The Four Seasons of Search : The entrepreneurial journey from A-Z with Richard Hernan, Managing Director at Broadleaf Financial Group

This year, the Australian EtA and Search Fund community is looking forward to its first big event for the region. The EtA Forum (www.etaforum.com.au) will be held in Manly Beach in Sydney, on Friday 16th September.

In this episode I speak with Richard Hernan, Co-Founder and Managing Director at Broadleaf Financial Group. Richard runs the day to day operations of the Broadleaf Financial Group including engagement, financing and project management of the acquisition of equity stakes in financial planning businesses.

At the Forum, Richard will be hosting a session focused on the Four Seasons of Search, in which he’ll walk through some of his experience navigating the Searcher journey from search, through acquisition, into operation and ultimately exit. It’s a varied, challenging, exciting and rewarding journey, so we’re looking forward to sharing Richard’s experience at the Forum in September.

Please stay tuned as we count down the days and be sure to yell out if you have any questions or comments to offer, so we can make the EtA Forum a great event for all involved.

Tickets available at: www.etaforum.com.au

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What we discussed:

3:03 We learn about Richard’s background and experience in the corporate world

09:32 Richard tells us what led him to go down the path of buying businesses

16:46 Richard discusses the topics for his session and what we can expect to hear from him at the EtA Forum

20:33 Pete and Richard discuss the many different hats worn during the entrepreneurial journey

Quotes:

The whole time there was this juggle between, do I start something? Or do I buy into an existing business? I felt like I'd built a background where people would trust what I do. And I had a track record of actually delivering, and not not just talking, so from that, I did a lot of research around the structures of how you finance that sort of business.

I sort of had this eureka moment of, oh, well, I'll just do this. This will be easy.

If you don't enjoy the climb, you're never gonna make it. You actually really need to enjoy that struggle and get maybe not enjoyment, but fulfillment out of that struggle.

There's a lot of lessons there that I think people can look at what I did and maybe hopefully not make the same mistakes.

Talking around here's what I went through, you guys don't have to do the same things. Here's the resources that are out there that are fantastic on the funding side.

In our model we never plan to completely exit the business, we have a wide range of shareholders, so people can get on and off the bus at any point. And as we have next generation leaders coming through, often it means that we will sell down some to make sure that there's an ideal point where people are incentivized to be genuine owners of the business.

We refer to it as hats now. What are we wearing at the moment? And there's this hat dizziness if you're doing all sorts of different things.