Things are not always sunny when it comes to running a business. There will be days where it seems like one disaster is pouring after another. Sweeping in just like her company’s name, Raincatcher, to help businesses is Marla DiCarlo. With her experience, Marla can fully empathize with the owners, especially with exiting their business. She shares her story of transitioning from a CFO role to becoming the CEO of Raincatcher, and imparts valuable advice on selling your business or building one. She also gives valuable insights on attracting buyers through digital marketing and generating leads. Learn what makes a good leader and how to navigate the business world and more in this episode with host Bob Roark and Marla DiCarlo.

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Marla DiCarlo: How To Exit Your Business And Successfully Start Over

We’re in the world headquarters of Raincatcher with Marla DiCarlo. She is the CEO of https://raincatcher.com/ (Raincatcher). Marla, thanks so much for taking the time.

Thanks. I’m happy to be here.

Tell us a bit about your business and who you serve.

The name of our company is Raincatcher. We choose this name purposely because we always talk about that it’s hard to make it rain but easy to catch the rain. That’s what we’re doing. We’re trying to catch these business owners who are out there who need help. They want to make this once-in-a-lifetime event decision and they’re not prepared. We come alongside them and help them to not only market their business, find the right buyer and get the right price but also to spend time with them to help them prepare to sell. We do that by doing some tests, looking at the overall score of their business and figuring out how we can improve it. It’s like staging the house. I tell people often that you can have a nice house and a great area, but if you haven’t taken the time to clean it and remove the junk and some of the personal stuff, somebody is going to go in and go, “This place is a mess. I want to drop this down to $10,000, $20,000.” The same applies to business. There are certain things that they need to do to stage the business before they go and sell the business. That’s what we’re good at and what we’re all about at Raincatcher.

Before Raincatcher, you had quite a bit of experience going out and working with companies. You did a bunch of due diligence work. Let’s talk about the experience when you got to look inside companies and how you bring that forward to helping the companies now.

I love talking about this. This is where the passion for small business comes out. First off, I have to back up all the way. I originally went to school to become a social worker. I tell people that because it’s important. It talks about who I am as a person. What’s important to me is helping others. It’s something that’s in my core, something I care about. When I was in school, the problem was I thought differently. I realized among my peers I thought differently and my director of human services brought up that I didn’t quite think like everyone else. I have a very analytical side. I understood math. I’m very geeky that way, which served me well in my career. I became an accountant. The people component helped me in my career. I always cared about making a difference and wanting to change things and make them better. I became a corporate controller at a very young age. I was only 27 years old. I moved on with the founder of the company I was working with who created a fund. It was a $500 million fund that we could pull from. We worked with business owners to either help them exit their business, sell or maybe merge with another company.

We were doing this back at the beginning of the 2000s. My job was to fly out and perform due diligence on the small business owner, create the CIM (a Confidential Information Memorandum – It’s the mar...