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Episode Summary
You’ve got a business that’s printing cash on five to ten hours a week, and you’re sitting at the table at midnight wondering whether to push the chips back in or take them off the table. That’s where Mike Spack landed after the pandemic cut Spack Solutions’ revenue 75% overnight, forcing him to shrink from 16 people down to 3 and prune everything except the most scalable product line. The leaner version came back at seven figures of EBITDA with two employees and a stack of cloud tools doing the actual work. Mike came through our program a year before he sold and we got into how he made the call. We talked about why the road less stupid means dealing with the numbers (not the emotion) when revenue collapses overnight. Why the “one-plus-one-equals-three” story of stacking consulting, services, and products under one roof was actually masking the fact that one line was subsidizing the others. The framework from Die With Zero that helped Mike see he already had 50% more money than he needed and that his health and time curves were the real constraint, not his money curve. And why the e-commerce broker world plays by completely different rules than Main Street M&A. Mike walked away with the check, and a sabbatical.
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## Top 10 Takeaways- Your real job in a crisis is making sure the company survives. You don’t have the luxury of being emotional.
- Stacking consulting, services, and products under one roof feels like one-plus-one-equals-three. Usually one line is subsidizing the others.
- Bookkeeping is not analysis. Without the analysis layer, you don’t know which revenue stream is actually carrying the company.
- The cash-flow merry-go-round looks passive once it’s spinning. The real risk is what happens when one bearing fails.
- Your single point of failure isn’t a number. It’s the one person whose redundancy you can’t afford to backstop.
- Your timeline isn’t fixed. The buyer type you choose (ESOP, PE, acquisition entrepreneur) reshapes how many years you still owe the business.
- Time, health, and money are three curves. If money keeps climbing past what you need, you’re optimizing the wrong axis.
- E-commerce buyers price on trailing-twelve EBITDA with almost no transition. Main Street M&A doesn’t work that way.
- SBA financing is laborious, not impossible. The bureaucracy moves to a different cook in the kitchen, not away.
- Identity wrapped in the company is the trap. Reset the identity while you still have the energy to do it.
Sound Bites
“We kind of thought one plus one would equal three, but it turns out through the pandemic, what I learned was the products were subsidizing everything else.” (@TBD) — Mike Spack
“I felt like I was kind of sitting at the casino at midnight and all of a sudden through not much planning, but just kind of stumbled in and, hey, this is a good run. I got a bunch of chips on the table.” (@TBD) — Mike Spack
“The three big resources we have to our life and living intentionally and building the life we want is we have time, health, and money.” (@TBD) — Mike Spack
“Intentional means being decisive. Quitting is a decision, and humans are bad at quitting on time. Usually we wait too long.” (@TBD) — Mike Spack
“I just don’t want to be traffic Mike.” (@TBD) — Mike Spack
About This Episode
Mike Spack is a civil engineer and the founder of Spack Solutions, a traffic engineering firm he started as a side hustle in 2001 and grew into a multi-revenue-stream company with consulting, services, and a global e-commerce product line. After the pandemic cut revenue 75%, Mike made the hard cuts to survive, ended up with a leaner and dramatically more profitable business, and then went through the Intentional Growth Academy (the precursor to iBD) to figure out his next move. He sold the company to an acquisition entrepreneur via an SBA-financed deal a couple of months before this conversation. Mike’s the kind of guest the show is built for: thoughtful, self-aware, and willing to walk through the actual decisions in real numbers.
Resources Mentioned
- The Road Less Stupid by Keith Cunningham — The crisis-management playbook Mike used to navigate the 75% revenue drop.
- Quitting by Annie Duke — On decision-making in reverse and how humans wait too long to quit.
- Die With Zero by Bill Perkins — The time, health, money framework that helped Mike see he had 50% more money than he needed.
- Strategic Coach (Dan Sullivan) — Mike’s mastermind program; the future-mindset work that shaped his post-sale thinking.
- Quiet Light Brokerage — The e-commerce broker Mike used. Chris Guthrie ran the deal. Mark Daoust is the founder.
- eCommerceFuel — The membership group of e-commerce operators Mike joined to learn how that world transacts differently from Main Street M&A.
- Who Not How by Dan Sullivan — Referenced as the mantra behind Mike’s outsourcing and automation stack.
- Mike Spack on LinkedIn — Find him there for follow-up.
Connections
Phase + Module:
- Module 1 — Ownership Goals — The vision, financial target, and exit path work Mike did before he picked his outcome
- Module 9 — Operator Transition — The actual handoff to an acquisition entrepreneur via SBA
Milestones:
- Milestone 3 — Net Worth & Valuation Targets — Mike’s “I have 50% more than I need” was this milestone in real time
- Milestone 6 — Transaction Value — Trailing-twelve EBITDA pricing in the e-commerce buyer pool
- Milestone 25 — Operator Transition Plan — Quick transition, mostly cash up front, no earnout
Concepts referenced:
- The Owner-Operator Trap™ — The identity collapse of “traffic Mike” and why Mike reset it at 49 instead of 70
- Capital Allocator — The seat Mike sat in to weigh ESOP vs. PE vs. acquisition entrepreneur vs. keep clipping coupons
- Normalized EBITDA — The number the e-commerce broker world prices on
- Three Lenses of Value — Vision, financial targets, and exit options as the framework Mike used to pick his outcome
- Independence Escape Velocity — What Mike actually achieved: a clean cash exit funding a real sabbatical