In this insightful episode, Angelo Ponzi shares how you can enhance your exit strategy with a strong brand focus. If you’re struggling with market saturation, or if you feel unprepared for a big exit, you won’t want to miss it.

You will discover:

- Why understanding culture ensures a smoother exit and lasting legacy

- How to assess your market size to avoid unrealistic growth goals

- What internal data analysis reveals to balance client concentration risks

This episode is ideal for for Founders, Owners, and CEOs in stage 5 of The Founder's Evolution. Not sure which stage you're in? Find out for free in less than 10 minutes at https://www.scalearchitects.com/founders/quiz

Angelo Ponzi is a fractional and interim CMO, CRO, CSO, and marketing and brand strategist specializing in B2B, B2C, and DTC markets. He is also a keynote speaker, author, and podcast host with extensive hands-on experience across marketing, branding, advertising, research, and sales. With a career spanning diverse industry verticals and brand niches, his portfolio includes engagements with notable brands such as AT&T (formerly SBC Global), Ericsson, Kendall-Jackson, and Disney, among many others.

Want to learn more about Angelo Ponzi's work at Craft? Check out his website at https://www.craftmarketingandbranding.com/

Mentioned in this episode:

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Founder's Quiz

Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome, once

again to the secrets of the high demand coach podcast. And

here with us today is the one and only Angelo Ponzi, who is

a fractional and interim cmo CRO CSO and marketing and

brand strategist specializing in B to B, B to C and OTC DTC

markets. He is also a keynote speaker and author, podcast

host with extensive hands on experience across marketing,

branding, advertising, research and sales, with a

career spanning diverse industry verticals and brand

niches include, his portfolio includes engagements with

notable brands such as at&t, formerly SBC global, Erickson,

Kendall Jackson, and Disney, among many others. He's here

with us today. Angelo, I'm excited to have you on the

show. Something on your website just totally

fascinated me, and we're gonna get into that here in a

moment. But first question for you out of the gate is

someone, let's say it's a founder. They've built a multi

million dollar business. They've got dreams of the big

exit, right? That they're starting to set their their

targets. It's easy to think that the numbers tell the

whole story, right? And this may not even be exit, it might

be acquisition, but in that whole space of kind of mergers

and acquisitions, we get so numbers sensitive, but you

emphasize that's not the whole story. So what is and what can

we do about it?

First of all, Scott, thanks for having me

on. Excited to be here. You know, it's an interesting

question, because I'm gonna backtrack just a few months I

was invited to sit on a panel on acquiring businesses. And

the the moderator was a VC, and he said, I understand why

the lawyers here, I wonder understand why the advisors

are here and the bankers, but I don't understand why

marketing is here and and so when I kind of went through my

spiel with him, if you will, the end, he went, I get it.

And so that was an additional trigger for me. And and if you

think about whether you're a quiet let's focus on a query.

I mean, ultimately people concerned about the EBITDA,

what you're buying and making sure it's financially sound.

But I never hear anybody talking about culture. How

does the company fit together? Is there an overarching

company? Do you roll it up? Do you keep them separate? What

happens to the customer base? Are you going to cannibalize

your customers? How do your customers feel about this

acquisition? And I'll tell you a quick story after this. And

so by digging into the data and understanding and going

out and talking to your customers, talking to your

prospects, really digging and talking to your employees.

Nobody ever talks to the employees. And so when you

merge two companies together, people start feeling, is my

job in jeopardy? Now they start thinking, especially if

they're key employees. And so none of that's really, in my

opinion, done a whole lot up front, and that becomes

something that's really important, because ultimately,

you just made this acquisition, depending on how

big is, how you gonna put it together? So I had the

opportunity, and fortunate opportunity, to sell my

business, and it was they bought me, and they bought my

creative partner. I had an ad agency at the time. They

bought us both, put us together, and we thought this

was going to be great. So we had employee issues about now,

who do you take? Who do you not take? Adjustments? I

actually was, even though I was one of the senior

leadership, I actually took the longest to adjust, because

I'd been my own boss for many years, but our clients didn't

like it, because we were purchased by a billion dollar

organization, and they just saw $1,000,000,000.07 150

people were used to working with, you know, a small

organization, and we lost quite a bit of our business

before we even kicked off, because they just assumed we

were beginning to become a traditional, siloed agency,

and so we're so right there and then, in my own

experience, you know, we had, you know, a lot of work to do.

We didn't handle it well. The acquisition happened very

quickly. So I think that, you know, for me, when I look at

whether you're acquiring or looking to sell, so on the

sell side, we get invited in that hey, you know, your

EBITDA is not quite there. You're not going to get the

multiples that you want. You need to go back into the

market and, you know, generate some more revenue and

profitability. And when I'm and I I usually get called in.

It's like the bit, they've been in business for 20 years.

They're a 10 million company, and then they want to sell

them three more, and they want to be a 50 million. And you

know, the rationale for me is, well, it took you 20 years to

get to 10, and you want to go from 10 to 50 and three. What

are you going to do different, right? And I don't think

businesses step back and really analyze, what do we

need to do different? How have we saturated our. Market. What

are the adjacent markets that we can go into? And part of

this came from working with a med tech company. About 16

months ago, I was called in. They wanted me to figure out

how big their market was, Tam, Sam and som. And as I started

to dig into the data, I looked at their revenues over the

last five years, I could see that some of their clients

were starting to spend less. They, on average, grew about

six and a half percent a year. But this year that I was

involved in had a 37% hockey stick growth goal. Wow. Okay.

Why? Yeah. And so as we started to dig into all of

this, and look at the dynamics of the business. You know,

360, 7% of their business was controlled by three companies.

One sales guy controlled about 85% of all their business. And

what happened is, we looked at Pipeline and all of this, we I

realized that there was something up. And I did find

out eventually that they actually brought me in because

they wanted to sell. They got a poor valuation, or bad

valuation, as they like to say. And so now they wanted to

flip the script, thinking they could sell the business in

here. And you know, there was just no way that was going to

happen. And so they were unrealistic. But the fact that

they'd been in business for 40 plus years and had no idea how

big the market was. To me, that was just a lot of red

flags. So I think, you know, there's kind of both sides of

the fence, if you will. And I'll turn it back to you,

because I've been ranked.

Yeah, there's, there's so many

things that I want to unpack in there. The first one was

the the hockey stick growth goal. I call it the strategic

planning slot machine. You know, it's like you just, you

know, it's the closest thing that I can relate it to, like

in my own life, other than doing it myself, but like

outside of work, is when my wife and I were engaged, we

went to AM, we went to Target, and they give you this little

scanner for your registry. And you just kind of walk around

and scan this and scan that, and it adds it to the registry

for you, and it feels like you got it, and you didn't have to

pay anything for it, right? That's basically how a lot of

us treat our strategic planning like our target GIF

registry, but it feels good. It just doesn't work very

well. But then you brought out a couple of points that that

again in my work, in the exit space, I see time and time

again, but it's like these concentrations, right? We

focus so much on, how do we grow revenue? How do we grow

revenue? And we think of it as it as if all revenue is

created equal, but it's not. So this is where I think you

know, going back to your VC example, like, why are you

here? It's why branding needs to have a strategy at the

table, even if you're not like a heavy marketing company, or

haven't been historically, I think it's especially true. So

there's so many places to start with this. I'm just

trying to pick one. But how do you go about right? Let's say

someone is putting an exit they find out they're overly

concentrated, either in a sales rep or in a couple of

customers. What? What's the process for starting to expand

that for, for getting out to market in a way that's

healthier and more balanced?

Yeah. Well, that gets back to a deeper dive

into the organization. We, we tend to look in the we broad,

right? Well, we tend to look outward more than inward and

and I encourage companies to Let's spend time really

dissecting the internal dynamics. So I work with a

company, I actually still sit on their board, and we spent

the first two months of my engagement literally just

looking at their data. And we found so many interesting

things about they won 30 they would win 30% of every

proposal they put out. That's and they were 25 year old.

Company, fantastic, but where do they concentrate their

their number one sales person had 750 accounts, and most of

them were tiny, $1,000 $500 right? And but she was

spending her time generating that instead of focusing. And

so by just understanding the dynamics, understanding where

their sales were coming from, not only sales, but

profitability, looking at what services, products are really

generating revenue and profitability. You know, what

are the dogs that you might have been your first product

that you started with, but nobody's really buying it, and

you just can't seem to love go. So really taking that

inward look before you start to figure out, where do you

go? This med tech company I was talking about, for

example, is they were convinced that they had

saturated the market. When I first started working with

them, turned out to be it was a $7.6 billion market, and

they weren't even close. But we were looking at adjacent

markets. How can we use the same products and services we

have in a new market without having to, you know, start all

over again? And so we found robotics, for example, we

could, we could move into robotics very easily with just

a new hire versus having to create all brand new services.

And so again, it's that spending time to work. Uh, you

know, I call it on the business, right? Work on your

business. Really understand where you want to go. Do you

have the capabilities? Do you need a new distribution

network? This company I was talking about earlier, as we

wanted to expand across the United States, we needed

installers. Well, we can't ship people from California to

go install a unit. So now we define places across the

country where could we have distribution so very strategic

approaches. How do you grow? And how do you grow

efficiently and profitably, versus just growing? Because

I'm sure you know, not every piece of business is good

business.

Yeah, for sure. So you touched on

another major issue, and I see two equal and opposite

responses to this. They're both wrong. So both of them

stem from misunderstanding how big their market is. Right?

Either, like, overtly, we just that we've we've maxed out the

market, or inadvertently, we just believe that we've maxed

out the market, but we've never actually asked the

question. So the first one is, we have to start brand new

things in totally different markets that don't play to our

strengths, and it's just try everything or buy everything,

right? And the other side of it is, well, we've done

everything we can in the market. I guess we'll just eke

out a little bit more efficiency and try to be more

profitable, and revenue will grow by 6% with the market,

and that's it. And we just kind of coast, right? So how

can folks really unpack how big the market is?

Well, so part of my kind of back my background

is research, and so I'm a big advocate of doing market

research, whether you're doing, you know, quantitative,

qualitative, predictive analytics while you're doing

secondary research, is to get facts, not only internally,

but externally, to try to understand the dynamics. What

are the market drivers, behaviors, those kinds of

things, in laying a strategy that way, if you moved into

like the example, moving into the robotics market, well, who

are the competitors in that market? How many are there?

Who owns what share? What are the possibilities of actually

being able to leverage the presence or perception of our

brand into that new segment? And so all those factors have

to be weighed. But a lot of times decisions are made, you

know, in this particular companies, you know, is like,

yeah, that sounds good. Let's go to robotics. It was like,

well, let's do some due diligence first, before you

invest a whole lot of time and energy to find out that what

maybe you win one account, what you spent, you know, 10

times 1010, fold, to win that. And so companies don't, my

broad opinion, spend the time to really understand not only

the market, and they're competing in rights, sales are

happening, revenues happening. But you know how much you

missing out on is and so doing that due diligence to really

drill down, like we do a lot of competitive analysis, and

it's typically a one and done. You know, we're do our annual

competitive intelligence, yeah, but as soon as we're

done with it, competitors do something different. If you

don't have an ongoing program, you're in trouble. We see that

with SWOT analysis. And you know, they they do them, but

they don't really use them, right? Yeah, so can again,

just again, I can't emphasize enough, is just doing that due

diligence to really identify the facts, not your personal

opinions. You know, I should get out of the boardroom. You

know, I work on a wafer stepper company, and did help

make semi semiconductors. And there were a million dollars

at the time, a machine was a million dollars, and they were

making these decisions. And I was like, Whoa, time out. How

many of these are you personally going to buy this

year? And the answer was none, I said. So why are we using

your opinion, not the engineers that are going to

have to make those decisions? We need to go talk to them.

And so that's another thing, is go talk to your customers,

not not ask your sales people, because it comes back a little

filtered. But, you know, hire an independent person to go

out and talk to your customers and really understand why they

make decisions to hire you, not to hire you, why they buy

what's important to them, how they even find out about you.

And so again, back to that due diligence.

So good. I want to take a bit of a

personal turn here. So a lot of folks I work with, a lot of

folks that are listening to this podcast, are founders.

And one of the things that's a little different about

founders is like the business is their baby, and it's true

for nonprofits as well, to some extent. And one of the

things that a lot of founders want to do is they want to

leave a legacy behind, right? And particularly from your

lens in terms of your brand or strategy or kind of the ethos

of the company, how do you capture that to ensure that

their legacy thrives even after they're gone?

Well, that's always an interesting

question, right? Because depending on how you sell or

whether you're passing it on to your kids or. Whatever

you're doing. Ultimately, once you don't own it, they can do

anything they want to do with it, right? And so, so part of

that is, is ensuring that you have a strong brand, and that

people don't, if you will, don't want to mess with it,

because it potentially is going to hurt them in the

marketplace. And and so that's, you know, building a

brand takes time. It's nurturing. It takes

investment. It's not an expense, it's an investment.

And to making sure that there's consistency across not

only your communications externally, but internally,

companies do a poor job in really bringing their

employees on board and making sure that they understand

their role, what's their their piece of the puzzle, and how

it contributes to the whole and and because everybody they

walk out the door at night, they're not just the

accountant or the, you know, inventory manager, they're

they're a brand ambassador, but if they don't understand

what's going on, they can't communicate. So I think

there's it has to be kind of nurtured and set along that

people feel proud and and and enthusiastic about working for

an organization, and that helps to cement, you know,

what that stands for. But, you know, once you sell it in,

like, in my case, once I sold my company, they, you know,

we, opted for a completely new, different name, you know,

my, my name disappeared from the from the shingle, if you

will. And that was okay with that. I wasn't looking for a

legacy of, you know, looking to grow a business, but those

that want to pass it on, I mean, I think you have to

really nurture it along. And, you know, it's your baby, and

I get that, you know, as I've This is my third business that

I found, and I'm very protective of it, but I found

ironically with my last name, it doesn't speak well

sometimes you know that that's Yeah.

Got it. I think the thing that really

struck me there is you just have to know what's important

to you right, to some it's legacy, and that's great. One

of the things that you've done, if you've reached a

stage where you can think about these things right, or

have to think about them. You've earned the right to do

what you want with it. Right? You may not be able to

maximize some dollar amount based on all of those things.

Maybe you can, maybe you can't, but knowing what's most

important to you during the process is really what I think

is the most important. And I love how you've identified,

hey, this is what I was trying to do at that stage. Okay, now

you can set your strategy based on that. It was very,

very cool. I've got another question that I want to ask

you. Ask all my guests. I'm interested to see what you

have to say. Antelope, the question is this, what is the

biggest secret that you wish wasn't a secret at all. What's

that one thing you wish everybody watching or

listening today knew?

Well, I think that's there's a lot to unpack

there, but I think the for me, it's get out of your own head,

get out of the boardroom and go out into the market and get

the facts. Again. I there's so many case studies of people

sitting around the boardroom, making decisions or not paying

attention to trends in the market. I mean, just go back

to Blockbuster. Kodak is a couple examples, right? They

knew. I mean, Kodak invented the digital camera. You know,

Blockbuster had the chance to buy Netflix and red box, but

they rationalize that, hey, nobody's going to want to

watch, you know, Kodak pictures on their television,

those kinds of things. So, I mean, you have to be very

aware of what the trends are and what's happening in the

market, and the influences that are going on. And so,

like I said, you know, get out of your own thinking. Make

decisions based on facts and not emotion, I think is the I

wish I could make everybody can see.

Yeah, so good Angela, there's some

folks listening, and they find themselves recognizing that

they they believe that their market is too small, or

they're thinking about that next stage, or that next exit,

or that next acquisition, and they want someone to really

help craft a strategy around it, where can they find more

out about you and the work that you do.

So the easiest way is to connect with me on

LinkedIn that has links to my website, my social channels

and things like that, but LinkedIn is probably the best

on my website. I do have, you know, some free resources,

some ebooks and things like that. I'm actually, I'm about

six weeks away from a strategic planning book, if

you will, that we'll be introducing, and it'll be up

on the website, but the but that's the easiest place,

everything, all my resources are on the website. But to get

there. As easy as through LinkedIn.

Got it excellent. We'll get the

LinkedIn profile and his website in the profile or in

the show notes. So feel free to click through on those.

Angelo, thanks for being on the show. Just love, love the

way that you you look at the world, you look at business.

There's some really great insights in there that I think

are very powerful for some of the folks listening today, I

know I enjoyed them, and for those of you who are watching

and listening, you know your time and attention mean the

world to us, I hope you got as much out of this conversation

as I know I did, and I cannot wait to see you next time.

Take care.