How to Find Businesses to Acquire

But I can't find a business to buy. I don't know where to look. Nothing's come across my plate. Oh, man. We heard these questions and thoughts before in unconventional acquisitions. So today we're talking about how to break down the search for businesses to acquire. The odd thing for me is that we make this so hard on ourselves. We're running around like a chicken with our head cut off, looking for businesses willy nilly, scouring a bunch of business broker sites to the point where we get annoyed and frustrated that we can't find a and then give up. And that's why I think a lot of people don't eventually make the jump to acquiring a business. One, they don't have skin in the game. Which is why we have. You pay for unconventional acquisitions. If you pay, it means you'll value it, you'll value yourself and you'll value your time. Two, they don't actually put a process around searching. And this video today got me thinking. See, I was running along the beach as I do in the morning, and I was watching a group of sandpipers, which is what these little birds are. And these sandpipers were, they were digging into the sand right in search for these little small crustaceans that they eat that are right underneath the surface of the sand. And the Sands Pipers will spend hours sort of scooping their little beaks along the sand looking for these little critters that make up essentially what they eat every day. And what I thought about it is I realized in finding a business, you got to get a little dirty. You've got to go out there and you've got to have a consistent process, in my opinion, to at least be doing 20 minutes to 60 minutes of searching a day. And you need do that for the first couple weeks that you're in the buying a business game. You need to be like the sandpiper, looking right below the surface to try to figure out where those businesses are that you can acquire. The beautiful part about sandpipers and buying a business is it's not rocket science. You don't have to have come up with some crazy algorithm or a unique idea or some sort of wizardry in order to buy a business. No, no, no, my friends, it's so much easier than that. Instead, all you have to do is be a persistent searcher. And so that's what I want to talk to you about today, is sort of my four rules for finding small businesses. I'm going to give you four ideas to go out and leverage and utilize and let me tell you this, if you put these processes in place and you execute on them, you will find a small business to buy. And you may just find an incredibly priced small business to buy because There are over 2.5 million businesses waiting for you. They're waiting for you. There are 10,000 baby boomers retiring each day. And these baby boomers, they're also waiting for you. They're ready to make the next stage and they need somebody like you to come in and help them create liquidity for their retirement. Okay, four ideas. Number one idea what you need to start doing is have a weekly process. I think about it like this. Anything that you want to do in life, you put some time aside every single day for it, right? If you want to get fit, can you do it once a week and get fit? Probably not. If you want to be really good at your job, if you want to learn Spanish, if you want to learn Portuguese, if you want to learn coding, can you do it once a week and be really good at it? Not really. What I think you need to do is take 20 minutes to 60 minutes a day and search for a small business. Now, if you want to switch it up once you have the 20 minute to 60 minute search on your calendar, do it for at least four weeks, every day, just like going to the gym. And number two is ways that you can do that. Here's an interesting one that I like to start with, which is driving around my neighborhood. I will go to the small little communities that are right around where I am, the dry cleaners that I go to, the Laundromat mat that's by my house. I'll look at the attorneys and accounting practices that are nearby, and I'll try to get to know the owners. I'll just go in and say something as simply as, I'm a new business owner, you know, located in the community. I wanted to introduce myself. I'm always looking for businesses to acquire, and so I like to meet the owners. Then shut up. That's it, Shut up. And once you shut up and say that, you're going to be surprised. They're going to be like, oh, that's interesting. What kind of businesses are you looking for? That's when you get to start telling your spiel. And the also interesting side note about this is you'll get to know your community. How many small business owners do you, you know where you live? If you don't, here's a fun chance to get to know those who are actually the infrastructure of your community. So that's number two. A third way that you can go out and do it is say you're behind the desk and you gotta be on a ton of zoom calls because I guess for some reason during the pandemic we need to be on 57 more Zoom calls than we took meetings pre pandemic. But that's besides the point. While you're on one of those useless Zoom calls, spend 20 minutes and have a process for combing through business broker sites. As you comb through those business broker sites, I want you to take a few of the businesses that look interesting and start a file. That file should look like Excel spreadsheet. You put those businesses in there and you start reaching out to those business brokers. You can switch off between the in real life to the online to the in real life to the online. And the last segment of it is I want you to become a little bit more hyper targeted. I want you to go after centers of influence in your neighborhood. I want you to go introduce yourself to the person who heads the local Hispanic Chamber of commerce or the local minority group of your choice, Chamber of commerce or the generalized Community Chamber of Commerce. I want you to tell them the same thing. Hey, I'm newly looking for businesses to acquire. I wanted to introduce myself and stay in touch. Then I want you to create a little CRM that kind of pings a reminder to you to ping these people. I set it up in my Google Alerts, in my email. It's super easy and it reminds me to send out these emails to individuals on a two week basis. Those four things. So one, set it in your calendar. Two, go and meet small business owners. Three, set time while you're on conference calls to actually reach out to business owners on websites. Four, go meet your centers of influences. And with those four things, you can be like the sandpiper. Continually picking each day through the sand, through the mud, through the noise, through to find the things that will change your life by allowing you to buy a small business.