Starting a Business Was Not How I Became Financially Free... (I Did This Instead)

You've been told the best way to get rich is to start a business. I didn't get rich that way. I wasn't smart enough to come up with the most brilliant idea. I did what the largest percentage of people on the Forbes 500 list did to make all of their money. I bought businesses. Now, you could start a business to ownership, but I like buying them because I don't like risk and I want to make money. Day one. But people on the Internet have been asking me this one question non stop since I started creating content three years ago. And that is, where do I find businesses to buy? How do I get my first 10,000 in monthly income or first million in monthly income from buying other people's businesses if I can't find them? So I thought I would create this video for you guys today. There are three things that are the main reason why most people don't buy small businesses. They don't actually know about the opportunity and have the mindset to do it. The second and the biggest is they don't know where to find them. And the third is they don't feel like they have the money to do it. And in this video, we are going to break all three of those things. This video is the most comprehensive video I have ever seen on how to find businesses to buy, whether a part of it or all of it, without a ton of money, without any money, potentially using your sweat, your time, your expertise and other people's money. You probably know, because you've heard me, that there are too many businesses for sale and not enough buyers right now. 75 million baby boomers retiring, 10,000 retiring a day. So we have all these businesses coming for sale every day. But then you guys ask me on the Internet, I don't know how to find them. Can you teach me how? I am going to teach you exactly how to buy small businesses by finding the best ones. I think this video could change your life. Now normally we make people pay money for this because I do believe when you pay for something, you value it. But I'm doing this all for free because I think that right now in this world we need more small business owners just like you. We are going to give you so many tactics about how to buy a small business that by the end of this and maybe even halfway through this video, you should be able to get on your phone and start texting small business owners in order for them to tell you whether they would sell you a portion of their business or not and do it in a way in which you don't need cash to do it. The tactics will be heavy on this, so I want you to stick with me. I'm not here to be your dancing bear. I am here to teach you a few things hopefully learned through my many, many years of being in private equity and investing in small businesses. But first, before we get to the tactics, the number one killer of buying businesses is the wrong mindset. If you have negative thinking and you don't think that you can do this, you will get stuck. You won't make offers and you won't do the work. Those thoughts are the destroyers of hopes and dreams. So you might have some questions in your head right now like can I really buy a business? And the answer, by and large, for most people that aren't completely lazy and incompetent is yes. Can I leave my W2? The answer is also yes. I worked in four W2s before I was ever willing to go out and leave my W2. And you might be wondering, I've never operated a business before. Do I have what it takes? This part I'll say maybe. Let's see. Stick with me and I will tell you if you have the traits needed to be a small business owner and to be the master of your own fate as the boss. Here's what a boss looks like. Can you work hard? I think you can. Can you handle the pain of being in charge? Are you curious and finding answers to problems? Do you want to take some short term pain for long term gain? And are you willing to do what it takes to surround yourself with other winners because success is actually contagious. Now I don't think this is going to be easy, but I do think you can do this. You need three things. You need the right mindset. You need a strategy which you're going to get today. And you need to take some action. In my opinion. You need a community of people around you while you do this. So you got to hear this YouTube video and you got to hear in the comments and you've got to hear it our free newsletter. Because successful acquisitions or business buying happens in the sweet spot between those three things. So you will face challenges in this journey and the question is, will you let them stop you? So the real question there is you. Now let me show you what I mean by this. Failure in finding businesses for sale is super normal. So I'm going to tell you the bad stuff first so we can get to the juicy stuff later. This is a guy by the name of Greg Eisenberg. You can shout him out on Twitter. Great guy. I tried to buy a business from Greg. I wanted to do a deal together. We were even friends. And after going back and forth for a few weeks, Greg tells me here, no. So it was not just Greg actually that told me no. I was trying to buy a marketing agency. And let me tell you who else told me no. Greg told me no. Hunter said no. I reviewed three agencies from Cold Traffic. No. I reached out to two agencies. I knew they said no. I reached out to two others, but it wasn't the right fit. I reached out to 10 others. They never got back to me. So 35 deals in one vertical to get one seller financing deal done. Most people on the Internet want to lie to you about how easy things are going to be. I'm going to tell you the opposite. This will be hard. It is worth it. And this is the only way that you will have massive Forbes 500 success is if you understand ownership. You'll never be able to buy a business unless you learn the basics about business. And there's like five crucial financial documents. You're going to need to know how to use them. Read and analyze. This is so you are putting yourself in a position to generate a positive return on investment. HubSpot sent me these templates for them. They also sponsored these videos and I love these. The number one is personal financial planning template so you and your family stay in a spot where you can safely buy a business. Number two is the cash flow statement. This is so important. The top reason businesses fail. Cash flow problems, AKA the don't buy a business that doesn't make money. Number three, balance sheet template so you can review the full snapshot of the business you want to buy. Number four, profit and loss statement. What kind of debt service are you taking on? Is there enough leftover to hire an operator? This template's killer. And then the last one is the financial projection template. Maybe the most important document for analyzing an acquisition. What's going to happen after you buy it? Link in the description. If you want to download all five of these for free, everyone say thanks. HubSpot. A couple acquisition obstacles that are gonna come onto your journey as we go. First, you're gonna have search, right? And search means when you're reaching out to small businesses, you don't find any that you like. There aren't enough options for it. The second obstacle you're gonna have is outreach. You're like, I don't know what to say to this guy Cody. Do I just walk up to him and tell him I Wanna buy a small business? That seems kind of intense. The second is competition. Well, they asked for more money. You said I could buy it for $0. They came back. They didn't respond to me at all. And then evaluation. You're overwhelmed. You're not sure how to read financial statements, and you feel like you might not be able to get past it. How do we make sure that you never get stuck again? Well, it really starts with what I call the 10 Entrepreneur Mindset pillars. When you know what to expect, you don't let it stop you. So the first one is self reflection. I want you to know what you really want from this journey. So we have a little screenshot here. You can take of it, of our deal. Clarity worksheets, and how do you know what you want to buy? How do you know what type of business? That's one. Two is a little bit of courage. You got to embrace some risk and realize that it might be hard. My dad had the best line about entrepreneurship. He said, you aren't in the game unless you find yourself in the dead of the night, head in the hands, sitting in the dark, with no idea what to do next. He was right. You know, if you run a business and if you become an owner, the truth of the matter is at some point you, it will be hard, but take courage and do it anyway. The third is creativity. So the cool part about buying businesses is it's the most creative way, I think, to gain wealth. So as long as you can see an obstacle and then go, hmm, I'm going to come up with a creative way to solve it, you can probably win in this game. An example here would be, this is long, so you can pause it and look at it for a second. Somebody in our group talking explicitly about all the different ways they went through a deal and then how they finally closed the deal. Four is resilience. I kind of have this belief that entrepreneurship is 5% idea, 5% timing, 10% talent, and like 80% not fucking stopping. So the real ingredient is just grit. The next one is resourcefulness. So basically, I think about this like a little monkey with its tools. How many different things do we have that will allow us to execute on this better than ever? And we have a bunch of these tools for you. I'm going to give you one of them later in this video, so you're going to want to stick around for this. Six is optimism. The truth of the matter is optimists get rich. Pessimists sound smart. Which one do you want to be? I Know which one I want to be. The seventh is continuous learning. I loved this quote from Henry Ford. He said anyone who stops learning is old, whether at 20 or 80. Anyone who keeps learning stays young, which is a huge differentiator in this game. 8 is like Simon Sinek said, start with why. What's your why? Create a compelling vision that keeps coming back when you get stuck. So, for instance, I often think about a dark vision and a light vision. My dark vision would be something like I can remember when I used to work at Vanguard like 15 years ago, and I would wait and sit and stare at the clock until it crept all the way to five o' clock and I could leave because I wasn't allowed to leave until I got off my 5 o' clock shift and I could remember like how awful those last 10 minutes were. And then I wanted to be anybody else and anywhere else in the world besides there. That's my dark vision or my dark why. My light why is I looked on the opposite side and I looked up to somebody who I didn't even know, who lived a life that was so free, who was their own boss and who got to choose the problems that they dealt with. And that was my why that was big enough to keep going. The last two things are pretty simple. You're going to have to pivot a lot because adaptability is one of the main keys to being a deal maker. And then if you can get a little patience loaned, it's not a linear path, it will take you longer than you think. But if you are able to marry long term patients and short term patients, you can win just about anything after seeing those 10 things. The only reasons why you can't be an entrepreneur and why you can't buy a business is if you are unwilling to do those 10 things. If you are willing to do those 10 things, then this should both scare and excite you. And as long as you're willing to commit, you can keep pushing through. I want to tell you a quick story. There's a time I did a deal that took three years. I was a part of the business. I didn't own it. I wanted to buy my partner out in that business. He did not want to get bought out. And so it took me three years of working with him, proving my worth, building up a case until finally, about three years later, I bought that guy out for about a million dollars, paid over time from the profits of the business. That business today does somewhere between, let's call it 15 to 16 million dollars a year. So that one deal for a million dollars made me millions, but it took me three years to do it. You need patience. Now I'm going to teach you how to do it in 12 months as opposed to what it took me, which was decades, to learn this. Let's take one of our first tactics here. This one I call the Venmo Challenge. So let's get right into one way today, right now, watching this video, you could pick up your phone, you could open up Venmo, you could reach out to a seller on here, and you could, before this video is even over, start engaging with sellers in order to find businesses to buy. The idea is simply this. You turn your costs into profits. What if you made money every time you spent. That's like a paradigm shift right there. What if you made money every time you spent. What do you mean by that, Cody? The Venmo Challenge, basically, is this idea. Where are small businesses that you already know, that you already spend money on that you could get to the owner? And the way you answer that question is, you open up your Venmo. And just like this is my real Venmo here, you see, huh? Look, I'm spending money with consistently a bunch of small businesses. I want to grab all those small businesses, and I want to put them into a list like this. And I have my cleaning lady on here. I have the property manager for a couple of my properties. I've got my handyman on here. And it shows how much I spend with them. So I list out, who is it? I list out what do they do for me. I list out how much I spend with them, and then the total revenue of their business. And then I add a column for value add. What could I do to grow their business? Now you might be going, who's telling you their revenue, Cody? What do you mean? How do you know what you could add value add for? Well, here's a real conversation. I reached out to Laura and I said, hey, can I get a meeting with you and Oscar maybe sometime after we get back from Thanksgiving? I want to run an idea I have past you and hear what you both think about it. It's about some businesses that I want to buy. That would be cool to have you guys run and you get equity and get paid for it. Would you be open to me? At which point Laura said, yeah, sure. And it turns out she is totally open to selling her business. And, oh, by the way, she might actually want to run a couple of other businesses that I either already own or want to integrate into her business. And at this point, I might say something like this to her if I was you. Imagine you're young, you don't have a ton of money, you don't have a ton of experience, but what do you do have? You are smarter than the average small business owner when it comes to technology because you're on YouTube and they aren't. And so I might have a conversation with the owner that goes like this. Laura, I see you run this cleaning business. You do an incredible job and love being a client of yours. Do you want to grow this business? Oh, you do? Okay, fantastic. What are you going to do to grow this business? Are you working on getting more clients right now or increasing prices or number of services? Oh, no, you're not. Interesting. Okay, listen, I actually am trying to focus on helping one small business owner grow their business. And by growing your small business with you, I take a percentage of the upside that I bring to the business. So I know right now you don't have social media, you don't have a website, and I have a bunch of friends that need cleaning ladies, but don't have one right now. What if I could bring you new clients? Could I keep a percentage of the upside? And just like that, you're in the game. So the one week Venmo challenge goes like this. How much do you spend on Venmo? You pull up the last two months, then you list all of the people you pay. How much do you pay? What do they do? Then you add a step we haven't talked about yet, which is desire to own. Would you actually want to own part of this business or the whole of the business? And then third is the owner conversation. Have your first conversation with them like we did with Laura, and ask them if they're interested in growing or if they're interested in selling or if they're interested in cutting costs, all of which you could use to buy a business for $0. And then you give them the offer, which is what I told you. Now, we're not going to obsess this video on how to have the owner combo and the offer, but I am going to give you a ton of different ways to reach out to these independent business owners. Hit me in the comments if you want an entire video watching me live. Talk to owners and get them to sell me their businesses. But for now, let's go in to this next idea that I think is very true. You can measure your success by the number of difficult conversations you have had. The more hard conversations you have had, the likely bigger your bank account is if you liked this one, one, you should open Venmo and start messing around with it right now. Put this video on pause, come back and watch the rest of it. Or I have like nine more of these for you. So let's get into the next one. Okay. Personal P and L review. This is sort of the same idea, but where do you spend that isn't Amazon. So this is getting away from Venmo and looking at your bank statement and your credit card statement. You're going to open up your credit card statement like this, and you ask yourself, what do I spend on vendors, local, small businesses. You're going to get to the owner, you're going to find out if they're profitable. If so you're going to ask yourself, do you want to own it? And you're going to start working the process. You do the same thing we did the last time, which is who do spend revenue value add. But in this version, because we have a wider set, because it's our credit card, let's make it a little bit easier on ourself, right? The parameters are this. It's not a publicly listed company because you're not Jeff Bezos. You make sure you can get to the owner. It's small enough that you can actually contribute. Like, for the average person, I think that typically means somewhere below 10 to $3 million in revenue. If you're a CEO yourself, you make a lot of money, spend a lot of money, you have a business. This could work up to a much higher dollar amount for you. But if you're a normal everyday Joe, then you can do this with smaller businesses. And then you want to make sure you'd actually want to run, grow, or own this company. Now, this is actually how I bought almost 50% of Strike Fire Productions for $10,000. I went to the founder of a company that managed podcasts. So it was a podcast production company. And he managed one of my podcasts at the time, way back in the day when I had one, and I went to the guy whose name was Jonathan, and I said, hey, are you trying to grow your business? And I had the exact same conversation. And Jonathan said the magic words, which were, I love podcast production. I love the operations of this company. I hate sales, I hate marketing, I hate growing this business. And I go, I love those things. If I can grow the business for you, can I take a percentage of it? And so this business ended up paying me somewhere between 10 and $30,000 a month every month for a few years before I eventually Sold the business back to Jonathan. So for $10,000, I got hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of a few years. Now, the most interesting part about this is that you can do it at all levels of the game. I also bought one half of unconventional acquisitions from my former partner over six months. I did a small down payment and I backed up the rest of the purchase by the company's assets. And I did it all by just looking at my P and L and seeing where I spent. So download expenses, list them all. Do I want to own this bad boy? Have a conversation with the owner? You make the offer. Now, right about this time is when I think the words of one of my favorite billionaires, Sam Zell, come into play, which is that fear and courage are very closely related. And anyone who does not understand fear does not know courage. And I like this story that he tells, and I think it's the most significant advice that I've ever seen him give entrepreneurs. The young man is facing bankruptcy. He's about to lose all his money, and he goes to pray to God each week to let him win the lottery to save his livelihood. And the first week, the man doesn't win. The second week, he doesn't win. But the third time, a flash of light appears, and from up high comes the voice of God and says, you gotta buy a ticket. And I don't think he said the word, but he did say, you've gotta buy a ticket. Our goal here is to help you close a business or buy a business that is in alignment with your personal goals of making money, of moving, of having freedom. There's a lot of ways to make that happen, but you have to buy the ticket. So I want you to pay attention in this next one in particular, because this might be one of my favorite ways to find a small business to buy that is so easy and yet rarely done. I call it the Rolodex to ROI method. So there's a lot of ways that you can go out and search businesses, but how do you attract businesses to you that are already for sale? Well, I think one of the most important ways is how you define yourself, defines how other people see you. So typically, you know, when you're engaging with somebody in a conversation, you ask, like, what do you do for a living? What's been up with you lately? What are you working on? Right. And normally people say, oh, I'm good. You know, I'm in finance, or I do YouTube videos. That's what I do. What's going on with you? Nothing. New family's good, right? That's how people answer. I want you to change one thing. One thing. Nothing else besides this. Oh. What are you up to these days? I'm buying businesses. I'm buying businesses that are small businesses located in Austin, Texas that I can help grow with marketing. I'm helping small business owners grow their social media presence and for that I take some equity. I want you to start telling people that you buy businesses. That is step one. You just tell people because words have power and a wild thing will happen to you. When you start sharing with different groups, you're going to realize how many owners you know. You might think right now that you don't know anybody who wants to sell their small business. You might even think you don't know anybody who owns a small business. I can pretty much guarantee you very few things except that that's not true. So I want you to start telling people, hey, yeah, I buy businesses. Tell that to your friends and family. Tell that to professionals, attorneys, accountants, industry specific individuals. Tell that to anybody who you can about explaining that you are trying to increase your ownership percentage and you are getting equity for it. Now one of the other best ways to get in the game of buying small businesses is what I call do you want to get paid for bringing other people deals? Now this is called deal sourcing or third party deal sourcing. And let's say that right now you're like, Cody, I don't know if I want to buy a business myself. Maybe I want part of it, but I don't want the whole thing. I don't know if I want to own a all of that. What if instead of having to own or take over the business at all, you could just get paid for bringing people businesses on what's called a success fee. So what that means is let's say right now you brought me a business. If that business is something that I invested in or bought, I typically pay a success fee for closing for like 2 to 3% of the deal size that I take down. And sometimes if the deals are smaller, it might be more like 10 or $25,000 as opposed to 2% or 3%. So you very quickly run up the math and you can see, wow, if I help cody close a 3 million dollar deal or a $10 million deal, I can make a lot of money. And if you think that this is crazy that I do it, just know people do this all over the place. This is my friend Andrew Wilkinson at Tiny. And if you send Andrew Wilkinson at Tiny a deal he likes, he'll pay you 25,000 as the base, up to hundreds of thousands of dollars for sourcing him deals that hit his deal box. So if this is something that interests you, what do you do? You start surrounding yourself with people who buy businesses. You could join the contrarian community that we have where we buy and sell businesses all the time. You could be on our email list, you could come to some of our events, you could go talk to people in private equity, identify anyone in your professional network who buys businesses, and then you want to start engaging with them to see if potentially you could source them a deal. Now, let's say you want to go back to buying the business yourself. What kind of connections matter? Well, first of all, the most important connection is probably you want to get around people who already touch people when they're about to sell a business. There are two A's that are number one for that. Attorneys and accountants. Boring at a cocktail party. Really useful if you want to buy small businesses. So I love to ask my richest friends, who are your best lawyers and your best accountants and could you introduce me to them? And then what you start doing is saying to them, hey, you know, I'm buying businesses in this space. I'm young, I'm hungry, I want to take over somebody's business. If anybody comes along that is selling your business, I'd love you to think of me, and surely I will pay a referral fee for anybody that we close. So this is kind of interesting because then you can become the person that sources them a deal. Another great way to find businesses to buy is industry specific individuals. So for instance, this is Lloyd Silver. He runs my community for me. He's a business broker and he also I taught him how to buy his first laundromats and he bought his first laundromat through with creative financing. And he got it through an industry contract distributor of equipment. So let's say that you like working out and you want to buy a gym, or you want to own part of a gym, or you want to own part of a gym equipment company, Go where the game is played, go to gym consultants, go to trainers, go to owners of gyms, go to trade association leaders, go to equipment distributors and gyms. Any industry that you want to get in, just start telling them the game that you're playing. The other way to win in buying small businesses is what I call the center of place strategy. So a lot of people talk about center of influence strategy. Coi I talk about center of place. You want to go where the deals are already happening. What does this mean? It means private clubs, nonprofit organizations, strategic vacation spots, basically anywhere where people with money hang out, deals are getting done and people own things. And so a great place to be is somewhere where the business owners are getting close to retirement and you can be the young fresh blood for for them. Now at this point you might go like Cody, I ain't got the money to join a golf membership nor do I have the interest. There's lots of ways around this. For instance, you can usually ask if there's a social membership, usually cheaper than the full membership. You can look for friends who are members and ask if you can join them for a future event. For instance, for a long time, you know, my husband Chris was in the military. He didn't have the cash to join a golf membership so he would find people who were already members and then he was, you know, buy the beers and go with them golfing. You could do the same thing for deal making, join one time events open to the public. What's wild is how often these places want to recruit and you can sneak your way in there when they have the one time events open. More than anything, I want you to take this point in, in this moment. I have given thousands of speeches. I've taught thousands and thousands and thousands of people how to buy businesses. We have people who have done millions and millions of millions of dollars in deals. People that used to be nurses and teachers. I have found one truth to be true. Every room you are in likely has an owner ready to sell every single room you are in. And so play a game. The next time you are in a room with, I don't know, 10 to 20 to 50 to 100 people go around and ask, hey, you know I buy businesses. Is any, you know, you do own a business, Would you ever be interested in selling a business? Oh, let's talk about it. And you're going to find them all around you. The old truism your network truly is your net worth is so true. But especially if you want to think about taking over somebody's already profitable, already cash flowing business. Now that said, I have this saying that my husband and I always say back and forth to each other, which is that I'd rather become so good they can't ignore me, not network so hard. I finally meet them. I always think owning the club better than waiting in line. But in this particular instance, until you are so good that they can't ignore you, it's fine to network hard so that you meet them. So We've given you like three ways to do deals where you're getting your hands dirty a little bit, you're going out and touching deals. It looks like you can talk to people, maybe even get a business for $0. But how do you press the easy button? How would you do it if you wanted to buy a business with essentially one or a few clicks? Now, in deal sourcing, or what's called origination, which is a fancy private equity term for finding businesses to buy, there are really two ways to buy businesses. There's an on market deal and an off market deal. The only way I really don't want you to buy a business is this, what's called spray and pray. Spray and pray is when an investor has no real plan. They kind of like throw a bunch of money or time at a bunch of deals. By the end of this video, I want you to pick like 1, 2 or max 3 strategies you want to use. Because hope is not a strategy. And, and too many strategies is almost as bad as no strategies. So all the business strategies we just talked about for finding businesses to buy are off market deals. Off market deals basically mean the businesses aren't advertised to the public. You can't one click see them for sale and you can't see all of the information about them. But they are probably going to be cheaper. Often you can have better negotiation. You're not going to have as much competition. They may be harder to get to with no clear sight to how much money they make or what's going on in the business. But because of that, you might get a better deal. Which is why I do a lot of off market deal searching. I kind of think about it like door knocking, like realtors used to do to go see if you wanted to sell your house. But for small businesses, the second way to do it, the one click way, are on market deals. Those are businesses that are already for sale. The owner knows they want to sell. They're publicly listed businesses, but then they're actively advertised for sale, just like they would be on Zillow if you were going to go sell a house. Now there's lots of pros to this. Visibility, transparency could be faster. The problem with on market deals sometimes is there's lots of other people looking to buy them and it might be harder to do creative structuring or get deals for $0 or little dollars. So basically I think about it like a teeter totter. If I have more time but less money, I might want to go off market to find my deals. If I have more money, less time, I might want to go on market to find deals. It really doesn't matter. And let me tell you why. Because unlike real estate, you can make money lots of ways in buying a small business. So if you own real estate, the only way you can really make money is getting a good deal when you buy and waiting a long time. Yeah, you could like, you know, redo the house, you could add on to it, but you're really probably not going to be able to 10x or 50x your return in a real estate transaction unless you wait a really long time. For small businesses, that's not the case. So even if you pay a little bit more, or even if you have to work a little bit more to get the deal done, you have way more upside because you know, real estate only grows by like 3 to 4 to maybe sometimes in great markets, max 10% a year, whereas small businesses can grow a lot more than that. So both work. Both, your choice. The real goal here is just which side of the teeter totter do you want to be on the nine to fiverr strategy. It's really good. This strategy is where you look around at your workplace and you ask yourself, would I want to own this business? Would I want to own any of our vendors? Would I want to own any of our suppliers? It's basically taking your employee hat and thinking, can you turn it into an owner framework by buying part of the business you work in and starting conversations with your boss who is retiring. Now, if you don't think this is likely, I'm going to give you a few examples. We've got Jay, who I taught personally to buy a business that makes 1.5 million a year in revenue. And the seller was her former co worker and he financed the whole deal for her. Then you've also got really public deals. For instance, one of the richest billionaires in the world, Wayne Huzinga, who started Waste Management, the trash company, he bought part of his very first trash company from the company that he worked with at the time. You also have this guy, Artie Moreno, one of the other richest men in the US who also owns a baseball team. And Artie Moreno worked in an outdoor billboard advertising company. And then he and a colleague got together. Artie was the sweat and the hard work. The other guy was the money. And they bought their company out from their employer. Now he has bought billboard companies all over the country. If you haven't read about Ted Turner, this is like Ted's old now. But Ted is the creator of CNN and Turner Broadcast News and tbs and was like the creator of probably one of the biggest media companies of all time. And he came from really nothing, super blue collar. And then his dad, right before he died, ran a business, a billboard business that Ted Turner worked at. And Ted Turner's dad sadly killed himself. And before he killed himself, he sold the business to somebody else. And so Ted worked at the business, couldn't run it anymore, but he figured out a way to buy back the business from the other guy as an employee using a percentage of future profits. So this happens all over the place. Now, you might be asking, why would anybody do that? Well, let's take Jay's story. So her old coworker originally wanted her to run the company for him because he already had a real estate company and he and her had worked together in the past. And then he was basically like, wait a second, Jay, why don't you just run my company for me? Can you just run this thing? And she was like, you know what? Because she had talked to me, she said, I'm not interested in running other people's companies. So he asked if she wanted to buy it, and she said yes. So what's fascinating is he was like, listen, I was going to have you run it, but I'm actually, I'm ready to retire, and my wife really wants me to go ski and hang out. And so as soon as we're ready to retire in a few years, let's set it up and we'll sell the business to you. And that's exactly what happened. It took them a few years to get the business done, but then he sold the entire business to her and she didn't have to put any money down, which is really cool. I think one of the keys to doing this, it's so important for this generation, my generation, you guys, to know, is you want to be an excellent worker in a lot of ways and an excellent employee and an excellent coworker. Because if you are the type of person who reaches out to others when you don't need something, people remember that. And the game of business sales is really just a transfer of trust back and forth. And so make sure that you are not the employee that people would never sell something to. If you want to use the nine to fiver strategy. Now let me lay out for you exactly what the owner profile would be for somebody who is willing to sell you their business and also potentially do it totally creatively financed or big creative finance so you don't have to put up the cash in this instance, Jay had the perfect seller financing avatar. So the seller that would be most likely to do all this, the seller didn't have kids to take over the business. He thought about selling to an employee, but wasn't 100% sure the other guy could run the company. The business had very few prospective buyers. Nobody wanted to buy the thing. He was kind of tired, burned out, ready to exit, about to retire, a little older now, he could have sold to a private equity company, but he wanted his employees to be taken care of and he wasn't sure how much work the private equity deal would be. This happens more than you ever know. If you are young right now and watching this video and you are hungry and hard working, let me tell you, because I own many businesses, I have given a business back to one of the people that worked with me in it because the business was too small for me, but they were super hardworking. I want you to open your aperture to think differently about the fact that not everything has to be a monetary transaction. Jay was able to take over this business using an agreement to pay the owner back over 10 years using profits of the business, which is really, really cool. The nine to fiverr strategy basically has five points that look very similar to the other strategies we talk about. First you look at your company and you ask, is this a company that's small enough for me to potentially buy it? Does the owner fit the seller, financing seller avatar? Then you look at your co workers and you're like, what other companies, opportunities, vendors might these co workers have of mine? List them out. Then you ask yourself, would I want to own any of these companies? The one I work for, the ones my co workers have on the side. Then you have a conversation with the owner of the business you work for, maybe some of your vendors. And finally you put together the offer five steps to you turning your nine to five into hopefully five figures a month or more. The next strategy you guys should know about because we're here on YouTube right now, it's called social media. The number one reason that I create YouTubes nonstop, if you haven't seen me say this before, is because I am increasing deal flow of small businesses. To me, I create content so that for free everywhere, like all over the place. We spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a month creating free content about how to buy and sell the businesses. Why? So that people who are selling their business will come and sell them to me. And also so if I want to sell a business, I have built in investors and buyers and simultaneously because I Do believe that more of you should own your small community. You should own the businesses in your community. Not Starbucks, Walmart, Target, own everything. And so social media is really interesting because unlike sometimes how I use it, social media isn't just for cat videos. You can actually attract things to you. And a perfect example would be, look at a couple of these videos we had that are about small businesses that I actually got asked to invest in or found the deal because of social media. So what I want you to do first is super, super easy. You'd optimize your profile. So if you really want to buy a business, make sure your profile says that I buy businesses that are X or Y or Z. That's it. I want you to then post updates about your acquisition journey. Tag me in them. I'll reshare them to see if you can get more people focusing on what you're doing. All I want you to do is clearly articulate what type of businesses you want to buy and that you are looking to buy small businesses. That's it. Something like this. LinkedIn's a great place to do it. So is Facebook, actually. I know, like, I kind of thought Facebook was dead, but space Facebook is perfect because the average small business owner is 65 plus years old, which means that they are perfect in the Facebook sphere because the average Facebook user is like 45 plus. So LinkedIn, Facebook, amazing. Now that's going to have people get attracted to you. That's the first step of acquisition. The second step is search. Now, I thought LinkedIn was kind of dead. I really don't do much on LinkedIn. Personally, I post content on there, but I wasn't hanging out on LinkedIn. But then I started realizing that you can actually go and find sellers of businesses all over LinkedIn. For instance, I was looking to buy a landscaping company and look what I did. I just typed in landscaping company located in New Jersey or Massachusetts. And what happened? A bunch of presidents and owners of landscaping companies popped up. These people want to be found by customers and now they're going to be found by you, the potential buyer. This is a guy by the name of Aubrey who's in our community. And it was perfect. He basically said one of his posts on LinkedIn was found by a family office that has a couple billion dollars under management and he wants to invest in his next deal, which is huge. So post on LinkedIn and you might be surprised who comes along. At this point, people typically ask, okay, well, now that I found the businesses to reach out to, even on LinkedIn, what do I say? Maybe I'll do an entire video on this. Let me know in the comments if you want a full video on how to reach out specifically to sellers. But let me give you one exact template first. Here's an exact template I have used on LinkedIn to reach out to people. Okay. The direct message kind of goes like this. Hi, thanks for the connection. I love seeing you share about your landscaping business. How long have you been in business? So it's like, I'm not asking for anything. He sees that I'm seeing the stuff that he posts. I'm kind of hands off on it. Then the next interaction might be something like, that's amazing. I also own a landscaping business or I work in a landscaping business or I'm buying a landscaping business. Have you ever thought about selling? You know, I'd love to talk to you about it. We could always get together and I could tell you kind of what I found in the space since I'm looking at a ton of businesses just like yours. That's it. Short and sweet. Another secret hack is to explore Facebook business listings or pages. Look at these. If you Google Facebook landscaping groups, you're going to find a ton of them and you can direct message them and they respond because they're looking for customers. And so here, Gonzalez Landscaping. Quick little follow little DM and you might be able to get right to the owner. Another sneaky way that one of our members did it in the community that I loved was once you become kind of a pro at this. So let's say you've started reaching out. Maybe you've done your first deal or two. You can host webinars or live sessions to kind of talk about here's how I grow landscaping businesses. Or if you're ever thinking about selling a business, here's how I talk to people about how to increase the price of a business for sale. Now this is a little 202 level, but I know some of you watching right now are 202 level. And so this is really fascinating because you don't need very many people to show up. You need the right people to show up. And who is going to show up for a webinar on how to sell your landscaping business? Probably landscaping company owners, which might be what you want to buy. I think that attention is the new currency. Naval Ravikant said, if you want to be rich in the 1800s, you did it with labor, in the 1900s with capital. Now you do it with code. I'd add in the 2000s, you do it with audience and social media can attract all the things to you and also allow you to search, which is super, super important. There's actually a database that is so useful yet free that I wish more people talked about and nobody does. And also secret hack, way better to work at than a Starbucks. And it is your local library. What's wild is your local library has access to digital databases where you can go in or access them online. One of the most important ones in my mind are databases like this Reference solutions which basically has a to Z resources on varying industries and businesses and you get it for free. Free. These business directories usually come from the government and are really expensive to get into. But you can go to your local library and have a list of all the companies within your target area and then reach out to them individually. Like cold calling. The reason why I like this is because think about it this way. Like lots of people online on YouTube talk about cold calling and growing your business through cold calling or through cold email or through Twitter. Yeah, you could do that and you could cold call in order to grow your small startup. Or you could make one phone call that could make you millions because you are cold calling for a business to buy. Totally different game. Maybe one of my most frequently asked questions besides where do I find a business to buy is how do I find a mentor? How do I find a mentor to help me? I think that there's a little bit of a wrong question there. I think you need three types of mentors. You need an up and comer with hustle. I think youth teaches you a lot, especially with technology today. You need a same level player so that you can learn together. And you need a billionaire to your millionaire. You need somebody who's like a few steps ahead of you wherever you're at. And so one, I would say you don't need one mentor, you need three. And the best way to find mentors is go where people are already buying businesses. I would probably go to our Facebook page where we have a Facebook page all around buying businesses. If you have a serious intent to buy a business, I would click the link below and you can figure out if you should maybe take one of our courses on it, maybe join the community. Or if you want to do it all for free, there's a free newsletter below too that is all about how to buy a small business. Every single week, information comes out on it. If you want to be rich, hang out with the rich. It turns out success is contagious. If you want to buy a business Hang out with people who own businesses or have already bought businesses. It's not rocket science, but we don't do it that often. I think stealing people's 10,000 hours helps you collapse decades into days. And anytime you can do that, life gets a little bit easier. The last two are so important in a way. I hate this word, but it's really necessary. And that word is networking. So how do you not just network though, but how do you leverage networking organizations to find off market deals so good that you feel a little guilty for getting access to them? That's the idea here. Let me tell you a hard truth. The way you do this is by going to networking organizations that you're going to think are boring. These are not fun parties. There's no I took a pill in Ibiza. Here we're not hanging out at some cool coffee shop. The average small business owner is 65 plus. You got to go where they hang out. And it's typically not a hipster cafe. So I like going to Chamber of Commerce events. You can become a member if you own a small business, but you could also just jump in and out of the events. Mixers and networking sessions. There's a lot of them. They're in almost every city in the US and in most of the world. And because they have these little events that are pretty poorly attended, usually you can really infiltrate and just start doing what I said in the beginning. You define who you are with the words that you speak. And so make sure you're telling people that you're looking for businesses to buy. Now you will be bored, but billions are found in the boring. So I think you're going to be okay. A couple of the cool things the Chamber of Commerce does that you would probably never think of attending, but actually has a ton of small business owners go to ribbon cutting ceremonies for new businesses in your area. These events provide sort of an informal setting to make connections. But you can also then access the Chamber's member directories. If you join or if you become fully friends with a member, just ask to kind of see who else is in the group and you can have access to a list of all the local small business owners by you. Then you narrow down the people you want to speak to depending on what kind of business you want to buy. The second organization that's interesting to think about joining are varying types of service organizations. So think like Rotary or social service volunteer type organizations. Church organizations, Great way to connect with other leaders in your community. Typically if they're leaders in the church or in Rotary or in service. That means they have some extra spare time. It also means that they're willing to do the hard work which has a high likelihood of them being an owner or knowing a bunch of local owners in the community. This is a very specific one. It's called BNI Business Network International. It's. I mean, look at this picture. It's got clip art all over it. The website's not pretty and yet it is huge for business relationships. You can actually schedule one on one meetings as a member and because of that they have this referral system to exchange business leads. You can do workshops and trainings. And there's a bunch of other organizations like this. There's one called ypo Young Professionals Organization. We have one called the Contrarian Community. There's eo, which is Entrepreneurs Organization. If you're super rich, you can join tiger21 where to be a member you have to have at least a $20 million net worth. All of these are going to be filled with owners and they might just be your perfect end to off market deals. All I'll say here is when you go and just be cool. Try to never use the word networking. It's, it's lame. I think this is my favorite. So you guys are going to want to stick for this one. I call this expertise to equity. And I have an entire video that I'm thinking of putting together on top of this if you guys want. Now what do I mean by expertise to equity? There's three ways to buy a business, in my opinion. You can use money. The most common way people think to buy a business, either your money or somebody else's, you can use time. So that's like sweat equity. Like I'll do all the stuff you don't want to do. I'll work hard for you. And then there's expertise. And expertise is a little bit better than sweat because there's some leverage associated with it. For instance, when I bought part of Strike Fire Productions, it wasn't my sweat I was using. I knew a couple of people that if I hooked him up with certain partnerships, he would grow the business. That's using my expertise to get equity in his business. And I'm not alone in this. Karun, who's part of our Contrarian community, said this about it. He basically has now bought seven law firms located in Australia. And he was like, how did I do it? While not using much at all of my own money. Step one, he's like, I became indispensable to my own business and Then with an owner that was ready to retire, I asked to take over the business. Then I did the same thing in another business. I became indispensable to them in some way. Then I asked for equity. Then I signed the paperwork. And we also had Ross Crandall do the same thing. So, you know, this story is fascinating. He basically had a friend of his looking for someone to help drive sales. And Ross was like, you need to do more online marketing. And his friend was like, well, you know, do you want to do it? And Ross wasn't sure. Took a moment, which is smart, to figure out what the deal exactly would be. But then a few weeks later, he said yes. And the way he split it was super interesting. So Basically, Ross owns 50% of the business. The guy runs an E bike shop and retail location. So Ross doesn't get any of that revenue or cash flow. But Ross gets to own 50% of the business because he owns the online store. So if you buy anything online, Ross gets 100% on that. If you buy anything in person, the other guy gets 100% on that, which is super interesting. What's interesting overall is because the sales are split right down the middle. You get to share expenses, but he, you know, pays most, if not all of it. This is just one way to structure an expertise to equity deal. Now you've got all these ways to buy a business, but let's think about how do we create the right habits to do this consistently until you guys buy a business and eventually an empire and eventually more businesses and you become like this guy, who's the richest guy in the world? Who, by the way, this guy, do you know how he made all his money? This is Bernardo Not. He is the CEO and owner of lvmh Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy. And he did not start any of these businesses. He bought them. He bought sort of defunct businesses like Christian Dior that weren't doing very good, compiled them all together and made an empire. And he did that by having the right habits continuously for deal sourcing. I think that if you want to have real success in life, you have to figure out the deal origination process. You have to figure out how to continuously get better deals to you. You don't need to do that for your first $10,000 in monthly revenue, you can just do one deal. With one deal, you can get $10,000 in monthly income. I've definitely done that. But if you want to hit those seven figures consistently, you're going to need to look at hundreds of Deals and do this often. So it's not like a one time thing. Just like you can't sell something once in a business and expect to never sell anything again and you'd be worth millions. You're going to have to be active. So I use a couple of different things in order to do that. This one is nothing more than a little app. So basically you can see here, I use an app on my phone right here and the app looks something like this. It just monitors your daily habits. And I hit the circle for every day that I do the habits that I want. So right now those habits for me are, am I looking for a certain business? Every day I click on the circle. The second that I've done that continuously have I read up on the industry. Every single day I click the circle. As soon as that's done, I have some health stuff on there too. But apps monitor habits. What gets monitored gets managed. What gets managed gets executed on the second way. This is pretty cool. I found this from a guy on Twitter and we have our own version of it. It's just an activity tracker. So if you guys have ever done sales, right, you track like the number of phone calls that you made, the number of phone calls that picked up, how long maybe you were on the phone for. Back when I was in sales, I had to do that aggressively. Well, they do the same thing with tracking deals. So basically how many phone calls have they made, how many have been connected, how many emails have been set, how many intro meetings have been had all the way to how many deals have been closed? And what was our success rate? And I find that if you are able to keep a scorecard in the things that you care about in life, your score goes up. You know, just like in sports, if we didn't keep score, we probably wouldn't try to win that much. And so just keep a scorecard. I think finding businesses is one of the most time consuming steps of the entire process because you want to find the right deal. But now you have so many tools in your toolkit to do it. I just want you to be consistent with your search. There's a famous saying from Charlie Munger who says you can't get a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant. Doesn't work with that. You have to have the patience to take nine months or get what we call in finance. The saying is pregnant with a deal. And the stages of pregnancy kind of do go like this in the beginning. You're like, ooh, this kind of sounds like a lot and then at the end you're like, oh my gosh, we have a baby. I can't believe I ever doubted this. It's the best thing that ever happened to me. And that's the same thing with doing deals. So regular deal searching equals a full pipeline. I ask myself this question a lot when I don't want to do something. And the question is simply this, do you want to have fun or do you want to be rich? In this moment now, I tend to think that the person who has the most fun in life wins over time and that no amount of money will be enough. But I also kind of chuckle and go, well, let's get the money first and then we'll figure it out. And I have found that after you make your first $500,000, your happiness kind of, it tapers off. But that first $500,000 is life changing. And I think you should unapologetically chase after it with everything you got. I want you to have really clear goals. Clearly defined goals lead to clearly met expectations. So you can use our goal tracker. We actually have this here for you which lists the number of businesses you want to find per week, the number of business listings you've reviewed. And this is important because in the beginning you want to get lots of reps in, you know, just like you don't expect to sell something on the first cold call, right? So you're going to start identifying some patterns and then I want you to keep a list of how many deals fall into a deal that would be interesting for you. So it's not just like, oh yeah, I found a business for sale, but it's a trash business in Kentucky. I don't want that, that doesn't count as that type of business. So you can use our goal tracker for that. Then I want you to have a number for how many follow ups when brokers or sellers don't respond to you. You know, just like if you want to get married and find the perfect partner for you, you don't expect that person to probably say yes to getting married day one. Maybe they don't even say yes to a date on day one. So you're going to have to have some follow up items as well. And it looks like this, it's super simple. We use a notion tracker. But the goal here is be consistent, measure your work and you will meet your expectations or outcome. The other thing I want to keep as real in your head is, is sometimes it helps to look at failures of those who have had a lot of success. Not Just those who have won continuously. Like for instance, Emily shared the other day that she actually passed on a business. It was too risky. You know, they didn't like the, the numbers that they found. They had a bunch of people in the mix. The financials didn't seem right. And I like them sharing their quote unquote failures like this. Because when the win happens, you kind of look back on all of this and it's a mark of appreciation for how hard you've worked. But you also need to celebrate the most important thing, which is Warren Buffett always said, the best deals I ever did were some of the deals I didn't do. And so remembering that, you learning what a good business looks like and a bad business looks like is really important too. I remember a billion years ago I met Tony Robbins and he said this line to me that has stuck with me. And the line was, if you say that won't work for me, it won't. And so I've always changed it to how could that work for me? Because then it might work for you. And so I want you to think about how can we do what most people will not do, which is put in the work past when it's hard, past when you don't want to, past when you feel like you might not be able to accomplish it. You're probably not where you want to be because you haven't done what is necessary yet. It's a very hard truth. There's very few problems because of other people and many problems because of you and many problems because of me, for myself. So accountability really matters. So we gave you a bunch of methods for how to find a business to buy. But one of my favorite things to do is track what I have been doing. I think keeping track of your deal flow is what separates people who win and people who lose over time. So I use something called the Contrarian deal flow funnel. And it kind of looks like this. You have the initial outreach, that's the top of the funnel where you review potential businesses. Then you sign an NDA, what's a non disclosure agreement. Then you kind of analyze what the business looks like under the hood. Then you make an offer, and then finally your offer gets accepted and the deal gets closed. So as you can imagine, you start with a lot at the top, but then the more deals you look at, you have a very small number at the bottom until you finally get the deal that is pretty perfect for you. The secret here is when you have the right volume of deal flow, you'll need to Manage that properly. But when you have the right volume, it's very likely that you will have the right success. So this is what's called the numbers game. The higher your activity level, the higher your success level would be. Now there's not a lot you need to keep track of at this stage, but I want to show you some of them. So at the very top stage, the early two stages, let's say you want to keep track of like what's the name of the business, what industry is it in, Is it an honor off market deal? How much money does it make and how much do you think you're going to offer for it? Or how are you going to finance the deal and how much cash flow is it going to give you in your pocket? That's all I'd keep track of. You know, five or six things. At the end stages, there's going to be more details. You're going to have kind of your notes back and forth. You're going to want to understand the customer base, you're going to want to understand how the business react runs. You're going to want to understand how many employees they have, maybe profit and loss statement, so all the financials of the business. So in the beginning you don't need all that. You need five things. And then as you get farther along, you can have a longer list of what's called due diligence material or things that you need consistently over time. Most deals die at the altar of no follow up. And so just like, you know, persistence is really hard to beat. Actually, I think if I could have one skill set magically placed upon anybody who works with me and myself in order to have success, it would be persistence. It would be like, do they just not give up? And so if you can have a process for following up with all the people that you are potentially interested in buying a business from, you won't need to have so many people in your pipeline because persistence usually wins the game. You can steal my homework, which is your contrarian deal sourcing CRM right here. And this CRM is very simple notion tracker of everything I think you need in order to close a small business. But then most people ask me, how long will it actually take to acquire a business? So I broke it down for you explicitly. I know everybody is always like, how fast can I do this? Can I do this immediately? I'm ready right now. There isn't just one typical path to follow. Some people in our group have found a business that's right for them and three months Some people have found a business that's right for them in a day. Others have taken a year until they find the right fit. I think of this a little bit like a three year mba. Year one, you buy a business. Year two, you scale or grow that business. Year three, you do your second or third deal and you hopefully are getting into the seven figure club. It's based on a lot of different factors, but it is a hundred percent reasonable that you can be an owner of a business within 12 months. If you have all the things we've talked about in this video mindset deal. Clarity, time and patience. And you go after deals. Here's the time range that I like to think of it as. One to three months, learn how to buy a business. One to six months, learn how to search for deals and start searching for deals. One to three months, make offers, get one accepted. Two to four months, close on the deal and get a deal accepted. If no bank, it could actually be a lot faster, especially if you're just doing a sweat equity deal or if you're doing an expertise for equity deal. This means that the fastest deals could get done is probably about three months. And the longest deals could take 12 to 18 months to get done. But it could also be a lot longer if a deal falls through. So I always like to have like lots of irons in the fire. I know you're not supposed to do this in dating, but they call it monkey barring. So you hold on to one handle on the monkey bar and you reach with the other one, but you're still holding onto this one before you let go and grab the other one. That's what I like to do in business buying too. In our community of like 1300 business buyers, the average buyer looks at about 30 businesses before making an offer. So I think you need to kind of get a few reps in before you do the exact same thing. And one of the ways that we do that the most is we have a whole channel dedicated to deal reviews. So I want to break something down for you guys that I don't think I've ever done before on YouTube, which is this. People ask me, cody, I'm located in Indonesia, I'm in Africa, I'm in Latin America, I'm in Canada, I'm in the uk. Can this work for me there or how would I do it there? So I pulled a couple specific case studies for you guys so that we could see if we could apply it to where you are in the world. The first one that I think about is Arun, who owns a law firm and now five to seven law firms. I can't remember his exact number from acquisitions. So what happened? I started talking to Arun two years ago and Arun was an attorney, he worked at a law firm. But he knew that the person who was running his law firm at the time was getting ready to retire. He was older, he wanted to move on to something else. So he made an offer to buy that business by paying him out over time from the profits of the business, AKA seller financing. And he bought that law firm and then he kept adding more companies on top of it, more companies on top of it. He did this all without any government entity like the Small Business association, which is where we do deals here in the US and get loans for them. And he did it in Australia, so we know that it can be done in Australia. Then we have another member who I'm going to leave unnamed because I didn't get a chance to ask if she was okay with it or not. Who is located in Canada. This one's kind of interesting because she was in real estate, so she'd done deals in real estate before, but she wanted to buy a property management company. So had done a bunch of real estate deals, like single family homes, had bought them, fixed them up, flipped them, and then was wondering, gosh, I have a bunch of these deals I'm doing, what if I kept more of them and I had somebody manage my properties? And so she ended up buying a property management company and then on top of the property management company, she ended up buying one for Airbnb and one for single family long term rentals. And now she owns two. She did that with seller financing and in Canada, so you could do the exact same thing. Then this one was interesting. She worked in a garden company in Canada too. So like a flowering garden store basically, and loved the business. But in Canada it's cold. And so for half of the year, you know, they couldn't, couldn't grow anything. They basically kind of shuttered the doors during that time period. And she was like, gosh, what if, what if I talk to the owners about could we buy another site that had an indoor grow so that we could sell flowers all year round? I'm going to go and try to find one that does that. And so she found a deal, went to the owner of her business and said, hey, what if we could grow our business from this acquisition, sell flowers all year round. You do the deal, you put the money down, you put the risk down, but I will help do the transaction. And run this other business and can I get a percentage of the equity? And so she did. And then she had an idea with the same owner to not just sell the flowers out of their shop like a normal retail store where people come back and forth with you. She was like, what if we create a subscription model? So they have these beautiful flowers, they're called ranunculus, they're kind of expensive. And she's like, people love to get them in bouquets. They ship well, let's create a subscription model where people can buy these for their loved ones or themselves month after month after month and sell them continuously. And she did exactly that. And so she ended up getting a portion of this company that started out kind of small, but then became bigger with three aspects of it because of her transactions. So that's how I would do it that way. Now, let's say that you are in more of a third world country, let's say. So I used to run a business. I don't know if I've ever told you guys this before. I used to run a business called First Trust in Latin America, and I grew our business at First Trust through acquisition. So I actually did a lot of joint ventures. I didn't have any money to work with from the firm's perspective. So I had to talk people in different countries into doing a deal with me where they would distribute, they would sell my financial or investment products, they would take a cut of the business that they sold from the fee perspective, and I would get a bigger, you know, pot to sell into. And so I did a joint venture, which basically means a partial acquisition deal of a company in Chile. I did one in Mexico, I did one in Colombia, and I was finishing one in Brazil before I left the company. And so I've done business in a bunch of these countries. And the first deal I did was with a company in Chile. And basically we created a joint venture where they sold this product for me, and anything they sold, they got a cut of. So I actually proactively went to them and said, will you buy part of my business in Chile? You can buy it with future profits of this business, and you get a percentage of these cuts forever for as long as this entity exists. And that's how I did my first deal. And then I did one just like that in Mexico. Then, interestingly enough, the company that I did it with in Mexico, that's called actinver, they wanted to do a deal in the US So they had their own products, and they said, wow, this works really well for US here in Mexico. What if we did the same exact thing, but in the US Will you help us do a deal with First Trust in the US and you own our distribution arm in the US and take a cut of the percentage of sales for the products we will sell in the US and you own part of that entity. So we ended up doing a deal where we owned like 51% of the sales entity in the US and they owned 49% of it. And then we owned a percentage in Mexico. I don't remember the. The exact percentage. I built that business up overall in all of Latin America to over a billion dollars. And I did that largely through smart deals and partnerships therein. Now that's obviously a high level, but if you were, I don't know. I saw a comment on one of the other prior videos and it basically said, you know, I'm located in Africa. Would this work in Nigeria? And I thought that was interesting. So let's say you're in Nigeria and you want to acquire a company. Can you do that? Can you buy businesses in the same way? Well, let's look at the big dogs. What are they doing? I looked at the last couple of years of acquisitions in Nigeria and there's a ton. You got HTN Towers, that was acquired as a company in Lagos. In the communications sector, you have a reinsurance company, African reinsurance company. You have Easy Appetite, which is Internet software. You have Atlas Cement retail, You got Diamond Bank Financial. So these are just like the first few acquisitions I see that happen there. One of the things that's wild is people always think that it's different in their country in order to buy businesses. It's actually not. One of the incredible parts about Nigeria that I was reading about is how much entrepreneurship is located there. And actually sometimes in emerging countries there are less laws and regulations that you have to start. In the U.S. for instance, when you sell a business and when you start a business, we have almost more regulations and expenses than any other country in the world. We're like top 10 for how expensive it is to start or sell or register a company. In Nigeria, you are actually one of the cheapest. And so it turns out that in order to do deals in some of these other countries, you might have it a lot easier than you think. So next time you're walking like last time I was in Nigeria, I noticed, for instance, that there are huge open markets. Every single one of those stalls is a business. You could buy it for its inventory. You could help them grow independently. I also noticed there Is a huge textile industry in Nigeria. So if you see a local retail storefront, you could go and do a transaction with a local retail storefront in every country around the world. I have not yet found one where you cannot buy a small business and accept especially do it with creative financing. In a world like the US where you have a huge banking sector and lots of financing available, it actually means that we have it harder in some ways. Sometimes people in the US want us to give them cash up front because it's so easy to come by. In countries where cash and loans and banking aren't as normalized, they're not as easy to access, it's actually easier for you to talk the seller into selling to you. Let's say you have a ton of cash. You want to hear how the people do it who are super rich and they do it a lot faster this way. There's something called a deal sherpa who basically is a buy side broker. You give them what type of business you want to buy, how much you want to spend, what industry you want it in, what sector, Everything that's located here in what I call my deal box. They go out and they put a team of VAs and cold callers on it and go give you a list of businesses to potentially buy from. This deal Sherpa though is expensive. Typically this will cost something like five to $10,000 a month for you to have somebody else do your search for you. And then they will help you determine which businesses fit your parameters. So you're basically outsourcing consulting for which business to buy. Now we offer something like this at contrarian community. We have a few individuals in the community who are deal sherpas. They go out and help people individually. Closed deals in private equity. This is a whole team, a whole origination team. This is all they do. They make millions of dollars a year doing it. The interesting part about this I think is that it really doesn't make sense if you're not going to do a deal that's like $5 million and above. But I want you guys to see behind the curtain. I don't want you gate kept. Most people don't tell you what happens with these big deals. And this channel is different. We try to share the stuff even if it seems past you right now. Just because something seems out of reach doesn't mean you shouldn't know it's there or for once you get there. And so I want you to keep in the back of your mind that you can always say, hey, if somebody wants to help, you know, finance your search, that you guys could probably go to somebody@contrainthinking.com there's also other services like Do Dilio, where they could help you close a deal, but it would be a lot more expensive, somewhere between 5 and 10k a month in order to give you a hand. Selected group of businesses that have been vetted and are open to speaking to you. But that's a little bit of the rich man's hack, which Lord knows they got enough of them. In order to find a business, you sometimes got to know what you don't want. So I have a couple rules for you. Super, super important rule number one, as told by Warren Buffett, the sage himself, never invest in a business you can't understand. Sort of funny, back in the day, I bought part of a company that built autonomous ships, which sounds really cool, right? You know, I invested a couple hundred thousand dollars. I was really excited. Excited. It was on the COVID of Forbes. It was going to be AI with these huge ships out in the world. You know, they would be taking tankers everywhere. And. And I thought this was a great idea. But actually the problem with this is it was a terrible idea and I should have gone straight to jail for this because we actually invest in businesses that do not do things like AI. We're the opposite of the Internet and Twitter right now. And I also bought a company that fuels athletes using new protein synthesis techniques, which sounds super cool as well. It was this like new kind of squishy gel fluid using a ton of fancy ingredients in order for athletes to run faster and harder. I happen to know nothing about consumer packaged foods, food in general, protein synthesis most definitely. And so also, believe it or not, straight to jail, terrible mood. Because what we should actually do is we should realize that we want to buy businesses our first go round that are so simple, you can explain it to grandma. And if you can't explain it to grandma, you should definitely not be buying the business. Once you become a pro, you can buy the complex business, you can do the crazy deal, but unless you're already an engineer, already a protein synthesis scientist, and you understand this game, you probably shouldn't play it. And so I say this because in order to find a deal, you have to know what you're looking for, right? It's called targeting. If you want to date somebody that you like, you've got to know. Well, I kind of like men that are, you know, have dark hair, are funny, six foot two, make $200,000, whatever chicks want on the Internet these days. And if you don't know that, then you're not gonna be able to find it when it hits you in the face. So your biggest business buy in problem is actually when you think you're smart, but you're not and you get too complicated that grandma can't understand it and you don't even actually know what you're looking for. And so your first small business should be so simple that it's obvious to you it would be hard for you to mess up the understanding of the business. You could mess up sort of the deal and buying it. But if you're already a Realtor and you know all about real estate and then you go to buy a real estate business, or if you already are a salesperson and you go to buy part of a sales business, that's probably hard for you to mess up because you already know how to do it in some way, shape or form. That's why I like to think about, you know, if I was in real estate or if I was a graphic designer, what would be the businesses that I would own? And I think about the businesses that would be right around my core overarching business. I call these my core satellite businesses. So if I was in real estate, I might buy something like one of these companies. I could understand them. I probably already use those companies. I'm familiar with them. I'm not going from real estate to protein synthesis like Cody the idiot did, like steal my 10,000 hours. That is one of the smartest hacks you can do is let other people lose money and make mistakes and then you learn from them, losing money and making mistakes, and you never have to make the mistake yourself. So these are satellites that you could already understand. If you're in real estate now, because you guys are on YouTube, I want to show you some satellites around media. I think a lot of young people on here are particularly good at buying these types of businesses or getting a piece of equity in these types of businesses. My mom has no idea what SEO services are, but I bet you do. I bet you also know a lot about TikTok and you know about video creation and you might know about how to growth hack emails or newsletter lists. The goal is you want to lock in your wants with your desires and that's how you get close, closer to having less mistakes because you have tools that keep you honest and focused on the simple, not the sexy. We've been over kind of a lot today, and this is all just one step of buying a business. This step is called Origination or deal sourcing or step three in the ten step process to buy a small business. So it starts with foundation, understanding that there are businesses to buy and it's possible. Then it gets to what kind of business is right for you. Then it gets to Cody, how do I find a business to buy? That was today. Then it's the fourth step is outreach. How do I talk to the business owner once I find them? How do I get them to engage with me? The fifth is, do I really want to own this business? Like, what is this business really worth? How much money can I make from it? The sixth is offer a negotiation. What should I offer for this business? How should I kind of start? Structure that. How do I negotiate to get what I want out of this deal? The seventh is called due diligence. But what it really means is like, are they lying to me or not? Are they telling me the truth about the business? 8th is financing. Cody, you've told me that I could buy a business using a bunch of creative methods. This is where we talk about all of those methods. What are all the ways that you can buy a business without a lot of risk or cash or with that, if that's what you're interested in. And then nine is closing. What about the paperwork? What about, you know, the next steps? How do I actually take keys from the owner now that I own this bad boy? And then finally 10 is what we call day zero, which is the day where for the next 90 days you ramp up to being one of the few, which is a builder and an owner in a world of renters and consumers. What I'll leave you with here is a story. I think that happiness is typically found through misery and struggle and that if we really want to achieve success, we have to go through the really hard things in order to do it. And so right now, you might look at me and my portfolio and see us at Contrarian Thinking Capital and Main Street Holdco, and you're like, you know, you have like 25 businesses and you have invested in 17 startups, you know, just this last year. And you must be nice, Cody. But what you guys don't see is where I started, which is very similar to all of you, I'm sure. I remember the beginning. And the beginning was Selling south, one of my very first companies that I bought and then tried to build. Failing the Struggle Isn't Real podcast, which I left out there and it's super embarrassing, that still exists. Failed. I had to give it up, otherwise I was going to get fired. From my company failed in a real estate transaction early on. A company that I invested in, a CPG company, failed. Another company acting, which was a company in Mexico, failure. So it was like failure, failure, failure, failure, failure. Until eventually I learned so much from those failures that I was able to create a portfolio so big that I get to leave something behind as a legacy. But it didn't start out that way. It started out with a lot of pain. And so I want to make sure that I tell you the truth, which is that this is hard and that all of your dreams are possible, but probably not at once. That having expectations is. Is more important than anything else. And yes, you can buy a business. Yes, it is possible to get money day one in doing a deal. Yes, it is possible for you to achieve just about everything you want in life, but it will be through a lot of difficulty. And I hope this video was really comprehensive in a bunch of ways that normal humans could do what used to be only possible for the big private equity guys, which is own our small businesses, own our communities, and take control of our financial freedom. And that's what I hope you learned today. A weird thing happens as you become an entrepreneur. First you have to make a decision to do something, to take action. That's really hard, right? This decision takes forever and then eventually that decision becomes a habit. And so you decide to take that decision every single day and replicate it, which is what a habit is. A habit is a decision compounded continuously day after day, over time. And after you have done that for a period of time, you accumulate what's called a skill. Right? Those are decisions and habits paired together to become something that you become so good at and so normalized that you consider yourself skilled. And what I want you to do is make the decision today to become an owner so that you can turn it into a habit to find things to own. And. And then you can have a skill of increasing ownership, because ownership is the only thing that leads to freedom. And that is how you buy businesses, how you find businesses for sale. And if I didn't cover something, hit me in the comments because we are going to put out an entire video on some of the things you tell us in the comments today, from expertise to equity, to creative financing and beyond. Oh, and also, if you liked this video, you're definitely going to like this video.