Buy a Business

How to Buy a Business

This is a course on aggressive growth through acquisitions. It’s designed for the successful entrepreneur currently running a successful business. At the very least, the student should have recent experience in operating a successful venture.

Warning: Most Entrepreneurs Have Nothing to Sell at the End

Here’s a horrifying statistic that all business brokers are painfully aware of: 80% of all small business are never sold. When the owner decides to retire or quit he or she discovers that buyers do not see any value worth paying for. Most small business are simply shuttered as a result. Imagine yourself being among the 80%. You have invested years and possibly decades building your business. Your dream is to eventually sell it for a million or two and retire in modest comfort. Then at the end you discover that you have nothing to sell. Nothing. In most cases, you are offering the public a chance to buy a job. And nobody is interested in paying 3X or 4X for an annual income of Y.

In fact there is ultimately only one reason to create a business of your own, and that is to sell it. – Michael Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited

This is a course on building real value that can be sold eventually. In most cases, the buyer will be a larger corporate one. It’s also a course on how to buy businesses. The reason for this is that to achieve the kind of size that deep-pocketed buyers will be interested in calls for an advanced growth strategy. In plain English, we are talking about growth via acquisitions.

The course is based on decades of personal experience as a business broker, business buyer, and a fascination with how most self-made men have made their fortunes. Free clue: They did so by wheeling and dealing in cashflow producing assets (usually small businesses). Read on only if you are have a serious interest in upping your game.

Should You Continue Reading?

Take a quick inventory:

– I have experience owning or running a successful offline business.

– I am ambitious but have patience and a long term commitment to building something big.

– I’m not looking for a get-rich-quick scheme.

If you answered yes to all three, please continue. If you didn’t you are wasting your time here.

The 25 Levels of Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship is like a 25-level computer game. Do you want to play at the top level? Do you want to engage in Full Contact Capitalism? If you answered yes to these questions, read on about the best “how to buy a business” course on the planet, and yes, this course does incorporate many in-depth lessons from self-made billionaires on how to become a billionaire.

If you’re asking what billionaires and buying businesses have to do with one another, allow me to explain. The majority of billionaires made their fortunes wheeling and dealing in businesses. In many cases, they started off small and slow acquiring tiny businesses. Then as their skill and confidence increased over the years, they started buying bigger businesses. In some cases, they ended up doing M&A deals with large public companies. My belief is that if you’re going to learn about business then learn from the best.

The longest journey begins with but a single step.

– Ancient Chinese Proverb

Do you have the courage to take even the first step?

WARNING!

However, before you read on you need to understand that this is not a get-rich-fast course by any stretch of the imagination. Rather it’s a course for serious entrepreneurs who want to learn how to grow their business through acquisitions as either a primary or secondary strategy. That’s how most billionaires become billionaires. They are deal-makers who acquire control of a business–or “cashflow,” as I prefer to call them–and then just keep acquiring more and more.

Think of it this way, this course is about building systems and adopting best practices for:

-finding deals,

-determining if they are do-able,

-negotiating the deal,

-financing the purchase,

-increasing the acquisition’s value,

-managing them remotely, and finally,

-selling them at the best price.

Yes, the course incorporates a lot of insights into the above topics from billionaires who made, in some cases, hundreds of acquisitions. The point of taking the course is to learn from the best and then see how far you can get. Most of us will never be billionaires but that doesn’t mean that we can’t learn from them and become lesser tycoons.

(If you’re looking for something that promises to make you a billionaire, I can put you in touch with a Nigerian prince who needs help in extracting $43 billion from his homeland to the USA. Last I heard, he was willing to split the proceeds 50/50. I still have his email address.)

How Billionaires Become Billionaires

Anyone who has built a company from the ground up understands that the initial high growth rate levels off all too quickly. At that point the entrepreneur has a choice between:

1) fighting the Law of Diminishing Returns to extract every last inch of growth from the existing company, or

2) adding growth through acquisitions of competitors and related companies to his strategy.

In the vast majority of cases, the first route provides far slower growth than the second. Moreover, most people go with the former simply because they don’t have the skill set and confidence to employ an acquisitions strategy.

A study of how billionaires become billionaires shows that they employ the second route because it offers the possibility of 50% per annum growth rates, or better, over a prolonged period of time. That’s why they’re billionaires.

By the way, this is also by far the most fun way to make money because you will never have a chance to get bored. There’s always a new deal to work on. The people who can grow just one business for four or five years without burning out are rare. Meanwhile billionaires frequently work well into their eighties and nineties because what they do is actually fun.

In fact, it’s so much fun that the people who start off by employing this strategy as a secondary one frequently adopt it as their main one once they have a deal or two under their belts.

Here’s one more reason why you should seriously consider learning how to grow your business this way: there’s less competition. While the masses today are focused on building the 3,876,734th “social networking” site, you will be operating in a rarefied atmosphere with a much smaller number of competitors.

Are These Real Billionaire Strategies?

The answer is a resounding “yes!”

This is a course for both deal-makers and aspiring deal-makers. We study self-made billionaires and focus in on their early days so that you can start off on the right foot, so to speak. There’s nothing like starting off on a new adventure with a reliable road map. It boosts your confidence level.

The most sure-fire way to build true wealth that can be sold at the end of the day, if that’s your goal, is through a combination of multiple-company building and mergers & acquisitions activity over an extended period of time, usually covering a decade or more. Billionaires rarely rely on just one company to make them billionaires. (In most cases, that’s as realistic as pinning one’s hopes on winning the Powerball Lottery.) Instead they understand that the road to wealth consists of a long series of deals involving the purchase, improvement, and sale of many business assets.

Unfortunately, it’s a seemingly tough line of work to step into. Why? Well first of all, deal-making is normally a game for established players. By “established” I mean that they have achieved the critical mass in both financial strength and reputation necessary to be taken seriously by the other players in the field. Second, most people are terrified of even taking the first step into this lucrative field because they don’t understand that there’s a proven winning formula they can employ successfully.

This course is designed to teach you the proven strategies of people who have been successful at it and how to start using them today.The program will accomplish this by:

1) teaching you advanced entrepreneurial and intermediate-level mergers & acquisitions (i.e., “M&A”) strategies, and

2) helping you to create workarounds for any obstacles (e.g., lack of capital, experience, and reputation) you may face in entering this field. As the old saying goes, where there’s a will, there’s a way.

However, if you’re held back by wimpiness or laziness, I can’t help you.

Nothing can.

The meek shall not inherit the world. We happen to live in a very Darwinian world.

Every day a gazelle wakes up and knows it must outrun the fastest cheetah in order to live. Every day a cheetah wakes up and knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will not survive. It doesn’t matter if you’re a gazelle or a cheetah, when you wake up you better start running! -Anon

Now let’s continue.

The course requires that you have basic entrepreneurial skills as well as the ability to recognize opportunities in your industry. The great thing is that the course will show you how to spot both existing and emerging opportunities. The course also requires that you have the patience and self-discipline to study, learn, and practice the strategies and tactics it will teach you.

The most important quality to have for success is a willingness to learn and implement new lessons. This is not for the meek or those seeking get-rich-quick schemes. The critical ingredient is getting off your butt and doing something. It’s as simple as that. A lot of people have ideas, but there are few who decide to do something about them now. Not tomorrow. Not next week. But today. The true entrepreneur is a doer, not a dreamer.

– Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari and Chuck E. Cheese’s