Why BUYING A Business Often Makes More Sense Than Building One From Scratch with Ace Chapman

How do you make business problems disappear? Wrap them in bacon for business owners, marketing execs, and anyone trying to grow your business, pump your profits and make more while doing less. Welcome to Bacon Wrapped Business with Brad Costanzo. Sizzling hot business advice guaranteed to make you fat profits. Every week, our chefs will serve you proven recipes for ramping up your revenue. Now here's your host, Brad Costanzo. All right, you're listening to Bacon Wrap Business. This is Brad Costanzo and I'm going to tell you right now that today is going to be a very fun and different conversation that you're going to get to listen to. And I'm inviting you to be a fly on the wall as I talk to Ace Chapman about buying and investing in profitable businesses as opposed to necessarily just starting your own. This is a top that I've been very interested in ever since I sold my first business and was sitting there thinking, should I start a new one, buy a new one, et cetera. And I've read a lot. I have not pulled the trigger on anything. And Ace is, he's a micro private equity investor. He's acquired like 15 offline businesses, sold 13 of them. So you've heard of house flipping. He's kind of like business flipping. Right? And he's also acquired like 31 different online website based businesses. He bought cool Wall street back in the day. He grew it to 250,000 members, sold it 15 years ago at age 19. And over the past several years, he's worked with a lot of entrepreneurs, gen y ers, business owners and folks probably just like you, helped you buy, sell and grow businesses in your local market, nationally, et cetera. And about six months ago, I read his book, the Ace how to buy a profitable business. Starting with no money, live life on your own terms like a boss. And I took a bunch of notes on it and I am excited to welcome him to the podcast today. So once more if you are, some of this may be over your head. I'm not going to go into the, into the real basics like, oh, you know about buying a business, the stuff that you could read in his book. I want you to actually buy the book if you find this interesting and take a lot of notes, because I know I will be. That being said, Ace Chapman, welcome to Bacon Wrap business.

That is great to be here. We ended up crossing paths years ago through one of my mentors, Oren Clapp. And so I saw the name, I was excited to jump on the call and reconnect.

Yeah, man, me too. This is really good. I remember when I forget how I stumbled across your book and I was like, oh, wait a minute. Yeah, I remember he used to work with Oren when I worked with Oren. And for my audience, if you guys don't know Oren Klaff, he's the author of a great book called Pitch Anything. I highly recommend you go out and grab it, but yeah, dude. So this is interesting. You and I have been chatting a little bit offline prior to turning the recorder on here, just about buying businesses and selling them. I mean, this is a totally different animal that most I believe entrepreneurs ever even really think about. It's like out of the realm of possibility. I know the folks that I talk to and I network with a lot of entrepreneurs, very few of them have actually went in and bought a business. They all just start one up. And if you started a business, you know, it is. There's a lot of moving parts, there's a lot to get. You know, you're pushing that boulder up a hill and just trying to get traction. I mean, I'm doing that with stiletto coffee right now. And sometimes I think, what the hell am I doing? Why did I not just go in and find a business that's already operating either profitably or almost profitably, that I know that I can improve and I guess leapfrog over all the startup crap that we have to build?

Yeah, it's one of those things that I know if it weren't for a set of circumstances, I would have never considered buying a business as. As an alternative. And yeah, I tell people, even to this day, when it comes to helping people go out and do deals and buy businesses or investing with people, I really don't like working with folks that have only. They've just never tried to start a business before or has never invested in real estate before. Because you don't appreciate how incredible it is that one day you cannot be making money and the next day you can have a closing and have positive income. Unless you've gone through, you know, the. The pains. And, you know, I'm fortunate. I'd done a couple of deals and then I decided on the third business I bought. We're going to open up a another location from scratch. And this is a business already had a brand already. You know, we had the systems, we knew what worked. But just to go to a different location and start something from scratch, it was like, wow, this. This is what entrepreneurs are going through. Like, this is craziness. I would never deal with this madness.

Yeah, I asked Myself that all the time. And it's funny. Like, that's the. To me, also, the most fun part is the very, very beginning, because anything's possible and you're giving birth to an idea. And then the worst part of being an entrepreneur, I believe, is after you've gone through all the setup and all the fun has actually now been drained out of the original dream and the idea because you're actually on it. It's that period after startup, but before really having much traction, exposure and revenue. And it's the oh, crap, what did I just get myself into moment. I mean, this happened the same. This exact same thing that's going on right now with my wife's company and mine. Stiletto Coffee is. We're getting traction. We took a lot to kind of get it up and out the door, and it's working, but we don't know what's going to happen. There's no proven processes. We're a whole lot of hope versus going out and finding a company that's already got all the other crap done, stepping in and improving what's already there.

Yeah.

How did you. I mentioned in the intro, at 19 years old, you sold your first business, Is that right?

I bought my first business When I was 19, yes.

Now, was that the cool Wall street.

Or was that something else that was cool Wall Street?

Give me a idea how that whole thing started.

So I was basically just a customer. I was a user, a member of this site that allowed people to take virtual money and go and invest in the stock market. And the annoying thing, this is 98, 99. The Internet was early, but the annoying thing was that you couldn't get any response from the company. The site was always crashing. There weren't a lot of options. So it was something where the users were really, like, rooting for this thing. But the owners just seemed to be totally checked out. So I reached out to them to become an intern over the summer. And just like I expected, it took them forever to get back to me. But when they wrote back, they basically said, hey, the reason this thing sucks is that we've moved on to another project. We'd love to sell it to you because it seems like you really like what we're doing. And, you know, they asked them, like, well, what would you sell it for? You know, I was a broke college kid. I was more curious.

Anything, right?

Yeah, I was. It was more just out of curiosity. It wasn't like, oh, what are you selling it for? I'm gonna buy it. But they wrote back saying it's making 60,000 a year. We would sell it for 70,000. And I was at a school upstate called New Colgate in upstate New York. We're making it like just to, just to pay for years tuition. It was 33,000. So they're making like over close 130,000 off of me for four years. And I would be thrilled if I got out and made 60,000.

So I'm gonna guess you weren't, as a college student, weren't walking around with $70,000 in your bank account ready to buy business.

Yeah, Exactly. I had $3,000 I'd saved up from the summer before. So I'm thinking, how in the world can I buy this thing? And ended up getting a little money from a buddy of mine who also was a business nerd like me, but in college, but actually have 15,000. And then I went back to them and asked them to finance half of it and made up the difference with some credit cards, which my biggest stress at that, most kids were stressed about, you know, like grades and that kind of thing. My biggest stress with that was that the credit card company would send one of the statements to my parents, send it to the dorm, because they would have absolutely murdered me. Like what you said $70,000. You know, all this money to some random people you've never met in person and over the Internet. Now you got to keep in mind this is again, 99, like people were nervous about putting their credit card for like a $15 transaction online. So it was awesome. I never, still have never met the people that I bought that very first business.

So did you buy it for like Cat? You just took, took on debt and bought it full blown cash for 70 grand.

I bought it for 70,000. They financed half of it.

Cool.

I raised some equity from a buddy of mine who also had some programming skills, so he helped me with some of that stuff. But even just transferring the site, like all that stuff was just a lot bigger pain back then.

What was your expertise there? Like, did you know a lot about marketing and tech and computers and Internet and stuff? Like, what gave you the confidence that I'm gonna go buy this? Because I know what to do when I got it.

I was a poli sci major. I knew nothing about computer science. And there just wasn't a lot of widespread knowledge because the Internet was new. The thing that I knew was as a user, and this is a great tip for anybody who's thinking about going out and doing deals. Buy a business that you're very familiar with that you're already passionate about as a consumer because you know what the other folks want. I knew that. Man, if this thing is making 60,000 without ever responding to emails, with the site going down for days at a time, people being annoyed because, you know, they had to reset their, their virtual cache. Just all kinds of crazy, crazy issues. I just felt like if I just do the soft points, you know, the just taking care of them, tell them, hey, it went down, even if it goes down, I'm sorry, we're trying to get it back up, Just letting people know what was going on, that we could take this thing to another level.

Man, that's cool. So I love the fact that you jumped in and did that. So then you grew it, then you sold it.

How long after I sold it in 2001. So we actually had seven figure offers. I'm 19, 20 years old and I feel like, man, this is it. Like I hit the jackpot. I'm going to be retired by 23. It was just on this hot trajectory. Every month, more and more money, you know, I raised capital. I ended up dropping out of school because my investors came to me and basically said, hey, we want to invest, but not if you're going to be a full time student. And actually I didn't want to. I felt like, you know, like, nah, I'm not gonna leave school. And I went to my parents and kind of felt like they would say, no, you shouldn't. But they actually, once they realized that it was real money. That was a funny summer. All summer. I'm telling my dad, you know, I kind of explained this thing to him. It's his virtual money investing stuff. Da, da, da. So the summer after I bought it, I'm working on, I'm like, hey, yeah, it's like, so are you gonna get a job this summer? I was like, no. Like I got a site and it's making money. It's like, what is it? And I kind of explain it to him. And so I would tell him, like, yeah, we did well this month, we make 5,000. And he just was never very impressed. I'm like, well, I guess that's just not a big deal. So towards the end of the summer, you know, I'm telling him I got investors that want to invest and that kind of thing. He's like, so why would anybody invest in your business? And I'm like, why wouldn't they? It's like all you're doing is making that virtual money and. Or Internet money is what he called it. I'm like, no, the Internet, the virtual money is what's just a game. Like, I'm making real money. He's like, so how much real money are you making? I was like, at that point, by August, we'd grown it to like 15,000 in a month.

Nice.

And we got a check. I had a check from Doubleclick. I'm like, well, you know, we made 15,000 this month. He's like, nobody's sending you 15,000 in real money.

I'm like, dad, like, it's not Monopoly money.

Yeah, yeah. So I show him this check from Doubleclick and he's like this. There's no way that this is real. Nobody's going to send you this money. We need to take this to the bank and like, get down to the bottom of this because you're probably involved in some scam and you know you're going to be in a bunch of debt. This is just trouble. So we get down to the bank and he's like, you know, is this real? Can you call and check on this company? And you know, it was just this funny thing. And so he realizes, like, oh, this thing is making actual real money. Like, why would you go back to school?

That's so awesome. So now I want to fast forward. So in the past several years when you've been, you've been really stepping up your game buying offline and online businesses. Give me, give me a clearer vision of this. So the online businesses, there's all types of online businesses, like from E commerce to content sites, etc. And I want to come back to those in just a second. But tell me about the offline, the types of offline businesses that you either own or have acquired.

Yeah, so I've done a lot of different types of businesses. The very first one I bought was a mortgage company. So when I sold Cool Wall street in 2001, it was after the bust and I actually left that, that business broke. You know, I had had nothing. So I went from like being 21, 20 years old, this is the end. I'm going to blow up and sell this business for millions to literally leaving the company, paying off debt. Rest of money went to investors and I left with nothing. And I end up working for a financial institution and I had written off the Internet. I'm like, I don't want to do any of. I mean, after you have that, you burned me down. I was burned. I never wanted to do it again. So I went and worked for a financial institution and was also frustrated there, knew I wasn't going to be a part of corporate America after that space made great money, especially for a 21 year old. They hired me because of what I was able to do with cool Wall Street. But the frustration was I wasn't able to hire an assistant. So I went out and you know, I had employees and I'm like, man, I can do so much more. I can sell so much more if y' all let me hire an assistant. And the, they're like, nope, you have to have seniority. And the BPs will be upset. And I'm like, I'll pay for them. I'll take care of everything. It's like, not about money. You know, you gotta follow this protocol. And I'm like, this is ridiculous. So I basically left the bank, went down two blocks, rented an office, hired a couple assistants to work for me while I was working at the bank. So I would kind of walk back and forth. No way. And at first I hired one and she was. That worked out well. And I'm like blowing up that I got another one. And you know, it's probably a little suspicious because most of the people that I work with, like, there's paperwork all over their desk, folders just falling off. And like, I'm, I'm doing all these deals and like, there's never anything. There's like, what are you doing? Like, ah, you know, I like to do my stuff in the evening. So the gig, the jig was up. When I walked in one day, my boss like step into my office and they're like, so who is Marie Jackson? And that was like one of my sister's name. And I was like, oh yeah, so that's my sister. They're like, you can't do that. This is a financial institution. Like, you just can't have random people working on stuff. It's like, you can either give us your, your resignment, but. Or we could do an investigation. I was like, ah, I'll go ahead and resign. Very first deal was going out and buying a mortgage company and ended up growing that. And then I bought a home vestor franchise. Then I went out and did a couple spas and some tanning salons and some retail shops called Plato's Closet. That was the one where I was like, oh man, I am the man. I'm such an amazing entrepreneur. I can go and I'm going to open up another location of this. And I realized at around that time I also found a mentor that flipped hospitals. And between him and the experience of going out trying to find a Location, signing a lease, paying them deposit in first couple months, lease, preparing for the build out, hiring employees, having to train those new employees. All this time you're losing money. You know, one day you finally get close to being able to open. You got to do some marketing so you actually have people coming in once you open. And then you get to the grand opening and you're still losing money for months and months before you get to just break even. And I'm like, okay, never again. This is it. And so that in addition to having an amazing mentor who happened to be in my same city, but it done deals all over the world and family flipped hospitals like I said, which that was, you know, you talk about not, not thinking about flipping businesses. Like, even though I've done business, I'm like, what? Like, no way. You don't just go and buy a hospital and flip it. So. And he just also, it's like, you know, I, when I was talking about starting, he's like, man, like, why don't you just build your laptop? And I'm like, what are you talking about? It's like, just build your laptop. If you're going to build stuff from scratch and that's what you like to do. You should build your car, build your house. Just with everything you need is like, if your goal is to build and just start building. But if your goal is to make money, then have a straight line to the money. And just that shift in thinking changed everything for me. You know, if you want a house, you go and you have a straight line to a house. If you want a car, you have a straight line to the car. It's like, if you want income, then you have a straight line for that. If you just want to go build something, then go build something. But if your goal is really I want to make money, then go find the money and get it.

That's. Yeah, that's. It's such a, it's such an important shift. And I've been, I think I've been making that shift over the past few years to where I still wake up going, why am I not doing this? Why am I not doing this more? Why am I not searching for deals? I wrote a couple questions down. I want to just kind of rapid fire. I usually don't even have preplanned questions, but this was an important conversation. So first of all, tell me about. Because I want to get to the point where you talk about, you don't necessarily need to bring your own money to this. That's probably the biggest fallacy that, oh, if I'm going to buy this business, I got to have the money to buy it or I have to go get a loan and buy it. And I want you to explain in a moment why that's not always the case. But first of all, tell me about your favorite business deal you've ever done.

One of my favorites was the very first tanning salon I bought. So it's my favorite for a couple of reasons. Number one, if your listeners can't tell or didn't go see a picture of me on your site, I am African American.

So you are not the average customer of a tanning salon.

I am not a tanning salon commercial. So for one, it's pretty cool that literally the very first time I stepped foot in a tanning salon, I bought it, like, bought the business. But the reason I literally bought it within 20 minutes of my very first time walking into a tanning salon was because the lady had been, it had a lot of things about it. I mean, it's really the exact, exact type of, of deal that we look for. The business have been around for 22 years. I love buying things that are proven. I'm not trying to come in and, you know, try to build a brand. When you've got, you know, one of my most recent offline acquisitions is a business that has now been in business for 35 years. And when you've got, what kind of business is that? This is basically party store. It's like party city.

Cool.

So everybody in like a 45 mile radius has heard of it or come to it and all that. And it's passed down in generations. Like people like, oh, yeah, we used to come here when I was a kid. My mom would bring me here, and now that person's like 30. So it's a powerful thing. But the interesting thing on the, the tennis line thing deal was, you know, number one, it been around for a long time. Number two, the, the lady was very motivated. Her husband was being transferred to Europe. She had to sell immediate, you know, as quickly as possible. And, and then the other thing was it was making really great money. So I, I walked in and I, I knew I had those factors.

But wait, why did you walk? What caused you to walk in? In the beginning, it wasn't obviously to get a tan.

No, no, no. So I, I knew that she wanted to sell.

So how did you. Pardon me for asking those questions because that's what. That's probably one of the hardest parts. How'd you know?

So a big part of this is Just telling people what you do know. There are very few people that. That buy businesses and flip businesses. And when you tell somebody that that's what you do, it sticks in their head forever. Like, it just. You're gonna be the only person their cousin flips real estate or is trying to do a startup or whatever. So this person I actually met, the person that referred the seller to me two years before.

Oh, wow. And they heard them talking and they said, yeah, my friend maybe interested in selling.

She was friends with the owner of the business and basically said, hey, I don't even know how to get in touch with this guy, but there's this guy in town named Ace Chapman, and that's what he does. He buys businesses. So if you want to try to sell it, you know, you should try to contact them. And she literally hunted me down and contacted me. So I go over there and meet with her and, you know, obviously got some initial questions. Like I said, you know, those are some of the initial things. When you're talking to a business owner, you want to find out how long has it been around, you know, why are you selling? So that's going to tell us the motivation, and then what's. What's the income? I really don't even try to ask price. Yeah. Because I want to. They don't know how much it should sell for.

Bingo.

I want to educate them before we get into the price of the business. And so got to the business, we're talking. We start to talk a little bit about price. And, you know, I really. When. When I'm negotiating with somebody, I want to spend a lot of time talking about how soon they need to sell, why they need to sell, the story behind why they're selling all those things just to get them in a space where they realize the reality. It's not about trying to trick them into something else. It's just, hey, okay, so let's just both make sure that we understand here that you need me a lot more than I need you. There are a lot of businesses out there. I'm the only person here that's trying to buy your business. So that creates a lot better negotiation process. And so we're talking about the business, and then I find out, you know, then I want to figure out the opportunities for growth. And I asked her about her customer list, and she's like, oh, yeah, we've got 15,000 people in our database. And, well, I'm, you know, I'm like, well, I want to talk about the leads in a bit, but let's talk about just the customers. And she's like, oh, no, we don't keep leads. Like, all of those. Those are just customers. And I'm like, what? You know, it's like, there are people on the Internet that don't have 15,000 customer lists, you know, and killing it. So. But over the course of 20 years, they had built up a customer base of 15,000 people. I'm like, oh, wow, okay, well, that's awesome. And check. We need to start collecting leads, too. But okay, so how often are you contacting those people? And she's like, I really don't like to contact them. I don't want to annoy them. And, you know, that kind of thing. I'm like, okay, yeah, that's fine. But like, when was the last time? She's like, yeah, we don't do that. It's like, okay, but like, when have you done it?

Like, never.

And I'm like, what?

And it's probably more common than you'd think.

Yeah, yeah. So at that point, that was just, like, completely shocking. And one of the reasons that I ended up. It was prevalent, which is why I ended up buying five tanning salons and pulling them together.

And so did you do any creative, like, what else made this really good? Like, did when you set the price, like, specifically, do you remember how this all happened? And then did you buy it using any kind of creative financing?

So we did basically 100% seller financing, but the price was just two times earnings. So she wanted. My thing with her was, when you're talking to a seller, you want to connect with them and see where they are. And I knew if I could give her the relief of selling that business right thin and she could walk out and not have to think about it anymore.

Yep.

That she would be done. And, you know, that's kind of what I said. I said, you know, I'm going to buy this. We'll do it. I showed her I happily educate my sellers. It's like, let's look at the market and see what things are selling for. Because it's way more about terms and then it is about price.

Right, Exactly. So, you know, and the seller gets one of the other.

Exact. Exactly.

So you got into this, like, 100% seller financing. So for anybody who doesn't really understand what that means is you didn't put money into the business.

Right.

Or maybe just a tiny bit, like, so in order to get it.

Yeah. So the way we did it, we did 100% seller financing. I said, you know, we're going to amortize it over the course of two years. And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna make the payments. I'm gonna make four payments up front.

Okay?

So that allowed me not to worry about having to pay her for four months. So it's a down payment because people want to get a check right then.

Yeah, exactly.

You know, but it's. It's kind of a win win, because really, you're just making your payments up front. And so she could walk out of there with a check, which is. Is big as well. And so literally within 20 minutes, you know, I got on her computer, wrote up a little contract. You know, we. I was like, we'll do a full purchase agreement later. I just want you to know you can walk out of here and not have to worry about this. I'm gonna pay you four months up front, and we'll come to this agreement. And within 20 minutes of walking into that tennis line, I end up buying it. The reason it's my favorite deal, of course, is because it was. It turned out to be very profitable. So we got to work reaching out to that list. You know, a lot of those folks that work at retail places, spa salons, are just sitting there. You know, a lot of the girls that work there were just doing their homework all day. You know, call the customers, make a deal, come back in, that's over. That's over. We're selling. You know, they weren't they just, like. She didn't want to disturb the folks by selling. Sending them coupons and emails and that kind of thing. She didn't want to upsell them. So they just never talked about the different lotions and all that. So I'm like, learning about the stuff. Like, this is definitely the prime case of never having any idea, so what do they want and how can we sell it? And. All right, this is what you need to say, and this is how we're going to put together the sales copy. So that was a lot of fun, but ended up tripling the size of that business, went ahead and paid off the whole thing. I made him enough to pay off the whole thing in about six months and sold it for double what my price was. So I sold that business. And then I was like, I won't.

Sold it after how long?

Six months.

So you doubled your money in six months?

Yes. Which is more than. More than double. Yeah, yeah, more than double. But that's.

That's awesome. Two big questions, and we've got about 10 minutes left, because I Know you've got a hard session stop on here. One of them is back then and now when you go to buy business, if you find a business whether it's online or offline now how involved do you personally get in the management, marketing, etc. Because that can be a big headache. Do you have a hit team that goes in and resources that you kind of lay out the strategy, they do all the work or do you roll your sleeves up and get your hands real dirty?

Yeah, I used to be in the business, you know, typically every single day back 10 years ago. Now I more have a passive portfolio of businesses. The great majority of them are Internet businesses. So right Now I have 28 different properties and but who's running them when you buy?

Are you, are you investing in now as like, as kind of a minority investor and then getting a piece for providing capital and maybe some consulting or are you buying them outright?

Yeah. So most of these deals I'm becoming an investor and that's what I've seen. A lot of my clients that I help buy businesses, you know, they get into a deal and they're like, man, there's just nothing else that provides these kind of returns. Because you can buy a business at two times earnings.

Yeah.

Which basically means you're getting a higher 100% of your money back in two years, 50% returns. And so we started, I had already done it. The only reason I started helping people buy businesses was so that I could invest in those businesses and not have.

To run the day to day.

Yeah, yeah. It's like, okay, I can only do so many deals, you know, how can I expand my portfolio? And that was a big thing. Reasons like I need more people that know these strategies so that I can invest in their businesses. And now it's kind of a second generation where I have a whole group of people that are doing that level. It's like now I'm training people on how to go out and invest in other deals and build their own portfolio. You know, it's exciting that you know, we're having people that are replacing their income. You know, I just had a guy in San Antonio build a portfolio, built a portfolio of just four deals. Started with absolutely nothing and got into his first deal and then the second deal got him fourth deal and just a little portion of several businesses. And now he's left his job, which was a six figure job and has a stay at home wife and spending more time with his family. And we're having a little mastermind is going to be speaking at here in a couple weeks. So those are really great, great stories. And I think a lot of people just going back to what my mentor Mike said, which is the real goal is the ink is the income. It's not about being an entrepreneur. It's definitely not about being a Facebook. You know, he would just make so much fun of. Of how, you know, it's like, oh, we're gonna study Facebook marketing now. We gotta become an AdWords master. And now it's Periscope. And, you know, it's like meerkat. You know, like meerkat is, I think, gone now. Before that was hot. And so you become an expert at all these things, and it's like, you know, you got two dots and you're going all over the place. As opposed to just a straight line to the dot.

Yeah. Basically you understand that you hire the people who are going to come in and do that stuff. Not learning it yourself. Yeah, that's actually something I've had to do on my own, is because I became a really good tactician and I realized there's much more money and just strategy and being the entrepreneur who organizes everything. Okay, so right now, answering that question is you're not going in and managing these things. You work with the individuals who want to buy them. You help fund, etc. And advise. What about finding the businesses? That seems to be the most daunting task. I know for somebody like me, it's like, if it's one thing, if you stumble across a business, but are there proactive things that, like, if you're working with a client, if one of my listeners hears this, gets in contact with you and like, hey, Ace, I want to do this. How much of it is them? You giving them the advice to go out and find the potential businesses to sale, or are you constantly sourcing deals all over the place?

Yeah. So we have a team of virtual assistants that are going out and always finding deals and coming, bringing deals into the pipeline. It can get complicated to create deal flow. It's work. And a lot of people, you know, you kind of. I've been doing this for 17 years now, and so there's just a lot more deal flow coming in than obviously I can handle. And it's kind of one of those things where it's like, you know what it is a lot, and I want to give some tips. But the other thing I would say is, you know, instead it's making easy. Making it easier for everybody else. Instead of you going out and trying to spend a couple of years to get to the point where you got deal, deal flow coming in and all that, we've created this network and you know, six years ago I started training other people so they've gone out and implemented those strategies. So we have 32 different ways that you create deal flow flow and then you want to get that into a funnel where at the very top you're getting those kind of three initial questions answered. Then you're building out a prospectus basically and getting a vision of what this business is, what it does on a day to day basis, how much money, et cetera. And then you get into, you know, pricing and valuation and after that you're moving it down to due diligence and making, doing a structure on the deal, making an offer and then financing and closing. And you need a lot of deals coming at the top of that funnel. You know, talking about in the, in the pre call the fact that a lot of people will find an initial deal that really isn't that great, but because they're just excited about buying a business, they're ready to buy and it's like, no, like you, you know, let's.

Kiss a lot of frogs.

Yeah, yeah. We'll look at all on average 100 deals for every one that we actually close. So you want a lot of deal flow coming through and that's one of the things we help folks with.

What's one of your favorite methods for that?

Yeah, a couple quick tips. One of the places that we find the very best deals is from places where the seller is going to be motivated. So we love dealing with divorce attorneys are around really great because a lot of times the person needs to get out of the business. The two, the, the couple may work, may own equity together. You know, they need to sell. It's not about how much money, it's about how quickly they can get some cash and move on. We've had just case after case where we've got amazing deals from, from those. The other thing is LinkedIn has been really great and you know, we've done a few different tasks and strategies where you know, you shift your, what you do, you know, just putting on there. I buy businesses or business acquisitions and then you're just connecting with the owners of the type of businesses that you want to end up buying. And but a huge thing is events. You know, I go to a lot of events connecting with people so you can go in person and nine times out of ten you're gonna be the only person there. They're gonna be, let's say you want to buy FBA businesses, You want to buy drop shipping businesses when everybody else is there learning how to build them. And you're gonna be the only person saying like, hey, great. You know, once you've built it, I want to buy it.

So what, tell me this then. What are your two quick things?

Your.

Your quick elevator pitch. If I meet you in an event, hey, I'm Brad Costanzo.

Ace.

What do you do for a living?

So if I'm at a drop shipping event, I would say I'm Ace Chapman and I buy drop shipping businesses.

That's easy.

Boom.

I love it. So is that actually give me a couple ideas of what's your sweet spot right now that you're looking for. What kind of businesses? Or is there one? Is drop shipping a hot one for you?

Yeah, I love drop shipping. I love fba. We're doing. I mean, now what's happened that's really neat is that we have built, we bought from a lot of sellers and a lot of times we'll hire those sellers on to be consultants and help us in the deals. And it's this really unique strategy where between me and my partners and clients, we've done over 100 Internet businesses and we have relationships where it may just be something simple like an affiliate business, but we're in a unique position. Again, by not trying to be the technician and focusing on this deal maker skill set, we're able to buy something from one affiliate guy who's used his specific strategy that he likes, and then we can go back to another affiliate guy who has used a whole different tactic and bring that new skill skill set into the deal. So same thing with FBA or drop shipping, e commerce. Not doing as many SaaS deals, but we do have a few of those. So that would be the. Probably the one weak point, but everything else we're doing a bunch of.

That's awesome. Well, man, this has been great. I know you have got to go right now. You got another call.

Yeah, let's do it again sometime. I would love to.

Let's do. Definitely stay in touch. I want to talk to you about a lot of this stuff, potentially even for some personal reasons.

Yeah.

And if folks want more information on you, give them the. Give them the where to go. More space.

Check out acechatman.com. got some articles and things there, but feel free. You know I'm available. You have questions about this stuff, shoot me an email. You can reach me aceace Chapman dot com. Perfect.

Well, thank you much, Ace. I appreciate all your time. This has been really, really good, guys. I recommend you go check out Ace's book that is on Amazon. You can just Google Amazon, Ace Chapman. Look in the show notes. Check it out. And speaking of business books, do me a favor, tell me your favorite one out there. I'm not talking to you, Ace. Although you could tell me, but from all my listeners, send an email to ask bradakenwrappedbusiness.com and let me know a great business book that you've read that you've really liked and maybe I'll mention it on the show. Until next. Go ahead.

I will say, man, we mentioned it earlier, one of my favorites that I think helps a ton of people is pitch anything.

Oh yeah, it's a great book for sure. So guys, go get that get aces book. And I dare you as a listener, I dare you to review the bacon wrapped business on itunes. I triple dare you to give me a five star review. I bet you won't do it. I bet you wouldn't like my reverse psychology there.

I like that. I like that.

We'll see if they'll take me up on it. All right, guys, till next time, I hope you've enjoyed this episode of bacon wrapped Business with Ace Chapman. Ace, you and I'll be in contact and I hope you have a great day, brother.

Thank you, sir.

Cheers.