Should You Buy a Business in 2026?

If you got $100,000 or more to invest, buying an existing business can seem like the obvious shortcut because you get to skip the years of finding customers, testing products, and figuring out how to make money from scratch. But here's the real problem: having the money to buy a business doesn't mean you have the experience to run one. And you don't want to discover that for the first time after you've already wired 6 figures when sales start dropping, or you learn that your supplier was only loyal to the previous owner and not to you. Because that's oftentimes the real risk, because you're not just deciding whether to buy or build, you're deciding how much money you're prepared to put behind your current ability to operate a business. So in this video, I'm comparing buying versus building on the things that actually matter, which is your experience your money, your time, and what happens when things don't go as planned. And by the end, you'll know which route makes the most sense where you are right now and whether you're actually ready to put serious money behind your judgment on running a business. But one thing before we start is I've done both sides of this. I built brands from scratch and I bought one business at $190,000 and now worth over $2 million. So this is in theory for me. I get why buying is so compelling and I'm honestly not against it, but more on that a little bit later. But if you're not new to my channel, you've heard me talk about the brands that I purchased before. Because instead of spending years building something from zero, you can buy the business where the revenue, the customers, and the systems already exist. But what are you actually buying? And what doesn't come with the deal you purchase? So say you have $150,000 and you find an e-commerce business that's been running for years. It has customers, it's got revenues, and there's a product listing with reviews, a supplier who makes the product, maybe a VA answering customer messages, and some history that you can look at to understand how the business performs and operates. Compare that from starting from zero. You build the brand yourself, nobody knows who you are, and you don't have the customers. You don't know whether people are actually going to buy your product because there's no listing, there's no reviews, There's no supplier relationship. There's no operating history that you can make decisions based on. So you have to build all of that. So yeah, I totally get why buying looks a lot safer because you're buying something that's already proven it works. And if you're going to spend 10 or 15 years building a career and you're sitting on real money, there's another part that gets really, really attractive because it starts to feel like your money can buy you the time that you currently don't have right now. So instead of spending the next 3 years getting a business to a certain level, maybe you can write a check and just start right now. And honestly, that can work a lot of the time because you can buy a customer list, the inventory, the listing, and inherit the supplier relationships and processes. What you can't buy is the judgment the previous owner built over the years of running this actual business. And you might not notice the gap at first because for a while everything continues to work. Then 6 months down the road, you see your revenue fall 20%. Now you have to figure out why it's falling. Is it demand? Did your ads stop performing? Did one of your biggest products lose its ranking? Or is the listing turning fewer visitors into buyers? Or is the previous owner-supplier relationship more important than you realized? Maybe revenue is fine, but your VA of 3 years just quit. Now you have to decide whether to replace them, take over the work yourself, or change how the operation actually works. So these aren't weird edge cases. This is just what running a business actually looks like when reality stops matching the spreadsheets that you've been looking at when you purchased this business. And the business you bought still exists, The listing still exists, but now it's waiting for you to make the decision. And that's the part people underestimate the most. And you're not just buying cash flow, you're signing up to protect it when things can change. And I've lived the expensive version of this because I bought a business for $220,000 at 39 times its earnings while it was already declining. And now that money is completely gone. But sometimes you can do your homework and the deal's deal goes bad after you buy it. Because I bought a $200,000 supplements business on Amazon, and 6 weeks after I bought it, Amazon started flagging the listing for compliance problems that nobody could see coming. And on that deal, I lost $60,000, but it should have been $200,000. And the only reason it wasn't is that I had structured the deal so when I first bought it, I only paid 50% upfront, which meant that I just handed over the business back to the seller. And those are 2 different ways to lose money. The first one was my judgment failing before I even bought it. But the second one, nobody could have predicted. And the only reason it only cost me $60,000 instead of $200,000 is how I structured the deal. And then real quick, give this video a like if you find it valuable and subscribe to this channel because I release videos every week about the real raw operations side of running a business and scaling it, and you don't want to miss any of it. So if buying a business can expose gaps in your judgment with 6 figures already on the line, building is another way to expose those gaps. But what do you give up to learn with less money at risk? Because the obvious difference is that you can start way smaller because instead of putting $150,000 into buying a business, You could put $10,000 or $15,000 into launching a product from scratch, and you still have plenty of ways to go ahead and go wrong. Because you can pick a product where the market looked great until you actually tried to compete in it, and you can build a product customers don't even care about, or your supplier can make you question several of your life's choices. Because there are plenty of ways to mess it up starting from scratch. The only difference is the order you run into them. Because when you're starting from scratch, you usually earn the right to risk more money one step at a time. Because first you find an opportunity and figure if there is real demand for that product. Then you work through the product, the supplier, the numbers before you launch, and then you find out if your assumptions were actually right. And if they were, you make the next decision, which is do you reorder? Do you spend more on ads? Add another product and tie up more cash. You're putting more money at risk as your earlier decisions prove right. And that sounds nice in 30 seconds, but in reality, learning this way is painfully slow because I paid for this education myself. I have lost over $150,000 launching brands myself from scratch, and these were products that I was sure about in markets I was sure about. And I'm not saying this to go ahead and brag because it sounds like I just love losing money, but I'm saying it because every dollar taught me something that no spreadsheet could. Because that's the part people clean up when they tell the story later on. Because nobody handed me a checklist. I made a bunch of calls, got some of them wrong, lost a bunch of time and money, and slowly got better at spotting the problem a little bit earlier. So building doesn't remove its risk, it changes what you're risking while you learn. And underneath the business, what you're really building is the judgment you'll carry into every deal after this one. Start with the customer. If you buy an established business, the customers are already there. That's one of the perks. But if you're building from zero, you have to figure out why anybody should become your customer in the first place. When you start from zero, you have to figure out who you are serving, what you— they're already buying, what frustrates them the most, and whether that frustration is strong enough for them to spend money on something different. And that's where you learn the difference between seeing demand and actually understanding it. Because a market can have millions of dollars in sales and still be a terrible opportunity for you. Because proven demand doesn't automatically mean there's room for your product. Then you have to figure out what it costs to turn that demand into a customer. And that's where the spreadsheet gets very real. Because maybe the product sells for $50. Great. But it costs you $14 to have it made and shipped to you. And then the fees start stacking up. The marketplace, the payment fees, fulfillment, advertising, returns, discounts, storage. Now the question isn't, can I sell this for $50? The question is, what's actually left after I sell for $50? And is that enough to justify putting more money into inventory? And that changes how you look at every opportunity. Because then there's the supplier side. What happens if the supplier wants a bigger minimum order than you expected? What happens if you have to put down a bigger deposit months before you can actually sell anything? And what happens if you sell faster than you expected and now you need to fund the reorder before the cash from the first order even comes in? This is the stuff that sounds like details until you're the one writing the check. And then if the product actually works, you run into another question. And honestly, I think this one matters even more, is that should you put more money behind it? Because growing is also about deciding where your money goes. Because say you've got $30,000, you put it into more inventory. A second product, advertising, a new sales channel? Or do you hold that cash because it's the first product and it still hasn't been proven enough? For example, maybe you find a product doing solid revenue at first, and then you think, this is interesting. Then you look closer and realize there's no reason for the customer to buy anything else from you, or the numbers only work if your ad cost stays unrealistically low, or the supplier setup means you've had a ton of cash stuck in inventory. And just like that, what looked like an opportunity becomes a hard no. Learning to say no is part of becoming an operator. The goal isn't proving every idea can work if you try hard enough. The goal is actually getting better at spotting where your money and effort should actually go. So when you build from scratch, you have to learn how all of this actually works. The products, the customers, the marketing, the suppliers, the numbers, the growth. There's no existing business shielding you from those decisions. And then making them yourself is what trains you to look at somebody else's business later and know whether it's worth buying. Because if you're building right now and making those decisions, you don't have to make them alone. And if you're building right now and making those decisions, you don't have to make them alone because that's what the Brand Operator is for— weekly coaching calls. And before you take the next major step, your decision gets reviewed and approved by an experienced operator, so you're not putting your time or money behind anything blindly. And there's a link down below in the description if you want more information. I told you earlier that I've lost around $150,000 $50,000 building brands from scratch, but one of those brands makes over a million dollars per year now. But the money wasn't the only cost at that time. Every product I tested took time, and when the product didn't work, I got the hard lesson. I didn't get the time back. And that's the biggest trade-off when you start building from scratch, because you can reduce the money behind each decision But you usually have to make a lot more decisions before you own something meaningful. And if you got a career, a spouse, kids, and a couple hours a night, you could spend 2 to 3 years becoming a much better operator and still have very little to show for it. And those aren't wasted experience whatsoever, but learning something and building an asset are not the same thing. So I wouldn't call building safer either. I call it safer with money and riskier with time because the goal was never to collect enough years of experience to earn permission to buy a business. The goal is to develop enough operating judgment that when you do put serious money behind a business, you understand what you're buying, what could go wrong, and what you'll actually do if it does. Because once you do that, the equation changes. Buying stops being a way to skip learning how to operate and business, and it becomes a way to put your judgment you already have behind a business that's further along than anything you'd built yourself. And that's the point where buying starts getting a little more interesting. So when does buying stop being a way to skip the learning and start being a way to put what you already know to work? So let's go back to that business from the very beginning. It's the same business, same asking price, same revenue, same customers. But now the only difference is, is the buyer. So instead of someone who's never run a business, picture a buyer who's already built and operated one. And when the seller says there's a huge opportunity to grow this with paid ads, you don't just count that as a bonus. You ask why the current owner hasn't done it already. What actually got tested? What did it cost? What actually happened? And that's a completely different way to buy a business. And you also think more clearly about what happens after you close. Because let's say revenue drops 20%, you still don't magically know the answer. Experience doesn't make you a psychic, but you have a way to figure out what's actually wrong because you know which numbers to look at. You know how to tell whether fewer people want it, the listing isn't turning visitors into buyers, the price is wrong, the ads are off, or something in the operations just broke, and that changes what the business you're actually buying. I once passed on a business listed at $969,000 because it was priced at 66 times what I actually earned at the time. And the listing told an exciting story, but the numbers didn't support the price. And that's where experience saved me in that situation. It didn't help me run the business better, it stopped me from buying the wrong business in the first place. Because picture 2 businesses, Both make $200,000 a year in profit, and at first glance, they might look exactly the same. But one has fading demand, 2 products doing most of the revenue, a supplier relationship nobody wrote down, and a thin profit margin at each sale. And the other one has sales spread across a lot of different products, steady demand, strong profit on each sale, processes that are actually written down, and few ways to grow that you actually know how to pull off. The profit number is the same, the businesses are totally different. And being able to see the differences is what makes buying interesting once you know how to operate. Because that's the arc I live. I've lost around $150,000 learning how to operate and build businesses from scratch. That judgment is what let me buy Maverick for $190,000, now worth over $2 million. The losses were my tuition fees. And the purchase, however, was the actual graduation. Because once you can read a deal, spot market trends, diagnose problems, and find ways to grow, buying becomes a completely different game than just using money to skip the building phase altogether. So the useful question isn't whether buying beats building. It's this: before you put real money into either one of these, what do your experience, your money, and your time actually allow for? And I'd look at 4 different things. The first thing is your experience. And I obviously don't mean your job title or how long you've been working or whether people even think you're successful. Have you actually made the kinds of calls we just walked through? The customer calls, the supplier calls, the where does the next dollar go type of calls. And you don't need to have done every single job in your company yourself, but be very careful about paying a lot of money for a business when you don't understand how it actually makes money. The second thing is your money. How much of your money is on the line while you're still learning what you actually don't know? Because there's a big difference between having $100,000 and being able to responsibly risk $100,000. And if that money is years of savings, putting all of it into your first time running a business is very different. Than someone experienced putting a slice of their money into another business. The third thing is your time. If you're working a demanding job and you've got 2 young kids, 5 years of nights and weekends has a cost itself. Can you live with that? And there's only one right answer to that. You have to decide which resources you can afford to spend while you actually learn. And the fourth thing is whether you can actually operate it. And this is the test I'd actually use and being the most important one. Because if a key employee quits, do you know how to decide whether to replace them or change the work that gets done? And if ad cost climbs 30% or a competitor cuts their price, do you know which number you'll look at before deciding how to respond? And I'm not asking whether you feel confident handling those situations. I'm asking whether you have the process of figuring out what's actually wrong before you put more money behind that one decision. And if your answer to most of these is basically, I'd figure it out, that doesn't mean you can never buy a business. Every operator has to figure it out, but it should change how much money you put behind yourself while you're still learning. But if you already made these calls, you understand the numbers, you know what to look at, and you can point out exactly where to improve the business, then buying starts to make a lot more sense than actually building from scratch. So the same business can be the 2 completely different investments depending on who's buying it. The listing can tell you about the business. It can't tell you whether your experience is ready for the amount of money you're about to put behind it. And that's the part you have to answer yourself. Do your experience, your money, your time, and your ability to operate justify putting that kind of money behind your judgment right now? If you watch this and realize you're not ready to put serious money behind buying a business yet, then your path is building one yourself. And now, if you're building your own brand and you want help making decisions like this with somebody who's actually built and operated a brand, this is exactly what we do inside the Brand Operator. We have weekly coaching calls where we help you work through the decisions you're dealing with. But the biggest difference is you're not just getting advice and then getting left to figure everything out yourself. Before you move forward to the next major step, that decision gets reviewed and approved by one of our brand operators or by me personally. So whether you're choosing a product, placing a production order, or making another important decision with your brand, you have an experienced operator looking at it with you before you put any time or money behind it. The link is below in the description. But if you're not ready for that yet, building doesn't automatically mean less risk because one of the first decisions you'll make could still put $10,000 or $15,000 of your own money on the line. So watch this video where I take a real Amazon product opportunity and show you exactly how I decide whether it's worth the investment or not, or whether you should actually walk away from it. So click on it and I'll see you guys there.