Using Strategic Acquisitions To Prepare for an Exit in Tech Services

Intro  0:06

Welcome to the Growth + Exit podcast where owners of privately held middle market companies talk about founding, scaling and exiting their businesses successfully. Learn how to maximize and monetize your business on your own terms. Let’s get started.

Heather Bennett  0:30

Hello. I’m Heather Bennett, your host for the Growth + Exit podcast featuring middle market owners and experts talking about founding, growing, scaling and exiting their businesses on their own terms. Past guests include John Fairclough, founder of Resicom Group, Matt Vuckov, co-founder and CEO of TalentCraft, and Tom Parker co founder and CEO of Align Consulting Group. This episode is brought to you by Newport LLC, a team of seasoned C suite executives who help CEOs of privately held companies grow de risk and exit their businesses successfully. Newport LLC is a winner of the prestigious Inc. Magazine Power Partner Awards recognizing elite B2B companies to see the least of winners visit Inc.com/power-partner-awards to learn more about Newport and what we do, visit us at Newportllc.com, or, of course, find us on LinkedIn. Before introducing today’s guest, I would like to thank Philip de Souza, a former guest of the podcast, for introducing me. You can find Philip on LinkedIn, of course, as as as well as on one of the episodes for this podcast, today’s guest is Arlin Sorensen. Arlin is an IT industry icon, having spent over 35 years as a visionary leader and community builder, Sorensen began his career in 1985 by founding Sorenson Computer Connection, an IT services company that specializes in providing technology solutions for the agriculture industry in the early 2000s Sorensen led his company through many mergers and acquisitions, transforming it into Heartland Technology Solutions for HTS. As CEO, he expanded HTS through strategic growth, and finally through a successful sale of the company in 2012 and we’ll get to talk about that a bit later. Since then, Arlin has continued to be an inspiring IT industry leader. He created globally recognized H, T, G, peer groups to connect it leaders. Founded Oak Road Consulting to support business leaders in transition, and currently serves as the vice president Ecosystems Evangelism, for ConnectWise, which champions community and shared learning. While researching Ireland for this podcast, I found so many accolades and great examples and positive words, it was difficult to simplify all of his contributions to a short bio, which is why it’s so long, and I can’t wait to learn more from him. Arlin, welcome to the show.

Arlin Sorensen  3:05

Oh, it’s great to be with you. Heather,

Heather Bennett  3:08

so let’s get right at it. Um, let’s go right to the beginning. How did you get started in it?

Arlin Sorensen  3:16

Well, back in 1982 I was farming with my my father and brother and bought an apple two plus computer to do our farm accounting on. And you know, it was something that intrigued me. I didn’t have really have any exposure to computers while I was in school, but a good friend at the school system in Harlan said I could come in and mess around on their their computer. And so I did, and fell in love with it and bought a machine and started down that road. And a few years later, I was showing it off to friends and neighbors who would come over to see what a computer could really do. And I was helping them drive into Omaha and buy a machine and come home and help them set it up. And I decided I should start a business around this. And so it was a very accidental thing, but it really, it really helped agriculture, you know, producers, and was fun for me as well. So it was a business that I really, really enjoyed, and took off and grew.

Heather Bennett  4:21

So then we’ll fast forward. So you created your computer company, started helping people, and then what prompted you to create Heartland technology solutions? How did that that evolution happen?

Arlin Sorensen  4:33

Yeah, so scci, the company that I founded on my farm in Iowa, we grew to about $4 million in revenue in 1997 and when we got to 2002 we were still stuck at a $4 million run rate. And so I was, I was very, very frustrated with my inability to break through the ceiling. A lot of that had to do with the fact we were in a. Very rural environment, and we had kind of tapped it out, but, you know, I decided it was time to try something different. And so we started to do some acquisitions. I had a friend that called me one day and said that he had a health issue and he wanted to sell his company to me. And so that kind of thrust me into the acquisition market, and over the next 10 years, we did an additional seven acquisitions to really grow and scale the company. So, you know, it was, it was a it was a desire to really get outside of Southwest Iowa, to serve the Midwest and be able to offer solutions to farm and business clients all over the Midwest

Heather Bennett  5:46

and that, I mean, that’s such a good example of that there’s many ways to grow a company besides just increasing revenue, number of clients. So and you had that unique, unique opportunity where your friend gave you the, you know, the, I’m guessing, a little bit lower risk acquisition experience. So then, with those other acquisitions, what did you learn about the decision making process in terms of choosing companies to acquire? Like, what were the key things you looked for in a company before acquiring them?

Arlin Sorensen  6:21

Well, obviously, we were looking for companies that were in good market locations that had solid team that they could bring to the table and help us continue to grow those markets. You know, I myself was not really a great financial guy, and certainly not a sales person. And so my second acquisition, I specifically went after a company that had a strong financial leader and sales manager, and so that that gave us a foundation that we could begin to then really plan out how to scale, because we had the technical side covered. We had the financial side and the sales side. And the one area we were missing was an operations person, and we got them in another acquisition. So that drove a lot of my decision making. One of the things I did right was I had a team of advisors. I had my banker, my CPA and my tax attorney at the table with everyone we interviewed in terms of potential acquisitions, and I empowered them to say no if they saw any reason why we shouldn’t do that, because I knew that I was going to say yes, you know, to just making it happen, and so that that saved me from making Some mistakes that I would have made on my own. So I’m a big believer in having the right people beside you when you’re when you’re growing and scaling a business, there’s a lot of decisions that you know, founders tend to make based on their gut, rather than looking at the reality and the numbers. And so having having those advisors by my side, really, really helped guide that. And you know, we found eight that we really liked, and we walked away from a number of others along that journey, absolutely.

Heather Bennett  8:12

And when you know, you talk about having that really strong board advisors that you can trust, how did you come to realize because when you, when you start, when you do a startup, you don’t necessarily think about having a board of advisors. How did you get to the decision to say, You know what? I could use some more people to help me make these big decisions as we go forward?

Arlin Sorensen  8:35

Well, school of hard knocks, right? I made some dumb decisions on my own, and I knew I needed somebody to to temper my excitement about continuing to grow the business. You know, I would have grown for for growing sake, but they wanted to make sure that we grew for the right reasons, and it was sustainable, and we could, we could carry it forward.

Heather Bennett  8:57

That’s excellent. That’s excellent. So when talking about building advisors. Because we, you know, a lot of the people listening to this podcast range from startups, you know, entrepreneur, entrepreneurs building their businesses, to people who have many, much experience in building businesses but are thinking about exiting. What do you look for in a good advisor? How do you find those, those really trusted people. Besides just saying, well, I need a tax accountant, I need a lawyer. How? How do you determine who to put on that board?

Arlin Sorensen  9:30

Well, I mean, a lot of it comes down to relationship. You’ve got to have a good working relationship. In my case, I knew all these folks, you know, as part of my team before we brought them together around the M and a thing. But, you know, there’s, there’s a lot of people in the market that that are really talented, but you have to find one that fits with you. So you go, you go through an interview process, and you, you have a conversation. You’re, you become. Clear about what it is you’re asking them to do, and then you select people that that can work together, and that really was a key part of it. I wanted a team that all my advisors knew one another. You know, they were all from the local area and and so, you know, being able to work together and to play off of each other, and not just me, have three different relationships, but we have one together. Relationship was really, really important.

Heather Bennett  10:29

Yeah, that is so important with boards and understanding the relationship, not just between the CEO and the board, but also amongst the board members. You know, especially when you think about major decisions or or regular major decisions in terms of like audit committee and governance. So what were some of the big turning points with HTS, maybe after those acquisitions? You know, because those that was obviously a big, big turning point making the decision to acquire them. What were some of the bumps on the road after acquiring those companies, bringing them into HTS that you learned from

Arlin Sorensen  11:09

well, one of the first mistakes I made was I I announced, when we were doing our first acquisition that nothing was going to change. We were going to continue to do business as we’d always done it, and we just had some new teammates on the team, and another place that did not go well, because immediately things began to change. So my intentions were that we weren’t going to disrupt things, but the reason you buy a company is to change things and to grow your organization. So I learned that right out of the gate that we don’t, we don’t say things like that. You know, my my, my approach was to really be transparent in and have conversation as early as we could. But over time, I learned that you don’t, you don’t telegraph a message too early to your team that there’s going to be an acquisition or a change coming, because when that happens, they all go into, well, what’s that going to mean to me mode? And they quit working. So, you know, I had to learn the hard way that you also, you know, wait until the appropriate time and bring the appropriate people into the conversation so that you don’t disrupt business as you’re getting ready to do a major transition. So you know, a lot of little things along the journey that I had to learn, and most of them I learned the hard way. But as we went further, you know, the team I had built around me really was the key to success, and so they helped keep me in the box and keep me from going too crazy. The team, the my management team, came up with a concept called mulligans. Once we wrote our business plan, I was allowed three mulligans a year, because my MO had been I would come into every leadership team meeting with with some new ideas, and my intent was that we were just going to have a conversation their their thinking was, well, this is what He wants us to go do. So how are we going to go get this done? And it was very disruptive to the team. They they couldn’t always tell if I was just throwing out an idea or if it was something we wanted to get done. So the the agreement we came to was I got three mulligans for the year. That was three things I could change in the business plan that we would make a right turn on and do. And you know, that really helped me to slow down and think about what I was talking about, to not throw grenades during our leadership team meeting and see what the response was. And I never did use all three after that. You know, the most I ever did was two of those. But you know, it’s important that we learn how to how to work together as a as an internal leadership team and as a CEO, founder, entrepreneur, a serial entrepreneur who never, never quits thinking of new ideas. You’ve got to you’ve got to create an environment where people understand how that’s going to all work together and where they fit into that process.

Heather Bennett  14:15

Yeah, that’s so true there. There’s such a unique balance when you are at the head of a company, when you’re the founder, the CEO, between your role and important role in being that visionary to see, you know, the bigger picture, the long term picture, while at the same time being able to relate that and communicate it to a management team who’s who’s going to end up executing on which one of those ideas. So that’s that’s a unique balance. I’m glad you pointed that out

Arlin Sorensen  14:45

my career, Heather, I’ve started 22 different businesses or business units, and you know, about a third of them were good ideas and went well. About a third of them were okay. A third of them I should have never thought of, and nobody should have ever let me try. Time so but, you know, that’s, that’s the MO for a lot of us as founders and entrepreneurs. We’ve got a lot of ideas, and we’re not afraid to try them, and we need somebody around us to temper us and help keep us from getting too far outside the box. Excellent.

Heather Bennett  15:18

No, that’s, that’s absolutely true. And I was at an event last night talking about boards of directors, and one of the questions that came up is, how much time should a CEO of their work time be spending talking to any of the board or working with the board? And you know, the industry standards about 25% but the panel there said, you know, it could be as high as 30% depending on the types of decisions they’re making at that time, and that it’s such a good, a good excuse to pause, like you said, and maybe not, you know, take, maybe take one of those mulligans and say, you know, we’re gonna pull back on that decision just A bit. So, so what were some of your proudest moments with HTS?

Arlin Sorensen  16:06

Well, the proudest moment was the team I built. I mean, certainly I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I surrounded myself with the right people, and, you know, for us to build a company in the middle of a corn field, literally in Iowa, because it was on my farm in in a corn field. You know, the number of times I had people tell me, you can’t do this in the middle of a corn field and serve customers across five states in the Midwest. Yes, you can, if you take care of the customer and serve them well, and so, you know, that really was, was a prideful part of kind of my run, just the people I was able to surround myself with and and the customers we were able to serve. You know, vendors and others would come, come to our offices, and every time my phone would ring and say, I think I’m lost. I’m on this gravel road heading out into the middle of nowhere. This can’t be right. And I said, just keep driving. You’ll come over the next hill and you’ll see the office as we built 12,500 square foot of office space on the end of my house. So we are literally in the middle of a corn field, and it was a lot of fun to bring people to the farm, and we still do that a lot today, through my work at ConnectWise, but people are really what I’m most proud of, and having surrounded myself with a team that was able to execute and create a business that we were able to successfully transition.

Heather Bennett  17:44

That’s awesome. And can you tell me a few of those people that you know that you really were just so grateful to have had the chance to work with at that time?

Arlin Sorensen  17:54

Yeah, JANE CAGE was, was my partner, that that was the financial genius of our organization, and she she did an amazing job of coming in and taking a very sporadic and loosely organized financial business and turned it into, you know, something that ran like clockwork. She was the no person on our team. So she really is the one that throttled me and held me back on a lot of my ideas, which I didn’t appreciate at the time, but I did later, for sure, Connie Hartson came on with me as a service person and became vice president, service manager, and then later became president of the company. She was president when we sold it back in 2012 and she still works with me at ConnectWise today, so she’s been with me since 1995 so a lot of long term people that went through the building of HTS and then came over to HTG, our peer Group organization, and now are at ConnectWise with us. Larry Hayden was the person that came along as vice president of sales, and Larry led our sales sales operation. That was another thing I said early in my career. I believe that we could be technically led and grow a company, you know, through the technical side of the business. I had to eat those words at some point, because if you don’t sell things, doesn’t matter how good your technicians are. So we had to transition from being a technically led organization to a sales led organization, and Larry led that charge for us. So I had a lot of really great people along the journey. And you know, the success we had was not me. It was it was the team.

Heather Bennett  19:43

You know, I will also turn that back a little bit to you, in that you seem to found the formula for creating long term loyalty with good employees. What do you think your secret is? And I know you work with business owners now. So what would you tell those business owners? The secret is. Is to really being able to maintain and keep the loyalty of those just wonderful employees that you know and co workers that you know are going to help you move forward.

Arlin Sorensen  20:11

Well, you know, I think being transparent and and upfront and honest with with the team was was an important part of it. You know, having their their interest in mind, and including them in the conversations. You know, I’ve always been a believer that when we did our strategic planning, we didn’t just include, you know, the executive leaders. We brought in, we brought in people from every facet of the business, and included them in the process. Because if they helped build the build the outcome. They were more willing to support the outcome and make it a reality. And so, you know, each year we had planning sessions, and we had too many people in the room according to, you know, the reality of what many would say. But I was a believer that I wanted somebody to represent every area of the company. I want somebody to represent every location we had. And so our planning meetings were, you know, 15 or 20 people, and it slowed it down, but, but it provided buy in for everybody, and they would carry that back. And so, you know, it’s really relationships. That’s where the loyalty came from, creating that trust relationship with people, you know, and we were very intentional about spending time with them and helping them achieve their goals, you know. We, I was big on having everybody write their life plan and what they wanted to accomplish with their life. And we looked for ways we could help support them achieve those things. And, you know, those are the kinds of things that create loyalty. Wow.

Heather Bennett  21:44

That’s very, very powerful. And I’ve done that method before, where you have 15 people in the room, but the intention is that it may take longer, but then for that next year, they’re all on board and they’re all willing to paddle in the same direction with whatever that plan is. So I

Arlin Sorensen  22:02

agree with that you always have one or two antagonistic folks on the team, and I invited them to be there, if they were in the room when we were making those decisions, they were far less antagonistic about, you know, not agreeing with what the plan was, because they helped create the plan. And so, you know, some of my my leadership team didn’t think that was a great idea, but, but it always worked out. And, you know, you just have to manage those, those individuals a little bit differently, but let them participate and say their piece. And then when they see that the team’s chosen a different route, they’ll follow it absolutely.

Heather Bennett  22:43

So talking about that next step, what? What happened? What were the triggers to get you to say, You know what? I think it’s time for Heartland technology solutions to be sold.

Arlin Sorensen  22:56

Well, when we did, when we did our acquisitions, back in 2002 my new partners, and I joked that, you know, this is a 10 year run, let’s do a 10 year run and and then we’re going to go to market. That really didn’t, didn’t drive the decision, but it did work out that way. I mean, what really drove us, Heather was I got a phone call from a broker saying, I’ve got somebody who wants to buy your business. And one of the things I had learned because we were getting calls, you know, about selling the company back in in the 2010 time frame, and I was spending way too much time talking to people about this, and we’d get to the point where they would say, you know, we really would like to consider buying your company, and I’d say, Well, there’s a list of non negotiables I have that, you know, have to be met if I’m going to sell it to anybody. And you know, I’m a big believer that I wanted to take care of the customers and the employees that got us where we were and a lot, you know. So one of some might not go negotiables had to do with you can’t close the markets we’re in. You can’t come in and just cherry pick the large customers and close locations you got to you got to take care of the employees we have. We’re not going to come in and chop 25% of the employees down. And so, you know, every time that I would share those non negotiables. Phone got slammed down, and that was the end of the conversation. But actually it was, it was Halloween day in 2012 I got a phone call, and same story. I shared the non negotiables, and they said, Yeah, we can live with those. It was like, whoa. Now, now we’re moving to another stage. But in the next 60 days, we were able to pull that deal together and close at the end of the business on the 20 in the 2012 and so it really just kind of happened. We were getting tired. I was definitely getting tired, and running out of energy to keep up with it all. And. You know, I could, I could look back across our journey and, you know, the first acquisitions we made, we were all excited. We were spending, I mean, actually moved to one of the towns for six months to really bring that location online. 2020, 10, when we did our last acquisition, it was like nobody wanted to go travel there. We were all getting kind of burned out and tired. And so, you know, it was, it was time to move on. I knew I was a bottleneck to our continued growth, because I just didn’t have the energy. And I had actually started working a lot more on the peer group organization that we we were building parallel to this. And so, you know, it was just, it was the right time to do it. We got a really, really fair offer. And, you know, all of us in the leadership side were ready for a new challenge, and we had a place to go. So it was good.

Heather Bennett  25:54

60 days is fast. It was really around. It was really fast.

Arlin Sorensen  26:00

It was, you know, we sold, we sold to a telco. And, you know, they aren’t known for fast decision making, but, but they did in this case, and they sent a team of five CPAs to our office, and we pounded due diligence out in a week. I mean, it was, it was unbelievably fast, but it worked, and we got it done.

Heather Bennett  26:25

What surprised you about the process of selling versus when you were the acquirer?

Arlin Sorensen  26:32

Well, certainly the due diligence that that was done on us as a seller was deeper than we were doing on the companies that we bought. So you know, being in a regulated industry like, like the telephony guys are, they have a whole different set of rules they follow. And it was a very intense, intense process. You know, there was, there was a lot less, I would say, interaction at the executive side of things, number one, because some of us were going to transition out with the deal, like myself, and so, you know, it was just a very different due diligence process, but a lot, I would say, a lot more formal and in detail,

Heather Bennett  27:18

Excellent, yeah. And that is, yeah, due diligence can be very intensive, and like you said, it’s a lot of work. So it’s, it’s, but it’s worth doing, because then you know that the deal is the right one, and it’s, it’s meant to happen. So you talk about afterward, part of the deal was that you exited your role. So talk about what happens next. So after a leader exits, what do they do then?

Arlin Sorensen  27:49

Well, that’s that’s really a challenge for a lot of people. I see this all the time with my work with our STS peer groups, which are focused on people that are trying to move from success to significance. You know, most, most entrepreneurs and founders don’t have a plan. It’s it’s sort of interesting that they’ll run a company for 2025, 30 years. Have plans for everything. But when it comes to transition and what’s next, there is no plan. I was fortunate in that I had. I had, you know, our peer group organization. HTG, we had the consulting company. I had a bunch of places that I could channel my energy and what I wanted to do. And so for me, it was a pretty simple transition. But you know, from for most, the next chapter is something they really haven’t thought about, and it’s it’s something that people need to prepare for. The most miserable folks I know are folks that have had very successful exits, but they’ve lost their identity and their purpose, and they don’t know what to do when they get up in the morning. And so it’s important to think about that prior to exit, and to have a plan in place for how you’re going to try to find that next chapter in life and involve your family, because the impact is really as much on them as it is you. You know, I see so many cases where we’re couples that were getting along fine while they were, you know, he was running a business, and she was taking care of the kids and the family and her career, and all of a sudden they’ve got time together. And, you know, husbands come home and try to micromanage the house and create all kinds of chaos. And, you know, it just doesn’t go well. So you gotta, you gotta really plan through some of those things. You know, the money is the easy part. It’s the relationships and the people and your own personal health and well being, especially mental health. You know, I see a lot of people get into some depression challenges after they. Exit doesn’t have to be that way. You just have to plan ahead and really have a plan now.

Heather Bennett  30:07

That is excellent advice and and like you said, it’s hard when you’re working so hard to grow your business and scale, to take time, to step back, even for a short amount of time, to say, Well, what comes next? What do I need? What will I need? You know, what will I do afterward? And there’s certainly a lot of organizations, the ones that you work with a good example. But even in other industries, I think there’s a lot more organizations that are paying attention to that post exit or that next step to help people find so definitely, you know, with any mental helping, it’s always worth reaching out to resources and asking questions and getting the help you need. You know, maybe even before you think you need it, which is good, which is really good.

Arlin Sorensen  30:54

So the other thing about that, Heather is that you know, most entrepreneurs and founders that I find haven’t really maintained their relationships they’ve had with friends. And so we did an exercise with with our STS people about just make a list of the people that that you have a close enough relationship with that if there was an emergency in the middle of the night, you could pick up the phone and call them, and they’d show up. And it was, it was really revealing that the lists were pretty darn short. Outside of family members, there weren’t many on it. And, you know, we’re so consumed with running our companies when we’re growing them, that that we, you know, we don’t intentionally do it, but we just kind of pull away from people, and we don’t, we don’t necessarily maintain those relationships the way we want to. And so we get to the other side of a transition, and we’re kind of all alone again, like we were when we were leading the company. So you got to, you got to really think ahead and put them, put in place, you know, some intentional things to kind of ease your way into what the next chapter is going to look like start before you transition. So there’s something on the other side

Heather Bennett  32:08

that’s great advice. Excellent, excellent. So speaking of advice, who are, who have been some of your mentors over the years, and what’s some of the best advice that they’ve given you,

Arlin Sorensen  32:23

well, Arnie Bellini, who is the founder of ConnectWise, the company that I now work for. And he hired me after we transitioned, actually, when he bought our peer groups, and I came to ConnectWise that way. You know, Arnie, Arnie is serial entrepreneur, a philanthropist. And, you know, he challenged me to to really build an organization that would support people on their journey through the IT industry. That’s what HTG was all about, is, how do we help it? Company owners be successful, and he created the software platform that would enable that. And HTG really was about a peer group support system helping people find best practices, benchmarking so they knew what good looked like. And so we partnered together, and he acquired us back in in 2018 and so, you know, he was, he was a great motivator and friend, and really pushed me to to get outside the box and to really think about growing what we were doing. You know, at the time of our acquisition, we had about 300 people we were serving. Today, we’re up over 1000 and, you know, we were, we were in the US, and today we’re global, you know. So his vision really helped push me along and helped me to grow the business. You know, my dad was a really big influence on me in terms of learning how to really think about business and focus on family and balance that you know, work life balance is doesn’t exist number one. So that’s first thing you have to accept. There’s no such thing as balance. There’s too much of both. So you got to choose. And that was one of the things that I really learned from my dad, was that you have to choose family, because work’s always going to be there, and you can work 24 hours a day and still not run out. So you got to learn to really pick how you’re going to spend your 168 hours every week. We all get the same amount. The only difference is what we choose to do with them. And so you know that that those lessons that he taught me early on were really important in terms of, how do I how do I create a work life relationship, and manage the tension between those things so that I’m doing both as well as I possibly can? Uh, without, you know, burning myself out. So, you know, those things were really life changing for me, and have served me well over the years. You know, along along our journey in it and in the peer groups, you know, there’s so many, it’s such a great industry. We’ve got so many great people in the industry that we’ve gotten to know and really appreciate. You know, I sit on the board for a company called Integris today, which is one of the rapidly growing MSPs in the IT space, and Rashad and the team there have welcomed me in, and that’s been a that’s been a great experience for me to work with a private equity, owned organization. You know, we’ve turned twice now and and I’ve learned a lot through through that, watching how private equity works and adjusting my mindset around, you know how I can help others learn those those things as well. So lots of positive things that have happened and lots and lots of great people that have been part of that journey

Heather Bennett  36:11

that’s so good to hear. And one of, I think the unique things about you personally is that you’re at that unique intersection between agriculture and technology. What do you see happening, you know, now and into the future with that combination of agriculture and technology?

Arlin Sorensen  36:29

Well, things are going fast in it. They’re going faster in ag tech. You know, I found an ag tech company back in 1995 and we just sold that a couple years ago to to the general manager that had been running it for me. You know, pretty much everything today that happens on the farm is certainly controlled by GPS and technology. It’s, it’s a totally different deal than the back when I was farming, I started farming out of college in 1977 I had 300 acres. I thought I was going to die trying to farm that much. Today, my nephew farms about 3500 acres, pretty much by himself. And that’s a we’re able to do that because of the technology. You know, the technology controls every part of the process of planting and fertilizing and spraying the crops. It measures everything that comes out of the field. It’s not is it’s not your grandpa’s game anymore. It’s all about data. It’s all about, you know, measuring and managing those things we’ve gotten into the grown area now, so that we’re able to spot treat areas in a field, rather than have to spray the entire field if there’s an outbreak of weeds or disease of any kind. It’s just completely different. Food production, you know, has increased significantly, which creates some issues on the market side of things. So one of the things about farming, you don’t control the weather, you don’t control the markets, and so going to Vegas has probably got better odds than farming some of the time, but, but the reality is that technology is enabling things that we never dreamed of. You know, years ago, and going from where my grandpa was farming with a horse to where we’re at today, where autonomy is becoming a big part of what goes on in agriculture, you know, with assisted steering and even autonomous vehicles today, in the next five years, it’s going to be a very, very different environment, and AI is going to be a big part of that transition. And as AI and that AG tech come together, we’re going to see another step up in yields and in food production, and we’re going to have to find a way to deal with the over, you know, the abundance. We still got people in the world that need food. We just got to figure out, how do we, how do we get the food from where we make it to where they need it, and do it in a way that that really serves them Well, absolutely.

Heather Bennett  39:09

Just a few more questions. I feel like I could talk to you all day. You have so much to share. What are a few of your daily rituals that you find have helped you over the years, be successful. I always find it’s when you find a really, truly successful business leader, they tend to have very, very strong belief in daily rituals. So what were, what are your habits that help you succeed?

Arlin Sorensen  39:35

Well, one of the things I started doing back shortly after y 2k time, y 2k was a very stressful time for us. I had bought into the idea it was going to be the greatest event in the history of it, and I staffed up in 99 hired an additional dozen engineers, and y2 came, and y2 left, and there was no business. And. A so we had to make some hard decisions. And part of part of the process I went through was beginning to journal and try to try to put on paper what I was how I was feeling, and it was a very stressful time, but I carried that forward. And so one of the habits that I got into is I write a blogs five days a week, every week, and I haven’t missed since 2008 and so I find that that I get a lot of clarity when it goes through my fingers to the keyboard. And so I write, I write that blog five days a week. My my daughter writes it on Saturday, so it goes out six days a week. And, you know, I cover, I cover three things I write about, you know, things I’ve learned in the in the recent past, often what I learned yesterday, because I’m always learning something different. I write about my study of Scripture. I’m a Christ follower, and so I read and studied the Bible and put my thoughts down on on what I’m reading about. I’m currently reading through Bible a chapter a day, and then I’m writing, writing kind of my commentary on it, and then I share something that I learned from somebody else as the third comm part of that email. And so, you know, a lot of content going out every day. I tell people on the list that if you read everything I write, there’s something wrong with you, because it’s way too much. But you know, I find that that people you know will pick it up on a day that they need to hear something I wrote that that made an impact, and I write it for myself because it gives me clarity, it helps me stay focused on the things that matter. But I send it out to a little over 800 people every morning, and have a lot of good, good conversations with folks about things that I write about. So it’s all over the map. You know, this week, I wrote about work from home versus working in the office, and why commutes are good or bad, and those kind of things. And I wrote about taking our grandkids to the circus, and the different environment the circus is today compared to the way it was 50 years ago when I went, you know, and just it’s all over the map. But for me, it just gives me clarity and helps me understand the discipline. It’s part of what I call my 20 mile march, which Jim Collins writes about, you know, and it’s one of the foundational parts of it, it just keeps me centered and focused on what matters.

Heather Bennett  42:46

Yeah, that’s excellent. Yeah. Journaling is such a powerful way to get your thoughts aligned and to help you, like you said, focus on what’s important, right? So I have one last question, and before I ask it, I want to point people to your website at connectwise.com at connectwise.com, and then, of course, to find you on LinkedIn. So the last question is, share, what is a hard lesson you learned while growing all of your businesses that you’d like to share with CEOs to help them avoid or business owners to help them avoid those issues.

Arlin Sorensen  43:26

Well, you know, I think, I think for me, the biggest, the hardest lesson I learned was the importance of taking care of family and relationships, and especially marriage. You know, I made, I made some poor decisions about time management and about focusing on what was important, you know. And I always use the excuse, well, I’m doing it for you. You know, I missed your ball game, or I missed I missed your birthday, or I missed the holiday. I did all these things, but you know, my motive was, right? I did it for you. The reality was I didn’t do it for them. I did it for myself. Because I was the hero at work, I was the guy. And, you know, at home, it’s not always the case, because sometimes I’m not the guy, I’m the bad guy. And so, you know, I really went through a period in the late 90s where I lost my way in terms of really being the right Dad and father that I and husband that I needed to be. And, you know, it took some, some really hard conversations with my wife before I finally got it. You know, I needed a two by four upside the head to say, Hey, you can’t, you can just say it’s, I’m doing it for you all the time, because I know that’s not true. And I finally came to grips with that and got my act together. But, you know, as business owners, we’ve got a we’ve got a real. ConnectWise that our business is going to go away. We’re not taking it with us, but the relationships we build, the legacy we leave, that’s what’s going to last. And we’ve got to, got to be intentional about building that relationship. It doesn’t happen when you die. You build it while you live. And we got to live intentionally and make sure that we’re building that really, that legacy,

Heather Bennett  45:25

incredibly powerful. Thank you. I’ve been talking with Arlin Sorenson, Vice President with ConnectWise, founder of HTG Peer Groups, Heartland Technology Solutions and Oak Road Consulting. Arlin, I can’t thank you enough for sharing your story, your experiences and your advice. Just thank you.

Arlin Sorensen  45:49

Well, it’s been a joy to be with you, and hopefully somebody will will get some value out of it.

Outro 46:00

Thank you for listening to the Growth + Exit podcast sponsored by Newport, a unique national business advisory firm. If you enjoy this show, be sure to share, like and subscribe for futu