We are looking to bring on a Vetting Advisor to join our operations team. After the initial 3-month training period, the role will be 100% location independent, allowing you to live anywhere in the world! The initial training will take place in Phuket, Thailand and you’ll need to be in Thailand and ready to start on September 9th, 2019.
At the start of October, the majority of the Empire Flippers team will be descending on Phuket for our bi-annual company meetup! This will be a great opportunity for you to meet the team and get a good understanding of how each area of the business works (plus do a spot of socializing too, of course!).
This is a huge opportunity for you to work with one of the fastest-growing companies in the U.S. and learn the ins and outs of the online business world. Over the last couple of years, our company has seen explosive growth—and there is no sign of it slowing down.
In order to keep hitting our goals, including our 2019 goal of $42 million worth of businesses sold, we need to expand our horizons and improve our customer experience to a point that makes us the de-facto standard for buying and selling online businesses. Your work will help propel the industry forward to new levels not seen before.
And we’re just getting started!
A vetting advisor looks at every new business that potential sellers submit to us. The majority of these businesses are not approved, as they do not meet our high-quality standards. It will be your mission to verify the business’s revenue, traffic, and that it’s a legitimate business before it goes live on our marketplace, plus give an accurate valuation of what that business is worth.
You will spend the first few months in Phuket, training with our Vetting Supervisor, Kevin Troyan. The first six months will act as your probationary period, at the end of which (all going well) we’ll have you up and running as a fully-fledged Vetting Advisor.
Empire Flippers started in 2011. Back then, we were known as the AdSense Flippers, and we were all about building our own niche sites. We would monetize those sites via Google AdSense. Once the sites were making a little money, we would sell them on Flippa for 20x their net monthly profit.
We recorded our entire journey by blogging all about it.
It was a nice little business and soon we built quite a following of people who loved what we were up to. It got to the point where people asked us if we would use our Flippa account to sell their sites. They told us it would sell easier since we had the audience, and they would pay us a percentage of the sale.
So… we said yes.
It wasn’t long before we were selling way more of other people’s sites than our own.
We realized there was something here. Something big.
In 2012, we rebranded to Empire Flippers and became an online business brokerage in our own right. We launched our marketplace and became the “go-to” solution for people wanting to sell their online businesses.
Fast forward to today, we now have the largest brokerage team in the industry. We have staff that is siloed for each part of the selling and buying process — everyone from marketing and sales team members, to vetting and migration experts.
Now, we’re inviting you to become part of our story.
Becoming a Vetting Advisor makes you a critical part of Empire Flippers. You will learn skills that will last you a lifetime in the online business world. We will teach you all of our methods for verifying a legitimate online business, how to spot fakery, and how to deal with manipulation.
You will represent our brand and be the face of Empire Flippers to someone selling their online business.
Once a seller submits their site for sale, they will deal with you. You will get on the phone with them, chatting with brilliant entrepreneurs and seeing hundreds of profitable online businesses.
In addition, we will train you on exactly how to value an online business. We have years of proven sales data to help you gauge what a business is really worth. At the end of the day, you will get to help change people’s lives in a dramatic way.
After all, when a business is sold, a seller can receive a truly life-changing sum of cash for their business. In some cases, we’ve even paid out a million+ dollars to a seller.
The Vetting Advisor role is vital to the success of our company.
Since this role allows new businesses to appear on our marketplace, it can be a bit stressful here and there. You will need to work weird hours sometimes to make sure you can get on the phone with sellers in different time zones. You will also need to be extremely detail-oriented to make sure everything lines up.
Not all sellers are familiar with creating profit and loss statements (P&Ls); you will need to catch any errors and will be regularly calling sellers to work with them to ensure we have accurate financial statements when we list.
You will be part of the team that identifies any/all potential problems. You’re on the front lines of ensuring that the quality of listings on our marketplace is in line with our very high standards.
You will drive all of our sellers through a multi-step vetting process. We are constantly refining this process to allow only top-notch businesses onto our marketplace. As you become more seasoned, you will be tasked with improving this vetting process.
We will train you on how to price online businesses using our valuation tool and other internal systems. Unlike some brokers, we always try to price as competitively as possible with what the market is actually paying for businesses. To come up with this price, we use a combination of our valuation tool, past sales data, pricing windows, and looking at year-over-year growth or decline each business has.
Since every business is unique, you will develop your own sense of how pricing works over your six-month probation period. Our sales team will give you valuable feedback based on real-world negotiations and deal making to help you develop this sense.
Ultimately, it will be up to you to make it clear to the seller what to expect during the vetting and sales process so they feel comfortable selling their business with us.
We believe in hiring people that are a good fit for us culturally. A good fit is actually more important to us than the skill sets since we will teach you everything you need to know.
While no previous work experience is required, having a background in customer service and/or accounting is helpful. Plus, there are some qualities that will go a long way in helping you succeed in this position, such as:
You need to be detail-oriented. Vetting is a meticulous job. You will be pouring through spreadsheets, traffic analytics, and revenue data, day in and day out. It is up to you to spot errors, inconsistencies, or when something just doesn’t feel “right.” In many ways, you are investigating these businesses to make sure everything adds up before allowing them to go live on our marketplace.
You need to be a team player. Vetting and sales often work closely together to help set our prices in the market. The sales team will provide you with useful real-world feedback to help fuel your valuation strategies. This process means you need to be okay with working in a collaborative environment, but you should also be capable of defending your points. After all, you will become an expert at vetting.
You’re good at defusing problems. Selling a business is an intimate process. There will almost always be obstacles and challenges for you to help a seller overcome. Some sellers will have an emotional attachment to their business and demand more than what the business is worth. Other sellers will be unresponsive during the vetting process. It will be up to you to solve these issues in an amicable way that makes sellers absolutely love our process.
You’re not afraid of getting on the phone. The vetting position will require you to get on the phone a lot with sellers. Your phone communication needs to be spot-on and you have to be comfortable making those calls to get all the information we need from the seller.
Our company is built on a culture of remote work, travel, and living life on your terms. Being a location-independent full-time position is one of the many benefits!
We aren’t going to chain you to a cubicle. You’ll be free to work anywhere in the world that serves your creativity best. The choice is yours. While we’re an Inc. 5000 company, we’re not a Fortune 500 company. You won’t be some badge number in the corporate machine. We will want your input and insight. As you gain more experience, we are going to rely on you to make our process better and smoother for our sellers while also helping to increase the number of high-quality businesses that go live on our marketplace.
When you first start off, you will fly to Phuket, Thailand in September to meet with our Vetting Supervisor, Kevin Troyan. You will need to pay your way to Phuket, but we’ll take care of the housing arrangements for the first month and provide a housing stipend for the remaining 5 months of your probationary period. Following the Phuket meetup, you’ll be with our Vetting Supervisor in Thailand and possibly Bali (sometimes Kevin likes a change of beach!). We’ll cover the cost of any travel that we require you to do during your probationary period.
You won’t start off making much money.
For the first six months, you will be paid $2,000 USD per month during the probation period. Plus, you’ll get a housing stipend of $700 USD per month for months 2 through 6 (we’ll book you a place in month 1). While not a lot, it is enough to have an enjoyable time in Southeast Asia. After six months, you will be gradually introduced to our compensation plan. Within 12 months, you will likely be location-independent, can expect to earn $40,000-$46,000 USD per year, and have international healthcare coverage.
That amount is more than enough to live a very nice lifestyle in Asia or almost anywhere in the world (within reason).
While our lifestyle is pretty great, this isn’t a gap year experience to go travel the world.
We are looking for career-minded people that can make a positive impact on our business. Sure, sometimes we really do work by the pool, but we also work hard.
There will be days when you clock in 12 hours. There will also be days when you are up at all sorts of strange hours dealing with our sellers who live anywhere from the U.S. and U.K. to Eastern Europe and Asia.
While you might take a long break during the middle of the day, you might also find yourself burning the midnight oil as you hop onto a call to get a seller through the last hump of the vetting process.
A lot of people love the idea of finding a job that allows them to travel the world and get a different job later back home. That is not this job.
We want you for the long-haul. We want you to grow with us and turn this position into a prosperous career.
Remember, we’re not going to throw you into the fire from day one.
When you first come onboard, you’re going to learn about our company. We will do a deep dive into how our processes and systems work, set you up in the backend, and teach you about each department within the business.
We’ll start you off with low-level tasks. As you get better acquainted with our business, we will gradually build up your workload, get you comfortable with routine vettings, and then start having you take on more ambitious projects.
We will review every application that comes our way. If we believe you’re a good fit for us, we will reach out to set up an interview. Typically, there are two rounds of interviews before we make a decision.
If you believe you’re a good fit, you have until July 12, 2019 to apply.
Here is the sequence of events we use when hiring our new vetting advisor:
*YouTube Video Requirements:
We will only accept submissions that include a YouTube URL. Please leave the video “unlisted” in preferences and share the link with us. The quality of the video doesn’t matter, and there are no bonus points for editing. We just want (up to) three minutes of you explaining and answering the following questions (based on your previous experience):
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