For many business owners and entrepreneurs, the time comes when they have to move on. When this happens selling your business becomes a priority. What can you do to ensure that you get the most out of it? In this episode, Bob Roark discusses business exit strategies with senior business broker Gary Wofford of Raincatcher LLC. Gary helps businesses buy and sell their companies and here, he gives you what you need to know with how to sell your company. Curious? Then learn more by tuning in to Bob and Gary.

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Watch the episode here:

 

How To Sell Your Business With Gary Wofford

The big questions are how do business owners like us spend our own money, time and effort? How do we grow our businesses and jump the line? That lets us accelerate the delivery of our products and services in our community while being smart about our growth and profit culture and still creating lasting value in our business. Those are the questions in this show and we will share some of those answers. Our guest is Gary Wofford. He's the Senior Business Broker at Raincatcher. Welcome to the show.

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Gary Wofford, thank you so much for taking your time to be a guest on the show. Welcome.

Thank you, Bob. I'm glad to be here with you.

I have been looking forward to this. You started talking about your experience in the franchise space. It seems like there isn't anything you haven't done. If you would tell us a little bit about how you got here.

I have been reflecting on my background and experiences. I do cover a lot of bases. I first was on the corporate side of the franchising world. It was with a company based down in Dallas that decided to franchise all of their company-owned restaurants. That was Bonanza International. I was VP of Operations over about 250 stores. They allowed me to become a franchise owner as a little bit of a stay bonus. My franchise fee was waived and I was able to pick 1 of 2 or 3 stores that would be mine. That's when I first got involved in the ownership side of franchising. It was a wonderful experience.

I was able to develop two additional Bonanza Family Steakhouses as a franchise owner in North Texas and Southern Oklahoma. I go back to that as a grassroots learning experience because with the adage, “You learn where the buck stops.” When it's snowing outside, you got a payroll on Monday and the business is down, you learn what you have to do as a business owner to take care of that. From that very early beginning, I started gaining a strong appreciation for business owners, knowing their world and what they were faced with on a day-to-day basis.

That later led to an opportunity to sell those stores to a larger franchise owner after about 6 or 7 years because the town that I was in built another highway. The cows cut the traffic patterns down quite a bit. I could see the handwriting on the wall that it was time to consider moving on to something else. I did sell those three locations to another franchise owner and that system. I got affiliated with another franchise as the operating partner back in the Dallas-Fort Worth area of Luther's BBQ. We built over 6 or 10 years of AAA locations.

This was back in the day. We were selling barbecue sandwiches for $1.99 but we had $2 million on average with a lot of drive-throughs, takeouts and catering. Each of these restaurants would sit 200 people. We were very successful in the Dallas-Fort Worth market despite some failures of the franchise company. That led to having a little bit of a dispute. We ended up, long story short, settling with those folks. We had to change the name from Luther's to Colter's. I still have the little writing pad that I use to come up with that name because we did a little marketing thing and didn't want to confuse customers.

Luther was the uncle of Colter. Colter was the nephew that took over because Luther retired. The thing I liked about it most is it saved me a lot of money because all the letters and the name were the same numbers of letters. There were canned letters on the building so it was very economical to change the name. Luther's became Colter's and that was a wonderful experience as well. That was about another eight-year segment. My partner ultimately bought me out at that point.

[caption id="attachment_5960" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Sell Your Business: Let's give our customers a reason to want to come back. That's really what it's all about.[/caption]

 

That led me to Colorado where I became affiliated with a company headquartered up in Wyoming. That being Taco John's International. It's a quick-service Mexican chain. I was their VP of Operations and Franchise Support from ‘88 to ‘96, at which time I left the company and went to work for a different segment in franchising. That being Grease Monkey International. Quick lube and preventative maintenance all change people. It's based in Denver. I started there facilitating a strategic plan with the preferred shareholders. They wanted to position the company to sell quite honestly. We were ultimately able to do that.

They brought me on board as Senior VP of Operations and Franchise Development to help implement the plan that we had developed. We did find a buyer after about three years and that opened up an opportunity then to either stay with the company in a different capacity or leave with a little bit of a parachute. That was a chance at that time to establish my own business. My wife and I looked at each other and said, “What are we going to do?” The kids are all grown and gone so we said, “Let's look at our backgrounds and start our own business.” That's when Wofford Management Services was born. We started doing franchise-consulting work because that was my background.

I got an exciting telephone call one day from the Taco John's Franchisees Association saying they were needing some management and help in organizing their company. I was flattered having been the corporate guy. I met all these great franchise owners and they asked if we would take them as a client. That was a flattering opportunity that I jumped on. I became the Executive Director of the Franchisees Association. That led to another piece of our business that lasted for about twenty years where we started doing their annual convention and trade show as a revenue generator.

My wife, Cindy, spearheaded that particular part of Wofford Management Services. I would be in more of the big picture overarching negotiator with the properties, vendors and that kind of thing. She was the one that made it happen and did a wonderful job. We had that franchise experience in putting on a franchise event for franchisees. That led me to the third part of our company, which was franchise brokerage. Having owned them myself and learned from that, having been a franchise owner and developing franchise brands, I started doing franchise brokerage work to help individuals and groups of people who wanted to own their own business.

I was being their guide and consultant. I let them share in my own experiences to help them avoid potentially costly mistakes. A lot of times people don't know what specifically they want to do. I was able to get into their heads a little bit to find out where their passion was and what they enjoyed doing. I could do research and introduce them to franchise models that would be a good fit for them and their unique criteria. I didn't look for people to fit a particular franchise. I looked for the right franchise to fit with a particular client. I did a number of those deals over about a 7 or 8-year period.

I started working on the other end of it because through referrals, people wanted to exit their business after several years. I started doing the brokerage on the other side of the table by finding a successor to take that business over both sides of it. Ultimately, once the pandemic hit us in 2020, which we all relate to, it took away the event business that had been very good for our company. The last event we did was in March of 2019. Although we were planning another event for this same client in March of 2020, like a lot of people, “All of this will be over in a couple of weeks. We can postpone it for a few weeks.” Here we sit and still experiencing the same difficulties with meetings and trade shows.

Cindy decided it was time for her to retire. To your original question, “How did I get here?” I said, “Business brokerage makes the most sense.” That's when I decided. Number one, here in Colorado, you have to have a real estate license to be a business broker so I got that done in February of ‘21. I made a list of about 10 or 11 brokerage firms I was going to talk to. Raincatcher was one that I had become familiar with primarily through LinkedIn. I had seen a little bit of activity that they had posted there. They were number one on t