Master Creative Business Acquisitions in a Buyer’s Market

💡 Want to learn how to buy profitable businesses and build lasting wealth? Access my free Business Acquisition Video Masterclass here: https://www.learnfromcarl.com/

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🎙️ Creative Business Acquisitions: Thriving in a Buyer’s Market!
Welcome to the Creative Dealmaker Podcast! In this episode, I’m joined by my incredible business partners, Chris Moore and Jerrad Smith, to explore the world of creative business acquisitions and how to dominate in today’s business buyer’s market. Together, we break down the strategies that have shaped hundreds of successful deals and share insights that you won’t find anywhere else.

💥 What’s Inside This Episode?
✔️ Unlock the secrets of building your personalized Buy Box – the ultimate tool to match your skills with the right deals.
✔️ Master the art of seller psychology and how to build strong relationships that lead to better deals.
✔️ Discover cutting-edge deal structuring strategies for today’s unique market conditions.
✔️ Learn how to leverage seller financing to acquire businesses creatively and profitably.
✔️ Spot profitable business opportunities in a market overflowing with potential.

🔥 Chris, Jerrad, and I dive deep into the methods that are helping dealmakers thrive in a time of incredible opportunity. Whether you’re new to acquisitions or looking to refine your strategy, this episode delivers the clarity and confidence you need to succeed.

💡 This is your chance to dominate the buyer’s market. Let’s make it happen!

#CreativeBusinessAcquisitions #BuyersMarket2024 #DealMakingStrategies #SellerPsychology #SmallBusinessAcquisitions #BusinessAcquisitionTips #BuildingBusinessWealth

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Transcript

0:28

One of the biggest questions from our marketplace was, well, if there's two point seven six million businesses for sale, which one should I buy? Nobody wants to buy a business. Uh-uh. We want the dimensionalized benefits that business ownership gives us. Well, we had a protege called Ed, you might remember him. He was a global sales leader at IBM. Right? So this guy was earning six, seven hundred thousand dollars a year, very successful, but he he'd been completely burnt out by IBM. He hated technology. And he joined the program and he's like, hey, here's my buy box. I'm I wanna buy a vineyard. I'm like, really? I think about HGTV Yeah. And Food Network Impossible and everyone wants to own a restaurant. For the first twenty minutes, don't talk about business. Talk about them because you'll disarm them. And talk about business. Talk about them because you'll disarm them. A very warm welcome to the Creative Dealmaker podcast. I'm Karl Allen. I'm your host, and I'm gonna be interviewing expert guests sharing investor strategies that will completely and utterly disrupt the market when it comes to buying and selling businesses all over the world. Hey, guys. Carl Allen. Welcome to another episode of the Dealmaker podcast. I'm back in the recording studio in Austin with, with my buddies, my boys, my business partners, mister Chris Moore and mister Jerrad Smith. They flew in from Huntsville, Alabama last night. I took them to HQ to the league for some pints of Guinness. You don't drink Guinness Go, Chris, do you? You drink I like Guinness. I just like the red wine vinegar. Yeah. And Jerrad was smashing the Guinness, then we went for sushi with, with my beautiful wife, Julia. And then today, we've been in the studio. We've been recording a brand new product that we're releasing into the market very very soon. Chris, I can't remember the name of the product. I know it's about the heat map and the buy box and the really cool industries that we, that we're doing deals in and our heat map analysis and the types of variables that we put into determining our buy boxes. But, yeah, what's the name of the product that we decided to call it? Yeah. It's the industry in multiple guide that's gonna help someone who's already in acquisitions or wanting to get in acquisitions over the next four years of feast through this new administration and the economic changes, how they can really thrive and with confidence, choose the right industry in the right sector where they're gonna be set up for success. Because this is a buyer's market we're going into. We're already in a buyer's market, but, again, even better for buyers. It's the biggest buyer's market, I think, for the last fifty years. You're in that perfect storm, aren't you? Remember the the movie, the Wahlberg movie, with the the boats called the Andrea Gail Mhmm. Sailed off the coast of Massachusetts, and it sailed right into the middle of two one in one hundred year storms that sadly sank the bow. We're in the middle of three one in one hundred year, not storms, but trends. We've got the most capital that we've ever had available in history to buy deals. We've got the most businesses for sale that we've ever seen in history and it's only gonna get stronger. And we've got the highest level of distressed seller psychology than there's been probably since the Second World War. Right? I think when you combine all those things together, we're just in this unbelievable market. Only one in eleven businesses that try and sell actually do. Sellers are open to a lot more creative types of deal structures. Multiples have come way down, than they have in recent years and, this is it. And because there's so much choice, there's so many deals out there, one of the biggest questions from our marketplace was, well, if there's two point seven six million businesses for sale which one should I buy? Right? So the whole point of this this mini training was to help potential dealmakers really focus in on the key sectors and the key industries that they should be thinking about. And and to be clear, it's really not a mini training. We just recorded like a Oh, yeah. We've been out all day. A thirteen lesson course. And it dives so deep into it too. And you said it very well just then that as a buyer's market, we have the power of choice, but your choices dictate how successful you'll be. You need to really understand how to vet deals correctly. So we dove in in this course to your heat map, to your industry and multiple guide Yeah. On every single different aspect that they should be paying attention to Yeah. Which is growth rate and the roll up models. We also have to look at average age of seller, the number of deals available under ten million, the MUD scores and lever scores. All these things was covered in this. Multiples. In the multiples. Yeah. And and it fully explained it all so you can walk away with clarity. So I would encourage you to pick that up. This is gonna be very valuable training. Not just for somebody who's brand new to acquisitions, but somebody who's already acquired five companies. Yeah. This is gonna be extremely relevant to take your game to the next level. So Jerrad, let's ask you. You sat here, kind of a fly on the wall, kinda creepy the entire time we filmed this. And I watched you my buddy. I watched Jerrad take notes this entire time. So I thought it would be really interesting today, Carl. He's closed four deals while we've been recording. Yeah. And Jerrad has done deals before. Oh, yeah. We're partners in in a couple of businesses. Yeah. So somebody who understands m and a and somebody who's been working in this industry, you took so many notes while we were recording this. Can we go over some of your notes as well as maybe some of the questions you had? Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, it was pretty pretty insightful. I think that for anyone who's thinking about making this, you know, their their, their their next journey, the training that was just done in here was impactful. And and I I saw tons of things that maybe I've seen before, but a little bit deeper, like, the multiples model, which is fantastic. But, you know, like, one of the things that I had, especially for anyone that's new to this, in fact, a couple weeks ago, when we were going through what I was looking to get into Yeah. We talked about my Buyabox. Mhmm. And could you go, you know, help someone understand who may be interested in, like, different industries or different businesses. What would be different between someone scratching their own itch and somebody that, either is passionate about a particular project or staying in their own lane? Yeah. So I think one of the key determinations so let's assume you don't own a business right now. Let's say you're in w two and you want to get into business ownership. You know that starting a business is crazy and you want to buy something. Right? So your your buy box is your unique fingerprint on the types of deals that you should be doing. And one of the big trade offs that people normally go through is, they might want to come out of an industry that they've worked in for a long period of time and then get into something that they're really really passionate about. So we had a protege called Ed, you might remember him. He was a global sales leader at IBM, right? So this guy was earning six, seven hundred thousand dollars a year, very successful, but he he'd been completely burnt out by IBM. He hated technology. And he joined the program and he's like, hey, here's my buy box and I wanna buy a vineyard. I'm like, really? You wanna buy a vineyard? I said, well, you've had twenty five years in IBM. You know every small technology company pretty much in the United States. You can open any door. You can buy any one of those businesses. Every investor and lender in the country will back you. You've got these incredible skills. Why aren't you buying technology companies? He said, because I hate technology. I'm done with technology. I want to buy a vineyard. I said, well, why do you want to buy a vineyard? He said, because I love wine, man. I love red wine. I get home at night. I'm stressed out with my job. And I open a nice bottle of wine, Caymus and all these great wines, and I wanna drink wine. And I'm thinking, well, I spend so much money drinking wine. Why don't I just go buy a vineyard? Like, I love Sonoma. I love Napa. It's like this guy's in my head. I love Washington state. How to buy a vineyard? I'm like, great. Okay. I said, well, what what do you know about growing wine? Nothing. What do you know about fermenting wine, bottling wine, marketing wine, operating a vineyard, customer service, distribution, marketing, all those different things. Nothing. I'd like drinking the stuff. I said, well, fine. I don't wanna dampen your enthusiasm, but for you to go anywhere near a vineyard deal, you need a partner. You need an operating partner that's going to come in and is going to run that business for you, right? And that's going to do two really important things. Number one, it's going to help you buy the deal in the first place. Because imagine you're trying to sit down with a vineyard business owner that might have founded that business in the 80s and it's his baby, it was her baby and wants to make sure that business is going to go into a safe pair of hands. So they're not going to trust you with their business if they think you're only there to drink the profits. Right? You're not there to expend and and keep the business going. I said, but then secondly, once you've done the deal, and bearing in mind lenders and investors are gonna want to see that you've got some chops in that space as well, once you've done the deal to add value to that business and create shareholder value. That's the game that really we're all playing. We're in the game of building shareholder value. It's hard to build shareholder value if you don't know what you're doing. So by all means, if you've got some skills you can leverage, maybe you've got some financial skills, maybe you've got some marketing skills, maybe you've got some relationships that you can leverage into that business. But from the operations perspective, you need an operating partner that that can run the day to day. So I think it's great for you to be passionate about an industry but if you don't know the unit economics of how that industry works, just go partner with somebody that does. So let's say for example, right, so part of your background is, used to work for a car dealership. Yeah. Yeah. Let's say I wanted to buy a car dealership. Right? I know nothing about that industry. Right? I buy a lot of cars. I've spent half a million dollars on cars literally in the last ninety days. Right? I love cars. I'm like you. I'm a car guy. Right? So if I wanted to get into that space, which I'm passionate about, I know nothing about it, you'd be a perfect partner for me. Right? Because you know that space, you've got relationships, you'd be my perfect business partner to go and buy that deal. So that that's one of the key things for me. Right? It's fine to stray outside of your lane if you can partner with somebody that's got those skills. The only caveat to that would be somebody that's got what I call a horizontal skill set. So let's say you're an attorney or a CPA or you're a crack marketer, or somebody that's phenomenally good at operations, then you can be kind of fairly industry agnostic because you've got a lot of experience that would apply to any business. But you'll soon gonna need a partner, in my opinion, that's got the nuances of that particular industry. I think about HGTV and Food Network and how it it it's kinda ruined business in a lot of ways where people go and watch Food Network and they watch the the great food truck race or they watch Restaurant Impossible. And everyone wants to own a restaurant. Right? Mhmm. That doesn't mean they have any business owning a restaurant. They're just passionate about it. Same thing with HGTV. Everyone wants to fix and flip, and they have no business doing it. They usually lose their ass when they try to do it their themselves. And I think there's so many people who get this emotional attachment to a vision, and they wanna execute at any cost. I I I hate seeing this, but I see it a lot. I go around different places we're driving, in our town or maybe other towns like Austin, anywhere. And you see these little boutiques or gift shops or these little retail stores where people are jumping into a almost dying market. And they're they're jumping in, and then within a year, they're bankrupt. And they put their entire world's life savings into these businesses. Sure. And and that's one of the things that we talked about in the recordings we did today is the concept of how to really make an educated decision, not just on developing your buy box, but on what type of businesses you should buy based off of what's gonna happen in in the deal making landscape over the next four years. And the things that you don't even know to ask, none of you watching this have any idea, most likely, of what to look at, what to ask, how to actually evaluate deals beyond just the spreadsheet. And that's what we went over today in detail, and you did it in a very masterful level. So think about someone like Jerrad. We've had a lot of vision conversations, and you have, like, four things that you'd love to do. One thing I always challenge you to think about is what do you want buying a business to do for you? That's another thing to think about too. Like, what do you want from it? So what's really interesting, right, I'm gonna say something now that you might not agree with. But I love controversial stuff. But I'm gonna be really controversial, man. We're gonna talk about football and politics and religion. Nope. Nobody wants to buy a business. Uh-uh. We want the dimensionalized benefits that business ownership gives us. Wealth creation, cash flow, can be freedom, independence, pride, ego, legacy, and work life balance. Could be all those different things. Right? And we're all we're all different. And there might be a little snippet of each of that in in someone's real why, sometimes real real motivation. So I I think really understanding, like, what what the business is gonna do for you and for your life is really, really powerful. And you have to make decisions based off that. Right? Yeah. If you need to quit your w two or or, like, you have a burning desire to get away from doing that, You've already had that moment that many people have had, probably most of the people watching this. I just realized I wasn't born and built and made to work for somebody else. Yeah. There's a lot more that goes into it beyond just calling yourself your own boss. Yeah. Right? It's also understanding where you are in your life. Imagine if you're a thirty nine year old guy. It's a very different story, and what you need out of business acquisitions is different than a sixty two year old woman versus a twenty five year old kid. Like, it just changes. So I think that's one of the things that I think we do really well in DealMaker is we help people find their identity. And and it can really cut nine months to a year, if not longer, off their journey and make it faster, almost collapsing time. Because one of the things that you and I see constantly, and, Jerrad, I think you feel this and you go through it, is almost a little bit of an identity crisis where I don't know what step to take because I haven't figured out what direction to go in. Mhmm. Yep. You can't get to the destination until you plug in the GPS. Yeah. So I think kind of part of what we did today, even for people who've already dialed in their buy box, they really need to learn this information. What else stood out to you today, or what questions did you have lingering, or what what really was the big moment? A couple things too is you had brought up, when we were talking about, how someone had asked you, you know, if they were in college, what you should go to school for. You said psychology, which made a whole lot of sense because we've had seller calls. I've you've you've been obviously on a ton of them. I've been on a few of them. You've been on them. Dude, you've taken hundreds. Don't let them lie to you. But but, Hundreds of seller calls. Understanding that, you know, having a conversation with somebody with with really no, motive in mind other than to understand about their business thing is something that most people don't really understand going into it because they're just in there really it what I can see is someone that's novice because I did it too, was I wanna buy this business because I want the dimensionalized benefits, like you said, the cash flow that came from it. But if you go in there in that kind of conversation, the problem is you it's it's like, commission breath on a sales guy. Mhmm. You're going in the I love that. Commission breath. Like, zippy. So what's really interesting is Commission breath. So you you you can the the way to set up the perfect seller call. Call. Right? You want you want me to teach you this real quick? So the the first thing is when you go into a seller call, for the first twenty minutes, don't talk about business. Talk about them because you'll disarm them, which means they'll answer your questions genuinely when you get into the business conversation. But secondly, you're gonna build rapport. And they're gonna know you, like you, and trust you, and they're gonna be a lot more open with you. And it's really easy to do it. Right? Because even old people, are now on Facebook, right? So I had a seller call with a seventy one year old that was all over Facebook, was posting like posting even more than I post. And I'm a big Facebook guy, as you know, and an Instagram guy. And I know everything about him, right? I knew his sports team. I knew what kind of restaurants he dined in. I knew where he used to go on vacation. He had he had dogs, like I have dogs. He had grandkids, like I got grand I got a granddaughter. So I had five or six connection points before I even met the guy to kind of talk about, right? And we spent an hour talking about our lives, right? And I actually found out, and I didn't know this at the time, that he'd also worked for HP. And I swapped for HP in mergers and acquisitions. So we had this wonderful conversation for an hour long about life. And within an hour, we were like best buddies. Right? So when I started asking him questions about the business, he was so open. He was so friendly. And I was able to kind of really get some intelligible information from him. Why, you know, why are you selling? Like, if I'd have gone into that call and said, hey. Thanks for taking the time. Let's get started. Tell me why you're selling the business. That would be a very guarded response versus after an hour of building incredible rapport and having a lot of laughs and jokes, he was, like, really honest. He's like, dude, like, let me let me tell you. Like, I'm worn out. Like, you know, my wife's really sick. One of my daughters is really sick. You know, I'm in here ten hours a day. I I can't seem to let go. I'm terrible at delegation. You know, my my staff are really frustrated with me. They're telling me I should look to sell this thing. One of my guys even wants to buy it. It could be a great partner for you, great operator for you, but he's gonna need some mentoring. And then just in those thirty seconds, like, I've already figured out in my brain how I can position that that kind of deal structure. So and and really, when you're a deal maker, it's all about how can I solve the problem that the business owner has? Like, when when you and I, Chris, riff around equity partner Mhmm. And we talk about consulting for equity projects, the whole concept of EP is matching your superpowers to a business owner's bleeding heart problem. Right? As a deal maker, your superpower is the ability to creatively structure a business acquisition. It's then figuring out what's the bleeding heart problem of the business owner. Why have they decided that now is the time to sell? And, you know, we talked about it in the in the training that we just recorded. Only twenty percent of business owners that decide to sell sell for financial reasons. Right? Those are typically SaaS guys, health care IT guys, those, you know, those sellers that, you know, they take the business to a million bucks. They want to cash out and go to something else with the money. Right? But most business owners, eighty percent of business owners in more traditional industries, so manufacturing, transportation, construction, home services, even professional services, and a lot of the health care sectors, they focus on the intangibles, right? Like they're selling because they're tired, they're burnt out, they're distressed, they're bored, they've run out of ideas, they're sick, they're dying, they want to retire and they don't have enough retirement income in their four zero one ks. So they're open to really creative ways to exit their businesses and boost their income with with monthly payments like you would lease a car versus you know, buying a car outright. So by really disarming a seller in those initial conversations and building those relationships, the the quality of the information that you can get because the barriers are down. Right? It it's like having a deeper meaningful with your significant other when you've doused them full of Prosecco or whatever. Right? They're gonna be a lot more open and honest with you. Away all my secrets. Yeah. They're gonna be a lot more open and honest with you if they're a little bit inebriated. Mhmm. We inebriate the seller by just building a friendship Mhmm. And really showing that we care because we do. Right? You know, we're all noble capitalists. You know, we're we're in this to, you know, to solve their problem that eighty percent of their net worth's tied up in the value of their business. They can't afford to retire because they only have a couple hundred grand in their four zero one k. They they're getting taxed to the high heaven on their income. Is there a way they can sell their business creatively, generate a monthly payment that's pretty tax efficient, and quickly transition the ownership of the business to somebody that a, really cares, b, knows what they're doing, and c, can really add a lot of value and protect whatever legacy that they want to build and take care of the employees that get left behind. So let's dive into something else. I wanna talk to Jerrad for a second. We talked about MUD score. We talked about all the time in Protege. We talked about it just in the the program we just recorded, Carl. And that's motivation, urgency, and distress. So let's go back even eighteen months ago. We generated this funnel. For anybody watching, funnel is essentially a series of landing pages, and it it's where you run advertisements to it to capture people's information. Right? You see it on Facebook ads. Funnels are everywhere. Well, that's my big specialty, my world renowned specialty and skill set. And we created this funnel. Thought it was bowling. Bowling's number two or number three. I'm good at fishing too. But we generated, I think, over thirty five hundred Yeah. Highly motivated, highly urgent, highly distressed seller leads with everyone over the age of fifty five. And I'm not gonna talk about the funnel. You can't have the funnel. But, Jerrad actually had this project with me, and you had literally hundreds, if not over a thousand conversations. And let's go to a limiting belief, Carl. We have a lot of students that come to us, and and they maybe prolong a little bit coming to us when they decide to finally. It's it's because they were hung up for a moment on, I don't think there's gonna be a lot of these business deals out there. It's gonna be way too hard to find these deals off market. And let's ask Jerrad, how many of those people you spoke to had a high motivation, urgency, and distress score, as well as how soon did they wanna sell? Ninety five percent of them. I mean, at least. Ninety five percent of them. And the ones that wanted to sell, the only reason why they chose maybe three to five years is because they didn't know that it would take it could take less than that. Because maybe their experience was that, someone that they knew, they took that long to sell their business. Mhmm. Right? And they just didn't know that it could happen a whole lot faster. And we look at the lever score, right, legacy driven, employee protection. We talk about value alignment as well as relationship, and that's a big part of what we we were teaching. Remember there, mister Chris. I I I'm remembering things. I'm getting better. But think about when you're talking to people, how much is price really the biggest driver? And you've had, I mean, almost probably over a thousand conversations. It rarely is. Mm-mm. They all have a sense of urgency. They're all really focused on protecting their customers, their employees, their legacy, things like that. And and a lot of them actually didn't wanna go to the next level. They wanted to bypass directly to exit. Mhmm. And that's why you kept coming to me because just so you can see this in the experiment we did, we were trying out a couple different things. Not just trying to, you know, feed buyer or seller leads over to our proteges. We were trying some different angles with them. And no one wanted it. They just wanted the instant gratification of selling. They all want out. So one of the things that people have a lot is this limiting belief of, one, I'm not gonna be able to find off market deals. And I don't think people are really that motivated. I'm telling you right now, one hundred percent of business owners over the age of fifty five are already considered selling or they're trying to actively sell or they feel defeated or scared to put their business on the market. They feel defeated because they feel like their business isn't prepared to sell And they are open to low offers and good offers for you because of that. And then a lot of them are scared. Do you know what happens when a business like, take a brick and mortar business puts a for sale sign in their yard. What does that look like? It scares the employees. It confuses the customers, and they go out of business. I watched a barbecue restaurant. I even knew the family. I sold a house to the family's son, and it was down the street from me in Alabama. They put a for sale sign up, and the business went under within a month because people stopped pulling in the driveway. And the employees show up and they thought they were losing their jobs. Like, it's a scary thing. So there's a lot of people who will never listen to the broker. Yep. Mhmm. And that's just interesting. After talking to all those people, you'd think after a while that, you'd find a couple of them that just were only wanting money, but it just didn't happen. And and over time, Jerrad kept playing with his scripts when he's talking to his sellers. And you were telling people and saying, hey, by the way, we find that a lot of businesses that are your size, in this industry have a hard time qualifying for a buyer to buy it through financing. You're most likely going to have to do a creative structure where they pay you over time. And, again, a hundred percent of them said, yep. That's fine. Sure. Yeah. It's crazy. You're giving them income versus capital gain, but the income is taxed as a long term capital gain through a seller note. So that's what a lot of older sellers want. Right? They want the income Mhmm. Not the capital gain. But can I tell you a really funny story? Please. So So as you know, most of our deal flow comes from off market deal origination. Right? Of course. And one of the things that we do is we write, highly tailored letters. Mhmm. So we write letters to business owners to say, hey, here's who I am. I wanna buy a business. I've looked at your business and I really like it. Here's why. So it's very tailored. And here's what I found out about you, and I'm building rapport in the letter. Right? So I send those out. So I got a call, a few weeks ago from a business owner. He said, hey, man. Got your letter. Very interesting letter. You know, appreciate the compliments you made about my business. You've cleared on your homework. I'm kind of blown away that you've researched me, and you understand kind of who I am and what my values are. He said, but I just wanna say to you. Right? Surely, you can't buy a business. Businesses you can't buy businesses. Right? My my thought was that when I'm ready to retire, which is kind of soon, I would have to just close it down. Right? I would have to close it down. I would have to liquidate my balance sheet, pay off my liabilities, and then that would be my exit. Right? That would be the cash that I would get. You know, you can't so you make it sound like you can buy my business like you could buy my house. He said, you can't buy businesses like you can buy real estate. I said, well, that's where you're wrong. Right? A business Is this under a rock? A business is an asset, right? And it got me to thinking, and I did some research. And did you know, right, sixty two percent of baby boomers that retire, that own businesses, their exit strategy is exactly that. They close the doors, they turn off the lights, and they walk away with the cash, right? They had to let their employees down, they had to let their customers down, their vendors and suppliers down, right? And in a lot of cases, it costs them money to shut that business, right? The liquidation value isn't enough to cover the long term lease, for example, or, you know, severance contracts with their employees and all those different things. So it's an awakening to realize that a lot of these business owners don't even believe or realize that they can sell their business. They have a business that they can monetize for some value that's going to prolong them into, you know, their retirement. And what I've noticed over the last five years is the average age of of a retiring business owner is, like, continually going up. So I think the way that we're educating the market, by doing this and the way that we focus so heavily on off market deal flow is is really, really solving that problem. What else I think is really true, and Jerrad can back this up based off of all of your conversations in mine and Carl's, is I think a lot of business owners also are are pretty intelligent, and they have realistic expectations. They look at a business that they look at, like, wow. This is a pain in the ass. It's a headache. Why would someone wanna buy my headache? Mhmm. And and that's one of the things that I think stops a lot of people from having the thought of, is my business even worth selling? There's another subsegment of that audience of business owners who say, I know what I have. I know what I have has value, and I'm not gonna give it away for a cheap price. And those are the ones that tend to not sell. Or if they have a best in class business, maybe it has more suitors. And then you have somebody kind of in the middle who is always gonna be postponing in their mind. Someone saying, my business isn't ready yet. I need to get three million when I sell. I know what I have is valuable, but it needs some work first. Right? And those are the ones that are harder, I think, to purchase, but there's a lot of those out there. And there's part of the process we teach a lot in Protege is kind of the cording process Yeah. And and understanding that you have different tools in your tool belt, right, in your toolbox, Carl, where when you find a business where it's a great business, it checks all the boxes, maybe there's some transfer value issues. Yeah. But there's ways you can turn the conversation towards consulting for equity. Yeah. There's ways you can turn it towards, an equity or annuity option deal where you come in and start paying them over time, help them improve the business so that it can be financed, then you have an option or a warrant to buy the rest. Like Yep. That's what's making what you're teaching and and what Protege teaches in general and what I'm teaching on the consulting for equity side so special is because there's so many ways to get the deal done. And what's really interesting about deals is when you're when you're closing deals, there's only two variables really that matter. It's it's the the price and the terms. Right? So the price is the valuation, and the terms is how you're structuring those payments over time. If you do an SBA deal, you're paying most of the money at close. If you're doing a annuity deal, you're paying for the deal over, say, ten, fifteen years. What's really interesting is when you go into a negotiation to buy a business, you've got those two variables, haven't you? On the one hand, you've got price. On the other hand, you've got terms. And all the deals that I've ever closed, and all the deals that all of our proteges have ever closed is when the buyer or the seller only controls one of those variables. Right? So if you're a buyer so if you're you're a seller and you say, well, hey. If I don't get three million dollars for my business, I ain't selling. Right? Three million dollars is is the magic number. Right? And price asking prices are always whole numbers. It's like a psychological number. So let's say three million bucks is their price. And let's say the business is doing, five hundred thousand dollars a year in profit. So by nature, the seller is asking for a six times multiple. Right? But the business is only worth a three times multiple. So the business is worth a million five in reality. That's all the banks gonna underwrite the deal at, yet the seller wants three million. Right? You can still pay three million to buy that business, but it might be a ten, twelve, or fifteen year annuity payment. Right? So you're financing the purchase of the deal over an extended period of time. So you're giving the seller the price variable, but then you as the buyer, you're owning the terms. Right? So I I will pay a ten times multiple to buy a business if I can finance it over twenty five years. Right? Absolutely. I mean, you're essentially renting someone's cash flow from them and just paying them a portion of it back and keeping the rest. Yep. It's a no brainer. Because what happens when you buy a business, right, is, your goal is to scale it and increase shareholder value. So if you're listening on Spotify, whatever right now, you can't see my arms, but my my watch arm is the increase in the shareholder value. And then the other arm, my tattoo arm, which you can just see, is the amortization of the debt payments. Right? So, yeah, if you're, bank financing the deal, you're amortizing those payments over time like with the mortgage, or if it's a seller financing deal, you're doing the same thing. So the gap over time that increases the gap between my arms, that's the shareholder value that you're actually building. So even if you you did a twenty year annuity deal and you only kept the business for two years, in that two year period, you've created some shareholder value so that when you sell that business, you're gonna make some money. It's great. We actually have a an experience that I don't think that we're leveraging here too much, which is almost like the perfect deal, which all three of us were a part of, which was the bowling alley was an off market deal. Love that deal. Right? And talk about someone who had probably a hundred percent MUD score. Yeah. And Hundred percent Levis score. We don't need to get too deep into the details, but, yeah, he was definitely Yeah. Yeah. On the bowling team. Yeah. He's a great guy. But what's great about having a team like we have is, you know, what was missing from that was I mean, there's definitely marketing that was missing. There was profit centers that did not exist, which are flourishing today. Dave and Buster's. Yeah. Yeah. Can I tell that story real quick? Sure. So He loves me. Used to we used to have a partnership with with an outsourced, Sales team. Sales team. Yeah. Up in Jacksonville. Jacksonville, Florida. And we went there with Leif and Steve. We call them the Duckett Brigade. Right? Because they're all ex military. Great guys. That's the name of their company. Yeah. The Duckett Brigade. Yeah. So we went there. We we trained them for a day. They were selling, one of our coaching programs. Slave, Big Steve, David Yeah. Psy. Psy. Psy. And, they they decided to take us out to Dave and Buster's. Right? And, obviously, this before I lived in America, I'd never been to a Dave and Buster's. It it it's like a Walmart sized arcade. Right? You go in It's wild. Yeah. You guys probably all know about this. Right? But I didn't. So you go in. You, you know, you put fifty bucks on a card and you walk around. You can play Guitar Hero. You can do basketball shots, you can play all all the old retro games. You and it's like the craziest fun. So we're doing this thing, and then we we buys the bowling alley, creative deal, annuity deal, and we gets in there. And there's these two huge, like, rooms Wide open. That they were using well, they weren't using for pasta. Right? Trash. Yeah. And we thought, well, what do we do with them? So I thought, well, why don't we create a Dave and Buster's? But then you're thinking, well, am I gonna have to drop a hundred thousand dollars buying Pac Man Guitar Hero? The the Try a million. Yeah. The the table hook For syncing. Right? Thirty grand a piece. Yeah. And no. You don't. Right? Because there are companies that you can partner with that they'll put in all the equipment for you. They'll maintain it all for you. Yeah. And then you just do a rev share Mhmm. On the amount of money that people are spending through those machines. So we created we almost doubled the cash flow in that bowling alley just from adding Mhmm. That that new profit center. Because guess what? Our cost of customer acquisition for that new profit center was zero. Zero. Customer's already there. Yeah. They've just been bowling. Right? Or they're waiting for their bowling lane to be available. Let's go play Guitar Hero. Let's go do that. Let's go do this. It it's crazy. And our only cost to fulfill was just prizes and the electricity. Yeah. Yeah. That's about it. This is why McDonald's is still the most profitable fast food restaurant in the world. Right? Because, like, if you you go to McDonald's and you walk up to the counter and you say, hey, I'll take a quarter pounder with cheese meal, please. Right? So let's say that's a five dollar meal. The gross profit in that meal from five dollars is about sixty cents, so twelve percent gross profit. But then if they say to you, do you wanna go large? Which is basically a few more ice cubes, little bit more carbonated water, a two inch taller cup, a slightly bigger cardboard box, and a few more fries, that's an extra dollar. That's a eighty five percent margin. And try thirteen bucks for a quarter pounder with cheese combo now. Is that what it is, though? Yeah. I don't eat to McDonald's. Can you I don't either at all, but it's about thirteen bucks. Yeah. Thirteen bucks? Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. What the hell, dude? Yeah. Really? But, anyway, there you go. But, yeah, their margins on their upsell is way, way, way higher. Like, we were talking about this in Starbucks today. Like, we went to Starbucks on the way, and Starbucks is it's a really low margin business when you're buying a latte. But when you say, oh, that tumbler is really really nice, it's fifty bucks, I'll buy that for, for a Christmas gift, you know, that that's costing them two three bucks to make, right? So the coffee they're selling you is at a five percent margin, but the tumbler you're buying is at a ninety five percent margin. So that's where they make all their money. It's good. And then you were saying, like, it it increased the cash flow, almost doubled it. And it didn't increase the revenue, but every dollar we made from it was almost all profit. Yeah. Yeah. It's the littlest things that make the biggest difference for sure. We I'll give you another story for the bowling alley. Right? So we noticed that and not a super affluent area, kind of a country area where we live. We noticed that on Wednesdays, we didn't have any leagues. Leagues are pretty consistent money. And we noticed that a lot of people would come in and bowl one or two games, get some shoes, and they leave. We looked at our average price per guest, also called PPG in a lot of businesses, was about nine dollars. And that wasn't very good for us. So we could get tons of people in, but if they only spent nine bucks a piece, it was really tough. So we looked at, if we're already gonna get the customer, let's change the way we charge on Wednesdays. We changed it to ten dollars all you can bowl. And then most people are also starting to stay longer because they feel like they're getting more value compared to being one day now. Drinking more beer. They're drinking more beer. They're eating food. Right. They're also playing pool. Guitar Hero. Yeah. They're not playing Guitar Hero, but they're they're playing via jukebox and things like that. We we took the average price per guest by one making one shift and keeping their people longer up to fourteen dollars on those days. That's so crazy. It's just the little things that make a difference. You know our David Busters, which is our arcade. Right? Yeah. It's up to forty six games, I think, in it. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. You know, the neighboring bowling alley closed, and we got all their games as well. So it's been it's been a pretty cool business. One of the other things too that's really great about this business that, again, when you go through the process, especially anyone that's listening to this, that's gonna go through the the course or go or just wanting to make acquisitions part of their journey is as a guy who's spoken to a lot of these folks on the front end Yeah. That, I think partnership is the most underrated thing on the outside Oh, yeah. Where it's I mean, what would you say? More than fifty percent of the deals? Yeah. So when we launched Protege three years is it three and a half years ago when we launched it? June twenty one. Mhmm. Three hundred years. Deals are closed every single week since we launched that program. Deals are closing every single day now. Right? But when we first launched it, all the deals that were coming through and getting closed, I'd say less than ten percent of them were partner deals. Now, because we've created more of a community vibe, it's sixty percent. So three out of every five deals that are closing are are partner deals. You've got people that are visionaries that wanna partner with operators. You've got people that are really good at, say, marketing, wanting to partner with people that are really good at operations. You've got CPAs now getting pieces of multiple deals. They're doing like consulting for equity deals. There there was a deal that closed yesterday, had six partners in it. Wow. But it was a two million a year EBITDA company. Right? Phenomenal. It's enough for everybody who makes money. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then you're harnessing six people's skill sets. Mhmm. And you're harnessing six people, you know, to do all the work. One of them was great at deal origination. The second one was great at meeting sellers and building rapport. The third one was great at modeling the deal and doing the vetting. The fourth one was great at just quarterbacking the close. The fifth one was the was the optimization guy that can come in and and just add profit everywhere. So It's a team it's a team sport. It's a team sport. I really agree agree with that. And I think there's a lot of people who are coming into our community who maybe don't have to go through every single step and learn every single thing because they've got such a a dialed in skill set that a lot of proteges are looking for that they can partner with people and get deals done super quick. I've seen that several times now. Yeah. And and, truthfully, that's what I would do. With my skill sets that I have, I could come in and add value to a lot of people who are looking to acquire Yeah. And they'd be honored to bring me on to their their cap tables. We get offered partnerships every single day. We do. But if you're somebody who has what you call, like, a horizontal skill set, who has the ability to really affect most businesses and help them grow. One of the things we did last week, I I taught a webinar. You weren't there, but it was it was really good. We talked about how buying the business is is really like the first ten steps of a of a mile journey. Yeah. And and really the big exit, the outcome at the end is the biggest part. There's a lot of people who are really, really good with businesses once they buy them, where you can add a lot of value to other people who are acquiring companies who may not have the right game plan post acquisition. There's so many ways to to work together as a team. It's huge. So, yeah, anything else you wanna talk about today on this podcast? No. I think we're good. What time's you flying? We're flying home, just in a little while. So Back to Alabama. Back to ALA? No. Well, I I think we'll wrap. But, but, yeah, I think a lot of people that have been watching this, are gonna be really intrigued about the new mini training program that we've put together. So how do people get their hands on it, Chris? Yeah. What we'll do is we'll put it in the description of this video, whether it's on Spotify or on Apple, iTunes, or if you're watching this on YouTube. We'll make sure you can find it pretty easily. Yeah. We'll also put it on our website when it comes out so you can find it. But it's something that you should be paying attention to. Somebody who's really looking to take it to the next level, and they're looking to to ride this buyer's market. You look at some of the wealthiest real estate investors of all time, like Warren Buffett. I mean, they just they can't buy enough during buyer's markets. Yep. And that's where they make all their money, and then they sell during seller's markets. And that's where we are right now. Yep. And you have a chance to participate or you have a chance to sit on the sidelines. I think it's up to you. But we can equip you with everything you need to know. And that's why so timely coming into twenty twenty five, we wanted to create this program that can really give somebody extreme clarity and and a lot of guidance and vision on exactly how to take action. And it's less than the price of a steak dinner. Mhmm. So jump on board. It's exactly right. Hundred percent. Alright, guys. Well, this was another live version of the Creative Dealmaker podcast. So mister Chris, mister Jerrad, thank you very much, for being the guest today. We're gonna wrap from our coaching session and our training that we've recorded inside of here today. And we will see you soon for the next edition of the Creative Dealmaker podcast. So until then, guys. Bye for now. Bye bye.