Suli Ali — Selling His Business for Millions, Discussion About an Interesting Entreprenur, and a Carl Icahn story

Why Listen To This?

• The Host is a Serial Entrepreneur who chats with a fellow serial entrepreneur — Suli Ali on his lesson from selling his business, How to write a LinkedIn profile and more.

Learnings

• ‘10 – When selling a business, disclose all the skeletons in the closet at the beginning itself.
  • Tell the buyer why they shouldn’t buy the business.
  • They are going to find that eventually when they do their due diligence some 2-3 weeks into the process and it will become really messy then.
• ‘50 – Interesting LinkedIn – Justin Yoshimura

• ‘52 – Justin Yoshimura’s Company – CSC Generation
  • Buys up antiquated furniture stores and makes them digital first.
    • These companies have huge data in legacy equipment. He extracts those valuable customer data and creates an e-commerce website for all the businesses he buys.
• ‘54 – The Buzz Around Justin:
  • Went around asking 50-60 years old furniture stores.
  • When they didn’t accept to being bought, he sent out press releases stating, he is ‘willing to buy these companies for 20-30% more than the public market price, please respond’.
  • As such put out press releases to buy 2 listed companies
• ‘67 – A Carl Icahn story on HR mismanagement
  • He once buys a business making subway cars, having a huge team in New York and a team somewhere in Middle America.
  • The NY Team is spread across 3 floors in a fancy Manhattan building. He goes to them and asks them what they do. They prepare a presentation to demonstrate what they do. After the presentation, he asks the same question again.
  • He then visits the guy who runs the Middle America operations — the one which actually prepares the cars — asks him does he need the NY Team.
  • The guy says, he doesn’t need them, in fact, he has 4 people just to manage the NY team, and if Carl gets rid of those guys, the business will continue to grow and they’ll be fine.
  • The next day, Carl flies to NY and fires 3 floors of people.
  • It was earlier in Carl’s career, that’s why it took him a couple of months to go with it. Had it been now, he would have done it immediately.