Tom Fochtman, Ceibass CEO, is a 40-year veteran in the green industry who took a $60,000 investment and turned it into a $30,000,000 commercial landscape maintenance & management company. And then he sold it.
Now he helps business owners in the lawn & landscape industry build the enterprise value of their company and then he helps them sell it.
“Most business owners will agree that they started their company to ‘earn a living.’ But very few of them thought about what kind of ‘living’ they wanted to do, or what standard of ‘living’ would make them happy,” said Tom. “Therefore they were working hard, laboring along, without a target to aim at. They knew they wanted to make more money but they didn’t know what the number was, really, and what they would be satisfied with. Without a target, and without a target based in reality, it is easy to make a lot of mistakes.”
And one of the biggest mistakes that the enterprise value specialists at Ceibass see time and time again is underestimating the amount of money people need to retire. “What people fail to account for is the fact that they are going to live longer than they think,” said Tom. “Basically you have from age 22 to 62, or about 40 years, to earn, spend, save and invest enough money to last you about 70 years, or until you’re around 92. And that is some difficult math for a lot of owners. So open your eyes and start preparing today.”
And that’s where the enterprise value specialists at Ceibass are at their best – helping business owners develop and then receive every last drop of value out of their lawn & landscape businesses so that they do not have to compromise on the quality of their lifestyle once they retire.
