Monkey Business Radio

Episode #25 - Silver Tsunami On Main Street

• American Gutter Monkeys, LLC

Share episode

Send us a text

Wayne Gretzky said he didn’t skate to where the puck was — he skated to where it was going. Demographics say the puck is headed straight into a massive turnover of small business ownership, as millions of Baby Boomer–owned companies change hands, get passed down, or shut their doors. That wave is the Silver Tsunami.

In this episode, Chris Collins and Dennis Siggins (a.k.a. Bobby Downspout) break down what this generational shift means beyond the headlines — for retiring owners, local Main Streets, and the next wave of entrepreneurs looking for real opportunity.

They also talk about what it takes to be ready on both sides of the deal: planning ahead, building the right circle of advisors, and recognizing that chance favors the prepared when the biggest wealth-and-business transfer of our lifetime hits your town.

Chris:

Wayne Gretzky said he didn't skate to where the puck was, he skated to where the puck is going. Demographics say the puck is headed straight into one of the biggest turnovers of small business ownerships we've ever seen. Millions of boomer-owned companies will change hands. Some to family, some to buyers, some will just close. That's the silver tsunami. On today's episode, Dennis and I break down what this massive generational shift really means. For local economies, for retiring owners, for the next wave of entrepreneurs ready to step in. We'll dig into what this shift means for real people, not just the Wall Street numbers. How millions of business owners are preparing to pass the torch, how communities will feel the impact when Main Street changes hands, and where the next generation of owners can step in and build real wealth through business ownership. We have a great show for you today. So grab a cup of coffee, sit back, relax, and welcome to Monkey Business Radio. Hello everyone, my name is Chris Collins, and as always I'm here with my business partner and good friend, Dennis Siggins of the Cape Cod Gutta Monkeys. Or as you know him on the Cape and the Islands, Bobby Downspout. Hello, Dennis. How are you doing, Chris? Doing good. Good, good. Good to be back. So today's subject uh is a little bit off the beaten track, but it's becoming more and more apparent and more and more in the press lately, and it's called the Silver Tsunami. Have you heard about that before, Dennis?

Dennis:

I think you opened my eyes very recently as to what it's called now. But yeah, it's the baby boomer effect.

Chris:

Yeah, the baby boomer. So being a baby boomer ourselves, we're kind of on the tail end of it. I think it's 1946 to 64. 64, I think they call it. So we're right on the tail end of it. So a lot of this applies to, you know, we're kind of looking at it because it's we're in that boom, and so we're kind of paying attention to it anyway. But a lot of people don't know that this is coming along. And it has big impacts on employment, ownership of small businesses, and things like that. Oh, everything. Housing, healthcare. It's incredible. Shifting of wealth, massive. It's really shaped our past. We've lived through it. Uh we were talking earlier before the show. Back in the day in Framingham, we were growing up, huge baby boom. And what did they build? How many of those schools did they build? Remember they built those schools?

Dennis:

Well, the I I grew up in the town of Framingham, and there was about eight or nine of these identical schools that were all built between 60 and 64. Yeah.

Chris:

Like in four years. And they're still there. Yeah. They're all still there. Yeah. Yeah. I don't think they're all schools anymore. They become other things now, but because they don't need them as much. But yeah, so the baby boomers are coming through. Got some statistics out there. 11,000 people a day turn 65. That's a lot of birthdays. A lot of birthdays. This is a big number, though. 55 and older owners control 51% of small businesses in America, but they only make up 20% of the population. So they have a huge impact on business ownership and employment in this country. But only 75% of these businesses believe that in the next 10 years they're going to retire out. So you can imagine this is a huge. And they estimate it's something like 10 trillion in business equity or business evaluation is going to change hands in these years. So it's this huge wave coming of baby boomers turning their businesses over to the next generation, whether it's family or whatnot. So it's going to be gonna be interesting. And only 30% of small businesses that change hands make it to the second generation. So in the same family. So it's gonna be a big change. It's a lot of opportunity, both for the sellers and for the buyers. And so that's kind of what we're gonna just talk about today. Uh kind of get your opinion and your experience because you're living it day to day. And of course, you uh advise your clients as well in these certain circumstances.

Dennis:

Anytime there's a major movement economically, socially, it creates opportunities. Too often we hear on the news and through our politicians and stuff their own agenda as far as which side of the fence they're gonna be on. But the truth is, whenever a house sells, somebody loses a house, somebody gains a house. Somebody takes in some cash, somebody gives up some cash. There's a yin to every yang. For every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction. So yeah, the boomers have been doing this since they were boomers. Right. We watched it. The high schools in Framingham, the two public high schools, went to double sessions when I was in middle and high school. I remember that north. Double session. Yeah, they didn't, they didn't have enough seats in the classroom to handle the amount of kids.

Speaker 4:

Yeah.

Dennis:

And they were turning middle schools into wings off the high schools or satellite high schools for a year or two. It was a crazy time to be in school in the 70s in the town of Framingham. I'm sure other communities had their challenges, but that was the baby boomer effect.

Chris:

And you saw it kind of ripple right through the economy from school buildings, housing increases. Eventually, these kids, their kids got to college. So there's this massive expansion in colleges, college attendance. And now we're seeing it kind of in the medical world, right? We're seeing this rapid expansion of medical services for the elderly and all these other things. So they're just kind of moving through. I remember someone described it as almost like this BOA constrictor, you know, and the baby boomers, that bubble kind of moving through that BOA constrictor. Through life. Yeah.

Dennis:

In the 80s, I remember very clearly I started buying and selling real estate in the 80s, actually late 70s. And there was a seven or eight year period where you could close your eyes and throw a dart at the newspaper, back when we had newspapers, and pick that piece of real estate and buy it, and you're gonna make money on it. Yeah. The boomers, a piece of the legacy was they were building larger homes with more square footage than ever before. I remember my son did a school project on the square footage of housing every five years from the time the boys returned home from World War II until probably 05, 2005, when he did this project. And I remember the massive jump in the 80s. This was in the hippies, these are the boomers. The hippies from the 60s and 70s cut their hair, climbed in the shower and cleaned up a little bit, and they went out into the workforce in great numbers with great energy in the 80s, and they were then called the yuppies. The yuppies was that next phase for those hippies, and they knocked it out of the park. The houses they built were massive. Yeah and it changed, there was a shift in housing because these yuppies now could build their own houses and they were building bigger houses, more elaborate, and that paved the way for somebody like me being a the sort of the tail end of the baby boomers to be buying up uh homes that were sort of cast aside. Yeah. My first two or three properties, I bought the worst houses in the worst neighborhoods. Moved in, and my roommate was a table saw for that next year, and we would just clean them up, polish them up, rebuild them and sell them and move on. And yeah, the boomers have had a tremendous effect on the economy ever since they were born.

Speaker 3:

Yeah.

Dennis:

And it continues to this day.

Chris:

Now they're aging out. Yeah. And now we're looking at facts along the lines of something like one in four small businesses owners are going to retire within five years. It's huge. 25%. Think of the opportunities it's creating for the next generation. That's six and a half trillion dollars at stake. That's what they're saying now.

Dennis:

So it is estimated right now. I read this just earlier today, that more than sixty-eight trillion dollars will be bequeathed to the baby boomer offspring in the next 25 years. 68 trillion dollars. This great wealth transfer is expected to make the millennials the richest generation in American history.

Speaker 3:

Oh my gosh.

Dennis:

Imagine that the millennials are going to be the richest possibly.

unknown:

Yeah.

Dennis:

Depends how they handle it. Are they ready for that? Yeah.

Chris:

Unfortunately, there's also statistics to say along the lines of inherited money only lasts a generation, and it's pretty much gone by the second generation. Same sort of slope off, you know. Sure. 50% of it's gone after a year, after first generation, and 10% is left or something along that lines.

Dennis:

You know, I I had made a couple of notes. I'm in my mid-60s. My kids are all in their late 30s to 40. And I remember when my kids moved out. They watched my wife and I own businesses, sell, buy, sell businesses. We would buy businesses and resurrect them, put them back on a paying basis and sell them. We were flipping houses. We had a blast. And my kids all said the same thing when they hit their their mid-20s. They said, Mom and dad, you guys made it look so easy. It's so much harder than we thought.

unknown:

Yeah.

Chris:

But that's what we were all doing. It I mean, everybody I knew, we were all moving into homes that were had to be rebuilt. My first home with my wife, Sandy, was a place up in Nashua, complete regut. Um, our next house as well. It wasn't until our third one that was kind of new. So yeah, it was a couple of years of rebuilding and stuff like that.

Dennis:

So my daughter will still bring that up. For 10 years of our lives, my wife and I were innkeepers. We had a bit of workaholism, each of us. So we decided to sell a lot of our properties and we sold a business or two that we owned and we became innkeepers. And we it was sort of a forced, a forced effort to live a more laid-back life and spend more time with our kids. And when you're an innkeeper, you live in the inn, you cook there, you know, our staff would be changing over the beds. We were always in the place, we were always around the kids. It was a great time. And afterwards, my kids just they didn't even realize it was work. Yeah. They didn't know mom and dad were working. They just thought this was a giant playground and everyone's having fun. And Katie Rose, my daughter, she always says that you made it look so easy. We just thought everybody could flip houses and make money. You know, dad would disappear for a day and a half and he'd come back and he'd put a new roof on one of the houses or something like that. You know, all my kids were really seriously in their 20s. They were shocked at how challenging and how difficult life was. As they got out into the real world, each of my kids has had his or her own business at one time. And of course, they had mom and dad as their mentors, their consultants, and all of them said the same thing, basically. They didn't realize how much work it is. And a lot of times, when the person who owns and starts the business makes it look great, makes it look easy, passing that business down to your children, sometimes they underestimate the effort. Yeah. They think that if mom and dad made it look easy, then it must be easy. This, some of this, some level of this will occur during this great transfer of wealth and businesses. Right.

Chris:

Yeah. So it's going to be an interesting time. And uh, I guess for today, we're going to kind of talk about both sides of it. We're going to talk about what can buyers expect coming along. There's going to be some incredible opportunities. And then also sellers. What do sellers have to kind of look at? If you're in that group of people thinking of selling within five or ten years, you know, you really pretty much got to get on it because it takes about five years, average, you know, what they're talking about if you look in the press, but about five years to prepare a plan to re to sell your business. We're actually looking at selling a bit uh a business here.

Dennis:

So South Shore is right now a corporate-owned territory. Yeah. We're actually meeting with a group tomorrow on a Zoom who's interested in purchasing that as a franchise. Yeah. So it's on your plate right now.

Chris:

You're going to like to get it off your plate because again, you're not going to be working 90 hours a week the rest of your days either.

Dennis:

So well, one of the things that we at American Gutter Monkeys look for is an individual and a team that is focused on its territory. We run two territories right now. So we have 15 trucks and 25 employees running two territories. And we would like to sell one of those territories and several trucks and then kind of reel things back in so we can focus, as we have been, on Cape Cod Gotamonkeys and have a new franchisee focusing on their new territory, the South Shore, which runs from Plymouth Mass, just south of Boston, up into the Weymouth Hingham area. Right, right.

Chris:

Yeah. All right. So why don't we kind of dive into it? I guess if you want to talk a little bit about, you know, let's talk about the owner side of it at first, I guess. You know, if you're in this situation, you're looking down the road five years, ten years down the road, you realize you're not going to be passing it on, or maybe you are going to be passing it on. What you got to start thinking about and what's on your list of things to do.

Dennis:

I've sold a few businesses in my time. It's really exciting. It's often said, you know, the best day as a boat owner is the day you buy your boat, and the second best day is the day you sell it. Yeah. Okay. There's some truth to that. In the business world, buying and selling, it's very exciting. As a seller, it's never taken me five years to sell a business. It usually takes a year, year and a half.

Chris:

But more along the lines of five years of prepping. If you're not prepping, getting ready for it. You've got to get your ducks on the line. You spend a lot of years getting your ducks all kind of in a row already, so you kind of move into it.

Dennis:

But on the flip side, the buyer, I believe the buyer is the one that should also have a game plan in place. That buyer should be looking two, three years out as to when he or she is going to purchase a business. If you look 30 years old and you have 2.4 children and you want to own a business someday, are you going to start one on your own from scratch? Are you going to partner with somebody? There's a lot of options that you have. And as you said earlier, Chris, one of our favorite sayings around here is you know, some people go to where the puck is, but I want to go where the puck is going to be when I get there. You want to look three years out, and that puck is the transfer of a business. And you want to be where that puck is when you get there and when it gets there. You want to get there at the same time. I just still think that a strong savings account, a good financial portfolio, and a lot of financial literacy is absolutely essential for both the seller and the buyer. Right. But especially the buyer. Oftentimes the seller, myself as a starter and owner of many businesses, I had a passion for the business. Sometimes the buyer may not have that same passion. I find a lot of potential buyers today are looking more at the feasibility, the economic feasibility, the potential profitability of a business as opposed to all of the businesses I started. I was intrigued. I was interested. Sure, the profitability is there. The profitability is there in almost any business. But I always had a little bit of a passion for whatever it was I was doing. So I want to find a seller. I mean, I want to find a buyer that has a similar passion for that. And that's difficult.

Chris:

Yeah, especially in this business, the gutter business. I mean, we see a lot of guys come through. Most of these guys are basically financial guys. They're not really wanting to own their own business, get down there and get up on ladders, right? So they don't have that same, they've got a passion for the finance, but I don't know if they necessarily have a passion for the actual business itself.

Dennis:

But then also there's the when I sold the inn, I sold it to a bunch of people that were much smarter than I am, um, or I was at the time. There were three, there was a group of three, and two of them had MBAs, and one had a master's in the culinary arts. And my wife and I, she had an associate's degree in secretarial, and I have uh a bachelor's in finance from Bentley College. We're not overly educated. We're well educated, but not overly so. And the buyers were three people who all had master, bachelor's, and master's degrees. They struggled at the beginning, and then the business failed after two years. Being on the outside, looking in, because I still lived in the region at the time and I did work with them a little to try to salvage it. They just didn't have the work ethic. They didn't have the grit, they didn't have the creativity. They were just missing, obviously, the three of them. Not one of them had that key ingredient, that magic powder that, you know, makes everything work. Yeah.

Chris:

Yeah, it's hard to document that sort of thing when you're selling the business. You know, you're gonna need grit. Yeah. You don't want to hand the business over to somebody who's not gonna be successful. You don't want to see your business and all that work go to go down the drain. So it's a hard thing to do. It's a hard thing to find. And that's what we're finding now. People are coming through the door and looking at some of the businesses you're selling now. It's gonna be challenged, and that's kind of what we're found already. It's this uh a lot of it's coming in, it's old money represented by either the children of the old money or friends and family. And uh correct. Yeah, it's not the same as you know, coming in, you know, a guy coming in the door that's been up on a roof before or something like that. It's a completely different sort of sale.

Dennis:

If you look at some of the things, Chris, that you were pointing out in this great transfer of wealth, one segment is the businesses that are owned by the boomers, they're either going to be given away or transferred to family members, kids, nieces, nephews. Some of them will be sold, and some of them will just be closed. The owner will close it down and sell the assets. Yeah.

Chris:

There's a couple articles actually. Um in this area, we're in a fairly you know congested area, big population here on the Cape. But you go out in West, Midwest, and places like that, you know, some of these main towns main streets and some of these towns are basically built of these businesses, these 65 and older, 55 and older businesses. So when they go away, what's gonna happen to them? What's gonna happen to these main streets all over the America? It's gonna be a bit of an issue and a bit of a problem. Again, it's a great opportunity for people living in that town to become the new, you know, florist shop or whatever. But are there gonna be people there to pick it up? They're gonna have the money, they're gonna have the skill, the education.

Dennis:

Yeah. Yeah, it's it's legit. I know that here on Cape Cod, a lot of the restaurant owners are 55, 60 on up. And I do know a lot of restaurant owners that are a little bit younger than that. You see a lot of multi-generational owners, I imagine, on the Cape. I don't know the owners that well, so it's hard to say. I do know the restaurants have struggled significantly on Cape Cod since the beginning of COVID. Once a lot of these restaurants started opening up, it was hard to staff them. Our federal and state governments were paying potential employees more to stay home and sit on their hands than they could make working. So it was very difficult for the restaurant owners on Cape Cod and other areas too to staff. A lot of them have gone to four and five days a week instead of seven, especially in the summertime. Because the summertime, the population on Cape Cod triples and quadruples. I mean, some towns like Provincetown, which only has a year-round population of, I think, 3,000 or a little bit less, they go to 50,000 in the summertime. I mean, it is amazing. Dennisport in the town of Dennis, it's one of the villages within the town of Dennis. It just booms in the summertime. There were just so many of these small cottages that just fill up, you know, from Memorial Day to Columbus Day, and the restaurants were still struggling to stay open. It wasn't because of lack of business. They had plenty of business, they just didn't have the staff to keep it open seven days a week. That's something that's getting better. I'm starting to see young people again, you know, teenagers and 20 somethings actually working in restaurants again for probably four years. We were, you know, we go out as a group on Wednesday nights. Uh, we do Wednesday night dinners, and boy, you're hard pressed to see a young guy or a young girl working in a restaurant. Now we do see them quite a bit. So I think that's changing. But I don't the ownership, I don't know. That's that's an interesting. piece to this economic puzzle.

Chris:

Yeah, you're going to see the same sort of bloom in people interested in owning a company. And of course, there's great opportunity here, right? Because these companies have already been up and running. You don't have to do this from scratch. It's not like you're starting a new roofing bet business, you know, by going out to Home Depot and buying your first hammer. You can go in and buy a company that's ready to go. So there's a lot of opportunity in that. So but are there going to be the people there that have that grid, that have that want to, you know, to build something, to own something? You know, we always talk about you know building real wealth through business ownership and we believe in that. Are we able to or are people going to be able to figure that out on their own and and work towards it?

Dennis:

You are right. Second generation ownership, second generation wealth, they treat it differently than the first generation who started those companies, who built that wealth. Chance favors the prepared. Sometimes the buyer or the the children, the family who inherit the business or who have it bequeathed to them, sometimes that level they don't prepare themselves. Their chance is not prepared the way their moms and dads were the way the original founders were. And that's going to be interesting. Regardless, Chris, huge opportunities occur every day and in these next 15 years more opportunities than normal are going to be created. So Chris, um just the other day I was reading some data on this topic and check this out the mean net worth for all baby boomers falls between 97000 and 1.2 million. That's the mean of all boomers. That's the boomers that start a little bit younger than us and go to 20 years older than us. Yeah they're millionaires. This is the generation where they're all millionaires or a huge huge portion of them are millionaires. And this is a major league statement. This is such a massive transfer of wealth you know you can say it is estimated that more than 68 trillion will be transferred down. You know that that that's just such a uh a macroeconomic number but when you break it down it's like everyone who's a boomer is probably a millionaire or close to it. That's a powerful statement. Now it does say net worth that includes your home and your investments and this and that and the other thing but business owners tend to be on the wealthier side of average business owners also tend to have a bigger net worth because they not only have their home and their automobiles and their retirement portfolio, they also own businesses that have assets. So these business owners that are getting ready to step aside and transfer ownership in one way or the other these are the wealthier they're on the wealthier side of average of this millionaire generation. And this is a phenomenal opportunity for their kids, for their heirs, for their families, but it's also a phenomenal opportunity for other people for everybody. If a business closes down another one has to open up and pick up that slack or that's just going to get evenly dispersed amongst the remaining businesses. If one business closed down if one restaurant closes down people are still going out to eat. They're just going to go to different restaurants. This creates little sort of micro bursts of economic activity in everybody's community all across this country yeah opportunities are going to be created this is going to be a fun a fun 20 years.

Chris:

Yeah yeah it kind of goes back to chance favors prepared if you're aware this is going to happen and your finances are good and you're got your eye on the ball you got five years to get ready to do it.

Dennis:

A couple of the businesses I've sold have not made it including the inn but a lot of times you look at it and you usually it's uh the changes that they make every time how many startups have you worked for uh probably four or five sure and how often when it's sold does the new ownership come in and say there's going to be no changes made everything's going to stay hours how many hours do you have to discuss?

Chris:

My most successful one I will tell you my most successful startup we were actually bought by Cisco and they took the product and immediately it was destroyed within I don't know I it was not in production after four years within four years. What was the product? It was a web uh server basically and it you know it was competing against an interior project that was already in Cisco and those guys thought they knew better just like sort of like the in all the mistakes we were making and all the things we were doing wrong and uh they tried to build it into their product and it failed failed miserably they should have just run with what we had because what we had was loved by the customers. So yeah um but in almost every case of the startups that I've been with that's usually what will end up happening. You get taken in and you have some sort of internal project or something like that competing against it and it kind of absorbs it and think about the average boomer.

Dennis:

How many how many times do you hear from Chris you and I are both in our mid-60s how many times do you hear from a 30 year old kid that you know you boomers don't know anything because you can't land a moon man on the moon with your cell phone. Yeah. Okay. A lot of these boomer owned businesses are run in an old school fashion with pencil and paper. Yeah. Right? They have a landline with an office staff. And sometimes my younger franchisees they try to run their franchise that way. I have an office staff of four ladies who run my office and we have 20 guys in the field. You got to have those guys in the field or the work won't get done but you also have to have your office staff. You can't do that from a cell phone. Maybe when you're a startup you think you can but it's very very difficult to grow a home services business without an office staff. And so one of the components we're seeing now is businesses that are being transferred down to the next generation from an old school baby boomer who kept his records an old school spreadsheet with pencil and paper being given down to the 30 something son or daughter who wants to bring it into a high tech level. And that's going to be very interesting.

Chris:

Yeah yeah there is some opportunity to do that to buy tech correctly but like you said if you don't understand the underlying business and the underlying importance of customer relations and all these sort of sort of things you can destroy it pretty quickly.

Dennis:

Sure. We had a plumber down here on the Cape oh years ago 20 years ago the dad was my age and his sons they're probably in their they're probably in their early 40s late 30s early 40s now and I remember about 15 20 years ago the two boys they were green they were like 20 21 they were just taking over the business and the dad he was he's a little older than me we were maybe like mid 50s at the time and the boys just didn't have the customer relationship skills that the dad did. And eventually I stopped using them. They didn't return phone calls they didn't show up on time and I found a plumber that did. You know my first mechanic here on the Cape, I was using him before I even lived here we had the house here in Cape Cod for about 15 years before we moved to it. We built the house in 96 but we didn't move down till 2010 but I had a mechanic here and he was great. You walk in and he he he greets you he says hello he takes good care of your car just bringing the car in was always a pleasant experience. And um Steve turned the business over to his son and he had no personality he was a jerk and um we stopped going there. Yeah we we just stopped going there because he just wasn't a nice guy like his dad you know and now we have a new mechanic and that kind of stuff is going to happen. I don't know if Steve's son is as good of a mechanic as he was but I know he did not have the people skills that his dad did yeah there's so much that goes into it.

Chris:

Yeah so much but the skills the customer service the relationships that you built with these people is easily lost. Yeah good opportunity too I mean I'm sure you know yourself in particular there'll be a lot of opportunity for consulting and stuff like that to keep these businesses sort of sort of going down the line too once they're sold.

Dennis:

I I love watching our company grow and seeing guys step up and ladies step up into positions of higher importance higher responsibility it's difficult not everybody finds uh delegation easy yeah you know a part of delegation is incentivizing and rewarding you know and uh that's it's not an easy puzzle a lot of business owners were the best at what they do the the roofer my older brother he was a really great roofer he was fast he was efficient I mean when he and I were in our late teens early 20s we were just streamlining the process of roofing. We were young we were strong we were good athletes we worked hard and we'd be out there on Saturdays and Sundays roofing and he my brother used to say Saturdays and Sundays that's when we gain our advantage because everyone else is back home resting and relaxing. And you know when you're 23 I didn't 22 whatever I didn't have kids yet. So yeah you can work really hard. We had a passion for roofing my brother and I and not everybody has that passion. I don't think my sons had that passion. My oldest son wanted to take over one of my businesses which was a roofing company until it came time and he just said I don't really want to do this. So he became a writer totally totally different direction. Totally different direction. He's actually uh he might be listening right now but Dustin admits it he's allergic to tools.

Chris:

Yeah he doesn't want to climb ladders he doesn't want to sweat yeah well yeah all right but but we talk about I mean you become this sort of thing we I know it's uh on a lot of our podcasts you talk about you know surrounding yourself with the best and five people around you you're the average of them but you're becoming one of those people you ought to surround yourself with right because this is now an advantage people could take you know if they bought one of these franchises actually our franchisees we kind of talk about this all the time too is that you're one of those people that they should be surrounding themselves with and listening to and I I think so I with without patting myself on the back.

Dennis:

Yes I have a lot of experience not only with self-employment but specifically in the trades and even more specifically in our field which is gutters. I was a roofer for 35 years I've been a full-time gutter monkey for 11 years and I'm really good at it. I'm very very skilled at this but I don't think that's my best skill I think my best skill lies behind the scenes in back end operations, team building um incentivizing and growing the team. Yeah you got to have a great team in your company but also within yourself. You've you've heard us talk about this you need a banker you need a lawyer or two. You know I don't mean a litigator per se but you need a business lawyer you need a you know an attorney for other types of things you need a financial planner you need an accountant you need a business consultant.

Chris:

Yes someone like yourself if you're thinking of buying a business or you want to take up up you know take this opportunity sitting out there these are the kind of things you got to start doing but you can't do it the day you decide to buy the business. You got to start way in advance. You do it takes years to kind of build these relationships up and so it's never too early to start.

Dennis:

Start building your circle before you need them. Yeah don't wait till you need a lawyer to go find one. Don't wait till you're in a bind you need an accountant I did a series of financial uh seminars Chris over the past two months and the final one it was a group that had been to each of the first two and they were all like 40 and over and the name of that or the subject of that presentation was Building Your Financial Retirement after the age of 40. We actually did a podcast on that one. I think we and that was during this time that I was doing this group of um presentations. One of the key pieces takeaways to this is for each of the attendees go out and meet your banker connect with a financial planner because we're going to need to meet with him in six months. Don't wait till you're starting to fill up your financial waterfall to go meet a financial planner. Go on out there interview one or two of them talk to your friends, your family see who they're using. Find a guy or a girl in the financial world that sort of shares your thought process. Do that before you need them same thing if you're planning on buying a business. I mean if your mom and dad own a restaurant and you want to take it over don't just go in there and keep cooking and being an employee at that restaurant. Start thinking like an owner start planning like you're gonna be the owner take all the good things that you know your mom and dad, the owners of that restaurant the founders of that restaurant, take the good stuff that they're doing and look for areas of improvement. How can you streamline and talk to the right people two, three, four years before you're going to take it over yes because chance does favor the prepared right yeah yeah Chris you you put together a couple of items here and let's talk about you call it the UVP unique value proposition price product and promotion this is a really interesting one for next generation look at what happened to the price of dinner to go out to dinner since COVID.

Chris:

Yeah I mean it's just we spent $73 I had myself my wife and my two grandkids and they're two in one okay so they don't eat much.

Dennis:

Oh $73 we got done insane I would say when we do our Wednesday night dinner sometimes I don't have a drink sometimes I might have a beer uh Bruce will usually have a beer Andy doesn't drink yeah maybe if we go out with six of us there might be six drinks ordered yeah but we average between fifty and sixty dollars a person yeah and we're not fine dining yeah we're just going out at nice restaurants and you know one of the things I do see with ownership change is price changes for product and service I go to Charlie the barber here in uh sandwich on Cape Cod and his two kids his son and his daughter have pretty much taken over the operation Charlie still comes in and cuts hair from like six in the morning till 10. And then his son and his daughter they stay on all day till about six at night and I remember they were still charging $12 a haircut. This is right before COVID. Even from like 2015 on and I was saying to Steve you've got to raise your prices I mean you've got to and you know I remember they were talking with their dad and he was very reluctant. And that to me and his dad's their dad is my age Charlie that's an example of the founder needs to change and we're only talking price yeah but he's reluctant to and COVID came along and everything got expensive. Yeah um especially things like that you know in the haircutting business you're limited to how many people you can have in at one time and it you know just it really drove the price of getting your hair cut and finally they went to 25 bucks I still give them 30. I'm I'm not gonna I'm a good tipper. If it's 12 I'm giving you 15. If it's 15 I'm giving you 20. Well right now it's 25 I give them 30 or 35 bucks to get my hair cut. I like them they need they and their coworkers need to make a good living so I just up it to the next increment if it's 25 I usually give them 30 or 35. And they have had no significant I'm in there all the time. I always talk business with those guys no significant drop off at all. Prices went up and finally they're making really good money the the individual employees over there are making good money. That's just one of those little changes that needed to be made that Charlie I believe was somewhat reluctant to because he'd been there so long.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Dennis:

And he's got all his regular customers they're paying 12 bucks and they have been for many many years. And you know that's a business that I'm watching that gradually turn over to the two kids. It's pretty cool.

Chris:

Yeah it's interesting it's interesting. And plus the two right there's the values of these people's lives the dad's probably got a home it's paid for sure he's probably got money in the bank like you said retirement so he's having a set where the kids are coming online. They're not like that. So they're gonna need these price adjustments because that's just going to be the nature of the business to you know keep them keep them and their kids in the city and even diversification of products it's a big one.

Dennis:

Years ago when we were kids and growing up you go in you get your hair cut and you leave. Now there's products on the shelf. Yeah you can buy that you take it with you it's a whole it's a whole nother component to the hair care business. Yeah and and and health and beauty aids in general. Right, right we talked about your friend that did the rug business right he brought in a new uh shampoo or a new cleaning product yeah sells it alongside the product so it's a new way of expanding the business out yep he's actually grown a lot I talk to Brian all the time he's in the process of buying yet another van and bringing on another one or two employees he's he's really grown nicely over these last five or six years. And again not to pat myself on the back Brian started talking with me and he became part of my circle about 10 or 15 years ago you know we just got back together our kids were all grown and Brian and I have always stayed in touch but we talk a lot now and we make recommendations to one another and um he's made a lot of changes in these last couple of years and I've watched that company probably double in size.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Dennis:

And I was just talking to Brian the other day he owns Lovejoy it's Brian Lovejoy's name Lovejoy Carpet Care out of uh Milford Mass. They're buying another van. They're growing again. So yeah it's it's it's gone well. And there's another one where his son John is very likely going to take over the business. Brian and John have a rather interesting father-son relationship as most fathers and sons oh my goodness yeah but it's very likely that within the next two to three years Brian will probably step away completely and John will own and run the business in some form. Yeah so that's occurring it's occurring all over the place Brian is maybe two years three years younger than I am he's probably 61 62 something in that range and he's getting ready to retire and this is one of those businesses that is is going to change hands and I strongly believe they will continue on their growth. You know wrapping up Chris on the topic of the boomers it's really interesting that whole generation I think it was the book The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell where he he highlighted the small classroom sizes in the 30s and 40s. It was the Great Depression immediately followed by the involvement of America United in World War II and there were not a whole lot of babies being born during that timeframe. And classroom size was smaller and yet there were still plenty of teachers in loads of schools so it's not like you know the number of buildings was shrinking and the number of teachers and school employees were shrinking. It was just the school enrollment and the boomers was the complete opposite yeah we just turned the corner after the war the soldiers came home they got married and they were having big families and the boomers have just drastically impacted each decade as they grew this this massive massive group of babies turned into hippies In the 60s and 70s, they turned into the yuppies. And they just every decade that they came along, they took it over. And they had such a tremendous impact. And the next generation has the potential to take the baton and run with it. Right. As we said earlier, the millennials, if for no other reason than the transfer of $68 trillion in wealth, have the greatest potential. They have the potential to be the wealthiest generation ever. Yeah, that's incredible. It's amazing. And there's a lot of truth there. Yeah. A lot of opportunity coming. Yeah.

Chris:

And um we always talk about that on this podcast. It's just how you look at things, you know, everything from COVID, the opportunities during COVID, the business opportunities we always talk about that actually exists. It's just kind of the way you look at it. And there's always something there. It's just you're prepared and ready to go. And uh, you know, it's great opportunity no matter what's happening. So this sounds definitely sounds like this is gonna be a big economic and big business event. So we'll see how it kind of plays out over the next couple of years. It's certainly sort of playing out here and playing out with the businesses you know and our kind of our friends and things like that. Yeah, it's happening right before our eyes. Yeah, it's gonna be a lot of fun.

Dennis:

Cool. Yeah. All right. Thank you, Chris. And no monkeys were harmed in the making of this podcast. That's right. Talk to you next time. Bye.

Chris:

Thank you for tuning in to Monkey Business Radio. If you enjoyed today's episode, please make sure to subscribe, like, and follow us wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps us reach more aspiring entrepreneurs like you. And if you got a question or topic you'd like us to cover, leave a comment or reach out to us on social media. We'd love to hear your thoughts and keep the conversation going. Don't forget to leave us a five-star review if you found the episode valuable, and make sure to share it with anyone who might benefit from our tips and stories. We'll see you next time. This podcast is produced by American Gutter Monkeys LLC. Build real wealth through business ownership. For details, visit us at American GutterMonkeys.com.