Buying a Business: The Easiest Way to Find Businesses You Want to Acquire

How much more successful would you be if you had lunch with insanely successful entrepreneurs who shared their biggest secrets on how they think and achieve success? Well, now you can here successful entrepreneurs reveal their step by step strategies and other fascinating stories. So grab your seat at the table because this is Business lunch with Roland Frazier and Ryan Deiss.

Hey everybody, Roland Frazier here and I want to share with you a little bit of information. I get asked a whole lot, hey, hey, I'm interested in buying a company or I'm trying to get a hold of somebody that is involved in a company and I have no idea how to get a hold of the owner. So I'm going to give you 10 different ways that you can go about connecting with the owners of a company. Find out who the owner. So the easiest one, of course is if you have a company already identified, then just look up the phone number and call them and say to the person who answers the phone, hey, who are the owners of the company or who is the owner? Can I speak to her or him? That's the easiest way to me. No research really in depth required. There are a whole bunch of other ways that you can do it as well though. So one of the easiest would be, and this would be number two would be to go to sec states.com that's S E C S T A T E S.com secret. That's basically a collection for United States companies of all of the Secretaries of State for each of the 50 states in the United States. Now the Secretary of State is the government office in the United States where you file to form a corporation. So we have 50 of those because there's 50 states and each of them is listed on the secstates.com site. And you can go there and then click on the Secretary of State site, you put in the name of the company that you're trying to find out the information for and the way that you find out who the owners are, typically the owners aren't listed as the owners. But for most smaller companies, and actually even a lot of larger ones, the officers and directors, particularly the directors of the company are listed. And that's a required filing for I believe all 50 of the states here. And so even though the owner's not listed, the officers and directors are. And the officers and directors are very often the owners. So the way that corporations work is that you have people who are the, the owners are the stockholders and then the stockholders elect the directors. The directors of the company then elect the officers like the CEO president. That Kind of stuff. So most often the directors are also the owners. Most often the directors are the owners. So if you go to secstates.com for, let's say a company's located in California and you go to secstates.com and you click on the California Secretary of State, go into that site and. And then you search for that company and let's say it's XYZ Inc. Then you would search XYZ Inc. And then the list of companies would come up. You could click on the company and go in and see the officers and directors. They're required to file a statement of officers. And so every year that updates that. And so then the directors is where I would really look. And then the, the, the filing also includes the address. Now sometimes that address very often actually is. Is the home address. It's a different address than the location of the corporation. And so that's a really good way to get the actual home address of a director. If you need to get a phone number too, you can reverse. You can go to a service like infousa or Melissa Data or somebody like that, and you can do a reverse lookup or an append to get phone numbers, but you really don't generally have to. Sending a letter is super, super effective. Not many people send actual physical letters anymore. So sending one of those can have a really positive impact. And that's, to me, the one of the easiest ways to find in the United States. In the UK you've got Companies House. So you could go to Companies House. That would be number three, that you could go and look up the data for the UK companies there. And then there are similar in similar agencies in the provinces, in Canada and in Australia as well. So you're basically just going to wherever the company is formed and looking up the official government filings with respect to it, getting the director's names and then using that as a way to contact them. Because if they're not the owners, then they'll certainly know how they can reach out and contact the owners. So that's a couple of really good ways that you can do it. A couple of others would be zoominfo. Com. So zoominfo.com has a lot of information on companies all over the world. Really good resource there. Another would be just go to their website. If you go to their website, they typically have on the website information about the owners on the about us page. So I would look at a few places. When you go to the website, the about us page would be one. Another would be to look at the Contact Us page. Another would be to look at the team page and team will typically say our founder, owner, president, CEO. He or she will be all of those, you know, like all of those things very often. So, so those are good places on the site. Also, if you are having a really hard time, you can, you can go and do a whois lookup or a reverse who is lookup to see who's registered as the owner of the URL for the website of the company that you're looking for. That's a good way to reach people as well. Another one would be go down to the very, very bottom of the page, scroll all the way down on the homepage of the website and typically you'll see that there's a terms of service page and click on the Terms of Service and it'll very often list a person or or another company that's the owner of this site in that information and that can then be used to find the people. Very often the owner's email is in there. Also if there's a site administrator, that would be another the privacy terms and policies as well. Another good place to look. So lots and lots of good places there. If you're having a hard time, you can also go to a paid service like dnb, that's DNB and look up companies there. Hoovers is another source and Hoovers and DNB are together but they also have a little bit different database. You can Google the business license. So basically the city and state or the the state or province or country depending on where you are and license or business license and then the name of the company will frequently pull up a department that has business licenses where the company is required to file to do business. And if so then they'll typically have the names of the owners there because the owners are usually the that are doing these things. Sometimes it'll be an attorney or a registered agent or somebody like that. And if it is then that person will typically know how to get a hold of the owner. So even if you can't reach them directly, that's a good way too. If the person who answers the phone if you're calling to try to find out who owns a company and just asking there if they don't know, then ask for the president or the manager and then the manager can pin very often get you connected. I think those are the, the best ways Occupancy permits would be another. You can Google occupancy permit for the name of the company and the city, state, territory, province, et cetera. Those are all different ways that you can reach out. And the goal here is that we're trying to figure out if we've identified a company that we want to get in touch with. And that's either something that we're doing so that we can try to cut a deal for some sort of consulting for equity, or maybe it's because we're trying to acquire the company or acquire an interest in it, or even if it's just to do a, like a strategic alliance or joint venture or something like that. You've got to get to the decision maker. And so one of the ways that we get to the decision maker is find out who the owners of the company are so that we can then reach out to them. And the other thing that's cool too is that when there is more than one owner, if you run into a brick wall with the first one, don't be afraid to try the other. Because different owners have different personalities. You may resonate with one, you may clash with another. The one might have a bad day. The day you talk to them, you don't want to bug them again, you have another person you can reach out to. So that's how we go about reaching out to the owners a few ways, 10 of them there that I think will help you if you try that. If you're ever trying to get a deal done, make sure that you're dealing with a person can make a decision. It's one of the first things my uncle taught me when I was young and he was teaching me. He was the first guy that taught me about negotiation and how to haggle. And he said, you always have to talk to a decision maker. Always ask for a manager when you're at a store. Always talk to the owner when you're trying to do a deal. I hope that helps.

You've been listening to Business Lunch with Roland Fraser. If you're enjoying the show, let us know by subscribing and leaving a review. And for more information, go to businesslunchpodcast.com thank you for listening.

Foreign.

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