Philip Arthurs On Becoming A Successful Entrepreneur Through Business Acquisition

 

Why start a business from scratch when you can just buy one? That’s what business acquisition is all about. In this episode, Rodney Flowers is joined by Philip Arthurs, serial entrepreneur and an evangelist for business acquisition. They talk about the benefits of acquiring a business and the opportunities that lie with having the right strategies and systems in place. Philip shares helpful tips on how anyone can become an entrepreneur with the right mindset. It might be easier than you think. Tune in to learn more!

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Philip Arthurs On Becoming A Successful Entrepreneur Through Business Acquisition

I’m excited about this show. There are many ways to win and get to where you want to go. There are opportunities all over the world, and we’re going to step outside and take a look around. There’s opportunity everywhere. With that being said, you can get to your goal through starting a business, being a speaker, or writing a book, and you can also get to go through franchising. The opportunities are limitless. I have an expert here who’s experienced with business acquisition and buying a business to get to your goal. He’s a Business Owner, a CPA, an Evangelist for acquisition entrepreneurship, and he’s spreading the word about why buying an existing business is the best way to become an entrepreneur. Furthermore, if you want to learn more about it, he also is the host of the Business Miner Podcast. His name is Philip Arthurs, and he’s here with me to help you change the game and acquisition, entrepreneurship. Without further ado, let’s welcome Philip Arthurs to the show. Welcome to the show, Philip.

Thanks, Rodney. I appreciate you so much for having me on the show. I’m excited, and I’m honored that you’d have me on your show.

I’m glad you’re here. I love the work that you’re doing because there are many ways to get to where we want to go in life. It’s understanding that process and understanding that when there’s an opportunity, and I want to take that opportunity, what skillsets do I need to learn? What do I need to know? How can I better put myself in a position to succeed? You don’t hear this much. You don’t hear people talking about buying a business. I want to learn more about why this is the best way to become an entrepreneur and what is your experience with purchasing a business? I know you’re a business owner and a CPA but give us a little bit about your background and how you got to where you are right now.

I grew up with humble means. I grew up in a small trailer park in Auburn, Alabama. My parents were both college students. My mom had me young in life, so we had humble beginnings. My mom and dad, I saw them work hard and overcome a lot of challenges. They got their college degree, and I noticed life started getting better and better. We started moving on. I saw their dedication to their family and how hard they worked, so it was a big thing for me. My dad was a military guy, and he taught me a lot about work ethic, perseverance, and overcoming fear and fear of failure, and moving forward. That’s about me, personally.

I went to Auburn University. That’s where we were living. My parents graduated, and we stayed there, so I went through Auburn University, got my degree in Accounting, and graduated. I started working at a public accounting firm in Atlanta, Georgia. It was one of the top CPA firms in the country and it still is. From there, I got into consulting, internal controls, and processes. With this publicly-traded company, I got to travel the world. That was a lot of fun. I got married and decided traveling the world is hard to do while you’re married. My wife and I’s first Valentine’s date was through Skype because I was in Malaysia at the time. It was a lot of fun traveling the world.

We got married, moved away from Atlanta back to Birmingham, Alabama. That’s where I live now and started working with a CPA firm there. It’s also one of the largest in the country. I got into their consulting group doing turnaround work. Turnaround Advisories is what we call it and I was leading that group for a little while, but we would turn around failing businesses. Toward the end, before I left, the economy was doing well, so a lot of transaction work was going on. We were helping clients, so I went to help the transaction advisory group, helping them help clients with buying and selling businesses. I got to be involved in the due diligence and seeing all these business transactions and learning about multiples, how to tell if somebody’s financial statements look accurate.

I was an auditor too, for years, so I brought my auditor hat. I was looking through their records, making sure the revenue was correct because when you’re evaluating the purchase price of a business, the revenue, and the net income, those are big deals. You want to make sure that’s accurate. I got to be involved with that. I fell in love with it at that point. I loved business transactions. I got hired out of there by one of my largest clients and became their CFO. The CEO was my former boss and he brought me over as the CFO. From there, we started buying up other businesses to help grow that business. On the one hand, I had experience helping clients buy a business.

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I saw where other clients were and this company that I was working for as their CFO, helping them grow their business through acquisition, which they’re completely different animals in my mind. It’s all in the same vein but different ways to approach it. I got involved in that, buying and selling businesses and that company sold for a good bit of money. That sold in October 2020, so I decided to take my consulting practice on my own. I’m a real estate investor as well, so I have my own real estate investing business, my consulting practice, and I started the Business Miner Podcast.

Congratulations.

Thank you. I’m excited about that and we’ve got a coaching program along with that, so that’s about me in a nutshell.

Why is acquisition the best way to entrepreneurship, in your opinion?

There’s a lot of reasons, honestly. Let’s start with 90%-plus of startups ultimately fail. The odds are stacked against you when you start a business.

I know those numbers exist, so I have a problem with those numbers because there’s something that follows those numbers. Yes, 90% of startups fail, but then 90% of the businesses that fail, fail because they run out of money.

That’s where I was about to go next. It’s probably because 10% have the right mindset. Being successful is a mindset. It’s what you feed your brain is what you tell yourself. It’s what you think. I agree with you 100%. Going back to that statistic and you look at why they are failing, you mentioned it. Cashflow. That is the second-largest reason. The first largest reason is people start up a business and there’s no market for it. People come out with this product or the service that nobody wants. They didn’t go out and test their market or do the right thing, so they poured a bunch of money into something that didn’t work.

 

Given those two reasons, you buy an existing business. I can look at this business. It’s been running for several years. It’s got good management in place. It’s making money. It’s cashflowing. That’s a big deal. The company doesn’t have to have it all together. There can be some value as that you can grow from that business, but the biggest thing is it’s making money and people are buying. You can see a trend and the revenue. You come up with your criteria. You might want to say, “I want to see revenue increasing every year.” You see revenue increasing, it’s cashflowing, and it’s making money.

If you go and you do a startup, you have no money to begin with. You are building from scratch. You’re a hunter at that time. You’re going out there and you’re trying to bring in the sales. You’re handling the marketing and the HR side. You might be handling the bookkeeping side, even though most people probably shouldn’t do their bookkeeping. There’s a lot of things that go into a startup business and it’s exhausting. If you can step into a business on day one and you can start paying yourself a salary while you’re building the business, the compound effect is going to be phenomenal. You’re going to be able to do so much more and have more impact on that business if you go through and buy it.

Here’s the thing, Rodney, and all the game changers out there. If you buy a business, you’ve got the money there, the cashflow. It’s going to help you build that business. What a lot of people don’t know, Rodney, is it doesn’t take a whole lot of money to buy a business. It does in the grand scheme of things, but if you have access, you could probably do it with $60,000. If you don’t have it yourself, you can get a HELOC on your house or you can raise money from friends and family. There are ways to do it, but it is possible to buy a business that does $1 million in revenue with $60,000 cash. Maybe $65,000 to pay some fees and stuff like that, your attorneys and advisors or whatever. With $60,000, you could be making $100,000 plus salary. You put in $60,000, and you make $100,000 that first year in salary, not including the value that you’re going to get from the enterprise value growing as you grow the profits.

When you buy a business, typically, you’re valuing it as a multiple of your seller’s discretionary earnings, which is your EBITDA, which is calculated by your net income. The E in EBITDA stands for Earnings. You take your net income, plus your taxes, depreciation, and amortization. You take that number and you add back some things whatever you pay yourself, or if you took a vacation out of the business or whatever. You get back to the seller’s discretionary earnings, and a lot of times, small businesses, their SDE is somewhere between 2 and 4 times that number.

If that seller’s discretionary earnings is $300,000 and you want to buy that and multiple and he bought at a multiple of two, and that’s based on comparables, what other businesses have sold for in that industry. You multiply that multiple times, that seller’s discretionary earnings and that gets you to the value of the business. Two times $300,000, that’s $600,000. You can get an SBA loan for 10% of that, so your $60,000 is your 10% and the bank covers the rest. It’s not going to work in every situation. In some industries, the banks don’t particularly like lending at that 90% loan to value, but it is possible to buy a business.

If you have $300,000 SDE and you have a $540,000 loan, you have enough to pay yourself a good salary of $100,000 easily. Cover your debt service and money left over to pump into growing the business. Baby Boomers are retiring at a rate of 10,000 to 11,000 per day, Rodney. A lot of these guys have businesses and a lot of them are profitable. The statistics say the majority of them are profitable so if you bought one of those businesses, you could easily put out $60,000, make $100,000 a year being able to cover your debt service. A lot of these older guys who are trying to retire aren’t great with social media marketing, there are a lot of upsides there. You can start putting some of that money into marketing through Facebook, Instagram, Google AdWords, and things like that and maybe improving some of the equipment or whatever you need to do. There’s a lot of opportunity through buying a business and a lot of people don’t realize it.

A couple of things that I would like to touch on. You mentioned that you spend $60,000 and you can start making $100,000 the first year. Is that an anomaly? Is that not something that you see regularly or is this a one-off type of thing?

That’s pretty common. It depends on the business now. If it’s a type of industry, where they multiple might be a four. Now your four times $300,000 is $1.2 million, so now you’re going to have to come out of pocket $120,000. It’s all about your multiple on the type of business you’re buying.

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The next thing is, what type of businesses fit that scenario? That’s an attractive scenario. That’s why I’m pulling the string on that. What type of businesses are we talking about?

Businesses that are 2 or 4 multiples, anywhere in that range.

What’s the multiple? I’m sorry, I don’t know what that means when you say multiples.

It’s the multiple you’re using to talk to multiply times the seller’s discretionary earnings. Let’s say a plumbing business. I like plumbing. Plumbing has an average multiple of 2.5 times SDE. If they make an SDE of $300,000, then you take $300,000 times 2.5 and that gets you your enterprise value, basically what the business is worth.

Give us a more clear understanding of what the SDE is.

SDE is your EBITDA and you add back whatever you pay yourself. You have a business. If you go take a vacation and use the money from your business, if you were to do that, that would be added back probably. There are gray areas about whether you should do that or not, but a lot of times, a business broker or whoever’s an advisor would say, “They spent $10,000 on a vacation. We’re going to add that back to the EBITDA.” The EBITDA is basically your net income, with you adding back your interest, depreciation, amortization, and taxes. That’s the acronym of EBITDA. Earnings Before Interest Taxes Depreciation and Amortization. If you pay yourself a salary of $100,000, so your EBITDA is $200,000, and you pay yourself $100,000, you’re adding the $200,000 plus the $100,000 now you’re back at $300,000 Seller’s Discretionary Earnings. It’s the simplest high-level way to explain that.

The multiple comes based on similar to cap rate in real estate. They use a cap rate. It’s a multiple and it’s based on what other businesses have sold for. Nobody says, “Arbitrarily, this is the multiple.” If we see that plumbing businesses are selling at a certain price, we can back into how many times are the seller discretionary earnings is that business selling for? At least, the terminology that I’m using, a lot of them is more for a small business, businesses that are probably making $10 million revenue and less. If you’re talking about getting too much larger businesses, that’s not my thing. I’m all about smaller, closely-held businesses.

 

These more services-type businesses.

I love services-type businesses. I like roofing, plumbing, electrical things. HVAC is a good one. They’re things that are not going to have a lot of market disruption. They’re not going to have a lot of technology. Think about when you buy a technology company. There’s a lot of risks there that somebody is going to come behind you and build something bigger and better and completely make you irrelevant. It is not just technology. Look at what happened to Blockbuster. It’s gone. They didn’t keep up.

They made some delayed decisions. They didn’t move fast enough.

Also, WorldCom. There are a lot of other companies out there that, because of technology innovation, they were behind. They were made obsolete. That’s not going to happen in plumbing, electrical, HVAC and roofing. Everybody needs those things and they’re Steady Eddie. Slow growth, but steady. Let’s say I went and bought a plumbing business at a 2.5 multiple. If I go string along ten of those in a region, say I do it in the Southeast, I go 10 or 20, I can package those up, sell them to a private equity group at a ten multiple, which is going to provide exponential growth.

There’s a lot of strategy behind it. There are a lot of upsides because once you get into the flow of this, understand the strategy and how to do this, it opens up a lot of opportunities for you as an entrepreneur. Are these businesses mostly owner absent or absentee owner-type businesses?

It depends. The ones that are more absent from their business probably are going to be more distressed. I’m going to keep using the plumbing example. Maybe a master plumber working for another plumbing company wants to start his own business and he’s his own guy. He built up a small business with a couple of plumbers, and he wants to sell it. It’s going to be hard to sell for him because he is the business. If he grew it big and had multiple master plumbers below him, had team leads, and he had a whole system of management in place, that’s a game-changer right there. Now, I want to buy that business because I’m not a plumber. I have no desire to be a plumber. I’m not going to do all the work that it takes because it takes 1,000 hours of working for another master plumber for you to even get your master certification.

I’m not going through all that. I can’t buy a small plumbing business like that. If I had an existing plumbing business that already had management in place, now I go by that little plumbing company. I bolt them on and I can integrate them all together and do what’s called a roll-up and you start buying out the small plumbers and creating one large company. You’re talking exponential growth when you do that, Rodney. If you bought it two multiple and then you sold it at a ten once you’ve grown it big, that’s 500% growth from the multiple alone, not considering the growth in revenue and everything else you’ve done. Streamlining your profit and loss statement and making sure that you’re more profitable from that standpoint. There’s so much opportunity to build your wealth doing this.

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What it sounds like in that scenario is the system. You have a system in place. That system is what allows you to buy up those other smaller companies and then you implement that system. The system becomes proprietary data, if you will, for lack of a better term. That’s the difference-maker.

You talk about processes and systems. I have something written on my board and it says, “You don’t rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” That’s something I try to live by, having systems and processes in place. I use a software called Trainual. You can document your entire business in Trainual. You can segment that in Trainual and say, “Here’s the training related to the HR processes and systems,” Whoever joined your HR team would have access to that. Day one, they get hired. They go in and they can watch videos. They can read through everything they need to do to do their job and execute their responsibilities appropriately without having to do a whole lot of training. It’s a way of training people. It’s something that they can go back to. Trainual is good.

I don’t know if you’ve read the book The E-Myth by Michael Gerber. He helped sponsor people who built this. In that book, there was a hotel. Everything that those people did in that hotel was meticulously documented because he was blown away, “How does everybody know how to do their job? How does everybody do it consistently?” When you go into a business, you love consistency. You go into a restaurant like McDonald’s or something. That hamburger tastes the same and looks the same at every single McDonald’s I’ve ever been to. It’s because they have everything documented down to a tee, “This is how many pickles you put on. This is what you put on first. This is what you put on last.” It’s the same experience every time I go to McDonald’s.

I’m glad we brought this up. That’s the key to success. I’m not sure everyone operates their business that way. They have a system that is documented, duplicatable, and repeatable for themselves and the people that are in their business. When we talk about being a game-changer, whether you’re buying a business or running a business, this seems to be something of consideration that should be implemented, if you will.

Michael Gerber says, “You’re building the business as if you were going to franchise it. As if you were going to take your entire business and hand it over to another owner and they can completely run your business from that.” That’s what I use Trainual for. In my real estate business, my team knows everything. They don’t have to ask me questions. They may have asked me one time. I say, “Let’s hop on a quick Zoom call and get it recorded.” Another is Screencast-O-Matic, which is free for fifteen minutes of recording. You can get on there and you can record your screen and show exactly what you’re doing. You talk through it, “Here’s what I’m doing. Here’s why I’m doing it.” You have them pull that together and put it in a document.

They have a video. My team builds out the Trainual. I don’t build it out. I do the recordings. I tell them, “Here’s exactly how to duplicate this process. This is the way I want it done every time.” They go into Trainual and they document everything down to the tee. I go back and review it. Let’s say something’s not working and I want to make a pivot in the business. I go to that process in Trainual, I make the change, hit a button, and it alerts everybody who has something to do with that process. It alerts them through an email, “This process has changed. Here’s what’s changed.” They could click on it and they go there and they can read it. Everybody’s in the loop of the change that you made in your business. That is a game-changer.

Do they have a website?

Yes, it’s Trianual.com. It has been a game-changer for us. I had an assistant and she got sick, bless her heart, and she couldn’t work for us anymore. I had to retrain somebody. I was like, “I don’t want to ever do that again.” It wasn’t long after that, I read The E-Myth. Not long after that, I saw a Trainual come through my Facebook feed. I looked at it and I was like, “I’m getting that. That’s what I want.” Documenting your business, every single aspect of it, is the best way to get your team in the loop and for a way to grow and scale. If you want to scale your business, you’ve got to be good at working with people and training people. That’s one way to do it. Have it consistent and keep everybody in the loop when something changes.

 

The idea of incorporating systems, is it something that you would recommend for those $10 million-plus type businesses? We have to have that system in place. What about the smaller service base type of businesses? Is the system just as important?

It depends. If they’re a smaller business and they want to stay small and they don’t want to maximize their profit, they don’t need it. It takes work. Honestly, it took me a lot of work to get some of this together. Another game-changer for me is I hired somebody from the Philippines to work in my business. I pay them a wage that is a deal here in the US but over there, it’s a lot of money to them. It’s a win-win for both of us. They work my hours. I started with one assistant and now I have multiple. They’re friendly and helpful. They helped me with this. When I was building out Trainual, they helped me. I was the mastermind behind everything and then I would tell them what to do. I would record videos for them. Recording the videos takes a lot of work. I’m like, “I can do it quicker if I did it myself.”

My advice would be to stay up later. I did that. I stayed up until 4:00 AM working on my website. It’s my marketing stuff. You’ve got to grind sometimes if you want something bad enough. You had a guest on. His name was Mike Goldman. He said that if people are frustrated, it’s because they’re too focused on what they don’t want. I love what he had to say about focusing on what you want and your why and the reason why you’re doing this business. You may have to stay up late one night to get these things documented.

I prefer to have them on the phone with me while I’m going through it and explaining because they have questions. If you can’t have them on the phone and you’ve got the time, do it at night when nobody’s bothering you. Record some of these processes in your business. Everybody should know what their hourly rate is. You should know what an hour of your time is worth. An hour of my time is worth a lot of money. I’m not trying to boast, but it is and I come up with that. If I can pay somebody less per hour than what my hourly rate is and it’s something that they could handle and do fine with it, I’m going to let them do it.

Too many people get into business and they’re afraid of doing what’s most important in their business because it’s hard. The things that are going to drive revenue to your business, the revenue-producing activities, tend to be the hard activities, the ones you don’t want to do and the ones you procrastinate. When you start getting into procrastinate mode, you’ll look for little easy tasks that you can feel good about yourself. It’s like, “I got all this stuff accomplished.” You wasted your time. Somebody else could have handled those tasks. You could have quickly delegated.

Take five minutes and type out an email of what you want. If a five-minute email can save you twenty minutes, that’s a lot. If you calculate your hourly rate, you can see how much time you’re saving and how much money you’re saving by saving your time. As entrepreneurs, we have to guard our time. We have to focus on revenue-producing activities. Sometimes that means you’re going to feel like you’re wasting time developing things to help save you time. Recording the Screencast, training your people, building out your Trainual, and documenting your business, all that feels like you’re not doing anything, but it’s highly important.

Those are activities that are not sexy. They’re tedious types of things that require a lot of time and they’re painful. Those activities, once you get them done, that’s where the sexiness comes in. It’s helpful to have those things in place but yet difficult to put them in place. However, they’re necessary. It’s one of those things where you have to have that grit side of mentality to go ahead and get those things done. That’s the grunt work. That’s the down-in-the-dirt type of work that you have to do to be successful. It’s like film study. If you’re in a game and you want to win, you have to study the film. That’s long hours of play, rewind, and play again. It’s similar to that type of stuff. It’s small, incremental activities that make a big difference.

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You talked about not only the system but putting the system in place, developing the system, understanding the system, understanding the processes. A lot of businesses may not even understand the product. When you begin to think about, “What’s the process here that makes this business operate?” That may be daunting in and of itself. I come and I do things. The things that I do make me money. I haven’t thought about the intricate details around what I do every single day. For me to sit down and think about that and put that in place, that’s a daunting task.

I don’t want to do that. I’d rather do what I’ve been doing because it’s making me money. The other side of that is, do you want to make more money? Do you want to scale? Do you want to grow? Do you want to continue to be where you are? Having that vision to look beyond, “Today, this is what’s happening.” Think at this moment. If you could put something in place now that can help you be more successful in the future, what’s the value in that? What’s the value of bringing some energy and attention to that daily basis until it’s complete?

I’ve heard multiple successful millionaires say this one thing, “What got you here won’t get you there.” You’ve got to change and adapt. You’ve got to better yourself. As entrepreneurs, we’ve got to focus on making ourselves better. I’m a big advocate of reading. I don’t know if you’ve been on Clubhouse yet. It’s a new app.

I’ve heard about it. It’s just for iPhones.

There are brilliant minds in these rooms talking. All of them are readers. Readers are leaders. I advocate reading 8 to 10 pages every single day without fail. Make the commitment to do it. Learn from other people. “You’re the average of the five people that you spend the most time around.” That’s the Jim Rohn quote and it’s true. You’re a product of your environment. If you want to be better, go find somebody that’s where you want to be and hang around those people. You will start to talk like them, look like them, and act like them. It’s all about mindset.

Philip, how can people connect with you if they want to find you and learn more about you?

I set up a welcome page for all of your readers. It’s www.TheBusinessMiner.com/gamechangermentality. We got some valuable resources over there. We have a free letter of intent template for anybody who wants to maybe go and start making offers on a business. There’s also a document on there at the top, Read This Before You Buy A Business. This is going to be twelve things that you should be thinking about. If something I said resonates with one of your readers, I want to be an entrepreneur. That’s a better way to do it. Download that document. Read it. If you have any questions about it, there’s also a way for them to schedule a free 30-minute consultation with me. I’m glad to hop on the phone with somebody and talk to them about their dreams, goals and give them some feedback there. They can reach me there. I’m on Twitter, @TheBizMiner. On Instagram, @Phil.Arthurs.

Thank you for sharing your expertise with us on business and why acquisition could be a valuable opportunity and a path to success. I appreciate that. You don’t hear about buying a business often. There’s a lot of fear around buying a business. It’s not having an understanding of what you’re getting into or not being able to analyze a business to the point of realizing that it’s not a high-risk area. This is something doable and something that I can make successful. I love the way you talked about the myth around it being too expensive. Most businesses are crazy expensive. The fact that you can get into a business for $60,000 and then turn around and make $100,000 the first year, that’s attractive. I hope the readers are taking that into account. We’ll go to your website and take a look at that letter of intent.

 

I was in an interview with someone that came on the show. They were talking about how game-changers, successful people, and rich people, they’re open to multiple avenues of gaining wealth and being successful. It’s not one thing that they’re focused on. They seem to master a thing, and then they’re open to reaching out and mastering another thing. Sometimes you get to the point where you’re on cruise control in your businesses. You’ve mastered it, and you’re looking for other ways to invest your money or looking for other revenue streams. Take a peek. No one is asking you to spend money.

Get an understanding of what’s available out there. If you’ve taken a step forward to explore this, you may find something that’s out there. Explore a little bit more and you may find that it’s affordable. It’s the right fit for you. If you pull the trigger on it, before you know it, you have 4 or 5 of these things. You’re changing the game. You’re making money. You’re being successful. I believe in being open to other ways of doing business, other ways of serving, other ways of growing. This is one of them. Thanks for coming to the show and sharing that with us. As we wrap up, we like to ask you, when it comes to overcoming obstacles and changing the game in life, what is one of the things that you would like to leave with us that would help us bounce back from adversity, dominate challenges, and consistently win in life?

I would love to share this. First of all, I am a follower of Jesus Christ. I believe that He died for my sins. I want to say that first. My eyes were opened to something. I was battling fear, anxiety, and feeling a little depressed. I’ve never battled it before. This was as I was building my real estate business and scaling it. I was over overcome with fear and anxiety. It was making me feel sick. I didn’t understand what was going on. Someone close to me shared a book with me called Be in Health. I was reading through it and it said that if you have negative thoughts in your mind, “I can’t do this. This is not for me. Nobody’s going to like me. Nobody’s going to buy my product.” Those negative thoughts or those thoughts that say, “It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there.” If you agree with those thoughts, in my opinion, it is a sin. You are disagreeing with what the Word of God says. God says that you’re wonderfully made. You’re a child of God. You’re the head. You’re not the tail. You’re more than a conqueror. You have to believe that.

If you’re not a Christian, it’s a spiritual law. It applies even if you’re not a Christian. Some people call it Stinking-Thinking. You got to get that crap out of your head. You’ve got to start believing that you can do it. It’s what you feed your brain. Read good books. Listen to positive things. Weed out negative people out of your life and surround yourself with people who are game-changers, winners, people who you want to be like. Hang out with those people. Also, I want to leave your audience with a quote from Napoleon Hill. He wrote a book called Think and Grow Rich. It’s an interesting book. It’s a great read. I believe in it 100%. It applies to me all the time. The quote is, “Every adversity, every failure, every heartbreak carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.” That is one of my favorite quotes about success and failure. If you’re an entrepreneur, you’re in business, or in life, failure comes. If you’re afraid to fail, you probably won’t succeed. You can’t be afraid of failure. You have to walk out on faith and do it.

Step forward and make the move. Know that when something fails, maybe it’s God’s way of saying, “Don’t go down that path.” You’ll fail because you’re not meant to go down that path. You need to think and ask God or ask yourself or whatever you want to do, sit there and meditate, pray about it, “What should I do about this failure?” Sometimes if you try to kick down a door that’s not meant to be open, you might find yourself on the wrong side. Things should come naturally, fairly easily. If you have a failure, maybe there’s a reason for it. Think about it. Is there another way around it? Is there a better way? Is there danger ahead? Every adversity, every failure, every heartbreak carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.

Philip Arthurs, thank you for a wonderful show.

Thanks, Rodney. I appreciate you having me on.

Important links:

• Business Miner Podcast
• Trainual
• The E-Myth
• Screencast-O-Matic
• Mike Goldman – Previous episode
• www.TheBusinessMiner.com/gamechangermentality
• Read This Before You Buy A Business
• @TheBizMiner – Twitter
• @Phil.Arthurs – Instagram
• Be in Health
• Think and Grow Rich
• TheBusinessMiner.com
• LinkedIn – Philip Arthurs, CPA
• http://RodneyFlowers.com/get-up-book/
• http://RodneyFlowers.com/essential-assertions-book/
• https://RodneyFlowers.us9.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=01f76a038256f77a6fbc93590&id=307d726734

About Philip Arthurs

Philip Arthurs has spent his career helping people succeed in their businesses and is now an evangelist for the better way to becoming an entrepreneur: business acquisition. He is a Certified Public Accountant who received a BA and Master of Accountancy from Auburn University. Philip spent several years in public accounting with some of the top CPA firms in the country and also worked many years in the manufacturing industry as a Chief Financial Officer. He worked with several different industries in just about every possible accounting-related role possible.

Before leaving accounting and jumping into the industry, Philip managed his firm’s turnaround advisory group helping restructure failing businesses. During this time, he also assisted the firm’s transaction advisory group helping businesses perform due diligence for potential business acquisitions. This gave birth to Philip’s intense passion for buying businesses.

Philip identifies first as a follower of Christ Jesus, then as a loving husband, engaged father, and dedicated entrepreneur. Philip and his wife, Sarah, own a successful real estate investment company as well as a business consulting and coaching practice. As the host of The Business Miner Podcast, Philip delivers gold nuggets to aspiring entrepreneurs, and he is excited to share with your listeners helpful tips for finding, analyzing, and closing on business deals.