Ryan Daniel Moran (on Capitalism.com / #FFLTV Ep 17 QA, uploaded March 24, 2017) answers a question about where to sell an e-commerce business. He recommends selling to a strategic buyer (a competitor or experienced operator who will grow the business), warns against selling to passive investors who won’t scale the business, and offers himself as a buyer — directing sellers to freedomfastlane.com/sell. He notes brokers and public listings are alternatives if no strategic buyer is available.
Questions this video answers
freedomfastlane.com/sell
March 24, 2017
Chapters
Joshua Singer asks, where's the first place you would look to sell an E commerce business? If you're looking to sell an E commerce business, sell it to me. Actually, this is where I double down. This is my strength. So, yes, I buy Amazon businesses, E commerce businesses, physical products businesses. If you have a business that you want to sell, by the way, go to freedomfastlane.com sell and you can fill out a form that'll actually put it on my radar to see if it's a business that my team and I want to purchase. My recommendation, though, apart from that quick little pitch, is that you should sell your business to a strategic buyer. Meaning someone is buying you because they think they can grow it. Cause they either know the market or they know the business. I've made this mistake in the past of selling a business, and it was to a group that was just looking at it as an investment. They weren't involved in the industry, they weren't involved in the market. And I retained a piece of that business, but they didn't grow that business. So the upside I thought I was gonna get, I did not get. I only got the cash upfront, which was fine. It was still a deal I wanted to take. But my hope was that it was gonna grow and that my piece in the business was going to grow. And that didn't happen. So if you're not going to get all cash for the business and then just walk away and be done, which you could do through a broker, you could do it on any number of sites that list businesses for sale. The ideal scenario is if you're selling to a strategic person who is a competitor or somebody who's in the business that has done it before, that is going to grow it and has the capital and the experience to be able to take that and put it alongside their track record of growing businesses like yours. But if you're not going to a competitor, if you don't have a strategic buyer, then you can put it listed publicly just about anywhere you want. There's a bunch of websites and brokers that will do that. Or you can just sell it to me.
