Ep 556 How Decamillionaires Think About Money. The 3 Digit Rule, Mistakes That Cause Founders to Walk Away From Life-Changing Offers, and Why the Best Thing About Selling Has Nothing to Do With What You Can Buy.

**Colin Morgan** (0:00)
One day, you're gonna have the opportunity to sell your business for life changing money.
And when that day comes, you'll discover the hardest part isn't getting the wire, it's what happens next. I'm Colin Morgan, executive producer of Built to Sell Radio, the podcast designed to help you punch above your weight in a negotiation to sell your business. And this week's episode is part of our After the Deal series where we explore life after the exit, including the challenges and opportunities that come when work becomes a choice, not a requirement.
Now before we dive in, if you're getting value from the show, I'd encourage you to subscribe to our YouTube channel. There you're gonna see full episodes, clips and content you won't find anywhere else. And it's the single biggest way to help support the show. And this week, John sits down with Adam Katz, who spent 20 years advising ultra high net worth families before becoming one himself when he sold his company KORE Private Wealth, a $5 billion wealth management firm. Now, Adam is the author of Making the Zeroes Count, a field guide for decade millionaires, centimillionaires, and billionaires. And in this conversation, he reveals the three-digit rule, why owners anchor to a number and walk away from life-changing money, and why the best part of selling has nothing to do with the money you can buy. Without further ado, here is Adam Katz. Enjoy.

**John Warrillow** (1:25)
Adam Katz, welcome to Built to Sell Radio.

**Adam Katz** (1:28)
Thanks for having me.

**John Warrillow** (1:29)
Yeah, you are the author of a book that's making a lot of waves. It's called Making the Zeroes Count, a field guide for decade millionaires, centimillionaires, and billionaires. It's quite a title. What made you write this book?

**Adam Katz** (1:45)
So, it's funny, I'll tell you, and if I can, I'll just sort of show it, because I'm pretty proud of the aesthetic. Yeah. But it starts with in the back, it says stop counting all of those zeros, just make them all matter.
And that's a really, really important element that this book is not about creating the wealth, it's how do you use financial wealth as a gateway to real wealth, which I talk about as time, autonomy, and health. And in fact, that's the first nugget that I call carries in the book, which you can sort of assimilate into your everyday person, and carry with you, so that in the moment, you can access them. And I've organized them into advice, mindset, career, and money. The whole book is told in a-

**John Warrillow** (2:23)
But why write the book? What was the-

**Adam Katz** (2:25)
Was there some sort of trigger or what happened? Yeah, no, the trigger was two things. One is that in my day job, I work in wealth management industry, and I run a big entrepreneur and founder business. And I have a big team, but I only work with a couple of dozen people at a time.
But I know over the past bunch of decades that my ideas help a lot and really allow people to have a much different life. So I want to help tens to hundreds of thousands of people I'll never meet. So I looked at the book as some type of a megaphone. It was also cathartic and fun to write. And I felt like a lot of times in certain industries, a lagging indicator is what acts as the catalyst. So, you know, a lot of people say, hey, you should write a book to a lot of different people. And I felt like people often say, well, I don't have the time. And then the reality is people sort of run out of things to say when they start writing. And you know this, John, you wrote a book. And I was sitting here a few years ago on vacation and I said, you know what? I do have the time. In fact, one of my caries is this life pie. And I realized that I felt like I had the room. It wasn't an agentic eye that gave me extra hours, but I found I had a new piece that I could insert to the life pie, which was gonna be this book. And I was really disciplined about it. But I felt like at that point, I was about a year and a half or so exited from my own business.
And going back to this lagging indicator concept, all the ideas in this book, for the most part, I could have talked about years ago. But there's something about being not only a provider to lots and lots of founders through the years, but now also being a peer that puts me in a unique spot to write it. So it just felt like the right time.