My next guest has created a super meaningful and easy-to-follow guide, which is designed to help entrepreneurs build a strong foundation for exiting their businesses on their terms.

Welcome to the Author Hour Podcast. I’m your host Hussein Al-Baiaty and I’m joined by author Wayne Zell, who is here to talk about his new book, Your Multimillion-Dollar Exit: The Entrepreneur’s Business Succession Planner, A Blueprint for Wealth Guide to Success. Let’s get into it.

Hello friends and welcome back to Author Hour. I’m very excited today because I have a special guest, Mr. Wayne Zell. Welcome to the show, my friend.

Wayne Zell: Hussein, it’s great to be with you, and thanks for having me on the show today.

Hussein Al-Baiaty: Absolutely. Wayne, I know you just launched a book and I’m very excited for you and I’m excited to share with our audience all about your journey, how you got on this path of wealth management and not just wealth management but really just identifying this blueprint for how people exit a business or a succession plan. I just appreciate that because I once had a business that—I had over 16 employees and it got so big I didn’t know what to do and I told you earlier that your book is one of those ones that I wish I kind of had earlier.

So I’m excited that it’s out in the world now but before we get into the book, I love to give our audience and listeners a little bit of a personal background of who you are, maybe where you grew up, and what led you down to the path that you’re on now.

The Path to Business Succession

Wayne Zell: It’s an interesting story. First of all, I’m from DC, Washington, DC, and I live in Northern Virginia but how I got to where I am today, it’s funny, I was thinking about that this morning. When I was a freshman in college, it was after my first year at the University of Virginia, I was driving home with my dad and he said, “Well, how did it go this semester?” I said, “It was great. I had a great year, grades were good.”

I was co-lead in Godspell. I’m a right-brain guy, I was really into music, I was writing music, and it was becoming prolific. It was flowing out of me as a lot of people say and it’s just great. So I was totally focused and I said, “It was great” and he said, “What are you going to major in?” and I said, “You know, I’m thinking double major, music, drama, so that I can go into musical theater, maybe on Broadway.”

Because I’ve gotten a lot of really good feedback from a lot of people over the years and I’ve never just taken that jump and there was this pregnant pause. Silence and my dad goes, “So how are you going to pay for school?” and I’m going, “Oh, what? What do you mean by that?” You know, “What do you mean, how am I going to pay for school? You’re going to pay for school.”

He said, “No, you need to get trained in a profession in some kind of useful background so that when you graduate, you can support yourself and I don’t have to worry about supporting you” and that’s the key. Another pregnant pause ensued and I’m sitting there, thinking about “Wait a minute, he just dashed all of my dreams and I’m supposed to respond to this?” It was good advice because I said, “But what should I major in, Dad?”

He said, “You need to go to the business school. The McIntire School of Commerce at the University of Virginia is one of the best schools in the country.” That was 40 some years ago, you know? Almost 45 years ago. I said, “Okay, like what will I study?” He said, “You should study accounting because it’s the language of business” and you know begrudgingly, I applied to the school.

I got in, it was a struggle at first because I really didn’t know what I was doing, and as a right-brain person, a creative person who did creative writing and getting into accounting and numbers and stuff like that, I wasn’t bad at it but I had to immerse myself in the stuff and I taught myself how to be a left-brain thinker. Analytical. Really digging into details as opposed to always thinking visionary, creative, and doing cool stuff and it was a big adjustment for me but I excelled at it and I succeeded.

I got a job at an accounting firm and I worked in the big accounting firm, Arthur Anderson & Company, which is one of the big eight back then. I went into the tax department, which was hard to get into right out of undergraduate and I did that for two years. While I was there, I was realizing that I was surrounded by all these lawyers who had a background in accounting and law and they were so smart and they were so capable and so technically proficient and I felt like, in order for me to succeed as a professional, I’m going to need to go to law school so that I can learn what they learned to think like a lawyer and even further my analytical left side of my brain.

So I went to law school. Again, it was a struggle. I got out, I excelled, I did really well in tax law and so I started out as a tax lawyer doing transactional work and then I—because I loved working with people one-on-one, I gravitated into both estate planning and business planning and for the last 37 plus years, that’s what I focused on and so it marries two very different areas of law together because of my background and accounting in tax, I’m able to work with entrepreneurs and businesses of various sizes.

I represented some really big family companies, the name’s really well-known, I won’t say them to protect the innocent but some very big companies, family-owned businesses, and then entrepreneurs who are just starting up their businesses and over the last 37 years, I’ve worked in business. I actually left practicing law and worked for a George Saurus-backed company called News Reel, which was a spinoff of one of the first search engine companies called Info Seek.

I did that for a couple of years. I was the CFO, the chief financial officer, and the general counsel of that company and I worked inside the company building their business model and working with all the employees. I did it once again back in the late 2010s when I worked for a company that was a registered investment advisory firm and I was general counsel, chief compliance officer and I was in the executive team and I did that as an experiment.

I wanted to really immerse myself in different industries and different businesses and because of that, I have the skill set that is really unique for lawyers, accountants, and others that I can really see the whole picture of what it’s like to do business succession planning for entrepreneurs. I just loved what I do and love to take it out to them and help them succeed, help them realize their personal dreams of wealth and freedom. So that’s my story in a nutshell.

Hussein Al-Baiaty: You know man, it’s a very powerful story but I know there’s quite a bit that happened sort of in between because there are so many transformations — I feel like for you and where you got to. Just how you brought this whole book together is actually pretty cool.

But I want to go back in time a little bit and if you don’t mind, I mean, what you shared with me before we got on the recording that you had gotten cancer at one point in your life and that really woke you up to a specific realization. Can you go there a little bit and share about that sort of story?

Wayne Zell: Absolutely. I talk about it a lot when I’m giving speeches and I’m talking to clients and friends. I mean, it was back in 2002, and I wasn’t feeling real good, I went to see my internist and he said, “Look, I think you had to go see this doctor and get tested.” So I went and got tested and it turned out, I had prostate cancer at the age of 43, which is really young. This is, you know, a long time ago.

I’ll be 65 this year, so I’ve survived it but when you hear that and my wife was at home with my four young children and she had stopped working to basically take care of the family, there’s a bit of a stressor, you know? So, I’d find out that I’ve got cancer, I ultimately had surgery at Johns Hopkins and everything was successful but, i