I sat down with Geoff Bruskin, founder of White Tiger Connections, to break down one of the most overlooked wealth-building tools available to business owners - mergers and acquisitions. Geoff specializes in M&A advisory, recruiting, and management consulting for professional services firms.

We get into what mergers and acquisitions actually mean in plain terms, why your business valuation can look completely different depending on whether a traditional buyer or private equity is at the table, and what EBITDA really is and why it matters more than your gross revenue when serious buyers are involved. Geoff also explains why the single most valuable thing a business owner can do, years before they even think about selling, is to remove themselves from day-to-day operations and build a company that runs without them.

If you found out you could sell your business today, do you think a buyer could run it without you, or are you still the business?