Plumbing News

Nexstar’s 2013 Super Meeting - Day 1

Contractors learn about acquisitions, recruiting at Nexstar’s Super Meeting.

About 420 Nexstar members are attending the 2013 Super Meeting in Indianapolis. Total attendance is more than 600.

Chris Risey from Lantern Capital partners demonstrates how to arrive at the best price to either sell your business or to assess the value of a business you want to buy.

The annual tradeshow allows members to connect with Nexstar vendor partners.

The preconference sessions yesterday at Nexstar’s 2013 Super Meeting — this year at the JW Marriott in Indianapolis — covered such topics as valuing a business to sell or buy, beefing up a website, recruiting top talent, flat-rate pricing, improving leadership skills through employee feedback and building your personal brand.

I sat in on the acquisitions session, presented by Chris Risey of Lantern Capital Advisors. The big takeaways were the most common way to value a business (a multiple of EBITDA) and how to finance an acquisition.

Risey says that more financing options are available for contractors to finance the purchase of a business than banks and venture capital or private equity firms. These include commercial finance companies, insurance companies, hedge funds, subordinated debt funds and business development corporations.

The key to financing a business purchase is to get your proposal out to as many financial institutions as possible, he notes — approaching just one entity won’t give you many options.

I also caught the last part of the recruiting workshop, where one concept was brought up over and over — always be recruiting, always be looking for the next team member for your company. Don’t wait until you’re in crisis mode. Make sure you have a vetted stable of potential candidates to bring into your company and its culture.

Today features a keynote address by football great Emmitt Smith and breakout sessions on finding the next generation of leadership, training accountability for techs and female leaders in the trades.

Look for more on these sessions Monday.

HELPFUL LINKS:

Kelly Faloon was a former editor of Plumbing & Mechanical as well as the BNP Media Plumbing Group’s Integrated Content Development Specialist. She also was a former editor of the Radiant Comfort Guide the Radiant & Hydronics Report — both official publications of the Radiant Professionals Alliance — and twice-monthly Radiant & Hydronics eNews, an enewsletter for anyone interested in the world of heating with hot water.

Her editorial specialties included women in plumbing, recruiting for the trades, green construction techniques, water conservation, water treatment, hydronic heating, radiant heating and cooling, snow melt, solar thermal and geothermal.

After a 3½-year stint at sister publication Supply House Times, Faloon joined the PM staff in December 2001 as senior editor. She was named PM’s managing editor in 2006 and editor in 2013.

Previously, she spent nearly 10 years at CCH, a publishing firm specializing in business and tax law, where she wore many hats — proofreader, writer/editor for a daily tax publication, and Internal Revenue Code editor.

A native of Michigan’s northern Lower Peninsula, Faloon is a 1986 journalism graduate of Michigan State University.