Job or Asset?

You can find the right business at a fair price and still lose the deal over the money. And the money is almost never a single loan. Host John Lay, founder of Three Circles Agency, walks the real menu of how regular people pay for a business. Sources: Brown & Earle (2017), Journal of Finance — financing access causally drove ~3-3.5 jobs per $1M lent.  Robb & Robinson (2014), Review of Fina...

Most owners think selling is about finding a buyer. The evidence says otherwise.  Host John Lay, founder of Three Circles Agency, puts the deal room and the research side by side on one question: are you selling a job, or an asset? He introduces the show’s central image, the risk pendulum that swings toward buyer or seller in every deal. Then, he walks the five lenses a buyer uses: Finance,  Opera...

Most people think you get fleeced buying a business by overpaying, but the worse traps are paying asset money for a job, or paying for earnings that were never real.  Host John Lay, founder of Three Circles Agency, turns the season’s risk pendulum to the buyer’s chair: your job is to read which way it truly hangs before you wire the money, and to use structure to push it back toward the seller whe...

Profit is an opinion. Cash is a fact.  And the difference lives on the balance sheet, the part of the books most owners never look at and every serious buyer examines for hours.  Host John Lay, founder of Three Circles Agency, gives a plain-English tour of the  statements every buyer reads and, then, goes below the income statement into the  pages that quietly kill deals. He shows why a profitable...

You became a physician to care for people, not to run a company. This episode is built for doctors, especially primary care physicians, who own a practice they were never trained to run.  Host John Lay, founder of Three Circles Agency, explains in plain language what a practice is actually worth (and the salary-adjustment that decides the real number), why patient loyalty to you personally can mak...

The most valuable work an owner can do before selling is also the hardest: getting the business off their own shoulders.  Host John Lay, founder of Three Circles Agency, maps exactly where owners become the bottleneck, what it costs, and the step-by-step playbook to fix it. Plus the part no one talks about: why being needed feels good and quietly destroys your largest asset, and how to let go. Sou...