Buying 6-Figure Businesses For Passive Income (With As Little Money As Possible) w/ Shakil Prasla

Hey, fastlaners. Ryan, Daniel Moran here. Welcome to Freedom Fastlane. Today I'm going to be joined by Shaquille Prasla. He is a fellow Austinite and a fan of Freedom Fastlane. He and I met because he was local here and we met up for lunch. And what really, really surprised and impressed me about what Shaquille does is he basically buys businesses for as a little money out of pocket as possible. And he sits in the owner's seat while systems and processes and or other people, all of the details. So he considers himself an investor. He acquires businesses that other people have built. And he is agnostic as far as where the cash flow comes from. He just wants the passive cash flow from the business. He wants to look at how he can grow it, and then he wants to sit in the driver's seat while the passive income piles up. So I asked him to come on the show to talk about exactly what his processes look like, how does he acquire them, how does he manage them, how does he sell, sit in that owner's seat without getting lost in the details? And also how does he manage multiple six figure projects at once? That would drive a lot of people crazy. So how does he do it while keeping his sanity? And he confesses that sometimes that piece is hard, but that for the most part, he's able to stay out of the operator's role and in the owner's role. I think you are really going to enjoy this discussion with Shaquille Prasla.

Hey, everybody. Welcome to Freedom Fastlane. Today I'm joined by Shaquille Prasla. Shaquille, thanks for hanging out with us at Freedom Fast Lane.

Hey, man, thanks for having me.

Hey, you know it. You know, we met. I don't even know how we were introduced, but, you know, we had a nice lunch together at Kirby Lane here in Austin. I didn't even know you were a fan of the show when we sat down and you told me that you were. But I think you just have one of the coolest business models and it's something I've been passionate about for a long time and want to kind of resurface. And we'll tease a little bit about that. But before we go into that, Shaquille, would you kind of give us a little bit of your background and then we'll go into, you know, the empire that you're building?

Sure, sure. So I've always been in the retail space. I used to own convenience stores, so I've been in the brick and mortar store. I've dabbled with real estate, but my biggest interest has been in technology and online retail. So about a few years ago, about five years ago, I started a website selling cufflinks and tie clips and men's accessories. And from then on I started acquiring online companies because I noticed when you start a company, you put in a lot of time and effort into it. And I wanted to bypass all that. I wanted to pay a premium on that just so I could have a existing business that I could quickly grow. So I've been doing that the past three years as I've just been acquiring online companies.

And when you're acquiring them. Yeah, it's, it's my understanding, at least the way that you described it is you're, you're making the decision mostly based just on cash flow and if you can grow them. But are you acquiring a certain type of business? Like are you in one specific industry? But from what I remember, you kind of are just if it cash flows, I'm interested. Is that the case or am I misunderstood?

No, absolutely. So I'm not particular about any product. It has to be a good cash flow business. It has to be a good product. So there's a couple things I look for when I want to acquire a business. It definitely has to be a evergreen product. And what I mean by that is it has to be a product that's not a fad business, it's not a trendy product, it's going to be there for the next few years.

The product itself has to be sort of in demand. Another thing I look for is the seller. I want to know the seller. I want to know the business that they're running. Is it a underserved market? Are the products in demand, but they're still not getting enough traffic. So that's one of the things I sort of look for, is the potential for growth in that aspect. There's a lot of times where sellers just get burnt out. They want to try a new industry or they have growth opportunities that they don't want to go after just because they don't want to go with the stress. My biggest acquisition was two years ago when the seller, Eastern Chicago. He stopped serving ads, he stopped running ads, profitable ads, because he just did not want to deal with the stress of too many customers handling too many employees. And I just said, man, I'm gonna buy this business from you. And I did. And you know, I was able to grow that into a multi seven figure business. So, you know, things like that, there's people out there that just don't want to run their business, that they're tired of it, they just want to get rid of it. And those are people I want to buy from.

So what's interesting about that is, you know, you're after the cash flow. But it seems to me that it might get a bit overwhelming managing businesses that are in different industries and that have different goals. So how is it that you can flip from something that sells cufflinks and then go after something that sells a SaaS product or sells on Amazon or sells advertising if there's no consistent trend between them? How does Shaquille keep his sanity?

Oh man, it does get tough sometimes. But.

The biggest thing that you need is good people around you. Now I always buy physical products, whether they're on Amazon or they're selling on ebay or they're dropship or the custom products. I always make sure that I have a good team. When you buy a business, for example, let's give our metal promotional products that we sell. This was a new product line for me. I knew nothing about manufacturing of metal products. I did not know how they were getting made in China. I spent like the first month being side by side with the buyer, I'm sorry, the seller, working with them full time, just learning the whole business. I used that knowledge and I transfer that knowledge to a manager. That manager is in charge of running that business.

In charge of handling the customer service reps. They're in charge of running the whole business and they're incentivized to do that too. If the company makes more money, they make more money. But I always try to pick good people to run the business.

So you're out of it at that point, Is that right? So you basically get to buy the cash flow and then, you know, advise the person who's going to manage and then bounce out. Is that right?

I try to, yeah, I try to automate as much as I can from my, from my stance. So if it's giving strategy, that's what I'll give. As far as working in the business, I don't spend too much time on that. That's why the manager is there. That's why we have artists, that's why we have contract employees. They're in charge of running the business. And I give sort of the high level strategy saying, hey, let's go after this market, let's produce this product, let's build this website, let's do this banner, let's do this ad. And they implement everything. I try to just keep on absorbing as much knowledge As I can from forums, from news, and I translate that message to my employees who then implement it.

That is a beautiful model because that just keeps you in the, like the tycoon. The tycoon chair. Right. You know, you get to buy all the cash flow and then pass all the good ideas to good people. I guess the next logical question to ask is, how are you consistently finding good people?

Sure, sure. So it's a matter of trial and error. You have to, you know, sort of as if you're launching a product on Amazon. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. You have to just try them out. I will look on upwork for some outsource employees. I will look on Monster.

And just a variety of places just to see the potential of people out there. I will personally interview them. I will ask them about my business. I sort of go through this three step process of interviews where I tell them, if you were given this task, how would you handle this? If I were to tell you I want to grow this product line, you have 12 hours to figure out how you can grow this business, do your research, come up with a business plan and tell me.

Usually I use that kind of strategy, putting them to do these tasks before I start to hire them. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. I do go through a three month trial period of just testing them out, see how they're doing. And once they, you know, prove themselves, I bring them on full time to run my businesses.

And are these usually local people? Are they virtual?

Your managers that are running those businesses, what's your arrangement like with them?

So everyone is virtual, everyone works from home. And that's one of the selling points I try to give to them is, hey, you can work from the comfort of your home, but you have to be running my business. And some of them are outsourced employees and some of them live in the US it ranges on what type of business it is. If it's a smaller business, I will probably use a outsourced manager. If it's a larger business like my metal promotional company, the manager, the CEO who runs my company right now, he lives in Austin and so he's the one running the company.

Got it. So it seems to me like in theory this is a perfect business, right, because you just get to acquire cash flow, tell somebody else how to manage it and get out. But I can imagine that it can be very complex and complicated and there are days you probably feel like you're going crazy because it could just be so much going on. But you also have A nice container for managing all of the chaos. So would you give us some insight into the, I guess, the involvement of detail that you feel like you get involved in? Do you feel like there's a lot going on and you're barely staying above water, or do you feel like you're systematically building kind of an empire of different businesses?

Sure, sure. So let's just say this year I definitely want to acquire more companies. So it's not a matter of time, it's a matter of how I'm delegating that time. I sort of use that 80, 20 rule where 20% of my time has to be for 80% of my growth.

So that's sort of the strategy I use. I use a lot of overall high strategy of making sure that my employees are showing up on time, that they're, they're managing the business, that they're running the ads correctly. I'm not an Internet marketer, you know, I'm not good at that stuff. Things I'm not good at. I will outsource it. I have agencies that send me reports on how the business is running and I do a lot of weekly calls to make sure that everyone's doing their work. There's an website I use called Hubstaff, which is great to monitor. Your outsourced employees basically is like upwork, where it takes screenshots of their work, it takes clicks of how many times that they're actually moving their mouse every 10 minutes to show their efficiency. And so just apps like that, softwares like that, I'm able to manage the people and sort of give this high level strategy of making sure that the business is growing. Every month I sort of give this projection saying I want to hit this much of revenue, I want to hit this much of customer acquisitions, I want to make this much of sales. And every week we sort of track that in our Slack group, making sure that we're able to sort of keep hitting that.

And you say that you're not an Internet marketer. How do you describe yourself? Do you call yourself an investor? A conglomerate? How do you describe it?

Yeah, so it's funny. I mean, I would probably call myself an investor.

I think my true asset is just analyzing businesses and finding good opportunities for growth.

I used to spend a lot of time on Google just researching, researching, researching. If I type in a keyword, I would probably go to page 30 just looking random things up. And that's what I usually enjoy. I just like reading, I like researching. And that's how my interest in businesses came for Sale. I mean, I think I look at probably over 100 online companies for sale a month just to look at their prospectus, just to see how businesses are growing, just to see if my interest is even in there for this business. But, you know, I think I'm an investor that's just, you know, looking to do some research, just to look for that new gold nugget of opportunity.

So let's talk about that growth process. When you take over a new business and you get the manager in place, I assume their job is to make sure nothing breaks, make sure that the processes keep running, and to improve those processes as much as possible, and you're looking at growth. What opportunities do you usually look for to add to a company in order to increase its profitability?

Sure, sure. So when a business comes for sale, the number one question I ask to a seller is, what growth strategies would you suggest for a new owner to implement that you just did not have time to get to? And that question.

Definitely sparks that true interest in me, in that business. I bought a dropship company a few years ago. The seller was the only one working in the business. He was managing the business, but he liked to play golf. So during the day, he would not even pick up the phone calls. He would have at least 10 missed calls a day. And he was telling me about this, and I said, why didn't you just hire a virtual assistant? And he said, well, I didn't want to trust someone else running my business taking the phone calls, seeing how they answered. And so I just missed the calls. And I would either answer the next day or later on the evening. Well, we all know that customers like to shop around, and that just means that they moved on. All I did was when I took over the business, I hired a virtual assistant, taught her on the products. We saw about a 40% increase in revenue in the first three months. I did not do anything else. Nothing else at all. That's all it took.

Just small things like that. I look at a website to see what their bounce rate is, if their bounce rate is 60% or really high. I look on their website to see why the website, you know, why the customers are bouncing off the website. I'll use a app or website called Heatwave, heatmaps, where it shows you sort of how the customer is moving their mouse, where they're clicking a lot and just making simple.

Conversion lifts on the website, showing, this is what I'm selling, this is why you should buy from me. This is does, you know, wonders for the customer. I've seen. You know, if you have, let's say, 10,000 visitors to your website, and you have a average industry of 2% conversions, that means you're getting 200 sales a month. What if you could increase that by just 1% to 3%? Now you have an extra hundred orders a month. And you know that, you know, 200 orders to 300 orders a month, that's a 50% increase on your revenue. And usually I just look to see how I could just get. Initially, I don't look to see how I could get more eyeballs. I look to see how I could get those current eyeballs to buy more stuff.

So I'll definitely market the current base. You'd be surprised to know that I bought the Sox company for sale last month. They had a customer list of about 15,000 people. They're not too big, but they were only mailing them once a year, just once a year. So these things just make me drool. I'm like, yes, this is great. Tell me more things you missed out on so I can just do them. And I ran a campaign. All I did on that mailchimp campaign said, hey, guys, order from me in the next week, get 10% off. And we had over $10,000 worth of orders just from that thing. And, you know, I'm not doing anything big. You know, this is not genius work. These are just missed opportunities by the previous seller. They just did not want to do this. You know, either they did not want to learn the technology or they were just lazy. So, you know, those were a few things. Another thing I do is I look at the product line. So let's say you're selling just one T shirt, and that T shirt's selling a lot. What I would do is I would add another color of that T shirt. And what that does, it increases your average order value because that customer will buy that black T shirt as well as that red T shirt. They like the quality. They want more colors. And I usually just sort of add more product lines. Use the 8020 rule of. Of, you know, the top 20, 80% selling coming from 20% of products, and just add variations of that.

And with, you know, these. These businesses are. They tend to all have different sales models, right? I mean, some get their customers from SEO, some are on Amazon, some just collect email lists. They're all different. Is that right?

Absolutely. So most of my companies I've bought have relied on either. So I usually try to look for companies that are mostly getting their traffic from organic traffic, that are sort of ranked Highly. That come with a customer list.

That have done no ads. And those are sort of the key opportunities for growth.

And when you buy these, are they usually cash up front and the deal's done. Are there earnouts involved? Are there terms? How do you usually finance them?

Sure, sure. So I think the great part about online businesses now compared to a few years ago, is banks are willing to finance Internet purchases. You know, first, when I went four years ago, hey, XYZ Bank, I want to get financing for this Internet company, they would come back and say, well, what assets are there? What guarantee is there that you're going to pay me back for.

An Internet business?

I think the Internet itself, the online business, it's becoming a maturing market where banks are seeing this opportunity to finance them. And so I think there's four key ways to get either financing or money for the business. I think the first one is what I just mentioned, bank financing. So with financing, you have your traditional regular loans or you have your SBA loans. The great thing about SBA loans is you could put down as little to 15%. So you get 85% financed from the bank. The great thing about SBAs are they're partially guaranteed by the government. So the banks are, you know, they have less risks, they're incentivized to push for SBAs.

But they do come with a little more strict requirements. But I think the number One key to SBAs are they do finance up to 85%.

Of your acquisition.

I think that the number two would be owner financing. So there's definitely an opportunity for the owner to finance part of the deal. Or you could also have them either do a earn out or a holdback. So if the company does a million dollars in revenue, I will pay you this much amount of money that's left over.

Yeah, I had never thought to do it that way until you actually turned me on to that. Let the record and the transcription of this podcast know that Shaquille turned me on. So you, you, you really made me start thinking in that way, which was, which was really helpful.

When you're, when, when you're acquiring these companies, where is most of the deal flow coming from? Is it coming from brokers? Are you actively going out and looking for them? Where do you find most of your deal flow?

Sure, sure. So I think with the increase of online companies coming for sale, there's a lot of brokers now available that exclusively deal with online businesses. So I think all of them put their business up for sale on buybizsell.com so you could find pretty much any business either. If it's a brick and mortar store, real estate, you can go to that website and pick specific fields such as an online business software that you want to buy. You know you're looking to make $100,000. You could field all that and it'll list all these businesses for sale. Usually I go through them every week. I get an automated weekly email saying that this business fits in your criteria. This is for sale. And usually I start my search from there. I also have, since I've bought, I think, eight businesses now, online companies. I have pretty good relationships with brokers where they will let me see the business for sale before being sent to the mass market. So I do have a leverage there where I get an insider's peak. But usually most of the time I'll probably pass on some of those deals too. You will usually find all the businesses for sale on bybizldo. There are private brokers out there that do exclusive work just for online businesses. There's Quiet Light brokerage FE International. I believe they came to your freedom fast lane live as well too.

They've been on the podcast too.

Yep, yep. So, you know, there's definitely good brokers out there that will broker online business, but you'll usually find them on Bybus.

So interesting. So you're going through brokers and you're also looking actively and sometimes you will go out and raise money in order to buy them. You automate the whole process through.

The manager on that business. And then where do you spend the majority of your time once the business is acquired?

Sure, sure. So the first month, what I try to do is I try to learn the business model. It's, you know, imagine you starting all over and you're trying to learn about socks. There's so many different customizations for socks and, you know, different colors out there in yarn material. So you definitely have to learn all that. So I visited the factory, I asked the customers, I asked the employees, I asked the owners how this business works. And for the first month, I am just learning the business. From months two to 12, I am growing the business. So I will spend up to 50% of my profits from that business, even more on just growing the business, whether through testing out new products, testing out marketing avenues, you know, I'll spend a lot of the money just growing the business. And towards the, you know, month six to 12, I will shift it to automation where I will give all the workload to the manager, the customer service. I will try to automate as much as I can and move on to the next project.

How long do you usually take a break in between acquisitions, or are you just funneling through them? It sounds like there's a lot of research that you spend getting to know the business. So how often are you acquiring them?

Absolutely. So I was looking at, you know, part of my 2016, you know, I was looking at my goals and stuff. And I believe for 2016, I probably looked at over a thousand deals, and I bought two of them, only two of them. So I spent a lot of time definitely researching businesses.

Asking questions, and, you know, I'll go through the whole funnel of, you know, maybe having an interest in 50 of them. I will place an offer on 10 of them. And not every time the seller will accept your offer. Right. There's multiple buyers out there. There's multiple crazy people out there that will just give a crazy valuation on the business. And sometimes it just doesn't make sense to take the risk. Right. So these two businesses that I bought, you know, they made the most sense, came at a good price. And so I don't necessarily. If I buy something today, I will be looking again tomorrow. That's my. I just love that feeling of looking at acquisitions.

That is actually really interesting. You said that a lot of these businesses have crazy valuations. In your opinion, what do you consider a reasonable multiple? I'm guessing you pay on multiple. What do you consider to be kind of your sweet spot for acquiring an online business?

Yeah, you're absolutely correct. It is a multiple of a profit Right now. E commerce companies, physical products, they go from anywhere from 2 to 3x, 2 being sort of the newer websites, and 3 being more of a established business. My sweet spot's right in the middle. Two and a half. So that's two and a half, you know, multiple. If a business is making a hundred grand a year, I'll pay up to a quarter million too, for that business.

Would you pay more if it was. If there were terms involved, if the seller was financed, or would do you kind of keep a hard rule on how much you're willing to pay?

No. No. So there's definitely leniency on that if a business has a lot of potential for growth. So that Sox business, I bought it at a 2.8x mainly because they were driving all their traffic to or through organic. They were not using any Google AdWords, they were not using any Facebook ads, they were not using their email campaigns. They had a overpriced customer service rep. So looking at those things, I paid a 2.8x on that. So it varies on the growth opportunities. It varies on the financing deal.

I haven't used owner financing yet. I've used some bank financing. Because if you look at the basics of bank financing, if you're getting a. If you're buying at a 2.5 multiple, that means it's a 40% return on your money. Right. If you're able to finance at 6%, you're sort of making that 34% on your money. I rather just save all that money and keep buying stuff.

Hmm, that's beautiful.

What would you say is the hardest part of the process? Because the way you're describing it seems very simple and straight up. So what would you say is the most difficult part for you?

Yeah. So, you know, with buying any kind of business, you know, you have your pros and you have your cons. Sometimes businesses will not work out as you anticipated, especially with the online business. I think online businesses are way more riskier than brick and mortar stores. Anything can happen online. If you are ranking highly for a keyword, Google could come in and shift their algorithms and say, hey, sorry, you know, you, you lost your rankings and all of a sudden you went from page one to like page ten, and I have loans to pay off. That gets scary sometimes.

Yeah. And just to clarify, they do not say I'm sorry, they just remove you and put you on page 12.

Absolutely. And you know, it's the risk that you have to sort of take on, but that's one of the things I am really scared for. So I have that Google fever sometimes where, you know, what if you get dinged for having these kind of backlinks and such. So that's sort of my fear, sort of my struggle. One of my websites did go through a penalty where I went from page one to page three, but I was able to quickly get it back through other forms of advertising. But there is that fear of sort of deranking.

And do you just have to be comfortable with that risk or do you do things to try to mitigate in the event that something like that happens?

Absolutely. You have to prepare for the worst. So I think that the biggest fear is definitely sort of the Google deranking you. But even on Amazon, you can unknowingly be selling a product that sort of has an IP owned by someone else. And Amazon can say, hey, you got suspended. You cannot sell again. So in order to really mitigate that, you have to have multiple avenues of traffic. You cannot just focus on Amazon. You cannot just focus on Organic traffic. You have to keep testing out email campaigns, you have to keep testing out different forms of ad campaigns and, you know, video campaigns. You have to constantly keep trying things out. You will. If you sell your business in the future, you are more likely to get a higher multiple if you have this diverse avenues of traffic.

Amen to that. And how was it that you were able to recoup the lost revenue from that one site that just went kerplunk in Google's rankings?

Yeah, so what I had to do there was I had to start doing a bunch of content around leather jackets and motorcycle. You know, a lot of motorcyclists use leather jackets, so started using a lot of content for that. I started doing more ads. You know, I was more aggressive trying to get my ads profitable besides the content and ads, you know, I was adding products. I was trying to look for new keywords to rank for. And, you know, slowly I think I lost my ranking. And within, you know, five months, I was back to my original ranking. And, you know, now it's even better than it was when I first bought it.

Wow.

So, yeah, I think when, you know, when competition comes in, when Google does it, it forces you to get your thinky cap on and just, you know, work your butt off and just, you know, start being aggressive and starting to, you know, grow your avenues and stuff.

Well, Shaquille, I don't know if you talk about this stuff publicly. If not, you should. I think the business model you're following is one of the most interesting ones. And as I continue my. My plan to own the Cleveland Indians, the acquisition model becomes more and more interesting to me. Is there a place where people can follow you? Is there anything that our audience can support you in doing? And if so, let us know because this is very fascinating to me.

Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, well, I wish I was more active on Twitter, Instagram, but you could email me@shaquillezventures.com or you could visit my website, szventures.com to see sort of my progress and my projects that I'm working on.

Was that spventures.com?

Yeah, szventures. I had to do it after my name and my wife's name.

Got it. Cool. Well, Shakil, this has been very fascinating for me, and I'd like to hear your thoughts over@freedomfastlane.com if you want to hear more on this topic and you have questions for either myself or Shaquille on this, post them in the comments at the show notes@freedomfastlane.com and we'll take to them. Shaquille, thanks for hanging out with us today.

Thanks, Ryan. Enjoy the weather in Austin.

Shaquille has effectively done something that I have done unofficially for most of my career, which is pursue projects that have unlimited upside, but taking advantage of someone else's hard work, whether that is buying a business, partnering with an audience, or some other fashion. I look for where there is already somebody else has already put meat on the bone so that I can come in and double profits or take advantage of a marketplace where all the buyers already exist. Shaquille has done that really as an investor, which back in, back in the olden days, I used to buy and sell little websites sites as a primary source of income. That was kind of how I cut my teeth in this world. And now we're doing it here inside of capitalism.com we're doing it with entire businesses and physical products businesses and Amazon based products and businesses. So we're doing it very similarly to Shaquille with a little bit of a different flavor. We're actually going to be doing a lot more training on this throughout 2017 because this is a primary focus of ours, acquiring assets, acquiring businesses. And I have become much more educated on the topic and we have actually a team of people now that is working on that as a primary project. So we'll be sharing a lot more details on that here on the podcast and@capitalism.com and freedomfasting.com and we will probably have some sort of an official training or a workshop dedicated to the topic of acquiring cash flowing businesses. Because the numbers, when you run this, when you, when you run this, the numbers are insane. And this is, this is the Warren Buffett model of business, just in the modern age and it is very compelling. So look for more of that throughout the year here at Freedom Fast lane and@capitalism.com as always, we appreciate your support in the show and sharing episodes with people that you think would find value in it. We appreciate your reviews and subscribes. Subscribes subscribers subscribership. We appreciate your support here at Freedom Fast Lane and we will see you on the next episode.