Her Story
About Andrea
When my husband and I met, we decided to try to buy a business, but we weren't getting any attention from business brokers. I learned later we just didn't have enough money, but at the time we thought business brokers just weren't very good and that we could do it better. We found that Nevada was the only state in the nation that required a business broker permit in addition to a real estate license, so we went out to Nevada to become business brokers. We learned from some great mentors and got all of our licenses and just kind of grew from there. We spent 10 years in Las Vegas working right underneath the franchisor, the owner of the entire company nationwide, so we were really hands-on with deals and did a lot of mentoring throughout the company. We purchased an office in Arizona, then sold that, and purchased our Orlando office in 2022. Our key role is white-glove service for our clients. Selling a business is kind of like selling somebody's baby, so when they call, you need to answer the phone and be available with options to overcome any situations that arise. We get involved when a seller wonders how much the asset they've put blood, sweat, and tears into is worth, whether that's because of sickness, burnout, divorce, or partnership problems. We identify what the business would sell for in today's market and carry the deal on our backs until we get to the closing table.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Andrea
01What do you attribute your success to?
I would attribute my success to resiliency - even when things didn't seem quite possible, it was finding a way to make it happen. I would say staying motivated, and having a strong mentorship network around me has been crucial to my achievements.
02What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
The best career advice I've ever received is that there's no I in team. It's all about the team and everyone working together and being able to have the same common goal in the end. One person's never going to be as successful as a team of people driving in the same direction. So I think it's cultivating a strong team and allowing them to feel that they can make decisions and have some ownership in the success as well.
03What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
The advice that I would give would be to find a great mentor who can help provide value to your professional team. In this industry, it's always great that you have a team of professionals that you know to go to when certain common situations arise, so having a mentor who can help share with you and build your network of value for your clients is very important.
04What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
The biggest opportunities in our field are the retirees. All the baby boomers looking to retire is a huge opportunity, and Florida's amazing for that. Right now, there's just this collision of timing with all the baby boomers retiring, and that's the biggest opportunity. The biggest hurdle is how quickly the industry's changing with all the technology that's entering. AI is both helping and hindering - we utilize AI to help value businesses and provide a clear picture of what we feel the market will yield, which allows us to be more accurate with our evaluations and find buyers. But it's hindering the industry a bit because buyers feel educated by social media and AI, and they'll come and ask questions that might have been appropriate for that industry or that transaction, but it doesn't make sense in this transaction. It's added a layer of complexity.
05What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
In this industry in particular, I would say ethics is a very important value. I know it's something that is highly educated and tested on with licensing, but ethics is something that is highly required within our industry. A business is not like real estate in the regards that there's a lot of goodwill and a lot of variable factors. Sometimes a client could tell you something about the business that changes the valuation or the value of the business dramatically, and if that's not disclosed, that could be very harmful to the buyer and possibly even the seller. So I think it's really just strong morals and ethics with knowing that something might actually affect the value or hurt either one of the clients. It's really about true transparency and being able to identify it.
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