Suli Ali — Selling His Business for Millions, Discussion About an Interesting Entreprenur, and a Carl Icahn story
Source: My First Million on YouTube
Why Listen To This?
The Host is a Serial Entrepreneur who chats with a fellow serial entrepreneur — Suli Ali on his lesson from selling his business, How to write a LinkedIn profile and more.
Learnings
‘10 – When selling a business, disclose all the skeletons in the closet at the beginning itself.
Tell the buyer why they shouldn’t buy the business.
They are going to find that eventually when they do their due diligence some 2-3 weeks into the process and it will become really messy then.
‘50 – Interesting LinkedIn – Justin Yoshimura
‘52 – Justin Yoshimura’s Company – CSC Generation
Buys up antiquated furniture stores and makes them digital first.
These companies have huge data in legacy equipment. He extracts those valuable customer data and creates an e-commerce website for all the businesses he buys.
‘54 – The Buzz Around Justin:
Went around asking 50-60 years old furniture stores.
When they didn’t accept to being bought, he sent out press releases stating, he is ‘willing to buy these companies for 20-30% more than the public market price, please respond’.
As such put out press releases to buy 2 listed companies
‘67 – A Carl Icahn story on HR mismanagement
He once buys a business making subway cars, having a huge team in New York and a team somewhere in Middle America.
The NY Team is spread across 3 floors in a fancy Manhattan building. He goes to them and asks them what they do. They prepare a presentation to demonstrate what they do. After the presentation, he asks the same question again.
He then visits the guy who runs the Middle America operations — the one which actually prepares the cars — asks him does he need the NY Team.
The guy says, he doesn’t need them, in fact, he has 4 people just to manage the NY team, and if Carl gets rid of those guys, the business will continue to grow and they’ll be fine.
The next day, Carl flies to NY and fires 3 floors of people.
It was earlier in Carl’s career, that’s why it took him a couple of months to go with it. Had it been now, he would have done it immediately.
