWW.TERRYMONROE.COM
800.805.9575
The following is an abbreviated version of an interview with Authority Magazine, which covers business, film, sports, and tech and credits itself with over 45 million readers worldwide. The interview is about how I became a business broker and some of my experiences along the way. Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us what brought you to this specific career path? Over my career, I have owned 40 different businesses. I loved buying and starting businesses, but I discovered I wasn’t very good at operating them. Some made money and some didn’t. I enjoyed the challenge of finding and buying businesses, but running the businesses bored me. Then, I discovered the business broker profession. In that role, I could find creative ways to help people buy and sell businesses. It was the perfect job for someone with my experience as well as someone who needed a fix for his ADD. Can you tell us about a time you were able to build a business from scratch, scale it, and sell it to a bigger firm? In the early 1980s, I opened up a video rental store with a partner in a nearby town after discovering there could be a niche for that. This was before Blockbuster, and the first store we opened was very successful. With the money from the first store, we opened a second store — and then more and more until we decided to franchise them. After about 15 stores and a dozen franchises, I bought out my partner and became the sole owner of the video rental and franchise businesses.
Can you share with our readers the ‘Five Things You Need to Know if You Want to Build, Scale, and Prepare Your Business for a Lucrative Exit’? Know your tolerance for risk. If risk makes you anxious, don’t own a business. If you like some risk, but not enough to start a business from scratch, you could buy a franchise with a concept that’s proven successful. If you’re like me, and you relish risk, you might enjoy starting a new business from scratch. Turn what you like into a business. Find a business that fits your personality. If you don’t like preparing food, don’t get into the food service business. If you don’t like to travel, then don’t start a business that would make you travel a lot. Stick to the things that you like to do — otherwise, it will not last.
I knew I needed to grow with more locations, so I started looking for a quicker way to expand rather than building one store at a time. Now, here is where it gets interesting. One day when I was driving around in Missouri looking for locations for more stores, I came across a Walmart Supercenter. At the time, there were only about a dozen Supercenters in the country. Since I had already put video rentals in grocery stores, I decided to call Walmart and see if I could put video rentals into their new Supercenters. Long story short, I ended up renting space inside the Walmart Supercenters and grew my video rental franchise to 155 stores across 27 states and Canada. I eventually sold the majority interest of my company to some venture capitalists who make the people on “Shark Tank” look like goldfish, who then took the company public and allowed me to sell out.
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