When someone sells their company there is one thing that everybody wants to know but is too afraid to ask.

When someone sells their company there is one thing that everybody wants to know but is too afraid to ask. How much money did you walk away with and where did the rest of the money go? Recently I was lucky enough to sell my company and so I'm gonna break it all down for you. Just to set the stage a bit, this common idea that it's rude to talk about money is just pure BS. It is essential that you understand the financial mechanics of these deals, particularly if you are an entrepreneur from a non-traditional or non-finance background because if you don't understand you will be in a big disadvantage if you get the opportunity to sell your company one day. You could for example underestimate the deal fees and the taxes that you're going to have to pay and in the end find yourself with less money than than you need to retire comfortably if that's what you wanna do. Which is why I think we all should be talking about the money aspects of these deals more, not less, even when it makes people uncomfortable. So, let's look at the numbers. In 2022, Border Insiders sold for 25 million, which is public information. So where did all that money go? As you would expect, most of it went to our shareholders. I was the majority shareholder so I got just under 13 million. The other shareholders received a total of 9.5 million. These were people who gave us seed money at the beginning of the company or traded their labor for equity early on. And remember, we only raised a total of about 200,000 dollars. So the shareholders got 22 and a half million. What happened to the other 2 and a half million? Our M&A firm got a little over a million, our lawyers got 200,000 and our accountants 51,000. These are the types of deal fees you can expect to see on a transaction of this size and believe me, these people earn their money. You do not wanna do a deal without them. We'd also put in place a phantom equity plan for our employees that said if we did a transaction every vested employee would receive a check. At the time of the deal we had 13 vested employees who together received a total of 800,000. Individual amounts were based on seniority and each person's contribution to the business. Now, let's talk taxes. I've been paying tax on this transaction for nearly two years and I just got the final numbers last week. So remember I received just under 13 million and when all was said and done I paid 3.8 million in federal and state taxes which adds up to about 30%. So after all the fees and taxes, I personally walked away with about 9 million on a 25 million dollar sale of a company that I founded in 2008 and ran for 14 years. That's it, those are the numbers and I hope you agree as an entrepreneur we should all be talking about money more, not less. Information like this is powerful and can help us all be more successful. Follow me for more content like this.