March 28, 2016

By Bob Coleman
Editor, Main Street Monday

Episode 17 -- Michael Carter, Founder and CEO of BizEquity

Mike Carter has over 15 years experience in enterprise software and technology services. He’s founded three software companies. Mike was chief marketing officer of a publicly traded billion dollar Internet company and has been called one of the top 100 people globally in Fin-tech.

Bob Coleman: Around 98 percent of all small business owners do not know what the value of their business is despite the fact that it typically is the largest, single asset in their foundation for retirement. Michael Carter, CEO, BizEquity. That’s an alarming statistic, isn’t it?

Michael Carter: Yeah, absolutely, Bob.

Bob Coleman: Tell me what you do. What do you offer to that small business, that Main Street entrepreneur that gets that number down from 98 percent to a more reasonable level?

Michael Carter:  We offer a better, faster, and cheaper way to find out that knowledge. And if you think about it and we make this analogy an awful lot is the old way 10 years ago, 12 years ago to figure out what your home was worth you had to get an appraiser to come into your house, you would take a couple of weeks to schedule that, you’d have to wait for the person to tour your house, then you’d have to wait a week or two to get an appraisal from the appraiser on the biggest asset for consumers which is their home.

Now the biggest asset for business owners is their business and before us there wasn’t a Zillow type of an approach to do it, so I always make that analogy because I think it’s a clean one. The old way to value your home was offline, time-intensive, and expensive. Similarly the old way to value your business was the same thing and like Zillow and Realtor.com ushered in a whole new way to do it using big data, the earliest users I think of big data where it was really Zillow in the states and Zoopla in the United Kingdom in the real estate market. We’re doing the same thing but for business valuations and we’re doing that for the business owner. But we’re delivering it through this network of advisors that include your local community banker, your wealth advisor, your insurance agent, your trust and estates counselor or your business coach, so that’s what we do.

Bob Coleman: Well, you learn something new every day. Zoopla, is that in the UK? I’ve never heard that before. Is that the UK equivalent of Zillow?

Michael Carter: We have an office in London, Bob, so if you say Zillow you get these blank stares. And a very close friend of mine and our investor, when I would go to these meetings with him in London when we were first launching the office there he would say Mike, these US-centric companies and I’d say what do you mean? He goes your Zillow is our Zoopla. I said, okay, note to self.

Bob Coleman: Now I know what my house is worth sort of.

Michael Carter: Yeah.

Bob Coleman: My neighbor sells it down the street, it’s being listed, so that’s a fairly easy metric. Mike, I run a dry cleaner, next door is a pizza shop and then maybe down the street is a car dealership or a Firestone tire dealership, so I don’t have a sense of what my business is worth. So you said big data, how do you bring all this together to separate those three different type of entities?

Michael Carter: Yeah, awesome question. So we constantly – we do something called machine learning which is a fancy way to say that we constantly scrape anonymized private company information that’s made public and that can become in certain states it’s mandatory when a company sells over a certain size, that some of that information is known. But there’s also loads of different databases that exist that professional, offline, independent business appraiser’s use and those databa...