RainCatcher is a Denver-based national business and brokerage firm that helps entrepreneurs buy and sell their companies. In this episode, Brian Loring who is one of its senior brokers talks to us about the company and how he ended up working there. As a real estate expert, he offers advice to those who are starting out in the buy and sell businesses and shares some of the things that he does to help business owners readily sell their business. Learn more from Brian as he discusses further how they go about acquiring and helping clients and the typical mistakes business owners make.
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Buying And Selling Companies With Brian Loring
We have a guest from the West Coast, Brian Loring. He is a senior broker with RainCatcher. RainCatcher is a national brokerage firm based in Denver. Even though Brian is in their LA office, he’s holding down the West Coast version or location for RainCatcher. He joined the company a few months ago, but he’s been a broker since 2005. He has completed more than $150 million in business sales and commercial transactions during that time. Selling businesses is actually a second career for Brian. He spent many years in a very different line of work. He’s going to tell us more about that and how he got to this point. Brian, welcome to the show.
Thank you, Bob. I sure appreciate it. Thank you for having me on.
Thanks for taking time out.
You’re welcome.
Give us a quick snapshot of your background and how you got to this point.
I actually am a two-career person. I completely had nothing to do with transactions, brokerage or anything to do with real estate or business for many years. I started out as a journalist. I was a reporter and a television news anchor. I worked as an on-air reporter for many years. I also worked as a television anchor for a while. I’ve been lifelong in California. I worked in Santa Barbara, San Jose, San Francisco, Oakland, Sacramento and all the major cities of California for many years. I started as a newspaper reporter, television reporter and I eventually got into television production here in the Los Angeles area. I worked for a bunch of syndicated television shows back in the ’90s and the 2000s. I worked for NBC, Fox, CBS, numerous television networks on the national level. I covered all the national news. I won several Emmy Awards, Golden Mike Awards and produced several documentaries, hour-long pieces. I did a lot of production. I was mostly a writer and producer for many years. I got to my early 40s or late 30s and I was running ragged. I was getting on a plane at a moment’s notice to go run to a news story that had happened and it gets tiring. It got to a point where I needed something else and I wanted to serve in a way that I wasn’t serving before.
I wanted to feel like I was making a contribution and helping people in a way that I wasn’t. I completely left the television production realm behind. I had been an executive producer. I was promoted to a divisional manager of an IT department at CBS and at Fox where I was doing a lot of IT work, a lot of systems work and network administration. I decided to try something else. That was back in the early 2000s. I went into brokerage. I’ve been a broker since 2005 and done a lot of deals both in the commercial real estate side as well as the business brokerage side.
For most of my life, I’ve done both side-by-side. I started out with several mainstream business or real estate brokerages; CB Richard Ellis, Grubb & Ellis, NAI Capital here in the greater LA area. It was just in deals, but at the...