EFP 82: Website Valuations And A 7-Figure Sale (With Drew Sanocki)

Are you thinking about selling your website? Well, there’s quite a bit that goes into any online sale and that’s particularly true when you’re looking at multiple 7-figures in valuation.

Introducing Drew Sanocki on Selling a 7 Figure Business

Today, I’ve got Drew Sanocki on our podcast sharing his story about how his business fell in value and eventually increased again to sell for 7-figures. We talk about opportunities in the $10K-100K space vs. the higher $100K and up businesses, when’s a good time to sell, and several other things.

We’re moving into the $10K-100K sites ourselves. Our Marketplace has a few sites in that range for sale right now if you’d like to see what direction we’re going towards.

Check Out This Week’s Episode Here:

 Direct Download – Right Click, Save As

Topics Discussed This Week Include:

• Drew’s business losing value, regaining it, and eventually selling for 7-figures.
• Opportunities in the $10K – $100K space Vs. $100K – $500K Vs. $500K+
• How do you know when it’s a good time to sell?
• How multiples change over time.
• How you might want to angle the sale of your business.

Mentions:

• DrewSanocki.com
• @DrewSanocki
• Viperchill’s How to Reach 100,000,000 Unique Visitors in Just 6 Months
• Tom Secuya’s Carveph.com
• John Naranjo’s Ingenuity.ph
• Dave Hermansen’s Storecoach.com
• Drew Sanocki’s Mineral.io
• Drew Sanocki’s Turnrivercapital.com
• Drew Sanocki’s Interview on eCommerceFuel
• The Small Online Business (“SOB”) M&A Report
• Empire Flippers’ New Website Valuation tool

Quotables:

• “It’s not just about average order size. How many repeat customers do they have? Try to think ‘Can I grow around that group?’” -Drew – Tweet This!

Do you have any questions for Drew? Leave us a SpeakPipe message or comment below and we’ll get you answers.

 

 

Announcer:                        Welcome to the Empire Flippers podcast. Are you sick and tired of gurus who have plenty of ideas, but are short on substance? Worried that ebook you bought for $17.95 won’t bring you the personal and financial freedom you long for?

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Straight from your hosts, Justin and Joe, from Empire Flippers.

Justin Cooke:                     Welcome to episode 82 of the Empire Flippers podcast. I’m your host Justin Cooke, and I’m here with my business partner extraordinaire, Joe “Hot Money” Magnotti. What’s going on buddy?

Joe Magnotti:                    Hello everybody.

Justin Cooke:                     We’ve got a great episode lined up today. We’re gonna be talking about website valuations. We’re actually gonna be looking at a multiple-seven-figure sale with our buddy Drew Sanocki. Now, I first heard about Drew Sanocki through a friend of ours named Dave Huss. He’s actually running our successful remarketing campaign right now, and said “Dude, you gotta get ahold of this Drew guy, super-sharp man. You gotta talk to him, gotta see what’s going on.”

So, we ended up having a chat, and I was just really impressed. He told me about an e-commerce site he had sold called DesignPublic.com, and they took it from scratch up to a multi-seven-figure dollar deal. Ended up selling it, and was very successful with that exit.

So he now works at a digital marketing agency he set up, and then he’s a partner at a VC firm. So he’s definitely at the higher end of the buying and selling market, but he’s had some interesting things about the $10,000 to $500,000 space, too. He put out a small business merger and acquisition report that I thought was really interesting and insightful. Definitely more in our space, so I wanted to talk to him. I’m really excited about this interview, and I think you’re really gonna dig it.

Joe Magnotti:                    Yeah! I haven’t heard the interview yet, but I’m looking forward to it as well.

Justin Cooke:                     Alright buddy, so let’s get into updates, news, and info.

First thing, we’ve got zero five-star iTunes reviews, buddy. Nothing today.

But we do have a fantastic article to share with you over at ViperChill.com. Glen was talking about … The article is headlining and catchy. It says “How to build a seven-figure business in six months.” But once you get into it, you’ll see that it’s actually true.

So it talks about things like Distractify.com, so those sites where your buddies on Facebook are sharing something kind of eye-catchy, and a really hardcore headline. It’s these types of sites, there’s a bunch of ’em out there. But he talks about how these people were able to build them up in a very short amount of time. He also talks about how they’re very likely over-valued, and this is something I talked to Drew a little bit about off the show and off the interview. We talked about these types of sites and how they might be overvalued. Either way, we’re talking about tens of millions of page views a month, and basically starting from scratch. These are cash cows. I mean, we’re talking $50,000, $100,000 a month, and you have just you working on it, maybe one or two contractors or employees. Like, that’s it. So it’s a cash-

Joe Magnotti:                    What’s a short amount of time? When you say “Short amount of time,” what’s a short amount of time that they’ve got this site up and to that level?

Justin Cooke:                     Three months? Six months? Like, really, really short period of time. Now, they’re working their butt off, and they’re basically hacking social media. So they’re doing a whole bunch of Facebook stuff. You know, Facebook’s changed a little bit on their images and how easily people are able to click through, but they did some amazing things. And there are still companies coming out that are breaking through.

The interesting thing though is I think for every one of these breakthroughs, you go, “Oh my God, it’s that easy.” And Glen lays out the process for creating these sites. What I think though is that there’s a lotta sites that are created that aren’t successful. So it’s the shelf theory, right? Yeah, you see the ones that are successful, but you don’t see all the studies or all the sites that are put in the shelf or in the drawer. So yeah, I just think there’s a lotta losers in this space, too, but …

Joe Magnotti:                    Yeah, I would imagine that a lot of it’s gotta go viral, and you can’t just make something go viral. You have to get a little lucky, right?

Justin Cooke:                     Well if you look at some of the headlines they use, they’re really eye-turners. They’re really gonna grab your attention. So they’re awfully good at that. They’re very skilled at headlines, and then they are good at curating or pulling this content out.

I think the point that Glen mentions is, and this is pretty interesting, but that this is not unique content. So they’re basically curating content from all around the web, some would say stealing that content from all around the web, instead of actually creating their own unique content. So they do have something at the bottom that states, “Hey, it’s not ours, we’re linking to where it came from,” and that kinda thing.

But it’s an interesting kind of moral or ethical point, like, is that cool? Can you just steal content, put it up there? I mean, companies like Yahoo and Google, they help you curate your own content through a search engine, so is this that much different?

Joe Magnotti:                    Yeah, I don’t know. That’s an interesting question, and it’d be funny to see how it plays out.

Justin Cooke:                     Either way, I think you should … If you’re listening to this podcast, you definitely needa check out that post on ViperChill.

Next what I wanna talk about is we’re meeting up with Tom over at Carveph.com, or actually Carve.ph as well. He runs an outsourcing company here in Davao. And it’s funny, I ran across someone a while back that was asking about Carve. They said, “Hey, does anyone have any word on them, how they’re doing?” I’d actually met Tom the last startup weekend event here in Davao. We chatted quite a bit, and he’s just a cool guy.

And I like what they’re doing over there, so I wanna see if there’s anything we can do to work together, of if there’s any possibilities over the next few months or this year on things we can do together. I mean, we’re always looking for talented people, Joe, so he definitely has his fingers in the pie there and is looking for people all the time. Maybe we can help push some clients his way for work that we don’t do. I just think it’d be an interesting lunch to sit down with him and see what’s going on.

Joe Magnotti:                    What do they specialize in?

Justin Cooke:                     They do some back office process stuff. Similar to what we’ve done. They also I think help the Ingenuity guys, and they take some of their falloff from … Ingenuity works with startups, and so they do a lot of development work for startups. So when they get deals that aren’t really a good fit, I think they might send them over to Tom. I’m not sure about that, but I think that’s how it works.

So the other thing is we’re talking to Dave Hermansen this Thursday, he runs a site called StoreCoach.com. I came across him ’cause I had noticed one of his Flippa auctions, and he had sold quite a few e-commerce sites on Flippa, and so he’s done really well in that space. I then found out that he has a site called StoreCoach.com where he teaches others how to build e-commerce sites. They have a forum and a community over there. And so I think I just Tweeted something, and he saw the Tweet, and he was like, “Hey, yeah, we should definitely have a chat.” So we’re setting something up, and we’re seeing if there’s some potential business or connections we can make in the future, and see what’s available there.

Joe Magnotti:                    Cool. I’m really excited about that one. I did check out StoreCoach.com, and really liked the site, and what he had to say. I’m always interested in recreating a process that could make it a little bit easier to make e-commerce sites, because that’s something that I would love to do for us.

Justin Cooke:                     It’s so funny Joe, we’ve been talking about this for over a year now, about e-commerce sites. But it just seems like such a good position for us, right? Because we have a whole staff of people that can take away some of the work involved. So, especially for an e-commerce store that’s based in the US, if we can take some of those labor costs, and cut those down with people here via customer services and fulfillment, I think it could be a real win. We’ve got all the keyword research stuff down, so … Anyway, man, it’s something we really need to look into, I think.

Last point I wanna make for updates, news, and info is we’ve got a new product out. So someone reached out to us from our previous days, back in the day working for a local SEO companies, and they were looking for a local business website setup service. So they were looking for a six- to ten-page website, just for a local electrician, or plumber, or that kind of thing. And so we talked to ’em a bit, and we’re not really pushing the outsourcing side of our businesses much anymore. We said “Look, as far as having people work for you directly as part of a project, it’s not really something we can do. But I think we could set up a product specifically for your needs.” And so I brought that to Joe, and he was like, “Yeah, no, that sounds great.” So we’re setting up our product, we’re beta testing it right now through Empire Flippers where we set up websites for local businesses, and they’re gonna be selling those over the phone.

I think it’s pretty interesting. I doubt any of our listeners are gonna need that particular website, but it might be something that they can use and then sell to their clients. So any of our buyers.

Joe Magnotti:                    Yeah, it definitely goes into the intersection of what we do well, right? We have the outsourced labor, we have the local experience, we’ve done this kinda stuff before. We even have staff on board right now that used to do the local SEO stuff, not that there’s much done of that over here. But, it all comes together very well in creating a local business product, so I’m glad that we have a client to test it out with, and I’m glad we didn’t try to just middle-man labor again. We actually just set up a product, and did what we said we were gonna do.

Justin Cooke:                     Yessir. All right buddy, well enough about that. Let’s get right into the heart of this week’s episode.

Announcer:                        This is the Empire Flippers podcast.

Justin Cooke:                     Hey guys, so I’m here with Drew Sanocki from DrewSanocki.com. A really interesting guy, I’m really excited to talk to him today. He actually sold an e-commerce business called Design Public for multiple-seven-figures. He now runs a digital marketing agency called MINERAL.io, and he’s also a partner at VC firm called Turn/River Capital, at TurnRiverCapital.com.

Drew, welcome to the program, man.

Drew Sanocki:                   Hey Justin, how’s it going.

Justin Cooke:                     Good, man. Good to have you on.

Drew Sanocki:                   Good to be here. You caught me off guard.

Justin Cooke:                     So I was actually introduced to you by a mutual friend, Dave Huss, who’s right now doing our remarketing campaign. He said “Oh, you gotta talk to this guy Drew, he’s really interesting.” So we got on a call, we had a few emails back and forth. And I actually listened to you on Andrew’s podcast over at eCommerceFuel, and I heard the story of how you built up this e-commerce business called Design Public, and it was awesome. We did a podcast episode on the entrepreneurial rollercoaster. And I just felt it. Throughout the whole podcast, you were talking to Andrew, and I was like, “Oh! That’s so exciting. Oh, that’s so horrible!” You know? The whole thing was just amazing.

So you built this e-commerce business, and then you were thinking about selling it. Right at that time, the financial crisis kicked in, the business tanked, for a lack of a better word, and you had to build it back up and then sell it again. Talk to me a little bit about that. What were the processes, what were you going through at that time?

Drew Sanocki:                   Yeah. I mean, people love that story. And I don’t know if it’s, what is the German word, schadenfreude? Where you take delight at the misery of others? But it’s not a happy story, you know? We were cranking. The business was just doing great, and I’m sure you know from your AdSense experience, when your site’s just taking off and the stars have aligned, you’re pulling in all this organic traffic, and you’re growing year over year. And selling is always on the back of your mind, but you’re growing so quickly, why would I wanna sell? I could just run this as a cashflow business. And then all of a sudden, your revenue gets cut at least in half, maybe even more than that, in one year, and the “I’m gonna sell the business someday” option just gets taken off the table.

And it’s like a gut punch. You’re just like, “Man, now I’m looking at … I gotta run this company for the next whatever years, until we pull out of this thing.” And it was really a tough time. And I moved at that time, we sort of decided to take the company virtual, and I moved to New York, my business partner is in the Bay Area. So it was just … We doubled down. I think we were running it up until then sort of as a lifestyle business, “Hey, we’re on vacation, we’re running our business, and we’re on the beach in Bali,” and doing that kinda thing. But we went back all into the business for a good year and a half then to sort of pull it outta that dip.

Justin Cooke:                     So you were build-

Drew Sanocki:                   Until it sold at … We were able to sell it a year or two later.

Justin Cooke:                     So you were pulling the business outta the dip. Do you think it was sellable at the time? Like, after the crash, after you just had an issue, would you have been able to sell it?

Drew Sanocki:                   Sure.

Justin Cooke:                     It’d be probably for a much lower multiple, I’m guessing. Is that the reason that you didn’t sell? That you said, “No, no no, we can build this back up.” What was it that made you stick with it past that?

Drew Sanocki:                   Yeah, I think it’s sort of like catching a falling dagger, is the expression, right? Nobody wants to … We found that most of the buyers wanna see the last three years of financials. And we had been in business for a long time. We had started the company in ’03, and this sort of all went down in ’08. But I think if you looked at the last three years, it was, “Okay, they had a good year, an average year, then they plateaued, and then it sorta went down.” And nobody … Yes, I guess they technically could buy it on a multiple of EBITDA at that point. You can’t really sell on a multiple of revenue because you’re not growing. Usually you can only get away with that when you’re growing. But what’s EBITDA when it’s getting smaller month by month?

Justin Cooke:                     Yeah. That would’ve been an awfully expensive short sale for you.

Drew Sanocki:                   Yeah.

Justin Cooke:                     Tell me about the process when you were selling the business. So it was always in the back of your mind, but once you started building it back up again, you and your partner at one point said, “Okay, we’re gonna sell this.” Did you start preparing your financials at that point? What was your thought process going into a sale? And did you have any idea who to look to, or who to talk to about getting the business sold?

Drew Sanocki:                   A little bit. I mean, we’d always sort of explored the idea, maybe just a couple days a quarter, just sort of talking to people about selling. But we never proactively went after it until then. Or, until maybe a year after that. So, a couple things went down, though. There was the recession, we switched IT platforms to Magenta, which is an open-sourced shopping cart. We were on the beta of it, and we had a lotta problems with it. It since has gotten better. We also knew that moving from our homegrown code to a common platform like Magenta might help us sell the company, because any buyer would be more familiar with that and more comfortable with that than they would with our own code.

Justin Cooke:                     Yeah.

Drew Sanocki:                   So then we sort of came out of that dip, and we started seeing, “Okay, we could explore the possibility of a sale at this point.” I think we were both a little bit burned out after that experience, and we made it our priority. So we had to do things internal to the company, we did things external to the company.

Internal, I think we focused really on our processes, which we had sorta done from the day one. But now, we really revisited them with an eye that somebody else might be looking at them and using them to run the company. And the better operating manual we had, the less likely it would be that we’d get sort of locked into a long-term earnout. So, if we could make the business truly turnkey and present the buyer with standard operating procedures for running Design Public, then they would feel comfortable letting us off the hook.

Justin Cooke:                     What was it-

Drew Sanocki:                   You know, earlier.

Justin Cooke:                     I forget from the podcast, did you end up going with a broker, or did you go to private equity? I think you were in kind of that weird space, right?

Drew Sanocki:                   Yeah, it’s a weird … You know, we heard that the multiples keep going up the bigger you get. And north of 10 million, north of 10, 20, 30 million, you’re sort of in a private equity phase, and we weren’t up there. We weren’t below a million, where we’d be more on some of the smaller sites, but we were in sort of a gray area. And we ultimately decided to go with a broker. The broker ran a process over three months where she went out to the universe of buyers that we presented her with, and tried to … You know, the broker’s job is sorta try to create some urgency, and to run the process. So our broker did that, she went out. She went out to a universe of buyers that we presented to her, and she collected bids, and she helped them with their diligence on our company.

Justin Cooke:                     So, you basically had the broker shopping the deals with buyers that you actually gave her, to go out and find them. So after going through the process, how long did the selling process take? Was it three months, six months?

Drew Sanocki:                   It was about three months. Three months from start to finish. And I think we have a little bit of a unique situation, because the person or the party that actually bought our company, we carved out of the deal with the broker. In other words, we had a relationship with these guys from before, and we knew they were interested, and when we found our broker, we said “Hey, go after these companies, but this other short list of companies, we already know these guys, and if we sell to them we’d like to sorta carve them out of the deal.” In other words, we’ll be able to discuss.

Justin Cooke:                     Did you try to build some competition so that you did have multiple people looking at the business, or potentially bidding on the business? Letters of intent, that kinda thing?

Drew Sanocki:                   Oh, yeah. Yeah, and what the brokers tend to be good at … I think you don’t really need a broker, all you need is a third party. It could be a lawyer, it could be a really savvy buddy of yours, who sorta plays good cop, bad cop. Because I think my business partner and I, we were sorta good cop. We got on the phone with a lotta these buyers, and we could BS with them entrepreneur to entrepreneur, and we hit it off. But then the broker’s job was sorta to be the bad guy after the call and say “You know, that bid’s not really high enough,” or “They’re looking more here,” or “Here’s some more,” “They got some interest from these other parties.” So it was helpful to have her in that role.

Justin Cooke:                     So I know you built this business from scratch. Looking back, now that you’ve had that exit, what are your feelings on that? Would you wanna go back to building a business from scratch, or would you rather buy into an existing business and grow it?

Drew Sanocki:                   I think the latter. And another thing happened in my life over the past couple of years, I got married and I had a kid. And I think to truly go all in on building something, there’s just a lotta risk there, and a lotta time. And I just don’t have … My appetite for risk has changed since I have a family now, and also, the amount of time I can dedicate to starting a company has also changed a little bit. And buying a company is much more appealing to me now, because it reduces your risk.

In other words, every company has some secret sauce, and you might look at a company and think, “Well, I could build something like that.” But, in reality, I think you reduce the risk considerably if you buy an ongoing venture. That entrepreneur has taken a lot of the risk out of the equation just by getting up and running.

Justin Cooke:                     Yeah, and a lot of those … I mean, a lotta business’ll fail, and they’re gonna fail early, right? So if you’re able to buy one that’s a little more established … You know, it’s interesting.

But I would say though, for entrepreneurs, you have totally different kinds. You have the kinds that get bored with their just-starting-out businesses. So they get up to $300,000, $400,000 a year, and they go, “Okay, I want outta this, I wanna start something new.” Because they’re putting all this time and effort and energy into it, it’s really exciting, and who knows how it’s gonna work out. And then when it starts to get somewhere, they’re kind of done. And there are other entrepreneurs that go, “Okay, I’m gonna go in here and I know that I can logically scale the business through these verticals.” And they have a different approach to it.

When you were starting off … I mean, obviously your company is much different when you’re going from $100,000 a year to $500,000 a year, than $500,000 a year to $2 million. What do you think the different types of challenges are in those different spaces?

Drew Sanocki:                   Well, from zero to 100k or 200k in revenue, it’s more can you find what’s gonna be your chosen channel for customer acquisition. And for us, it was SEO. And it’s just a lot of experimentation to figure that out. “Is AdWords gonna work for me, can I scale there?” And by scale, I mean can you acquire customers cheaper than your lifetime value of the customer, right? So, is AdWords gonna work for me? Maybe it’s gonna be the Facebook channel, maybe it’ll be social, maybe it’ll be email marketing, or … There’s just so many different channels you could acquire customers through, and I think early on, your job is to figure out which one’s gonna work.

And then that might get you to 500k, but if you wanna go north of that, you sort of get into building an organization around those one or two scalable channels, right? So, you get more, it’s can I hire the right people, or can I develop the right processes around that channel that really allow my business to go from 500,000 to five million.

And I think even more than that, I-

Justin Cooke:                     Yeah, it’s-

Drew Sanocki:                   Go ahead.

Justin Cooke:                     It’s people and process, right?

Drew Sanocki:                   Yep.

Justin Cooke:                     So if you’ve got the right processes in place, you’re hiring and bringing up the right people, that’s how you’re gonna scale the business. I also think early on, it’s product/market fit. So you see a lot of entrepreneurs that struggle. “Is this really valuable, or do I just think I can make money with it?” “Do people really want what I’m delivering, and if they’re not, how can I adjust it to match their needs, to really solve a problem for them?” And I think that’s kind of the fun part of trying to … And there’s a lot of worries when you’re just getting started, too. But that’s one of the fun things, is trying to find that fit. And when you do, and you nail it, it’s really exciting.

One of the struggles I see with e-commerce, and it’s been there for a while now, but if I’m a brand-new entrepreneur, I say, “You know, I’m into this e-commerce thing, I see all these people building e-commerce sites. I don’t know how they’re doing it, ’cause there’s Amazon out there, but I’m gonna try it.” How do you avoid the Amazon problem? How do you avoid just Amazon stomping on you, and completely decimating your business?

Drew Sanocki:                   That’s a good question. It’s one that everybody in e-commerce is always asking, and I think you’ve gotta do one of a couple different things. The first is probably … well, you always have to be thinking about differentiation. And I think that differentiation can come a number of different forms, but one might be customization. Like, there are certain products out there that are highly customized. I’m thinking of things like highly customized pieces of furniture. I’ve seen a tin roof company, a company that sells tin roofs, which contractors need to do a lotta customization. And I think by choosing a product that’s highly customized, you can … You know, Amazon, it’s gonna be a while before Amazon can touch those markets. So that might be one.

The second thing I like to look for is a strong community. And if you can … You know, I’ve seen retailers around certain sporting niches. For example, like lacrosse, where e-commerce companies that play in that area, if they can tap into that community, they’re able to grow, despite the fact that all the product is still available on Amazon. So I like to look for customization and community.

Justin Cooke:                     That makes sense. Like Andrew’s site, the TrollingMotors, right? People that are way into their boats. They’re into fishing, there’s all kinds of different pieces to the product, right? And there’s a lot of education that goes on there, too. And I’d imagine a small e-commerce site that’s really into it as well, it’s gonna give you a lot more information than a big box retailer like Amazon.

One of the things I really love, and it’s on your blog, and I’m gonna link to it in the show notes. But you wrote the small online business merger and acquisition report. And I thought that was fantastic when I came across it. And when I was reading through it, I realized you’d pulled a bunch of information on all these small acquisitions that had happened, and that is really difficult data to come across. It seems like this industry, small business mergers acquisitions, is really fragmented. Where do you see the market for anywhere from $10,000 to one million dollar businesses, where do you see that market going three to five years from now?

Drew Sanocki:                   Well it’s definitely there. And I’m seeing more and more brokers kind of addressing that area. I think I’m on the list of probably five different brokerages that send me companies in that 10 to under one million dollar revenue sort of size. And I see it growing, because it’s becoming easier and easier to start a company. Tech is becoming cheaper and cheaper, and I think, like Marc Andreessen said, “Software is eating the world.” So it’s easier and easier to create apps and e-commerce sites, and I think you’re just gonna see that is a very, very crowded space.

But it’s also probably gonna become more transparent, and probably more rational. In other words, it’s very chaotic now. And you can probably attest to this better than I can, but a lot of the value, as Warren Buffet says, “A lot of value is in the initial purchase price that you pay for a company.” And I think if you’re sitting on Flippa or some of the small business marketplaces, a lot of it is on you to figure out which companies are undervalued, which ones are sort of a sham. And in that initial purchase price, you’ve made a lotta your return if you can find the gems.

But I think with becoming more and more popular, you’re gonna just see more transparency. And I think the chaos is probably gonna go lower and lower in the market.

Justin Cooke:                     Yeah, that’s one of the things that we’ve heard a lotta complaints about, is you go to Flippa and you just have to dig through so much crap. And for us, we saw an opportunity there. We said, “Look, if we could just avoid this, we don’t let them … List with us.” And so by cutting out all of that, we’re saving our buyers the hassle of doing it, and we’re able to charge a premium for that. ‘Cause they know that across the board, generally, our sites are gonna do better. They still have to do their due diligence and everything, but they know they don’t have to weed through all of the other sites, right? And I think-

Drew Sanocki:                   Yeah, that’s great. And I think the role of the broker there, if you wanna call yourself a broker or a platform, it’s just becoming more and more important. Because people want that curation.

Justin Cooke:                     Yeah, for sure.

Drew Sanocki:                   The buyer does, yeah.

Justin Cooke:                     One of the other things I loved about your report is you were talking about e-commerce sites, you were talking about content sites, you were talking about SaaS businesses. And you made the point, or you brought this up, that e-commerce sites right now are getting fairly high multiples. And it might be a good time for them to sell, whereas content sites with all the recent updates with Google are selling at lower multiples, it might be a good time to buy. That’s scary to people, right? So they’re thinking e-commerce.

And I know, it sounds like you’re talking … It’s the market, right? You’re talking about the market. And so when everyone says, “Oh, e-commerce is safe, that’s a safer place to have a site, and that’s why it’s worth more,” that’s a great time to sell, because you’re gonna get better multiples. Talk to me a little bit about how you came up with that, and why you think that’s the case today.

Drew Sanocki:                   Well I think the article you’re talking about, I did look at just a pretty small universe of sites. I basically went back a couple months to all the brokerages I could find, and pulled the data, and just ran some numbers about what the average multiples are. And the idea is if you look at them over time, those multiples are gonna expand or they’re gonna contract, just like in the public markets, and when an industry comes into favor or goes out of favor.

So I think you just take the same approach to any company. And in this case, looking at e-commerce multiples over time, it seems like they are up relative to content sites. I think a lotta that is because of the Panda and Penguin updates sorta hammered content sites, and I think investors or buyers got sort of scared. They didn’t … The last thing you wanna do is spend a bunch of money on a content site, and have it drop out of Google’s index.

Whereas with an e-commerce site, there are a lotta things that can happen, and yes, Amazon could kill that site at some point. But it’s not something that … You don’t tend to wake up and have that happen within a day, you know? It’s sort of, you hope, like a slow process that Amazon’s coming into your vertical. So I think buyers sort of perceive the e-commerce sites as a safer place.

Justin Cooke:                     I read an article recently that was talking about a lotta baby boomers are getting older, and they’re starting to retire. They’re looking to sell their brick-and-mortar small businesses, and there being a lot of opportunity for up-and-comers to step into those positions, and be able to, over time, take an equity stake or even take over some of those companies. And so there’s definitely opportunity, I think, in the offline world as those people start to retire and kind of move on from their businesses.

There’s a lot, though, in the online space, too. ‘Cause that’s happening as well, where you have a lot of different types of businesses that are coming out, and a lot of businesses available. We’ve found that there’s actually more buyers than sellers in the $40,000, $50,000 space for website sales. Where do you see that going, as far as the brick-and-mortars versus the online website purchases over the next couple of years? How would you compare the two?

Drew Sanocki:                   That’s exactly what I’ve seen. I have a couple friends who run sites, such as yours, where they’re seeing more and more baby boomers wanting to acquire. It’s almost like they get to retirement age, and they want a small side online business that they can run as a lifestyle business. And it’s interesting because the whole lifestyle business promise is usually for 20- or 30-year-olds. Mostly guys, you wanna go-

Justin Cooke:                     Go live on the beach in Bali!

Drew Sanocki:                   Yeah! Go live on the beach. But I think it’s turning into our parents, who, they want some more income while they go into retirement, and they view an online business as something that might be easier than a brick-and-mortar business. I don’t know if that … I wouldn’t agree with that, but I think in their minds, it is. I’m also seeing a lot of them want to move overseas to sort of make their dollars go a little bit farther, and acquire a business that they could run from overseas. Whereas, I think that the idea of moving overseas or moving to Mexico and retiring, and then getting involved in a brick-and-mortar business there is sort of daunting.

Justin Cooke:                     Yeah, that’s a little odd.

Drew Sanocki:                   Right.

Justin Cooke:                     It’s funny though, so these people are retiring, and they have traditional business experience. Especially small business experience in a brick-and-mortar. And so it seems to me there’s a lot of opportunity to kinda help those people transition from an offline business to an online business. If you can facilitate that, either through obviously providing a marketplace to sell them sites, but I think also the training that goes along with it, or being kind of a manager of a group of sites that people can invest in, seems to be one of the ways that you could do it.

It’s interesting, because a lot of these people move, they have very little experience running a profitable website, but they have plenty of business experience. So kind of a young entrepreneur that puts themself in a situation where they handle the website, maybe get a piece of the pie, they don’t have the cash, ’cause they’ve got these retirees with the cash. There are gonna be a lotta opportunities in that space, next few years.

Drew Sanocki:                   Yeah.

Justin Cooke:                     So let’s talk about opportunities in the $10,000 to $100,000 space versus $100,000 to $500,000, $500,000 plus. As a builder that starts from scratch, you’ve built your business up to let’s say you’re doing a couple hundred thousand a year, $100,000 profit. How do you know when it’s a good time to sell? So you’re cruising along, you say, “Okay, I’ve gotten here. Can I take it further, or is it a good time to sell my business?” We’ve traditionally built these smaller sites that are really early, and sold them on. But we’re starting to think maybe that’s not the best idea. Maybe we should build them up bigger, and hopefully get larger multiples, and obviously more dollars for the sites that we do sell. What’s your thoughts on that?

Drew Sanocki:                   Yeah. You know, I’m thinking back to the article I wrote where I talk about how multiples change over time, and how you might wanna sell when your multiples are higher. But, not every … That’s a very rational decision, and I don’t think we’re rational beings. I think people … There’s so much more that goes into the equation of “Should I sell” if you’re a sole proprietor. And I dunno if you would agree with that, but I don’t think you sit back rationally and say, “Well, e-commerce multiples are up, I’m gonna sell my pride and joy e-commerce site.” Unless maybe you’re in the business, like you are.

But I think it has much more to do with just where you are in life, and have you challenged yourself enough with the current business, do you wanna find another challenge, do you wanna take some money off the table. I tend to think those things weigh in the equation a little bit more than where the multiple is at any one time.

But that said, bigger is better. Everything gets better as you get bigger. The multiples get better, the universe of buyers kind of expands, buyers who have a lotta capital. And it might be … You know, it’s something I think we thought of in the early days. Like, “Wow, if we could just get over a million in revenue, we could sell it for relatively much more. Okay, now if we could just get over five.” And you just keep doing, you think in terms of those step functions. But I would definitely think, unless you can get over 20, 30 million in revenue, then you’re-

Justin Cooke:                     “I’m out, baby. I’m out! That’s it!”

Drew Sanocki:                   Yeah! I mean, you’re like in … There are plenty of private equity firms at that point who are interested. You could sell your business for a lot, whereas in less than that, so much else, you gotta find the right buyer who definitely wants your business, and they’re just aren’t as many of them.

Justin Cooke:                     We had a learning experience where we ended up purchasing and then building up a site. It was a design site for Twitter backgrounds. We built it up, and it was doing really well, and then we kind of just left it alone. We focused on other projects, ’cause it wasn’t a huge win, and it wasn’t making a ton of money or anything. And it just became this declining asset. So we were hanging onto this thing, and it was making money, but we weren’t growing it, and we had no intention to grow it. And looking back at that, we realized that when we stop growing a business, it’s probably a good time to sell. Because someone else can step in and take it over and give it the love and have new ideas, fresh ideas to grow it up. But for us, it’s probably just it’ll either hang out or it’ll decline, that’s it, without any growth.

And so we’ve actually been thinking about that with our outsourcing company. We’re not so focused on our outsourcing business, or attracting new clients, maybe it’s a good time for us to get out of that, and give someone else an opportunity to build it up. So that’s kind of our approach to it. It’s not totally, “Okay, what’s my multiple, is this a good time to exit,” but more of like, “Are we continuing to grow the business?” And if we’re not, then maybe someone else could.

Drew Sanocki:                   Yeah. I like that. And you can always sell a growth story, but it’s harder … Like, multiple-

Justin Cooke:                     Like, why are you hanging out? Yeah, yeah. Why-

Drew Sanocki:                   Yeah, multiples depend on a lotta things. And one of ’em is growth. If you’re growing 30% year over year, you’re gonna get a bigger multiple. And if you let it go a couple years and it’s plateauing, then your story has to be that it’s a lifestyle business now, and I’m running it for cashflow. And then there better be cashflow.

So, you gotta … I would say, what bucket is your business in? Are you gonna sell this as a growth business? In which case, people don’t care about cashflow as much. Or, are you gonna sell it as a cashflow business?

Justin Cooke:                     So, let’s go back to the retirees that are talking about potentially looking at purchasing a lifestyle business that has decent cashflow, but maybe they’re not gonna grow it, they just wanna collect on the cash. What would be your advice for someone that isn’t as experienced in the online space or online assets that’s looking to get into it? Let’s say that they have sold their business, they’re close to retirement age, but they want to get into the online space. They want to look for online investments, specifically through earning websites. What would be your advice to them to getting started? I think that’s … We’re thinking about trying, how do we solve that problem. What would be your advice to them?

Drew Sanocki:                   That’s a good question, because I get that question a lot from … There’s so many people who wanna compete online, or get involved with an online business. And then you just look at them, and you’re like, “You’re just gonna get roundhoused.”

Justin Cooke:                     You’re gonna get eaten up.

Drew Sanocki:                   Right?

Justin Cooke:                     I know, I know!

Drew Sanocki:                   Every mother who’s … You know, my mom is like, “I wanna start a store.” Amazon’s just gonna kill her, you know? They’re just gonna nail her. So I-

Justin Cooke:                     Chew her up and spit it out. Yeah, I know.

Drew Sanocki:                   Yeah. So it’s tough. So what do you do? One thing, you talked about it early on with product/market fit. So one mistake I see a lot of these people making is they kinda go all in. Like, “Oh, it’s gonna take $100,000 to build out my e-commerce site? Okay, I guess we’ll have to cut the check.” Like, it doesn’t-

Justin Cooke:                     Scary. Scary, right?

Drew Sanocki:                   Yeah! And you really want them to think, go read Lean Startup, and think in terms of … Just start blogging about what you’re passionate about. You know, just start blogging about these products. You don’t have to go out and start a store right now. And then, okay, hook up a checkout to your blog, and just try to run a small store. And I would … I think that’s a much better way to sorta dip your toe in the water of online businesses. And then-

Justin Cooke:                     Yeah. Sorta WordPress blog, get a few posts up, put a PayPal button up. Right? Just these kinda things that can kinda guide them in. It’s funny though, because you’re right, if you are just trying to get into that space and you’re just trying to buy a business, and say, “Okay, how am I gonna build this out?” You’re not gonna know anything, and people are gonna eat you up. They’re gonna take all of your money, right?

Drew Sanocki:                   Yeah.

Justin Cooke:                     “Oh, I have to pay for a designer.” “Oh, no, you shouldn’t be on WordPress, you should be on this platform.” “Oh, I guess I’ll switch and pay.” It’s just-

Drew Sanocki:                   Because they don’t know.

Justin Cooke:                     Yeah.

Drew Sanocki:                   And I get this question all the time. It’s like, “Oh, this developer was trying to sell me on $50,000 for a site. Is that what I should be paying?” ‘Cause they have no idea.

Justin Cooke:                     So if you’re a listener right now, and you’ve got good development skills, and-

Drew Sanocki:                   Go hit up old people!

Justin Cooke:                     And you can talk to the 50-plus crowd with cash, you’ve got some opportunities. Legitimate opportunities to teach them, not scam them out of their design money and programming. But, yeah.

Drew Sanocki:                   I like to tell them, you build a landing page in WordPress or something. And then try driving traffic at it using AdWords. And AdWords is a great test, because if they can figure out AdWords, I think they can figure out a lot. There’s a lot involved, and you’ve gotta think in terms of in ROI, you gotta think in terms of what keywords are driving my business and what people are searching for, it starts to get you to think in terms of testing, like AB testing. And it’s just a great way to start. And if they are lost there, if they can’t get their head around AdWords, then it’s probably not a good idea.

Justin Cooke:                     Yeah. I think focusing on keyword is definitely a good start. That’s one of the things we talk about a lot is keyword research, and finding the right niche through keyword research. And there’s a lot of other ways to select niches, but that’s one that I think is a great way to kinda get your feet wet, and is kinda a great way to get started.

Drew Sanocki:                   Right.

Justin Cooke:                     Let’s talk a little bit about the due diligence process with Design Public. I mean, that was … Going back to your e-commerce sale, what did they want, man? What did you have to deliver? And I’m asking this because we’re thinking about our outsourcing company and what people might be asking us for. So what if they come to the table and say “Hey guys, show us this.”

Drew Sanocki:                   Yeah. We were fortunate enough that our buyer, and it’s one of the reasons we sold to them, they had e-commerce experience. So they had a couple stores, they wanted to build out a portfolio to get their top-line up, and then sell it for a higher multiple. It’s a classic roll-up, right? So they knew how to operate them. They weren’t as familiar with Magenta, but for the most part, the basics of e-commerce, they kinda got it. And that saved us a lot in due diligence. The due diligence was essentially they presented us a list of maybe 150 different questions about all different aspects of the business, and then we spent weeks getting them the answers to that.

Typically, they give you a LOI on the business, and in there is written, “Okay, we sorta wanna pay this much for the business, and we want an exclusive 60-day window on your business while we do the diligence.” And then you just crank through the diligence, because at the end of that 60 days, the deal’s off. Or …

Justin Cooke:                     Yeah. “Get it right man! You got 60 days, good luck.”

Drew Sanocki:                   Yeah. So it behooved both of us to really move that forward. So it was a lot of going through our QuickBooks, going through our accounting, learning all about our marketing programs, how everything worked, discussions on calculations about lifetime value, trying to figure out what exactly was the cashflow of the business. It’s always a gray area when the owners are taking some money out of the business. Do you count that as salary, or do you count that as a cashflow?

And that’s important, because the multiple is always off the cashflow. So if you say “This is a lifestyle business, I’m not spending any time on it,” all that money that I’m taking out is cashflow of the business. Because I wouldn’t need to pay anybody to use it to do that, to do my job, then you get a higher multiple than if they determine that you actually are crucial to the business, and that should be a salary. And to replace you, they’ll need to pay somebody.

Justin Cooke:                     Yeah. So sellers are constantly saying, “Oh, no, I barely do any work on this site.”

Drew Sanocki:                   Yeah. Yep.

Justin Cooke:                     And the buyers are like, “No, no, no no no, I bet there’s a lotta work.” Yeah, we see that in brokering deals. And so we generally try to flesh that out with the seller in our vetting process. So, okay. “Well, I don’t really spend … I spend an hour a week.” “Okay, what exactly do you do? Who handles the customer service complaints?” “Oh, yeah, no no, I do that too.” “Okay, all right, so let’s put that time in there, that’s helpful.”

And maybe the buyer won’t have to have someone to do that, but we need to know what the cost would be to replace that actual work. Either with a VA, or an employer, or something like that.

Drew Sanocki:                   Right. So-

Justin Cooke:                     You talk about this in your article, the mergers and acquisition report, about $50 million acquisition. Obviously, they’ve got teams of lawyers and accountants going in there, and they can just dig through the books, they’re gonna figure out everything. It should be pretty straightforward, but it’s not so straightforward with these smaller businesses. So when you’re talking up a $80,000 e-commerce site, it’s not like you both have teams of people that are gonna go in there and do the due diligence and check the financials. What are some of the gotchas you’ve seen in the $50,000 to $100,000 space in e-commerce business, and other businesses? SaaS businesses, that kinda thing?

Drew Sanocki:                   Well I think we just talked about one. The biggest is, what’s cashflow. And that’s probably a gotcha if you end up buying a business, and then you realize that that previous owner did a lot more on the business than they said they did, and you kind of overpaid there. So that would be a good one to really look into. I would think getting a really good sense of, if it’s e-commerce or SaaS, what’s the lifetime value of that customer? So, it’s not just about the average order size, customers come back again and again. So how many repeat customers do they have. And if you can get a sense of who are the good customers, how often do they come back, what’s their lifetime value, who are the bad customers, how often do they come back, and what’s their lifetime value. And try to think around, can I grow that group of good customers and reduce-

Justin Cooke:                     And dump the bad ones?

Drew Sanocki:                   Yeah. I think that’s important to look at.

Justin Cooke:                     That’s interesting. I think specifically with SaaS business, the ones that are eating up all your profit with customer services requests, and feature requests, and that kinda thing, how can you get rid of them, and make the business more profitable? There may be a lotta opportunity there for you as a buyer.

Drew Sanocki:                   I always think in terms of reducing risk, also. So one thing we talk about at Turn/River Capital, which is the private equity fund that I work with, is what keeps you up at night. And I think if we buy … We recently invested in a web security company. They do anti-malware, and things like that. We already own a appointment scheduling company called BookFresh. And with both of those … Like, web security’s not going away. And appointment scheduling is not going away. That’s not gonna keep us up at night.

What keeps us up is can we help the teams execute on the business. Which is I think very different from if we had acquired a site that was built off of traffic from Facebook, where we think, “Okay, these guys got up to a million users pretty quickly, but what if Facebook changes their algorithm, and this business could be gone tomorrow.” It’s just, we like to … That would be a gotcha. We like to work in the areas where the things that keep us up at night aren’t so core to the business.

Justin Cooke:                     The, wake up in the morning, and everything’s gone. Or the, I absolutely smashed or demolished the business overnight. I think you can find more diversified business the further up the value chain you go, too, right? I’m sure you do get those, though, that come across, and you’re like, “There’s a ton of opportunity,” but it is the “Oh my God, we could eat it with this one.” And those are the types of sites and businesses you avoid today?

Drew Sanocki:                   Yeah. We were just in discussions with one that just had insane amount of traffic, and over a course of a week, we knew we shouldn’t buy it. Or we knew … We just were very wary about it. And within a week, Facebook did change their algorithm, and now we’re thinking, “Man, they stopped growing.” Days after we were putting an offer together. And it just … It’s good that we avoided it, because it was sort of a flash in the pan. [crosstalk 00:44:21].

Justin Cooke:                     Yeah, I remember that. They changed the images, the image posts aren’t getting nearly as much visibility as they were before. And, yeah, painful. And you’ve seen this a lot, we talked about this in our last call, our previous call to this show. We talked about some of those sites out there, Distractify and those types of sites.

Drew Sanocki:                   That’s … Yeah.

Justin Cooke:                     In three months, they are getting six million visits a month, or something. They are just blowing up. And there’s a lotta talk, there’s a lotta press, but you’re saying from an acquisition standpoint, that’s scary?

Drew Sanocki:                   Yeah. I mean, and they’re making … These guys who start these sites … Maybe women. But, I don’t … Whoever’s starting these sites, they’re making a decent amount of cashflow off of AdSense and whatever ads they slap up there. And so, as an investor, you say, “Okay, I could go in there and professionalize that business. I could look at BuzzFeed or Huffington Post, and I could hire out a professional sales staff that could get them much more ad revenue than what they’re getting now, and try to turn it into a brand.” But, and it’s a big but, you know that all their traffic is viewing one page, and then they leave. They’re getting no repeat traffic, they don’t have a brand. If Facebook changes the algorithm, that business goes away. So that’s a big risk to take, impacts what you’d pay for that business.

Justin Cooke:                     And thing rise and fall so quickly in that space, too, right?

Drew Sanocki:                   Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Justin Cooke:                     It’s like the club scene in a major city. That club’s really popular for six months. Not anymore, it’s done.

Drew Sanocki:                   Right.

Justin Cooke:                     So with your private equity group right now, do you guys normally do cash buy-outs? Are they earn-outs? Is it a mixture of cash, stock? Or do you do all?

Drew Sanocki:                   I think we do across the board. It was started by a guy named Dominic Ang a couple years ago. It’s a very, very small private equity fund, so he raised about $30 million to invest. And we look to invest, I dunno, three to five million per deal. Ideally, we’d buy the company out. But increasingly, we’re doing sort of majority shareholder kind of investments, and keeping the current team in place. And the thesis is that the cost of running web businesses has come down so much that something that used to take 300 people can now be done by a handful.

And this shift has created just a whole new kind of company out there. Bootstrapped, low-burn, that generates revenue, and it’s pretty capital-efficient. And you find that these businesses are too small and messy for traditional venture capitalists, or private equity firms. They’re too small. So they’re not gonna … They may not be billion-dollar businesses, but sort of the prototype, or the archetype I guess, was Dominic’s first. He bought a company called Designer Apparel, which was just getting a lot of organic traffic for various fashion brands. And he took the revenue there from a million, to, maybe he took it to 10. And I’m just guessing, I don’t have the exact numbers in front of me. Just by improving the UI and engaging in some PPC arbitrage, right? And then he was able to sell it. So that was a great outcome for one guy. And so, that’s kind of what we’re looking to do, but for across a portfolio.

Justin Cooke:                     Yeah. So you’re basically targeting these groups that the traditional VCs wouldn’t go after. So are you looking for larger multiples, though, because you’re looking at these smaller investments? Or, like … What would you consider a win? I know that you guys are looking to purchase, maybe hang on for 12 to 18 months, and then flip those businesses. Because you’re gonna have some failures, or some losers there. What’s a good win for you? 10 X? 15 X? What are you looking for?

Drew Sanocki:                   I think, yeah. 10, 15 would be great. I think I mentioned BookFresh before, which Dominic bought, which I believe was in the portfolio of a larger company, and they probably reached that phase where you were talking about earlier where it wasn’t growing, or they just wanted to rid themselves of managing it. He got it for pennies on the dollar, and kinda put some professional staff and institutionalized it a little bit, and put some professional staff in place around web usability and conversion optimization. And we’ve just been growing that over the past couple years, and if we sell it for 10 times what we got it for, that would be a great outcome.

Justin Cooke:                     How do you find these deals? So are you out there hustling, trying to look for deals you think that are a good fit? Or are people just bringing you the deals, saying “Hey, we’re ready to sell.” Or are other people, are brokers bringing you the deals? How do you get those?

Drew Sanocki:                   I think because we’re small in the grand scheme of private equity, we are pretty nimble, and we could close on a deal in several weeks. Which is sort of unheard of. And I think once brokers realized that, they do give us first look on a lotta deals that might be a good fit.

Justin Cooke:                     Well, ’cause everyone wants a fast deal. As long as you guys are able to do your due diligence in the purchase in a short period of time, if you’ve got the capital, and you’ve got the cash ready to roll … I mean, it’s nice to have a war chest, because you can snatch up deals. Maybe you can get a slightly better deal, because you’re able to close it quickly, which makes a lotta sense.

So Drew, we’re about to wrap up here, man. I just wanna thank you for being on the show, I really appreciate it. I think we got some great information, I’m sure our listeners are gonna appreciate it.

Anyone can check you out at DrewSanocki.com. You on Twitter, man?

Drew Sanocki:                   I am. @DrewSanocki.

Justin Cooke:                     Cool, buddy. All right, well I appreciate having you on, man.

And let’s get into our tips, tricks, and plans for the future.

Announcer:                        You’re listening to the Empire Flippers podcast with Justin and Joe.

Justin Cooke:                     All right buddy, so our first tip or trick, or I guess plan for the future here, is that we have a valuation tool coming out. So basically what this is, is it’s a tool that you can go to. You’ll be able to enter your website and enter some information about your site, and you’ll be able to get a valuation based on all the data we have for the sites that we’ve created, or for sites that we’ve sold, and all the sites that we see as a broker, for your site.

So, it’s not at all ready yet. So what I have right now is a Google Doc where you can fill that information in. And we’re gonna accept up to 20 people, and then I’m gonna manually go through and do those valuations, and send them replies. And then within probably the next couple of weeks or so, we should have something up, at least a good tester, and we’ll have that up on EmpireFlippers.com. So I’m gonna put a link to the form, if anyone wants to find out what their site valuation is, if they’re one of the first 20 to get there, they can click on it, check it out, and then enter their information, I’ll give them a free site evaluation.

Joe Magnotti:                    Cool. I’m always happy to add new tools and exciting resources to EmpireFlippers.com, and I think this’ll be just a natural extension of the other stuff that we have over there. Our basic niche site evaluation tool that we had way back in the day, this is kinda the natural evolution of that.

Justin Cooke:                     Yeah, we had a profit calculator that’s been used quite a bit over the years since we created it. It was some silly little spreadsheet that we were using, and we said, “Oh, why don’t we make this a tool?” And people got a lotta value out of it.

Here’s what I’m thinking, and this is kinda like our business or strategic thought behind it, is that if we get people going there, and they’re going to the site, and they’re filling in their information to see what their website’s worth, they have an interest aside from just a curiosity of what their site’s worth. There may be some opportunities for them to sell their sites with us, so we’re thinking about using it as a lead generation tool for site sellers. And if the sites meet certain parameters, and they’re kind of a good fit for us, then obviously we can reach out to those people that filled in their information and were trying to look for a valuation, and then contact them and say, “Hey, by the way, if you are looking to sell with us, here’s how it would work, and here’s the deal,” and that kinda thing.

So it’ll help everyone that’s trying to find out a valuation for their site, but it also helps us in that it’s a potential lead generation for cool and interesting sites that we can then offer to our buyers. So I’m really excited about that, buddy.

Well that’s it for episode 82 of the Empire Flippers podcast, thanks for hanging with us. Make sure to check us out on Twitter, @EmpireFlippers, and we’ll see you next week.

Joe Magnotti:                    Bye-bye, everybody.

Announcer:                        You’ve been listening to the Empire Flippers podcast with Justin and Joe. Be sure to hit up EmpireFlippers.com for more. That’s EmpireFlippers.com.

Thanks for listening.

Photo Credit: 401(K) 2012 – Flickr