The Owner / Operators Journey: The energetic highs and lows of running a business with Akram Sabbagh, Founder at WayFinder Capital

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 to Ak Sabbagh. Ak is Director and Coach at Beckon Business, Co-Founder of Second Squared and Managing Director and Co-Founder of WayFinder Capital Managers.

Ak works extensively with entrepreneurs and business owners in the Mid-Market Enterprise (MME) sector across Australia. For over 20 years his work has primarily focused on sustainable business growth, alignment of commercial strategy with partnership/shareholder aspirations, structuring for growth (including setting up of boards and governance processes), acquisitions, and succession (MBO, outright sale, etc).

Ak co-founded Second Squared in 2018 to develop the ecosystem and accelerate the development of the Searcher Community in Australia. He mentors and advises many of the existing and imminent Searchers throughout their searches and acquisitions.

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

Connect with Pete : https://www.linkedin.com/in/peteseligman/

Connect with Ak : https://www.linkedin.com/in/akram-sabbagh/

What we discussed:

03:24 Ak tells us how the year been so far his ventures in the search fund

09:38 Ak gives us his view on the current building blocks for search and where he sees the challenges and opportunities

17:00 Pete asks Ak what we can expect to hear in his session at the EtA Forum

20:35 Ak discusses the importance of the human factor in the owner/operator’s journey

Quotes:

It never ceases to surprise me how much that cultural element translates because even when I'm speaking to people in South America, or Europe, or, or Africa or wherever, there are those common threads around that openness, that abundance mindset, and that willingness to share.

We had to keep reminding ourselves that we were one year into something that was 30 years old, in a market which has a huge cultural focus on entrepreneurship that's different to the one in Australia. But having said that, I think we're starting to see those bits of infrastructure coming together. Certainly the searcher community itself is growing.

The other side of the equation is that business is a human experience. We often go to the numbers as indicators of what's happening. But rarely do we get the chance to go to the human experience and really tap into the energy of the human experience, that could actually potentially indicate to us what's going on in the business, probably even more so than the numbers.

And how can you link that to emotion and the energy of that time? And if you're aware of that, how can you leverage that energy for your betterment? And suddenly, they're sitting on this business five years, six years down the track, which is, and we hear it all the time, if it wasn't for the staff, and the clients wouldn't have been a wonderful place.

That human experience, that is really the piece that's missing. The solution won't come from the numbers, it will only come from talking about it with a real human being at the other end. So it's that relational piece, which is really, really powerful and important. The important thing to understand about payback is that generally, the mistake that's made is people take out too much of the business, and they forget to reinvest.