Five Places To Find Acquisition Opportunities That Will Grow Your Business, With Roland Frasier

Foreign. You're listening to Business Lunch with Roland Fraser. This is your seat at the table. Welcome to Business Lunch with Roland Fraser. This is Darren Clark, the producer. Today we've got a snack size episode with our host. Roland is going to lay out five starting points for finding smart acquisitions that will grow your primary business. As we've heard before from Roland, acquiring businesses is one of the fastest tracks to exponential and sustainable business growth. Before I hand you over, would you please take a moment to hit that subscribe button and go to businesslunchpodcast.com for show notes and more.

So the different places, the different types of acquisitions that it makes sense to consider are those that compete directly with your core business now. So people who are already selling the same kind of thing or a substitute or a replacement for the thing that you're selling now, that is the first place to look to acquire. The next would be media. Media is one of my favorite because it is able to feed to so many different businesses. So when you have multiple companies, if you acquire media, then that media and the media can be lots of different things. And I'll give you lots of examples here in a minute. But any media that you acquire is basically aggregated eyeballs that you can then send product offers to. For all of the other companies that you've got, teams and resources would be another primary reason to buy if you have something. We were interested in going into the software business, so we bought a company that already had a dev team because we didn't really know how to put one together. And if there's a team that you want, maybe it's a salesforce, maybe it's a sales rep network, maybe it's somebody that knows retail operations because you haven't done that. Just anybody who has skills or team members or groups of teams that you would like to have and then these are kind of related. But anyone who is selling services to your existing market, so your customers, whoever's selling services to them now, or products to your customers or to you, so they could be selling indirectly to you through selling a service that is purchased by people that you sell things to. So they're selling down here. Or it could be that they're selling services directly to you. Either one to me is a potential buy. And product vendors too, same idea there. And then supply and distribution. So consolidating your supply and distribution chain if you have any kind of manufacturing, and manufacturing in the digital world can mean the creation of content too. So there could be content creators, people that do that as well as Factories and more physical things. And anyone that's in the distribution chain, so anybody that you are selling to or anybody that is an affiliate for you, those would be distribution chain partners that you can acquire. And then that expands your margin because you basically are picking up all the margins between what they're making as they sell it to you and what they're making when they sell it to the end customer, if you're in the middle. And then last but not least, intellectual property. So we've purchased patents, trademarks, copyrights, lists. If you're doing rental list rentals right now, maybe you purchase the company that's got the list, or maybe you just buy the list directly. So there's all of those things that can be purchased. So for us, we have a company called DIY Projects. And so we bought a Facebook group. Facebook group is media. An Instagram account is media. YouTube channel is media. A Facebook page is media. Right. A blog is media. It doesn't have to be a business. It just has to be something, some splintered asset that has value that can increase the value of your company. So we bought a Facebook group for 1500 bucks. That doubled the number of people that we had in our Facebook group. I think it was about a quarter of a million people. And for team, as I mentioned, when we wanted to go into software, we were already, and this is a good place when people say, how can I find deals to do? Who's your vendor now? Who's selling to you now? Who are you giving money to on a regular basis? Who are all those people? Those are all potential acquisition candidates. And then on the other side, who are you sending business to? Who are you referring business to? Those are all potential candidates, and you already have a relationship with them. So very, very, very frequently the deals that we do are people that we've already got relationships with. We were looking for a Facebook group to buy. That's how we found those guys. These guys. Truconversion was an analytics and conversion optimization SaaS that we were subscribing to. And so we just approached them and said, what do you think? Right. Graphics Connection Group is a mailhouse. And a mailhouse is a place that when you're sending large volumes of mail that you go and they have all the printing machines to do it really, really fast and all the automation to stuff the envelopes and seal them and put the stamps on them and whatnot. And so in our real estate business, we were sending business to graphic connections. And because they were selling, they were not selling to us. They were selling to our customers. They seemed like a logical group to acquire. And we already had the relationship because we already knew them for the product side. One challenge, and I'll tell you two stories on this, but one challenge that you frequently have if you want to deal in major brands is that they will not sell to you unless you have a physical location. And so for Survival Life, there were several brands that we wanted to make available to our customers, but we couldn't be dealers because we didn't have a physical location. So we found a store in Austin near to all of our things that were operating that had been in business for a long time and already had those relationships. So they were already a dealer, so we didn't have to like. It would be harder if you bought a physical store and then went out and tried to get a bunch of dealerships and they didn't have any to start with. Or you just said, I'm going to rent a small space in this place, that'd be significantly harder. But if you go to a place that's been around for 20, 30 years that already has all of the dealerships that you want, then any new dealerships that you want are easy because they say, who are you already selling? Oh, we're selling this, this, this, this. They're like, oh, okay, cool, right? So that's a really good strategy if you're having any challenges with that. And for supply and distribution, we bought the company called Fesco that made water filters, because we were selling water filters to people in Survival Life because they thought the world was going to end and we wanted them to be able to purify water. And we bought that company and we rebranded Fesco to Rapid Filter. And then when Rapid Filter was purchased, when we exited, it was purchased by Coleman Filter company. So that was buying to get the supply chain margin to our other business. And then for ip, we had an idea for doing business opportunities of how to get into business for regular businesses, for brick and mortar, so how to open a hairdresser business, how to open a truck driving business, et cetera. So we looked at creating all the content that was going to have to be created. And it was a huge, huge undertaking. And the prices that we got were like pretty steep to be into it, to not know if it was going to work or not. So we went out and looked and found a company that had been around for a long time called Business Booksource that already had 128 different business plans already written, plus I think there were about 100 actual software programs that were customized for each of those industries. So we were able to acquire that and instantly have all that. And it was so much less than we had to pay for having that developed. So those are really good reasons to think about acquiring things.

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.

Ever wondered how some people build real wealth through acquisitions while others just sit on the sidelines? Well, I'm here to tell you it's not about luck. It's about having the right system, the right deals and the right guidance. And that's exactly what we give you in the EPIC Deal Fast Track. If you've been thinking about buying a business, but you keep getting stuck, whether it's finding the right deal, structuring the financing or or negotiating with sellers, you are not alone. Too many people waste months, even years just thinking about acquiring a business while the real opportunities pass them by. The Epic Deal Fast Track is not another course. It's actually an implementation program and it's designed to get you from the idea to the acquisition in just 16 weeks or less. We work with you one on one to help you find, fund and close your first or next deal. And once you do, we're gonna plug you into our elite EPIC board community so that you can keep scaling through acquisitions. We install three powerful systems in your business. The first is the Deal Flow Engine so you always have high quality off.

Market deals coming to you.

Number two, we give you our offer and funding system so that you can structure offers that get accepted and fund them creatively many times with no money out of your own pocket. And number three are closing and integration systems so that you don't just buy a business, you actually successfully run and scale it once you have acquired it. Plus you'll have direct one on one support from an EPIC Deal Advisor every step of the way. And that's people that have actually come up through the system and done these deals themselves. That's the only way to become an EPIC Deal Advisor. And if you're serious about acquiring a business this year, don't just sit on the sidelines. Just text I'm in to 334-589-9034 and we'll get you in. So text I'm in to 334-458-9034 we'll get you in. No fluff, no wasted time, just real deal making from people that are actually out there doing deals right now.

I'll see you there.