From Founder to Exit: How buffaBRAND Scaled, Sold, and Evolved

Paul Sonneveld
I'm your host, Paul Sonneveld, Now, today, we're diving into a story that every agency owner thinks about sooner or later. What happens when you decide it's time to sell? My guest today is Corey Brown, founder of BuffaBrand, an Amazon and Walmart marketplace agency that recently joined a larger group. And a little bit more about that in a sec. Corey is going to take us through inside that journey from building the business to identifying the right time to sell to navigating the acquisition process and life after the deal. So whether you're growing, scaling, or considering an exit down the road, this conversation is going to be full of practical insights and honest reflections. Corey, it is absolutely great to have you on today at Marketplace Masters. 

Corey Brown
Thank you so much for having me. 

Paul Sonneveld
I need to probably lower my seat a little bit and level up our heads. Maybe I go up a little bit too. Awesome. All right, here we go. So before we sort of get into the whole process of selling your business and all that, maybe just like, let's take a step back, right? Like, take us back to the beginning, right? What motivated you to start BuffaBrands? What was your original vision?

Corey Brown
Yeah, so my original vision with BuffaBrand was really kind of focusing on what I felt my strengths were in the workplace. So for many years, I had found ways to make businesses better and essentially consulting kind of in-house at every job that I was at to the point where I would get friction from the owners who were very complacent. And what I quickly realised is that I wanted better for their businesses than they wanted for them because it was difficult to grow and it was easy to continue doing the same things. 

So when I was voicing that to my mentor, he essentially, for a couple of years, kept telling me, you should start your own business. You should do your own thing, and here's what you can do. And hey, you know more about Amazon than any person I've ever met. This is your opportunity to switch to a consultative role and build a consultancy that can help brands around the world. 

So, for me that was really congruent with how my mind works like I don't see things how they are I see things and I go that can be better you know I can walk into a house and it could be completely run down and I look at it and I go oh it can do this and it can do that I mean this is an old living room that I'm in right now it's now a studio and and where I've built this business. That's just how my mind works. So with a little push from my mentor and a little push from COVID, quite honestly, I was able to take that step and jump into starting BuffaBrand. And from there, it's just been a little bit of controlled chaos. 

Paul Sonneveld
So I wanted to ask, like, what do you attribute like that? Like, we have this value, right, at MerchantSpring, which like think like a business owner, which sort of came to mind as you were talking about that. Like, have you always had that sort of perspective? Is that always something you've had? Or is that just something that you said, oh, look, doesn't matter what I do. I'm just going to, you know, really kind of own it or think about what's best for the business. You know, where does it come from? 

Corey Brown
Yeah. So it's, it's kind of twofold, and it's going to sound a bit, a bit grandiose, but for me, I am absolutely an idealist. So I always, again, kind of look at things on how they can be, and I can't help but see it and want to move towards it. Even if it's not something that I have the power to control. And then also, for me kind of being in team sports, I attribute a lot of this to team sports. In every team sport that I've ever done in any organisation I've ever done, I've been a part of, I have essentially become a defacto leader within the group very quickly for whatever that may be. Some, I think, you know, some leadership skills are definitely, you know, nature and then some are nurtured. 

But for whatever reason, that's kind of always been my path is kind of to, to be in a leadership role and to also be a bit of an idealist. And so that doesn't work with every role you ever have in life, but what it does work for is exactly what I built, which is helping businesses that really want to get better do so and leading them to financial success and building those brands along the way. So that's kind of been the journey. And a lot of that is just the inner workings of who I am. I'm sure a lot of agency owners feel that way, too. They're probably the person who's executed the highest in every room they've ever been in, and they have a lot of that why not me attitude. 

Paul Sonneveld
So take us back to, I think you mentioned sort of COVID days. I don't think any of us want to go too close back to COVID days, but that was one of the catalysts you mentioned before, right? So you started out, I mean, what did that journey look like up until the selling point? Tell us a little bit more about how you started and how BuffaBrand evolved during that time. 

Corey Brown
Yeah, so at the time that COVID was hitting, I was considering doing just this. And then we had an RTO policy at my previous role that I felt was not safe for my family. My wife was actually pregnant with our second child at the time, so we were growing our family. And we had a conversation at one point, and we put a little bit of money in two different bank accounts, and she started her business, and I started mine. And we decided we're going to go all in on building this. We've worked for other people for long enough. And so what that looked like was working with a few contractors that were working at night, and I would work the entire day and pass off work to them. They would work at night. And we had basically a one-year plan of say yes to everything, grow and build this to where I could hire both of them on full-time and then see where we could take it from there.

Paul Sonneveld
That's I think there's a really important point there, which I think is often overlooked, which is particularly with your partner, having alignment on this is actually what you're going to do. Right. I remember having a very clear conversation with my wife, like around the same things when we started MerchantSpring and say like a lot of unknowns, but you know, we're going to give this a year and really kind of try something. 

I mean, I think it's remarkable that you both went out and started your own businesses. But yeah, maybe, you know, obviously, I appreciate this sort of touch more on the personal thing, but I'd love to just, I think this is really great advice, right, for other kinds of people thinking about starting a business like alignment and the backing of your family in terms of actually starting a business. I mean, would you mind just elaborating on that a little bit more? 

Corey Brown
On having the backing from the family side? Yeah. So for us, it was hard to come to that decision. It was hard to find that. We had kicked it around for a long time. Neither of us had many family members who had graduated from college, let alone owned a business. We didn't have mentors to turn to. I fortunately was able to have a mentor that took interest over the previous couple of years and had encouraged essentially both of these businesses to start. And so for my wife and I, there was a lot of worrying about risk. I am not a big risk taker, or at least I wasn't at the time. And for us, I think that COVID was scary enough that it allowed us to, for a moment, put some other things that were riskier at the forefront and say, actually, this is the least risky thing that we're doing right now with all the unknowns that we had going on at that time. 

So for us to be able to sit down and say, hey, we're going to build this, and essentially we're going to take two swings. You're going to build something. I'm going to build something. And we're going to support each other the best that we possibly can. And hopefully, one of these two things takes off. We always knew mine was a little bit riskier, hers was a little more steady. And that's exactly kind of what unfolded. And, you know, we got to the point where, you know, now we employ, I think, fifteen or sixteen people, which is an incredible feat over the course of six years for two businesses that were self-funded. Right. I mean, that's the other part of it is like there was no investment into this. It was literally just us building from day one having to be profitable. 

Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, no, that's absolutely fantastic. And having gone through this journey myself, I know it's, you know, it sounds it sounds easy and obvious and rearview mirror stuff. But, you know, there's an enormous amount of kind of a couple of things that have got to go the right way and a lot of energy and effort as well. So six years, six years ago, if you think about that journey, right, like at what point did you actually start thinking about selling? I mean, is it something that you're like from day one, I'm having an exit in mind? Or is it like, hey, I woke up on January the third, you know, last year, and there was a light bulb moment. Like, at what point did these things around, Hey, maybe I should think about selling my business. When did they start to crystallise for you? 

Corey Brown
Yeah, so this is an area where I can say I distinctly did not have plans on selling my business. This was something that I had planned to grow, sustain over the course of years and see kind of where things went. There was no, hey, we're gonna run this for three years or five years or get to this certain number, and then we're gonna look for an acquisition type of thing. For me, it was very much working and getting it to a point where I felt it was successful enough, which was getting well into six figures, moving towards that half-million-dollar mark. And again, there wasn't an exact figure. But for me, I think that was always part of the thinking was like, let's get to half a million dollars heading towards a million dollars for the agency, and then maybe there'll be interest. But what happened was I actually started going to events. So I had very much stayed head down in Buffalo and like just continue to work and build things from here. And then finally I said, I need to go to some events. 

And so I went to a couple of industry events, and what happened was that's where the light bulb moment. I was at a number of dinners, a number of nights out with different people. And I realised how many brilliant people were in the rooms that I was in. And how it would be irresponsible of me to continue to work in the fashion that I was building without considering the idea that perhaps some of these people could help me drive my vision forward in a faster way than I possibly could. Whether that be through investment of time, energy, actual just capital, mentorship, or just synergising multiple businesses together. 

And so once I had some of those conversations and met some interesting people, I would say yourself included, and many, many others, I was actually inspired. I came home and immediately within a week, reached out to an M&A firm and was saying basically like, Hey, I think I'm in the six-month run-up to potentially putting my business on the market. And here's why. And so it kind of led me straight into that moment. And honestly, from that point, I had a couple of conversations, and we actually ended up tabling it for like three or four months because I wasn't quite mentally ready to jump into what it actually meant to go through an acquisition. Although the idea was firmly implanted in my head, I just wasn't mentally prepared to kind of let go or move into that phase quite yet. 

Paul Sonneveld
Can I just touch on your motivation a little bit more? Of course. A lot of times the motivation is, hey, I'm getting tired and weary. I want to take money off the table. I want to have a better lifestyle. But you mentioned something else there. You're like, I feel like with external help, I could grow this better, faster. Can you expand on that a little bit more around your motivation for selling and really attracting external resources to do that? Because I don't hear that very often. A lot of times exit is really what it says on the label, right? I want to get out of there, ideally with a suitcase. There's money in it. So talk to me a little bit more about that. 

Corey Brown
Right. And I am also still in the business, which I'm sure we'll get to, but that was also a piece of it. So, from my side of things, working through it from the personal standpoint, I think this is where living and building a company in a smaller city, maybe, has impacted me more than I'd like to admit. So, being from Buffalo and building this in Buffalo, there's not a huge, vibrant e-commerce community. I'm starting to build one now, and I've found some people that are kind of in that mould. But it's not the same as being in Vegas, being in LA, being in Seattle, some of these other places where New York City, probably the one I'm missing, where there's just so much going on, there's so much opportunity. 

And so for me, I've always been told, if you're the smartest person in the room too often, you're not really learning anything. And I got to the point where I'm like, I need to be in some different rooms and start to be in rooms where I can learn, where I can actually be the student a lot more than the teacher. A few years of leading a business is absolutely fantastic. I think it was actually somebody at an event said I was walking kind of shoulder and shoulder with someone, and they said, look around this room. Think about the amount of brilliance and the amount of money and the amount of whatever it might have been that's just in this room alone, and how incredible it is to be a part of that. And I think for me, I took that back to Buffalo, and I went, okay, I think it's time. 

I think I need to be in more of those rooms, and I need to do it now because personally, I'm at a point where I'm not growing anymore. I could do the same thing for the next few years, and that's fine. But I'm on a journey of personal growth as well. And so for me, it really wasn't about the money. Yes, you don't sell to not make money, of course. But it was really that moment where I said, it's my time. I'm in my mid-thirties. I'm ready to take the next step, the next chapter of life. 

Paul Sonneveld
Thanks for sharing that. I've heard it before, but it's not very usual, not very common. And it's actually really refreshing to hear that. It does require, I guess, a degree of maturity. I think once you've been running your business, a lot of times entrepreneurs think they know everything, right? So to actually say, actually, I'm starting to hit some limits here. I need some external kind of input, whether that's an intellectual kind of input or financial. Very interesting perspective. So, well, let's dive a little bit deeper into the process, right? So you mentioned that you sort of started a go-to-market process, but maybe just take us a little bit deeper into how did you go about finding and attracting potential buyers? Did you do that yourself? Did you get an advisor? Did they run a book for you? What does it look like for you? 

Corey Brown
Yeah, I had a really fortunate series of events that happened in that timeframe where I went to those events. I actually had someone that I had met who was working for a really large M&A, and we kind of hit it off on a personal level, and we said, Let's stay in touch. I'm not ready to sell by any measure. It was kind of like maybe even a year before that. And she reached back out to me and said, hey, I actually formed my own company. And it's going to be smaller. It's going to be more intimate. We're building something special here. And I would love to work with you. I know the size of your business. And I know what other firms may say. And I would love to work with you as we build this. 

I actually took a meeting where I went and had dinner with them in New York City. I happened to be in New York City for an event. I went and just had a random dinner with them and really connected. And for me, relationships are everything. Authenticity is everything. The dollar amounts don't matter as much as the other. I just think that that's smaller in life than actual relationships, and I felt like they were the right people. So, and I mean the firm's name is Palmer. The people there are incredible. And we had that dinner, and that was pretty much it. We said, let's stay in touch. And a few months later was when I kind of went on that personal journey at the shows and said, man, I really probably should pull the trigger on this. So we had a couple more meetings, and then we ended up tabling it and saying like, let's figure things out, head towards the start of the new year. Let's get through the holidays. Kind of in this time period where we're in now, where it's like, do I really want to start something new and bring that to the surface? 

So we ended up going through that in January, but they, they're the team that worked on all of the attraction of potential buyers. Obviously, I told people that I was gonna be doing this, but there's a little bit of keeping it behind closed doors as well. I think that's, and we might get to that a little bit, but I think that's one of the difficult parts of going through an acquisition is like, really not being able to tell your staff and your team or people outside in the space. You kind of have to keep it to yourself and go through this process. It's kind of behind closed doors. But Palmer was great with all of it. They held my hand through all of it. They were the one who found all of our potential buyers, set up all of the meetings, did all the documentation from start to finish to the day we closed. 

Paul Sonneveld
And just on that process itself, I mean, obviously, they were running most of the process. You said they're doing the documentation, all that. So, describe to me what was the level of investment from your perspective in this process in terms of time? I'm particularly thinking from an agency point of view, about to go through this process, how much time did it take up? I mean, obviously, they did all the documentation, but they needed access to you, right? To get, get the story straight to understand the financials, all of that, like, can you give us a flavour of the, I guess the investment you had to make in order to support the process? 

Corey Brown
Yeah, and I think the timeline is important too. So for me, we went live, we'll call it the first week of January, and we closed on Memorial Day. So you know, basically very end of May. It's a pretty aggressive timeline, too, to sell a business. For those that aren't as aware of that, that's actually pretty fast. Our goal was to sell in six months or fewer. So, we actually hit that goal pretty much dead on. The process ebbs and flows.

So for me, it went from hey we're going live which meant i didn't have anything to do. So we launched in January it goes out to a bunch of different lists and potential people that might be interested in it other firms, other individuals. And basically, what happens is they start reaching out to all these people, they're sending out all these different lists, and I'm operating. I'm just doing what I need to do. Maybe I pull a few documents here and there. And that was pretty much the first six weeks, six to eight weeks was a lot of that. And maybe setting up some meetings as people were starting to show a little bit of interest. We had to obviously build kind of a book that people could look at. They had to have numbers and scope. So that was a part of it where we did that originally. 

So essentially, people that were interested would request that information. So I would see that kind of on an Excel sheet, see, hey, they've requested information. And if they liked the information, they would have a meeting with the firm. If they liked that meeting with the firm and my firm liked that meeting for me, then they would set up a meeting with me. So there was a lot of sifting through before I got pulled in. 

So that window was a little quieter on my end, which was fine. It was once we got into the meetings where I had to meet with potential buyers. And for those who haven't gone through it, it's very staggered too. It's not like everybody shows up for one speed dating round and you kind of go through it all in one or two days. It's a meeting on a Monday and then not a meeting for two weeks and then three meetings on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and everyone's at different stages. 

So you're having first meetings while you're having second meetings. And in between, I'm meeting every single Wednesday. I was having basically a standup with my team to go through and digest all of the different ones that we had. Every single meeting that I had with a potential buyer was with one of their staff members on where they would take notes and do all of that, and essentially was an hour at a time. 

As far as a time commitment for me, it probably was five to eight hours a week. Once we got past that first six weeks, it was probably five to eight hours a week for the rest of the process through the end of the six months. And it got, you know, there were periods where it was more and periods where it trimmed down a little bit as we kind of got closer to, hey, we're getting some offers and things of that. 

And there's different pain points at different points of that, but it definitely is a lot. If you think about that as a, hey, I'm operating my agency, I'm trying to live my life. Hey, I'm also, you know, running things at home. And you're trying to sneak in meetings with- Couple of kids. Yeah. Yeah. You're trying to sneak in meetings with someone from Europe. So you got to kind of be on a different. So there was a lot of shuffling, and it wasn't all in. 

So as a marathoner, I'm an elite-level marathoner. My friends always joke, when you're building up to a marathon, there is everything you need to worry about before, and then there's after, right? Yeah. So you just get this focus on marathon day, and anything that doesn't have to be done before marathon day starts to just get back burner, and you just focus, and you narrow that focus. That's kind of how this felt for me. It was like, until this happens, I'm pushing so many other things off because this is kind of my singular focus, and then I'm just operating my business in the background. So that was something that I was not quite prepared for was how much I was going to have to actually do in the process, even with the team. 

Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, I'd love to touch on that a little bit later. But before we go there, so I'm just want to sort of get the timings right. So I think, from what you're saying before, five-month process there or thereabouts, it sounds like maybe the first two months were the sort of the speed dating phase of the process. And then obviously, then you went into like, second dates, third dates, and all of that. 

So you were getting, you know, interested parties across your desk, right? And maybe even sort of, you know, early-stage offers or expressions of interest or things like that. When those sort of pieces of information floated across your desk, so to say, like, how did you go about evaluating, right? Oh, this is a conversation I want to continue. I'm going to say, no, maybe not now to this party or like, what are the things you were looking for in a buyer or, you know, an acquiring group? Like, what's your framework? How did you think about it? 

Corey Brown
Yeah, so I kind of was looking at like three main things. So for me, again, it was not fully about the money. It was more about finding a good landing place. Because of what triggered this, it was more about where I was going to go and how we were going to do that. So the three things for me was like, we were always looking at a strategic buyer. So kind of looking towards mentorship, towards partnering synergistically with the different leadership teams that were going to be in there and kind of like figuring out tech and all of those different things, were they going to be able to invest? 

For me, I was looking for kind of a personal relationship too, in terms of a mentor or in terms of a partner, even if you will. I always say, like, I'm a handshake guy. If I handshake on something, if I say it's going to happen, it's going to happen. I'm going to do it. I needed somebody I could look eye to eye and do the exact same thing and have good trust in them. And that was like paramount for me to be able to sign kind of of my baby away to someone else. I needed to be able to fully trust them. 

And then the last thing was really, do I have a safe landing place for me, for my clients and for my team? My team helped build this. My clients helped build this. I need to make sure that everyone's taken care of in the process. That doesn't always happen in business. There's a lot of sharks who will go out there and cut everything to make a dollar. You've heard me say that that's not me for a few times. I think Palmer also had a really good pulse of that too. So they were able to cut through some of the noise for people who felt that way. But those are kind of like the three big things for me. 

Paul Sonneveld
And in terms of, you mentioned obviously that the financials was not your main priority or they were like overriding priorities in terms of what you were looking for. But can you talk a little bit about how you thought about the valuation of your business, and how do you go to stage in your mind and go, right, actually, this is like fair value, right? How did you sort of think through that in your mind? 

Corey Brown
Yeah, so this is one of the harder parts because for me, I didn't prepare to sell my business. Quite honestly, I was ill-prepared and that was something that everyone else was so numbers-focused, which makes perfect sense, right? You're investing in this huge thing. I wasn't numbers-focused enough, and I didn't do enough in the lead-up to prepare my business for those numbers. So it was definitely some difficult conversations of trying to sift through people who were just all in about the numbers, and then people who understood the value prop of like myself, my org and our clientele. And I think that that was really difficult at times to get across to different potential buyers. 

And honestly, to kind of take it one step further, that was something I was really surprised about for a lot of buyers or potential buyers was just like how they were even on the first call trying to devalue what I had built, which I think is a really interesting take when you're trying to bring someone on and build. It's just like, hey, your business is okay, here's all these flaws they're almost trying to like get how much they were gonna pay for it down before we had even established a relationship. And so obviously all those people I immediately cut from my list, and some of them to this day, like there's been some relationships that I think were slightly frayed because of that, because I just didn't have an interest in that at all. So that was definitely an interesting thing that I kind of ran across as well. 

Pau Sonneveld
Yeah, it's the trying to lowball. It's almost like the first meeting is the start of the negotiation, right? As opposed to actually, let's try to work out whether there could be a strategic partnership here, to your point. It's not just a, You know, a financial transaction, right? You're looking for so much more than just like, you know, oh, let's, there's a multiple. Let's agree on the multiple. Here's the money. Like, here's your two-year exit. You know, it sounds like, yeah, way, way more than that. 

Corey Brown
For me, just to add on to the kind of how do I actually value it? You know, for me, I was looking for it. I was looking for a decent amount up front with an earn-out. I wanted simplistic. I didn't want it to be complicated. I wanted to be very clear. This is what you're getting. This is what you get if you do X, Y, and Z over the next year or two years, right? That's what I was looking for. And so often I would express that. And the number was movable, right? The number was movable based on some of the parameters of like what does that earn out look like? What are the parameters for that earn-out? What metrics do I have to hit?

And I had a number of offers that came in that were very much right on par with what I thought we would get, maybe the numbers were even like lower or higher, but the structure was important to me to have it be simple. And I had a bunch of offers that were just like off-the-wall complicated, like just I needed to use AI to figure out even how I would get my earn-out out, and I thought, Wow, if it's this complicated on the first offer that you've given to me, how complicated will our relationship be if this doesn't go well. And so for me, that was like a red flag, not going to do that, can't even consider going that direction, because if this is how you put together a term sheet, we aren't going to work as partners. 

Paul Sonneveld
So, how did you end up kind of structuring the deal and the transition so that you could have that right balance between trust. Obviously, the acquiring party does want something because there's risk in buying a business that you don't know very little about your involvement in terms of post-acquisition. Obviously, we're not obviously appreciate you won't be able to share the specifics, but some of the principles behind the deal that you ended up signing and felt comfortable with. 

Corey Brown
Yeah, yeah. I mean, very, very simple. There was a number up front. A portion of that, that number that we agreed upon, got kicked to being an earn-out at the end of year one. And there's a very clear one metric that's based off of. And all the qualifiers are right in there. So it's very, very simple. And basically the rest of it was my employment agreement and just figuring out like, how much that looks, what that looks like, what my role is going to be, how is that going to shift as we hire more people and add more services? And what the goal is of that. 

And that's about it, quite honestly, because we worked very quickly to get through this deal for various reasons. And we both wanted it to be very simplistic. We're both handshake humans. And that's how we went about it. We tried to keep it as simple as possible. And I mean, I know brands that have gone through diligence that takes months and months and months. We did our diligence in a couple of weeks. It was very much a lot of trust built very quickly. 

Paul Sonneveld
That's fantastic to hear. Actually, you don't hear those stories. And you're at least six months on from that now. So, you know, I guess I'm conscious of time. And I know your kids are about to come back from school. So I do want to wrap up here. To my point earlier, like you're sort of six months past the deal closure, right? Looking back, any things, not so much regrets, but any things you would do differently, or you'd think about if you do this again in the future or any advice you'd have for other agency owners learning from this process? 

Corey Brown
Absolutely. If I didn't learn anything, I'd be a fool, right? So first and foremost, the biggest thing kind of goes back to the numbers. So anything that I build in the future, anything that you're building out there, you should be thinking this is going to end at some point, right? That this business is going to end in some fashion. Either someone's going to buy it, or you're going to stop running it, whatever that might look like. You should have a plan for that. 

And that could be as simple as just working through and making sure that you have profitability, and kind of knowing what your runway is. Because for me, I didn't do that. And it's my single biggest regret. I probably left a bunch of money on the table. I probably closed a lot of conversations because my books weren't tight enough. I did the accounting for my team for five years. I am not an accountant. So, that's probably my biggest regret is not giving myself a year of preparing my books professionally and making sure that we cut business that didn't make sense and that we only focused on what did make sense and were as profitable as possible. I did not do that. This was a very personal decision for me, and so I definitely left money on the table there. 

The other thing that I would add to that now being six months afterwards, is something that I didn't know six months ago. I knew I kind of knew the numbers thing six months ago. Right now, the thing that I would say is also if you're being acquired, if you can work into that process, getting a plan for what the first year or more looks like and getting that into the contract so that you have the ability to say, hey, we have a plan of this much investment. We have a plan for these types of roles. Anything that is absolutely paramount to your success personally and for the business, working through what that is and trying to get that contractually in there to whatever degree you can with your leadership team, so that you guys are all in very much alignment of where things are headed.

I think that is something that a lot of founders run into that I've talked to is they run into, okay, we get through the deal. It's deal, deal, deal, deal, deal. You're so focused on that. And then, if everything doesn't line up after that, there's no recourse, there's no kind of going back, there's no conversation, you're no longer the owner. And I think that that can be a weird spot to be in at times. And I think that I've heard a bunch of different people say that they had kind of unexpected acquisitions, right? And that can happen a lot in unexpected acquisitions where people walk in or people just approach you and say, hey, we're gonna buy this. So that would kind of be my two big pieces there is know your books and have a plan. 

Paul Sonneveld
I think Know Your Books is probably a more obvious one. But yeah, the plan piece, that's super important, right? Particularly in the context, I guess, of an earn-out and hitting KPIs, you want to align on, what the level of resourcing plan investment in order to support you to get there as well. Yeah, very interesting. All right. Well, Corey, let's wrap it up here. We're at the thirty-five-minute mark. So I want to make sure I let you go. I want to just say thank you so much, man, for coming on. I love the kind of the humility and the genuineness that you bring to this conversation. It's really, really valuable. I mean, I think we can get all the theory, you know, off ChatGPT, but actually, to get the human element to this process, I found it to be like super, super valuable. So I just want to say thank you for doing that. Thank you for being generous. And I really appreciate it. And of course, I want to wish you all the best for the upcoming holiday season, and hopefully you and your family get a nice rest after, I'm sure, a very, very busy year. 

Corey Brown
Well, thank you very much for that. And I do wanna encourage anyone that's going through this process or thinking about this process, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn, and there's a lot more conversation we can have. And I think we can only cram so much into thirty, forty minutes here. But if you are going through this process, you're having this thought, Happy to have a conversation with you. Maybe be your momentary mentor. Maybe just shed a spotlight on something that you're having a difficult time with and help make your decision-making. This isn't a process that has to happen a hundred percent behind closed doors. So I am here for you if you want to have that conversation. 

Paul Sonneveld
That is so awesome. Thank you so much, Corey. Really appreciate it. 

Corey Brown
Thanks for having me. 

Paul Sonneveld
All right. All right, everyone, that was our last episode of Marketplace Masters for the year. Don't worry, we'll be back the first week of January and look forward to meeting you all again. In the meantime, feel free to check out our website. We've got an entire resources section where you can find all of these recordings, blog articles from our guest speakers and much, much more. But until then, best wishes for the holiday season, and see you in 2026. Take care, everyone.