201–210 of 329 posts
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Holy hell the pessimism in this thread over a life-changing amount of money for 99% of people. > should have stayed at Google You should feel privileged that you've never been "stuck" at a job that you don't find personally interesting and stimulating. Wasting your life to see the number in your bank account increase.
Half a million isn't really that much.
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Common fallacy is to imagine that the exact same deal at the same price would have happened without a broker. A lot of people are going to look at this and imagine that if they just eliminated the broker, they'd get an additional $88,900 in their pocket. That's not how it works, though. Without a broker you may not find a buyer at all. If you do, you might not know how to price the business. Even if you could find th…
> Common fallacy is to imagine that the exact same deal at the same price would have happened without a broker. > Without a broker you may not find a buyer at all. This only applies if your business isn't super profitable and you're looking to get rid of it. If you have a wildly successful business and you enjoy running it, you don't need to find a buyer, you can wait until one comes along.
Even if the business is wildly successful, a broker is going to help you shop for competitive offers and get the best price on the open market.
And if your business is wildly successful and you enjoy running it, hiring a broker will let you focus more on running the business. Trying to learn how to sell a business is going to take you away from this hypothetical wildly profitable business that you enjoy running, which is neither good for your profits nor your enjoyment.
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A broker is just a middleman between the seller and buyer. What’s the value add for sales like this?
Author here. For me, the value of the broker was just someone to guide me through the whole process because I'd never done it before. It was good to have someone whose interests were pretty aligned with mine and who answered questions quickly and thoroughly without me having to pay by the hour. Another big part of the value was finding the buyer, as I probably couldn't do that on my own. I could have thrown a hail ma…
Perhaps so, but you can buy a lot of legal hours with $89,000...
The marketplace connection seems the part that gives the most value.
"When you sell a business at TinyPilot’s scale, there’s no deposit. You can invest hundreds of hours into preparing reports for due diligence, reveal all your confidential business secrets, and spend thousands of dollars negotiating legal documents and still walk away with nothing if the buyer backs out." Great write up overall but as someone who has bought a couple of businesses, it is not just the seller who loses…
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> I was paying This is relatively small pickles. Your employer paying a few hundred, maybe a thousand dollars on your behalf if you are old, per month. You can buy the same on healthcare.gov
You actually can’t. There are off market and on market plans. Even though it’s by the same insurer, on market insurance is only taken by 50% of the places that take the off marketplace plans. Been down that road a few years ago and it was a disaster. Ended up getting a great plan for my company through the state chamber of commerce.
They only things that I expect to change are total premium, deductible, out of pocket expense, copays, and network. Otherwise, the coverage itself is dictated by the same law.
I can see right now that the BCBS gold HSA premium from my employer (total, including employer portion) is the same as the BCBS gold HSA available on healthcare.gov.
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> Family of four, living in Oregon, non-smoking, our premium is ~$1k/month. Granted it’s a high deductible ($12k), but it protects us from the kind of catastrophic emergency that could wipe out our savings. We are fortunate to not have expensive, ongoing conditions. Family of two, living in the EU, non-smoking, our premium is ~€0/month. Granted it's a €0 deductible, but it protects us from the kind of catastrophic em…
Are you unemployed? Otherwise, this is just not true. Assuming OP and his wife earn average incomes for academics in the US, they'd pay 2x ~920 USD per month in Germany, totaling 80% more than the premium and only 9% less than the worst case scenario of OP having to pay the full deductible.
That being said, the average professor salary in Germany is around 84,000 Euro, so it's closer to $560 a month.
You also ignore that after the high deductible is paid in the US you're still paying co-insurance and co-pays. (I love how US health insurers describe these as "your contribution" to your healthcare costs, as if you weren't already paying premiums and deductibles, but the magical insurance fairy is...).
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Congratulations. I have been following the retrospectives for more than 2 years now. I hope to keep enjoying your monthly posts. My question is, did you change anything on your strategy after you were set on selling? Or the goal was still the same, optimize earnings?
Thanks for reading! > My question is, did you change anything on your strategy after you were set on selling? Or the goal was still the same, optimize earnings? Once I started the process of preparing the company for sale, it did change a lot of the strategy. For example, one of the things I'd been thinking about was how to allow users to purchase recurring subscriptions to their TinyPilot Pro software licenses rathe…
I actually hate the 'flip' side of this. Over the last few years I've lost track of the number of services/providers who think it is just fine to renew annual subscriptions (in some cases $400+) with zero warning of upcoming renewal. It's not the amount of the service that bugs me, but the fact that that isn't a small chunk of change, and even a "Heads up, we'll be billing your card in a week for your annual subscription" email seems too much to ask for, to some.
You know it must have been stressful when you were compelled to list your desserts in order. Now that we're almost in June, does it feel like the deal happened a million years ago? I know when stressful things happen and time passes, it always feels like it was so long ago even when it was only a month or 2 back. It was a pleasure having you on a few years ago in the Running in Production podcast: https://runninginpr…