How to Sell Your eCommerce Business

welcome to the ecommerce podcast with matt edmondson a show that brings you regular
interviews tips and tools for building your business online
hi and welcome to the e-commerce podcast with me your host matt edmondson
a show all about growing your own online business yes how to do it top
tips all that sort of stuff we get into i eat i mean every week i get to talk to amazing people from the
world of e-commerce and ask them all kinds of questions about what they know
and how it's going to help us to develop and grow our own online businesses right
now i don't know have you ever thought about selling your e-commerce business i mean
there are stories that you hear all the time right of people building an e-commerce
business and then selling them for crazy sums of money
but selling an online business can be an overwhelming process because there is a lot of uncertainty
and it requires patience and trust in the system and as a seller going to market you are putting yourself
in a vulnerable position because not only do you not know if you're actually going
to be successful at selling but you also have to open up about the business and let people look into
something that could be very private to you right and they're going to give you thoughts
and feedback and all kinds of things about what you've done so i am super excited today to be
chatting to brad weyland of quiet light brokerage um he has helped countless ecommerce owners sell
their businesses and he is going to give us all kinds of tips and tricks and insights that you
are not going to want to miss uh especially if you're thinking of selling your business right how do we
get the best sale that we can now all of today's notes from the show will
be available uh for free uh on our website just head on over to matt edmondson.com to download them they're
there for you for free just take a moment and go and download all the links that brad talks about everything are going to be in the show
notes now before we get into what is going to be a fascinating conversation and super helpful
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more information on my site at matt edmondson.com [Music]
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[Music] so brad thanks for joining us thanks for
being here great to have you on the show all the way from well near nashville tennessee right
you're you're you're beaming in so uh all the way to sunny liverpool well dark
liverpool now but thanks for being on the show yeah thanks for having me matt i'm glad to be here no no problem it's uh it's a
privilege really because we're going to get into this whole thing about selling your online business right
which i um i'm really intrigued about right just so many questions buzzing through my
head and uh look i mean i really enjoyed our pre-call where we talked about this and i thought oh this is going to be a
great show but before we get into that i think it would be good just so the audience
understands a bit about you what you do now and how you kind of came into this whole
brokerage and selling online businesses yeah so i've been in the workforce uh
almost years and uh was cl was trained to be an
accountant a finance guys something along those lines was kind of wanting to get a financial analyst job
out of out of school there was a publicly traded company that i was kind of hoping to work for
in a financial analyst capacity and the ceo got escorted out with the
paperwork for my job approval on his desk oh no i went went back to the vp
that had kind of set me up with the interview and said do you guys have anything and he said you know what we've
got a sales and use tax accounting job that just opened up okay oh
okay well i'll interview for it so i took the job and so i did hours a day of
sales and use tax accounting and property tax for a big rv company in the states and after about three months i was like
i'm gonna get fired i felt like i was checking into a jail cell my dad my dad was a corporate guy uh worked for
hp hewlett-packard for years i thought that dad's job was like the most ideal and so i
planned my whole life around i'm gonna get a finance degree i'm probably going to corporate maybe i'll do some financial planning
that might be like a an alternative path and i got in like three months and i was
like i'm gonna rot here they'll never think i'm any good at anything this is gonna be terrible i can't i can't even bring myself to
like get into the office and i realize that the same entrepreneurial spirit that had driven me all through high
school and college was not gonna let up and that i needed to do something that gave me a little more freedom and creativity so
i found my path i thought would be to go the financial planning route so i leveraged
some connections and some different things got an offer from edward jones to come on as a as a financial planner and then i had
two friends that had been running a t-shirt business that they started a few years before
okay and they say hey do you want to jump in and do some like business development for us
and they had like employees and i was like yeah sure so i came in and started trying to sell t-shirts
after a few months they had this website they were starting to get some sales from and i started playing with the website
and that's when everything kind of changed for me i got really into search and specifically in the natural search
spent several years kind of fumbling it around doing a terrible job and but had lots of freedom you know i
wasn't making any money but didn't have any didn't have any responsibilities either so i just worked all the time
my wife and i were both working and so i just worked a lot and failed a lot and eventually
after from to i pretty much was just fumbling it around
you know finding little successes here and there on some paid ads but in we kind of struck gold and
you know built a site from the ground up to rank naturally and on the day it launched it was
gizmodo picked it up and put it on the front page there was no social media it crashed the site
oh wow thousands and thousands of people trying to get to it no one can get to it and then a month later adobe awarded us
with a site of the day award and said you guys have done the best flash you know you know photoshop
environment we've ever seen blah blah blah and so we grew at like
a year for nine years holy cow so it just was the t-shirt business it was yeah wow and so if you fast
forward to you know uh by the time i left that you know business we had you know
employees we had a square foot warehouse that we were that we owned that we were producing
shirts from and it turned into a pretty good sized medium you know business now
it went heavily into the fulfillment business like fulfilling for
other e-commerce yeah and we never really developed out like a really good
e-commerce team and so the more time went on the more we were kind of outmatched by
other e-commerce players and we were going more and more down the fulfillment road which was less and less interesting to
me because i really liked the web yeah but i was always kind of a one-man band there like i ran all the web for
this you know um seven and eight figure business and you know so i had to wear a
lot of different hats and that gave me a lot of experience and exposure a bunch of different things so and just
it's at one point i finally kind of got bored and i kind of felt like man t-shirts is a really hard way to make money we
calculated that every shirt had to touch hands before it left the building and so that's a lot of people every
order is custom every order is time sensitive these are for groups these are for you know i've got a charity event and
all this stuff i have my shirt and it's got to be perfect and nobody wants to be the guy that ordered shirts that suck for his group
and so there's a lot of anxiety and so i saw a friend of mine who was in the
content space and he had a content site that he was looking at buying
and it had made like three thousand dollars in the last month and it was for sale for grand
and i was like what what do you do and he was like you don't do anything you just post blogs and things like that and i
was like i mean that sounds like the kind of business i want to be in i want to be in kind of
you just you know publish an article and then yeah yeah moment right yeah so he decided he
wasn't going to buy he's like you know what i found that it's only worth grand and i was like well can i buy it and he was like sure you can buy it so i jumped in
bought it for grand made my money back in months and then went on a crazy buying spree
where i bought companies in five years and oh my goodness ended up selling that
into private equity in and so from
to i was kind of trying to figure out what i was gonna do next still running a small
portfolio had some other e-commerce things that have gone on during all that time i'm not going to cover every little detail but
had some other things going but nothing that was like you know really that involved and got approached by mark
doust at quite like the founder of white light he took weird dinner one night he said hey what'd you think about coming on and
advising clients for quite light and i was like you mean come on and be a broker
and he was like yeah what do you think about that i was like honestly if i give up on everything and there's
and i have nothing left i think that sounds like a good idea and mark was like wow thank you for
putting it so you know nicely and i told him i was like honestly mark did can anybody even make any money in
that work all the guys i've dealt with seemed like total sleaze bags it was like well we do it different and
you know you you're an entrepreneur i only hire entrepreneurs and i court them and so that's
he kind of planted the seed and then he would send me things every now and then he'd be like hey did you know that
this is how much people earned at quiet light did you know that this is the kind of lifestyle they have and then my i remember calling him one day and i
said okay mark look i can't really work for anybody so i got a question for you how much
time could someone take off so it's not really a job i mean i we share fees i mean i don't i have a
company underneath quite light but but i said how much time could a broker or advisor take off before it would be a
problem for you he said well i wouldn't want anybody to take off more than a year at a time
i was like okay i'll give it a try but that was the he seems like a great guy i mean just saying that
yeah this guy really understands entrepreneurs he understands they don't feel tied down and so his his kind of
premise behind the whole uh quiet like thing
is hey you know we're gonna put people that have done a lot of things online out there
and they're gonna be people that have operated bought and sold businesses and we're gonna let them advise sellers
on how to get out with a successful exit and so i've been doing it for three years and i've had
some pretty decent success with it and i do really enjoy um
moving from problem to problem each business is a problem i get to jump in spend it spend some time with these
people try to solve that problem and then move on to the next one and so
you know i'm an operator um i probably will operate again at some point in a more involved
capacity but i've really enjoyed getting to know this space better getting to know the private equity side
of this space better made a lot of good connections and right now i'm really enjoying advising
clients on kind of how to go from point a to point b well so that's what you're doing now you're
you're helping clients sell their online business so you they come to you i want to sell
the business you get them ready to sell their business help them figure stuff out so they get maximum return on
their on their sale is that have i understood that right that's exactly what we do now we have a
lot of buyers and sellers and so buyers come to me all the time too it's a very common thing
um i get emails i probably get somewhere in the neighborhood of emails a month of people saying
hey i need to get minutes of your time i want to tell you what we're looking for okay which is not i don't even really
know how to respond to those because i don't want to take those calls um those are those are difficult calls for me i'm not a i'm not a search
service to find you a business um i think there's some talk of quite a lot
of some folks offering that kind of thing buy a side um but as a general rule i
represent sellers i'm really trying to help sellers people that are ready to sell prepared
for selling and so i've got to navigate buyers and sellers okay so there's a whole bunch of people who
listen to this show brad whose ears have suddenly perked up because they'll have an online business and it
will event in their head the idea of selling and they would have heard of other people selling their online business but
i think running my own online businesses and having been approached a couple of times to buy my company
the whole thing feels a little bit like it's shrouded in kind of mystery and black arts i don't
know if it's just me that thinks that but is that is that quite a common feeling that people have
i think that it is can be an overwhelming process um emotionally it doesn't seem to work
well with entrepreneurs as a general rule um there's a lot of uncertainty uh
entrepreneurs are not known for being patient it requires some patience um
so you know i don't know i don't know if it's if it's you know if it's that mysterious what's actually
going on but i think that you kind of have to be prepared that it's a vulnerable time when you go
to sell okay putting yourself in a vulnerable position because not only do you not know if you're going
to be successful at selling but you also have to kind of
open up the business and let people look into something that's been very private in most cases
and let them get their thoughts about what you've done yeah and sometimes that makes the entrepreneur feel
threatened sometimes it makes them feel just uneasy sometimes they don't care it depends on
the person um but i find i mean we have people that come to us and say i want you to sell my
business but i don't want to really reveal any information about my business okay i thought those two things would
have gone hand in hand myself that's not what they that's not what they say but that's what they're really saying oh okay when you get down to it
yeah they're like hey so yeah i'd love to sell it um now you're not going to show that p l to anyone are you well
i guess i'm a little bit more relaxed about it yeah do you not have it so i mean in the uk
uh my accounts are public everyone can see my accounts you just go to the company's house website which is
run by the government and you can download them because it's a public it's a limited company so it's part of the deal
the ones where you can't see their accounts are the ones where it's private where it's like a partnership or where it's just in my name
and so i don't know if i'd have an issue with publishing my accounts as such because they're
they're out there already if that makes sense
yeah so in the states the only ones that are
public as a general rule are the ones you see
on the public stock exchanges okay so tesla apple you know those
those are companies that are public if they're publicly traded then their numbers are public
um you know in my case think have you heard about all the the hubbub about donald trump's tax
returns yes this is a perfect example you know there's this big there's this big debate in the states about whether or not does
donald trump have to show his tax returns or not and um because in in america if you have a
private company you don't have to share anything with anyone besides the irs and
you know what we've come to learn is even what people show the irs it can be very confusing yeah
long big big tax code with a lot of loopholes for for wealthy people okay so uh okay well i mean i
i am very tempted to go down the trump tax return debate but let's avoid it for now
so if i was if i was wanting to sell my online business right um
where do i start what what's what's a good place to sort of get my head to to so before i start this
journey well you can't even think about selling
if you don't have good records so you know the the kind of the the very most
fundamental place to start is if you're not keeping your financials monthly and very organized
there's no chance that anyone's going to be able to sell anything for you so we got to have really good history so i have calls of
people that are getting started all the time and i say you know hey are you keeping your financials things like that and
sometimes they say yes but sometimes they say well i mean i have an idea of you know what i'm doing but i'm not i'm not really
that just doesn't work you really have to before you can think about selling you
have to really keep your numbers going in a very consistent fashion for
really we need three years we sell up on months sometimes but um but months is a more ideal setup
and so we've got to have people that are really kind of in the details they've got revenue
minus cost of goods sold minus expenses equals net profit and then if there's some ad backs or something
it gets to what we call seller discretionary earnings which is just you know your discretionary income it's your net income plus maybe
some other like personal things that you're allowed to expense on the business in your country or something you know that are personal
um and so i always start with the financials but there's other questions that we have
to ask ourselves and so one is how transferable is the business
it's a big question i'll give you an example had someone wanted to sell an app that i had sold
previously like an iphone app in the last year and there's a there's a
button in the developer tools for apple that if you click it you can never transfer that app
everything oh wow okay privacy and icloud yeah and so the guy that i
sold it to the first time he operated it for a while and he came back and said hey you know i didn't really ever pay much attention this i
think i should probably unload it his developer was doing some updates and saw this box about icloud
and he checked it and that box made that application untransferable for
forever if it's not transferable
um you know and then uh risk you know there's there's risk situations
going on and so you know it's hard to hard to articulate but i'll give you just an example like i had
a i had a valuation request for a domain name this week
that's related to the pandemic so like it's not this one but i'll just
use this as an example covidcom yeah you know
so if someone throws me an uh and we don't really sell domains but if someone throws me cobidcom
and they're like hey i want to sell this it could be earning a million dollars a
month right now because there's tons of talk around the world about covet maybe it's filled out with
information and it's got ads on it but is anyone going to buy it if they
think that a vaccine or whatever or this you know whatever is going on will be gone in six months
there's just tons of risk and so you know we got to have documentation we got to assess whether
there's transferability we got to access what the risk of the business is these are all going to determine the price but they're also
going to determine whether or not a sale is even possible sure you know to even happen
that's really interesting and so i mean i uh and i i guess it also depends
like i think about jer so i have a beauty company called jersey beauty
company which is probably the most sellable site that i have at the moment so if i was going to offload something that
would be that site so we have accounts going back to
um so i check jeremy i'm just running through my little my little checklist in my head so
accounts are good transferability i'll come back to that and then risk you know it's
been around for a while it's in the beauty business it's kind of stable it is what it is right and so i guess if i was to ask answer
the question about transferability i think there would be a number of different ways to answer that question for example
um i could transfer that business um say to if i sold that business to
somebody who didn't have anything to do with e-commerce just wanted the business and
they bought it so they bought the distribution system jeremy they the whole thing becomes theirs
well that's very different to me transferring that or selling that to somebody who already owns
an e-commerce business who's already got a warehouse who's already got the fulfillment engine and staff and they're just
literally plug-in you know it's plugged into this system over here and the next day it's plugged into that one and away they go they're
shipping out the products um i think i find i sorry i i get what you mean in terms of
transferability and the nuances and and who buys it and and the value therefore that it's associated
with because i think if if um you know if uh if someone came to me to
buy the business just because they wanted to run it they like beauty and they wanted to create an income well i don't think to them it's worth as
much maybe i'm i'm getting this wrong it's worth as much as it is to the guy over here that's already got the
distribution facility who doesn't need all those extra on costs he's going to make a lot more profit than this
person over here yeah it's definitely a real uh situation that we deal with um now
you know you're in the uk so that i don't want to get too into the weeds but in the states
of what we sell goes as an asset sale which usually means that the goods are
transferred from one warehouse to another that everything is kind of you know and the business that was there
whatever the name of it was xyz corp that the seller had stays
and he just empties out all of its revenue and then he's got a company he either has to like go find a new revenue source for it or
just shut it down close it down with the irs what i found with sellers in the uk i
don't know how much of your audience is is uk based but um many times uk sellers one of the
transferability concerns becomes that they want to tap into entrepreneurs tax relief yeah i definitely would yeah yeah which
is a program in your country that i think takes your tax from like or something down to is that right
yeah so here's the issue with that is that requires a stock sale
which means you've got to sell the business entity the limited liability whatever you call a limited company you got to sell that whole entity
we run into some red tape on that from a couple different angles for one we can't legally offer a public company up for
sale it's against the law um you need an sec that's a that's a us-based company
uh us-based uh regulatory arm securities and exchange commission
you need an sec uh license in order to sell a publicly traded
company now oh wow no one's actually doing it when you're talking about an e-commerce business or
something like that there isn't any sec brokers that i'm aware of that are actually doing it they they actually deal with public companies
like tesla apple and places like that so it's a little bit of a problem in our code so we offer things up as an asset
sale now if someone comes in and says hey i want to buy it as a as a stock sale they can do it it just
changes how we interact with the transaction we can't we can't really be involved in the same way we can we can help
market the business for sale and help you prepare everything which is the most important part of what we do
but when it really comes down to it you know you're gonna have to sell the whole company and so that becomes a
transferability concern sometimes if you came to me and said let's let's list the company for sale
and i put it out there and let's you know we put it out there as an asset sale because we're required to
and you say well if it's going to go as an asset sale i'd have to sell for more we'd have to work out something you know in order to make up for this
difference and then you guys flip it to stock there's going to be some buyers that are like well i don't want to buy the stock
and there's reasons for that because like in the u.s if someone buys your business for a million dollars then
they if they buy it as an asset sale they can go depreciate that asset they got a million dollars in basis in
it if they buy it if they buy the stock of your company excuse your uk company but if you buy a
stock of someone's company a lot of times the basis is less because that person didn't put
as much they put the sweat into the business to make it grow but they didn't put as much in not as much basis left so there's other
transferability concerns but to your point i think that the internet kind of provides us with this
opportunity to sell businesses much
more streamlined than like a traditional brick and mortar business yes there's some complication there's
warehouse concerns there's there's logistics that are issues but when you compare it
to other businesses for sale out there even the most complex look pretty simple yeah when you compare
them to the other types of businesses people can buy that's very true and um i mean i guess
if i flip this then if i was looking to buy an e-commerce business
for the very reasons that you've just said um what are some of the things that i should be thinking about
because that's also going to help me to understand how i should sell it i would have thought yeah well it's funny because it's really
the same things i mean i want to know is there documentation i want to know what the risk is buying
it i want to know what the trajectory looks like um in in terms of uh where it's going and i
want to know about you know kind of the transferability of the assets to me it actually we're
both both buyers and sellers are kind of looking at the same information and just looking at it from a different
angle but you know what i find that the buyers really want to see is they're really scared of trends
yeah buyers want to see good trends people come to me all the time and they say like hey i got this
business it's been great last couple months really been rough that's that's a really
difficult time to sell because the buyers don't know your business at all so when they see
those last two months don't look good all they're thinking is well this is going to be a zero in months yeah they just do the math
it's all worst case scenario they don't have any sense of like that there's an actual brand here that's got some trust and
things like that and so buyers care immensely about the trends
and they're willing to pay for good trends and they're not willing to pay for bad
trends honestly and then um you know the easier you can make the transition
and the lower the price the faster things can close and then the inverse the more complicated the transition and the higher the price
the harder it is to you know kind of get get it closed so what would be if i was looking to
sell what would be a typical time frame uh or is that asking like how long's a piece of string
no it's um so i i don't i can't speak to our competition like for sure but i've been told by people
who call me that are like they're currently listed with our competition or they're talking with them about
uh i've been told that our competition across the board does like a six month to a one year contract
exclusivity meaning no one else can sell it for six months to a year depending on which firm you go with
ours has always been days and i think that mark's approach to that was
basically that the timer starts once we push the business live which takes a couple weeks depending on the business
take a couple weeks to get to that point but push it live if we don't have a buyer
identified in days our feeling is you need to be allowed to go look
somewhere else people do not want to be in the sales process for two years you know they they don't want to be in
it for six months um but you know at quiet light just as a
kind of general rule of thumb we try to be careful about pricing at the valuations that we set ourselves
i'm not here to have someone come tell me hey i've got my business and i know you said
it's worth but i want you to stick it out there at because i think there might be a
chance we just don't do that you just stick with the it's like we're going to sell it at and it is what it is but
we want to do it we know enough about what it takes to get one of these deals
done that we are not going to allow you to shoot the deal in the foot
because we know that you'll be in pain okay we're positive so so what we say instead is look we don't
agree if you don't want to list that's fine you know you can take it elsewhere or you can hold on to it but
we feel strongly about it now if i don't feel strongly i'll be just the opposite if i say man i don't know how much things work
maybe it's something that i haven't dealt with or maybe there's some reasons why it's hard to put a value on and i say you know i think it's probably worth and you
say brad i think it's worth i say i really don't know what it's worth so if
you want to stick it out there at we could do that for a few weeks and see what happens but we need to be prepared to lower the price if it doesn't work
yeah um i don't think that we always try to pretend like we know the exact price i'm a big believer in the market forces
so you know the market's going to ultimately tell us but i do feel like i've got a pretty good sense for what the market's going to say
in most deals on the forefront and what i want to do is i want to have a situation where when we
launch it we get multiple parties that are interested in the business
when you sell your home at least in the states when people sell their home they over price it almost of the
time i think right now is actually a seller's market in the states because you know they're printing money like crazy and
interest rates are super low and yeah sellers are actually selling pretty quick but as a general rule
people with their ties up for sale if their house is worth you know thousand dollars they listed it and then they play
this waiting game it's like i'm gonna wait for that buyer i think it's worth but the market you know when you do a when
you do a limit order when you're doing stocks when you buy a stock if you press market order that's the price that it sells or
is bought or sold at right now yeah if i press market order on tesla then i buy a share at the
current price no matter what it is and so my philosophy and really qlb's philosophy
on how we handle listings is we really want to go in as close to the market price as possible
and the reason is this they're t it's really tough to get these transactions done
they fall apart over the smallest things they're very very fragile so when we go
at the market rate we get lots of buyers come in and then the cream rises to the top
and then our sellers are able to pick from hey i've got these three really good candidates to buy my
business they're willing to pay this this market rate they all agree that the price is about the same their offers are
within ten thousand dollars of each other they're all about the same they close in about the same amount of time and then we end up picking between
well which one looks like it's the most sure to close that's a very common you know kind of situation so
that's how we want to strategically approach it it's not so much about i think it's great to have pie in the
sky numbers you don't come to you don't come to quite like any broker for the pie in the sky numbers
those pine sky stories that you read on tech crunch and things like that those are very rare things generally
sell for what they're worth and so i think we should try to put it out there at what we think it's worth and the market will correct us and at
quite late i don't remember what the last date i saw on it was but we get an unbelievably high amount of
our deals sold at asking price or above and it's not because we're underpricing
it it's because we're putting it out there at the market rate a lot of times people come and say i think you got this price right
i'm interested but if we overprice it by there are good buyers that respond and
say this looks like a great business but i'm not gonna dig in because it's overpriced
okay so how do you how do you reach that market value what what are some of the
criteria that you're i mean i'm not asking you for your secret sauce brian but jim jones i mean it's that kind of
um it's it's um if i'm if like i've got my business what are some of the things that i need to think about
to give me some indicative idea of value besides the things that you've already mentioned
well the range is really tight so you know i don't know that there's any real
secret to the sauce here just so you know not to burst your bubble oh here i'm not over here modeling out some
very complex thing you know like wait once i get the last factor we're going to push you know the equals button we're going
to find out your exact valuation it doesn't really work like that i'm really leveraging my experience you
know i i've sold five times myself i've had five personal okay
yes i have bought times wow so i'm
a buyer and i've brokered about deals so you've got to find a bit of
experience you've got more than me brad i'm not gonna lie right i just kind of hung out in that space and so i have some sense and then
not just that but i also follow the industry so i see all of our deals at quiet light so i hear i see them i've
got access to the data i can see what the multiples were see all the stuff so what i've found e-commerce
you know and i'm going to take subscription out of it so i've got all these people doing like you know nutrition supplements things
like that they got subscription revenue take that out of this equation because subscription revenue is different okay
got us got a subscriber it's gonna pay you every month then we need to talk but traditional e-commerce i find a
product i press add to cart i go to the car to check out you ship it to me or i go to amazon
i add it to cart go check out in traditional e-commerce the multiples are pretty tight
the overwhelming majority like i'd say of the businesses are selling between a
times multiple and a times multiple of earnings so when
let me just clarify language when you say earnings what's that figure is that would you
like that turnover would they call that profit would i call that gross profit net profit what are we talking
about so we would look at it as your revenue is your top line
it's not a multiple of that minus your cost of goods sold is your gross profit yeah minus your
expenses is your net profit or your earnings yeah and then i said earlier you might
have some ad backs and ad backs might be like your personal health insurance or
your personal cell phone or your personal car or whatever personal vacation that you're allowed to expense for one reason or another i
don't know what things are different and so we add all those back that gets us to seller discretionary earnings meaning
hey the business made a hundred thousand dollars but you know because matt does this this is
this and this it actually made yeah cause those are discretionary the new owner's gonna have to play with
they may choose to go get that car or get that whatever or they may not so when i say two and a
half to three and a half times the earnings i mean the net the net net profit
number or the seller discretionary earnings number now um
it's kind of complicated because on smaller deals which i'm going to use a very broad
stroke for smaller and it's not a fine line it's not like an exact line let's just say
deals under seven million that's not that small yet smaller yeah smaller
not because i'm i'm not saying seven million is actually a big deal but smaller because i'm going to compare it to the larger
so smaller deals we add inventory to the purchase price so let's just say your business was
making a year and i said it was worth a three times
multiple that's and then you tell me hey landed cost of
goods that i haven't sold yet that are sellable is a hundred thousand so in that case we would sell it for
three times multiple plus inventory so if someone came and want to pay full price they pay plus
okay now the larger of that scale for us is the to million
range which we're being asked routinely to advise on
and in those deals they almost always sell to private equity
and private equity will walk out of the room if you tell them they have to pay for inventory separate okay they're gonna want a working
capital peg they're gonna want inventory included it's just different lingo
different everything the reason why we do that separation is because on the smaller deals
the it makes more sense to the entrepreneur buyer to people who are not in private equity
that are like running a small team have a small business where they're acquiring some businesses or they're an individual
the idea of i want to know what i'm paying for the business and then i want to talk about the inventory they like those conversations to be separate
we're not going to exchange any working capital if you got grand in the bank whenever you sell the business you're going to sweep that out they're
going to put their own money back in the business um that's how that's going to work you get to private equity
like i have a deal right now million deal under loi uh seller is taking
out of this transaction and rolling
into the new entity with the buyers wow and so that's a private equity deal
so in that case um you know we don't the value of the inventory is
included in that and so is working capital which will be like you know probably close to a million
dollars okay that's really interesting so i mean uh i dare say the majority of
people listening to the show would be your classes a small deal few of them will be the larger ones um which i find fascinating
the thing that you you mentioned the multiple figure um i don't know if you've ever heard of a guy called albert gubay he's um
he's a british entrepreneur um passed away a few years ago he he's he
was if he started a few companies in the uk that most people in the uk will know but they
won't know who he is it was kind of like one of these hidden figures if that makes sense and um when he passed away i don't know
you know he was multiple hundreds of millions of wealth i mean he was a very wealthy chap
and um i had the privilege of getting to know him and we did some work together over the years and he was very kind and very gracious
to me took me under his wing a little bit and he said to me one day because i was asking him this question this is before
i got into e-commerce about how do you value a business because he would buy businesses and he would sell businesses
and he very simply said to me matt listen what you do is you take the net profit and you times that by three and that's
the maximum value of that business if you can get it if you can buy it under that value you've got a winner
and so i'm really fascinated that actually that's that's pretty much between two and a
half and three and a half is what you said it's it seems like goobey's wisdom from years ago is still carrying forward
which i find quite fascinating and so if i bring that back then to the business that you purchased the
content business that was making three grand a month which is so you buying that for
actually that was a bit of a bargain going by that multiple yeah so the risk
on that one was that it had only made for
two months okay so that wasn't the three years it made like
for the whole all the years before yeah and the last two months before the sale it made and so i go to the seller
and i say hey why did it make these months he's like well i started doing
advertisements inside the post like got these people that reach out to me there's thousands of posts they would
say hey we want to be featured in this post as an ad and because it really appeals to our users
and he said so i think that that revenue will be there if you're willing to do those kinds of sponsorships going forward i just never
done them before but i can't be for sure well not only that but i mean i made my
money back in in months by doing that and more yeah i got that thing up to five or six thousand and by the time
that particular buy ended up growing much larger than that um and that's what led me to buying a
bunch of stuff in that exact space i ended up buying domains in that space from different you
know as different acquisitions um and so you know that is true so let me clarify
two things number one a five million dollar deal or a six million dollar seven is not a small deal i was only saying it
for the example of million yeah okay so small deals for us our average deal size is about a million
okay if you include private equity sales which we we don't like to include them because they skew our numbers if you
include our private equity deals it moves it up to like million on average so if people come to us and
they say i got a business for sale and it's like that's a small deal for us
uh there might be a broker at qob that would take it on and sell it our list loves to see a
small deal you know because they're used to seeing larger deals so when something small comes out
they scoop it up you know really fast a lot of times um so that one clarification is just on i'm
big and small like i think a million listing is a large listing um but
for that example i was trying to differentiate the other thing uh that i would mention is when i say
the overwhelming majority sell for two and a half to three and a half that's a true statement
let's talk about what doesn't sell for two and a half to three and a half so like the business i just gave you the
example of sure million and we're under loi we're
going to close before the end of the year we had three competing offers and the multiple was okay
so where can where can we expand that multiple well growth great growth opportunities
great historical growth that's one way yep longevity this is a year old business
that's had a history of growing um in this case there's been a couple of
acquisitions made in the last year that haven't really shown all their value yet
so that raised the multiple sum so you know we just tried to put it out there at
the highest that we could justify and one of the ways we're justifying is his growth is justifying the multiple so
we're like yeah you're going to pay at close but he's still going to be the ceo and
here's where he'll be next year and it's pretty compelling like it's not it it looks like it will fall into a
much more reasonable not three but much more reasonable so also you know had a young company come to me this
week and i i potentially will take this on a young company coming to me this week
uh only months old million in sales oh my goodness the dream yeah yeah yeah
really months yeah and five million in profit
wow really really strong and so they one of the comments that they made
was you know what could we sell this thing for and i said well we only have months of
history why are you guys trying to get out there like well [Music]
we just it's just grown so fast that you know we just really feel like we need to take some chips off the table
like it's just i think it's just overwhelming it's just such a whirlwind and they moved into such a big business
so fast you know something year old guys running it um
you know in that case i'll still try to go at a premium ultimate i won't go
because we only have months of history and we got product concentration most of it's to like a single skew
and there's lots of concerns but with that kind of growth you also have to believe like man what
is the opportunity there that's a big indian so uh we're kicking around the idea of going at on that
and that would be high if it was like a business but it would clearly be a
private equity deal is pretty light on multiple for private equity
uh i don't know that they'll be overly offended by it okay so just just some context i i find the
whole thing absolutely fascinating bradley my my head is spinning with a million different questions so i appreciate you
letting us know um if
if i was uh let's say with jersey for example so i have this beauty company so i have i have three options i guess in front of
me right and one i could sell it two i could carry on with it um and keep
doing with it what i'm doing or three one of the things you talked about there is i could try and grow
maybe with acquisition i could try and buy more businesses to build my business and grow my business
um the the latter of the the those three
being probably the most scary if i'm honest with you um but is that a viable strategy for
growth as an entrepreneur as an e-commerce business um to think actually maybe i don't sell
it maybe i go and buy other people's businesses and that's how i'm going to build what i'm doing
yeah it's it's really the easiest way to grow is to acquire um one of the reasons why
i got so addicted to buying is because i didn't want to do the hard work of actually throwing the entities that i
had so i had them under you know my own umbrella of companies
and so you know if i was if if capital is not your biggest issue
then acquiring makes a lot of sense because you can just basically buy the success that you want it's like
how much more do i have to buy i mean i can remember tracking my revenues and income and saying well
i'm here today but i want to go to here so how much more do i need to buy
and i would just it was just a math equation for me i was just like okay well i need to buy at about a two and a half times multiple
i need to buy this much you know this many assets and that'll get me to here that's how i kind of did it now
a couple of words of caution there first of all the question of whether or
not you should sell is one that i don't think entrepreneurs
are executing on very level-headed oh i'd love to know what you why why do
you think that well because so many people come to me
and say i think it might be time to sell
and the reasons for it are a lot of times are circumstantial
like i'm bored um
i've been doing this a long time and i think i'd like to just take some chips off the table these are very common kinds of answers
yeah but here's what i'll tell you from someone who's sold some things and bought some things
once you sell now that income stream is gone now you have a pot of money instead of
the income stream you want to talk about feeling uncomfortable
the pot of money is way more uncomfortable than the income stream unless the pot of
money is so gigantic that you can never exhaust it
so my thing is people always say like man i i can't believe you even do this
job and give this advice so my my philosophy
is if you enjoy the business you've had that business since
yeah do you enjoy it um if i'm honest i'm enjoying it
more undercover than i have probably the previous two years um so i think i've um i would say i've
rekindled my love for it um but if i'm honest i would say i got bored with it
i can see why people would say that so i'm just bored with this now yeah so if people enjoy it
and if they think that the prospects for the future are good like if you're in a business that you
think is going to get shut down by amazon or the competition is going to be so great
that it's going to disappear overnight then that's not a good roadmap you know
for the future yeah no one's going to want to buy that i wouldn't have thought right right and and that's why maybe if you can sell it
you should sell it if you think that's where things are going but if you're in an industry where things look stable
where you think the process for growth are good or you enjoy the work enough then i would say never sell i'd say just
keep it and just incrementally improve it and don't ever abandon it
and um but where i start to feel like people should sell are one
are you not doing the things that you need to be doing to take care of the business that's the number one sign that i see a lot of times people
instead of going through the complication of selling they're like i think i'll just put this thing on autopilot see what happens i can tell
you i have the answer to what happens when you do nothing to a business do you
want to know what it is it crashes of the time yeah and i
have people contact me all the time and say i haven't done anything to this thing for a year and the trends are great
and what i say to that is that won't last it's very rare i own an application
that might be the exception to the rule
it is an application that allows for note-taking in the cloud
like evernote yeah but it's free and i sell ads on top of it
and i literally don't ever look at it and the traffic doesn't come from google
all the traffic's direct visits a day
it's all direct traffic i bought it from somebody yeah they didn't even have analytics on it i
said well can we hook analytics up to it hook it up first day i saw business and i was like
visits good night a lot of traffic here so then we go look at it and i was like well where's this coming from it's
google or something oh no it's all direct direct visits just people that use the
app and so you know now it's not a huge
business makes a few thousand dollars a month in ad revenue with very little you know no
cost really associated with it just servers you know so that is a business that i might be able
to do nothing i don't even know what i would do if i was gonna work i didn't know what i would do
i don't know what i would do to it but most things if you if you are going to
abandon it it's gonna crash it's going to crash and
and it's going to crash way worse than you expect when it does it's weird in the internet age some of
them hold on for long enough that the entrepreneur becomes convinced that they won't crash
and sometimes those are the ones that when they finally do catch up they catch up in a very brutal way yeah
and they crash hard but you know so i would say you know keep the business if you're if you enjoy it if you're willing to do the amount of
work that it takes to actually maintain the business no reason to sell unless you just need the money or something
like that um what you find is once you sell got that pot of money i was talking about
you got to go on a search what you find is you're on a search to replace what you had yeah and so it started to feel to me
and this is why people have asked me they're like why did you stop buying like you were doing all this buying and selling you sold into private
equity seemed like you had a pretty good gig going why did you stop doing that and start working a quiet light and i
would say like i didn't really stop i don't buy deals that are on our but i have connections from all my years
things come my way i still invest in projects um and i still have a portfolio i still
have some sites things that i'm interested in you know that i own uh that are very low
workload things like that but one of the reasons why i stopped is because it's a vicious cycle
i only liked buying but once i what i realized is that i would buy
i would operate i was good at finding some low-hanging fruit early that's always been kind of my thing buy something at a good multiple find
some low-hanging fruit early that's kind of my that's my thing never would take things down to the level of
detail that i needed to uh because i just didn't enjoy it um i'm
like you i mean you have an accounting degree i can do the accounting i can do the
detail work that doesn't mean i love it no i i like it for like two hours and then i'm bored with it i can build a
spreadsheet and then move on right yeah that's how i am i really enjoy the detail work
for a period of time but i don't if you're going to do like like content especially i do a lot in content contents detail work if you want to do
really well with content you're going to be in the detail work hours a day you're going to be in there breaking
down every little detail what this post is doing compared to this other post all that kind of stuff so i just tell you all that just to say
that like for me it became a vicious cycle of sold here's a big pile of money
but now i need to replace that income because i value the income i don't just want the pot i need the i
want the income yeah so then i'm just trying to reinvest this and then i find myself going
i'm out here looking for something like what i just sold why did i even sell it i should have
just kept it but that's kind of the cycle that it is and the main reason is if
really getting into it i'm being a little bit unfair to myself because i would sell things that hire multiples than a bottom four so
the real thing i was doing was trading multiples yeah yeah i buy something at a two and a half and i want to sell it at a three and a half or whatever you know
so i'll tell you in the middle and then and so let's move on do you subscribe to the the michael
gerber i think it was him the e-myth kind of entrepreneur idea that you should build a business to sell it
that should whenever you start a business you should you should be in the mindset that you're gonna sell it
even if you're the one that ends up buying it do you know michael uh not personally no
i know his books and his his ideas
yeah so i do i do i think if you're gonna have a business that it should always be in a position
where if someone called you up and said hey i want to buy it that it's something that you could put
the financials together and lay it out for someone in a very short period of time and say
here's what it looks like all things are for sale you never know every once in a while we get a moonshot that approaches us
um you know i'm i kind of subscribe more to the up to the kind of like view the world in terms of of work
in that as entrepreneurs we only get hit with like one or two really good
opportunities to make lots of money every few years and we spend the rest of our time trying
to replicate the ones that came yeah yeah this is this is kind of contributed to
my own personal boredom you know like my issue as a person if you want to get into like
you know if you want to do a little therapy session with brad right now my issue don't need to lie down yes
but you might my issue is nothing excites me you know in the
business world anymore because what was fun to me was when i had made no money and
i was trying to figure out how to make money online and so those years where i was short on
capital but i was high on energy yeah that was the most
when i think back on my career and i think about when were you having the most fun that was it yeah okay i know i totally
get that i totally i've seen the revenues come in and i didn't know how it was going to translate into actual income
but the excitement of checking it every five minutes and like working on the initiatives and then what
happened for me is i started having some success and making money became something that was easier
for me to do than i ever realized it would be but once i made money i never could find
that drive again now my wife and my five children would tell you that i work hard yeah you
know that they would say i mean you know they would say he says he doesn't do he says he doesn't work that hard but he's working all the
time and we see him like he's he's at the office he's up early every day so now i would say you know they saw what i
was doing at the office they may not be as impressed with you know what
about what what's actually going on but in all my circles even at quiet life i've had people at quiet like call me
and say man i don't see how you get so much done i mean i i'm known as a productive person um i've always said that i think that
i'm a fast worker so whenever i do work i think i get a lot done yeah um but i
lack like i wish there was an idea that i was so excited about that i wanted to go pour my blood sweat and tears into it
but there's not yeah and it's a you know what brad i said i think i said before we went and
hit the record button you and i are very similar and you're you're preaching to the choir here but because i
if i go back to my jersey example the reason why i've just sort of had to rekindle my love for jersey
is i i love the thrill of the startup jeremy i love the generation of ideas and the
getting thing going and if i'm still involved months later it's a miracle because i i'm on to the
next thing right and so with jersey we were like this is great this is brilliant this is running this is working
and i'm on to the next thing so i've hired a team to run jersey and i dip in and out of it
and then i'm on to the next thing whether that's a consulting um company which we set up whether that's a
web agency which we set up whether that's another e-commerce website we set up i'm always jeremy every months i've got to
have something new to get my teeth into um to get that to try and find that drive
that energy and i don't know if that's the thing common with entrepreneurs it kind of feels like it is we like the startup
we like figuring it out right at the beginning it is and actually one of the answers that sellers tell me the most frequently when i say why do you want to
sell because i do kind of go down this road where i try to convince people not to sell first just to see make sure because
sometimes they're that they realize that they don't want to sell and it's better for them to realize that before we start working on this project
then whenever we're supposed to close in three days and they call me and tell me they can't do it which is um so i try to i try to go down
that road of like really trying to figure out where they're at but i think the most common
and the most compelling answer that i get is what you just said which is i just don't i just like to
start businesses yeah don't really want to be there to see it come to fruition i'm happy to
happy to pass up the moon shot to jump into something new yeah and some
of the people that come back over and over again and buy over and over again at quite like that's who they are they've got an operations company set up
somebody's running the operation they have set up a scenario where they can go bet businesses and buy businesses
and and do the exciting idea and jump in for a few months and then kind of pass it off or
sell it or whatever it is they're going to do yeah it sounds ideal it's part of the reason why i did the consulting and
coaching is because you actually um it was there was a lot of people saying can you come help
and just the thrill of going in somewhere new with that fresh challenge that fresh idea
i i i guess i thrive in that kind of environment i love that that type of thing and so i get that
that would be um a big reason um now before we carry on because i feel
like i could talk about this for hours right i've got so lots of things going on one of the things that i did want to ask you
um was about this phrase reckless honesty what is that
all about for you guys okay so technically i've been told
we're supposed to say relentless honesty because some of the like um whatever focused
studies or whatever said that reckless seemed a little too harsh okay personally like reckless i think
reckless is great it appeals to me here's the story with
reckless honesty it is that we are in an industry
remember when i said that when mark approached me that i said be a broker those guys are all sleaze
bags remember that yeah that's generally how i feel about the industry like i really do so you know i don't
know that they're all like that probably some guy listening that's like a broker or somebody else he's like man that brad's terrible he's making us out
to be you know but i just like the people that i worked with i i bought businesses and and sold some businesses through
brokerages i wasn't impressed i didn't like who i dealt with so one of the things that it seems like
is a common approach in the industry is that you bring your business to us
and to one of our competitors and our competitor says hey matt what do you want to sell for you're like well i want to sell for
a four times multiple and they're like okay sounds good just sign this month
engagement letter and we're going to list it out there for four times multiple for you
and so they put it out there and then after three months you haven't heard anything and you email them and say hey can we
get on the phone i want to talk about what's going on with my business sale i'm gonna say well the activity's been a little bit light
we probably need to drop the price okay well what do you drop it to well if you want to get some interest you're probably gonna need to drop it to
and then you're going to say that's what brad told me he was going to sell it for
yeah and he only needed days so the reckless honesty has to do with let's just go ahead and
have the tough conversations right now up front and so and let's not be afraid to tell
people the truth even if the truth hurts you know so today i get this a lot got an email today
really fantastic brand for sale potential opportunity for me to jump in and broker the deal they sent me an
email and said hey i'm courting you versus several other brokers
um i saw your fee schedule is that negotiable let me know how we can negotiate your
fee schedule and so i just wrote back and said no
it is what it is i'm not going to negotiate my fee schedule and then i said and look if you're just
looking for someone to tell you what you want to hear there's there's a long list of people that are willing to do it in the industry
um you know i don't charge retainers right now for my services uh that may not always
be the case uh i'm starting to work on a lot more private equity deals and so
private equity deals generally come with retainers i mean that they just that's as a general rule they do because they
they have a lower success rate of completing for one reason or another and they usually come with you know a
retainer of something you know grand a month depending on what the size of the business is um
but the idea of reckless honesty is just let's just tell them the truth now
let's tell them what we really think about what the business world let's let's be willing to let a listing not happen with us now but let's tell
them let's let's let them know up front why we're not willing to do it and so in the case of this guy right here he might have gotten that email today and you
might said that brad's a jerk i asked him to negotiate his fees he won't even negotiate his fees
but what i think he'll realize is if he goes and lists with somebody else and then he doesn't sell it i think he's
going to look at my email differently then yeah i think he's gonna come back and be like well i guess i'm probably willing to pay your fees if
someone's just willing to be honest with me i've had that said to me a hundred times if you're just willing to be honest with
me that'd be great so it's a beautiful thing about going to
be honest with you no matter what we're just going to tell you like it is and i'm not going to sugarcoat it
i'll be honest with you from a marketing standpoint i actually think that being brutally honest with people
gets us more deals well it will definitely get you more repeat customers it's very um who's that chap i'm
thinking of patrick leoncione you know he wrote the book getting naked which is is pretty m if you want to read
his book just listen to what brad said it's a very good summary of that book uh it's
a brilliant book but in effect be brutally honest with your clients and um i think it's it's brilliant
can i ask um if uh there'll be some questions i think in people's minds so
quickfire questions do you broker uk business sales as well as u.s sales do you do international if people
are in the uk or australia or new zealand can they get in touch with you yes and uh
is there you know the guy said is your fin structure negotiable do you mind sharing what what sort of ballpark
figures we need to think about in our head in terms of brokerage fees yeah so we it's a little complicated we
follow what's called a modern layman form formula for calculating your um commission on sale so that runs
uh it's it's a graduated scale that reduces as the transaction value goes up so anything less than a million ten
percent it doesn't matter whether if you've got a business for sale and it's got in inventory
that would be assessed at okay now once you go over a million
inventory drops to no matter what size the transaction is so let's just say you know we're talking
about a um million dollar sale and it's got in inventory you
pay on the first million you pay on the second million so in that deal
you got on the first million you got on the
for the second million that's at nine percent i made that too complicated i should have done should have two million dollars let's do it
so you got two million dollars spot the accountant making things difficult with numbers yeah yeah [Laughter]
two million dollar deal you're gonna do on the first million that's you're gonna do nine percent on the
second million that's ninety thousand and then there's two hundred thousand in inventory at three percent be six grand
so for a million dollar deal inclusive of inventory you're looking at
in fees and we get paid when the deal closes now um that scale keeps going down it goes
ten nine eight seven six five four three three three three three three three
three three so how that really works out is in the m a world private equity
investment bank guys they want to make about five percent on a transaction but they don't want to fiddle with
anything less than million so if you take our modern layman you scale it all the way up to like a
million dollar transaction you're at like a four point something percent commission rate also
on private equity since the inventory's included it it doesn't get assessed separately it's just part of the deal it's hard to know
what you know what's what so um so for most of our deals you know the
people that are on our list kind of our what i call our bread and butter deals are one to five million dollars those
are we've got a very large list very active buyers sellers on that one to five million list that's that's who
we email out to that's who our site kind of caters to um and so those folks
you know are following that modern layman ten nine eight seven six five four three three three three three three that's that's the way
that it gets calculated and so it's not super easy to do in your head all the time but just know this that our fees are or
less yeah as the transaction grows so cents a good ballpark starting figure and then figure it out
up to a million you're going to be right at that mark and then you know every once in a while people will take on a smaller deal
and those this is just at the discretion of the broker like in in my case um if it's a perfect fit i might take on
a small deal i guard my time really carefully so i'm not as inclined to just take on anything nowadays i
really try to focus on i've been focusing a lot on private equity deals recently um but we have a
minimum of so if for some reason you've got a business that's worth and a quiet light broker is willing to
take it on you're going to pay more than because we have a minimum of
right i'm with you if we sell it for you're gonna pay us grand just because that's the minimum fee but
um on the private equity side just since i talked about the list private equity side we go pursue the
buyers there so like i've got a deal that um we've been uh working on uh
last couple months and uh actually had a buyer fall through on it due to some trends
that changed with the business and you know that one we've gone out to
private equity firms okay ended up with several offers and uh but we're going out and
proactively reaching out and um so we do we do it
i want to list jersey um i'm happy with your fee let's that's rock and roll do you how do you promote it how do you how do
you find the buyer or is it a case of actually we just know so many people now that well so so what happens is if it's
less than five million in sale price it goes on the site and it gets a scheduled email date that
email list has got a massive amount of buyers on it and so
if it's an attractive we've done everything or done our homework right we should get to inquiries
in the first to hours when it hits the website wow and that is a combination of here's what happens we put on the website
and then we schedule the email usually for the same day or the day after when it hits our website there's all
these services in the industry that scrape our website yeah they pull
our listings they heal them email them out to their groups they've they've been i've even heard of some that got like text message alerts
saying we listed something you know so um so there's people that follow us and then we also email out our list
and so when i list a business depend on the size now if i like if i do a million listing i'm
not even going to show people the materials without like some pretty serious vetting so if i do that i'm not going to get to
inquiries and i don't actually want to inquiries on that size deal the nature of the deal changes
doesn't it yeah the nature of the deal but but if it's a business that's under five million dollars um we're just going
to put it out on our list we're gonna get we're not gonna have to do a lot of proactive searching it's gonna be more about
filtering through the people that come to us figuring out who the best fits so if i wanted to buy businesses then i
i need to go to your website and subscribe to your email list all you gotta do is pick one listing
click a little check box that says notify me of future listings you'll get an email every time a listing launches
doesn't mean doesn't mean you'll get an email for every single thing you see on the site sometimes i have people say hey i signed up for your check box but
this deal right here i didn't get an email on like like the million dollar deal i just mentioned yeah
yeah to be fair as good as i am brad i'm i'm not in that league to buy something
for million just yet okay give me a year or
i two people that yell at me about it yeah i'm trying to say is that we put everything that's sale pending up
on the site even if it never went to the public list okay that's really interesting there's a
lot of buyers that feel like they have a right to see my listings that's where the
reckless honesty comes in yeah i'm paid by my client which is the
seller if someone buys that is like hey i don't really care
that you feel offended by it i'm doing what's best for my client so that means that i only go to three people
and i give them preferred access you know on the deal that i just told
you that i had three meeting offers you know how many people we went to one three three competing offers
three yeah do you um do you charge a fee for
someone who wants to buy a business or is it seller pays all the fees seller pays fees fair enough there is
talk um and i think there's some interest um
quietlight is going to be offering some buy side services i think it comes at about an hour
people buy so many hours and that is a quiet light broker
sourcing your business for you off market not through our deals but through offline deals yeah and we've got some
guys on the team that has some experience in that um but again each person's different
i'm not i have no interest in doing buy side deals if you want to pay me like a million dollars to do some buy side deals i'll do it
but i don't got to be worth it right yeah i don't really want to do it i i don't really like to measure my time
in dollars per hour as a general rule anyway and what i want to do is work on listings that are exciting and get them
sold well listen brad uh this has been a fantastic conversation i
super appreciate you being here with us and sharing all of that and being uh recklessly honest uh with your with
your information i just i love that phrase you may see that appear on my websites going forward i hope it's not
trademarked um i'm just being recklessly honest now if people want to get in touch with you
get a hold of you connect with you what's the best way to do that how do they reach out to you two things i want to mention one is brad
at quite light brokerage is my email it's easiest way to get a hold of me um i'm on twitter if
you want to see my personal rants at brad weyland um but the other thing i wanted to
mention is we have a referral program this is as much for you as anybody matt and that is about
of our listings are now coming from referrals so the way that works is if you have
someone that you think their business looks like they'd be a good candidate for quiet life and they say they're interested in
selling you send me an email and copy them on it so matt you got your
friend that's got the you know five million dollar business yeah and he wants to sell and you say hey
this guy brad was the best podcast guest i've ever had and i want to just sure let's go with that
um this guy seems like he might not screw it up too much maybe it's like that um so you would send an email to me and
copy them and say hey i want to introduce you to my friend so-and-so you don't have to say anything about the referral or
anything when i respond i'll say hey matt thanks for the intro but then what i do is i put him in our
system and then i tag matt edmondson in our system and if that guy's deal
ever closes you get an email that says hey we owe you of our fees on this oh wow
so uh i have reached out to tons of people in the last two years and said hey i owe
you eight grand do you have like a account you want me to send it to and they're like are you joking i'm like no
i do here's a form fill it out we'll send it out to you so we take it very serious but if people refer sellers to
us that are you know ready to go and sometimes it takes a while for these things to come together you might refer it today you might not hear from us for three
years because we put them on a path to plan for their exit and then we execute it down the road but
the cool thing is is once we get it i send you an email that says hey matt thanks a lot for the referral just want
you to know this thing sells you're going to get a commission i've tagged you in our system and so that tag in the system just let
you know we we've got a record of it we know that you were involved we know that if that deal closes so
before i can actually get through the steps to close it it says do we owe anyone a referral and i go to the referral field and it says
matt evans and i'm like oh yeah that's that guy that i went fellow ginger i went on his podcast
fellow ginger accountant and we both like kansas city chiefs so it's like
i think the only difference but is i've actually had laser surgery on my eyes which is why i'm not wearing my glasses right now
i need to i'm a full-time glasses wearer yeah it's um one of the best things i
ever did was getting that laser surgery try unbelievable anyway i won't go there this is not the show to talk about laser
surgery but now i appreciate that and hey listen if you want to reach out to brad i'm sure brad would more than love to
connect with you and um just let you uh know what's going on we will put his email address in the
show notes in a way that the spam bots don't pick it up um but you know reach out to just one more time
brad what was your email brad quietlite brokerage.com
quietlitebrokerage.com so uh email brad and if you're feeling generous just say listen i was listening to matt's show
[Laughter] make sure you buy him a pint if this comes off um that'll be brilliant
listen brad really appreciate your time thanks for being with us thanks for being super generous and uh it's it's been fab thank you i
really enjoy okay so this is the bread outro take two funnily enough
well a big huge special thanks to uh my very special guest brad wasn't he fantastic wasn't he super
helpful with all that information you know uh my aim whenever i speak to guests is always to find
something real practical you know those kind of nuggets that i can use on my own e-commerce businesses and websites
well we got a lot of those today right and understanding how to build your ecommerce business in such a way is to
sell it goodness me there was some really great stuff in that so i hope you got a lot out of it too i hope you
got some great stuff on on how to sell your own business or maybe even buy a business
if you did then i would appreciate it if you could rate the show on itunes or even share it out you know so
we can connect with more folks from around the world super helpful and as i said at the start all of the notes links and transcripts to today's
show are online you can get them for free yes you can totally for free at matt
edmondson.com thanks for listening make sure you come back next time as we get to interview some more great
guests on how to grow our own online business
you've been listening to the e-commerce podcast with matt edmondson join us next time for more interviews
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