The truth about buying business gurus

So this video is going to be a bit of a rant. It's Friday, why the hell not? But basically, I want to talk about the arena of business buying, and specifically like buying a business in order to become an entrepreneur. You know, if you look at where we've come to today, there has become a massive industry around people who are selling info products, services, all that kind of stuff designed to help people like you and me who want to be entrepreneurs. They basically go out and find a business to buy. And a lot of what you hear from these folks peddling these types of courses and info products and groups and all that kind of stuff is the following kind of big-scale numbers, which is 10,000 baby boomers are retiring every day, 8 to 10% of them own businesses, therefore like there's nobody to buy these businesses. So that's where folks like you and me can step up, buy those businesses on the cheap, and walk our way into wealth. I heard this story and I saw people selling this stuff and it And this kind of bothered me because like it didn't match my understanding and basically what I was seeing on the ground in the world. When I first started going out to try to buy businesses back in 2017, I went in with my eyes wide open. I knew finding a deal and a business that I wanted to own and a business that I wanted to buy and that I could afford and that a seller was ready to sell and all those things and I could get the deal across the finish line, like I realized it was gonna be pretty fricking hard. And business buying has always been that way. But something has changed in the past 6, 7 years. It's time for that to change back. It's time for people to get their mind right about what business buying is really like. My name is Michael. I am a business nerd. Other people like to do real hobbies like model airplanes or race cars or go on hikes. Me, I like to talk about business. I like to think about business. I like nerd out about business. I find it super fun. I don't know why. It's just me and I love it. So if you like that kind of stuff, stick around. That's what this channel is all about. Nerding out about business topics for entrepreneurs and that sort of thing. So stay tuned. Stay tuned. My journey with trying to buy a business, the first time I did it was in 2017. Basically, like by the numbers, I knew I wanted to buy a small software business. And by the numbers, like I knew I was gonna go have to kiss dozens, if not hundreds of frogs in order to find a prince, to use kind of the old metaphor around cursing frogs to find a prince. Like I knew that was just the way it worked. I was gonna have to go talk to hundreds of sellers. I was gonna have to go send emails, letters, network to tons of brokers just to hopefully find a deal that was going to be priced right. It was going to be a good fit for me, and it was going to be a seller who was going to be reasonable. And I spent literally 6 months talking to sellers, learning how the deals were put together, people out there selling software business were thinking, what was important to them, how to put it all together. I would go through weeks where I was talking to dozens of different sellers just to try to find a decent deal. I didn't go into the situation thinking that it was going to be easy to find a business. There was this huge silver tsunami of companies just ready to throw themselves at me for dirt cheap. In fact, when I talked to a lot of these sellers, they were being approached by so many potential buyers that they were just like high in the sky about what they thought they could get for their business. And they were just holding out for their number. They just wanted a huge price. And for me, as somebody like who actually wants to make money when I buy a business, like I wasn't going to pay up pie-in-the-sky, 20 times earnings type multiple. There's just no way I'm going to try to spend 20 years running a business, try to get my money back. No, thank you. Look, you could say that maybe I was just too picky when I was out looking for a business. And look, the reality is when I did that first deal, like I wanted to make sure that deal went right. So that was important and I was pretty picky. But the reality is my experience going out and acquiring my first business in a space is consistent with what other people see when they go out to do it as well. If you go look at your typical search fund, right, the search fund that's going out out and has raised some money to go try to find a business to buy and operate. And it's a lot of times these are MBAs and stuff like that. It's a pretty common model. Like, the typical one spends 18 months trying to find a business to buy and operate. Like, it doesn't just happen overnight. And similarly, like, you look at the numbers of these businesses that are so suddenly, like, supposedly, like, falling and available with baby boomers who can't sell them to anybody. Um, like, like, okay, well, you see the number, there's supposed to be hundreds of thousands of these. Like, but when you go actually look at what's transacting and what's selling, the number of businesses that are selling per year is actually really small compared to, well, what you're hearing with some of these, you know, the propaganda around business buying. As an example, my buddy Heather Anderson, who's co-host of my podcast, we do a podcast on business buying, like went and they did the actual numbers of what one of the business buying lending programs, SBA 7, is doing in terms of the number of deals per year. Only about 5,000 businesses are transacting using that program per year. In other words, it's like an order of magnitude lower than this like 300,000 businesses per year transacting kind of number that we all keep getting promised when we hear, well, the business buying propaganda. And so if the reality of what's happening with business buying is radically different than kind of the dream that's being promised, like why is this dream being promised by folks who are in the Guidance and InfoProductBusiness and all that kind of stuff? Like why are they like making it sound like there's this giant wave of businesses transacting, when in reality, like, what we're seeing in the— on the ground and in the numbers, like, it's not happening. Here comes to what is rule number one of being a guru, whether you're Tony Robbins or anybody like that. What you do when you're selling those kind of things to folks is you sell them on a dream. You don't sell them on a product. You don't sell them on a book. You don't sell them on information, on data, or any of that kind of stuff. You sell your customer on the person they're going to become after they partner with you and become part of your tribe. So if you sign up for Tony Robbins stuff and look, a lot of people like Tony Robbins stuff, I got no problem with it whatsoever. You're gonna live a better, happier, more fulfilled life at the end. That's the dream like that you're being sold there. And the same thing happens with folks that are helping you as a guru. They're the gurus trying to sell you services and products and they're selling you a dream. Like the dream is you're gonna become a business owner by partnering with them, buying their stuff, learning their types of things. And I know there's people that hate on course sellers. There's people that hate on the folks that are selling these types of masterminds and groups and all that kind of stuff. And look, I'm not going to come on this video and be like, hey, that's horrible, like writing off the whole category, because the reality is like there is utility there. I've done some of that guru type stuff myself. Like I put out some courses and have been part of masterminds and all that kind of stuff. Like I see the utility in it. So the whole category isn't wrong, but there are people who are taking it way too far. I saw it on Instagram yesterday, and the ad on Instagram was basically a young guy coming on telling you and me how there's a huge future and you can become a millionaire by buying a business. And it's relatively easy. And this group would actually go so far as to put it all together for you. They'd find you the business, they would structure the deal for you, they'd help you get financing, and they would even go so far after you buy the business and maybe put your whole livelihood and your whole net worth on risk by borrowing money to do this and signing a personal guarantee, they would find somebody to come in and run it for you. So basically, like, taking the dream, like, just to an extreme, like an unrealistic dream. I understand why gurus like this go in and make unrealistic promises, cuz guess what? Unrealistic promises are even better dreams for people to achieve. And if you could sell somebody on that dream and sell them to a service there, like, that's going to convert better. The problem is, like, unrealistic dreams, they don't happen. They're not realistic. And that's where I have a problem with all this. The summary of this whole rant, which is like, it is okay to go buy a business. It is a good path for many people as a way to get into entrepreneurship. I know a lot of people who are really good as 1 to 10 entrepreneurs, like taking a business from 1 to 10, as opposed to being a 0 to 1 entrepreneur. Personally, I love 0 to 1, much more fun. But other people love 1 to 10. They are better at scaling a business than they are starting it. There is nothing wrong with that, and that is a perfectly good, healthy approach to life. But my warning to folks. And my concern is, beware the folks that are selling you a dream that's just impossible. And there are so many people out there that are promising you these big numbers. They are exaggerating because, man, they need to in order to break through the noise and try to sell people more info products and masterminds and all this kind of stuff. Just like anything else, buyer beware. And there's never such a thing as a free lunch. There's always a catch, and there's always a downside to stuff. And that's my rant about all of this. This industry's gotten pretty big in terms of trying to sell people on buying businesses. You don't want to be one of the people who ends up with broken dreams by choosing a a guru who's going to lead you the wrong way. What do you think? Let me know, tell me in the comments below. Bye!