Faelon follows own advice by grooming next wave of leaders

“We’ve been kind of busy the last couple of years,” says Tom Lyons, president of Faelon Business Brokers Inc. in Golden Valley.

They moved into new office space last December, in a building purchased and leased back to the firm. And they recruited two brokers: Mike Hart, with a banking background; and Nina Goldberg, an estate attorney, both mid-career. “We’ll make it easy for them to buy into the firm,” says Lyons.

The result is a succession plan for their firm, something they preach all the time to their clients and are now putting in place for themselves.

“I’m 55, my partner’s a couple of years older. We’ve spent a lot of time building this business and I’d like to see it keep going,” Lyons says, referring to Norm Rippentrop. “I would guess I’d work full-time another 10 years and then part-time as long as I can.”

Lyons says bringing in younger partners, and helping them buy the firm eventually, is a typical scenario for professional services firms. Selling to an outside party is difficult, because “the buyer can’t get confident that if you go away the business will stay,” he says.

“The problem with a service company, you pay out the revenue each year. You don’t have a plant, equipment, assets,” he says.

Bringing in new people has energized the firm, he says. They now have four dealmakers and three part-time people working there. “We had to put an IT person on the payroll,” he says, at the urging of the new people who wanted to exploit the Internet as a business tool.

“This year we’ve learned a lot. The real successful businesses reinvent themselves every five years,” he says.

Lyons says the real estate purchase was part of a financial plan: “One of the last tax-advantaged deals available to business owners, is to buy real estate, form an LLC, and then lease it back to the company.”

Tom Lyons, Faelon Business Brokers Inc.: 763.231.4200, ext. 1; lyons@faelon.com; www.faelon.com