EFP 179: Build Or Buy an Online Business?

Would I be better off buying a business that’s already running/profitable, or should I build one from scratch?

Anyone new to the buying and selling of online businesses has to eventually answer this question for themselves.

The short answer (which isn’t terribly helpful) is, “It depends”.

It depends on a number of factors, which is why we wanted to create a framework for our listeners to use to help answer the question for themselves. We look at things like their financial situation, time availability, and specifics around the niche that makes this question easier to answer.

If you’ve been considering buying a business but wanted to weigh your alternatives against building one from scratch, this is a great episode for you.

Check Out This Week’s Episode:

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Topics Discussed This Week:

• What’s your financial situation?
• How much time do you have available?
• How specific do you want to be with your niche?
• What do the barriers to entry look like?
• How urgently do you need cashflow?

Mentions:

• Jase Rodley Interview at Tropical MBA Podcast
• EF Listing # 45317 an Amazon FBA Business in the Children’s Niche
• Dynamite Circle
• Empire Flippers Podcast Episode 173

Justin:

Welcome to the Empire Flippers Podcast episode 179. Is it better to buy and establish online business or build one from scratch? This question tends to bring out passionate believers on both sides of the argument. It is a question you need to answer though. Which one is better for you. We are gonna look at a framework that you can use to answer this in today’s episode by digging into five distinct questions you can ask yourself. You’ll find the show notes for this one at empireflippers.com/buildorbuy.

Justin:

Alright lets do this.

Voice over:

Sick of listening to entrepreneurial advice from guys with day jobs? Want to hear about the real successes and failures that come with building an online empire? You are not alone.

Voice over:

From San Diego to Tokyo. New York to Bangkok. Join thousands of entrepreneurs and investors who are prioritizing wealth and personal freedom over the oppression of an office cubicle. Check out the Empire Podcast.

Voice over:

And now your hosts. Justin and Joe.

Should You Build or Buy a Business

Justin:

Alright Joe, I’m putting the question to you buddy. If you had to start over today, right now, would you build or would you buy, and why?

Joe:

Yeah, I mean based on where I am personally and financially in my life, and where I am in my career trajectory, I think buying would give me a nice head start. Now that said, I do think that if I was looking to build some sort of very unique service based business, something that was either tough to find on the secondary market or just didn’t exist, then building might be the option.

Justin:

I get the financially piece, that makes sense to me. What do you mean, “Where I’m at personally?”

Joe:

Yeah, I mean the idea of trying to scrape it out all from the beginning is… there’s a long list of things that have to go into starting a business and it’s nice to get a head start if you can afford it.

Justin:

What’s interesting about this question is, it’s funny how your perspective changes, right? So depending on where you’re at financially, depending on where you’re at with your business, depending on where you’re at with your skill sets, I mean you mentioned that as well. I think that’s critical too. You’ve got skill sets and chops to wear, you feel more comfortable putting the cash down. But it is quite a cash outlay and when you’re considering putting that much personal cash or capital into buying an online business it gets a little scary. That’s a significant chunk of money two, three, four or five hundred thousand dollars or more.

Joe:

Yeah, I know. I think that’s why it’s a good bet on me rather than a complete newbie. At the same time I would say that there are ways to mitigate my risk. Right? With all the connections that I’ve developed over time I could find people to not only help me develop the business and build it up, but also financially help in mitigating that risk, finding investors, that kind of thing. So I can use some of my own money and some of other peoples money to start the next thing or to buy the next thing.

Justin:

I like the point about investing in yourself. I heard Jase talk about it over on the Tropical MBA Podcast quite a few episodes ago, where he’s talking about buying businesses, and he said, “Wasn’t it better for me to buy a business and invest that money in myself? Essentially investing in or gambling on, or betting on myself. It’s better than putting it in the stock market where these large corporations I have zero impact on, or interest in, are making decisions on growing the business that I may or may not agree with.”

Joe:

Yeah, I know. I think that definitely has some merit and that’s a good way to think. At the same time, I think taking your entire life savings and putting it in to something, also has a bit too much of a danger feel to me.

Justin:

And there’s some people who just don’t have the option. They simply don’t have the cash or they don’t have enough cash that it makes a lot of sense, and we’re kinda cover all those questions today. Our goal here is to help our listeners create a framework for answering this question internally. Right? By trying to figure out whether it’s better for them to buy or to build from scratch.

Justin:

The financial ones obvious, but we get into some more I think, nuance points that I think will be interesting for our audience, and I should point out to that we don’t particularly have a horse in the race, even though obviously we love our people to buy online businesses through our marketplace. The people that build from scratch typically become our sellers, right. So those are people that build up their business over time and ultimately sell with us. So we’re really on either side of the market so we wanted to, through our perspective and experience, share some of our thoughts on how people can answer that question for themselves.

Justin:

Before we do that though buddy, let’s talk about the featured listing of the week. What have you got for us?

Joe:

We’re talking about listing 45317 it’s an Amazon FBA business in the children’s niche, it also has a little bit of an E-commerce element to it Shopify store. It’s making just over $15,000 a month net, we have it listed at a 34 X multiple for $518,000. Some of the things I love about this business is, very little time from the actual seller, he’s spending less than five hours a week on the business, and if you look at the profit to revenue ratio, it’s quite good. The monthly revenue is 43,000 and the monthly net profit is 15,000. More than 30% is coming through in profits. That’s very good in physical inventory type businesses, and something I like to see.

Justin:

One of the other things about this business that I like is I know the seller, I know the guy and I’ve built a relationship with him over the years so I know that this is coming from a place that’s solid. So that’s helpful to, to me. He also built it as an actual brand, as a company that he wanted to build longer term. So knowing that just puts a bit more in me that this is an interesting business for me rather than some random that was built just to flip.

Joe:

Yeah. That’s a good point too. Obviously I know the seller well. I’d also say, with only seven active skews it’s not too many skews. You have some FBA business that can have hundreds of skews, but it’s not also too few, when it’s just only one skew and completely dependent on one particular product. So he’s done a nice job of mixing that up there, creating a real brand, some Facebook followings there, along with a good mixture of products.

Justin:

Alright Joe, that’s it for that man. Let’s dig into the heart of this weeks’ episode.

Voice over:

Now for the heart of this weeks’ episode.

1. What’s Your Financial Situation?

Justin:

Okay Joe, we’re talking about whether we should build or buy an online business. We have five basic questions. They’re basic but there’s some detail to it. We’re gonna get into all five of them.

Justin:

The first one is, and this is obvious. But what’s your financial situation? This is our first question because it’s a critical question, right? If you don’t have the money you’re not going to be able to purchase. So if you could… Max put together a few thousand dollars then I know exactly what you need to do, you’re going to need to start from scratch.

Justin:

Let’s say you’ve got 100, 200, 300, 500 thousand dollars you could potentially use to buy a business. You’re in a financial position where you can buy a business

Justin:

Lets talk about minimums Joe. Our minimum at Empire Flippers is around 20 to 30 thousand dollars. You’re not gonna see hardly any websites or businesses that are lower than that, and we have a reason that’s on our side, it’s not worth it for us to do the smaller businesses. There’s one thing that’s our issue and not necessarily from a buyers’ perspective, but it’s not worth us to do the smaller deals.

Justin:

But the other thing is, is that from a buyers’ perspective, if you’ve got this E-commerce brand that’s shipping products from China and you’ve got suppliers and you’ve got breakage and you’ve got to warehouse those goods and you’ve got conversion issues and you’ve got all these things to deal with. Let’s say you’re making three or four hundred dollars net profit a month. That’s just not worth it man. It’s not worth the hassle.

Joe:

Yeah. The super small sites you definitely have to take a critical eye towards. You should also know that those don’t last very long on our marketplace, they tend to go very quickly because there are a lot of people out there that know how to evaluate them and know what their looking…

Justin:

Sorry. No Joe. I was talking about like sites that would be $8000 or $6000. Those ones aren’t on our marketplace at all because we don’t list them because it’s not worth it. Now, when you say super small you mean something like 20, 40, 50 thousand dollars, right?

Joe:

That’s right yeah. Well the ones that we list I would say probably aren’t even worth your time investing in because of that very reason. Unless they tend to be a completely passive content site that you’re willing to just allow to go to zero and possibly have some zero months, maybe that’s worth it, but an E-commerce site where you could possibly go negative, when the up sides only a few hundred dollars, unless you have a way to really grow that or some other need or test or something, really there’s no reason to get into those kind of businesses.

Justin:

Yeah. E-commerce businesses, FBA businesses, service type businesses that are making less than $1000 a month profit just aren’t worth it. I agree with you. I would say, and these are sites we don’t list, but I think are worth it. You know a $150 a month AdSense site. A $250 month Amazon Associate site. I think those can be worth purchasing, and they’re smaller, they’re gonna cost you five, six thousand or whatever. It’s not worth it for us to list them, but it may be worth someone to buy them, particularly if they wanna test out their skills and stuff. That’s the exception to the rule there. Even though we don’t list them, those ones I think are worth looking for and buying.

Justin:

Like you mentioned though, I think some of the smaller ones, lets say under 10,000, like the small AdSense site, five thousand on a AdSense site. It comes with more risk/reward. It’s easy… you could turn that one into a $30,000 site or it could go and have a month or two months in a row where it made zero dollars through traffic and whatever. The risk/reward is higher on the smaller sites, and that continues up the chain. So the risk/reward on a $50,000 drop shipping site is higher than on a $500,000 drop shipping site for example.

Joe:

Yeah. Exactly. And I think that comes with the stability. The smaller sites tend to have larger swings just because of the numbers, whereas the larger sites, especially the much larger sites they tend to be more steady month to month.

Justin:

Yeah. And another thing we should mention is that when it comes to your financial situation, how much you are able to afford. Sometime you’ll rely on outside financing, you’ll go, “Hey I’m gonna get seller financing or I’m gonna borrow money.” And we should talk about some break points there. I mean anything under $100,000 Joe, is gonna sell way too fast to try to get an seller financing, so if you’ve got a $60,000 Amazon Associates site that you’re trying to look at on our marketplace, you’re like, look in gonna reach out to them to see if the seller will finance half of that or 30% of that or something. Good luck with that. There’s no way, it’s super unlikely because someone else is gonna come along with an all cash offer and snatch that puppy up.

Joe:

Yeah, and then also you’ve got to remember a lot of times the math just doesn’t work out on doing the financing. They’re worried about the risk of you taking it over and running it into the ground and not paying them and this kind of stuff. They would rather just get the whole kit and caboodle, and they know at that level they can most likely get it.

Justin:

Yeah. 100,000 to 500,000 it’s possible that you’re gonna get financing, and generally that will be somewhere between 10 to 30% from the seller. That’s not a guarantee, but it’s possible that it could happen. About 500,000 it’s typically expected so you can probably try to work out some kind of deal with the seller. Not all, but more likely than not about 500,000 some financing would be involved.

Joe:

Yeah. And obviously there are other places to get financing as well, which is larger than the discussion is here, but asking and trying to make a deal happen at those low six figure and mid six figure levels [inaudible 00:11:33] Million dollar level, that’s where it’s gonna work out best.

2. How Much Time Do You Have

Justin:

Question number two. How much time do you have available?

Justin:

This is an important question because if you’re starting a business from scratch it typically requires much more of your time. There are gonna be long hours trying to figure out what your gonna do, getting things set up, depending on the type of business, either putting content out there or finding suppliers. There’s just a lot of business set up stuff that happens. And I’m not talking setting up your legal agreements and whatever, I’m talking just getting your WordPress site set up and testing everything and just getting it running.

Joe:

Yeah. This was a bit of what I was eluding to in the beginning of the podcast. Not only how much time you have available but how valuable is your time. If you’re a wealthy individual and you do have a lot of time available, still your time might be quite valuable to you and to spend that scratching out on the beginning of a business, it might not be the best way to effectively spend your time. Sure, maybe for some beginning learning lessons or something like that, but if you’re beyond that, definitely getting a jump start into buying a business is gonna be the better way to go.

Justin:

To be fair we’re not mocking that too. I mean how much is your time worth blah, blah, blah. Well we spent hours and hours on this podcast Joe, hustling, grinding in the early days. We’d already had a business that was running, that was paying the bills but we weren’t crushing it by any means, right? So in the early days of starting our business we were those hustlers, we were doing that work. We were hoping that the work we put in early days would pay off for years. So we were kind of kicking the can in terms of profit and value, hoping that the work we did would pay off, and it did. But there’s also a risk that it won’t. So you may be spending time on a business that will ultimately never work out and that’s some of the risk that come with starting from scratch.

Justin:

I will say though, that if you’re buying a business it’s not like it doesn’t require any time and so sometimes people think, “oh, well I’m gonna buy myself a nice passive investment business.” Well, good luck with that. That’s not realistic. Almost all businesses require some amount of work and some more than others. Particularly when you buy a business that you see a tonne of opportunity to grow, but it requires major changes to the business. Know what you’re getting into. If you’re looking at a business going, “oh, I wanna change this and change that.” You may be looking at a 30 hour weeks for the next six months, nine months until you can make that actually happen. Be aware of what kind of time you’re looking to spend going into the purchase of a business.

Joe:

Yeah. I think that’s a really good point. If you’re looking to grow the business significantly, if you’re looking to really get in there and change the operations, change the marketing strategy, change the personnel, that kind of thing, those are major shake ups and it’s gonna take up a lot of your personal time. So keep that in mind when buying a business.

3. How Specific Do You Want To Be?

Justin:

Question number three. How specific do you wanna be with your niche? And when I say niche, I’m also talking about, depending on the type of business, I’m also talking about the product, I’m also talking about the [inaudible 00:14:42] Product, I’m talking about the service that you may be delivering. In any type of business how specific do you want to be with the niche?

Justin:

The fact is, that the more specific the niche of the industry, the harder it’s gonna be to find a business for sale that matches your criteria. So if I’m very specifically looking for a business that sells ceiling fans, like for whatever reason I want to get into ceiling fans. It may take me a long time to find a ceiling fan business for sale, not just one that’s for sale, but one that’s for sale in my price range. I may find an $800,000 ceiling business for sale, but if I’ve only got $200,000 that effectively doesn’t work for me.

Joe:

Yeah or that matches your criteria, right? You mind find a business that is within your price range but for whatever reason it has a bad [inaudible 00:15:28] profile or it doesn’t fulfill some of your other criteria that you have, and I think that’s important to think about, especially if you’re very drilled down on a niche is don’t go outside of your buying criteria just because you need to be in that niche. Reconsider possibly the niche or maybe you do need to build from scratch. This is especially true in the service based businesses I think. We’re delivering these services to other businesses or maybe even individuals, a lot of times I think that those service based businesses can be tough to find the exact kind of way that you want to do it and if you wind up buying something you might be spending a lot of time to shift it over to what you want it to offer.

Justin:

Yeah. Sometimes if it is particularly unique or it’s a product that’s never actually been delivered before, let’s say for example it’s a really leading edge emerging market, or this is just a brand new revolutionary product, it might not make any sense for you to try and take some of the products that are already out there and try to adjust them or bend them to what you’re talking about. It may be easier and more straight forward to just start from scratch.

Justin:

This also applies to code. It also applies to tech projects where it may not make as much sense to go and try to change the tech into something that works for you it might be better to just start coding it out from scratch, because the hassle and the time and the man hours required just isn’t worth the effort honestly.

Justin:

Another thing you can look for if you’re looking to buy though, and you do have a unique niche or a special niche, is you can look to buy a business and add either product or service to it that’s under the framework of a business that’s already established. So say for example, that I want to come up with a specific new type of yoga mat or workout balls or whatever, and I end up buying a business that in the health workout space, I’ve already got a baked in audience, that business is already cash flowing and I can test out that new product through that business. Now it doesn’t mean that that new product’s gonna be a win and I need to know that now I’m buying this business and that business is my priority. But if you’re really thinking about developing a product you may want to look at trying to develop that product under the broader umbrella or the broader scope of a larger business with a baked in audience of customers.

Joe:

Yeah, we’ve seen definitely buyers do this at Empire Flippers, and I really like this idea, perhaps even have a business or a smaller business, you know you were using the ceiling fan analogy, maybe they’re looking for a ceiling fan business because they sell parts for ceiling fans, or some other type of home fixture that goes a long well with ceiling fans, and they just know that having these different products is a cross offering of audiences, and it a good way to test out your theory in before you go out there and completely build a business from scratch.

4. What are the Barriers to Entry?

Justin:

Alright question number four. What do the barriers to entry look like? And this is going to depend on the modernization type, it may be the type of niche you’re dealing with. But some businesses over time have built up some internal barriers to entry that make buying the business more attractive.

Justin:

An example of this would be FBA businesses. Years ago during the hay day of FBA it was much easier to get started from scratch, to build up your reviews, to build up a product that’s well liked and purchased in your space. That’s much more difficult to do today so there’s a barrier to entry that’s been built up over time that favors established businesses and established products and established brands in the FBA space.

Joe:

Look I think as online businesses mature this is just gonna happen more and more. We’ve talked about this on previous podcasts. Brands are getting more and more valuable and because they come with a built in moat around them and as you see that in online businesses in different niches it might be a better way to break into certain businesses just buying instead of building.

Justin:

Yeah I mean, higher barriers to entry can just make starting from scratch more expensive, it can make it more time consuming and can just make the process slower. So that’s the one side of the coin. The other, is that lower barrier to entry can make starting from scratch cheaper, more reasonable in terms of the time you’re gonna put in and much faster to get up to speed. So in a niche or industry were the barriers to entry are low there’s not nearly as many costs, it’s not nearly as difficult to get started from scratch. So if you can get up to scratch with less work, less cash outlay and get up to that same level quickly, that might make sense for you to start from scratch.

Justin:

Whichever way you go, whether you’re building from scratch or you’re buying a business, finding ways to increase the barrier to entry in your specific niche is often a really smart play, and it typically will make your business more valuable. So think about it, if someone’s looking to buy a business and there are more barriers to entry, it’s harder to get into, that gonna inherently make the business that’s already successful and already making money and already established with customers, more valuable because it’s harder for copycats, it’s harder for other people to compete. Right?

Justin:

So just as [inaudible 00:20:42] Joe. What are some sneaky ways that someone can raise the barrier to entry in your mind?

Joe:

Yeah, I mean sneaky ways right, this is an interesting way to look at it and I think coming up with industry standards, using monopoly type of price fixing structure with your competitors. These types of sneaky ways of doing business and increasing the barrier to entry are definitely ways were you can make the business more valuable.

Justin:

At a very high level working with the government to put more regulation on your industry, that’s gonna create a bigger moat around your castle and make your business more valuable. I think it’s interesting to take those principles and apply it to when I’m watching the news and I see the latest hearing about whatever and the regulations they’re putting down I’m like, “Hmm, I wonder what’s going on there? That’s pretty interesting.”

Justin:

Back to the basics. If you can create a bigger moat around your business, particularly after you come successful, you’re just baking in more value into your business and to your industry quite honestly.

5. How Urgently Do You Need Cash Flow?

Justin:

Alright Joe. Number five question. How urgently do you need cash flow? So just the truth of the matter is that starting from scratch is typically gonna take months or even years to become cash flow positive, and this has to do with you spending time, but also money on getting the business up to speed and a whole bunch of other factors. Business don’t generally take off until you’ve mastered at least one marketing channel, you’re driving customers, there’s a product market fit, you’ve got traffic through Google search engines for affiliate sites. You’re gonna need some time and some traction and that generally doesn’t come immediately.

Joe:

Yeah. I mean the Google sandbox these day is, wow, it’s getting pretty ugly for new sites out there, so that can definitely take time to overcome. Obviously there’s other ways to get traffic and other ways to get business but either way it’s gonna take you a little while to spin up a business and really become cash flow positive.

Justin:

By the way that’s an interesting point Joe, and this goes to people just starting off, or they’re thinking about building a business. If you’re partnered with someone, or someone on your team or whatever, is like, “look. We’ll do this and this will drive a bunch of traffic and that’s how we’ll get our first customers, or that’s the way that we’ll become profitable.” Test it sure, but if anyone’s like, “I’ve got a sure fire way of driving traffic, and I know those customers convert.” That doesn’t pass the bullshit test for me.

Joe:

To good to be true.

Justin:

Yeah. The other thing is you need to be aware off is that starting from scratch can provide a much higher ROI on the money spent. A business starting from scratch, let’s go with an affiliate site for example, there’s not a lot of money that goes into that, inside of a thousand bucks probably over the first year, and you get a solid affiliate site, authority site built and running in that first year. You’re not spending a lot of money and ultimately that affiliate site can be sold for fifty thousand, two hundred thousand, five hundred thousand, eight hundred thousand dollars over the next couple of years. So your ROI on the money spent is fantastic, but you will be putting quite a bit of time into it, and that’s the thing people don’t count a lot. So, let’s say for example, I spent $5000 to get a $500,000 business in three years. That I sell my business for $500,000. Wow, I mean that’s amazing 100 X on my money right. $5000 spent 500,000 return, maybe I buy a $250,000 business and I double it to a $500,000 business in three years. Return on my money, I’ve only doubled my investment where I 100 X’d the other way. But what you’re not considering is the time factor.

Joe:

Right. And that’s what I was gonna say. The biggest thing there is the time factor. To go from 1000 to 500,000 I think it’s gonna take several years, whereas going from 250 to 500 could take less than a year. So that’s part of the good natured ness of scaling up quickly.

Justin:

And the urgency on cash flow is important for everyone to be aware of and where they’re at. Say for example that, for your lifestyle reasons you’re looking to either build or buy a business and you’re thinking about quitting your job, you’re thinking about doing this full time, if you’ve got a wife and a couple of children you’re gonna need that cash flow right away, right, you can’t just hang in there, live in Mom’s basement until it’s up and running a year, year and a half from now making money, you just don’t have that as a luxury. So buying might be more important to you, where if you’re a single guy or a single girl and you’ve got Mom’s basement to hang out in while you get that affiliate site up and running, you’ve got more time, you can take that time risk.

Empire Flippers Round Up

Justin:

Alright Joe, let’s get into news and updates.

Voice over:

You’ve been listening to the Empire Podcast. Now some news and updates.

Justin:

First up Buddy, we are looking at conferences for 2019. We’ve had a great conference year in 2018, we’re looking to expand that in 2019 and I wanted to ask our listeners; are there any that they think we should be attending? So if you’re listening to this and you think we should attend a particular conference in 2019 please leave a comment, send us an email or send us a tweet on Twitter. We would like to hear from you. The one conference we know we are attending in April will be the Dynamine Circle Austin event. That will be April 5th to the 7th. This is for DCers only so unfortunately we can’t invite our audience. We might be able to do some sort of side thing, maybe a dinner or something with anyone who happens to be in town or around that wants to meet up.

Joe:

Yeah. We’re gonna be doing a lot of travel in late march and April so hopefully we will be coming to a town near you.

Justin:

It’s just rare that both you and I are in the same city in the US at the same time, so we should probably do something to capitalize on that.

Justin:

The other thing I should mention, this is a bit of a bummer, but we had some bigger seven figure deals fall through recently and we were working on these deals and working on these deals for a number of months and has some bad luck, like multiple fell through at the same time, which I don’t know what that means, it just sucks. It’s a bummer. We weren’t happy about it because we were really hoping we’d be able to close those deals either this month or next…

Joe:

It sucks when in comparison to the first half of the year when we closed some seven figure deals with ease and now ran into a little bit more of a struggle with them in the later half of the year. It’s interesting I think to consider that and see what the reasons for that is, whether we just got unlucky or not, I’m unsure, the jury is still out but I’m sure we’ll figure it out and be back at it.

Justin:

Yeah we’re digging into that now trying to do a recap of what went wrong, what we can fix, what we can’t fix, what’s out of our control, so we’ll definitely share our thoughts with you on that as we get them.

Justin:

There are still lots of listings to choose from though. We’ve got over a hundred listings currently available, and they range from 38,000 to 2.9 million, so if you’re interested in buying a business we definitely have some inventory on our marketplace. More than we’ve ever had before.

Justin:

Another thing I wanna mention Joe, is we’ve been testing an exclusive due diligence process and there are very strict requirements on this, only for larger businesses and certain cases. We haven’t rolled it out fully because we want to test through this and the results aren’t fully in, but there are some issues that we have with exclusive due diligence, there’s some things we don’t like about it, and honestly, the truth is we’re just not sure which way we’re gonna go with this. On the one hand you have buyers who tell us… these are larger buyers, experienced buyers, they say, “Look if I don’t have the exclusive due diligence in place, I’m just not gonna be able to do business and buy businesses from your marketplace.” That’s one thing we hear from the buyers.

Justin:

On the other hand exclusive due diligence process have the negative approach of putting sellers under exclusive due diligence, not available to be seen or looked at from any other potential buyers, and it puts the squeeze on sellers. So it’s less good for the sellers and it’s pressure buyers have put on us. I don’t know man, you know where I stand, I lean toward not, I lean toward not thinking it’s a good idea for the sellers. But I understand that some buyers think it’s a requirement. What do you think about this?

Joe:

Yeah. I mean

Justin:

I know it’s tough.

Joe:

I hate it. I don’t wanna do it. And the reason why we set up no LOI kinda period when we first did Empire Flippers was because of the speed factor. Really, I don’t think there’s any reason to have an exclusive LOI period where you’re locked in an additional APA negotiation period after that. It really moves more towards the buyer than the seller.

Joe:

However, I think that what we’re finding, especially on the higher end, towards seven figures and beyond, people just have requirements, they have to do it that way, they have to have exclusive due diligence and they have to know that no one else will be able to come in and essentially submarine them for a deal because they have to dedicate time, effort, resources and money towards doing the due diligence. Now it’s unfortunate and I’m unsure what we’ll wind up with in the end but we’re testing through our process and we’ll definitely have something for these types of funds and higher end buyers in the future.

Justin:

Yeah. Ultimately we want to do right by both parties. What makes the most sense, what has the highest likelihood of getting the sellers’ businesses sold and sold successfully and sold for the right price and also gives buyers the fairest and best opportunity to buy their businesses. We’re looking at that and we’ll have more of a report back as we get more findings there, but wanted to let everyone know.

Justin:

Alright Joe. Let’s do the listener shout section, also known as the indulgent, ego boasting, social proof segment. Got a shout on Twitter from [inaudible 00:30:17] I know I’m mispronouncing that name. [inaudible 00:30:20] said, “I liked the episode in which you discussed different types of buyers’ avatars. Episode 173 as well, an interview with Abundant Michael from Intuitive Leadership.” [inaudible 00:30:30] thanks man, appreciate it, glad you’re digging the show.

Justin:

On Stitcher we had a five star review from Ben McAdams, who said “useful tips from the trenches. Anything you’d wanna know about buying and selling online assets delivered well.” Thanks for the shout Ben. Really appreciate it.

Justin:

We had a review from Yannick on Facebook. Yannick gave us five stars, said, “I sold for the first time through Empire flippers recently. I wouldn’t trust [inaudible 00:30:54] again. Everyone I was in contact with from the support staff to the analyst was quick to respond, competent and friendly. What’s most important though is that I felt everyone was working to get me the best deal possible, and that’s what I got indeed. Thanks guys.” Well thank you Yannick for trusting us and giving us your faith and trust to sell your business.

Joe:

Thanks a lot Yannick.

Justin:

That’s it for episode 179 of the Empire Flippers Podcast. Thanks for sticking with us. We’ll be back soon with another show. You can find the show notes for this episode and more at empireflippers.com/buildorbuy and make sure to follow us on twitter @empireflippers. See you next time.

Joe:

Bye bye everybody.

Voice over:

Hope you enjoyed this episode of the Empire Podcast with Justin and Joe.

Voice over:

Hit up empireflippers.com for more. That’s empireflippers.com.

Voice over:

Thanks for listening.