Mark Evans argues data is the real asset in small business acquisitions. He bought a gun retailer with thousands of customers in an unleveraged CRM, hired an assistant at $5/hour to digitize the records, and increased revenue roughly 5 times by activating that customer dataset.
About 5× (five times).
About $5 per hour.
Speaker says 'thousands of clients.'
Bolt on is great. If you already have that business and you could buy one, you don't even really care about the owner name. You just care about that. I don't even care if they have systems because I'm just plugging in. I've done that, actually. Sometimes it's easier. They don't have systems, then you don't have to like deprogram it, decode it, put them in. I invested in a gun business. I forget. I mean, thousands of clients he got. I did. Show me your CRM. What's the CRM? Don't you message him when you're going to an event because he has millions of dollars of guns on this wall. He was like, I don't know what you're talking about, dude. People come in, okay, have an assistant hire someone for like five bucks an hour to put these all in. Name, email, phone. He has address, everything he data. I was like, we know what kind of guns they like. They're married with kids. I bought myself guns, my wife guns, my kids guns through this guy. So he has full data on me and has never messaged us. So when we did that, like, he literally left his business 5x just from data.
