After the Deal: How Billionaires Think with Adam Katz | Built to Sell Radio

One day, you’re going to sell your business, and when you do, you’ll experience a step function increase in your net worth. Navigating that moment is something Adam Katz has spent his career helping owners do. He spent twenty years at Merrill Lynch as a Private Wealth Advisor to ultra high net worth families before he and his team left in 2018 to build KORE Private Wealth, an independent firm that grew to five billion dollars in assets. Just four years later, they sold. His new book, Making the Zeros Count: A Field Guide for Decamillionaires, Centimillionaires, and Billionaires, distills what he’s learned into a playbook for owners who come into sudden wealth. 

Katz says the greatest benefit of wealth isn’t what it buys. It’s the freedom of never needing anyone again. Not your clients, not a boss, not a buyer. He argues that kind of independence is impossible to understand until you’re on the other side of the deal, which is why, even after decades of coaching founders through liquidity events, he admits he is still adjusting to it himself. 

In this episode of Built to Sell Radio, John Warrillow sits down with Katz, and along the way, you discover how to: 

• Apply the “three digit rule” to understand why the ultra wealthy literally cannot see hundreds of thousands of dollars in their own accounts 

• Treat financial wealth as a gateway to what Katz calls real wealth: time, autonomy, and health 

• Avoid conflating the headline of the deal with the bottom line to your family, a mistake that causes owners to walk away from life-changing offers 

• Explain your “why” before friends and neighbors invent a narrative that suits them 

• Recognize why a cash-rich business can lull you into overestimating what it will sell for 

• Get off the “one-speed bike” mentality that built your company but sabotages your life after the sale 

• Spot the difference between consumption and a balance sheet shift, and why a Rolex may not be the indulgence it appears 

Show Notes & Links

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Learn more about Making The Zeros Count

Definitions

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About Our Guest

Adam Katz

Adam spent the first 20 years of his professional life at Merrill Lynch, with two distinct careers. The first dozen years spanned a variety of leadership roles within investment product, sales and strategy. He spent the last eight years as a Private Wealth Advisor. He and his team left Merrill in 2018 to form their own independent wealth management firm called KORE Private Wealth, which they sold in just four years in 2022, to what is now CORIENT. Adam is currently a Partner and Head of the Entrepreneur and Founder Practice at CORIENT, one of largest and fastest growing wealth management firms in the world.