Quick wins interview with David Barnett – author, speaker, and seasoned consultant with expertise as a private transaction advisor that helps clients around the world buy or sell businesses.
After a career in advertising sales, Barnett started several businesses including a commercial debt brokerage. Helping to finance small and medium sized businesses led to the field of business brokerage. Over several years, Barnett sold dozens of businesses for others while also managing his own portfolio of income properties and starting his career as a local private investor. Barnett regularly consults with professionals and banks on business and asset values.
In today’s interview, David breaks down how best practices in buying and selling businesses, how you should prepare, as well as emerging trends in the business brokerage space.

Listen to the Episode Here:
We are doing a Quick Wins episode. Quick Wins are when I have the opportunity to connect with individuals, discussing products, ideas or services to help round out your consulting toolkit. We’ve got super cool guest. I call this a special edition, go-getters. We’ve got David Barnett on the show. He is a seasoned consultant, an author, a speaker and he’s a former business broker. I asked David to join us on the show to talk about the buying and selling of businesses. It’s a topic that I hear a lot of consultants talk about. Just from an M&A perspective, when at least the consultants that I know and work with, they may do a lot of what’s called mergers and acquisitions transactional types of work.
What David is describing and what he’ll share on the show is for those go-getters out there that may be already entrepreneurs, independent freelancers that are wanting to step their entrepreneurial consulting game up in scale and thinking about buying a consulting firm or go getters out there that currently have their own boutique firm and maybe thinking about selling it off. David provides cool insights. David has a unique position he plays. He acts as a consultant for individuals that are seeking to buy a business and giving people the ins and outs of the business brokerage and commercial debt structuring, different kinds of elements of buying and selling businesses. David is going to unpack what do you look for when you’re buying a business, selling it, managing small businesses, the complexity of it. Sometimes people don’t realize how complex it is to buy and sell what he calls the main street businesses, things like gas stations and laundry mats. He talks about that nobody else talks about where he sees business buying and selling, where he sees that headed, what are some of the trends out there and what are some things that you should consider if you are looking to be in this space. I thought it was really unique.
I want us to do a quick recap of my experience. I’m officially a TEDx speaker. I had the utmost pleasure of hitting the TEDx stage in Zaragoza, Spain where I talked about how to create thriving organizational cultures and my talk is called Why Great People Quit Good Jobs. It was so surreal to not only be on the stage but the journey it took to get there has been pretty exciting. I do plan on doing an episode just on TEDx and I want to gather some of my peers in this space to talk about if you’re interested in doing TEDx talks or hitting the TED stage yourself and want more information even attending a TED event. Before I went down the journey of my TEDx journey, I attended a TED Talk event because I wanted to get more insight. You see what is the final outcome on YouTube videos and if you go to the Ted.