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EFP 174: Avoiding First Time Buyer Pitfalls

EFP 174: Avoiding First Time Buyer Pitfalls

Justin Cooke February 8, 2018

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Everyone has to start somewhere and that’s especially true for those looking to purchase their first online business.

So – where do you start?

Your first bet would be to check out Season 2 of the Web Equity Show. In that season, we walk you through, from start to finish, exactly what you should do if you’re looking to purchase an online business.

Once you’ve done that, do come back and listen to this episode where we lay out 7 of the most common mistakes and misconceptions of first-time buyers.

If you’ve been looking to purchase an online business, but still haven’t take that first step towards pulling the trigger, this is a great episode from you.

As always, if you dig the show, please make sure to give us a review on iTunes!

Check Out This Week’s Episode:

Direct Download – Right Click, Save As

Topics Discussed This Week:

Cheapest Isn’t Always Best
Everything’s Negotiable
Thinking You HAVE To Have THIS Deal
Trusting Spreadsheets Over Due Diligence
Let The Seller Have A Win (In Negotiations)
Don’t Sell Us On “Future Deals”
If You’re Sure, Move Quickly

Mentions:

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“Find something that’s reasonable, that meets your predetermined values and go for that.” – Joe – Tweet This!

“You always wanna buy deals where you have a competitive or unique edge.” – Justin – Tweet This!

What do you think first-time buyer should look out for? Anything we missed? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!

Justin:
Welcome to the Empire Podcast, episode 174 you don’t know what you don’t know. We do a lot of questions from new buyers wondering what they should look out for us. Joe and I wanted to take an episode to look at some of the pitfalls when you buyers run into and lay out some of the pro tips to avoid them. Now, this episode is definitely targeted to new buyers, but some experienced buyers may find some value as well. You’ll find the show notes for this one to empireflippers.com/pitfalls. All right, let’s do this.

Speaker 2:
Sick of listening to entrepreneurial advice from guys with day jobs, who wants to hear about the real successes and failures that come with building an online empire? You are not alone 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 and now your host Justin and Joe.

Justin:
All right, Joe, there’s no way around it buying your first business can be both exciting and scary at the same time. Lots of questions from newbie buyers.

Joe:
Yeah. Especially because people don’t go through the buying process of the business very often, most people don’t. There’s probably not a lot of people to hang in your network to ask them about this kind of stuff.

Justin:
Yeah. We have the pro buyers that buy pretty regularly, but they’re definitely less of them. Most buyers buy a business once a year, once every couple of years, once every five years. So it’s not a common practice for sure.

Joe:
Yeah. And so I think that this will be a good kind of little handbook for people to look at, whether they’re new or whether they’re just coming back to the table and want to refresh themselves about what to think about when buying a business.

Justin:
You get on the phone with someone I was looking to buy. What are some of the signs that they’re new without saying it? Though, without just coming out and telling you like what are some of the signs that you’ve noticed?

Joe:
Yeah, well I definitely see the people that have read a book somewhere and maybe the guy was talking about buying $100 million business and they’re trying to use those strategies here when buying a $20,000 website while some of the things might work. I think you’ve got to make sure that your checklist is rational and you don’t have a hundred things that need to be checked off.

Justin:
Yeah, we get these in customer service where some almost an over like 120 point checklist and they’re like, it was literally their first communication was like, Hey, can you get these answers for me please? And we’re like, Whoa, hold on, you haven’t even bought me dinner first let’s talk for a little bit here.

Joe:
Yeah. Other one definitely is flexibility. I mean, you’ve got to see a balance here and do a little give and take. Especially if you find a seller and a business that’s close to what you want. People that draw a line in the sand too early and say it’s either this or nothing. I think that’s a problem. Do we call, it comes back to criteria and if your criteria is you’re trying to thread that needle, that can make it very difficult for you to a business to work with. It might take a very long time.

Justin:
Yeah. You might think in your head, well maybe I’m not act like I know what I’m talking about here and get on the call and just kind of like act as if. Right? But I think with us in particular, it’s better to just say, this is my first time, I haven’t done this yet before I’m looking into it, I want to get comfortable with it and our guys they’re not super pushy. They’re not going to try and push you into deals or pull the wool over your eyes like they go. Okay, great. Well let me step you through the process, show you how it works and basically lay it out.

Joe:
Yeah. I mean most good brokers are going to be that way. Especially if you say you’re new, then they’re not gonna try to find you a business that’s going to require all this time, effort, energy and experience. That’s part of the problem.

Justin:
So our marketing team and our sales team has been like, Hey Justin, can you guys do something that can help out new bios? So this is the episode for them. I also want to mention that this isn’t just a standalone, like you’re not gonna get everything you need as a new buyer out of this episode. It should give you some helpful tips and guidance. But really if you’re brand new and you kind of want like more, you want a little more meat on the bone. I check up season two of the podcast web equity show that we do with Ace Chapman and it is star to finish season two, episode one all the way through the end. It will guide you through step by step exactly what you needed to know to buy it on my business. So I think that’s a great resource and I’ll link to that in the show notes before we do that buddy. Let’s pay the bills with our featured listing the week would he got,

Joe:
we’re talking about listing 44165 this is an Amazon FBA business created back in April of 2015 in the sports niche it has the Amazon seller central account included has six products, two of which have design patents pending, so that’s pretty cool. The brand is trademark and the business includes a website where the seller publishes content and it has began setting up a storefront so it has that ability, doesn’t require a whole bunch of work required from the new owner. Roland looking at about seven hours per week. The net profit is just over $8,000 a month and we have it listed for $211,000.

Justin:
Yeah, as you would expect to had a really big Christmas obviously. So there was a run up there and all fall back down to normal levels after that, but that’s to be expected. What I think is interesting about this, I was chatting with the buyer the other day in Zendesk for our customer communication tool and this spiral was like, look, I think Amazon FBA in particular is going the way of brands of having a brand that’s memorable, having repeat customers. I think that’s where it’s going. And so this type of business would be a good fit for someone who wants to get ahead of that curve because it’s not a me too product. It’s not just anyone can source it easily, like it has a brand and they’ve taken steps to protect it. So that’s what I thought was kind of interesting about this business. All right, let’s dig into the heart of this week’s episode.

Speaker 2:
Now for the heart of this weeks episode.

Justin:
We’re talking about avoiding first time buyer pitfalls. We’ve got seven guidelines, seven things to talk about with new buyers. I’m going to go through them, we’re going to give some kind of tips around them and they give you a pro tip. What like the more experienced buyers would do in that situation. So number one, cheapest isn’t always best. And I think this is really important because you get some new buyers were like, look, I want the lowest multiple, I want to get the fattest discount I can get. And the old saying, “If a deal’s too good to be true..” that definitely applies online businesses. And you’ll see a places where you know, you can get a multiple of like seven times monthly net or I’ve even seen like three times a thing that, I mean if it’s that low it’s just not real.

Joe:
I spoke to a guy on the phone the other day said the same thing, looking at somebody who was willing to sell five times monthly net. And he said this is definitely too good to be true and he passed on it. But then we get buyers on the other hand who come in and say, look, unless the seller is willing to give me a 50% discount right off the bat, I don’t even want to speak to them. So whichever your listings that you have available are able to get a 50% discount. And my answer is none.

Justin:
Yeah. So I had this is years ago, Joe, we are early on, there was a guy that like didn’t like our multiple said all your multiple are way to high but elsewhere and there’s a really low multiple and he like literally kind of gloated to me the emails, like I got this deal, it’s gonna be great. And then like within six months or something, it was on the warrior forum. It was, yeah, that’s where I was on the warrior forum and he was like, yeah, that didn’t work out too well. I got burned, blah blah blah. I was like, wow, that’s not at all surprising because it was just ridiculously low. But now there are differences that are reasonable. So forget about the ones that are crazy low multiples. Right. Let’s talk about a 20 times 22 times 24 times monthly net profit versus a 32 or 34 right?

Justin:
You have a new bar that sees that. It looks like a similar business some similar niche that’s one’s for like 24 acts and those for 30 acts. And they were like, well, of course I’m going to buy that wants 24th who would spend like why would someone buy one for 30 well, here’s the thing, the multiples are like an indication of risk, right? So the ones that have lower multiples generally are higher risk and there’s a whole lot that goes into it and you’ll normally pull that out. Our suss that out and due diligence.

Joe:
Yeah, and I think we’re trying to be very objective about computing or multiples and look, if a site hasn’t been around as long, if a site is small, every site takes more work required, that kind of thing, then you’re going to see lower multiples. And the reason why is because there is a risk related to that, and you need to figure out those things and we’re willing to walk through those numbers and show you why they’re computed that way.

Justin:
The other thing is if you’re looking at smaller deals, you really need to make sure they’re worth your time. So if you’re looking at a deal that makes say 50,000 bucks a month, $2,000 a month, and it took you 20 hours to find that deal, take you 10 hours or so to get through it, you’re going to put it in 100 hours over the next two months or so to kind of like get it improved and you improve by 50% let’s say. Is that really worth your time? Like was that the best use of your time? Maybe for your first one, maybe if you’re trying it out. But I mean still, you might find yourself working for $3 an hour and you’re like, wow, this is such a good deal. So make sure that if you’re doing a deal that it’s going to be an annual successful. And let’s say best case scenario it needs to be deliver a reasonable ROI or it’s not worth it for you.

Joe:
Yeah, I mean, we’ll talk about this later in terms of moving quickly, but have some guidelines, some goalposts for yourself in terms of ROI. But don’t spend months and hours and hours, hours of searching, negotiating that kind of stuff. Really find something that’s reasonable that meets both of your predetermined values and go for that one.

Justin:
Funny Joe, we were literally talking about this, what, 15 minutes ago, 20 minutes before, before we got on the show, Joe and I were looking at some real estate investments and we were deciding whether or not we’re gonna do this deal and we’re still not 100% decided. But one of the concerns is that he’s like, man, we already spent 15 minutes talking about this, how many hours are going to put it into like, well they were going to do it and then finding the right deal and dig him through all the comparables and Oh my God, there could be a lot of work to it and is it really worth our time? And it’s an open question. We’re still trying to figure that out.

Justin:
I’ll give you a pro tip on this first point cheapest isn’t always best. You’re looking for value. That’s really, really looking for not always the cheapest deal, but when you buy, you always want to buy deals where you have a competitive or unique edge that actually isn’t baked into the multiple. So the multiple is based on risk and based on a bunch of other things. But if you’re particularly good at Facebook ads and the person running the businesses not, and you’ve seen that, that’s not baked into the multiple, for you honestly as brokers, we’d love to charge you more because you know how valuable it is to you. But we can’t do that cause we don’t know. So you have a unique advantage if you have particular skill sets that can grow and expand that business quickly.

Joe:
Well, said and that’s why I think making a list of your skillsets and your advantages beforehand is a good idea. So that this way when you’re looking at a marketplace like ours, you can quickly check off which ones meet your criteria and which ones don’t.

Justin:
That’s a good idea, man. All right, number two, everything’s negotiable. And brokers and market places and everything will do their best to put up a front and say, “This is the price, this is what you get. This is where you’re paying.” But that’s absolutely not true everything’s negotiable in this business. So always ask for a deal, the worst cases they say no, they’re not going to take it personally. If it’s a solid that might take it personally will help ease the blow, that’s our job. Some make it work, but usually always ask for a deal it’s not going to hurt you. I mean, if you try and get paid like 20% or something, it’s gonna be an obvious no, but I mean some kind of discount seems it can be reasonable.

Joe:
Justin you, you’re making our sales guy’s job hard.

Justin:
I know they’re not liking me, but hey man, that’s the deal. They should ask I mean, things like asking for seller financing, asking for 10% off. I mean, these are things that you can and should ask for, sometimes they’re just gonna say no. Sometimes you asking might lose you that deal, but we’ll talk about why that’s not an issue in a minute.

Joe:
Yeah, and I think that’s always a good thing. It gets the juices flowing because you might come up with a deal that you didn’t think of in the beginning just by starting to set the measuring stick on that. And so one book I would recommend about negotiating, if you guys haven’t seen it before, it’s called ‘Never Split The Difference,’ by Chris Voss, pick it up. It will give you a lot of great tips on asking for the correct price and getting some good tactics done in negotiation.

Justin:
Oh God, I just talked to Ace about that and let’s tell them about that book and how you were negotiating and trying to have one of their guys come out and train our guys and I got a little sticker shock and I was like, good luck negotiating that with the hostage negotiator. That’s not going to be fun. And I know you’re proud of your skills, Joe, but I think you met your match with those guys.

Joe:
Perhaps.

Justin:
Let’s talk about, it’s not just about price either. So when you’re negotiating the seller stock, and they just can’t go down a bit more and you’re like, I’m not sure I want to pay that. What else can you get aside from that dollar amount? Can you give value in other ways? Can you get a longer not compete with that, make you feel safer? Can you get the seller to commit to a bit of work? They still want that price point, but can they take it in 90 days? Can they take it as an earn out? Or are there other ways to get that deal done and get them the money, but still get a slightly better deal for yourself?

Joe:
I love the subjective pieces that you can put into a deal and they’re definitely on both sides. Something that we use here at Empire Flippers in order to make a buyer and seller come together. We’ve done it before and we’re really good at thinking outside the box to make sure that both sides can get what they want.

Justin:
Here’s the pro tip on this one. If you’re able to argue your case to your broker, and you can get the broker on your side as a buyer, like you make them see your points, see that valuation, they’ll actually make that case to the seller. So if you can get them on your side, get them to understand why you’re making the offer that you’re making, they’ll then take that to the seller and be supportive of your points. So ultimately brokers are looking to get deals done. So if you make the case and you make it well, you might actually suck the broker over to your side.

Joe:
Yeah, well, I’ve had many buyers do that to me before and it’s something that comes with the game.

Justin:
All right. Point number three is thinking you have to do this deal. This deal on your plate is the one, this is the perfect deal for you, you just can’t get away from it. The truth is, there are plenty of opportunities. I mean, Joe, we’re probably going to do, I’m a put foot out here on this one, but in 2018 we’re going to probably you around 250 deals. It’s probably going to be around $40 million with the deals. So this isn’t the only deal. Well, there’s going to be 20 a month that we’re going to do 20 to 30 a month this year. You’re going to have plenty of opportunities.

Joe:
I think we’ll do more in 250 but let’s leave that for another podcast. Yeah, I mean, I think getting stuck on something, we had a buyer recently who is very stuck on a deal. Unfortunately, he did miss out on it and he had been looking for a while and when I talked to him about his criteria and we were able to open it up a little bit more, he realized that, maybe this deal wasn’t the only deal that could work for him. There were other ones on our marketplace that could work and we were able to work through that and he actually will have out up something that was better for him. So it does work out if you kind of open your mind a little bit and don’t get too tunnel vision on one deal.

Justin:
Every acquisition, every purchase you make is a commitment, not the commitment of your money, but also of your time, so what’s worth taking your time on the front end to find the right one? It’s similar to hiring, like we do take our time when we’re hiring someone because we want it to be the right choice. We’re gonna end up putting a lot of time, effort and energy into that person. So we want to make sure that those efforts are well invested. At the same thing when you’re buying a business. If you ultimately end up reaching for a specific deal that can cause you to number one, pay more. Number two just get less value and number three, miss other opportunities that came and went while you were focused on that one deal.

Joe:
Yeah, I think the opportunity cost is not to be understated, it’s really hard sometimes to put an exact value on that, but a lot of times people spend so much time, effort and energy doing due diligence on one particular deal. When you know due diligence isn’t very important, but at the end of the day, triple checking the numbers is not helping when you could have been looking at a different deal and kind of doing your other due diligence steps there.

Justin:
Here’s a pro tip, put on your other hat, put on the negative Nancy hat and try to consider reasons you shouldn’t do the deal reasons that deal isn’t a good fit for you. If you can’t find one or two reasons why you shouldn’t do the deal, like balance it out or to weigh it out, then you’re likely too stuck or too focused on this one day you should probably back off and think about it a little more.

Joe:
Yeah. And to expand on that, another thing you can do is compare two deals together and kind of do the Ben Franklin approach of pros and cons of both deals. And that might help you make the decision a little bit better.

Justin:
All right. Number four, trusting spreadsheets over due diligence. The truth is that past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results. So looking at what is on the past, which trajectory it’s on, it doesn’t mean you just get to continue that line up into the right. So you can manipulate a spreadsheet or make it say whatever want and so it can look really good on paper, but the fundamentals of the business, the details of the business might be a horrible fit for you.

Joe:
Yeah, I mean you sound like a Charles Swab commercial when you say it that way, Justin, but definitely I agree that you shouldn’t get so caught up in the numbers that you miss the bigger picture of where the company is going, where the company’s headed, and what are the underlying fundamentals of how the business is doing. If you’re in a niche that’s a fad and the numbers look great right now, but it’s pretty obvious that that’s going away, that might be something you need to seriously consider taking a step back.

Justin:
Yeah. I think future performance on your spreadsheet isn’t going to matter, if there’s something about the business that makes it a hard no for you that just makes it to where you don’t want to do that work or you don’t like the niche or you don’t believe the industry is to stick around very long, it’s faddish so there are problems that you can make your own paper business go away. One of the pro tips for this would be to do a live walkthrough of the business with the seller. And in that instance you’re actually, you’re seeing like a real life example of the numbers but also what they do in the business and what the business looks like rather than just looking at a spreadsheet.

Joe:
Yeah and we can help you with this, we can obviously set up the call and beyond there with you to make sure all your questions is the answer. It even as a first time buyer maybe you don’t know what to ask for. We can make sure that’s set up beforehand, but if you’re comfortable with the seller walking through the business, walking through the website, blocking through the numbers, showing you actually how he gets paid, then that’s going to make you feel more comfortable with the numbers that are on a spreadsheet.

Justin:
Point number five, let the seller have a win in negotiations. So a lot of new buyers will feel the need to win a negotiation they want to win on every single thing that they’re arguing. And I think new buyers would be better served by avoiding that temptation. They don’t need to win on absolutely everything. In fact, by giving the seller a win it lets them feel like they’re walking with some benefit. You want them to feel like they got a good deal. And by not being so hard on every single point and knowing the parts that are important to you versus not important to you, it allows you to give that when that lets the seller walk away happy.

Joe:
Yeah. And I’ll take a tactic from Chris Voss, his book here and say really listening to the seller and hearing what is important to them and being able to give that win, especially if it doesn’t matter so much numerically to you is going to be really important in the negotiations.

Justin:
Another example is and you have this maybe six months ago or a year ago, there was someone who, I think it was the seller, but they got a counter offer. They were always going to offer a counter offer. They would never be the one accepting the deal. And so it just kept going and kept going and he finally said, look, I think you told the buyer, look what the seller comes back if you’re good with it just take it don’t counter again because you’re going to get stuck in, this wasn’t just countering dollar amounts either was countering all other kinds of things and I was like, look, just let them have it. They will keep going to the end of the earth on this negotiation.

Joe:
Yeah, counteroffer help. Sometimes as the broker we have to play referee and we have to kind of explain the rules a little bit and say, look, this is where this guy’s coming from, this is sort of the mentality out there and that can help get a deal done.

Justin:
Here’s a pro tip. As a buyer, if you’re tight on everything and then negotiation, giving up on a point that’s less critical to you can make them feel like they got a win. So a lot of times it’s perception and as the seller feels like they got a win, even though in your mind they didn’t, hey, that’s a way that gets the deal done.

Joe:
Yeah. There’s an old adage that says no one comes away from the negotiation happy and that’s actually wrong. You want both sides to come away from the negotiation happy. That’s ideal, if both the buyer and the seller think they got a good deal, that’s what we want to do. And and by giving up on a small point that might make him feel good about it.

Justin:
I think there are zero sum negotiations where it is like neither party should walk away completely satisfied with it and that makes sense. But I don’t think these are zero sum. I mean you have a buyer maybe taking the business on that’s going to expand it. That’s some do really well with it and the seller’s happy to exit where both can actually be happy with the deal.

Joe:
Yeah, so definitely there’s definitely going to be different types of negotiations, but in these types of negotiations, business types of negotiations, you want the seller to walk away being happy.

Justin:
Okay. Point number six, don’t sell us on future deals. Now this is more about Empire flippers than dealing with an actual seller. But we do hear this from Newbie buyers where they come in and they kind of puff up their chests and they say, look, help me out with a small deal because behind me I’ve got $20 million in the fund and I’m going to be buying, a dozen businesses of the next 12 to 18 months from you and are we spending $15 million. And it’s just tiring man. We honestly, if we’ve never done business with you before, we just don’t even need to hear it. Like there’s just no reason to tell us it doesn’t get you anything. In fact, it’s just not helpful.

Joe:
Yeah, I know it’s a big pet peeve of yours and it’s definitely a time waster. I understand where people are trying to come from when they do this. They probably have the best of intentions, but it’s absolutely not useful. And-

Justin:
It’s a negotiation tactic they learn but it just doesn’t work in this scenario and we hear it all the time. It’s just not terribly convincing and it’s not going to get you very far. On the other hand, if you’ve done a dealer two with us, and you want to have that conversation, we’re more than willing to kind of like dig into it and we’ve done some business together, we’ve already kind of test each other out, we know how you work, you know how we work in, you kind of know how that, what the deal is. Come back to us, let us know what you’re planning to do. We’d love to hear about it and both help and guide you want it. And the thing is, is when they come to us with these spreadsheets and this kind of like business plan, and it’s like literally first call we’ve ever had with them and they want to discuss it for three hours and we just sign a nondisclosure before they’re going to show it to us like, look, that’s it. We just can’t do this, then we’re not doing this deal.

Justin:
All right man. Number seven, if you’re sure, move quickly. Analysis paralysis is a real thing. And so as a newbie buyer you can look at just a ton of deals and you’re unsure and I’m not sure which one it might be the right fit. But when you find that deal, you’re going to need to move quickly. And this is especially true with us on deals under 200,000 they very often get snatched up out from under someone. So it’s almost looking at it. They really wanted it. Someone else swoops in and buys a deal before them. And some people they say, well it’s your process and the fact of the matter is that we have the deal up until it’s purchase, until we received the wire. It’s available for purchase.

Justin:
And there are ways around that, we could do LOI and lock it up for 30 to 60 days, but that’s not an interest of our sellers. So if we had to lock it up for 30 days, all the momentum, all the interest in that business goes away because no one’s reviewing it. And then we have to put it back out to market and try to rebuild that momentum. It just not a good deal for our seller. So as it is, when the wires receive, the deal is done. So if you’re too slow, especially these like under 200,000 ordeals they can get snatched up.

Joe:
Yeah. What I see, this is probably the biggest one I see from new buyers and the best tactic to usually use as a new buyer is to go set up a criteria beforehand, try to match that criteria as close as you can. Then focus on one listing in one listing only. Drill down on that one, and if that one is your one, if that one is good enough, don’t get the fear of missing out. Don’t get that worry that matched your criteria beforehand, that checked all your boxes go for that one. But if it’s a no, then explain to your broker, explain to us why it is a no, what boxes we missed so that we can sharpen the criteria and work with you by going to one other listing for that. It’s when people start to look at too many listings all at once to take yet very confused and wind up not being able to move forward.

Justin:
Yeah. That’s something that we’ve dealt with as we have more and more or less things available in the marketplace, something our business analysts have worked on as like, look, here’s one or two that meets your specific criteria. Let’s look at that and ignore the rest of the marketplace. Let’s just see if this is a deal first, if not, we’ll move on to another. Here’s a pro tip for you if you’re doing this when you’re sure move and respond quickly. A great way to do that is to consider keeping funds on file with us. Now you don’t have to do this and it’s normally not first time buyer that do this normally repeat buyers, but they’ll do a deal with us and why our extra money over and leave it there are, particularly If they want to follow up with another smaller 40 $50,000 deal and then they can quickly move when they want to make a move.

Joe:
Agreed. We have a lot of our portfolio guys doing this and as you gain experience I recommend looking into this by a sitting in a call and talking to one of our sales guys.

Justin:
All right Joe, time for some news and updates.

Speaker 2:
You’ve been listening to the Empire podcast now some news and updates.

Justin:
First off, we are close to our best month ever in January, 2018 and we’re still waiting on the final numbers based on this recording, but we’re super close.

Joe:
Yeah, I looked at it. We’re about a thousand dollars off it looks like. So we might be number two but it’s close.

Justin:
Yeah, but you don’t know. We got some deals that may or may not go through its, we’re damn close but it’s been a really good month for January. It’s even better, It’s considering that we’ve got a bunch of new sales guys waiting in the wings are up and coming that haven’t really got up to speed yet. So I think if they’re able to kind of help and get on board, that’s an to help us out a lot in the end of this quarter and definitely heading into Q two and Q three. The other thing is we’re working on some SBA loans for some of our seven figure businesses for sale right now.

Justin:
I think that’ll be great for us in 2018 I think we’re going to get a few multimillion dollar deals done via SBA. We’re currently working with a couple of bars and a couple of sellers with their businesses on the SBA loans. If you’re interested in this at all, I’m going to put a link in the show notes for this episode. You can set up a call and talk to one of our businesses advisors and they can kind of guide you through the process, see if there’s a fit for you

Joe:
And it’s not only SBA, we can also get other types of loans and financing available if you are interested in those big, big deals, but simply just don’t have enough to get there. Let us know.

Justin:
Yeah. We made a real commitment to look at that and to help solve that problem in 2018 another thing that our new business analysts and our vetting specialists are coming up to speed nicely. I’m a here with them in Metagene Columbia. They’d been going to the office almost everyday else I’ll have to let you know that the sales guys did leave early on Tuesday so I dunno what that was all that about. Even guys were given a little shit. Yeah, it was funny.

Joe:
Yeah. I’m excited to beat them all when they get out here to the Philippines. I know we’re trying to plan the plane trips now. I’m sure I am the mythical CEO because they haven’t seen me in person yet. But yeah, we’ll try to work on that when they get here in April.

Justin:
Yeah. I guess Mike P was telling me that about me when they went to chain my cause. They hadn’t met me at all and they thought, I guess that his previous company, they had a fake marketing person and so they thought maybe I was just like a name, like just a fake Avatar or something for the marketing I was, it was pretty far. I was like, no dude, no, I’m real. Okay, so they’re coming up to speed. We also are going to do something in February that we were talking about with the marketing team. We’re just starting, I don’t know we’re going to call it, but an ETF team profile basically behind light. The people on our team both you can call it the front end and the backend guys and gals and do like a full profile and then we’ll lead to them from the about us page. We’ll give you like more in depth information about the people you’re talking to, you that people are dealing with and maybe give you some insights on your broker on our team.

Joe:
I love that teaching people that it’s not the Joe and Justin show anymore.

Justin:
Yeah, well that’s helpful. And just to like open the Kimono. I mean part of the goal there is so it’s not the Justin Joe show, so we have more of our team highlighted because it makes our company more valuable. So if you have, you’re working with employees, you have a team I think it’s helpful for culture, it’s also to show like everyone in the company so they can get like some of the benefits of being out there. And it’s also helpful to the company overall to not just be you.

Justin:
Last point men, we’re beefing up our Instagram, the empire flippers, Instagram, which it’s a marketing thing, man. I don’t know, I’m okay with it I guess I’m just on Instagram guys. So if you’re listening to this and you dig Instagram or we’re going to have a lot of photos coming your way on our Instagram page is already up and I’ll link to in the show notes, but we’re gonna, we’re beefing it up. We’ve got a marketing plan all set up, our marketing guys are fired up about it and me I Dunno man. I don’t know if this will work, but I’m just too old for it. I think.

Joe:
Well, I just took a picture before this. I said prepping for the podcast with my headset on and like boom, microphone. So maybe that’ll go up on Instagram. I don’t know. But yeah, I agree. It’s kind of a weird thing to be out there and use, but a heck we’re doing it

Justin:
Well Mike Swig takes some amazing photos. He was just down in Patagonia, like the southern most part of South America and took some like glacier shots and just a really cool photo so. And John too on the margin so he’s got some real photography chops, so I think they’ll get some good photos up there, so at least that’s cool. All right man. Let’s do the listeners. Shout section also knows the indulgent ego boosting social proof segment. First up we’ve got Ryan who said, Hey, what side project can I do to bring results? I’m ready to rock. So happy, you’re offering a growth opportunity for someone. Please let me know if there’s any way to measure up. Thanks.

Justin:
So he’s asking about the positions we have available at empire flippers and how to apply for them. Right now we have a content marketing specialist position, so if you’re at all interested, if you’re a writer you can you write copy or you’re a marketer and you think you’d like to apply to work with empire flippers and join us and Bor Kai Philippines in April and we’ll put a link to that in the show notes.

Justin:
But Ryan’s asking like what did we look for in general for people that we hire at Empire Flippers and would say first off, I mean the first thing is did you follow directions. It’s very clear in terms of like what you need to do to apply for the position. Did you follow directions? Is Number one second for this position in particular, can you write coherently? Do you write in full sentences? Does it make sense? Do we like? What you had to say was an interesting, those are the things we’re looking for initially to get the first interview. The first interview is really about like did you follow directions? Do we like what you have to say about the position and kind of what you want to do in terms of marketing for Empire Flippers? Do you understand our kind of vibe?

Justin:
If that works, you’ll get onto the second interview which is more about like cultural fare. Are you good fit with our company? Do we see ourselves working with you, day in and day out? Can we see you both being able to learn and come up with your own ideas? Those are kind of the things we’re looking at to source out in an interview.

Joe:
Yeah, agreed. I definitely think there’s going to be some cultural fit there, but the attention to detail in the following directions especially initially is critical.

Justin:
Steven had a question for us so that I may suggest a topic I’d love to hear Empire Flippers, thoughts on if and how net neutrality would affect websites and website investments and returns. How would net neutrality affect the buying and selling websites industry overall? I think it’s interesting topic. I’d actually really like to see what EF would say about it. Well thanks for the question Steven.

Justin:
Joe and I were talking about this right before the show I wanted us to Kinda like put our thoughts together and I just don’t see a turn of changes for our industry overall. I mean I guess I see that like obviously the larger companies, if they’re getting preferential treatment they can kind of like suppress the smaller companies. But in those cases we’re talking about $50 billion company suppressing a $500 million company. It’s like kind of beyond the Pale and scope here.

Joe:
Yeah, I think the only effect it might have is in the hosting category. So if you happen to be with a hosting company who didn’t play ball with the underlying Internet provider in order to get fast traffic for all of their websites, then you might have to change your hosting provider and you’re hosting fees might go up. But I don’t think it’s going to go up 10 X. I mean you might double and most small sites have very limited hosting costs anyway, so you’re not talking about a huge impact on our industry.

Justin:
To be fair though, Steve, I don’t know that we know all that well. I’d love to hear your thoughts on it. I’d love to hear our listeners thoughts on like how this affect, I know there’s some people that are very worried about what’s coming up and I’d love to hear what they, how they think it’ll affect our industry. I think they get pressure US administering insights.

Joe:
Look, that’s not to say that neutrality isn’t key. We definitely need to have net neutrality and I think any of the reversals that have been done by the US government are a bad, bad, bad thing but that’s not-

Justin:
Yeah bad thing in general. But like I don’t know how it’s gonna affect our industry exactly. We’ll see, couple of the things I did a really fun podcast with Mckayla over at intuitiveleadershipmastery.com I’ll put a link to that in the show. We’ve talked about how we use business intuition and making decisions at Empire Flippers and other things in our business. Also did an interview over at the Entrepreneur House podcast it’s really interesting company where they basically set up like an entrepreneurial house, bring people out for a month and they kind of work together, play together. It’s like this kind of commune, living, working entrepreneurial deal. It’s crazy.

Justin:
All right. That’s it for episode 174 the Empire podcast, thanks for sticking with us. We’ll be back soon with another show. You can find the show notes for this subset or more at empireflippers.com/pitballs. Make sure to follow us on Twitter @empireflippers and our new Instagram account. I’ll see you next time.

Joe:
Bye Bye everybody.

Speaker 2:
Hope you enjoyed this episode of the Empire podcast with Justin and Joe. Hit Up Empireflippers.com for more. That’s empireflippers.com. Thanks for listening.