Small businesses who are looking to grow, but feel like they are stuck need to consider bringing equity into the business. This allows them to consider if they should work with a partner or partners and under what conditions and structure. Ann Bennett, Founder and CEO of KBA Associates has been helping small businesses move into a state where they can grow the company for five years then sell it or grow it so that their children can take over. Ann explains that a company cannot run without people, so strong employee management is vital for growth.

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How Equity in Small Businesses Help Growth with Ann Bennett

As our guest, we have https://www.linkedin.com/in/anncbennett/ (Ann Bennett). She’s the Founder and CEO of http://kbaassociates.com/ (KBA Associates). Ann, tell us about your business and who you serve. Before we get too far into that, let’s dig into your journey to this point and your background.

Thank you, Bob. I appreciate the opportunity to discuss my business, KBA, with you. I work with small and medium-sized businesses. I’m going to give you my background first and then it’ll journey on how I work with them. I have a Big Four background, started out in audit, then in consulting, left Big Four, and started an IT company that did large trading partnerships. We developed a software and we had customer service. I did that for fifteen years then I sold it to a strategic buyer and was a director of national tax at the company that acquired my company and had a non-compete. After I left after the non-compete, I realized that I had a lot of knowledge and had been beat up a lot in the small business world that I could help small businesses.

Specifically, what I’ve noticed is the lack of the journey of finance. You don’t look at your financial statements fifteen days after year-end. The financial attributes are throughout your company from day one, and every activity within the company has a financial component and should have a return. That helps in your decision making and your planning, and that’s why I help companies in strategic planning, executing the planning, making sure that the finance flows out throughout the company and the margin area, returning on marketing in sales and promotions. When you go to a conference for example, $10,000 spent at the conference, what was your return? What did you do? What should you do with the cards? That makes a difference in your growth.

The thing that folks are thinking, they go, “You went quickly through the fact that you started a company and ran it for fifteen years.” Most companies don’t make it that long nor do they get bought out. Let’s dig in a little bit to the start of your company and the growth and then the subsequent sale of your company. You left audit in the Big Four accounting firm. What was that thought process like when you said, “I’m leaving a great job, good security, and I’m going to start my own business.” What was that like?

What happened was I was going with a company that was going to do a large trading partnership in oil and gas, because I had done a lot of systems work in oil and gas, and I got a call. I never know how the call came. It came on my phone and it said, “Ann, we need a partnership system. Your name came up and we’d like you to write it.” I put together a couple of programmers and second floor of the train station and we were off and running. However, I was very lucky. In that environment, there were only three other public accounting firms that had large mainframe systems.

Where was this at the time?

Denver. There were a couple other companies that wanted to have a system available because they wanted the audit work, but they didn’t have the systems work, but we were developing the system.