Transforming M&A: Lessons in Culture, Growth, and Purpose

Ron Carson: I grew up just north of here, about an hour, and met my wife when we were 17. So we've been together—it'll be 43 years this August 15th. We were both farm kids. So Jeannie and I grew up on farms, met, and have been together ever since. We have three kids, three grandchildren—three daughters and then two grandsons and a granddaughter. She's been my partner all along.

We started Carson Group in 1983 out of my college dorm room on the 11th floor of Abel. So I was in the dormitory, cold calling out of a phone book. My parents had just gone broke and I had a negative net worth of $2,600, and that’s where this all started.

Kison: A party dorm. I couldn't get in Abel—they didn't want to let me in there.

Ron Carson: Yeah, it was a party dorm. Matter of fact, my roommate, who was my childhood best friend, actually works here at Carson Group. We partied every... I went down to play football actually. Well, we did a fair amount of partying and I got injured my first year, and that gave me the time to actually start what has become Carson Group today.

Kison: This is so early. Like, how were you even thinking about starting a business or how'd that happen?

Ron Carson: It started by accident. I had heard at the time Amoco Life had just come out with Universal Life. And someone said, if you sell it, you can sell insurance and make a lot of money. I thought, I need something. I remember my dad saying there’s no future in farming—because I thought I was going to be a farmer—when he went broke. Someone said you can sell life insurance and make a fair amount of money.

So I didn’t know anything about life insurance. I had a little bit of sales training from the managing general agent here in Omaha. I would go and talk to farmers about why they needed life insurance. You talk about just trying to sell something regardless of the need.

But the thing I could do is relate to farmers. I could relate to them on equipment, weather, grain prices, herbicides, pesticides—because I knew it all. People would trust me. I was truly what you would call an unconscious incompetent. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I really didn’t know what I was doing.

Back then, the play was to replace whole life insurance. You could give people more benefit and faster-growing cash values. I did that for about six months. I just didn’t enjoy it. One, I really didn’t believe in the product the more I became educated on it. And two, I always wanted to have something to do with financial services.

I was sitting in a library shortly after the news from my parents, and I looked at Money Magazine. It had the top 10 professions of the future, and at the top of the list, it said become a CFP. Insurance, I thought, would be a good step towards that, but then I soon learned I wanted to sell stocks, bonds, mutual funds. So I started down the road of becoming a certified financial planner.

And talk about small world—I was at an event in Napa Valley at the wine auction, which was an event my wife and I went to for many years. There's a pre-party and a lady there I knew had a friend with her. We got to talking and she asked where I was from. I said Nebraska. She asked what I did. I said I’m in financial services, I’m a wealth advisor. I told her the story of how I got into it—reading the article in Money Magazine. She looked at me and said, “I was with Money Magazine, and I wrote that article.”

Kison: That’s a great story. It’s so funny.

Ron Carson: Yeah. The butterfly effect—that’s how it works.

Kison: So you started with insurance and moved toward becoming a certified financial planner.

Ron Carson: Yes. What drove me was pure fear. I know we’ll talk about this later, but it’s core to who I was and who I became. That moment when my dad—only time I had ever seen him cry—explained our financial situation... It seared my soul. It hurt. It was painful.

Being from a small town, especially for a 17-year-old, I was so embarrassed. I vowed then and there I was never going to be poor. I set out on a sprint to be successful and I worked all the time. I’d get up before the sun was up, be in the office before the sun came up, and I didn’t get home until late at night.

Thank God Jeannie stayed with me through all of that because she raised the kids. I was really not around much. No matter what level of success I had, I just kept grinding harder and harder because deep down, I didn’t feel worthy. I didn’t feel like I deserved the success. I felt like what happened to my parents could happen to me in a second.

That all changed when I was 50. I just turned 60—I’ll be 61 on August 28th of this year. From 17 to 50 was basically a sprint.

Kison: 17 to 50 is a sprint. You started independent, just one person. How did it evolve into a real business that grows?

Ron Carson: Because I had no money and no contacts, I was in Lincoln, Nebraska with a phone book. I got really creative. I remember calling out of the phone book with a little spiel and people would let me come out and see them. Sometimes they’d let me in the house, sometimes not.

I came up with something creative. On Valentine's Day, I went to the drugstore and bought a handful of those big candy hearts with the chocolates inside. I’d show up at the door and say, “Happy Valentine’s Day,” and give them the heart. Everyone let me in and everyone did business with me that day.

Something was born that I later termed “Love Affair Marketing.” I didn’t even know there was such a thing as emotional reciprocity. You make a deposit and people want to reciprocate back.

Once I had some success, I learned everything I could about my clients—their goals, favorite restaurant, where they traveled, kids’ names, dogs’ names, favorite movie, book... Then I’d randomly touch them and invest in the relationship.

Then I realized I needed a process for managing Love Affair Marketing. Someone invited me to meet Michael Gerber, who wrote The E-Myth. He said, “With great systems, you can deliver extraordinary results with ordinary people. Without great systems, you need extraordinary people to deliver ordinary results.”

That idea of systemization—when I combined it with Love Affair Marketing—my business went from $30,000 to $900,000 a year, literally in two years. Then I developed Passion Prospecting. I loved to golf, fly, collect red wine... I invited my clients to do these things. And they referred others who liked the same things.

So now I had Love Affair Marketing, Systemization, Passion Prospecting. I started building on these together and my business skyrocketed. But eventually, I got burned out...

Ron Carson: The final factor—and what really pushed that first 50 years of my success—was something we developed in our coaching program called Blueprinting. We say, “Live your life by design, not by default.” I always told people, if I could reach into your belly and figure out what your burning desire was, then I could measure how far I think you’re going to go. A lot of people know what to do, but do they have that fuel in the tank to truly propel them to greatness?

Greatness, by my then definition, was having a lot of money and material success. Blueprinting—still used today—is very effective. It’s a process of setting goals, going out 30 years, then 20, 15, 10, 5, 1, and then having a “six most vital” every day that are tied to short-term goals, which are tied to long-term goals.

I had all of this going—this perfect vortex—and I was the number one advisor at LPL for almost every year I was there. I was working all the time, and I was burned out. I had all this financial success and I remember thinking, while driving to Hastings, Nebraska, “If I could ever have $5,000 in the bank, I wouldn’t have this awful feeling.” I thought it would give me that security.

I got to $5,000. It didn’t help. Then I thought, maybe it’s $100,000. Got there—didn’t feel any different. Then a million. Then 10 million. Then 100 million. Didn’t matter.

Then my mom died. She was the one person I could go to no matter what. Moms are the greatest. As a child, you can depend on your mom. I went into a real spiral. People perceived that I had this perfect life, but I didn’t really have any joy. I drank a lot. Jeannie and I had a stressed relationship. My partner at the time—I think I was impossible to live with. I was grinding. I was like a drill sergeant. Everyone who worked at Carson wore a suit and tie every single day. I tried to control everything.

I realized success wasn’t what I thought it was. It wasn’t the material things. I couldn’t find what would free me from that operating system of fear and scarcity.

Kison: We’re going to dig into that. I want to get a little more of the entrepreneur journey here. You mentioned you had a good process going—Love Affair Marketing, Systemization, Passion Prospecting, Blueprinting. When did that start to scale into building a real business with multiple advisors? Was that part of the partner system?

Ron Carson: Even to this day, I’d tell any business: every little thing, you should have processes and systems for. If someone leaves, gets sick, heaven forbid they die—someone else can step in and you’ll have the same result.

Here’s an example from the asset management side. Advisors back then—especially independent financial advisors—were called on by wholesalers. If you looked at their book of business, it was based on who they had the best relationship with.

I remember holding client events. Clients were having such different experiences that I wanted to group people together who were getting similar outcomes. It really hit me one day golfing.

I had a client—still with me today—80-some years old. He referred two guys. One became a client, and we were golfing with a prospect too. The new client told me he was up 38%. I thought, “I wish you wouldn’t have said that,” because Doug—one of the original clients—wasn’t having that kind of year.

Doug asked, “How’s Ron up 38%? I’m only up mid-single digits.” They were virtually identical people—same age, similar industry. I told Doug, “He’s in this product; you’re in that one.” He goes, “I thought you had a process.” And we didn’t.

That’s when I developed models—standardized portfolios based on risk profile. Obvious today, but back then, almost nobody had them. It let us scale the business and ensure clients had an appropriate experience for their risk tolerance.

We scaled everything—events, prospecting, onboarding, follow-up. We even systematized what we called “Random Acts of Kindness.” They felt random to the client, but there was a system behind it.

That brought an S-curve explosion. Every business builds, then has an explosive growth curve. Then it levels off. That flat spot is either a time to reinvent or the beginning of decline. I’ve had a bunch of those S-curve explosions in my life. I used to tell advisors, “If you’re not growing, you’re dying.”

You need a certain level of growth to attract good people, keep good people, and reinvest in the business. I never wanted a lifestyle practice. I wanted to build a business.

Kison: When did M&A come into this?

Ron Carson: M&A came a lot later. We were about $3 billion in AUM when we did our first deal. It was with a woman in San Rafael, California. She’d been part of my coaching program—we started the coaching business in 1993—and she was with us all the way until we acquired her, which was around 2012.

Man, that was a tough deal. I didn’t realize it at the time—I just wanted to do a deal so badly. She had about $200 million in AUM. I was looking at her staff salaries in San Francisco—they seemed so reasonable. Like what we paid in Omaha. I asked, “Is there pressure for them to make more?” and she said no.

Little did I know, she just wanted to get the deal done. I didn’t even think to look at turnover. She was attracting people who couldn’t get other jobs. After we closed, suddenly everyone needed massive raises or they’d leave. The economics didn’t work.

She retired, we put new people in, and now the business is growing phenomenally. But if you look at the original deal—factoring in our time, the hiring, the training—we didn’t make any money on it. We probably lost money. She later even left us to take those same clients elsewhere. All these things I didn’t know to do or protect ourselves against...

Kison: Was it, “Hey, do you regret doing M&A in general?” Or was it more like, “These were so many lessons learned that it helped us build our M&A program”?

Ron Carson: That was it. We did the one M&A deal—and it hurt. It stung for a long time. We didn’t do another for a while, but I started doing minority deals.

We had our partners program. I was flying back from a trip, had this idea while hiking in Scottsdale, Arizona. I remember stopping by this cactus—it gave me a little shade—and I left myself a 15-minute voicemail. Our system was unlimited on voicemail length. I said, “You know what? I’ve got a really good team and systems. I’ve got this coaching group with all these people. What if I created a platform—everything I want that I’m not getting from my current broker-dealer? I wonder how many people would join.”

So we hosted a meeting here in February 2012. It was so cold. I brought people in and said, “Here’s the idea.” A few said, “If you could create something like that, we’d be in.” They didn’t have to sell. We didn’t have to buy them. They’d just move onto the platform. We charged basis points and handled the things they didn’t like doing.

A lot of advisors became accidental business owners. They were great advisors, the business grew, and before they knew it, they were managing things they weren’t good at and didn’t enjoy. What if we took that off their plate? That was my theory.

We did it—and their growth skyrocketed. Hence, Carson Partners was born.

I was trying to sell a gentleman named Eric Wishon—hope he’s listening—from Oregon. We were at a conference in Florida, and he wanted to fly back with me to Omaha on a private jet. Over dinner, I talked to him about becoming a platform partner.

He said, “No, I don’t think it’s for me. But if there’s any way I could get the Carson name, I might do it.”

I said, “I’m not sure how that would work.” But right then and there, I said, “What if we bought a minority?” I didn’t want to buy and give them the name and have a repeat of the San Rafael experience. But I thought, if it’s a minority interest, and we’re shoulder-to-shoulder—25/75—we’re truly aligned.

They’d still run the business. If someone needed a pay increase, they’re paying 75%, we’re paying 25%. I said, “What if we acquired 25% of your firm?” He said, “I’d do that in a second.”

Right in that moment—it was born. The minority deal. We did a lot of those.

Over the years, the M&A has only ramped up. In just the last few years, we’re seeing more advisors getting up in age and needing a full buyout. We own a minority interest, but now for those who want to fully sell, we’ve bought 100% of the business.

We’ve got the bandwidth, the people, the technology to keep driving strong organic growth while also developing through our coaching program and our business consulting group, G2.

There’s going to be a massive shortage of capacity in the advice space. We’ve been very aggressive in developing the next generation of advisors—giving them career tracks and placing them in our offices.

Kison: I want to come back to how your M&A evolved, because your personal story changes it. You mentioned around 50 years old—how the company culture evolved. Your team mentioned, “Omani’s evolved. The name change is part of the story. A lot of personal revelations. It impacted company culture.”

They said, “We used to be super buttoned-up. Suit and tie every day. Now it feels like a tech startup in Silicon Valley.” I want to talk about your personal journey and leadership.

You’ve got a lot of the same elements you hear in big success stories—like Michael Dell and others. But tell me about that inflection point around 50.

Ron Carson: There’s a common pattern. I’m an investor in a group out of Boston led by Mark Casady—used to be CEO of LPL Financial. I’ve known him a long time. We were talking recently—I shared that I deal with a lot of people like myself. I used to operate under fear and scarcity. Now I operate from love and abundance. He said, “We’ve been studying what makes leaders successful. The number one trait? Childhood trauma.”

And that hit me. If you think about it, it drives people to prove something. To push. They’ve been through so much already, so any business challenge feels small.

Kison: I can relate. I went through some traumatic experiences growing up. That’s why I’m risk-forward. I’ve dealt with worse.

Ron Carson: Exactly. It helped me examine my life.

I met a gentleman I now call my “cosmic father.” His name’s Kurosh, and he works with me in my new business, Omnia. I’d tried all kinds of therapy—my mom was manic-depressive, either manic or in mental hospitals. I had lots of talk therapy, but it never helped much.

Jeannie and I were working with a therapist at the time—Dr. Laura. She had a syndicated radio show. Jeannie still works with her. But I told her, “You’re not helping me.” She agreed and said, “I think I know someone who can.” She gave me Kurosh’s name.

There was just something about him. I reached out. We had a conversation, and I thought, “This guy can help me.” So I flew to Venice, California, and spent a week fully unplugged—reading, walking, massages, just working with him every day.

He shifted my life. On that Friday, I was getting ready to fly back, and I gave him the biggest hug. I said, “I love you. No one has ever given me the tools and perspective you have.”

That was the start of me having a life I truly love. Bert White, our CEO at Carson—who I’ve known for 15 years—says, “I’ve never met anyone who protects their happiness more than Omani.” And that’s true. Because I lived so long with so much unhappiness, now it’s all about joy.

Kurosh jolted me into joy. I’ve referred a couple hundred people to him over the years—people like me. Not one of them hasn’t said, “I didn’t know someone like him existed.”

Even today, he checks in. I’ll think I’m doing great, and he’ll catch something subtle I said—and boom, he’ll help me see it in a whole new way.

Ron Carson: And here’s the beautiful thing—as successful as I was, despite all the sprinting and operating from fear and scarcity—once I began to see life differently, everything changed. My relationships with our internal stakeholders—our employees, our team—they shifted too.

It stopped being just about driving for results. It became about the relationship. They became like family. We created a culture where people weren’t just workers—they were part of our extended family.

I didn’t know it at the time, but there’s a term for this: conscious capitalism. That’s what I was starting to do. Someone mentioned it to me, and I was like, “Wait, what? There’s a group for this?” I didn’t even know.

It turns out, John Mackey—founder of Whole Foods—and Raj Sisodia started this conscious capitalism movement. Today I’m a part of it.

Capitalism has done more to raise the standard of living for humanity than anything else. But Milton Friedman wrote a piece back in the ’70s that said the sole focus of capitalism should be maximizing profits. A lot of people jumped on that, including me.

But it’s not true. Conscious capitalism says—yes, profit matters—but so does investing in stakeholders, community, the planet. It’s about how you show up in a balanced way. That allowed me to invite abundance into my life.

Thanks to Kurosh, I started seeing the world completely differently. And not only was I having more fun, but my business started growing faster than I ever imagined.

Instead of attracting stakeholders and partners operating under fear and scarcity—where no one trusts anyone and everyone’s trying to squeeze the best deal—they were now showing up with abundance. It was a different kind of energy. They wanted to build together.

Our philosophy at Carson—and with the Carson Family Office—is to use our resources to invest in conscious leaders who have world-changing ideas. These are people who operate with love and abundance.

People started coming to me and saying, “I knew you before, and I see you now—and I want some of what you have. Help me get there.”

And that’s how Omnia was born. We help people architect an activated life plan—with coaching, advice, and access to an incredible network and transformative experiences. It lets us do things I never thought were possible.

And it all came from that shift—at age 50.

Kison: So you had a whole life philosophy shift. A full 180. When you came back to running the business, how did it impact the business?

Ron Carson: It accelerated. We started doing deals we never could’ve done before. We attracted people we never could’ve attracted.

Kison: What did that change look like to the team? They said it felt like a 180. Did you address it openly? Or was it more incremental?

Ron Carson: I talked about it a lot. And I’ll say something that might be a little controversial—I actually brought Kurosh here.

We put a big emphasis on mental wellness at Carson, especially in the family office. It’s personal for me. My childhood—my mom, dad, grandmother—mental health was always present. So I brought Kurosh in to speak to the team.

And here’s something else: I did psychedelic therapy at the end of that week with Kurosh. He didn’t even mention it at first. I had done a ton of reading on it. I brought it up and asked, “What about psychedelics?”

He said, “It would really help you.”

I said, “Where was that all week? Why are you just now bringing this up?”

He said, “It’ll call you when it’s ready. And the fact that you’re asking means you’re ready.”

So I flew to Topanga Canyon, worked with an MD who was doing underground therapy at the time. This was 10 years ago. I was terrified. I’d never done anything other than maybe smoke a little weed in college and drink.

But that experience—my spirituality was born. I had no spirituality growing up—my parents were atheists. But that session changed everything. I knew there was something greater. It was exciting.

That really fueled my abundance mindset. I believe in God now. I believe this isn’t the end.

Ron Carson: And I was open with my team about it. I shared that journey. We made mental wellness part of our culture. In our Carson Family Office, we invest heavily in companies exploring these therapies—like MDMA-assisted therapy.

We were involved in trials that got great results. RFK is now backing this movement, and if he ends up with influence over the FDA, we think things will open up even more. There’s a lot of resistance from Big Pharma, since these therapies aren’t patentable and don’t make as much money—but they work.

In fact, about a year ago, Stanford did a study on iboga—a psychedelic root from Africa. They found it was the only thing that actually grows new brain matter. They believe it could be the key to curing Alzheimer’s. That means something to me—my mom died from Alzheimer’s.

We’re also working with veterans and the VA on trials. Carson Family Office is funding a study here in Omaha. These things are going to help a lot of people.

Kison: This is different from ayahuasca?

Ron Carson: Ayahuasca is one of them. There’s also iboga, huachuma, peyote… many others. They’re all sacred, ancient medicines used by indigenous people for hundreds, even thousands of years.

We’ve partnered with the Secoya tribe in Ecuador. We built a healing center there so people can legally go and experience these medicines. The last two people to die in their tribe were 114 and 117. No access to Western medicine—everything from the jungle.

We needed something while we were there, and they just went out and gathered it. It’s a powerful way of living.

Kison: So this whole journey with therapy and psychedelics opened everything up even more. You were already open about it with your team, so when they saw these changes, they understood.

How did it impact the team? When they saw the culture shift—what happened?

Ron Carson: People love working here more than ever. We’ve attracted talent we never could before. We used to have this reputation in the industry—“You can work at Carson, but prepare to be worked like a dog.” I pushed hard. Really hard.

But now? People say this is the best place on the planet to work. We give them freedom, flexibility, ownership. If we have to tell you how to do your job, you’re probably not the right person. We want people to be creative and responsible.

That autonomy and purpose—it’s powerful.

And Jeannie and I began investing heavily in impact. Our team loves being part of that too.

We started Dreamweaver 14 years ago—granting end-of-life wishes to the elderly and terminally ill. We’ve funded over 20 schools in Kenya. We’ll serve our 4 millionth meal there soon. We support Charity:Water. And it’s not just us—our company supports these causes too.

People want to work somewhere that’s about more than a paycheck. They want purpose. They want to be part of something bigger. That’s what we’re building.

And from Carson Group came Omnia. Omnia exists because of those relationships—because of the people. Many who join Omnia become Carson clients. It all flows together.

My personal goal with Omnia over the next 20 years is to create $1 trillion in impact. It’s doable. We’re about to see an $80 trillion wealth transfer between generations. That money will be put to use.

We’re hosting the World Cup of Healing at the Omnia Ranch in 2026. It will bring together top soccer players, the Vatican, Mayo Clinic, and others. We have initiatives like FC Mother—with a goal to add a trillion years to humanity by improving maternal healthcare globally.

And there’s another initiative, led by Zach Bush. We’re regenerating topsoil in Africa. We’ve destroyed 97% of the world’s topsoil. That’s a crisis. It took 4.5 billion years to create it, and we’ve nearly wiped it out. Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, and Ukraine have what’s left.

The Royal Family is getting behind this initiative. We’re regenerating a billion acres of soil. And yes—Carson is now one of the largest farming operations in Nebraska. We’re leading the charge on regenerative agriculture and creating better food.

These causes—this mission—it’s why people want to join us. They feel the impact.

Kison: That’s incredible. You mentioned supporting these causes: Charity:Water, Omnia, Dreamweaver. There’s so much going on.

Ron Carson: Yes. Omnia is different. Omnia drives impact through people—entrepreneurs, families—who come to us for personal transformation. We help them heal, find purpose, build vitality, and connect through powerful experiences.

We architect a life plan across five areas: spirit, mind, vitality, play, and legacy.

Play is big. So many people don’t have a plan for joy. We help them live a life that’s vibrant and activated. We’ve built an incredible network. And for legacy—we help people live it now. Estate planning isn’t enough.

That’s why we developed the “Family Constitution.” With Aaron, our Carson Family Office CEO, we’re ensuring impact across generations. Our grandkids will go through rites of passage at 10, 12, 14, 16, 18… all designed to prepare them to steward this legacy.

That’s how we’ll reach $1 trillion in impact.

Kison: A couple more questions. On M&A: Are you privately held?

Ron Carson: Jeannie and I own about 53% of Carson. The rest is owned by Bain (minority stake) and our internal stakeholders.

Kison: The cultural shift is so exciting. Coming back to M&A—how has that impacted your approach to M&A?

Ron Carson: Our perceived culture used to hurt us. Today, it’s our biggest selling point.

Everyone says they have a great culture. But when people get here, they realize we actually do. At our Partner Summits or CEO Summits, you’ll see people go out of their way for each other. That’s rare.

We built a community of people who treat each other like family. That’s what makes us different.

Kison: How does that affect the companies you acquire? You have a dramatically different culture from the industry.

Ron Carson: That’s why culture is the #1 thing we look at in any deal. If it’s not a fit, we won’t do it.

Many of our acquisitions come from our coaching group. They’ve been with us for years, they’ve evolved with us. They know the culture.

Take Scott Ford. He was our first partner. When someone asked why he did the deal with us, he said, “I didn’t know anyone else I could do 12 years of due diligence on.”

That’s powerful. It speaks to the strength of our culture and trust.

We just did a deal with Brian Sweet—$1 billion. He’d been in our coaching group 12–15 years. He knew us, trusted us, and culture was the biggest reason he joined.

Kison: Personal question. I’m in my 40s. I’m always thinking about what’s next. There’s this commercial life—and then there’s the other part. The impact. The joy. I’ve got three kids. I’m thinking a lot about legacy.

You’ve been through it. What advice would you give someone like me?

Ron Carson: A few things.

First—live your life so that work and play feel the same. Richard Branson once told me, “I don’t think of work as work and play as play. It’s all just living.” Structure your life that way.

If it’s not a “hell yes,” it’s a “hell no.” Be thoughtful about what you say yes to. Protect your time.

Second—hire the best people and get out of their way. Sounds easy. It’s not. But it’s essential. When Bert came in, he brought a whole new level of capability. There’s no substitute for great people.

And third—live every day like it’s your last. One day, it will be. Life is a flicker. Make the most of it. Be joyful. Be the best version of yourself.

Kison: I love that. Hey, one last thing. You posted about doing a seven-day water fast. I’ve done a couple days before, but never seven. How was it?

Ron Carson: Fantastic. The data is powerful. One seven-day fast can reduce your cancer risk by two-thirds.

I did it with a group—35 people joined. We checked in daily on Zoom. Half made it all the way. First day is the hardest. Second is tough. By day three, hunger fades. You feel amazing. Tons of energy. Only need 2–3 hours of sleep.

I wanted to go 10 days, but I had lens replacement surgery on day 9, so I stopped. But I’ll do it again.

Kison: I love that. I look forward to trying it. Last thing—what’s the craziest thing you’ve seen in M&A?

Ron Carson: Our first deal. I trusted the seller—she’d been in our coaching program for years. I didn’t put protections in the agreement. As soon as the check cleared, everything we agreed to fell apart.

It was painful. I felt duped. But I learned. That deal helped us build a better M&A program. We’re much more disciplined now.

Kison: That’s a great story. Thank you, Omani. I really appreciate your time and insights.

Ron Carson: Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.