Ashley Micciche is the CEO of True North Retirement Advisors, an independent financial advisory firm managing $230 million in client assets, and located just outside of Portland, Oregon. Ashley specializes in helping small business owners exit their business & retire with financial security by crafting and implementing a custom-designed exit plan. Whether you’re looking to retire in the next few years or you’re on draft one of your business plan, you should plan for the end in mind. Ashley is going to walk us through the 3 universal, must-do steps to help you get what your business is worth so you can retire with confidence and financial security!   Press play and get ready to take some notes!   More about Ashley: Ashley Micciche is the CEO of True North Retirement Advisors, an independent financial advisory firm managing $230 million in client assets, and located just outside of Portland, Oregon. It’s a family business, that she owns with her father.  Ashley specializes in helping small business owners exit their business & retire with financial security by crafting and implementing a custom-designed exit plan. She started her career as a financial advisor in 2007 after graduating magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Finance from Portland State University. Early in her career, Ashley developed expertise in 401k consulting for small businesses, and she quickly realized that business owners nearing retirement were not taking the steps necessary to exit their business. She watched several of her business owner clients walk away from their business at retirement without the financial security they needed. Today, she is on a mission to transition 300 small business owners successfully into retirement in the next 10 years. Ashley started her first business at the age of 8 years old, taking care of her neighbor’s pets & plants, and picking up their mail when they went on vacation – for $3 a day. She ran that business (a complete monopoly with 100% profit margin!) for 3 years.   FULL TRANSCRIPT Karen Litzy:                   00:00                Hey Ashley, welcome to the podcast. I'm happy to have you on. Ashley Micciche:           00:04                Thank you so much for having me, Karen. Karen Litzy:                   00:06                Sure. Now before we get to the meat of our interview, I would love for you to fill in the blanks a little bit from your bio that we read to introduce you so that the listeners get a little bit better sense of where you're coming from. Ashley Micciche:           00:21                I know one of the things that was mentioned in there was I started my first business when I was eight years old. I didn't know it at the time, but you know, I was very entrepreneurial growing up and I started this business where I would pick up your paper and your mail and water your plants and feed your dogs and cats if you went on vacation. I found out really early on that if I worked really hard and I posted flyers and put flyers on mailboxes, put stuff in the newsletter and our neighborhood advertisement that I would get business from that. If I didn't work hard, if I didn't post flyers or do any of that, I got nothing. So I learned these really awesome lessons about hustle and working hard and making $3 a day doing all this work early on. And so that was a really neat experience because it taught me a lot that I have carried with me over the years and now starting my own real business. Karen Litzy:                   01:32                And those are lessons that you know you can take with you for your whole life. And now you are at True North Retirement Advisors as the CEO and retirement plan specialist. So today you're going to share with us three universal must do steps to help you get what your business is worth so you can retire eventually which is something we all want to do. Well, maybe not everyone, but most people want to retire and we want to be able to retire with confide