Embarking on a Complete Career Shift | Raleigh Williams, Atty, Wealthy White Coat

Transcript Disclaimer: This transcript is generated using speech-to-text technology and may contain errors or inaccuracies.

Mike Koelzer, Host: [00:00:00] Raleigh, for those that haven't come across you online, introduce yourself and tell our listeners what we're talking about today.

Raleigh Williams: My name is Raleigh Williams. I am an investor now. I started as a lawyer doing mergers and acquisitions. I quit that to build trampoline parks of all things and was a small business owner for seven years. And I ultimately sold those and became an investor in people who have businesses that are looking to sell.

And so today I 'm gonna talk about selling a business, maybe pursuing a new opportunity that may be different from the one that you spent a lot of time and investment in developing. 

Mike Koelzer, Host: You left for a trampoline business.

Raleigh Williams: Yeah.

Nine months after I started at a big massive law firm, I said, you know what, actually I wanna burn this whole thing down.

I don't want to do any of this stuff. I would rather do anything else. Laws, probably very similar to pharmacy in the sense that it's very lockstep and it's very easy to see what your life is gonna look like in 10 years.

'cause you can see someone who's a 10th year associate and someone who's a partner. And I saw their lives, which I viewed as what my life would be 10 years in the future. And I said, I want nothing to do with this. This is not what I signed up for. That was the first time that I'd ever gotten a panic attack where I just had so much anxiety at the prospect of going back into work the next day 

Mike Koelzer, Host: Raleigh, your opening comments here are very interesting because in pharmacy, a lot of pharmacists go into pharmacy school, some of them without ever touching foot into a pharmacy or talking to pharmacists. I think more than ever, there's people that have blinders on in the profession. I think the average pharmacist and the average lawyer might be getting some of those same feelings in their first few years of, what did I do?

Raleigh Williams: Yeah. I think there's a huge disconnect in what, at least law, and I assume pharmacy is very similar. It tends to attract people that have. They have done very well and have been successful in school, and they're very good at taking tests and they're very good at doing homework and doing what they're told and following directions and meeting expectations.

 I wanted to just start back at zero and say, I will go back to zero right now. I had a two year old daughter at the time. I was our first kid. My wife and I thought it would be so easy for me to fall prey to the golden handcuffs if I don't get out of this as quickly as I possibly can.

Fast forward, so I've always been, for better or worse I've always been okay with. Changing my answer, right? If at 18 I was a lawyer at 26, I said, I don't know what I'm willing to do, escape rooms, trampoline parks, whatever.

And then I did the same thing at 33 and I'll probably do the same thing at 40 and 52 and we'll see how many times I changed that answer.

Mike Koelzer, Host: Riley, when you are into the trampoline park or beyond, you're saying to yourself, damn, I'm glad I'm an attorney. Because something like this might have put someone else into the hole, or they might have been blindsided by other scoundrels that are trying to do something against them.

Is that true? At some point, did you say even though I'm not, that it's a pretty good combination still.

Raleigh Williams: Totally. I, as when I quit practicing law, nine months in, there was a time where I was pretty. Embittered at the idea that I'd spent so much time going to law school and, focusing on this thing that felt like, like a career cul-de-sac that didn't really lead anywhere. That just left me in a circle that I didn't know what to do with.

And over time I've been, I 

found more and more gratitude for that. 

Mike Koelzer, Host: What was your worst emotion 

Raleigh Williams: I didn't like the work, I didn't like the people. I felt anxiety and I just really felt trapped. I felt like I was, like, I had been, I felt like it was just such a different experience than what I thought that I was signing up for.

Mike Koelzer, Host: Depressed about it and duped 

Raleigh Williams: It's very bureaucratic. Like me, I wrote an article on LinkedIn a couple years ago. I felt like I was going into a library on a daily basis and I was getting paid to take a book off of the shelf and basically transcribe the book.

I'm gonna take this dictionary and word by word I'm gonna rewrite it and handwriting and if I get through two books tomorrow, then that's great. Then tomorrow, then the next day, they're gonna gimme three books to do and the game never ends. The library continues to expand and you're getting paid more money than most people get paid to do something that you're not putting life or limb risk, but it's just ly tedious that I just felt like it was it was really the first time, it was really the first time that I was in a, in something [00:05:00] that there was no obvious into, in law school or pharmacy school, you can take a class and you can be like, wow, this is really boring, but whatever, I have a semester and I can knuckle it out and like I'll figure it 

out 

Mike Koelzer, Host: There's no finality, there's no summer, there's no refreshing the teacher. It's like, all right, probably see 40 years from now, now do it. 

Raleigh Williams: It was kinda like that, gnawing terror of I have to do this for the rest of my life, seriously. This is what I signed up for. And so I don't know whether that's, depression, anxiety I don't know clinically what that maps do, but it was just something that was, I just felt so massively stuck and it felt like the mental image that I had a lot at the time was, If you're ever walking your dog, I used to have an English bulldog and you walk them for some period of time and then they just lay flat on the pavement and

anymore.

And

To pull them with the leash and the collar like pushes up on the wrinkles and it looks like they're about to get decapitated. So I knew that in order to get out of practicing law, I was gonna have to go through that experience of having that collar slip over my face and it was gonna be an unpleasant thing.

Mike Koelzer, Host: I think a pharmacist listening to this, I think you set it up well, where a lot of the pharmacists have a lot of commitment, they've taken pride in being studious and all that kind of stuff.

And unfortunately they have the golden handcuffs. Even as employees, they're at. Higher figures 

and it's cool talking to you because when you have something pressing on you, you think you're alone. No one else understands it.

But it's really every profession that's 

doing it. Alright, Raleigh, so here's what I'm thinking. I thought that if I left the pharmacy and sold the pharmacy, and I'm an old fart now, I don't think I'll do this, but if I did, I would find a business that I think is a little crappy looking, a little rough around the edges and a little old looking. You go in there, they don't say thank you, you can see there's room for improvement. I would drive to the owner's house. Secretly, of course they won't see me. I would drive around their house and maybe even Googled earth, I can do this now. But I would look and see that they're doing okay, they consistently have the cars in the driveway, they're in a halfway decent neighborhood and things like that. And then I would say, alright, I could make it if that's all I did, and then I'm gonna do better.

So I'm going to get more than that. So it's the old story of, basically flipping a house You see the potential.

You've done some of that, but some of it's more integrated with online stuff. What route would tickle you the most merging into a business, buying something that's going or 

starting your own thing?

Raleigh Williams: I felt like when I went from practicing law to running my own business, I thought that was going to be the ticket that gave me the freedom that I sought. That being an entrepreneur was much more there. There's much more freedom in an entrepreneurial life than a W two based life.

 If you've traversed that path before, what you realize is that it's true in some respects, and it's also not true in other respects. As a W two employee, you can. Give two weeks notice and be done with the whole thing in a matter of two weeks. It's easy to end those things.

You have the things that you're worried about and it's stressful. But, as an entrepreneur, you have a whole host of things. You have everything that ultimately falls to you and you have a lot of personal risk at stake. So what I've found is that sometimes going from W two to an entrepreneur, you find that you go somewhat from into the frying pan into the fire.

And the last step that I've found for myself in order to find the real freedom that I was seeking all along was building my business to be an asset that could run without me. I decided to sell it. Some decided to keep it. And once I was able to sell that first business, that was the first time in my adult life that I had the space to really.

Reassess, what do I like and what do I not like? I think, and it falls into two camps, you explained it. I think that there are people that tend to be more creative. I ran these businesses with my brother. My brother is more creative than I am. And we were able to sell the business.

And when you're selling a business, if you build it the right way, you tend to get paid, anywhere from five to 10 times what it makes on an annual basis. So I viewed that as I just got paid for my next five years of work. So let me slow down, let me take some more time and really reassess what I really like to do.

My brother took that time and he said, I love being creative. I hate operating. So he became much more entrepreneurial. He wants to start new businesses from scratch because he enjoys having an idea that no one else has and taking that and doing with it whatever he wants. I. Just [00:10:00] like something that's predictable and that I can understand where it's going and I can optimize it.

And I don't particularly enjoy the process of starting something from scratch. So when I sold those businesses, I said, never again will I start something from scratch. I'm skipping kind of the proof of concept phase and I'm going only to businesses that are pre-existing similar to the path that you're alluding to of what are the businesses that are, that already exist, that have an owner that, maybe has left them to decay in some way that I can help.

Or an owner that has something that's going great and really just needs some help alternatively, and we can build it together and I buy into the business and do it together. I find if you're trying to optimize for just what's the path. What's the most asymmetric risk where there's like really great upside with very limited downside.

I tend to find that businesses that are preexisting, that already have a track record, that already have a customer base, a brand a profit and loss statement that you can look at, it's much more, it's much simpler to predict where that will go into the future than it is to, patent a new idea that you've been thinking about for the last 10 years.

I talk to a lot of business owners that are in the process of getting their business sellable where they can maximize the exit value of their business. Most of those people are looking to continue to work and generate income. And they want to do it with the most upside, with the most limited downside.

And that tends to be acquired. Assets that generate free cash flow month in and month out, and the, and they've done that in the past

Mike Koelzer, Host: A lot of I. Companies you think of crock, with McDonald's, he got in there. He had a lot of upside, but maybe it took care of some of that bottom risk.

But like you say, maybe you're not crowned as having the best idea that's ever been out there. But do you want that or do you want some money, enough 

money to live? 

Raleigh Williams: if you look at the richest man in the world right now is a guy named Bernard Arna, who's a French guy that bought L V M H, which owns Louis Vuitton. 

Mike Koelzer, Host: And Gucci, right? 

Raleigh Williams: he owns Gucci Dior. Yep. He owns a lot of these luxury brands and none of them has.

He started as a real estate developer in Miami. Obviously Warren Buffet would be another acquirer Of businesses. And I think if I had a pharmacist background where I was running my own pharmacy store, I think you tend to. When you're around a lot of similar people,

you tend to not see the genius and kind of the skills that you've developed along the way.

And so if your crowd is pharmacists or general practitioner doctors and you like birds of a feather flock together type of thing you tend to not even see how far you've developed and the skills that you do have because you're just not put in a situation where there's people that are deficient in the areas that you tend to be highly proficient in.

And

so I ran an escape room business and a trampoline park business, but I can work my way around a lease and a landlord negotiation and managing employees, what time they show up, what time they open, whether it's delivering a trampoline park, birthday party, or it's, whatever a brick and mortar aspect of a different business is.

 The product may be slightly different, but it's a very similar process of local marketing, getting people to the foot, traffic and standing out relative to competitors. It's a highly applicable playbook. And if you're someone that has, taking a risk, put pen to paper, sign your name on a document that puts your ass on the line somewhere, then you're already in the top echelon of humans out there that will never take a risk that will always sit on the sideline and , I've found that the actual competition on the real playing field, not what the people stay say on the stands that never actually do anything, but the competition on the real playing field tends to not be as competitive as it looks like it is from 

the outside 

Mike Koelzer, Host: So Raleigh, you then have success selling your escape room business gives you a little bit more time to think about things and more money to do things. Do eventually you get known to be the guy, that does this, does that word start to spread and people start offering you things or coming to you for questions and things like 

that? 

Raleigh Williams: Yeah. the deal that I did with. Jamie Wilkee in the pharmacy space. That was her reaching out to me about a question about how to potentially sell her business. And I saw it and I decided that it was a business that I'd like to be involved with. And so my process was, even after I sold the escape room business and the trampoline park business, I went through, again, my own internal process of what does it look like if I'm no longer the entrepreneur that I've labeled myself as for the past seven or eight years.

What does it look like if I'm an investor instead of an entrepreneur or an author? I'm in the process of writing a book right now. So for me, at every stage, you go from [00:15:00] lawyer to entrepreneur, to whatever this next thing is that I'm in the process of figuring out it's been a process of shedding the last label and being okay of what does Raleigh look like if he's not an entrepreneur? If I'm not, if I'm not starting a business and I'm not actively selling something and I'm not running a business with customers, what does that look like for me? And part of that process was in, in the midst of selling my last company, my wife who I've been married to for almost 12 years now, she was diagnosed with breast cancer.

And so we had a year of her going through, she had stage three breast cancer, so chemotherapy, mastectomy, and raising three children. just the reality of life and things happening and the time and the energy and the effort that's required to be an entrepreneur and kind of birth an idea from scratch and take it out to market and talk about it all day, I was just at a different stage in my life where I felt like doing that, Felt a little bit more hollowed than it had in the 

past of just running a product and hoping somebody buys more coconut water from me.

Like there's, there was a different layer of depth of what I just experienced in my personal life that I felt like I wanted to help entrepreneurs who are already in the midst of things, trying to figure out how to get to that last stage of making their company a sellable asset, selling it and giving the entrepreneurs back the time to do whatever they wanna do.

Mike Koelzer, Host: Alright, Raleigh, let's think to our listeners now, we're just gonna pick a demographic. Let's say we've got a 45 year old pharmacist and we established that a pharmacist's thought pattern might be similar to what yours was. And let's say that they're starting at zero.

They might have a decent change of job. They're not coming out with any debt. But obviously they're gonna lose that job if they go to cold Turkey. Or let's say you've got a pharmacy owner who's also let's say zero. They might have some debt, but maybe at least 

selling it off, they might get back to zero.

You're 45 years old. What are we looking at? What route would you go if you were in that position?

Raleigh Williams: The route that I went, I, I think that there's basically two paths that you

can 

go down. 

Mike Koelzer, Host: We'll spread 'em out.

Raleigh Williams: So I think the first path is you may be starting at zero from a dollar amount, which is fine. And I think that's what tends to be the thing that people focus on the most and really becomes their barrier that they can't ever get past.

But I think that there are two separate areas that you can supplement or that you have assets in that you've developed that aren't. Necessarily cash. The first place that I would look is, I would think of it as what are the assets that you've developed over your career in terms of your network, the people that you know, the people that you have a relationship with, and who are the people that you have a great relationship with that you can start having conversations with a, around what their business interests are, how they make money.

I think another barrier that people tend to run into here is a total fear of talking about money. Wanting to make money, wanting to do something. Particularly people with a more medical bent, like a pharmacy bent. It's like a superman complex where like they, they don't want anyone to know that they have individual personal desires for themselves to get wealthy and they want it to all be couched in this idea of, it's better for palliative care, clinical care.

Like them, they want somebody else to do well and they want that to be the focus. I think, probably before you even get to, what are the assets that you have from a network and what are the assets you have from a skill standpoint, I think we're doing the work for yourself if it's okay to want to be rich.

It's okay to specifically seek getting wealthy and if you're of a more religious inclination, it's ask and you shall receive. Like you have to be willing to ask for it. You have to be willing to seek it out specifically and not be so gun shy at the idea of wanting to make a lot of money for yourself.

 That is to be the first thing that people get stuck with is like, money's the root of all evil. People are gonna think that I'm greedy, that I'm Scrooge McDuck if I'm trying to make money, there's this very unhealthy to, I would say, unhealthy or at least unproductive relationship with money and trying to get money.

That I think is step one. No matter what, when I was 26, I wanted to make 10 million bucks. I didn't know what I would spend it on, right? And my only regret at that time is that I didn't shoot higher because I actually, when I sold the escape room business for 26 million, my cut debt investors, all that things it like almost hit right on the nose of what I was shooting for.

And so I look back and I said, shoot, what if I had said a hundred million dollars instead of $10 

million?[00:20:00] 

And so I think that's step one irrespective, is it's okay to want a lot of money for yourself. And it doesn't have to be because you're gonna donate it to charity and you're gonna be Mother Teresa for it.

You can just do it for yourself. You can want a jet, you can want a yacht. And if you demonize people that have those things, it becomes very difficult. For you to get them because the cost of getting them is the risk that you have to traverse the dragons, you have to slay. All of those things are a risk.

And so you have to be okay. You have to really want the reward

And you have to set yourself up to want the reward and you have to want it for yourself, not for somebody else.

Mike Koelzer, Host: If I'm giving you my time and my risk, it's like you can do it too.

People will come in the store and they're like, you don't have this. It's like, no, but I have an idea. You should start a business on that across the street. I'll come to you for that when I'm looking for it.

everybody's

free to do that.

Raleigh Williams: One of the things, I truly believe that the ambition that you have is something that is God-given and something that should be nurtured and not suppressed. And so I have always been very ambitious from the time that I was in law school. They'd say what kind of law do you practice?

I'm like, I don't know. I just wanna be rich. And that's like kind of a faux pa to say, you know, it needs to be constitutional law or, helping the oppressed or going and building homes in Africa. And I think all of that's great, but it's very difficult. I've, I don't think I've ever seen someone achieve something greater than their ambition. And ambition tends to be the anchor that kind of holds people back. And so you can work on your ambition, you can work on your relationship with money. It costs you no money whatsoever.

I would buy some books on it. I would buy the War of Art by Steven Pressfield, how To Get Rich by Felix Dennis. You can buy 'em for 12 bucks and work on your relationship and foster your desire for

Economic gain. 

Mike Koelzer, Host: I wish more people would be honest about why they're doing things, 

Raleigh Williams: You tend to look very mercenary when you say it. It's so much easier, say follow your passions and do what you enjoy and you'll never work a day in your life. And just to put a fine point on it, I had zero passion or inclination or desire about trampoline parks or escape rooms or any of it.

I didn't care. I wasn't an avid attender of any of those things. I just wanted to not practice law and I wanted to get rich doing it and that

was it. 

So step one is work on your relationship with money and heighten and magnify the ambition that you have for yourself.

I know for me, as I got. More serious about kind of thinking about what I really wanted to do and the ambitions. It became clear to me that the vehicle that I had picked of practicing law, which is very lockstep, 180 than 

2 0 5 and 2 25, that I had more ambition than that vehicle of practicing law could ever give me.

And I wanted more autonomy than practicing law could ever give me.

The next step was the thing that I'd started into before I backtracked into your relationship with money, which is the assets that you have within your network and your community, the people that you already know,

Which again causes no money, but I.

When I was practicing law, I found a buddy that was working at K P M G, which is a big accounting firm, and he also wanted to quit his job. And so weekly we would talk, we would go to lunch and talk about business ideas and we would just say, can we make money doing this? We talked about collecting coins, doing remote car washes.

 We ran the whole gamut of what the ideas look like, 

together. And then when I brought my brother into the conversation, , I basically found a Market watch article that was called The Unbelievably Lucrative Business of Escape Rooms.

And they walked through what the escape room business looked like. I sent it to my brother and my buddy who ultimately became my partner who was working at K P M G and said, "is this?" Is there something here? Is this possible? I was just trying to become as sensitive as possible to what economic opportunities look like.

And I was trying to look at what my network looked like in terms of people that were wanting to make more money. Those are who ultimately became my partners in the venture. So I would say, what assets do you have in your network? And then the other potential bucket is what assets do you have in terms of the skills that you bring to the table?

You can increase the skills that you have by buying courses, you know, that don't have to be massively expensive. And, you can go to more networking events and really try to get outside of the circle that you already have if you feel like the networking circle is lackluster in what I was spending a lot of time with. Junior associates at a law firm, and I talked to all of them and none of them wanted to pursue something entrepreneurial. And so I started to look outside of that. I started to look at my church and who is doing something [00:25:00] that could be interesting.

I started to look at networking groups, young professional organizations that weren't law organizations 

Mike Koelzer, Host: It's almost funny

sometimes, uh, 

not everybody has your same urge. Like when you 

talk to those lawyers, it's You mean you don't have those urges? You mean you're gonna be a lawyer and they're like, yeah,

Raleigh Williams: that helped me learn that that my ambition was particular to me and different than the 

people that had picked the same career path as

1. and I think I got into practicing law thinking if I go to a good enough school and if I work at a good enough law firm, I'm just gonna be around really bright people.

And of course they're gonna have divergent interests. Of course, not all of them are gonna wanna practice law. And what I found the reality was that most of them, I. Went to law school because they wanted to practice law and they were practicing law because they wanted to practice law. And so it helped reconfirm like, oh, I'm in the wrong 

I'm in the wrong spot. 

And that kind of further catalyzed the idea of, I, I don't belong here, which I'm not a victim to, but I gotta move on and I gotta find 

a place where I do belong even if I have 

to build it myself.

Mike Koelzer, Host: Alright, so let's say you've hit your network and you're like, alright, people are interested, they've got maybe some dreams and things like that. Where locally would you get some of these connections?

 Let's say someone's gonna set up, shop, whatever shop it is, five miles from them. What would you do locally?

Raleigh Williams: If you're putting on the acquirer's hat of something that you want, something that you want to go acquire, I definitely wouldn't have any reservations about reaching out to business owners about potentially acquiring. Business because the businesses will trade hands for sure.

, for me personally, I'd reach out to 'em on LinkedIn and say, whenever you decide that it's time for you to sell, I would love to have a conversation if it makes sense for me to buy.

And it's totally low pressure, as someone who's owned businesses and who has received that message. It's never threatening to me. It's 

Hey, I want to give you money one day. Yeah. 

When I was operating businesses, there would be plenty of days where I was like, I would never sell this thing for a hundred million dollars if someone offered it to me today. And then the next day it's if someone came with a hundred grand on my doorstep right now, I would sell 'cause I'm so done with this thing.

Like the massive variance that an entrepreneur goes through in terms of what they'll, they're willing to sell their business for is day by day dependent, 

Mike Koelzer, Host: And I suppose if you went cold Turkey from a business as a pharmacist, that might be another reason to get a going business, you've already got some cash flow coming in and that kind of

Raleigh Williams: Yeah. And what you'll find in the business acquiring route is there are plenty of business owners. I've done this before. There are plenty of business owners that will do it. Seller financing. When you put some money down, you put 50 grand. If it's a million dollar transaction, you may put 50 or $25,000 down that you could get from an investor.

And the seller can be willing to do those deals because, and there's a whole host of reasons for getting out of a lease that they don't wanna be a part of anymore. Not dealing with the employee headaches that they've had to deal with for so long.

They have kids that don't want to take over the business like they thought. A sick wife, a sick husband. There's a whole host of reasons why someone would, why a business owner would give seller financing to an upstart entrepreneur who's gonna put new energy and new life into the business that they built from scratch.

Mike Koelzer, Host: I wouldn't get anything local. I don't want to do any work. I just wanna sit in my ass and let my fingers do the walking and talk to people like you, Raleigh and things like that. So if I'm looking for a business, I would be online.

Well Then that up the world 

Raleigh Williams: Yeah. And there's plenty of ways to start conversations with people that are online like that. That was when after I got out of all of these brick and mortar businesses, I said, I'm never signing a lease again. I'm never signing a personal guarantee again.

 I've actually invested in some brick and mortar businesses since then, but it's done in a way that I'm not, I. I'm not risking the kingdom for a pot of gold and I'm not putting my own ass on the line. If things go poorly, I make sure that someone's there that is massively incentivized to build their fortune out of the success of the business that we're partnering on.

And so that's what kind of led me to more online style things. And it's an iterative process. As you take the risk that you are, that you can tolerate,

And then you let it play out and you say that, I want to course correct and I want to go only online, or I wanna do more pharmacy stuff.

And I think you figure it out over time as you take those initial steps and take action.

Mike Koelzer, Host: So Raleigh, what are your personal goals? Not dollar numbers, but what would be your dream of, and I know it [00:30:00] could switch. Is there a certain number of businesses, a certain involvement you wanna be? What would that look like for you?

Raleigh Williams: The place that I enjoy now more than I ever have is I really enjoy being a part of an entrepreneur's journey, taking them from where the business sits today to a sale and to, to exit the business. , my own personal experience again, was going like I say it's like frying pan to fire, to freedom.

And I enjoy helping the entrepreneur go from their first stage of the business that they thought was going to free them from. Stress selling it to give them the time and the freedom to do whatever they want to do for the rest of their life. And it tends to look very different than the thing that they were doing previously.

 I don't have a number in terms of the amount of businesses that I want to own or be a part of. I think I've, as I've done it more and more, I've, I want to own the fewest amount necessary, not the most necessary. 

 Satisfier versus a maximizer, what's sufficient? It's the part of the entrepreneurial journey that I felt most. Stuck in was I was running a business again. It felt very similar to when I was practicing law and I felt stuck, but I had, I was the creator of my own cage, right?

I had built this business that couldn't exist without me and it was very difficult to figure out how to sell. And that's the part that I enjoy the most. Like when I bought into Jamie's business, it was, I will buy into this under the premise that we're going to get this thing to look like an asset and we'll sell it a second time.

So I'm gonna buy it. This is your first exit, and then we're gonna work together on the second exit. and And I enjoy that process. I en I enjoy helping the entrepreneur 

I enjoy helping the entrepreneur get there.

 I enjoy doing that side by side with the entrepreneur, right? Like I, I've looked at plenty of businesses where the entrepreneur is trying to sell and they want to get out and go to Mexico or do whatever they wanna do for the rest of their life.

And my deal is usually I'm willing to get in this boat as long as you're staying in the boat with me, and we're gonna get into this thing and we're gonna, we're gonna do it together. There have been difficulties that I didn't anticipate, and there've been a lot of great things that have happened that I didn't anticipate either.

And so that's the thing that I've enjoyed doing and writing about and talking about more and more is there's so much conversation about passion driven entrepreneurship of, do what you love. Selling a business is almost this dirty secret of like, I don't want anybody to know that.

I want to move on and do something different. My dad, who is a lawyer, always said a business has no soul to save and no ass to kick. Like the business itself is, Not anything that you need that requires passion to do,

 and you can find and fill that passion elsewhere.

And, there are things that are a lot more important than making more money month over month. And they tend to be human related, dealing with your children, your spouse, your parents, the people that are in your orbit. And a lot of times I think as entrepreneurs we tend to minimize those things because the exigencies of the business are always pressing on us.

I'm doing this for you guys. I enjoy helping entrepreneurs out of the last prison that they've created for themselves.

Mike Koelzer, Host: So you were honest about saying that money is a goal. What other goal though, are you looking for? What other needs do you have in this business?

Who are you trying to impress

So you make money, but where's that Maybe? 10 years old or 15 years old or 25 years old, that's inside of you. That, that you're saying, , look, world, I did this. Is that there? What are you trying to prove?

Raleigh Williams: Yeah. I think the thing that I always say to people is you need to make enough money to know that it's not the answer and then go find what is. That was my process. I always attributed money to freedom, money to do whatever I wanted to do to not be told what to do from my parents and not just to have total autonomy in how I chose to live my life.

And then after I got enough money to do that, I found that I still wanted more. You're always one zero away from being happy enough with 

money. 

Mike Koelzer, Host: sure. 

Raleigh Williams: You just need one more zero at the end of

your bank account and then, and then you're happy. 

And as I sold those businesses I started to spend more time thinking about not what I can make the most money in, but where I can uniquely contribute in a way that's unique to me in my experiences.

Who are the people's lives that I would be interested in changing for the better. And how can I contribute to those? And, usually it tends to look like some version of you five or 10 years prior, some of the harder problems that you've had to overcome yourself.

What I've [00:35:00] ultimately found is that like any external answer of who are you trying to impress or what are you trying to do, or what does the car mean, or the house mean, or the whatever mean, once you have enough stillness in your life, you can find that it's you, yourself, that you're, it's a conversation with yourself.

The self-confidence, self-belief and you can never control whether. Your parents love you, or your kids love you, or even if your spouse loves you, but if you love you and you love what you're doing, and you feel like you're uniquely contributing in a way that, maximizes your gifts that you've been given then I think that's contentment fulfillment.

 If you'd asked me that five years ago, I would've been too much in the hustle and bustle to

have a more thoughtful answer, 

Mike Koelzer, Host: Yeah. With mine, The pharmacy is no longer an image thing for me. I think it's always been cool to say that I'm an owner. 

I know the podcast, the reason for this, Raleigh is I'm the eighth of 12 children, 

and when you're the eighth of 12 children, you don't get a word in. If you wanna be heard, you have to have a podcast. You're not gonna be heard by your older brothers, you're the little punk brother,

Raleigh Williams: For me, that was law school. I'm not gonna be heard from my parents and my older siblings unless I'm sophisticated. Unless I'm very well educated and I can out argue them and what the right answer is. And at least for me, my process has been, okay well, What about you listening to yourself?

and that's been, my lawyer answered what I wanted to do growing up, saying a lawyer was an answer that everyone was happy with except for me once I got into it. And same with entrepreneurs. And so it's been that, that process of just like making myself proud of what I'm doing and 

If anyone else has a problem with it, that's okay too.

Mike Koelzer, Host: So Raleigh pharmacists are listening to this and they're pulling up in their driveway and so on. They've got a few minutes to maybe think about this conversation. And let's just pretend they're maybe the situations that you were in earlier on.

What advice would you give to them?

Raleigh Williams: I think the advice that I got that was the most helpful in that stage was I think we're all on our own. I. Hero's journey where we're the hero of our own life. And you can't avoid that journey by not taking any risk or you can. And the payment for that, the recompense for that will be massive regret and wishing that you had done something differently.

And the fear of pain. The fear of the pain that you think, that,, a less well trodden path will bring the fear of the pain is always worse than the pain itself. And the anticipation, the anxiety that it produces, you're experiencing something worse than if you were to just do it.

'cause once you just do it, everything that you feel, it pales in comparison to the anxiety that you generate, thinking about what it will be like. And I think taking a proactive step, that doesn't have to be a massive step. It could be telling your significant other, Hey, I don't know if you know this, but I'm actually pretty unhappy in my job and I want to do something different.

I want to try something different. I don't know what it means yet. I don't have the answer, but I'm just really unhappy and I would love for your support and what it looks like doing something different. That can be a massive step. That can be a conversation that you've never had before with anybody else.

And I think taking those steps and expanding the amount of. Risk and bringing more people into the conversation because a lot of times it just stays in our head and we're playing out everything in our head and no one else knows. 

And so just, doing something that puts you back in the hero seat 

of taking an affirmative action towards the thing that you want.

Mike Koelzer, Host: Raleigh boy, thanks for joining us today. It's so important in every profession. To know there's an option out there. You might not use the option, you might not care about the option, but it's important to not think that what you're doing in life is the only way it can go.

And so thanks for opening that up for us.

Raleigh Williams: Yeah. Thanks for having me. I appreciate the time. And hopefully we convince some people to. Take some more autonomy and control of whatever they wanna do.

Mike Koelzer, Host: Absolutely. Alright, Raleigh, we'll keep in touch and thanks again.

Raleigh Williams: Thanks, man.