Ep 553 Why 17.5% of Owners Are Burnt Out and Want to Sell

**Colin Morgan** (0:01)
Hi there, and welcome back to another edition of Built to Sell Radio, the podcast designed to help you punch above your weight in a negotiation to sell your company. I'm the executive producer Colin Morgan, and today we're trying something new.
Instead of one guest, John is hosting a panel, and the conversation gets pointed. He's joined by Lee McCabe, a private equity veteran who now advises PE firms on the businesses they buy, and Jason Swenk, who built marketing agencies and sat on the buy side acquiring them. The trigger for the discussion is finding from our PREScore data, 17.5% of business owners now say burnout is the number one reason they want out, not retirement, burnout. John pushes both guests hard on the question underneath that number. If you're tired and feel like AI is a threat and you don't have the energy to fight, do you sell now or is your business worth more than you think? They don't fully agree, which is what makes it worth your time. If you'd like to see more panel episodes just like this one, leave a comment on the YouTube page and let us know. It helps us decide what to provide for you next. Though further ado, enjoy the conversation.

**John Warrillow** (1:13)
Lee McCabe, Jason Swenk, welcome back to Built to Sell Radio.

**Jason Swenk** (1:17)
Thanks for having us.

**Lee McCabe** (1:18)
Yeah, thanks for having us.

**John Warrillow** (1:19)
Yeah, it's good to have you both here. And it comes at an interesting time. We've just analyzed the users of our PREScore assessment. And this is an assessment we have business owners do as they're thinking about kind of selling their company. And we've looked at it long dissimilarly over six years. And so we've just done a big deep dive. There's a couple of things that are popping out. Today, one in five business owners say their primary reason for wanting to exit is burnout. If we look at that cohort of people who are burnt out and kind of unpack it, 57% say too much stress versus 11% of the overall market.
41% say my business is taking too much time versus 13% of the overall.
40% want to cash out versus 28% of the overall. Here's what's interesting. Time to retire, it's basically a dead heat. What I'm getting away from this is that business owners, many of them, don't necessarily want to go retire, but they are really burned out. And I think part of the burnout is coming from everything they've gone through. Like if you're a 50-something business owner today, you've gone through 9-11, great financial crisis, COVID, and now you've got this thing called AI. And I think a lot of people are kind of throwing up their hands in the air and saying like, I'm out. Like I don't have another transformation in me. Like I just don't have the stomach for it.
And that's why I wanted to have you both on this conversation. Lee, you've been in private equity, you started off at Alibaba in North America, then you were in private equity, now you advise private equity companies. Jason, you built marketing agencies, one of the kinds of companies that are being affected by AI, both good and bad. You've then worked at the acquiring company, looking at acquiring agencies, and then today you help agency owners get ready to exit. So you've got a really interesting lens on this. So let me throw it open to the group. Lee, maybe you can start. Should business owners just hang it up? And if they're feeling burnt out, what do they do?

**Lee McCabe** (3:24)
Well, look, if they're feeling burned out, I think that's a whole different issue. If the question is, how should they think about AI, I would say this.
One, it depends on the business, but as a whole, I'm an optimist in general. And I think AI can be a great amplifier for your business. We're in a gold rush right now, and the ones that figure it out first will benefit. But the ones that figure out first, I think, have to do the basics very well, which most business owners don't. AI is not a magic wand. It's not some ominous threat that's going to approximate your business or your industry overnight. So I would say take a look at your business. If your business is built on data and process and systems, then AI should be a big advantage for you. But that's where most business owners are not in that place.

**John Warrillow** (4:17)
Jason, what's your stats? Agree with Lee or have data?

**Jason Swenk** (4:22)
So about a year ago, when I started watching all the propaganda of all these social media people, I just replaced my agency with AI, and I started watching some of their videos. They sucked me in, those creative people. And I was like, yeah, agencies are done, or a lot of businesses are going to go out of business. And then I started really getting into AI. And I was like, this is the most amazing tool. And kind of like what Lee was just saying is, if your business is not built on systems, and you are the biggest bottleneck, AI is going to destroy you and expose you. But if you have systems, and you look at... I always tell people, use AI and start where your biggest bottleneck is. How can I replace myself? Too many business owners are still operators, where they're doing everything. They focus on sales, then they focus on operations, sales goes down, and vice versa.