Archive for category: Know Your Broker

From the very start of her career, Debbie Small was interested in small businesses and entrepreneurship. Even as a child she confessed, “I didn’t read Glamour magazine like my girlfriends, I read Entrepreneur!” In college, she put those lessons to work and created Party Pizzaz, a business that sold unique party favors to sororities and fraternities at Kansas State University. She spent the first decade after college as a Senior Media Consultant for Time Warner producing comprehensive television advertising campaigns for small business owners and placing them on cable networks. She found the work fulfilling and loved the opportunity to consult with business owners to assess their needs and grow their revenue.

Due to her experience, she is recognized as one of the top brokers in the country!

Utilizing her core strength of working with business owners, Debbie joined the Apex team in 2004. She’s now worked in the Mergers and Acquisitions industry for nearly 20 years. While she’s sold hundreds of businesses in a variety of industries, she’s still the same friendly and approachable person that she was when she first started as a broker. Her longevity and seniority with Apex have given her extensive experience helping business sellers and buyers navigate the numerous complexities of selling and buying a business. She’s helped many sellers avoid challenges that can arise when cashing out of one of their largest assets, their company.

Due to her extensive experience, work ethic, and customer focus, she is consistently recognized as one of the top business brokers in the country!

Debbie was named Apex Broker of the Year & the International Business Broker Association’s Platinum Chairman’s Circle Winner!

When asked why she loves selling companies, Debbie replied, “there is nothing better than helping make business buyers’ and sellers’ dreams come true! It’s the American dream to own your own business, to be an entrepreneur, and then sell your company, reaping the financial rewards of all your hard work!”

She went on to share the example of a manufacturing company she sold that was generating $1M a year in profit. Within five years of buying the business, the buyer had tripled his cash flow profit on the company and came back to Debbie to sell the operation. She said that “it is difficult to find that kind of return on investment anywhere else including the stock market, real estate investments, or securities.”

Debbie noted that buyers can face challenges when trying to acquire a company. “The buying environment is very competitive.” Debbie has thousands of buyer confidentiality agreements on file with only a small percentage of buyers actually acquiring a business. Savvy buyers become the ‘squeaky wheel’ with her to get her attention and rise to the top. She advises buyers that “there are too many well-capitalized buyers in the market to play the waiting game on making an offer. A solid business will be snatched up immediately! It is best to come to terms with the seller on an accepted purchase price prior to doing a deep dive into due diligence.”

Along with working as a broker, Debbie loves being a mom to a teenage son. She also owns and manages residential real estate properties. Even now, as Apex’s Broker of the Year, she still remains as driven to achieve as she did when she was that young girl flipping through business magazines!

To learn more about Debbie’s broker services, feel free to contact her at .

In this occasional series, we will share profiles of our team here at Apex so you can get to know the men and women that make us best qualified to help you buy or sell a business.

“This is the first time in my career that I have found myself still challenged after the 3-year mark, because each situation is complex in its own unique way – I love it!”

Valerie has a rock-solid educational foundation (apparently a Ph.D. in Chemistry wasn’t enough for her; she also has an MBA) underpinning dozens of years of work at some important companies: Marion Labs, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM, just to name a few.

The roles at those companies challenged and encouraged her to keep going deeper with her core competency: problem-solving.

“To be honest, I love that it’s complicated,” she opines. “It’s complicated to find sellers, to get them to the point of selling, to find the right buyer, do the dance and get the deal closed. I love putting all the pieces together to form a puzzle.”

Valerie has been at Apex for over 4 years now, and she’ll tell you that the first year was the hardest. She was doing a lot of networking, meeting a lot of people, and “drinking too much coffee.”

But she knew that she was doing the right things and putting in the work, and in time she would get to help represent manufacturers, HVAC companies, and women-owned businesses, the last of which are a particular passion of hers.

“I think you’ll find that a lot of women-owned businesses tend to be in really good shape financially, with systems in place, which, of course, de-risks the purchase for the buyer.”

She currently serves as the President of the Kansas City Chapter of the National Association of Women Business Owners (NAWBO) where she gets to see a lot of the challenges (and success stories) of these businesses up close.

“I’m not looking to close a deal as quickly as possible, but rather feel as though I helped everyone at the table win. My clients often tell me that they appreciate how much I really cared about getting them what was best.”

Jerry Meinert

In this occasional series we will share profiles of our team here at Apex so you can get to know the men and women that make us best qualified to help you buy or sell a business.

“You can’t make this stuff up!” Jerry says when asked about “war stories” in the business brokering world.  

While Jerry has been a broker for five years, he was a business owner for 33 and he uses the exit of that business to inform how he advises his clients.

Jerry was in the general construction business, both in design and build. Because of that, he was able to see seven quarters ahead of time what was going to happen in 2008.  

The challenge was that he was tired and wasn’t willing to negotiate on the deal when an opportunity to sell came up. Instead of taking payments over a period of time, he insisted on a cash-up-front deal and the opportunity dissolved.  

“I should have been more patient. Period,” he reflects.

He brings that patience, also honed by raising two daughters, to bear on each of his transactions, and uses it as a watchword whether he’s dealing with a buyer or a seller.

“What is perhaps most satisfying for me is helping qualified and motivated buyers find the right match with the opportunity to control their own destiny and live the dream of owning a business. That spark and fire is exciting to see and I’m able to use my background as a business owner across decades to help get them ready for that next step.”