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Although a primarily male-dominated industry, a family-owned business under a well-known brokerage franchise is set to transfer ownership and become a woman-owned business.<\/p>\n
Sunbelt Business Advisors of Southwest Ohio in Centerville looks to witness a change in ownership as Gerry Chadwick prepares to pass the business to his daughter Kate Vriner. The transition places the business under woman ownership for the first time.<\/p>\n
As Vriner prepares to take over as owner in Q1 2025, she assumed the role president in January. Upon her appointment to the role, Chadwick stepped back to become a broker and adviser in the interim.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn kind of a traditional guy world women have not always been given the access and the support to successfully operate a business,\u201d Chadwick said. \u201cWe don’t get any financial value out of being a woman-owned business, but I think one of the things that we bring to the table is certainly a great level of empathy \u2013 maybe some skills that can add in assisting business owners with where they can get to. I think through Vriner’s experience in this business, she can show them and give some guidance on how to get there and maybe skip a couple of mistakes along the way, which that’s kind of what I see. And that’s something that’s awesome.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Vriner\u2019s journey to the top began a decade ago when her family returned to Dayton where she worked for Dayton Freight. As Chadwick began to ponder the possibility of retirement and the future of the company, Vriner sought to change career paths with her eyes set on taking over the business.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt’s scary and exciting,\u201d Vriner said. \u201cThere\u2019s pressure to continue what he’s built \u2013 Not just on the work side of things, but on the community aspect of it. He\u2019s been, for as long as I can remember, extremely involved in the community. That was something that like he and my mom instilled in me. So, I\u2019m making sure that, as a company, we continue to be involved in different things.\u201d<\/p>\n
Vriner said with her leadership, the business has shifted to becoming slightly more girl and women focused both in and out of the office. The brokerage has become involved with Girls on the Run, an organization teaching young women leadership and teamwork skills.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have not worked with a lot of women business owners,\u201d Vriner said. \u201cThere are a lot of women business owners in our community and in the surrounding communities and I want that to be a focus for us. We\u2019re not at all walking away from what we’ve done in the past, because that’s obviously where we got to where we are, but we\u2019re making a concerted effort to diversify who we’re working with.\u201d<\/p>\n
The brokerage primarily serves clients with businesses valued between $500,000 and $10 million. Sunbelt conducts an average of 14 deals per year. In its 18-year history, the business has done almost $150 million in gross sales volume for 230 businesses.<\/p>\n
\u201cA large M&A firm, our whole 18 years could be one small deal for them,\u201d Chadwick said. \u201cBut for us, we look at it as this is 230 business owners we helped achieve the value of their life’s work and provide that value back to the owner and their families. So if you take 230 of those, we start to feel pretty good about ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 2023, the Sunbelt office did $26 million in sales from 14 businesses. The company reported revenue of $1.8 million, a 60% increase from 2022.<\/p>\n
Amid success in the last year, Vriner recently won the Platinum Chairman’s Circle Award through the International Business Brokers association for doing over $10 million in business.<\/p>\n
The franchisee has six brokers with a combined 50+ years of broker experience and over 100 years of general business experience. Their team considers its largest advantage to be access to the Sunbelt private search engine listing site.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat gives us a really strong marketability because it also shoots us into other marketing platforms,\u201d Vriner said. \u201cWe’re not only putting things up on the listing sites and the search engines, but we\u2019ll also go out and look for strategic buyers for our sellers.\u201d<\/p>\n
A change in leadership and impending ownership transition were not the only big changes in line for the company at the start of 2024. A week before Thanksgiving in November 2023, a fire broke out in the Corpus building where Sunbelt was previously operating.<\/p>\n
The building was condemned and earlier this year, after 18 years in the building Chadwick called \u201chome\u201d, Sunbelt transferred its operations to 450 N. Main St. in Centerville, above Coffee Hub.<\/p>\n
Sunbelt Business Advisors of Southwest Ohio was founded as a Sunbelt franchise location in March 2006. In 2009, the Dayton-area location acquired the Cincinnati Sunbelt franchisee where it has continued to grow, covering 18 counties across Greater Dayton, Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Although a primarily male-dominated industry, a family-owned business under a well-known brokerage franchise is set to transfer ownership and become a woman-owned business. Sunbelt Business Advisors of Southwest Ohio in Centerville looks to witness a change in ownership as Gerry Chadwick prepares to pass the business to his daughter Kate Vriner. The transition places the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":12017,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12008","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n