Hey now, welcome to another edition of the Inside BS Show. And this is what you have been asking me for. So I get feedback from people who watch the show, people who listen to the show, and people who I work with.

And the feedback I get all the time is, Dave, but the businesses I work with are different. Dave, my business is different. Dave, you don't understand.

I don't work for GM. I don't work with IBM. I work with a business that is super successful, but it's successful because a guy founded it 40 years ago, and his son took over, and now it's the third generation.

And Dave, you don't understand. Third generation businesses, like 80% of them fail. So what am I gonna do? How am I gonna give these people advice? Well, this is the show you've been waiting for because I have the person who's the trusted advisor to folks in this exact situation because he came up in the same situation.

But that's not all. He can also help you if you have a successful, privately held business that's in what they call the middle market. And I'm gonna have him define middle market for us.

There's so much advice. I'm not gonna be able to pack it all into 45 minutes. So buckle up, here we go.

My guest today is Bruce Werner of Kona Advisors, and he's gonna help us understand family-owned businesses, privately held businesses, and what you need to do to help them be more successful. Bruce, welcome to the Inside BS Show. Hey, Dave, thanks for having me.

It's great to be here. I love your energy. All right, so here's what I wanna know.

You and your family had a successful business, and now you wanna help other people. Talk about your background and talk about how it led you to do what you do today. Hey, that's great.

So I was born and raised in a family business, and until we sold the business at the right time for the right reasons, all I ever knew was a family business. I didn't know there was another way. I read about IBM and General Motors in the newspaper, but they didn't matter.

If you think about family businesses, go back to the time that people lived in caves. They'd go out, hunt, and gather. Typically, the men would go hunt and gather, and supposedly, the women would stay back.

That was the first family business. I could say a whole lot hasn't changed since then. Dad's telling son, have a do it.

Son said he has a better way. The heart of it's always communication. So during high school and college, I worked in the shop in the business.

We had three or four rules. One is you had to work somewhere else before you came into the business. Second is you had to start at the bottom and work your way up, and because we had four dads and six sons in leadership, you worked for your uncle, not your dad.

Just a little background. At the time we left, at the time we sold the business, we were about, I don't know, four or 500 million in revenue, 55 million in EBITDA, had about 3,500 employees in seven factories U.S. and had licenses around the world. That's the end point.

We started with my father's uncle pushing a cart in lower Manhattan selling needles and thread to feed his 11 brothers and sister because there was no dad back in 19-whatever. And so there's a story about survival, and each generation adapted to changes. And so what I learned about family businesses, it's really, you wear a couple different hats.

You wear a hat as the owner, you probably wear a hat as head of the family, however you define family, and then you're the boss. And those three hats can be confusing. So I always say, if you're in a family business and you're making a decision, which hat are you wearing? Because if you got the wrong hat on, you're not gonna think straight.

So you have built, and I think sold, a number of businesses since the time you were in the family business, right? You've done a lot of other stuff. Yeah, so I have a separate, separate from the family business, I've started four companies, two went into the multi-hundred million dollar range, two not so successful. So if you hit 500 in baseball, it's pretty good, I hear.

I was also a partner in a private equity fund working on the other side of the table, as they say. And then the last 10 years or so, carry two portfolios. I serve as an independent director to private companies, and I serve as a consultant to private companies.

Most of my clients are between 10 and a hundred million dollars of revenue, but certainly lots on both sides. You know, I have clients up to, you know, $500 million. Just depends on what their needs are and how I can help them.

All right, so talk about, because I talk about this till I'm blue in the face, and, you know, sometimes I get through and sometimes I don't, but you have a background that gives you a lot of credibility in this area. Talk about the value of fresh eyes, the value of independent outside advisors to a privately held company and to a family business. How valuable is it to have that perspective? I will say, having made the mistake of not having at critical times, it can be the difference between the best and the worst.

It's about human relations and how we manage our emotions. And I consistently see within our family, when we own the business and in my clients, when it's just the family in the room, I hate to say it, but some part of the brain stops working. You know, if one person leaves a room or there's an outside in the room, everyone's well-behaved, right? Like the teacher is here, but when the, you know, when the mice is away, the cats will play.

When it's just us, it becomes this little echo chamber and that part of the brain doesn't work. And so I am a huge fan of making sure you have trusted advisors who can, the phrase is be the adult in the room, not meant to be derogatory, but just that influencing force, because it changes how we think and how we feel and how we communicate. At the end of the day, successful family businesses are about communicating between family members on both business matters, which we may agree or disagree, which is fine.

And that the family side, which is purely emotion and we're just human, that's hard for everybody. Yeah, I mean, so I worked in public companies and then I worked in a company that was owned by a family in the hospitality industry. And it's very, the dynamic that goes on, even in, so the public company that I worked in was Marriott and the Marriott family was always involved in leadership.

And there was no real, there was no, and this is not a secret, I'm not betraying any trust. There was no real criteria for the Marriott kids deciding what jobs they were gonna have in the organization, right? Basically they were, it was like the King and the Queen of England. Well, here's the Prince, welcome.

Yeah, so one of the consistent pieces of advice that's been around for 50 years, since Leon Danko started the family consulting industry in Cleveland is you need to have what's called a family constitution. It's the set of rules that says, here's the qualifications for employment. Here's the qualifications if you wanna be in the executive suite.

Here's how we decide how you get paid. Here are the things that get you thrown out without question. Here's like public, no.

It's the rules of the road that mom and dad know but probably don't communicate. So the kids kinda guess at it and you always find out after you screw up but they never tell you beforehand. So we literally had a, being engineers, a 10 page list with flow charts and spreadsheets and all that, because bunch of engineers but it laid it all out.

And when you actually go and look at it, it makes sense. It's about, I mentioned communications. The next part is expectations.

You need an open channel and mom and dad have to say, here's what I expect of you as a professional and being the family person that all of our employees in our community looks at. Because if people do bad things, they embarrass the family, it impacts the business and the family. What are the rules? And the third part of that, communications, expectations and accountability.

If Junior goes off to Vegas and it's in the newspapers, what's the consequence? If there's no consequence, you wind up with a consequence somewhere else that you can't control. So how did that background, how did your growing up in a business that had more structure than most family businesses, but how did that inform what you're doing right now? So explain to people what you do now and connect the dots from how you got from there to where you are today. Sure, so I'm third generation.

My dad was CEO. And I will tell you, you gotta look at the chronology of generations and this will tie to what I do now. Because this was the education I could not get at school.

So when kids grow up in the same household with the same mom and their siblings, they have their established relations. They kinda know what's inbounds and out of bounds. They know how to push buttons and what buttons not to push.

And you're brothers, right? But when you're cousins, it's different. So in our case, the cousins grew up 1,000 miles apart. One set grew up in the North Shore of Chicago in affluent community.

The other set grew up in a steel town, which was purely blue collar. And if you had any commercial success, you didn't flaunt it. It was just a different environment.

So the groups of cousins, my generation, really different backgrounds, different parents, the communities influenced us. So we had to actually work to get the cousins to kinda come together. We had some successes and frankly, we had some failures, like most families.

But we spent a great number of years. We went through about a dozen consultants till we found one that fit. And the lesson was, you need help.

Why are you doing this on your own? Like, if you had a cavity, would you pull your own tooth? No, you go to a dentist. And I really gotta give credit to my dad, who was, he was literally the leader, but the most progressive. He took the responsibility of saying, what do we gotta do to keep the family together? What do we gotta do to make sure the business is okay? Because if the business fails, we all starve.

And while his brothers were running marketing and sales and manufacturing and engineering, his job was to keep it all together, literally. And so I would hear stories at the dinner table. I'd watch what he did.

I went through the process with everyone else. And time helps with judgment experience. As I look back at that after leaving the business, realized, hey, this was a true gift.

This is the way you ought to do it. Boy, if we had done that at the beginning before all of us kids came in the business, we would have saved so much heartache. So I had this graduate school and family business that I went through, and we had a success story.

We didn't lose the business. And I saw, if we had just taken a few more steps here and there, like, oh, wow, what could have happened? How wonderful might it have been? We did well, but on the emotional things. And so that had tremendous impact on me.

I left the business after we sold it. I was involved in dozens of businesses, either starting them or buying them, whatever. And I got to see how the world at large was.

And what I thought, you know, we have this wonderful esprit de corps, this wonderful culture. And I just thought that was normal because I was a kid from nowhere, Pennsylvania, and you go out and you talk to 100 companies like, wow, we had something really special. And it got me thinking about, if most companies are like not what I grew up with, just think how I could help them.

Why should other guys have to go through the painful learning process? Let's just get into the express lane. One of the things that I'm really focusing on now, and it's partially out of self-awareness, I think partially from maturity and partially from just asking better questions with clients and friends of mine who are in business. One of the things I really am focusing on from a leadership perspective is empathy.

And I'm curious to hear your thoughts on your dad as a leader. Because it was a family business, and I'm really, this is fascinating to me, was there more empathy or less empathy? Because sometimes we take that family bond for granted and other times we go way overboard to make sure. And your phrase of, hey, keeping the family together, I'm wondering if he approached his leadership, if his leadership style had more empathy because it was family.

What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, so it's a great question. It's situational specific. Every family business makes a decision on does family come first or business come first? They may not say it, they may not know it, but the way they behave is the answer.

And there is no right or wrong. There's just one or the other. In our case, the family came first.

And when some bad decisions were made or some individuals kind of went off the reservation, we made decisions to protect the family even though it really cost the business. And while painful, those were our priorities. And so my dad being the leader of the second generation, there were four brothers, he became CEO because the founder knew he was the only one who can arbitrate between the others and keep them from killing each other.

And that was because he was humble and he had empathy and he knew the way to win was to let the other guys do their things and manage the team in total. I've certainly have seen lots of family businesses where it's one leader, typically the dad, maybe a couple of kids who's hard charging, entrepreneurial, may have low EQ. And that tends to be really rough on the kids because all the things about parents and kids and wanting acknowledgement, all that, hey, all that's still true.

Doesn't matter that you're working together 60 hours a week. But certainly in today's day and age and with people age 20 to 40 who are in the workforce and coming up, they were different than my generation. My parents were depression babies.

They worked six and a half days a week because they were afraid of starving to death. And that's all I knew. If you were awake, you were working.

We didn't know that fun was supposed to be a priority. And that's okay. It's a good skill to have, but I see in my children and their friends, they have different priorities.

They grew up in a different time. The world is different. And I would counsel family.

I was actually just writing an article on succession planning is, you know, the parents have to look at it for where they are today. And when you look in the future, you can't predict what your kids are gonna have to deal with when they're running the business. So if you love your kids and want them to be successful, make them prepared for the unknown and uncertainty and accept that they're gonna have a challenge you don't know.

Just like, you know, my dad had a challenge that his dad didn't have. And my generation had challenges they didn't have. And you need to be able to understand and accept that if you want to really pass the business down and have the kids be successful.

Okay, so I need to dig into your experience on both sides of the fence with private equity. Because many people who own a business hear private equity and they think, hey, that's to the extent that they think about exit strategy, Bruce. They think maybe private equity is my exit strategy.

And you've been on both sides. So I want you to give us the good, the bad, and the ugly related to private equity. But I want you to wait just one minute because I need to remind our viewers and our listeners that our show is brought to you by Sandrowski Corporate Advisors.

So today I'm talking with Bruce Werner and Bruce has a wealth of experience in advising businesses from a leadership development and succession planning standpoint. If you want to dig into the numbers and Bruce comes and he advises you and he says, hey, you know, we really need to take a closer look at this. Sandrowski Corporate Advisors, they're the team to bring in to take a closer look at the numbers.

Let me give you an example of some of the things that they can do. If you're thinking about selling your business down the road and you have a business that's either in the sweet spot that Bruce works with from 10 to 100 million or your business perhaps is a little bit bigger than that, you need to call Sandrowski Corporate Advisors today because they have a group of people that focuses on what's called the Qualified Small Business Exemption. Now, this is an area in the Internal Revenue Code that can help you take advantage of an exception in the tax law that will allow you to retain your earnings.

They won't be subject to capital gains when you sell your business, but you have to be in certain industries and your business has to be structured a certain way. The reason that you got to call Sandrowski is because they've done this over and over and over again. Harry Sandrowski was just telling me that he saved the owner of a business over $10 million in taxes.

Now, that was a huge business, but let's say your business isn't that big and you save a million dollars in taxes. Wouldn't that be a nice thing? Give Sandrowski Corporate Advisors a call. I mean, the best time to call them would have been when you formed the business, but you didn't know about them.

I'm telling you about them now. The second best time to call them is right now. Give them a call at 866-717-1607, 866-717-1607.

They're an accounting firm with a different perspective. I also wanna remind you that we're brought to you by my Revenue Roadmap Guide. So you're a professional and you're listening to the show today and you're thinking, man, I wanna do what Bruce did.

I wanna build a business. I wanna be successful, but I'm a lawyer. I'm a CPA.

I'm an architect. I'm a financial advisor. I have a professional practice.

My business is different. Well, okay, you can think your business is different, but I will give you the business development guide you can use to build your business, even if you're working for somebody else and you wanna have a portable book of business clients that you can take with you to a different place. My Revenue Roadmap Guide will help you do that, and it's free.

It's my gift to you for listening to the show, for watching us on YouTube. Go to revenueroadmapguide.com. That's a website, revenueroadmapguide.com. Enter your name, enter your contact info. You can automatically download the Revenue Roadmap Guide, and no salesman will call.

Remember those commercials? No salesman will call. Well, nobody's gonna call you. Download the Revenue Roadmap Guide.

Take it today. Build your book of business. You'll be glad you did.

This is the same guide that I use with my clients, so it can't be any easier. It's as simple as falling out of a boat and hitting water. All right, Bruce, give us the good, the bad, and the ugly of private equity.

So, not easy to put two or three trillion dollars into a few sentences, but let me give it a go. Private equity is a pool of capital, like many other pools of capital. I really try to stress, you need to have your ownership strategy.

What do I wanna do with the business and why, and do I need capital to do it or not? If I need capital, how much, and in what structure, how do I want my cap table to look like? And then, who might be the best source of it? Private equity is a great source for many reasons, but there's other ways to get capital if that's what you need. Remember, money's a commodity, and it's fungible, so don't get too enamored by the bright young MBAs and their spreadsheets, although I love them dearly. The pros of private equity are, there's a lot of money available, they're very sophisticated.

While there are many stories of disasters, including our company, there's more stories of success. But the limitations are, they have to return capital to their investors in typically three to five years, maybe seven. So, they're only going to own your company for a short while.

They are not long-term owners. They are going to come in at a price, they're going to build up the value, and they're going to sell it. And that is kind of the antithesis of being a long-term family business owner.

It is a culture shock. So, there's nothing wrong with it, but it's a different beast. And most importantly, take the time to get educated and understand.

There's lots and lots of options out there. There's many options within the world of private equity and private debt. And unless you're experienced, do not go it alone.

You are a lamb in the jungle. And there's great solutions out there, there's great people, but it does take some effort to navigate the right solution. So, talk about Kona Advisors and what you do now.

So, are you somebody who could help people navigate those waters of, hey, listen, I'm thinking about an exit, and Bruce, can you help me with positioning my company for private equity, or positioning my company to be purchased by a competitor? Is that what you do? Explain to folks exactly how you can help. I help in three or four major ways. Remember, I work with owners.

The person who, my question is always, what keeps you awake at night as an owner? Most people know how to run their business, but when there's something new they don't have experience in, that's where I add the most value. So, from a governance perspective, my first question is, what do you want to do with your business and why? You know, once we say, here's what I want it to do, then let's develop a business strategy to get you there. And then let's go get the capital and talent so you can execute the business strategy.

I will keep you on point, relentlessly. We probably need a little M&A to accelerate your growth. I'll go run deals if we need to.

You'll probably have some conflicts along the way. I'll help mediate those. At a certain point when you've had some success, you're gonna want to bring in some more talent, maybe slow down a little bit.

I'll help you develop a management team. And when your ownership strategy says, it's probably time to get out or we need some more capital to grow or something like that, I'll help go navigate that. So, I typically run a couple of sell side assignments a year.

I literally start with, what do you want to do and why? I spend a ton of time on education. If here's how the world works, the long version of the answer to your private equity question, I will run the search for the bankers, the lawyers, the Q of E and run the deal if they want, just depends on the client. So, we announced last week the sale of a second generation private business.

I've been working with them for 12 or 15 years. In the 08 crisis, they really kind of hit the wall. Like everyone else, to their credit, the management team, we built it to being very profitable, growing very rapidly.

They figured out the whole online thing. They figured out the global sourcing, really, really rocking it. And instead of growing at 15% a year, they want to triple the business.

I said, we just got to put more gas in the tank. They said, I don't know how to do that. And so, we just recapitalized the company, gave them all the capital they need to grow.

We picked a private equity fund that will also bring talent and relationships to accelerate their growth. So, a true partner as compared to just money. And they're really happy and excited.

It's just great to see dreams come true. All right, so if somebody calls you and they bring you in, do you work strictly on a cash compensation basis or will you take a piece of the action? I mean, I'm sure it varies per deal, but how do they compensate you? Sure, so it varies in a couple of ways. First of all, anything that requires a broker dealer license for selling securities, I don't do because I don't carry a license.

I will bring in the people who have the license and work with them, but I just want to be careful about that. Typically, I'll say, if I can get a good fix on the number of hours on a project, I'll fixed bid it. So, I formed a couple of boards of directors, including other recruiting and whatnot.

I kind of know about how much that takes. So, I said, I'll give you a flat price by stage because no one likes surprises. I've got another assignment right now.

I'm working on a $100 million capital raise. There's no way anyone knows how much time it is. It's a long-term relationship.

I raised, I don't know, 25 million bucks with them recently. So, it's based on trust. That I won't waste my time or their money.

So, I'll bill by the hour. There are cases where I'll take an incentive, but carefully thought out and only when incentives are aligned. I don't want a fee structure that gives me a motivation to disadvantage my client.

That's just not how it works. Well, and it's also about perception too. You need them to, I mean, your intentions are always gonna be good, but you need them to not ever have a shadow of a doubt that, hey, listen, Bruce is doing this because he wants what's best for us.

He's not punching a clock over there. So, I get it. I understand.

All I have is my reputation. And I'm not selling it to- I got it. All right, Bruce.

So, tell me now about what your focus is on, what's a typical day in the life of Bruce? Like Bruce Werner, are you working with 15 clients or you're working with 150 clients? So, you got a thousand things on your mind. How does it work? So, I don't think about clients. I think about relationships.

I look for multi-year long-term relationships. I've had people come to me with a six-week project or a three-week project. And I will be probably inclined to turn them down because the first three months of working with someone new is a tremendous investment to develop a working relationship.

And if I'm done in three months, I've made all the investment, but I don't get a return. And that's time I could have put somewhere else. So, I will say, listen, it's a six-month minimum and they can fire me at any time.

I mean, I don't put any... If you're not happy, you should get rid of me. But I'm looking for relationships that last years. They'll go in spurts of, I'll be busier, I'll back off.

They don't need me as well. That's all fine. To me, the motivation is having an impact.

You know, when I meet a company, my question is, can we double the revenue? Can we do things that just change the whole scope and scale and people go, wow. If you're looking for a 5% improvement in sales, I'm the wrong guy and I'm not interested. If you're looking to solve a problem that no one else has been able to solve, well, that might be interesting.

So, you and I are both part of a group of really established professionals who refer business to each other on occasion. Where do your best referrals come from? Who tend to be your best referral sources? Thanks for asking. So, in my line of work, referrals are delicate.

You have to understand that the first time I meet someone, I'm gonna talk about their most delicate, intimate business and family issues and they haven't met me before. So, my method is when I meet someone, I have 15 minutes to get them to completely trust me with their most delicate secrets, 15 minutes for them to explain the problem, 15 minutes to deliver a solution and at most, if they give me an hour, 15 minutes to convince them that they need to keep talking to me. And obviously, it's the first 15 to determine everything because the rest doesn't happen.

So, my best referrals come from my longer term relationships. Almost all my business comes from referrals that are typically 10 years or more, certainly five. The other new business is people who are in such pain, they just need immediate relief.

And if I happen to walk on their stage at the right time, great, dentist, pull the tooth, I can't handle it anymore. But those I recognize are, I'll take that business if there's a fit between my abilities and their need, but the best relationships are from the long term referrals. And that's why it's like everyone always says, it's who you know, not what you know.

You gotta carry a good reputation, you must do good work because your work is really what people remember. So, did you keep the client happy or did you screw up? There's a lawyer who's listening right now who's jumping out of his seat, picking up his phone, going through his contacts, and he's like, I gotta refer Bruce to this guy, but that guy's the exact wrong person. So, Bruce, talk us out of referring you to the wrong people.

Because everybody has an idea in their mind, everybody who's listening now has an idea in their mind of who they're gonna connect Bruce to. Who's the wrong person, don't connect Bruce to this guy? Well, certainly if they're not open to change and they're not willing to be self reflective, it's gonna be tough for me to have a positive impact. The one thing I can assure you, if you engage me, things are gonna change materially.

It ain't gonna be the same. And if you don't like change, I'm not your guy. If you really wanna make your world a different place, we should probably have a conversation.

All right, Bruce. So a little birdie told me that you wrote a book and that you have a book coming out. So congratulations on that.

As somebody who's done that himself, I will tell you that writing the book is the easiest part. Getting it in the hands of the right people is the difficult part. So let's you and I try and get this book in the hands of the right people.

What's the book about and who do we hope reads it? Thank you for asking, I appreciate it. So the title of the book is Your Ownership Journey, 12 Secrets for Personal and Business Success. It should be available on Amazon middle of March.

It's targeted to private company owners, typically 10 to 100 million revenue, who are stuck on an issue on their ownership journey. So a couple of the words I've mentioned so far is what's your ownership strategy? Which is really, what do you as a human wanna be when you grow up? And then what's the business strategy that allows you to get there? For most people is I need X dollars in the bank so I can retire, that's fine. That means we have to grow the business to a size so when you sell it, after you pay taxes and all, you have X. So what's the business strategy? How much capital do you need for growth? Just what I told you before, those are all the steps on the ownership journey.

Everyone's on their own point on the ownership journey. I kind of walk through, it's kind of a cradle to grave owner's manual for a private company. And I don't expect every chapter to apply to everyone.

I expect one chapter to apply to everyone. And if I can accomplish that, the book's a success. All right, so we're gonna put a link to the book, to the Amazon page for the book in the show notes.

I'm gonna give you, let me give you Bruce's phone number real quick and then I will also ask Bruce one question before we, one last question before we go. So if you wanna reach Bruce Werner at Kona Advisors, here's how you can do it. Give Bruce a call at 847-910-2025.

847-910-2025. Or you can email him bruce at Kona, K-O-N-A advisors, A-D-V-I-S-O-R-S.com. I'm putting all that in the show notes. I'll also put his website in the show notes for you and a link to the book page.

All right, Bruce, give this a moment's thought. We need three things that we should take away from our time together today. So they can be the three most important things or the three things you want people to have as a lasting impression from our time together.

Three things that they should take away from our interview today. I'll give you a minute to think about that as I remind people about Sandrowski Corporate Advisors and how they're the ones who are bringing you this show. Without their help, I wouldn't be here.

So I'm grateful to them, but you should use them for anything related to complex accounting. Now, let me talk to you about economic damages. If you're an attorney and you're listening to this, and I know we have a lot of attorneys who are fans and followers of the show, when it comes to economic damages consultants, you need someone who really knows what they're doing.

Well, there's a guy at Sandrowski Corporate Advisors named John Alfonsi, and he's been doing this, focused on economic damages and not only figuring out what the economic damages are, but giving testimony in court, standing up to withering cross-examination, being able to be deposed like a champ. John is the man for this type of work. If you want case studies, we've got a ton of them.

So I want you to reach out to Sandrowski Corporate Advisors if you have a situation where there could be economic damages and you're wondering who to call or you just want a fresh face. Give John Alfonsi a call at 866-717-1607, 866-717-1607. And remember, Sandrowski Corporate Advisors, they're a CPA firm with a different perspective.

Also, remember My Revenue Roadmap Guide. If you haven't downloaded it yet, don't wait. Go now, revenueroadmapguide.com, enter your contact info.

You'll get a business development plan for you, for your firm. Your book of business will grow. It will be portable.

It's my gift to you for joining us today. All right, Bruce, what are the three things you want people to remember from our time together today? Well, the first thing, which doesn't count as one of the three, is the website for the book is brucewerner.com. I wanted to say that before I forgot. Very simple.

The three things to remember are having a successful family business is about process. Not events, but process. My example of my dad, he managed the process over decades, and that's why we had success.

The second thing is something I learned early in the business. Bad news doesn't age well. You got a problem, talk about it, deal with it.

The longer you wait, the worse it gets. That's true at home as well. The third thing is what Darwin didn't say.

We were all taught, Darwin said survival of the fittest, and that's where we should be rough and tough. The man never said that when he was sitting on the beagle writing his books. What he actually said was survival of the most adaptable.

If you can adapt to changing conditions, you can prosper. So the reason why General Electric and General Motors and the companies at U.S. Steel, which dominated our economy in the 70s and 80s are gone is they didn't adapt. And so, especially in family businesses, which tend to be slow to change, you have to adapt if you wanna be successful in passing the business to the next generation.

Bruce Werner, nuggets that are absolutely gold. Thank you so much for that. Thank you for joining us today.

Give us a website for the book one more time. BruceWerner.com, and my website is KonaAdvisors.com, and thank you very much. It's been great to be your guest today.

It was wonderful having you. I sincerely appreciate it. All right, folks, BruceWerner.com. It's a book.

You can afford it. Go buy it and give it to somebody who's got a business, and if they don't listen to you, hit them over the head with the book and leave it there for them. Bruce, it's been great having you here as a guest.

I really enjoyed our time together. That'll do it for this edition of the Inside BS Show, folks. It's my pleasure to be with you today and every day.

We will see you right back here again tomorrow with another fantastic interview. Until then, my name is Dave Lorenzo. Here's hoping you make a great living and live a great life.