Once upon a time….
Carl walks into a beautiful clinic with serious chest pains.
He is seen by Dr Sam, a heart specialist with more than thirty years behind him. Sam listens to the symptoms, and he listens to what Carl really wants. Carl wants to be well enough to walk his daughter down the aisle when she marries in eighteen months.
Sam lays out the path. A full assessment, the treatment options, at least six months of work and dozens of visits.
If it goes well, Carl will feel like a new man and the chest pains will be gone.
“You will walk down that aisle with her,” Sam tells him. “You might even skip.”
“That sounds great,” Carl says. “Let us start… But I will pay you nothing until you have fully healed me.”
What do you think Sam says to that?
It is not a trick question.
And it’s not a fairy tale.
It happens all the time.
An M&A advisor told me how he was on a call with a dentist who wanted to sell his practice and retire.
He had come to the advisor after spending nearly eighteen months trying to sell through someone else, with nothing to show for it.
The advisor explained his process and offered a very reasonable retainer.
“Absolutely not. It’s our policy. We do not pay a retainer. You get paid on the successful sale, like the real estate agent who sold our house. We did not pay them up front.”
I could not believe my ears when he told me what the dentist said.
That policy had already failed him once. The previous broker worked on success fee alone, never sold the business, and walked off. And here he was, insisting on the very same terms that had just cost him a year and a half.
Here’s a spoiler alert: Selling a business is not like selling a house.
The advisor politely wished the dentist the best of luck.
And I will tell you now, that dentist will not sell his practice. If he somehow does, it will be for far less than it is worth.
Now this man is not stupid. After all, he was savvy enough to build and own a successful clinic.
And it’s not as simple as him being cheap.
So here’s the problem.
He has spent so many years haggling and bargaining that he is now bringing that same reflex to the single most important deal of his life.
He’s trapped in a toxic transaction income mindset.
Think about it for a second.
If a patient walked into his clinic and said he would only pay once he was fully healed, he would be shown the door in five minutes.
Why? Because the patient has to own his side of getting well, and the dentist cannot control that. So a dentist or doctor never tie their compensation 100% to something outside their hands.
Yet he wanted an M&A advisor to do exactly that, while both the buyer and seller are outside that person’s control.
This Dentist is not unusual.
A toxic transaction mindset is a widespread quiet epidemic for many owners.
Sure many end up building profitable companies, but these tend to work them to the bone and end up worth almost nothing the moment they try to sell.
It does not have to be that way.
Replacing that mindset with a much healthier and profitable outlook is one of the reasons why I created End Burnout and Fall in Love with Your Business, whose full program launches on Halloween.
By the end of it you will see your business in a completely different way, with the clarity to make it give you the life you want, today and tomorrow.
I’ll give you details when it comes out, but before then, take less than five minutes and find out whether you are quietly limiting yourself without even realising it by taking the free Buyer Verdict Survey.
It tells you how your business ranks on the four areas an investor looks at.
Click here for your Buyer’s Verdict score.
Business advisor George Sotiropoulos opens with a fairy tale that turns out to be real. A heart patient offers to pay nothing until he is fully cured, and then a dentist on a live M&A call insists on the same deal, a pure success fee with no retainer, the very terms that had already failed him over eighteen months. George calls it a transaction income mindset, a quiet epidemic among owners who build profitable companies that work them to the bone yet are worth almost nothing the day they try to sell.