From 0 To $240,000 Per Year PROFIT In 18 Months (Acquisition Entrepreneurship)

[Matto]

Thanks for this reply. I'm encouraged to hear that it's possible to own a business without having the operations skills- there's one part I'm still unclear on though:

I read that Andrew Carnegie did not know details about still business but he had a massive take on putting together one of the biggest conglomerate on still ever existed. And from what I read that was due to the trust the people that collaborated to him had in him so no practical experience but knowledge and experience on how to manage.

Also Henry Ford had this kind of trait.

 

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[Matto]

For due diligence, my check list is the following:

1) Matching published sales/revenue with tax returns (if available), bank accounts, and merchant accounts.
2) Go back 2 years at least for financials.
3) Get records of most significant expenses.
4) Get marketing performance numbers life for Google Ads, Facebook, etc.
5) Find out what products/services they use for their day-to-day operations.
6) Get list of employees/contractors that you'll take over. Offer not to discuss when them directly until after closing.
7) Get list of employee/contractor responsibilities.
8) Get breakdown of customer sales. Better yet, get details/invoices for customer individual sales.
9) Try to get their accounting books.
10) Get any future projected revenue like recurring invoices.

I'm sure there are more, but those above are key.

@doitman this list in itself is already an execellent piece of value you delivered at least to me.
Thanks a lot!

 

[Matto]

I never buy the company. I always buy the assets. If you already have a corporate structure in place, or some business entity, you should consider running the new business under it, unless you want a more complex structure for tax and liability purposes.

For you, real estate investment sounds like a good option to continue doing. You can definitely go my route, which will give you a diversified portfolio.

I ask a question regarding the quoted answer above:
I had a quite extensive experience on ecommerce back in the days from 2015 to 2018.
We had a fairly known ecommerce that was selling both directly and on other platform like Amazon, Ebay and so on in all Europe. The thing is that since we bought one of these ecommerce from a previous owner we had to move accounts like Ebay, Amazon, and other assets or tools from the previous owner to our company.

This process is quite long, a fairly pain in the a$$ and with the bigger players like Ebay and Amazon you can't do it at all. For various reasons legal and proprietary from the platform they do not want, even if you have the contracts between the previous owner and the new one to move the account to the new one.

This leads you to have to create new accounts therefore restart all the accountability, authority and trust, feedbacks reviews process from scratch.

In few words you lose a big part of the digital assets these accounts stands for in the hands of the previous owner and that in many cases are a big part of the value.

2 Disclaimers I can do now that I wrote and understood better where my question was leading:
1 - You should NEVER (MJDM wrote it in plain words also with a very self explaining testimonial in Unscripted ) be out of CONTROL, and I was out od CONTROL in the cases mentioned above. So never relay solely on those platforms / accounts. I tell all these cause we were brought to that situation by the market but I tell you for my experience even though I read Unscripted many times during that period I couldn't realize this. The epilogue was that we went banckrupt!
2 - Of course you could discount the fact that: since you can't use the value of the accounts cause you have to reopen them, you will not pay that price and evaluate the business at a lower price excluding the business generated from those accounts.

Sorry for the digression but at the light of this I'm puzzled to understand which assets is @richardd buyin:
1 - just domains and sites?
2 - the acquiring business processes and procedures, clients and suppliers?

Are there other that I can't think of?

Thanks to anyone that could help me understanding and elaborate that more.

 

[Matto]

Lol, there is no secret sauce. It's all laid out in this thread. The playbook is written. Honestly, everything I've done up to this point like raising capital, setting up a strategy, targeting businesses based on that strategy, and then executing the simple strategy is all in here.

For the people that have read this thread, let me know if this all makes sense. And if there are any grey areas, or you're not sure about certain details, pm me. Lots of people have already done so with their thoughts, what businesses they have targeted, and asked for my opinions on those opportunities. Just get out there and start looking even if you are window shopping. You can save money in the meantime.

But before you start targeting, again make sure you come up with your criteria of what your future business should satisfy. Then find those opportunities, and get back to me. Don't let lack of capital, lack of experience, or lack of even confidence stop you from starting to look for purchase opportunities.

I sound like a commercial! But I promise you, I'm not selling you anything. Hell, I'm spending a lot of time working with so many of you. But I'm not asking for any money or financial gain in return, nor will I ever.

The only thing I'm selling you is frankly a way for you to enter the fast lane. And my only compensation is to see you succeed.

@richardd I bow before you for this great demonstration of human kindness. I'm loving reading this thread and your business model is really close to the one I've always wanted to achieve.

I think especially now, after covid and people getting more and more remotely working should be easier to be autonomous and have digital businesses to grow for our freedom to be Fast Laners.

Thanks again!

 

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[Matto]

Someone recently came to me with the idea of going into a partnership when purchasing a business. My initial thoughts were that I hated the idea. One of my criteria is to retain control, but when you go into a partnership, you lose some control. But the more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea. Most importantly I thought that if a partnership could be structured that I retained the control, but the other partners received value, then maybe it could work. And just as important, as long as there was an exit strategy that was agreed by all, it could be even more workable.

So I'm throwing an idea out there for everyone. I see a business that I can purchase in 6 months, but I don't have the capital to get it now. I love the business a lot, not because it's exciting or sexy, but because the business model is simple, the barrier of entry is great, and the product/service is in demand and used by thousands. I'm going to get it in 6 months if it's available. It's a no-brainer for me. But there is a risk that it won't be available then. Although I have a feeling it will still be on the market because it is so mundane.

I think I can offer $105,000, but should be able to get it at $110,000. I'd disclose the ROI, but I have signed an NDA, so I won't disclose that. But for the sake of example, let's say the business makes $50,000 a year in profit. If I got a consortium of investors who equally invested the same amount, and then shared that percentage of the profits, the deal might look like this:

1) 9 other investors contribute $10,000
2) I invest the rest, maybe $15,000 or $20,000 depending on the negotiated sales price
3) All investors including myself receive 10% of the profits: for this example each person including myself would receive roughly $416 per month
4) I have the option to buy out each investor of their share at the $10,000 amount any time after 6 months, thus receiving their corresponding profit share moving forward
5) I retain full control of business operations

Does this type of deal seem fair to the other 9 investors? What they get is profit sharing, and a return of their initial investment upon buy-out. I'm curious to know what other people think of this type of deal structure.

I think this should be fantastic for someone that is starting on this business model you teaching us.
It keeps the investment low, it gives monthly revenue and a way to get the principal back whenever you are fine with buyback.

If eventually the venture in 6months is no more profitable there should be another option eventually to fix a lower price for the partners to exit eventually.

 

[Matto]

I have been watching the thread since first day. I love Richard's rules to select a business to acquire.
My target is to acquire one before the end of the year, with up to 25K down. Up to about 50K, with seller financing.

Man, I should add, I am almost worn out to go over the opportunities and elimination process. It is difficult to find a business that resonates and also fit your budget/skill sets you have.

Nevertheless, thanks much Richard! This has been an eye opener thread from day one!

Here is the list of brokers and websites I found that list businesses for sale. I am sure that are more out there, so please let us know if anyone is aware of any listing sites out there.

P.S. If you have any experiences with any of these, would love to hear your feedback as well.

• Centurica - Solutions for Buyers of Internet Businesses
• Empire Flippers - Website Brokers | Vetted Marketplace
• Expert Internet Business Brokers - 100% Internet Focused Business Brokers
• Business Brokers Selling Profitable Online Businesses | Latona's™
• Website Brokers that Sell Websites & Online Businesses, Selling Your Sites and Domains | Website Closers
• Acquisition Station - Website Brokers: We Sell Profitable Web-Based Assets
• Upward Exits - Online Business Brokerage
• AppBusinessBrokers.com – #1 Source for Buying/Selling your App, Software, and Online Business.
• FE International: Professional Website Broker
• Ecommerce Websites & Businesses for Sale | Buy and Sell Online Sites
• Flippa - #1 platform to buy and sell online businesses

Thank's for your list, that's really helpful.

 

[Matto]

Thanks for the list. I have checked most of them and to be frank I am disappointed with the options for filtering and sorting they provide. That could be one of the reasons for your frustration. In fact, having an IT background, I feel that I should rather start a website scraping these sites and provide a better way to view and find these deals.

This is a good Idea, since some time passed from the time you posted it, did you applied kinetic execution on that, and eventually how is it going? Or it just remained an Idea? Curious to know.

Thanks

 

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[StefVE]

I'm really curious to know about the fun topic here.
Can you elaborate some more and explain how you deal with Scam artists?

Thanks a lot man this is really inspiring cause I also think that execution is the real problem I face.

I am in the process of buying my second business and - as I don't consider myself experienced - prefer to use the platform of Empire Flippers after checking out different platforms. It is true that the multiples you pay on there might be slightly higher but they already do a decent check on the businesses they take on so that takes some of the risk away. I consider myself rather lucky now that my first deal on Flippa went well although looking at it now I didn't really knew too well what I was doing. In any case, make sure to get in the game!

 

[sravyasri]

HAPPY 4TH OF JULY UPDATE FROM AMERICA!

Hey, Friends! It has been a long while since I last posted. You can probably imagine with the state of the world, I have been busy. I'm sure many of you have been. I had been locked down in my home for a couple of months, so I took the opportunity to re-architect and re-code our whole accounting software product line. And now I'm done! I modernized the user interface since the original software was written over 10 years ago. And I added a bunch of features that are pretty common now with current software standards. I'm really proud of this.

My focus was on making the user experience much more enjoyable, increasing the performance and speed of the programs, and improving the support capabilities. And now that I have everything working, we are in BETA test mode. Once we clear that hurdle, then we market the new products to all new customers, something that I prevented from happening while we had the old platform. We have been cruising with our current customer base. Time to take the new company that I purchased over a year ago out for a worldly spin!

My online blog took a precipitous drop in traffic during the early C0VlD-19 days, but has since rebounded. And actually, the past week we have blown past daily traffic records that we achieved back in November of 2019. Yesterday, we had over 45K page views with revenue of $689. The previous day we had 40K views. Today, even though it's still the morning here on the East Coast of the US, I can tell that we will eclipse 40K views.

The timing of all of this has been perfect for me. I quit my last full-time consulting gig at the end of April 2020. The last paycheck cleared a couple weeks ago. So, now I'm basically flying without that safety net. I'm not sure what our revenue numbers will be this month, but next month, I'll try to post them. My guess is that we will be around $20K.

Don't get me wrong. I'm scared. But even with C0VlD-19 in this new world, we just keep chugging along. Maybe "scared" is too strong a word. "Anxious" is better suited. Even when things got dark a few months ago, I told myself that THAT was the time to hit the accelerator. When things get hard, in my opinion, that's when you double and triple your efforts. I mean it. I hope all of you took advantage of all of this "downtime", to advance your undertakings.

Hey @doitman, any updates on your business?

 

[Deleted025167]

From 0 to $240,000 per year profit in 18 months

I've been a follower of this forum for about a year now, had read the Millionaire Fastlane book, and finally have decided to tell my story. About a year and a half ago, I found myself unemployed and with near zero savings, two house payments, and a second baby on the way. Things were so dire that I was contemplating bankruptcy. I had just lost my slow-lane job with one of the original big three TV network companies. Worked there for about 3 years making the mistake of transitioning away from my career in computer consulting thinking that having a job would bring a certain level of security. It didn't. Man, those were dark days.

I decided to go back to consulting. But this time instead of taking on just one client full-time, I took on a second, and then a third, and then a fourth. A couple of them, I was billing 40 hours a week, working at the client site for 1, while telecommuting for the other. Clients 3 and 4 were part-time, billing 10-20 hours a week for each but at higher rates, also remote. FYI if you haven't heard, businesses more and more are allowing the telecommuting way. So, if you hate going into your job, look for opportunities to work from home. They're out there.

Well I did this for the past year+, and life has been shit busy, but I saved up a ton, about $200,000 in a year. That felt good. I felt secure with a lot of savings, I had multiple income streams, and the second baby now walks and can feed herself. My wife suggested we invest the $200K in money market funds or CDs. Sounds good, right? Earn 2.3% APY resulting in a whopping $383/mo.! I love my wife, but not for us.

Investing in low-yield financial instruments, and working for someone whether consulting or full time. These are strong characteristics of the slow lane. I've always had an entrepreneur’s mindset. I wanted financial freedom from the daily 9-5 grind, or for me this past year, the 5am-1am grind, including weekends. Even though I had the high-paying clients, if you think about it, it's never good to have all your nuts in very few baskets. And you definitely don't want your schedule dictated to you as consulting can often times do. Besides, money was still tied to my time, and this current work schedule was unsustainable. So having a business seemed like the way to go.

How did I start a business that gives me the financial freedom and time freedom that I so desired? Funny thing. I didn't. I didn't start a new business. Oh, I created a new corporate entity initially for my consulting. But I'm just not creative enough, nor risk averse with family and kids to take a chance there. And besides, burning a year of my life working my a$$ off to roll the dice on a new venture. Nah. So did this mean that I just wasn't going to pursue financial freedom, and maybe instead continue the 100 hours a week work load? No.

About 6 months ago, I started looking at buying software/internet businesses. Why reinvent the wheel? The number of businesses sold on the internet is growing rapidly. Sure there's a ton of scams, get-rich-quick opportunities offered by fake sellers. There are a lot of businesses that the seller just wants out because of failing operations. There are businesses that are a dying breed tied to the old world, pre-internet. For example, consider commercial printing companies which as a side note I was an owner of one about 10 years ago. I'll get back to this in a moment. There are businesses that run in a saturated space like many ecommerce, dropship/Amazon businesses that may have once been profitable, but have lost their edge due to the marketplace. Oh, and blogs, need I say more. Lots of bad opportunities!

So let me quickly detour farther into the past. 10 years ago, I was the owner of a print shop. We had lots of B2B customers looking for printed material on paper. They were all local customers, who often times paid late since we invoiced at NET 30. We had employees running the machines to print and cut and collate and staple. We had leased printers and other equipment. We had leased store-front space. We had a lot of COGS (Cost of Goods Sold), namely the paper itself. Ultimately we failed, and went out of business. Simply put, sales decreased over time, the business didn't scale, the cash flow was shit due to late payers, the overhead was horrendous, and having full-time employees was expensive and such a burden.

Years later, I tried blogging. Tech centric since I'm a programmer. That was a waste of time. AdSense brought in a few hundred bucks a month. But since I don't like writing (even this posting is painful to me), it turned out not to be worth it. I tried ecommerce, AliExpress/Shopify drop shipping of apparel. Did OK for a few months, but then the sales dried up, and I had difficulty coming up with new products to sell. Hated that as well. Definitely not sustainable. So ultimately I failed.

Which bring us back to now. I say I failed, which I'm sure many of you reading this have done so as well. But I say that to make a point. Failure is not truly failure when considering what it really is. As humans, we all fail, probably every day in one form or another. Most of our failures are inconsequential. We break something. We say the wrong thing at the wrong time. We buy some product that doesn't live up to our expectations. But guess what? We adjust our behaviors to mitigate risk so that next time, we do better. Business should be treated the same. Choices that you make in business can be driven by experiences, good and bad. I have a ton of that, especially the bad.

So based on my past failures, I came up with criteria for what my next business acquisition would require. Here they are:

1) No full-time employees. Didn't want the headache.
2) Profitable. Of course.
3) Years of proven profitability.
4) Digital/software products or services. No inventory. No drop shipping.
5) Scalable.
6) No physical location. Allowing work from home without need for leasing office/store.
7) Flexible business. Caters to expanding product and service line beyond current offerings to customers.
8) Low weekly hours necessary for owner operation.
9) Instant credit card sales, vs NET30 or other delayed payment processing.
10) Minimal marketing.
11) Full control. No partnerships. Limit dependencies with external entities.

So, I'm sitting on my $200,000 nest egg from all that hard work. I'm researching businesses for sale. And I find one that is a software company that sells proprietary accounting software. Promising! I'm a programmer with tons of experience in accounting. The business has been operational for 30 years, with recurring clients going back 10+ years, and has been run by this one couple who are well into their retirement years but hadn't pulled the trigger. And guess what? This software business satisfies all 11 of my requirements above. Well, I send their broker an offer of about $200K with half of it owner-financed for 5 years. They accept. Done deal. The profit annualized is $70,000 with an initial investment of $100,000. ROI = 70%. Nice! Since taking over, I'm happy with the performance, and I only spend maybe a couple hours a week on it. I outsource the programming.

Why stop there? I know MJ preaches monogamy. But I feel you can scale your company multiple ways. 1) expanding your sales in your current product/service line, and 2) buying existing businesses to generate more revenue. The only limiting factor of the second is that you will hit a limiting threshold in time when managing and marketing your multiple business holdings. Hopefully by then, you have gotten to a point where you can hire managers to offload that work. In any case, I next took over... a blog. I laugh when I write that because as mentioned before, I hated blogging. But I'll give you a little secret. You can hire writers, which I have a whole staff of them.

The blog is more than just a blog with hundreds of thousands of viewers per month. It has an online Facebook page with a quarter million followers, and a Facebook group with tens of thousands of passionate people whose lives revolve around my niche. And I am one of them, also passionate towards the content that we generate. So, I placed an offer, and got it, trademark included. $80K. We make money working with an advertising agency that deals with handling ad fill. Profit after paying our writing staff has been about $3500/mo. So annualized is $42,000 profit/year. ROI = 52.5%.

Next acquisition. I bought a web site backup service. We have hundreds of customers that we perform nightly backups of their sites as well as make sure their sites are operational 24x7. I outsource that work to offshore for cheap, but excellent labor. I love the guys who keep this business going strong day to day. I barely do anything but accounting for this. Maybe spend half an hour a day. I got it for $35,000. And annualized we make $30K in profit. ROI = 85%.

And most recently I've assumed a web marketing business. This too has a team of contractors that do the heavy lifting. Premium one-word, business-specific, domain name that garners 30K organic traffic a month. Very little ad spend. We generate about $8000/mo. in profit, again annualized to $96K profit for an ROI = 240%. I haven't figured out why the previous owner sold this other than he didn't want to do it anymore, and wanted to concentrate on his other business. He's got rep. I did my research.

So here's the grand total annualized profit:

Accounting Software Business: $70,000
Blog and Online Community: $42,000
Web Site Backup Business: $30,000
Web Marketing Business: $96,000

Total Annualized Profit: $238,000

Mind you, since these ventures take up maybe a total of a couple hours a day for me to run, I am free to focus on marketing for growth, while keeping a couple of my consulting clients. I quit the one client where I had to go into the office, and the other remote client, I just quit because I didn't have time for them. So I work from home now. The consulting dollars gets me to $400K a year, but I will most likely stop consulting next year to completely focus on my businesses. And my family and I are planning on moving to Central America this winter, because we love it there, and hell, I can work from anywhere that has internet.

One last note on being a serial entrepreneur. I look for synergies between my businesses and any future acquisitions. Each of the four ventures that I now have complement one or more of the other businesses, so I can leverage/cross-sell amongst the lot of them. This specific business model is starting to gain traction. But one challenge for me is branding when cross-selling. I haven't figured out how to consolidate the brands most efficiently. Each has their own distinct brand that current customers trust. And future customers may gravitate to the current branding. So not sure yet, but it's a good problem to have.

That is inspiring. Thank you for sharing your success.

 

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[Makaveli7]

From 0 to $240,000 per year profit in 18 months

I've been a follower of this forum for about a year now, had read the Millionaire Fastlane book, and finally have decided to tell my story. About a year and a half ago, I found myself unemployed and with near zero savings, two house payments, and a second baby on the way. Things were so dire that I was contemplating bankruptcy. I had just lost my slow-lane job with one of the original big three TV network companies. Worked there for about 3 years making the mistake of transitioning away from my career in computer consulting thinking that having a job would bring a certain level of security. It didn't. Man, those were dark days.

I decided to go back to consulting. But this time instead of taking on just one client full-time, I took on a second, and then a third, and then a fourth. A couple of them, I was billing 40 hours a week, working at the client site for 1, while telecommuting for the other. Clients 3 and 4 were part-time, billing 10-20 hours a week for each but at higher rates, also remote. FYI if you haven't heard, businesses more and more are allowing the telecommuting way. So, if you hate going into your job, look for opportunities to work from home. They're out there.

Well I did this for the past year+, and life has been shit busy, but I saved up a ton, about $200,000 in a year. That felt good. I felt secure with a lot of savings, I had multiple income streams, and the second baby now walks and can feed herself. My wife suggested we invest the $200K in money market funds or CDs. Sounds good, right? Earn 2.3% APY resulting in a whopping $383/mo.! I love my wife, but not for us.

Investing in low-yield financial instruments, and working for someone whether consulting or full time. These are strong characteristics of the slow lane. I've always had an entrepreneur’s mindset. I wanted financial freedom from the daily 9-5 grind, or for me this past year, the 5am-1am grind, including weekends. Even though I had the high-paying clients, if you think about it, it's never good to have all your nuts in very few baskets. And you definitely don't want your schedule dictated to you as consulting can often times do. Besides, money was still tied to my time, and this current work schedule was unsustainable. So having a business seemed like the way to go.

How did I start a business that gives me the financial freedom and time freedom that I so desired? Funny thing. I didn't. I didn't start a new business. Oh, I created a new corporate entity initially for my consulting. But I'm just not creative enough, nor risk averse with family and kids to take a chance there. And besides, burning a year of my life working my a$$ off to roll the dice on a new venture. Nah. So did this mean that I just wasn't going to pursue financial freedom, and maybe instead continue the 100 hours a week work load? No.

About 6 months ago, I started looking at buying software/internet businesses. Why reinvent the wheel? The number of businesses sold on the internet is growing rapidly. Sure there's a ton of scams, get-rich-quick opportunities offered by fake sellers. There are a lot of businesses that the seller just wants out because of failing operations. There are businesses that are a dying breed tied to the old world, pre-internet. For example, consider commercial printing companies which as a side note I was an owner of one about 10 years ago. I'll get back to this in a moment. There are businesses that run in a saturated space like many ecommerce, dropship/Amazon businesses that may have once been profitable, but have lost their edge due to the marketplace. Oh, and blogs, need I say more. Lots of bad opportunities!

So let me quickly detour farther into the past. 10 years ago, I was the owner of a print shop. We had lots of B2B customers looking for printed material on paper. They were all local customers, who often times paid late since we invoiced at NET 30. We had employees running the machines to print and cut and collate and staple. We had leased printers and other equipment. We had leased store-front space. We had a lot of COGS (Cost of Goods Sold), namely the paper itself. Ultimately we failed, and went out of business. Simply put, sales decreased over time, the business didn't scale, the cash flow was shit due to late payers, the overhead was horrendous, and having full-time employees was expensive and such a burden.

Years later, I tried blogging. Tech centric since I'm a programmer. That was a waste of time. AdSense brought in a few hundred bucks a month. But since I don't like writing (even this posting is painful to me), it turned out not to be worth it. I tried ecommerce, AliExpress/Shopify drop shipping of apparel. Did OK for a few months, but then the sales dried up, and I had difficulty coming up with new products to sell. Hated that as well. Definitely not sustainable. So ultimately I failed.

Which bring us back to now. I say I failed, which I'm sure many of you reading this have done so as well. But I say that to make a point. Failure is not truly failure when considering what it really is. As humans, we all fail, probably every day in one form or another. Most of our failures are inconsequential. We break something. We say the wrong thing at the wrong time. We buy some product that doesn't live up to our expectations. But guess what? We adjust our behaviors to mitigate risk so that next time, we do better. Business should be treated the same. Choices that you make in business can be driven by experiences, good and bad. I have a ton of that, especially the bad.

So based on my past failures, I came up with criteria for what my next business acquisition would require. Here they are:

1) No full-time employees. Didn't want the headache.
2) Profitable. Of course.
3) Years of proven profitability.
4) Digital/software products or services. No inventory. No drop shipping.
5) Scalable.
6) No physical location. Allowing work from home without need for leasing office/store.
7) Flexible business. Caters to expanding product and service line beyond current offerings to customers.
8) Low weekly hours necessary for owner operation.
9) Instant credit card sales, vs NET30 or other delayed payment processing.
10) Minimal marketing.
11) Full control. No partnerships. Limit dependencies with external entities.

So, I'm sitting on my $200,000 nest egg from all that hard work. I'm researching businesses for sale. And I find one that is a software company that sells proprietary accounting software. Promising! I'm a programmer with tons of experience in accounting. The business has been operational for 30 years, with recurring clients going back 10+ years, and has been run by this one couple who are well into their retirement years but hadn't pulled the trigger. And guess what? This software business satisfies all 11 of my requirements above. Well, I send their broker an offer of about $200K with half of it owner-financed for 5 years. They accept. Done deal. The profit annualized is $70,000 with an initial investment of $100,000. ROI = 70%. Nice! Since taking over, I'm happy with the performance, and I only spend maybe a couple hours a week on it. I outsource the programming.

Why stop there? I know MJ preaches monogamy. But I feel you can scale your company multiple ways. 1) expanding your sales in your current product/service line, and 2) buying existing businesses to generate more revenue. The only limiting factor of the second is that you will hit a limiting threshold in time when managing and marketing your multiple business holdings. Hopefully by then, you have gotten to a point where you can hire managers to offload that work. In any case, I next took over... a blog. I laugh when I write that because as mentioned before, I hated blogging. But I'll give you a little secret. You can hire writers, which I have a whole staff of them.

The blog is more than just a blog with hundreds of thousands of viewers per month. It has an online Facebook page with a quarter million followers, and a Facebook group with tens of thousands of passionate people whose lives revolve around my niche. And I am one of them, also passionate towards the content that we generate. So, I placed an offer, and got it, trademark included. $80K. We make money working with an advertising agency that deals with handling ad fill. Profit after paying our writing staff has been about $3500/mo. So annualized is $42,000 profit/year. ROI = 52.5%.

Next acquisition. I bought a web site backup service. We have hundreds of customers that we perform nightly backups of their sites as well as make sure their sites are operational 24x7. I outsource that work to offshore for cheap, but excellent labor. I love the guys who keep this business going strong day to day. I barely do anything but accounting for this. Maybe spend half an hour a day. I got it for $35,000. And annualized we make $30K in profit. ROI = 85%.

And most recently I've assumed a web marketing business. This too has a team of contractors that do the heavy lifting. Premium one-word, business-specific, domain name that garners 30K organic traffic a month. Very little ad spend. We generate about $8000/mo. in profit, again annualized to $96K profit for an ROI = 240%. I haven't figured out why the previous owner sold this other than he didn't want to do it anymore, and wanted to concentrate on his other business. He's got rep. I did my research.

So here's the grand total annualized profit:

Accounting Software Business: $70,000
Blog and Online Community: $42,000
Web Site Backup Business: $30,000
Web Marketing Business: $96,000

Total Annualized Profit: $238,000

Mind you, since these ventures take up maybe a total of a couple hours a day for me to run, I am free to focus on marketing for growth, while keeping a couple of my consulting clients. I quit the one client where I had to go into the office, and the other remote client, I just quit because I didn't have time for them. So I work from home now. The consulting dollars gets me to $400K a year, but I will most likely stop consulting next year to completely focus on my businesses. And my family and I are planning on moving to Central America this winter, because we love it there, and hell, I can work from anywhere that has internet.

One last note on being a serial entrepreneur. I look for synergies between my businesses and any future acquisitions. Each of the four ventures that I now have complement one or more of the other businesses, so I can leverage/cross-sell amongst the lot of them. This specific business model is starting to gain traction. But one challenge for me is branding when cross-selling. I haven't figured out how to consolidate the brands most efficiently. Each has their own distinct brand that current customers trust. And future customers may gravitate to the current branding. So not sure yet, but it's a good problem to have.

Thanks for sharing the details and the step by step.

 

[Jcmont]

Can any of you recommend a website, book, online course, mastermind, or something similar for a beginner to walk this path (of purchasing a business with positive cashflow that meets RichardD's criteria)?

Ideally, I'd like to find a mentor who would profit share with me when I do all the work and they save me from dumb mistakes while speeding up my learning curve.

Hi, try reading Buy then Build by Walker Deibel. He also has a masterclass and an intensive workshop called the Acquisition Lab.

 

[Chrisrod2597]

From 0 to $240,000 per year profit in 18 months

I've been a follower of this forum for about a year now, had read the Millionaire Fastlane book, and finally have decided to tell my story. About a year and a half ago, I found myself unemployed and with near zero savings, two house payments, and a second baby on the way. Things were so dire that I was contemplating bankruptcy. I had just lost my slow-lane job with one of the original big three TV network companies. Worked there for about 3 years making the mistake of transitioning away from my career in computer consulting thinking that having a job would bring a certain level of security. It didn't. Man, those were dark days.

I decided to go back to consulting. But this time instead of taking on just one client full-time, I took on a second, and then a third, and then a fourth. A couple of them, I was billing 40 hours a week, working at the client site for 1, while telecommuting for the other. Clients 3 and 4 were part-time, billing 10-20 hours a week for each but at higher rates, also remote. FYI if you haven't heard, businesses more and more are allowing the telecommuting way. So, if you hate going into your job, look for opportunities to work from home. They're out there.

Well I did this for the past year+, and life has been shit busy, but I saved up a ton, about $200,000 in a year. That felt good. I felt secure with a lot of savings, I had multiple income streams, and the second baby now walks and can feed herself. My wife suggested we invest the $200K in money market funds or CDs. Sounds good, right? Earn 2.3% APY resulting in a whopping $383/mo.! I love my wife, but not for us.

Investing in low-yield financial instruments, and working for someone whether consulting or full time. These are strong characteristics of the slow lane. I've always had an entrepreneur’s mindset. I wanted financial freedom from the daily 9-5 grind, or for me this past year, the 5am-1am grind, including weekends. Even though I had the high-paying clients, if you think about it, it's never good to have all your nuts in very few baskets. And you definitely don't want your schedule dictated to you as consulting can often times do. Besides, money was still tied to my time, and this current work schedule was unsustainable. So having a business seemed like the way to go.

How did I start a business that gives me the financial freedom and time freedom that I so desired? Funny thing. I didn't. I didn't start a new business. Oh, I created a new corporate entity initially for my consulting. But I'm just not creative enough, nor risk averse with family and kids to take a chance there. And besides, burning a year of my life working my a$$ off to roll the dice on a new venture. Nah. So did this mean that I just wasn't going to pursue financial freedom, and maybe instead continue the 100 hours a week work load? No.

About 6 months ago, I started looking at buying software/internet businesses. Why reinvent the wheel? The number of businesses sold on the internet is growing rapidly. Sure there's a ton of scams, get-rich-quick opportunities offered by fake sellers. There are a lot of businesses that the seller just wants out because of failing operations. There are businesses that are a dying breed tied to the old world, pre-internet. For example, consider commercial printing companies which as a side note I was an owner of one about 10 years ago. I'll get back to this in a moment. There are businesses that run in a saturated space like many ecommerce, dropship/Amazon businesses that may have once been profitable, but have lost their edge due to the marketplace. Oh, and blogs, need I say more. Lots of bad opportunities!

So let me quickly detour farther into the past. 10 years ago, I was the owner of a print shop. We had lots of B2B customers looking for printed material on paper. They were all local customers, who often times paid late since we invoiced at NET 30. We had employees running the machines to print and cut and collate and staple. We had leased printers and other equipment. We had leased store-front space. We had a lot of COGS (Cost of Goods Sold), namely the paper itself. Ultimately we failed, and went out of business. Simply put, sales decreased over time, the business didn't scale, the cash flow was shit due to late payers, the overhead was horrendous, and having full-time employees was expensive and such a burden.

Years later, I tried blogging. Tech centric since I'm a programmer. That was a waste of time. AdSense brought in a few hundred bucks a month. But since I don't like writing (even this posting is painful to me), it turned out not to be worth it. I tried ecommerce, AliExpress/Shopify drop shipping of apparel. Did OK for a few months, but then the sales dried up, and I had difficulty coming up with new products to sell. Hated that as well. Definitely not sustainable. So ultimately I failed.

Which bring us back to now. I say I failed, which I'm sure many of you reading this have done so as well. But I say that to make a point. Failure is not truly failure when considering what it really is. As humans, we all fail, probably every day in one form or another. Most of our failures are inconsequential. We break something. We say the wrong thing at the wrong time. We buy some product that doesn't live up to our expectations. But guess what? We adjust our behaviors to mitigate risk so that next time, we do better. Business should be treated the same. Choices that you make in business can be driven by experiences, good and bad. I have a ton of that, especially the bad.

So based on my past failures, I came up with criteria for what my next business acquisition would require. Here they are:

1) No full-time employees. Didn't want the headache.
2) Profitable. Of course.
3) Years of proven profitability.
4) Digital/software products or services. No inventory. No drop shipping.
5) Scalable.
6) No physical location. Allowing work from home without need for leasing office/store.
7) Flexible business. Caters to expanding product and service line beyond current offerings to customers.
8) Low weekly hours necessary for owner operation.
9) Instant credit card sales, vs NET30 or other delayed payment processing.
10) Minimal marketing.
11) Full control. No partnerships. Limit dependencies with external entities.

So, I'm sitting on my $200,000 nest egg from all that hard work. I'm researching businesses for sale. And I find one that is a software company that sells proprietary accounting software. Promising! I'm a programmer with tons of experience in accounting. The business has been operational for 30 years, with recurring clients going back 10+ years, and has been run by this one couple who are well into their retirement years but hadn't pulled the trigger. And guess what? This software business satisfies all 11 of my requirements above. Well, I send their broker an offer of about $200K with half of it owner-financed for 5 years. They accept. Done deal. The profit annualized is $70,000 with an initial investment of $100,000. ROI = 70%. Nice! Since taking over, I'm happy with the performance, and I only spend maybe a couple hours a week on it. I outsource the programming.

Why stop there? I know MJ preaches monogamy. But I feel you can scale your company multiple ways. 1) expanding your sales in your current product/service line, and 2) buying existing businesses to generate more revenue. The only limiting factor of the second is that you will hit a limiting threshold in time when managing and marketing your multiple business holdings. Hopefully by then, you have gotten to a point where you can hire managers to offload that work. In any case, I next took over... a blog. I laugh when I write that because as mentioned before, I hated blogging. But I'll give you a little secret. You can hire writers, which I have a whole staff of them.

The blog is more than just a blog with hundreds of thousands of viewers per month. It has an online Facebook page with a quarter million followers, and a Facebook group with tens of thousands of passionate people whose lives revolve around my niche. And I am one of them, also passionate towards the content that we generate. So, I placed an offer, and got it, trademark included. $80K. We make money working with an advertising agency that deals with handling ad fill. Profit after paying our writing staff has been about $3500/mo. So annualized is $42,000 profit/year. ROI = 52.5%.

Next acquisition. I bought a web site backup service. We have hundreds of customers that we perform nightly backups of their sites as well as make sure their sites are operational 24x7. I outsource that work to offshore for cheap, but excellent labor. I love the guys who keep this business going strong day to day. I barely do anything but accounting for this. Maybe spend half an hour a day. I got it for $35,000. And annualized we make $30K in profit. ROI = 85%.

And most recently I've assumed a web marketing business. This too has a team of contractors that do the heavy lifting. Premium one-word, business-specific, domain name that garners 30K organic traffic a month. Very little ad spend. We generate about $8000/mo. in profit, again annualized to $96K profit for an ROI = 240%. I haven't figured out why the previous owner sold this other than he didn't want to do it anymore, and wanted to concentrate on his other business. He's got rep. I did my research.

So here's the grand total annualized profit:

Accounting Software Business: $70,000
Blog and Online Community: $42,000
Web Site Backup Business: $30,000
Web Marketing Business: $96,000

Total Annualized Profit: $238,000

Mind you, since these ventures take up maybe a total of a couple hours a day for me to run, I am free to focus on marketing for growth, while keeping a couple of my consulting clients. I quit the one client where I had to go into the office, and the other remote client, I just quit because I didn't have time for them. So I work from home now. The consulting dollars gets me to $400K a year, but I will most likely stop consulting next year to completely focus on my businesses. And my family and I are planning on moving to Central America this winter, because we love it there, and hell, I can work from anywhere that has internet.

One last note on being a serial entrepreneur. I look for synergies between my businesses and any future acquisitions. Each of the four ventures that I now have complement one or more of the other businesses, so I can leverage/cross-sell amongst the lot of them. This specific business model is starting to gain traction. But one challenge for me is branding when cross-selling. I haven't figured out how to consolidate the brands most efficiently. Each has their own distinct brand that current customers trust. And future customers may gravitate to the current branding. So not sure yet, but it's a good problem to have.

Thank you for sharing your inspiring story! I love how you show resilience when pursuing what you want.

 

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[samuraijack]

@doitman updates?

 

[sonny_1080]

I have a couple contractors who are very good with both SEO and client interaction. I spend my time acquiring business. Our web site gets about 30K page views a month.

I'm not an expert on SEO, nor do I want to be. My model is to have contract staff do that work.

what is a "contract staff"? are you talking about freelancers from fiverr?

if not, how do you get a contract staff?

 

[Gio.N33]

From 0 to $240,000 per year profit in 18 months

I've been a follower of this forum for about a year now, had read the Millionaire Fastlane book, and finally have decided to tell my story. About a year and a half ago, I found myself unemployed and with near zero savings, two house payments, and a second baby on the way. Things were so dire that I was contemplating bankruptcy. I had just lost my slow-lane job with one of the original big three TV network companies. Worked there for about 3 years making the mistake of transitioning away from my career in computer consulting thinking that having a job would bring a certain level of security. It didn't. Man, those were dark days.

I decided to go back to consulting. But this time instead of taking on just one client full-time, I took on a second, and then a third, and then a fourth. A couple of them, I was billing 40 hours a week, working at the client site for 1, while telecommuting for the other. Clients 3 and 4 were part-time, billing 10-20 hours a week for each but at higher rates, also remote. FYI if you haven't heard, businesses more and more are allowing the telecommuting way. So, if you hate going into your job, look for opportunities to work from home. They're out there.

Well I did this for the past year+, and life has been shit busy, but I saved up a ton, about $200,000 in a year. That felt good. I felt secure with a lot of savings, I had multiple income streams, and the second baby now walks and can feed herself. My wife suggested we invest the $200K in money market funds or CDs. Sounds good, right? Earn 2.3% APY resulting in a whopping $383/mo.! I love my wife, but not for us.

Investing in low-yield financial instruments, and working for someone whether consulting or full time. These are strong characteristics of the slow lane. I've always had an entrepreneur’s mindset. I wanted financial freedom from the daily 9-5 grind, or for me this past year, the 5am-1am grind, including weekends. Even though I had the high-paying clients, if you think about it, it's never good to have all your nuts in very few baskets. And you definitely don't want your schedule dictated to you as consulting can often times do. Besides, money was still tied to my time, and this current work schedule was unsustainable. So having a business seemed like the way to go.

How did I start a business that gives me the financial freedom and time freedom that I so desired? Funny thing. I didn't. I didn't start a new business. Oh, I created a new corporate entity initially for my consulting. But I'm just not creative enough, nor risk averse with family and kids to take a chance there. And besides, burning a year of my life working my a$$ off to roll the dice on a new venture. Nah. So did this mean that I just wasn't going to pursue financial freedom, and maybe instead continue the 100 hours a week work load? No.

About 6 months ago, I started looking at buying software/internet businesses. Why reinvent the wheel? The number of businesses sold on the internet is growing rapidly. Sure there's a ton of scams, get-rich-quick opportunities offered by fake sellers. There are a lot of businesses that the seller just wants out because of failing operations. There are businesses that are a dying breed tied to the old world, pre-internet. For example, consider commercial printing companies which as a side note I was an owner of one about 10 years ago. I'll get back to this in a moment. There are businesses that run in a saturated space like many ecommerce, dropship/Amazon businesses that may have once been profitable, but have lost their edge due to the marketplace. Oh, and blogs, need I say more. Lots of bad opportunities!

So let me quickly detour farther into the past. 10 years ago, I was the owner of a print shop. We had lots of B2B customers looking for printed material on paper. They were all local customers, who often times paid late since we invoiced at NET 30. We had employees running the machines to print and cut and collate and staple. We had leased printers and other equipment. We had leased store-front space. We had a lot of COGS (Cost of Goods Sold), namely the paper itself. Ultimately we failed, and went out of business. Simply put, sales decreased over time, the business didn't scale, the cash flow was shit due to late payers, the overhead was horrendous, and having full-time employees was expensive and such a burden.

Years later, I tried blogging. Tech centric since I'm a programmer. That was a waste of time. AdSense brought in a few hundred bucks a month. But since I don't like writing (even this posting is painful to me), it turned out not to be worth it. I tried ecommerce, AliExpress/Shopify drop shipping of apparel. Did OK for a few months, but then the sales dried up, and I had difficulty coming up with new products to sell. Hated that as well. Definitely not sustainable. So ultimately I failed.

Which bring us back to now. I say I failed, which I'm sure many of you reading this have done so as well. But I say that to make a point. Failure is not truly failure when considering what it really is. As humans, we all fail, probably every day in one form or another. Most of our failures are inconsequential. We break something. We say the wrong thing at the wrong time. We buy some product that doesn't live up to our expectations. But guess what? We adjust our behaviors to mitigate risk so that next time, we do better. Business should be treated the same. Choices that you make in business can be driven by experiences, good and bad. I have a ton of that, especially the bad.

So based on my past failures, I came up with criteria for what my next business acquisition would require. Here they are:

1) No full-time employees. Didn't want the headache.
2) Profitable. Of course.
3) Years of proven profitability.
4) Digital/software products or services. No inventory. No drop shipping.
5) Scalable.
6) No physical location. Allowing work from home without need for leasing office/store.
7) Flexible business. Caters to expanding product and service line beyond current offerings to customers.
8) Low weekly hours necessary for owner operation.
9) Instant credit card sales, vs NET30 or other delayed payment processing.
10) Minimal marketing.
11) Full control. No partnerships. Limit dependencies with external entities.

So, I'm sitting on my $200,000 nest egg from all that hard work. I'm researching businesses for sale. And I find one that is a software company that sells proprietary accounting software. Promising! I'm a programmer with tons of experience in accounting. The business has been operational for 30 years, with recurring clients going back 10+ years, and has been run by this one couple who are well into their retirement years but hadn't pulled the trigger. And guess what? This software business satisfies all 11 of my requirements above. Well, I send their broker an offer of about $200K with half of it owner-financed for 5 years. They accept. Done deal. The profit annualized is $70,000 with an initial investment of $100,000. ROI = 70%. Nice! Since taking over, I'm happy with the performance, and I only spend maybe a couple hours a week on it. I outsource the programming.

Why stop there? I know MJ preaches monogamy. But I feel you can scale your company multiple ways. 1) expanding your sales in your current product/service line, and 2) buying existing businesses to generate more revenue. The only limiting factor of the second is that you will hit a limiting threshold in time when managing and marketing your multiple business holdings. Hopefully by then, you have gotten to a point where you can hire managers to offload that work. In any case, I next took over... a blog. I laugh when I write that because as mentioned before, I hated blogging. But I'll give you a little secret. You can hire writers, which I have a whole staff of them.

The blog is more than just a blog with hundreds of thousands of viewers per month. It has an online Facebook page with a quarter million followers, and a Facebook group with tens of thousands of passionate people whose lives revolve around my niche. And I am one of them, also passionate towards the content that we generate. So, I placed an offer, and got it, trademark included. $80K. We make money working with an advertising agency that deals with handling ad fill. Profit after paying our writing staff has been about $3500/mo. So annualized is $42,000 profit/year. ROI = 52.5%.

Next acquisition. I bought a web site backup service. We have hundreds of customers that we perform nightly backups of their sites as well as make sure their sites are operational 24x7. I outsource that work to offshore for cheap, but excellent labor. I love the guys who keep this business going strong day to day. I barely do anything but accounting for this. Maybe spend half an hour a day. I got it for $35,000. And annualized we make $30K in profit. ROI = 85%.

And most recently I've assumed a web marketing business. This too has a team of contractors that do the heavy lifting. Premium one-word, business-specific, domain name that garners 30K organic traffic a month. Very little ad spend. We generate about $8000/mo. in profit, again annualized to $96K profit for an ROI = 240%. I haven't figured out why the previous owner sold this other than he didn't want to do it anymore, and wanted to concentrate on his other business. He's got rep. I did my research.

So here's the grand total annualized profit:

Accounting Software Business: $70,000
Blog and Online Community: $42,000
Web Site Backup Business: $30,000
Web Marketing Business: $96,000

Total Annualized Profit: $238,000

Mind you, since these ventures take up maybe a total of a couple hours a day for me to run, I am free to focus on marketing for growth, while keeping a couple of my consulting clients. I quit the one client where I had to go into the office, and the other remote client, I just quit because I didn't have time for them. So I work from home now. The consulting dollars gets me to $400K a year, but I will most likely stop consulting next year to completely focus on my businesses. And my family and I are planning on moving to Central America this winter, because we love it there, and hell, I can work from anywhere that has internet.

One last note on being a serial entrepreneur. I look for synergies between my businesses and any future acquisitions. Each of the four ventures that I now have complement one or more of the other businesses, so I can leverage/cross-sell amongst the lot of them. This specific business model is starting to gain traction. But one challenge for me is branding when cross-selling. I haven't figured out how to consolidate the brands most efficiently. Each has their own distinct brand that current customers trust. And future customers may gravitate to the current branding. So not sure yet, but it's a good problem to have.

Thank you for sharing your story. I love this.

 

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[Andy777E]

From 0 to $240,000 per year profit in 18 months

I've been a follower of this forum for about a year now, had read the Millionaire Fastlane book, and finally have decided to tell my story. About a year and a half ago, I found myself unemployed and with near zero savings, two house payments, and a second baby on the way. Things were so dire that I was contemplating bankruptcy. I had just lost my slow-lane job with one of the original big three TV network companies. Worked there for about 3 years making the mistake of transitioning away from my career in computer consulting thinking that having a job would bring a certain level of security. It didn't. Man, those were dark days.

I decided to go back to consulting. But this time instead of taking on just one client full-time, I took on a second, and then a third, and then a fourth. A couple of them, I was billing 40 hours a week, working at the client site for 1, while telecommuting for the other. Clients 3 and 4 were part-time, billing 10-20 hours a week for each but at higher rates, also remote. FYI if you haven't heard, businesses more and more are allowing the telecommuting way. So, if you hate going into your job, look for opportunities to work from home. They're out there.

Well I did this for the past year+, and life has been shit busy, but I saved up a ton, about $200,000 in a year. That felt good. I felt secure with a lot of savings, I had multiple income streams, and the second baby now walks and can feed herself. My wife suggested we invest the $200K in money market funds or CDs. Sounds good, right? Earn 2.3% APY resulting in a whopping $383/mo.! I love my wife, but not for us.

Investing in low-yield financial instruments, and working for someone whether consulting or full time. These are strong characteristics of the slow lane. I've always had an entrepreneur’s mindset. I wanted financial freedom from the daily 9-5 grind, or for me this past year, the 5am-1am grind, including weekends. Even though I had the high-paying clients, if you think about it, it's never good to have all your nuts in very few baskets. And you definitely don't want your schedule dictated to you as consulting can often times do. Besides, money was still tied to my time, and this current work schedule was unsustainable. So having a business seemed like the way to go.

How did I start a business that gives me the financial freedom and time freedom that I so desired? Funny thing. I didn't. I didn't start a new business. Oh, I created a new corporate entity initially for my consulting. But I'm just not creative enough, nor risk averse with family and kids to take a chance there. And besides, burning a year of my life working my a$$ off to roll the dice on a new venture. Nah. So did this mean that I just wasn't going to pursue financial freedom, and maybe instead continue the 100 hours a week work load? No.

About 6 months ago, I started looking at buying software/internet businesses. Why reinvent the wheel? The number of businesses sold on the internet is growing rapidly. Sure there's a ton of scams, get-rich-quick opportunities offered by fake sellers. There are a lot of businesses that the seller just wants out because of failing operations. There are businesses that are a dying breed tied to the old world, pre-internet. For example, consider commercial printing companies which as a side note I was an owner of one about 10 years ago. I'll get back to this in a moment. There are businesses that run in a saturated space like many ecommerce, dropship/Amazon businesses that may have once been profitable, but have lost their edge due to the marketplace. Oh, and blogs, need I say more. Lots of bad opportunities!

So let me quickly detour farther into the past. 10 years ago, I was the owner of a print shop. We had lots of B2B customers looking for printed material on paper. They were all local customers, who often times paid late since we invoiced at NET 30. We had employees running the machines to print and cut and collate and staple. We had leased printers and other equipment. We had leased store-front space. We had a lot of COGS (Cost of Goods Sold), namely the paper itself. Ultimately we failed, and went out of business. Simply put, sales decreased over time, the business didn't scale, the cash flow was shit due to late payers, the overhead was horrendous, and having full-time employees was expensive and such a burden.

Years later, I tried blogging. Tech centric since I'm a programmer. That was a waste of time. AdSense brought in a few hundred bucks a month. But since I don't like writing (even this posting is painful to me), it turned out not to be worth it. I tried ecommerce, AliExpress/Shopify drop shipping of apparel. Did OK for a few months, but then the sales dried up, and I had difficulty coming up with new products to sell. Hated that as well. Definitely not sustainable. So ultimately I failed.

Which bring us back to now. I say I failed, which I'm sure many of you reading this have done so as well. But I say that to make a point. Failure is not truly failure when considering what it really is. As humans, we all fail, probably every day in one form or another. Most of our failures are inconsequential. We break something. We say the wrong thing at the wrong time. We buy some product that doesn't live up to our expectations. But guess what? We adjust our behaviors to mitigate risk so that next time, we do better. Business should be treated the same. Choices that you make in business can be driven by experiences, good and bad. I have a ton of that, especially the bad.

So based on my past failures, I came up with criteria for what my next business acquisition would require. Here they are:

1) No full-time employees. Didn't want the headache.
2) Profitable. Of course.
3) Years of proven profitability.
4) Digital/software products or services. No inventory. No drop shipping.
5) Scalable.
6) No physical location. Allowing work from home without need for leasing office/store.
7) Flexible business. Caters to expanding product and service line beyond current offerings to customers.
8) Low weekly hours necessary for owner operation.
9) Instant credit card sales, vs NET30 or other delayed payment processing.
10) Minimal marketing.
11) Full control. No partnerships. Limit dependencies with external entities.

So, I'm sitting on my $200,000 nest egg from all that hard work. I'm researching businesses for sale. And I find one that is a software company that sells proprietary accounting software. Promising! I'm a programmer with tons of experience in accounting. The business has been operational for 30 years, with recurring clients going back 10+ years, and has been run by this one couple who are well into their retirement years but hadn't pulled the trigger. And guess what? This software business satisfies all 11 of my requirements above. Well, I send their broker an offer of about $200K with half of it owner-financed for 5 years. They accept. Done deal. The profit annualized is $70,000 with an initial investment of $100,000. ROI = 70%. Nice! Since taking over, I'm happy with the performance, and I only spend maybe a couple hours a week on it. I outsource the programming.

Why stop there? I know MJ preaches monogamy. But I feel you can scale your company multiple ways. 1) expanding your sales in your current product/service line, and 2) buying existing businesses to generate more revenue. The only limiting factor of the second is that you will hit a limiting threshold in time when managing and marketing your multiple business holdings. Hopefully by then, you have gotten to a point where you can hire managers to offload that work. In any case, I next took over... a blog. I laugh when I write that because as mentioned before, I hated blogging. But I'll give you a little secret. You can hire writers, which I have a whole staff of them.

The blog is more than just a blog with hundreds of thousands of viewers per month. It has an online Facebook page with a quarter million followers, and a Facebook group with tens of thousands of passionate people whose lives revolve around my niche. And I am one of them, also passionate towards the content that we generate. So, I placed an offer, and got it, trademark included. $80K. We make money working with an advertising agency that deals with handling ad fill. Profit after paying our writing staff has been about $3500/mo. So annualized is $42,000 profit/year. ROI = 52.5%.

Next acquisition. I bought a web site backup service. We have hundreds of customers that we perform nightly backups of their sites as well as make sure their sites are operational 24x7. I outsource that work to offshore for cheap, but excellent labor. I love the guys who keep this business going strong day to day. I barely do anything but accounting for this. Maybe spend half an hour a day. I got it for $35,000. And annualized we make $30K in profit. ROI = 85%.

And most recently I've assumed a web marketing business. This too has a team of contractors that do the heavy lifting. Premium one-word, business-specific, domain name that garners 30K organic traffic a month. Very little ad spend. We generate about $8000/mo. in profit, again annualized to $96K profit for an ROI = 240%. I haven't figured out why the previous owner sold this other than he didn't want to do it anymore, and wanted to concentrate on his other business. He's got rep. I did my research.

So here's the grand total annualized profit:

Accounting Software Business: $70,000
Blog and Online Community: $42,000
Web Site Backup Business: $30,000
Web Marketing Business: $96,000

Total Annualized Profit: $238,000

Mind you, since these ventures take up maybe a total of a couple hours a day for me to run, I am free to focus on marketing for growth, while keeping a couple of my consulting clients. I quit the one client where I had to go into the office, and the other remote client, I just quit because I didn't have time for them. So I work from home now. The consulting dollars gets me to $400K a year, but I will most likely stop consulting next year to completely focus on my businesses. And my family and I are planning on moving to Central America this winter, because we love it there, and hell, I can work from anywhere that has internet.

One last note on being a serial entrepreneur. I look for synergies between my businesses and any future acquisitions. Each of the four ventures that I now have complement one or more of the other businesses, so I can leverage/cross-sell amongst the lot of them. This specific business model is starting to gain traction. But one challenge for me is branding when cross-selling. I haven't figured out how to consolidate the brands most efficiently. Each has their own distinct brand that current customers trust. And future customers may gravitate to the current branding. So not sure yet, but it's a good problem to have.

Thank you for sharing! I'm currently engaged in consulting as well, and I've experienced significant success using the process you mentioned. I can personally attest to its effectiveness. In fact, I've expanded my operations to the point where, leveraging my network, I've been able to bring on additional consultants through my company.

However, I've encountered challenges in scaling further, particularly in terms of acquiring another business. I attempted to explore potential opportunities on https://bizbuysell.com/, but unfortunately, I couldn't identify a suitable match. I would greatly appreciate it if you could offer some guidance on how you went about finding businesses, as your insights would be invaluable. Thank you!