Original Interview: Nurture Small Business: Selling to a VC? What You Need to Know!
Announcer: Welcome to “Nurture Small Business,” creating a thriving space with your host Denise Cagan. Denise is the president of DCA Virtual Business Support and has been a business owner for almost 20 years. DCA Virtual Business Support provides small businesses with an expert pairing of virtual administrative and marketing assistants to match your needs. Learn more at dcavirtual.com.
Denise Cagan: Maceo Jourdan is a serial entrepreneur with two decades of building businesses by creating great products and great marketing. His experience spans a widely eclectic mix of practical real‑world experience from the US Army to the cutthroat world of electronic trading.
An early pioneer in computerized trading, Maceo built one of the earliest high‑frequency trading systems for the S&P 500. When pay‑per‑click marketing platforms burst onto the scene, he translated his work into massively successful, automated systems for Google and later Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
This sounds so exciting. Maceo, welcome to the show.
Maceo Jourdan: Great to be here, Denise. I’m glad we could connect.
Denise: Absolutely. In my pre‑conversation with you, I learned that you are quite the serial entrepreneur. Can you tell me a little bit about your first job, your first business?
How Maceo got started in business
Maceo: My first business was, like all good things nowadays, a side hustle. I was working for a large publisher. In other words, I was a paperboy, deliver my papers around the townhouse complex. I noticed some ladies had bird feeders hanging in their trees or from their awnings.
I figured out quickly that they loved having birds around. I figured out how to make a better one. I got this device, rolled it in peanut butter and birdseed and presto chango had my first business. Unfortunately, it was a monthly recurring business. They wanted me to come back and refill the bird feeders.
Being an enterprising young boy, I didn’t want to work that hard, so I snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. That experience, for some reason, even as a child I understood, “Hey, if I can find the buyers first, then the product is the easy part. I took that with me into my adult life after the military and getting into business. It has, quite frankly, never failed me.
Social media and the time factor
Denise: Finding the buyers first, is that more like developing a following?
Maceo: No. I could probably go on for three hours about that, so I’ll cut it short.
I had a digital agency for quite a while. We sold a large, as you can probably guess, the software solution. What I sold it on was return on investments. Now, this was early, like 2008, ’09, ’10. Everybody was about followers and likes and really just nonsense metrics because that’s not going to make you money.
We had this massive data set where we can prove that the more of that stuff you got, the harder it was to make money. Because if you look at the machinery that you need it to put in place to keep the likes and the comments coming and you factored that into the cost of your products, I mean, that’s cogs to me, it’s really difficult to justify the effort.
Of course, nobody believed it because at that time Facebook was ruling the planet. They, of course, were promoting their platform and saying, “Hey, if you get these likes and shares and comments, you’re going to make all this money” and it was just a pack of BS. We can prove it, we have the data for it.
No, I really don’t talk in those terms. In my mind as an entrepreneur, it’s always about return on investment. When I work with entrepreneurs, I try and hammer that into their head that you’re investing whether it’s time. People say social media is free. It’s not free unless you don’t value your time.
I mean, personally, when I factor in my time, we’re in triple quad digits depending on however you calculate that. But it’s like, would you pay somebody $1,000 an hour to run your social media account? The answer is obviously, no.
The time factor has got to be factored in, but more importantly, entrepreneurs have to take a more holistic view of social media and understand what all the costs are, what all the inputs are, and then have very strict measures of results that lead to the bottom line.
Denise: I was approached by a luxury real estate company in Florida once about doing their social media, and he was so tied up with, we want to get to 50,000, we want to get to 50,000, but we didn’t ever come to an agreement because that was also not my style.
Great content and engaging people and luxury real estate you know pays pretty well. Could they have afforded that type of social media? Probably, so. I kept up with them and watched them, they acquired their 50,000. And with their audience of 50,000, every single post had no more than two likes.
Maceo: What people forget is social media is very much like a cocktail party, or a social gathering. For a business to come in there, though I used to like it when it was, walking to a party and try and sell something to a person.
You might get one or two people deep, but pretty quickly, the word’s going to get around, everybody’s going to be avoiding you, nobody wants to be sold when they go to a party. Well, the antidote supposedly was, well, we just need to think of social media as interruption marketing.
That’s where you got all these outrageous videos and people doing crazy stuff in the intros, which, yes, that will work. You will stop somebody in their tracks whenever you’re scrolling on their phone and get them to engage with your content. However, we’re still selling to a human being.
The social media platforms and I love picking on Gary Vaynerchuk because he invites it, so I’ll pick on him. Guys like Gary Vaynerchuk because everybody forgets he’s got a social media agency. He has to convince you that social media is a good idea because that’s how he makes his money.
What those people have done is really they’ve muddied the waters, and what they’re not talking about is as a business, you have to sell somebody, you got to engage their emotions. Most importantly, you’ve got to involve them in your product so that they can envision themselves using it.
Yes, social media platforms are a good way to do that because you can put out video, rich media if you want to call it that. But at the end of the day, sitting down with somebody one‑on‑one and selling them is always going to be the most effective, getting on the phone would be the second-best. As we get further and further away from actual human interaction, it just becomes less efficient.
Denise: It does. Those interrupter types of videos that you talked about, if I’m not mistaken, the current algorithms for the social platforms have downgraded those simply because they’re not relevant to that page. Coming on into doing a contest, like, guess how many jellybeans are in this ginormous jar doesn’t relate to real estate.
Social media algorithms
Denise: The platforms have been paying attention to this, very much. The company that you owned and I want to back up just a tiny bit. You have a ton of experience working with super high‑tech companies, S&P 500 and the Goliath Google and this intrigues me. Talk to me, tell me about this.
Maceo: Well, a programmer’s speak, I always worked with these companies in a really low level. You said the platforms are getting rid of particular content and what everybody misses, whether you’re consuming content or you’re a business and you’re trying to advertise or put out content in order to attract customers.
What everybody forgets is these platforms don’t care about you. They don’t care if you succeed, they don’t care if you fail, they only care that you keep people on their property. Facebook, unfortunately, went way too far that they’re under a lot of fire right now because they’re actually using very propaganda Goebbels‑Hitler like techniques to get you sucked into the platform.
The level that I worked on was the algorithm. In other words, how do we get this machine so that when somebody is looking at our site on their phone or they’re on the computer that we can predict what they’re going to want to see next so they don’t leave? That’s really a key feature of the platforms and you can adjust for it very simply.
If you’re on Facebook, keep people on Facebook, if you’re on Instagram, keep people on Instagram. What that means from a business standpoint, we’ll take the luxury real estate company. What they need to do is make it humorous or entertaining, but then also relevant. Throw a crazy party at the luxury real estate.
Get a bunch of people together and try and break the Guinness World Record for a balloon fight or water gun fight and feature that in the real estate. Or because you can target individuals, which is really the beauty of these platforms, you can target an individual very precisely, just figure out who’s going to buy the property. Where is it situated? This is sales 101.
Who’s your customer? What do they want? What’s their life like? What are their fears? What are their desires? It really doesn’t matter what platform you are on. If you put a video in front of somebody and you’re communicating something that they want, they’re going to watch it. It doesn’t really matter the length either.
I mean, let’s face it. “Gandhi” was a three‑hour movie; it was a hit back in the day. “Infinity Wars” was almost a three‑hour movie; it was a global blockbuster. You can’t tell me long content doesn’t work. It has to be entertaining, it has to be worthwhile.
Denise: Engaging and capture. We have so little attention these days because so much stuff is in front of our faces. The company you created, that you sold, was based on that algorithm. Is that correct?
Maceo: That was really the start. From 2000 to 2005, I was hardcore in the market so developing algorithms and computerized trading systems. We had to model human behavior, translate that into something a computer can understand, and then make money with it, which is basically what Facebook, Google, and all these platforms are doing. They’ve reduced us to objects of revenue.
When the paper clip platforms popped into being, I fit right in because I could not only understand what they were doing in the background, I’ve always been a very black cat.
All that means is I don’t care about Google’s rules. They’re like Joe’s Pizza to me. They’re just a company. Facebook’s like Pete’s Plumbing. They’re just another company.
I broke all their rules, figured out how to hack their algorithm to get the results that I wanted. That’s what I mean. I’ve worked with these companies at a low level.
Interestingly, in the early days with Google, we were part of a fairly large product called the ZMOT study. What they were trying to do is figure out what is the moment of truth when somebody decides either a specific product that they are going to go into a store and buy or a category that they’re going to go in and choose from.
Now, in the retail world, it used to be called the moment of truth. The moment of truth, you’re standing in front of the aisle, you’ve got all these products, and you’ve got to make a decision among one of them.
What Google wanted to find out, and there was Procter & Gamble, and Johnson & Johnson…There were some huge companies involved. We were small fish in that, but what we figured out, was that even, I’m going to mess up the years I think it was ’07 or ’08 or something, even back then, people were starting to use their phones.
Google, of course, was trying to say, “This is the zero moment of truth.” Meaning, before they go into the store. Now, what’s interesting about that is, it really telegraphs what entrepreneurs need to know. This is all about human behavior. Stop thinking about it in the sense of we just need to slap something up on this magic social media platform and go back to your sales roots.
Think like a salesperson. If you’re selling in print, you’re selling at a distance. You got to have great copy, and it’s a difficult thing. If you’re selling on video, you got a little bit more leeway. You can put visuals and other things.
Non-linear sales process
Maceo: As we are figuring all of this out, how do we sell in print? How do we sell in email? What we came up with was what I called a nonlinear sales process. We tested content. We spent a lot of money figuring out what works and what doesn’t. Now, why would I want to do that? I want to transition quickly into how to sell a business.
In technology, what everyone is looking for is something called a network effect or network effects, plural. All that means is, as you get more of one thing, it attracts more of another thing that’s critical to the business.
It all started back in 1908, which nobody probably expected that. It was AT&T. AT&T figured out the network effect. Basically, the CEO said, “You know what, a telephone without a connection to a network is pretty useless. It’s not good for a scientific device. It’s not even good for a toy,” and he was right.
Denise: Was it AT&T then, or Ma Bell?
Maceo: It was AT&T.
Denise: OK. I was just curious.
Maceo: It went through several transitions.
Denise: Oh, yeah.
Maceo: Facebook, if you think about it, the Facebook app, if you’re not connected to your group of friends, it’s absolutely useless. Much like the telephone, you need to plug into the network. Facebook’s network effect is getting more people in.
In the early days, they used some less than ethical methods to get people, actually tricked people, I’ll just come out and say it, into inviting more of their friends. Actually, they did get in a little bit of trouble. When you would connect with them, they would go into your contacts and contact people for you because we needed assistance with that, right?
We’re not smart enough to actually tell people, “Hey, why don’t you try this new Facebook thing?”
What Facebook realized was, if they had somebody come on the platform and get five to seven friends on the platform, then their network effects started taking over. We forget Facebook’s been around for so long that without other people it’s really dumb. It’s there to connect me with other folks.
In a technology company, that’s really the Holy Grail. If you want a unicorn or you want to get these valuations you see in the paper, you have to legitimately have a business where you get a person in or, let’s say, a customer in.
We’ll take Uber. Uber needed drivers, and you need drivers to get riders. What that means for a business, if you’re going to sell that, whether you’re selling it to an investor or you’re selling it to the public, you’ve got to have a machine and it has to be believable, we can go on for four hours about that.
You have to have a machine where you can say, “Look, if we get 15 drivers in a five‑mile area, then, we’re going to have 5,000 rides.” We’ll say over a calendar quarter.
You can put that into an equation to figure out, OK, how much does it cost to get our drivers? OK, that’s one number. Then you have to figure out, OK, well, how do we get the word out and get people actually to use the app? They buy them, right? They offer incentives or, “Hey, have a free ride.” Uber’s early strategy was that simple. “Hey, your first ride is free.”
The shortcut answer is that’s why you go get venture capital money because you need somebody with deep pockets, that’s willing to pay for that because that’s risky. Then, what you’re figuring out, what the risk boils down to is whether or not that equation is right. Is it true that if we get more drivers that we can attract more riders and over time that they’re going to stick with it?
The network effect is driver equals rider, more riders equal more drivers, more drivers equals more riders. That’s a network effect like a flywheel.
If you have a technology company, that’s the key to getting venture capital. That’s the key to getting huge valuations. My company was at such a low level. It was almost like the grand unified theory of physics that my physicist brethren have been chasing. It was this grand unifying theory of marketing, but more importantly, network effects.
It was how do you build a machine that will reliably generate business, and reliably generate revenue?
Start with the end in mind
Denise: It sounds like you started that company because you mentioned that, that was your goal was to get that network effects for valuation. Sounds like you started that company with the end in mind.
Maceo: Always, in fact… I don’t know. Why do I do this? I started out. I have a very simple process, which I took from my trading training, running a trading desk. Getting what you want is really very simple. You have to have a target, that’s reachable and describable. You’ve got to course correct, right. Your day is centered around what you want.
I sat down in 2000‑2005. Of course, hand‑wrote out. I’m very analog when it comes to this stuff, exactly what I wanted down to the penny. In terms of revenue, described what the business is going to be like. Who was going to attract? What did I want to do with it? What that does is it engages your brain in figuring that stuff out.
Determining valuation
As I was growing the business, of course, I started asking a lot of questions about, how does a company get a billion-dollar valuation? Is it just marketing? What I learned as a trader, trading stocks in particular, is that it’s all smoke and mirrors.
The stock market is marketing, they have to convince you to invest in something and the SEC is there to make sure that you don’t get too crazy. Because when money’s involved, people absolutely get crazy, their better judgment we’ll say will be suppressed.
What I figured out through the process was, you have to start at the very beginning with that end in mind. Of course, it doesn’t help somebody who might have a business, they have been in 15 or 20 years. Someone listening to this is thinking about selling. They’ve been in the business 20 years, their kids hate the business, maybe the kids hate them because they work so much.
They’re going to spike dad and mom for working so hard. Happens a lot, actually. These are the real nitty‑gritty concerns when you’re selling a business. What am I going to do with this asset? First of all, you have to ask, do you really have an asset? An asset is priced and valued by the buyer, not the seller. That’s the first lesson you learn as a trader.
You can have the greatest thing in the world and if nobody wants to sell it, you are absolutely going to be busted. You got to trade in active markets. I came to the trading world when the pits were still around, and people traded person to person live, in one building, in one room, screaming at each other. There is visceral understanding of what it takes to sell something.
I’ve had plenty of times where I would pick up the phone, call my broker, and I was trying to sell coffee, lumber, supposedly a liquid commodity and nobody was buying. Well, then my commodity is worthless if I can’t sell it. A business owner has to confront that reality. Who am I going to sell it to and what do they want?
If you’re selling to a venture capitalist, a VC, your business has to have a legitimate growth path so that when it is sold that the fund will get its entire fund at that sale. That’s a lot of words.
Let’s say your company is worth $10 million and you’re talking to a venture capital firm that has $100 million in assets. They need to sell your company for $100 million in profit in order to make that investment.
That’s because the way the math works, venture capitalists fell quite a bit and if they didn’t do that, they go out of business, that’s VCs. With private equity, it’s a little bit different. They still do want a return, but they have some private equity which you will invest for a cash flow. They want more cash to come in, which means your business had better generate a lot of free cash flow.
There are some businesses looking to improve what’s called their platform. Let say you’re a manufacturer and you make watch bands.
Well unless you’re going to sell to a private equity firm that owns watch companies, or you’re going to sell the LVMH, which is a luxury brand that does have watch companies inside of it, you’re probably going to be hard-pressed to get a good valuation because those are the only companies that value that particular thing.
The same thing goes with even retail establishments, coffee shops, clothing stores. You’ve got to have somebody that wants this thing that you’ve built. That is such a tough hurdle for a lot of entrepreneurs to get over, myself included because we put our blood, sweat, and tears into something.
But at the end of the day, if you don’t have something that someone else is willing to pay your price, you literally have something that’s worth zero.
Denise: I was speaking to somebody yesterday or the day before and literally what we talked about, he helps folks with that path, with selling the business and he talked to me that, people show emotional about their business, but they also, they very habitually overvalue it when they’re thinking my business is worth XYZ.
Maceo: Absolutely.
Denise: What you just said rings so true. The value is not really created by the owner, it’s created by the buyer. It goes back to basic economics, what’s the need for that and can I get it elsewhere for a better price or position? Yeah, that makes complete sense.
Maceo: Coupons are a huge business. Why? Because people want a better price. When you walk into a car dealership, you just pay the sticker and they all, give me the car, you just write a check for what’s on the sticker or do you negotiate?
In every case, people know as the buyer that they have the power because they can always just go somewhere else, but it seems, not seems. When an entrepreneur is faced with selling this company, their emotions absolutely take over and as a trader I know that’s the death nail. If I am emotionally involved in a position, that is recipe for disaster.
This is why, the stats vary 90 to 95, 96 percent of businesses, don’t sell. I’m usually asked,” well, Maceo, what happens to them?” They just die, they get gobbled up, people leave, they go somewhere else. I mean, the business just the owner comes in all sad and lonely, turns off the lights.
It’s like this, the last scene in the movie where the lights are going out, you got the sad music playing in the background. That literally happens every single day all across the world and it could have been avoided by simply understanding what you have and who’s going to buy it.
Then, if there’s a gap, doing what’s necessary to fill that gap, instead of trying to force-feed something into that. Now, this relates right back to social media platforms. What a lot of entrepreneurs think is, oh, if I get a large enough company, I’ll get Goldman Sachs to sell my company.
They think that marquis brand is going to somehow we said in the business, put lipstick on the pig, it won’t. I don’t care who your investment banker is. I don’t care what your broker is telling you. If you’re talking to me as an investor, I’m going to look at your business as an asset.
If I’m putting 10 million dollars into something, I need to know, number one, am I going to get my money back? I need to get all $10 million back. Then, how fast am I going to get it back? Then, how much more am I going to make? Three very simple pieces of information.
If those numbers, if it takes too long, if there’s a great risk that I’m not going to get all my money back, I’m only going to get some of it, it’s no deal.
Maybe a deal at a lower price, maybe a deal at that different terms, but at the end of the day, those are the only three things that an investor is going to really want to pay attention to which means you’re the only other alternative is what we call the stupid buyer.
Then, you’re just hoping for somebody to come in who has a lot of money and who is just willing to pay the price for whatever reason and you’re OK with that. I think it’s worth X 10 million, I’m just going to go find somebody that values it at 10 million. Good luck with that. Again, that’s why 90-95 percent of businesses don’t sell.
Denise: Yeah, I sold a business about 10 years ago, actually. It went completely through a broker. Fortunately, I wasn’t particularly emotional and I was ready to move on. There’d been a lot of strife in my personal life and it was just a good endpoint for the business as well.
The valuation when they did it, came in at about a third of what I thought it should have. It was disappointing. But again, I was not emotional, I was like OK, let’s do it. It still sold six figures which is fine, no complaints there, but there is that total disconnect on something that you created from start.
That was just an idea, seed, whatever, and then you built it up. You sold your business. Did you go through a broker?
What about brokers, investment bankers and auctions?
Maceo: No. I have very little good feelings for most brokers. In my experience, they always get in the way. They’re constantly pumping their buyers up, giving him the siren song. Oh, yeah, there’s another buyer. Like last year, just before COVID, we were dealing with a broker out of Ohio, and he was a total nincompoop.
Whenever I would try and pin him down, he always said well, these businesses are selling for X. I finally told him to show me three. If you’re saying you have the data show me three or just shut up because he was getting in the way of a transaction. I tend to get my back up when it comes to brokers, but it’s no different when you go to investment bankers.
Their job is to get the highest commission possible, not to make sure I’ve got a viable business once I buy, not to make sure that all the numbers are legit, which I’ve run into quite a bit with business brokers.
It’s just a very adversarial process, very much like the stock market. Your broker is not your friend. They only care about their commission. Even big companies incentivize their brokers to get more assets under management. So really entrepreneurs, we just have to look at how the world is not the way that we wish it could be.
Like in your situation, I mean, six figures is better than no figures, but most people don’t look at it like that. I’ve realized that. I’m fortunate to have spent a long time trading where day in and day out, I could see when I was making those same, I call them, cognitive mistakes.
I’ve got mental mistakes that I’m making, where I’m valuing something outside of where the market is valuing it. The way we would say it on the trading desk was, if you didn’t like that price, you’re not going to like the next one. If I bought something and it went up to, let’s say 10 bucks and I was like, oh, man, I should have sold, and it’s down around even and I don’t sell.
If somebody knows I’m in that position and they know I’m not selling it at seven, they would say, “Hey, Maceo, you don’t like seven. You’re not going to like the next price.” Why is that? Because if the price is going down, it’s usually going to keep going down.
One of the amazing things about auctions is that they find the greatest pain, not the greatest pleasure. The greatest pain point when something is going down is that it goes much lower than you would ever expect.
Denise: Did you sell at an auction because I thought you told me something different?
Maceo: No, I didn’t sell, I was leading you somewhere.
Denise: OK.
Maceo: That’s actually why I never participated in auctions because I know that the broker that’s at the center of that auction, his job is to manipulate my brain because that’s what I did for a living for 15 years. Whenever I find an investment banker that is running an auction process, which is usually my first question.
I say, well, we don’t participate in auctions, thank you and I literally hang up the phone. Having said that, as a business owner, if you create an auction, all the better. We actually had two transactions. The first valuation was around 230 million that was with the group out of Florida. Then we had that combined company we were going out and selling that.
Fortunately, we all came from the trading world and we created our own auction process which means we let everybody know that they were involved in the process. Most companies like to keep things quiet and they don’t like to sell, no, I’m a trader.
I know that if company B knows that company A is in there and even better if they’re rivals, we’re getting into the psychology that actually matters not the BS you’re going to read in the stress theory. I’ve seen people make transactions in the tens of millions of dollars just so the other guy wouldn’t get the deal. Unless you’ve seen that, you’d never believe it.
In fact, I’ve seen billionaires scuttle 100 million, 250 million dollar deals just so the other guy wouldn’t get it and they spend in some cases 10 or 12 million dollars to do that in fees and advisors or what not. I’ve seen how the world really works in that regard.
If you’re selling a business and you can manage to get an auction going, that’s how you want to sell a business because that’s when people will start bidding each other up and really chasing something. That’s why Christie’s and Sotheby’s, and all these auction companies are so popular.
That’s why eBay is a massive platform. It gives people the opportunity to bid and feel like they’ve got some agency in a transaction but most importantly, it’s when you get the highest price possible.
Venture Capitalists
Denise: OK. Venture capitalist?
Maceo: Unfortunately, when I was growing my business, I didn’t get them involved early enough. I’m very much a maverick, very much going to do it on my own because it comes from all the other usual childhood traumas, but that’s mistake number one is not getting venture capital involved soon enough.
Now, this is an absolute minefield and you better know what you’re doing, and it goes back to where I started, which is network effects. You need to know what a venture capitalist values. Let’s pick on Facebook some more. Facebook was famous in the VC community because they were selling very small slivers of their company for huge dollars.
The reason why is because they proved a robust network effect. Facebook’s draw is solely because they were going to get 200, 300, 400 million people on the platform and sucking all of their behavioral data and then sell that to advertisers. A very simple model.
Once people understood that was the real play, they knew the value was going to be sky‑high. That’s a very simple exercise. Now, of course, most entrepreneurs will fool themselves into believing that they do have network effects.
If you want to know, start talking to VCs very early in the process. That way, they’re going to give you feedback, they’re going to tell you if you actually have something or if you don’t, and more importantly, if you do, get the auction process going.
If you have a VC that’s eager to invest in you, your first reaction is going to be tough. Don’t take the check, call their competitor, simply google the transaction they were involved in, that they missed out, or even better when they’re really pressing you to take the check, so you know what? Let’s slow it down.
Tell me about some of the deals that you’ve lost? Why did you pass on them or who did you lose to most recently? They will tell you, then go call them. So you know what? Hey, I was talking with XYZ. So Sequoia, a well‑known venture capital firm.
You say you’re talking to A16z which is a big venture capital firm, go call Sequoia. You know what? Hey, I was talking with Marc Andreessen and he really likes the company and they seem to maybe want to make a deal. Hey, maybe you want to take a look at it.
You don’t need an intermediary like a broker to run an auction process. You simply need to understand that you have something of value. Get them involved early, never take the first check, always ask them basically, who’s your rival? Who did you lose the deal to? Tell me about your last failure? Tell me about your last win?
Always interview them. Always have multiple VCs going into this valuation and investing process because it all comes down to one thing. When somebody’s at the closing table and they know they have no competition, what do you think is going to happen? Do you think they’re just going to bless you with all the money you want?
No, they actually have a phrase for it called re‑trade it. They are going to suddenly come up with 57 reasons why they need more equity, harsher terms, more board seats, more control, and that could spell disaster especially when things start getting rough.
Denise: It’s exactly what’s going on in the housing market right now.
Maceo: Yeah.
Denise: Literally, I mean, my daughter and son‑in‑law just lost a home where they put in an offer 15,000 over, somebody put in an offer 30,000 over with no inspection required.
Maceo: Wow, man.
Denise: Yeah.
Maceo: What market is that?Denise: Richmond, Virginia. My colleagues in Charlotte, North Carolina, have told me it’s been the same way there as well. It’s just, the housing market has been really tight. Pandemic has impacted it severely, as far as it goes back to that. Same economics, the availability of homes, and the number of buyers that are trying. There are so many more buyers than there are homes available. Basic economics.
Wrapping it up
Denise: Maceo, we need to wrap up shortly, but I want to ask you very quickly, you didn’t employ some of these tactics during your transaction. Is that correct?
Maceo: I am communicating lessons that were learned the hardest way possible through years of effort. Millions of dollars in my own investment. I rarely communicate with people. This is all stuff that I learned the hardest way possible. This is not conjecture. This is the stuff that I went through. It’s the adage.
What would you have done differently? I just described it. All of that would have been different, which is part of why I do podcasts like this. I want other people, hopefully, to listen, to maybe think maybe that crazy guy in Arizona is onto something. Then they can go google around and you’re going to hear when you get into…
When you talk to people that are doing the investing that I’m talking about, they’re going to say all the same things that I am.
Denise: All you have just heard from Maceo Jourdan, Professor from the School of Hard Knocks. Just kidding, that is not his title.
Contact Maceo
Denise: Maceo can you tell our listeners how they can find you after a podcast.
Maceo: You can get in search with me personally, maceojourdan.com. I’ve got two projects I’m working on now. We’re bringing hospital-quality healthcare into the home.
Denise: Nice.
Maceo: That’s a company called Canexxia. Then I’m working on a little streaming media project where we’re looking to cancel Hollywood over at LOOR.tv.
Denise: Perfect. Maceo, thank you. It’s been a pleasure chatting with you today.
Maceo: Thanks, Denise. Glad to be here.
Announcer: Thank you for joining us for today’s, Nurture Small Business. Creating a thriving space podcast. Learn more about your host at dcavirtual.com or by emailing her directly at denise@dcavirtual.com.