Jason Alan Bohrer - The 6 Pillar Exit Formula to Double Business Value and Maximize Legacy

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This is the Beyond the Story podcast, a show that goes way beyond the story. And now, Sebastian Rusk Jason, welcome to the show. Great to be here. I'm It's great to have you here. We're having a great conversation here before we started recording. And I probably should have started hitting record when we started the conversation, but you never really know where the pre-show You're in the episode. So we, uh, we both are in the great Dan Martell's, uh, elite mastermind group, and he's just bringing other great human beings together and doing a damn good job of it. So great to, uh, put a face with an aim. Great to meet more people within the elite family. It is truly a special place and, um, well, it creates opportunities like this for great conversations.

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So I'm looking forward to it. You know, Jason, I, I look, I love to tell people's stories and I look for interesting stories with people that I want to meet and connect with. And that's what we do on the show. But when we get started, I always like to, for context purposes for our listeners, I'd like to go back to the beginning of the story where it all began.

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Now the beginning is different for everyone. Sometimes it's in childhood. Sometimes it's after high school or college, or the first time you got a job and realize you hated a job and did your own thing. So whatever the beginning of the story is for you, bring us back for a minute. where it all started and what really brought you to what you're doing now. I'm really excited to talk about that too. I know we were chatting about it for Yep. Yep. I love it. So really for me, this chapter at the beginning of the mastery framework, the inception of everything I'm doing now began when I woke up to a room of empty gurneys, disoriented and scared. I, I tried to call for help. There was nothing but the hum of fluorescent lights, but I couldn't speak.

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Only these fevered mumbles came out of my mouth. And my mind was putting the words together, but I couldn't deliver them. And I tried to stand and I tried to run, but my legs gave way from out my feet. And then all of a sudden I see this nursing staff with concerned faces running in around me and then nothing. Earlier that day, I'd been at lunch with my father. and my words just started to fall apart. It's a condition called word dysphagia.

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I saw my father, you know, like a Dolly Zoom, just sort of slip away into the background, and then the room just sort of melted and fade to black. Hours later, I woke up on an operating table and my surgeon said, you know, I couldn't see what was wrong with you, but you were clearly in trouble. So I just kept poking around until I found what I was looking for. And what it turned out to be was that a benign cavernous hemangioma, a tumor had ruptured and I was bleeding on the brain and it caused a very critical seizure. The good news, he would tell me, is that it was fixed at 30 or dead by 60. And at that point, I was like, OK, more morphine, please, nurse. That's a lot to take in.

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But the bad news was the recovery was going to be long. It was going to be uncertain. It was going to be painfully slow. And then he warned me that if I chose to move too fast and if I moved in the wrong way, the damage could be completely irreversible. So he said, okay, 12 months at minimum, I was going to need around the clock care. And I was really going to have to get comfortable with the fact that I couldn't walk. I'd need to learn to talk and I'd need to learn to eat. And I really just felt entirely trapped in my own body. My grandma was nice enough to take me in. She took me to her home in Corona Del Mar and, you know, really just took care of me around the clock. And it was hard. It was arduous. But she was there for me. And that was a really nice place to recover. But that recovery was still hard, right? I still felt trapped and very uncertain with what I could do to get back to myself, right? Would I ever be me again? And so despite her beautiful home where you grew up in Newport Beach, and we were at clifftops above Corinda del Mar, all the sun in the world outside, I was stuck in a dark room, just trapped, waiting, until my grandma came in and said, we need to stop lying to ourselves so we can lead ourselves. And if you had truly tried everything, I know you, you'd be walking right now. So if the map they gave you isn't for you, that's okay. We just need to figure out what is for you. And that really cracked something open.

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I realized I really wasn't waiting to heal. I was trapped by my own design because taking that next step really meant owning what happened next. So I was lying myself, saying I was following doctor's orders and saying I was doing everything. And oh, here's the truth of my situation is I'm just trapped. Doctors said so. I was lying to myself and all that language of doing what the doctors told me. And that was, that was pivotal for me because it allowed me to to really understand that very literally for me, that journey was just taking the next step. It wasn't learning to walk and talk and eat at the same time. It was literally, can you take a next step in front of yourself? So I stopped looking at the mountain and I started looking at the next step. I knew where I wanted to go. I knew what I need to do now. And I just, you know, decided that I was going to let the middle take care of itself. I shrank the move. I focused only on the next step and I realized that's all there was. And that really kicked off a chain of dominoes for me. They had given me a 12 month recovery and with 90 days, I was able to start walking again. Within six months, I decided I was really enjoying this idea of the next step and proving to myself that I was still there and I still had more to prove to me. So within six months, I was back on campus at Pepperdine in Malibu to earn my MBA. And it was there that I really fell in love with the world of business valuations and mergers acquisitions and all sorts of that ecosystem and all the ways that it allowed me to serve. Because I realized, you know what, in my life, it was really just taking the next step. And that's where it all started for me. That's where I began to unpack and unfold the idea of the Mastery Framework and what you can do when you really understand to take the next small step, because that's all there is. And now today, it's a It's a six pillar framework. It's been distilled into a six pillar exit formula. And now it's the framework itself has become a a launchpad for a coaching program, Mastery One, that I began to offer for folks who want to understand how to step into a larger, fuller life Let me ask you real quick before I forget. You were at your grandma's house. She had that talk with you. How long was the whole healing journey?

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The healing journey for me, It went from 12 months to 90 days because what I was doing more so than following doctor's orders, I was leaning into the self-inflicted burden of saying, oh, it's, they said at 12 months, it's going to be 12 months. I was using that as a crutch because I was scared to move. I was trapped inside my own body because I was uncertain and I wouldn't allow myself to take the next step because I told myself I lied to myself. I said, well, I'm following doctor's orders. They said 12 months, but I wasn't making any progress. None in the first month that I was with my grandma, I was just, you know, faltering, failing to take steps. And I realized, you know, at that point, it wasn't learning to walk, talk, eat, all the things, the basic functionalities of, you know, basically being a newborn again. It was simply taking the next step and that unlocked something in me because, you know, much as I would learn by going to get my MBA to prove that I was still there cognitively on a much higher scale, I was proving to myself my own capability, my own abilities. And that was just simply taking the next step. And once I took the next steps, I found, well, hey, the words I was forming, they were easier to put together again. Hey, that next bite of food to feed my ambitions was easier to swallow because I was simply changing my perception of the world around me. I was confronting uncertainty in a very real way. And that allowed me to break through being trapped in my own body, let alone the constructs that others were Yeah, I mean, it makes me think about there's a few people, sometimes it's family, sometimes it's a stranger, sometimes it's a friend, but it's one person that can say one thing to us that can radically change and forever alter the path that we're on. And it sounds like that's exactly what happened because for you to take a 12-month healing and shrink it into 90 days and be back in action and digging into what would become your passion I completely agree. Yeah. And that's similar to what I've learned, right? I mean, take the next small step. For me, ahead of physically walking, it was really just leaning into some beautiful words from my grandmother. We stop lying to ourselves so we can start leading ourselves. That was the first permission slip I gave myself. Maybe she's right. Maybe I try it. Maybe that's OK. Maybe I fall on my face. That's OK, too.

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But I am going to listen. That was my first small step, was to say, you know what? There was something in those words she told me. It just gave me full body chills. And you know, when your body knows this is full cellular thing, it's like there's truth there. Yeah. I'm Sure. Absolutely. Where did you have, where did faith show up in this whole equation for you? Cause you were like, well, you went from, you know, a near death situation to being able to recover from that. And you're like, well, I clearly didn't do this by myself. I'm always curious what a person's thought process is or where they were at or what showed up with them or whatever their version or Yeah. For me, it was as much as anything we can receive all the guidance in that is available to us. Right. It is only for me when I learned to start trusting in myself and believing in what my body was telling me that I was able to put any of it to good use, right? It's like having this beautiful library, but you don't open or read any of the books, right?

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That's sort of the way I've... I've learned to understand guidance. So I really started to lean into how I was feeling, my internal knowing, my internal belief and conviction to understand the moves I would need to take next and the moves that were important to take next. That small step that was front and center among everything in contrast to the mountain I was looking to climb. So for me, it was really learning to trust myself and to listen to what my own body Yeah, absolutely. I love that. So you got to Pepperdine. No, I mean, so, I mean, we went from Coronado Mar to, to, Yeah. So you got there, got to school and then found your passion of what you would go For me, I've always just had this sort of, passion for understanding how the pieces come together, for really the whole gestalt effect of how something becomes larger than the sum of its parts. And something about the mathematics of it spoke to me in a way that I was like, oh, I really enjoy these puzzle pieces. This is really fun for me. This is something that I found very inspiring, that I found I was able to get passionate about and excited about. So that's really what it was. Again, it was listening to my body and trying to simply lean into the thing that excited me in contrast to, you know, a lot of what I've been listening to from external sources of, you know, what people told me I should be interested in, what people told me I should want to pursue. And really what was just Simply exciting in front of me is the next step. I really knew nothing. Outside of knowing that I wanted to prove that I was all still here, up here, I didn't really have an intention for what I was going to do with this MBA. It's not like, OK, I'm going here so I can be C-suite in a year. I just wanted to prove that I was all still here. And that was, again, another item of saying, okay, this is exciting to me. I'm going to take a step towards that because something's calling to me. And then when I got into school, it was a similar passion. It was just like, okay, just learning to listen to my body and show some of my body's telling me as I met more of the faculty and staff and my professors. It was just like leaning into these conversations that excited me. And it was really, it's funny because now I look back and I was like, it's really that simple, but that is a tough skill to cultivate. I mean, there's so much noise around us in so many places. It's about learning to lean into the things that excite you. So you can take that noise and really turn it into, you know, as we were talking about guidance, like, oh, okay. There's a physical response to that thing. I wonder what would happen if I pursued it a little bit more. We're just going to see where it Yeah. Yeah. Stay curious and open. It's amazing what happens when we do both. Yeah. So fast forward to present day. What do you do? How do you Right. So right now we are in the midst of the greatest transfer transfer of wealth that we're going to see in our lifetime. There are 10,000 baby boomers retiring every day, 2.7 million businesses for sale right now, and more coming on the market. Um, but what we know is that nine out of 10 of those businesses listed on the market are not going to sell. And what's probably worse is that one those one out of 10 businesses that do sell, we know that 76% of those owners regret selling no more than a year later. And it's somewhat staggering that in 2024 alone, there were 44,000 M&A transactions. three out of four failed. And 60% of those failures were due to a lack of structure. And as I stepped into this realization and this world, I thought, well, this is interesting. And I feel like there is a fundamental framework that can be applied to understand and really address what is happening here. And that's where I took the mastery framework that I had developed from my own experience that brought me to where I am and really distilled it down into what is now the six-pillar exit formula to address this situation, where I can address and help you understand what you need to do to walk into the next step of your life, to exit with certainty, to profit with purpose, and to really walk away wealthy. And that's where I'm at today. It's been a unique opportunity to serve really the backbone of Main Street America.

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And it's also led to an interesting jump point, a platform for Mastery One, which is a coaching program I now offer for folks who have seen the way this framework can be applied in the context of something transformational, like a business exit. and want to understand more of how they can take those steps and disambiguate them into more of who they are and what they're looking for in life. So they can fearlessly walk into that feeling, that little pull inside of them that says, I want something more. I may have no idea what it is. Maybe I do. I want to put the kids through college. I want to exit the business. I want to learn to ride a bike. But that's what it has become. And it's very interesting to see it work so concretely.

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In serving folks who are looking to exit their business at this time when we're seeing a once in a lifetime opportunity to do that, and also to watch them sort of allow me guide them into saying yes it works for that, but if there is something pulling at you. this framework helped me and it will help you expand into that too. If there's Yeah. It's always where I say that a lot in the world of podcasts, if you've had an inclination, somebody told you, you saw a sign, you had that gut feeling, whatever it may be, that is reason in and of itself to give it a closer look and be with it and see what may be possible and Follow the clues, right? Yep, follow the, one of my favorite books is The Alchemist and you just follow the Every time I read it, I learn something new, which is what I absolutely love about it. So, yeah, there's always something there I swear I've listened to that audiobook four times and I was like, what is going on?

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It would give it another shot. That'll be another podcast. You and I can just wax poetic about how awesome that book is. Yeah, we're going to dissect The Alchemist. The Transformers, where Personal superpower is transformation. I mean, but at its core, I'm a kid of the 80s. I've always loved these things. It's always been, you know, my iteration of a sneaker collection.

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It was only more recently as I was, you know, articulating the framework. And, you know, I was working with my brand strategist and we were like, Okay, my uniqueness, how are we going to dissect that? How are we going to distill that? And he looked at me and started laughing. I said, what's so funny? He's like, it's sitting behind you. I'm like, ah, of course it is.

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It's the transformation I can bring you. So it's, it's clearly something that has been speaking to me since I was a child. Uh, it So, yeah, no, no, I, I'm not, I'm a big collector. I've, I started, I'm a late collector.

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I, uh, I started with Stan became a sneaker head.

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And when my daughter went off to college, um, My good friend, Gary Vee, he's got his collectibles, the Vee Friends collection. It started with his NFTs, and I'm all in on that. Hulk Hogan just died, and I left my signed lunchbox when I worked with him in my apartment in Newport Beach. And I'm like, damn it, just found another one on eBay. For Yeah, totally. So I don't know what I'm going to do with all this That's it. That's it. Well, man, it's been great to get to know you and great to meet you here on a podcast and learn more about your story.

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Stories are here to inspire us to change our thought process and our thinking as well. And that's the goal for those of you listening is for your perspective to be shifted through the stories that we get the opportunity to be able to tell them. So thanks for your time, man. I really appreciate you hanging out with me for a few minutes here. Any final thoughts for Take the next step. If you take one thing from this talk that we've had today, I really want you to lean into, if there's something pulling on you, just take the next step. If it excites you, take the next step. Just find out what it means Got it. Until next time, friends. Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of the Beyond the Story podcast. We sure do appreciate it. If you haven't done so already, make sure you're subscribed to the show. This way you'll get updates as new episodes become available. If you feel so inclined, please leave us a review. We sure do appreciate it. Signing off from the podcast, launchlab.com studios.