Ike Wingate shines a light into the dark corners of our government, our media, and our culture. He gives you a conservative millennial’s common sense perspective on Business, Politics, Family, and Culture, plus additional commentary on all things related to the State of Arkansas.
Episode Highlights Here:
Ike
I highly recommend the book Built to Sell. Because if you are building your company in mind to sell it one day, whether you’re going to actually sell it or not, making sure that you have everything buttoned up is just a smart way to build and grow a business. But if you ever go to sell it, you will save yourself a lot of headaches.
Brett
The number one secret to building an exit plan for a billboard business. So I What would you say the number one secret was for you? And then we’ll dive into the DST after this, but just kind of going into the overall exit for you what that means for the next chapter of your life. And then some of the challenges you started to uncover as you did the research?
Ike
Well, I don’t know if you’re specifically talking about a business.What you know, lessons from an exit on the business specifically, in that case, what I’m talking about are what I learned, or what the secret was, is being patient, which is a very difficult thing. For me personally, I’ve had personal struggles with patients for a long time. My mom actually when she traveled somewhere, she buys me a turtle figurine to remind me to slow down and to be patient. So it is just a lovely gift to receive a turtle over and over and over. But it is a good reminder, Mom Knows Best. And so that was something that I had to finally, and certainly times I did not deal with it as well as I should have. But just be patient because there are so many things if it can go wrong in the transaction of a sale of a business, it very well likely will happen and or if they’re you know, there’s snag after snag after snag. And the one bit of advice that I tell people that are you know, building a company or thinking about starting a company, I highly recommend the book Built to Sell. Because if you are building your company in mind to sell it one day, whether you’re going to actually sell it or not. Making sure that you have everything buttoned up, is just a smart way to build and grow a business. But if you ever go to sell it, you will save yourself a lot of headaches, and realize that you know what you have is buttoned up. And what you have is scalable, and can be repeated by somebody else. And you essentially don’t know, just yourself, where all the bodies are buried, if you will, you actually have processes and things documented. So that’s something I learned is, you know, we went through almost a sale once and realized all the holes that we had. And thankfully a guy who was looking to sell our company told me all the holes and why he wouldn’t buy wouldn’t buy it. And so, you know, we go back to that lesson about wisdom and listening to other people. At first, I was upset. At first I was offended, if you will. How could you talk about my baby this way, you know which many of our business owners look at our business like a baby almost a child. But then once I got over myself on the feedback, I took to heart what he had to say a very wise person, and then buttoned up a lot of the loose ends over the next 12 months and was able to sell the company for a good amount more than we were previously entering into a potential interaction, a potential transaction for
Brett
amazing. So it sounds like having patience is the number one secret. But not only that, I guess even having the humility, I think it also comes out of that to take the wisdom. And instead of either making excuses or getting upset or making that drive you somewhere else, you use that as fuel to actually take action to improve the processes, the procedures, the books, the scalability, all of that, so that someone can come in and you actually get a higher price for us. And it sounds like it ultimately ended up being a blessing, although it took a little bit longer to exit. Is that a fair summary?
Ike
Yeah, it was, it was a painful lesson. But it was a fruitful lesson. And the other side of that to sum it up, I could have summed it up a little bit better by saying, don’t take your business so personal. When you get down to the end wire like that people are coming in to look at it as a transaction. You have got to remove your emotion from the transaction and look at it objectively. I hear multiple people talking about, you know, they came in to buy our business but they said this, this and this about it, you know, and they don’t understand it. Well, if you’re an objective person outside of the situation, how would you actually view it so you really do have to remove the emotion to be able to think clearly, especially in the negotiation phase.
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About Ike Wingate
Ike Wingate grew up in Arkansas and progressed through the ranks of media and went into radio broadcasting. My dad was a radio broadcaster when I was a kid. And I’ve always been interested in media broadcasting and that kind of thing. Of course, my dad said don’t go into the radio, there’s no money in it. And just like a good obedient son, I did the exact opposite of what he told me to do. And so progressed up through media, had an afternoon show, as well, and then moved to Nashville, Tennessee, back in 2006, to work for a syndicated radio show called Dawson McAllister. And of course, I got married shortly before that, and then started a billboard company on the side, as you mentioned, to allow my wife to stay home. She came home one day and said that she wanted to stay home and start a family. And I said, I can help you with that. But we do have to figure out how to replace your income. She was working in the optometric field. So we started the billboard company on the side. And the reason why I did that is I grew up watching my dad start a billboard company as well in Arkansas in Northwest Arkansas. And so he had the broadcasting and media background and went into billboards as a more sustainable business for him. So I thought I could start, small company to replace the income that went to work. Then from there for Dave Ramsey, and his radio broadcasting Empire was a fantastic place to work. But on the side, this business kept growing and growing and growing. And I got to the point where I had to make a decision. Either we needed to sell the company or I needed to go full time. And it was a difficult decision to make. But I’d always wanted to run my own company. And so we made that leap in 2014, to go full time and then ran that company and grew it through 2020. And then 2021, we sold it and then made our way back to Arkansas with our three kids. So that puts us where we are today.
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