Roland Frasier Reveals His Proven Formula to Win At Investing (Exclusive Sneak Peek: Virtual Event)

Hey everyone, so this is a clip of the Virtual Growth Accelerator, and here you're gonna find out more about, to get some context into the group that we have. It's a monthly meeting with amazing founders and executives, and the speakers that we have, these are people that will talk about the latest marketing tactics, the latest strategies, and also talk about topics such as mergers and acquisitions, culture, hiring. And so you have a group of really strong people. Some of the speakers that we have in the past, have had in the past, Roland Frasier of War Room, Brian Dean of Backlinko, Ryan Levesque of the ASK Method, and a whole host of amazing speakers that are guaranteed to blow your mind. But in addition to that, it's really, I actually think more importantly than that, the group of people where, the group of people are super accomplished in themselves and the networking sessions that we have and also the chat that we have where people are helping each other out, That definitely goes a long way. So, you know, it's getting that peer group of people to help take you to the next level and help you accomplish your goals. We also have an accountability group as well where each month you're going to be held accountable to, you know, you're going to commit to whatever you want to do and then the next month, you know, we're going to see who in the group actually got that done. And, you know, having that sense of, you know, competition a little bit helps drive you towards getting closer to your goals as well. So without further ado, please enjoy this session. This is just, again, this is from one of our virtual Growth Accelerators. And if you want to learn more about it, you can just go to marketingschool.io/live, that's L-I-V-E, to learn more. And we'll see you inside.

Welcome everybody. Welcome from our homes. Sam and I actually got ready for today. First time getting ready in a long time for work stuff. But yeah.

I'm wearing my same white shirt.

This is true.

This is, yeah, Neil's really expensive white shirts. Yeah, everyone welcome. We're all really excited to have you here.

You know, we're going to give you—

and we're going to end up teaching you unique things that you probably wouldn't end up learning. I know many of you guys here are like, hey, how can I increase traffic? How can I increase conversions? We'll be teaching some of that stuff, but the whole purpose of the Growth Accelerator is to teach you new concepts that you may not be looking for that can grow your business. In addition to that, if you have any questions that are the traditional stuff or want us to help you look at your site or analyze your business or anything like that, you can just let Eric and I know offline and we can jump on a call and help you out there as well.

We've— we met Roland really through Digital Marketer and now he's the principal of a mastermind called The War Room. But even beyond that, Roland's practiced business tax and security laws for over 12 years and is now an active investor who knows how to drive growth and scale in his portfolio companies. So he's got a lot of things going on. I think it's— I wouldn't even do justice I'm going to let him explain and then Neil and I will share some stories as well. But yeah, I've been a part of Roland's mastermind in the past. A lot of good learnings, a lot of great marketers in there. And even beyond that, recently I joined one of his programs to basically learn different ways to— creative ways to invest or even potentially fully acquire other companies. And so Roland's got a lot to teach and we're super excited to bring him on. And, you know, I want to turn it over to Neil for a second to talk about, share some stories in terms of what he knows about Roland and to give you guys a little more context as well. So Neil, I'm going to pass it over to you.

You know, Roland is one of the most creative people that I've seen when it comes to deal-making. For example, for what I know from the Traffic and Conversion Summit, he had a really slick term in there in which He ended up doing it where after selling Traffic and Conversion Summit, based on how they perform in the next year, he could actually even get paid out even more money because he already knew that he can end up performing better. I learned that from one of his partners, Perry. But the way he does deals is pretty creative and he figures out how to either buy companies for really cheap and in many cases seller-based financing Or when he's selling a company, how he can get paid out more than, in theory, what most people would pay for the company.

And hopefully you guys can hear me okay. Uh, what I am going to talk about today is how you can buy businesses and traffic assets for $0 out of pocket. And, um, it's a fantastic, uh, way to build your business. I have not been able to find any faster way to build a business than to simply buy other ones. And not only whole businesses, but traffic assets. And I know Neil's done a fantastic job of this in buying and aggregating a whole bunch of sites that were ranking well for SEO. And it's just a very, very powerful way to grow. The cool thing is, is that there are lots of ways that you can do this for $0 out of pocket as well. So what I'm going to talk about today is I'm going to talk about why now is the very best time to do these kinds of deals. There's a lot of opportunity right now. The, the whole challenge with the shutdown has created a huge opportunity to acquire businesses and to acquire them at really great prices. And I'm going to share with you 41 different sources that you can use to find these deals. And then also I'm going to give you 8 different ways to buy them with $0 out of pocket. And keep in mind, I'm talking about companies, but I'm also talking about traffic assets, assets that have traffic attached to them. So So rather than renting that traffic by buying paid media, you can simply own it. Now, first off, why is this the best time ever to do this? Well, the main thing is that the prices of businesses go down every time there is a dip in the economy with a recession. So you can see in the graphic there, those gold bars show 3 of the most recent recessions before the current one. And you can see that the red line goes down in each of those because multiples, which is how businesses sell, they typically sell for a multiple of their profits. Basically, there's fancy terms for it like EBITDA and SDE, but for our purposes today, those multiples go down, which means the prices of the businesses go down. But then, as you can see in the white areas that follow the gold areas, they always recover. In fact, in the 17 recessions that we've had in the last 100 years and the and all of the recessions that we've had in the United States, this has been the, the pattern of activity. So definitely something to know. The other cool thing is that if you look at that bar on the right, this is a very different situation right now than we've had in the past. In this situation, we just basically clicked a switch and we said, hey, we're not gonna have the economy on anymore. We're just gonna stop everything smartly because we said, you know, we're gonna do this so we can save millions of lives. But at the same time, there wasn't a wind-down. There wasn't like economic difficulty. We were actually still booming when we hit that switch. And so knowing right now that this is an artificial tick in the economy, there's a ton of cash around. So if we can buy these businesses right now at really great prices and kind of add them together so they get to the point where they would be attractive to larger buyers. As you can see in this, in the chart, there's $2.5 trillion sitting there right now in private equity funds. Private equity funds are basically just investment funds that buy other companies to sell them for a profit later. Well, in a normal recession, those guys would be hurting because there wouldn't be a lot of cash available. But because this just happened like instantly when we turned the economies off in the, in the entire world, all these companies, all these funds are sitting on cash. The same thing in the, in the second one, $2.4 trillion in corporate cash sitting on the side. That's almost $5 trillion of buying money that's kind of hanging out waiting for deals, right? So if we're able to put those deals together over the next several years, there's a huge opportunity that really hasn't existed before. The other thing to think about is that this is a repeating pattern. And for me, over the years, there's pictures there of me going back to the '80s when I was playing keyboards all the way up to last year interviewing Richard Branson at our Traffic and Conversion Summit event. But I've— this isn't the first recession rodeo, right? So over the last several years, in the '80s, I was able to buy manufacturing companies using a technique called leveraged buyouts. In the '90s, it was retail and food with workouts. In 2000s, with the dot-com bust. It was reorganizing those companies after everything fell apart. Then, in what we call the Great Recession in the United States, doing roll-ups in real estate. When all the real estate market crashed, I was out buying real estate with leverage and other people's money and no money out of pocket, aggregating those deals and bundling them up to sell. Now, it's everything. We're buying SaaS, software as a service companies. We're buying media, real estate, publishing, everything that we can, particularly things that have MRR stands for monthly recurring revenue, and we're doing it for no money out of pocket, which is what I'm excited to share with you here today. And just so you know, Neil and Eric gave me a fantastic intro. I've acquired over 2 dozen businesses with sales ranging from $3 million to just under $4 billion, and I do it all with no money out of my pocket because there's just so many strategies. There's 216 different strategies I've got now for buying these things with no money out of pocket. So, and it, and And just so you know, this applies in all industries. Here are several of the deals that I've done that way. I acquired a significant interest in Digital Marketer, Big Block Realty, one of the fastest-growing real estate companies in the United States, Scribe, which has published over 1,000 books successfully, Real Estate Worldwide, which has a SaaS, several different SaaSes, Praxio, which is a SaaS for delivering business-to-business services, Platter, which is a content service. All of these, I'm telling you these. So that you see, Everbowl is a restaurant chain with 40-plus restaurants. This applies everywhere. So whatever you're doing, whether it's online, offline, whatever niche you happen to be in, this stuff works across the board. All I have to do is identify what I want to buy, and then I go buy it. So M&A for growth is, to me, the absolute pinnacle of things that you can do to grow the business. The other thing that's interesting, in the United States alone, and globally this applies as well, there's a $10 trillion opportunity. Right now, 96% of businesses fail to continue for 10 years or more. And 50 million baby boomers in the United States alone, more globally, are going to retire over the next 10 years. 12 million of those baby boomers own businesses, right? 420,000 of those businesses every single year will transition for the next 10 years in the United States alone. That means 4.5 million businesses worth $10 trillion are gonna transition over the next 10 years. And only 20% of the businesses that go to market that actually get listed for sale end up selling. So there's a huge number of businesses that don't end up selling. How big is the market? It's giant. And in the United States alone, SMB stands for small and medium-sized business. there's 28.8 million of these businesses. In Canada, a little over a million. 25 million plus in the EU and UK. Australia's got a couple million. So 57 million businesses that are small and medium-sized businesses. Only of, of those, only 4.32 million will be listed for sale. Listed for sale. But a lot more are going to be sold without listing or are going to close, as I'll describe in a second. Now, of the 4 million that are listed, only about 700,000, 720,000 are going to sell, which means that globally in these markets, 3.6 million businesses are available for us to acquire. And so you can see, like, there's, there's really no limit. It's not like this is a very limited opportunity and there's only going to be 52 businesses available for sale. There's 3.6 million. So there's plenty for everybody. So this is a strategy that works and has worked for me for 35 years now. So it's very effective. A lot of people say, well, why don't I just start up a business and, and not buy one? And there's a lot of reasons. One is there's a heck of a lot less risk. When you buy a business, you have a 2% chance— if you buy a profitable business, you have a 2% chance of failing. If you buy a Excuse me, if you start a business within the first 10 years, you have a 90% chance of failing. Even the smart people at Silicon Valley with all their degrees and all their endless capital fail 75% of the time when they start up a business. So that's a huge difference. There's a whole lot more financing options available to acquire businesses versus starting them from scratch. Brand recognition already exists in a business. That is already going, and you have instant customers, which means you have instant sales, which means you have instant profits, you have instant contacts and connections, instant systems, and instant employees. You don't have to set all that stuff up. So, this is the argument for acquisition over startup. The other thing I want to talk about is that Gerber wrote a great book called The E-Myth, and I'm gonna— and in that book, he said, don't work in the business, don't open the store and sweep the floors and that kind of stuff. You should work on the business. You should be hiring operators and things like that. But the product is still the thing that you sell in the business. It's still the widget or the service that you sell in the business. My suggestion is that you want to think about working above your business where you're finding investors, you're acquiring competitors, you're integrating your supply and distribution chains, you're acquiring new verticals. Really, at this point, your product becomes the business itself. And that's a huge mind shift that investors have, right? So when I'm looking at businesses, I'm thinking about the business as a product because I want to buy the business and sell it to somebody else. I don't care about the me working on the business as far as in selling more of the stuff that the business sells. I'm much more concerned With my product being the business, and how do I make that product better and ready to sell? That's a really important thing to think about. Just so you see what our end objective here is too: you can buy a business and hang on to it. That's absolutely fine. I like selling them because you can make several years worth of income every time you sell a business. And multiple-wise, I mentioned businesses sell for a multiple of profits, and profits are determined differently depending on the size. An owner-operated business will typically sell for about two. 2.5 times. This is an average in different industries. They're higher or lower, but just as an average of 2.5 times its profit. A non-operated owner-operated business, a professionalized business that has management where the owner can leave and nothing really changes, the business continues to operate, continues to grow. Those are selling for about 3.7 times profits. Now, I like playing in the blue box and the, and the green box here. Because when we aggregate these smaller businesses together and we get them to about $10 million in sales and about $2 million or more in profits, then private equity— remember, there's that $5 trillion roughly dollars that's sitting on the sideline— then private equity becomes interested, and the corporations that are buying companies become interested because the deal is big enough for them to do, and they're paying between 12 and 13 times profits. Now, why would they be willing to do that? Well, number one, there's a lot of competition. Only about 15,000 transactions closed in the United States last year with private equity and corporate acquisitions. So there's not a lot of them. 15,000 sounds like a lot, but remember, we've got millions of businesses for sale. So they don't want to deal with the smaller business. They're going to wait until that business hits about $10 million in sales, $2 million in profits. Before it's really worth all the effort, because it takes the same amount of effort roughly to buy a $3 million business that's making $400,000 as it does to buy a $20 million business that's making $3 million. So that's, that's where they play. And what, what their game is, they don't mind paying that 12 or 13 times because they're going to sell it to a public company or flip it or take it public. And those companies right now are trading at about 24 times on, on the NASDAQ. So that's the game, is that we play in the blue and green boxes, and we actually try to buy significantly— and do succeed at it, by the way— buy significantly lower than that. And then we sell in the red box, and then we let the red box guys go on and sell in the orange box. So that's kind of how that works. Now, what's interesting is there's a couple of really big opportunities right now, and this— these numbers I'm going to give you are before before the pandemic happened. The numbers are going to be significantly higher. I've seen estimates into the millions. We don't really know what the total fallout of this is going to be, but a lot of businesses just close their doors. In the United States alone, every year about 595,000 businesses simply close their doors. Well, when they close their doors, that means that everything goes away— the goodwill that they've built up, the customer list that they've got, any social media or web presences or search rankings or anything like that. All of that just goes away. Their customers are available, all those assets are available, and they're just gonna die if somebody doesn't acquire them. A lot of reasons though that, that this happens. One, number one, is money. The average business in the United States, I've seen statistics saying they have only 27 days of cash flow. We've been in the COVID shutdown thing for about 90 days now, so that's having a huge impact on businesses that are otherwise Fine. They were doing just fine before this happened and are likely to again. A lot of people, as I mentioned, 420,000 baby boomers a year that own businesses are retiring and they don't know what to do to sell it. So they simply close the business. Sometimes they're just relocating to be with family or for health reasons. They may just be tired and burned out. People down the street ran a restaurant since the '80s and couldn't find anybody to buy it and were going to close it. And finally, we were able to get a buyer in there, right? They may close for health reasons, particularly now, even more than before. Or just, you know, entrepreneurs are— the most interesting businesses, the— or the least interesting business is the one that we own right now. The most interesting one is the next one we're thinking about doing. So a lot of entrepreneurs simply close the business because they're tired of this, or they've got multiple businesses going on and they just— this one isn't the most successful. And that happens a lot. There's tremendous opportunities there. They may think that This is the end of the upcycle. And so they see that there's a recession that we have entered into as a result of the COVID thing, and they don't want to go through that again because they've been through a couple. I mentioned I'm on my 5th one, right? I like it. I see the opportunity. But if you're just owning one business and your product or service is not the business itself, but is the widget or the service that you're selling, you may say, man, I've done this 4 times and it just sucks every single time. So I don't want to go through this again. And a lot of them simply have bad partners. Many of the deals that I put up on the board here that I have done over the last few years have been where a partner was being bought out, either because there was a challenge with the partnership, or that partner was no longer contributing, or the partner simply wanted to exit. There wasn't really any problem or anything, just that partner was done and was ready to move on to something else. And then, of course, death, because people do die every year who own businesses. So there's a huge amount of of these businesses even before this, $595,000 a year in the United States alone, simply closing their doors. Now, our goal is to, in this opportunity, acquire pre-close. And because the numbers I gave you, that, that blue box and green box where the average was 2.5 to 3.7 times profits, that's what you get when you do a market sale at fair market value and you're not motivated to sell. You're not a motivated seller, so you're not going to take a discount. And You have the time to go through the process of selling, but most of these people don't know the process, aren't willing to do it, or they're motivated for one of those 9 reasons that I just gave you to simply get rid of it faster. So I'm going to show you, and it's possible actually just to take them over for, for no purchase at all. They just basically, hey, you know, I want my employees to still have jobs and my customers to still be served. And, you know, I built this business up over 8 years and I just really like for it to continue, please take it. That actually happens. But let's take a look at EBITDA. I mentioned was— is a form of profit and stands for earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization. So let's say that we've got a Target that is doing $360,000 in EBITDA, and we'll call that profit from now on, right? Doing $360,000 a year in profit. Well, a good deal would be one where the purchase price multiple— let's say this is not an owner-operated business. Remember, owner-operated businesses were 2.5.

Mm-hmm.

professionalized managed businesses were 3.7. Let's say we buy it at market. If we buy it at fair market value, we pay 3.7 times the $360,000 in profit. So our purchase price is going to be $1.3 million. The valuation post-closing, not surprisingly, $1.3 million. Now, if we find a motivated seller and we buy it at 1.5 times, then it's 1.5 times the $360,000 profit. We're only going to pay $540,000. But if we sell the business, With a process, then we're going to get fair market value for it, or 1.3, which means we pick up about $760,000 in wealth as a result of doing that. If we get a great deal and we buy it at a 1x, we're only going to pay $360,000. We're going to get our money back in a year, which is really where I like to sit, at 1 or lower times profit. So $360,000, it's going to be worth 1.3 if we sell it. We pick up $940,000. In wealth the day that we close, because we are not motivated sellers. We are able to go through a process. We are not having any of those 9 problems that I mentioned, right? So that's a huge opportunity simply making that spread. Now go then and say, okay, let's buy 5 of these or 10 of these, and let's get up to that $10 million in sales, $2 million in profit, and then we're gonna flip it out and we bought it at 1 and we're gonna sell at 12, that's a pretty decent return. And let's say that it takes us 3 years to get there. That means that we're 12x-ing our money in 3 years, or 400%, 4x per year in return, just because we bought it right and we know the process. That's a huge, huge, huge opportunity. Opportunity number 2 is equity deals, and these are fun because This is where you're going to have no investment in the company, but it's— but, but you're going to have equity in it as a result of your efforts. And there's a few ways to do this. You can earn into equity in 3 ways. First, you can be an advisor. So I'm an advisor to a lot of companies, and for that I get paid somewhere between 1% and 5% of the equity of the company. Also, I assist a lot of companies, and you guys have the skills to do this too. With growing. So a growth assist deal is typically I'm going to get 10 to 50% of the company I'm going to earn into. That might be done as a result of milestones. It might be instant because they know what I've been able to do in the past and they believe in me. And so you have those opportunities available. And also exit assist. So when I help a company sell, I'm typically paid between 5 and 10% of the price it sells for. Well, what's awesome about that Is when you know how to do this stuff, you go into a company, they've built the company up over 14 years or 7 years, right? And you come in and help them sell it and get 5 to 10% of that 14 or 7 years of effort that they've done because you're able to tap the market and get them a market deal. So tremendous opportunity there. You want to be careful here because if the equity issues instantly, you're going to get taxed on it most likely in the United States, and it works similar in most other countries. So rather, when you go into a company that already has a value, if they've already done an offering, they've already had offers, or there has— it does have some sort of value, then you don't want to take typically equity right away. Then you want to take it in the form of either warrants, which a warrant is simply an option to acquire an interest in the company that's issued by the company, An option, which would be an option to acquire an interest in the company issued by someone other than the company, or something called phantom equity, which is a contractual relationship that says that you'll be treated like a shareholder and you'll be paid on exit like a shareholder and you'll be given distributions like you were a shareholder, but you don't actually own shares. Those are 3 ways that you can generally consult your tax advisor, not giving you legal or financial advice here, but that you can get paid on these deals. Uh, without that, you can get this equity-like stuff, interest in these deals without actually paying taxes on it. And then getting paid, typically ask for a lump sum upfront or some sort of monthly cash plus expenses, that amount being whatever you need to make this work for you. Don't take only equity if you need some cash too. Um, you can have a performance-based cash or equity kicker based on milestones or performance targets that you hit. Um, you also might want to negotiate what's called a put option. A put option means that within a certain period of time of you acquiring your equity or your equity-like compensation, you can force the company to buy you out of that. That's important because if you're a 1 to 3 or 5 or, you know, 16% minority shareholder in a company, you are stuck there. And unless you have a put option, then you can't get out unless you can find someone to buy your shares. And generally you can get the consent of the rest of the company to do that. So you want to be careful about that. They may in turn ask for a call option, and most of the deals that I do have put-call. It's a reciprocal put-call option where not only can I force them to buy me out after a certain period of time, they can also elect to buy me out within that period of time. So that's— those are some things that you can think about. And then how can you be irresistibly attractive to these sellers, the key is positioning yourself as an investor. And while I don't have time to go into it in great detail, the simplest way to do that is simply on all of your social media accounts, simply add the word investor and people will start coming to you and saying, oh, I see you're an investor and, um, I've got this deal, right? Get your deal flow up by positioning yourself as an investor. The other thing that is important to think about is how can you do acquisitions without having personal liability or using your personal credit. And when I was interviewing Gary Vee last year, I asked him, I said, what's the one thing that you know now you wish you had known when you got started? And he said, that's the SPV, that it would have saved him tens of millions of dollars. An SPV is a special purpose vehicle, which is just a fancy lawyer and investment banking way of saying it's a company like a corporation or an LLC that has limited liability, meaning that any liability of that entity doesn't extend to the owners of the entity. And, um, it's, it's so it's, uh, any entity that you're forming for a special purpose. That's why it's called a special purpose vehicle. The special purpose in our case here will be to acquire traffic assets and companies. And, um, why, why do you use it? I mentioned it creates this bright line of liability that cannot be penetrated by creditors. So it's definitely something to think about. And so when we buy these companies, and I'll show you here in a minute how we do it with no money out of pocket, the business is basically paying to buy itself. And we put this in a company— our buyer of the business is actually an SPV because we want that company, if there's any debt, if there's any seller financing, if there's any assumptions of loans or anything like that, we want that to be the company that has those. So it doesn't need credit, you don't need credit, it doesn't have any way of passing its liability for those debts on to you personally. When to form it? I'd form it as soon as you can. It's very inexpensive. You can go to LegalZoom or BizFilings or any of the billions of places you can form companies online for usually under $100 plus filing fees and have it set up so that you have it ready to do a deal When the deal comes about. So that's, that's a great way to do that. As far as finding things to buy, the easiest types of businesses to buy are if you own an existing business. And I know most of you here own existing businesses. And so the kinds of businesses to buy would be competitors to your core business. That's the first category. Media companies that have businesses that have created the attention and eyeballs for ideal customer profile, your ICP. Other companies that have teams and resources that you would like to have. I'll give you those in a second. Companies that are selling services or products to you or to your customer. Also consolidating your supply and distribution chain. So if you've got— if you're buying products and selling them, even if it's intellectual property that's being manufactured by someone else, as in you're a publisher, then buying those suppliers, manufacturers, wholesalers, those are ways that you get 100% of the profit that's in the total value chain for the product. Similarly, buyer distributors, which might include stores, online stores or offline stores, or even affiliates, depending on how your products or services are being distributed. So acquiring those, again, you pick up 100% of the profit in the value and distribution chain. And last but not least, intellectual property, right? And that is what I am excited to share with you guys All right, Roland, that was incredible.

Thanks so much for doing it. And guys, I want to open up for little questions as well. Neil is going to join back, I think, if the link works. And Roland, where can people, if they want to find out more about the program, right? I paid the $55 and I upgraded to $2,000 because it just made sense to. I almost felt like it was almost too cheap to upgrade to the $2,000. So thank you for that.

You know what? It is now $3,000 and $7,000. So you've done well.

Thank you for that. Yeah, guys, I mean, the 8 things Roland shared afterwards, you actually have like 216, right?

Yes, sir.

Yeah, it's just amazing. I think it's— how do people find it?

It's at ethicallyprofit.com. That's where all the info is. And I do a 5-day challenge on it. And then, but the full program is at ethicallyprofit.com. And yeah, thank you for asking for that.

Got it. And the challenge is just $55 still, right?

It is, yes.

Guys, $55. Come on. Just, you know, if you're interested in this stuff, you got it. I mean, it's amazing value. But guys, in terms of questions real quick, we'll have maybe— we'll give it a couple minutes. I know we're running a little over. Neil's going to come back in. Andy Mackinson, former War Room member, had a question around debt servicing. He said he didn't see it there earlier. Do you have any comments on that?

What was the question?

The question is, what about debt servicing? So, are you— do any debt servicing, any of that stuff?

Yeah. Well, so, I'm not exactly sure what the question is, but like, if there's debt that you have on the company, then the company is paying for that debt from the profits that it already has. So, you structure the deal so that the company is able to pay for whatever debt you're putting on the deal.

Got it. He was referring to, sorry, I missed this part. The tier 3 chart that you put up earlier.

The tier 3 chart? I'm sorry.

I guess you just have to email Roland after.

Yeah, dude. I'm happy to talk with you about it. I just don't understand exactly what you're asking.

Cool. Neal, you have any thoughts? Any questions?

What's the most creative deal that you've done?

Man, there are just so many. The 216 different things have come about by just sitting down and thinking about all those. Like, my favorite deals are the one that I just— the last one I just showed you. I like deals like that. So, you know, when I can buy it and then fund it, not have to come out of pocket, plus I can put $300,000, $400,000 in my pocket, just— that's a good day. I mean, it just feels good. It's really fun to do those, you know. Those are my favorites.

By the way, that's— I think it's important. I don't get an affiliate commission or anything. It's important to be able to go through a program like Roland's You understand all 216 and able— then you're able to kind of combine and figure out how you want to creatively do these deals. That's basically it, right, Roland?

It is. And that's why I call it the deal stack, because to me it's like you've got all of these Lego, these 216 Legos, and you can build them and mix them and match them any way you want to get the seller what they want. Because this isn't about buying businesses for no money. You can't buy, that I'm aware of, a really good profitable business for no money. And, um, and it's not even buying for no money down because a lot of these deals have money that comes down. It depends on what the seller needs. And you get to do these once-in-a-lifetime deals that I say— I joke and say they come along 3 or 4 times a year now, right? Now it seems like they're coming along 6 times a year. But you can do these deals when you can get the seller what they want. And when you have all of these Lego blocks to stack in whatever way you need, knowing the goal of what the seller wants, you can get there and still be zero out of pocket, which is kind of fun. So I like the I like it because it's a puzzle and a challenge and there's a payday at the end.

Right. And Roland, 2 more questions. I know you probably have to go soon too. So questions from chat right here. Ricardo's asking, have you ever done deals in Europe and what were the challenges if so?

Yes, we have. It's the same everywhere. So this stuff, and that's a really good question because it's important to know you can do this anywhere. So we've bought companies in Asia, in South America, in Africa, in Europe. The software company I mentioned was in Pakistan, so that gave us a new It was a Danish citizen that was living in the UK that owned a Hong Kong company that was based in— it was formed in Hong Kong, but the assets were in Pakistan. And so that was a very, very international roundabout deal, but it's the same stuff, right? All of the same principles apply. The only thing that was new to us there was we had to— I didn't realize That you had to do this until we took it to the attorney and they said, yeah, because it's in Pakistan, we have to do a terrorist blacklist check to be sure that you're not wiring money to a terrorist organization. So, okay, well, that's, that's interesting. But yeah, man, it's, it's, it's the same everywhere. The biggest challenge you would have is, you know, is remote, as long as you're comfortable managing remotely. But that's not really that hard now. We almost everybody's done that with the COVID thing. And then currency changes. Those are the only 2 things that— and, you know, maybe some cultural stuff too. If there's some culture that is different in a place that you're acquiring that you're not familiar with, that makes sense for you to be culturally sensitive and, you know, do a little bit of research and find out what is expected. Like in the Philippines, you might be surprised to find there it's a 13-month payroll instead of a 12-month payroll. So, you know, that if you don't— if you're like, well, I'm not going to pay that, that's not going to go over too well. So. Those are things to think about.

Got it. 2 final questions. You got time for 2 more?

Yeah, whatever you like, man. I'm here for you guys.

Cool.

Appreciate that. So Evan asks, what's your favorite industry to invest in if you even have one?

Yeah, I like service businesses. I like software as a service in particular because it is just, the valuations are crazy on the exit. They're doing multiples of revenue. So if I can buy a SaaS business, on a low multiple of profit and then flip it out at a multiple of revenue, I'm pretty happy about that. Cool.

Final question comes from Mike. Biggest lessons from deals that did not go well? Potholes, key due diligence items you always look for, etc.?

Yeah. I think, so, I have a whole due diligence checklist, but that's really, the big thing is, don't pay too much for it and that you make your money when you do the deal, when you buy. You don't make your money as much when you sell. And so don't overvalue the business and give away your profit that you're going to make because of the thing that you, you know, you can do with it. That's your profit. What I see, you know, people that go into deals and that I've learned over the years is that, you know, you get excited and it's like this one little deal and, you know, maybe you don't have a lot of deal flow, so you're like, oh, pretty little deal, I'm going to take care of you and we're going to make this happen. And so then you bend over backwards to make it happen when you shouldn't. And then you also give them credit because they're saying, yeah, but look, in the future you can do this to it and this to it and this to it, and it's going to be worth twice as much. So give me that now. It's like, no, that's my money. I'm not giving you that now. That's my money. I'm going to give you what the business is worth today based on what you've already done. If you want more for it, then you go do that, right? But that's, that's why I'm buying the business. So don't ever fall in love and get into the heat of the deal like an auction, you know, where you keep raising the paddle and you end up paying 6 times as much for something. as you thought you were going to pay because it's just, you know, you're in the, in the thing. That can happen with a deal too. So I think that's the single biggest thing is, is really know what you're willing to pay. And I will also tell you that I would say probably 2/3 of the best deals that I've done were deals that did not work out. In the first round, so I walked away, and then six months, a year, two years later, the deal came back after all the things that they thought they were going to do and all the buyers that were allegedly going to pay them so much cash for it and all this other stuff. Because you hear all these stories from sellers when they you know first talk to you. None of that happened, and then they come back and they're like, you know, well, you know, I didn't work out like I thought, and then you buy it for what you wanted to buy it. So it's— and the deal always gets better for you as a seller when you walk away and they come back. As a buyer, I mean, excuse me, yeah, as a buyer, as a buyer, it's always better for you as a buyer when you walk away and the deal comes back. As a seller, it's almost always worse.

That's awesome. Roland, before we let you go, Neil, do you have anything else to add?

I'm good.

Cool.

Well, Roland, what's the best way for people to find you online? We'll also drop it in the— we'll also email everyone your link Yeah, sure.

I've got a podcast called Business Lunch where I talk about this kind of stuff all the time, and then I've got a site, rolandfrasier.com. Also, I'm at /rolandfrasier on all of the usual suspects for social.

All right, Roland, thanks so much for doing this.

Thank you for having me. Thanks, guys.

All right, take care.

Bye.

All right, everyone, so that is it. Hope you enjoyed this preview of the Growth Accelerator. You can go to marketingschool.io/live, that's L-I-V-E, to learn more about it. We hope to see you apply, and if it looks like it's a good fit, we will actually reach out to you, have a chat about it, and again, we hope to see you inside. So that is it for today, and we'll see you tomorrow.