The State of Retail: Black Friday & Cyber Monday

Cocaine, heroin, drugs are effectively borrowing all of your tomorrow joy and compressing it into this moment and then that leads to depression and bad things down the road. It will be interesting to see if the logic of the more I spend, the more I save during this discount period damages sales going forward. If it's basically just borrowing from tomorrow and compressing, I don't know, based on everything that I've seen, that it was that people were waiting for Black Friday to unleash a torrent of buys.

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Hey everybody. Roland Frazier here with Business Lunch and Ryan Deiss. How are you doing today, Ryan?

I'm doing exceptionally well. How about you?

Excellent. Just coming off of the heels of Black Friday and looking at some stats which I'm going to do from memory. And then you can.

We can.

We can see how close I came. As I recall, online was up depending on who you checked, between 7 and a half and 9% year over year and in store up 2.5% year over year from last year. Is that close to correct.

Your memory, as always, is exceptional. Yeah. Which I was surprised by. I kind of thought it'd be down year over year.

I did too. And I said I haven't seen the stats yet. I think they said the average person was going to spend $567. That was. Or 576, something like that. That was. That was up from last year as well. And it turns out that they were right. Cyber Monday, they said was going to be. What did they say it was? There was another Stat I saw that was basically 60. It was 60. 60 versus like 51%. I don't remember if it was total sales, but it was, it was pretty close that that Cyber Monday was almost as big as, as the Black Friday. And so we're, as we speak, we're literally in Cyber Monday right now. And anything else in the market that you thought was interesting before we get into kind of some specifics of us.

I mean I just, I keep going back to the fact that I thought everything would be down year over year. Yeah. Now. Yeah, sorry, go ahead.

How did the companies, a couple of the companies in the portfolio that we've been tracking, how did they do, Were they up or down from last year? Did you tell? Up?

Yeah, up pretty much across the board, up year over year. Now a lot of that was execution we had. So 2 of our portfolio companies last year just laid a frickin egg, you know, on Black Friday one of them tried to do a bunch of new stuff even though it had always worked. So boy, let's innovate.

Well, the good news is it's not really a time that's important in terms of sales. So it's not like pro caution to the wind.

What's the worst that could happen? Yeah, no, so definitely up. But I think what it speaks to just kind of macro economically speaking. And what I'd forgotten is last year was when really we were starting to see inflation go up a lot. Gas prices were up, food costs. And I think everybody was a bit shell shocked and they were like, interesting. Whoa, what does this mean?

Y.

Which makes sense. And I guess at this point everybody's sort of gotten used to it a little bit and they're using this. What I'd read is people are using this as an opportunity to get deals and bargains. Yeah, but so they're seeing it like no, no, I'm doing this. I'm shopping on Black Friday because I'm frugal now. I don't know if that's the right thing, but what I did see is, and I think you had some stats on this as well, the buy now, pay later, all the after pay, all those things were way up year over year.

76% I think. So. Yeah, let's, let's. My wife, I think she heard it somewhere, so I'm not trying to attribute this to her, but, but for me it's attributed to her. She said that basically cocaine, heroin, drugs are effectively borrowing all of your tomorrow joy and compressing it into this moment and then that leads to depression and bad things down the road. It will be interesting to see if the logic of the more I spend, the more I save during this discount period damages sales going forward. If it's basically just borrowing from tomorrow and compressing, I don't know, based on everything that I've seen, that it was that people were waiting for Black Friday to unleash a torrent of buys. It seems more like this was an excuse to give yourself permission to say, well, if I don't, if I buy it now at 50% off, then I'm going to buy a new TV anyway eventually, and I need one, so why would I pay twice as much for it? I'm going to buy it right now and let's use buy now, pay later to do it, because my credit cards are already maxed out.

Right.

So it's. And if I pay the buy now, pay later over this many months, it's no interest and no cost, you know, so I'll figure out how to make that happen. That's tomorrow's problem. I think that might be what we saw.

What do you think it'll be interesting to see? I think you'll get a little bit of a canary in the coal mine come actual like holiday, Christmas buying season. Yeah, right. If that's down year over year, then what that suggests is, yeah, everybody did just pull forward. They just pulled forward their spending and, you know, so I think if that stays down, you're right. If that is up as well, then what this means is we need, we.

Need a new economic outlook.

When do we're going to need interest rates to come down quick, fast and in a hurry? Because debt is skyrocketing right now. Consumer debt is up, business debt is up, government debt is up. And so if these interest rates, I think, I think the government is going to have to lower interest rates just to keep everybody from completely going broke, themselves included.

Especially like the commercial, commercial real estate. There's so much of that coming due in 20, 24, 25, 26 that will not be able to be refinanced that you're going to see, you know, you're going to definitely see 2008 foreclosure rates, if not devastation, but all of that could really be avoided if they bring interest rates back down. But inflation's running, I think, at 3.5% right now, which is too high. I think it was 3.5, then 3.2 maybe last month, which is still more than 50% higher than the Fed wanting it at 2%, which I think is pretty crazy. By the way, let's just say what, what the heck's wrong with 3%? But, but really it will be interesting to see because the fate of so much is in the hands of the Fed with the interest rates and it's just all teetering and so many things happening. It's going to be interesting to see so.

Well, I was, I was initially encouraged when I, when I saw, because I expected it to be down, I was like, okay, this is good, you know, consumer, because the economy is a function of consumer confidence. If consumers are confident, then consumers spend and then the economy turns along because if consumers spend, then that means businesses can spend. And so wherever you are in the economy, whether you're B2B or B2C, your, your ability to grow is a function of consumer confidence.

Yeah.

And so when I saw that it was up, I was like, okay, well maybe consumers are, are confident, but if it turns out that all they did was pull forward, that's bad. If it turns out that the spend stays about the same but debt goes up, then yeah, all we're doing is pushing that further down the road. And so how many more quarters can we go without a significant reduction in interest rates to get things going again and to give people some relief from these debt payments they're going to have to make? It's going to be weird to see. I think we are, like you said, we are balancing right now on a razor's edge and it can go either way.

My barometer, my barometer is how much cash does Buffett hoard? And right now they're sitting on more cash than they've ever sat on their lives because they are absolutely opportunistic investors and their whole philosophy beyond buy and hold forever is buy when everybody else is selling. It's indicative of their thinking that everybody's going to be selling soon for them to hold that much cash. And that's true, I think around most of those investment funds that are value investee smart kind of people. So it'll be interesting. I believe that there's going to be a flood of amazing deals and across the board because of that. And then also because of. We talked about this earlier and then I want to get back to Black Friday, but we talked about this earlier, you and I, with all of the, all of the. Well, not all of, but a lot of the funding for startups has dried up and a lot of them are in 12 to 18 month Runway cycles that are about to mature and they're going to be going back to the well in 2024. And there's not a lot of money dry. But one thing that's really interesting I saw today is that Blackstone and a tremendous amount of capital is going into debt funds, including debt funds for credit for small business. So I think that the investment banking world is saying that credit has been. Has that the equity capital's dried up. Let's go into debt. And it'll be interesting to see how all that balances out, because they're also looking like, where do we put our money now? You know, and you're gonna have all these companies that are potentially going out of business cause they can't get their next round of funding. And then are they gonna get debt? Can they qualify for debt? If they do get debt, then will interest rates be so high that it's punishing and they can't afford it? And then they're gonna go out of business anyway, which would then bankrupt all of the lenders. You know, it's an interesting daisy chain of things that's going on. But let's go back to Black Friday.

Yeah, that is a fun. Because we could hang. Linger there a lot longer. Ultimately. One last thing that may be the thing that saves it is the fact that there is still just so much money sitting there and they just aren't allowed to just put it in Treasuries. They're going to have to deploy it. And so if they can't deploy it directly into securities because the stocks aren't moving and because they're afraid of business failure, they're going to have to deploy it into debt. That would suggest if they're deploying it into debt, that that's going to bring down the rates, which is going to bring it down to the banks, which.

Anyway, I think what might be interesting that could happen is that effectively nothing changes, except pretty much everything gets a giant devaluation that startups, companies funded companies, public companies, commercial real estate, all take a giant haircut and then it's just a reset.

Yep. That it's sort of like, you know, it's like what some international. You know what some countries have to do their currency every few years, like we're just going to lop off a zero. This is what it is now. Yeah. Sorry about that, everyone. Yeah. And arguably that's what should happen. And I'll tell you, if you are a, you know, if you have bootstrapped your business, this doesn't matter to you as much. You know, if you did, if you haven't gone and raised a bunch of money. Yeah. You Know it doesn't hit you as badly, but it may create some acquisition opportunities. But we're not talking about that right now. We'll do another episode on that. We're going to go back to Black Friday. So what did, what do we do that worked really well in Black Friday this year?

So for a couple of the companies that we've got, number one companies that had never run Black Friday sales before ran Black Friday. And we started planning for this a couple of months out instead of holy crap, it's Black Friday tomorrow. You know, let's spend our Thanksgiving creating an offer and get that page up and hope that something happens. So that was, that was one thing is I think that it was much more intentional. And a lot of the companies and our friends who had never done Black Friday before were like, okay, this is, this is something we should do. And they're all happy that they did it. So that's thing one, if you didn't do Black Friday this year, that's a big opportunity for you. And remember, it's, it's Black Friday Thanksgiving, Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday, all right there together over four or so days. And if you're not doing it, you're missing out on a giant opportunity that people want to buy. And the people who are in business, if you're business to business, because we have lots of business to business companies that run Black Friday specials, if you are in business selling to businesses, those people are susceptible to the urge to buy in their private lives bleeding over into their urge to buy in, in their business lives as well. So that's a good time. Like everybody's in the buying mood. You're kind of crazy to miss out on it. That's the second thing.

Can I tell you something I saw this year that I've seen it in past years, but this year particularly pissed me off. The anti Black Friday virtue signaling companies. Like the people that are like, we don't participate in this. So to this we just say happy Thanksgiving. And you know, we hope you're gonna. It's like, we're not going to do this. It's like, who do you like? Do you, do you honestly think, do you honestly think that the people on your list open that email and they're like, I mean, finally somebody didn't give me a deal. Like, who is that for? Like, all you're doing is because you either and some of these people. Cause I saw one from one person and it's like, I know for a fact you just forgot. You just forgot to plan. You Forgot to do it. And instead of coming up with something last minute, you decided a virtue signal. Okay? So if you did that this year, that's fine. We're not going to judge you. Don't do it next year, okay? Don't do it next year. And don't say, well, because we, you know, crapped on it this year. Nobody will remember. Just like they didn't care when you told them you weren't doing it this year. They're not going to care when you do it next year. And nobody's going to say, but last year you said there we didn't care this year. They're not going to care next year. Please help a God. Just do a Black Friday deal. Your people want it.

I like the anti Black Friday deal that Cards Against Humanity did for several years. They. They filled a hole. One year they just filled the hole. That was great.

Well, there was funny though.

What? They didn't they sell poop one year too. They sold. They lived. They actually sold poop one year.

One year they doubled their price.

Huh?

One year they doubled their price.

Yeah, it's awesome.

Black Friday at least if you're gonna.

Do that, be fun, right?

Yeah, but that's on brand, right? And look, Cards Against Humanity. Doubling their price for Black Friday is not virtue signaling. Right? It's them doing what they do, which is entertaining their list. And there were plenty of people who bought that offer at twice the price because they didn't just get a fun, fun card game, they also got a story they could tell their friends about how, holy crap, this company did it. And I thought it was so funny. So I went ahead and paid double for it. And now they got their own way to sort of signal that they're funny and important and rich, I guess. So don't look at Cards Against Humanity as the reason, like not participating because they absolutely did. And they made so much freaking money when they the year they doubled their price as a joke.

And loyalty. Think of the brand loyalty that you get from that. It's like, we love those guys, right? The other thing that we did was we did not offer discounts. We offered extra stuff, but we didn't offer discounts. I'm not a fan of discounting. I feel like you train your list to wait and not buy from you when you do that. So I think that it's nice that throughout the year you have promotions that offer bonuses and things like that. As a matter of fact, we pretty much always have bonuses. They just change. And so we will create a bundle or or a bonus or offer some combination of things we haven't offered before or introduce a new product but not offer discounts. And so that's something to think about when you're doing this, that you don't have to, to take half off of what you sell. And I've seen more of a trend of that out there also with a lot of companies where you look, and my son and I were talking about it is like, you know, gosh, there aren't as many great sales as there used to be. You know, those, those crazy discounted things that they did before, those aren't out there as much. And I think that might be some of it. Especially since costs are increasing in the companies that you're running on the portfolio side. How did that play out?

So Digital marketer absolutely did still run a discount, because what we found is that it just works. You always do.

Yeah.

And it's. Exactly. And it's this time every year, you know, do a discount. And it does really, really well. Last year, one of the things that they sought to innovate was to not do as many discounts and it didn't work as well. And I, I saw some other people, the owner of Goggin Biani, I believe he was one of the founders of Udemy, who now runs a course company called Maven. And he was talking about how, you know, he was very against it, but Udemy would go and run a bunch of discounts. And, you know, and he said, I would argue that we got way too discount heavy. And I didn't like that we were doing that, you know, too many discounts. I still think it was too much. But at the end of the day, you know, Udemy is larger than Coursera and its other largest competitor. So maybe there's something to, you know, to that. So I do think it's brand specific. I think it's market specific. Digital Marketer functions way more like a B2C company. And it, and it is just, that's been the history and the pattern, you know, of that business because it was frankly one of the first course companies to ever do a significant Black Friday participation.

And if you're, if you're ever thinking that you want to change a discount culture by, by not doing that, I will say, look at the JC Penneys when the folks that did the Apple stores came in and they said, you know, no, we're not going to be discounting. We're going to be everyday low prices. And they stopped all of the sales. And the culture of the Pennies customer was we like those sales they like we're coupon clippers, we're looking for that. That's the game we want to play. And they were like no, now you don't have to, it's just cheap. And they were like we hate you. And so that I think that person lasted a very, very short time and almost bankrupted the company. So you know, a cultural change is something to think of. But maybe instead of getting in a race to zero with your discounts like ever having to do greater and greater ones, think about maybe adding some bonuses and bundles and things like that that can increase perceived value or launch a new product that you get the choice of how you're going to price. Right.

That would be and I will say a digital marketer. They. There were no discounts on the higher ticket premium products and programs so maintained, you know, at that I think at the pre. If you're at the premium and definitely if you're at the luxury level, you don't discount. Yeah, right. If you're kind of in the mid range and if you're the low price leader discount, I think you've got to know which one of these kind of quartiles you're sitting in. Digital marketers sits at the mid to low range of what it's looking to do. It is a, it's a larger aggregate type play. It's not trying to be the premium provider of digital marketing training and education. It's trying to be for the masses. Yep, that, that is, that is where it sits. Now it does have premium offerings and so those were not discounted. But I can tell you a lot of sales of the premium offerings happened because they were offered as an upsell to the discounted front end offer.

Absolutely. Yeah. So if you're using the discounting for effectively lead magnets, it's fantastic.

Yep.

So. So the other things that worked were we, we had good sales out of the. And this is for I'd say a mid tier product, 5,000, 10,000. We had good sales on the first day that we launched our Black Friday campaign. Then they fell off a cliff and we had nothing the entire second day. And looking at what could we do to make it better. One thing was that we didn't have a guarantee and so we added a guarantee and I did what I'll call the In N Out guarantee because In n out has, has triples and doubles and double double burgers. And so I was like, well what if we, what if we give a guarantee that's not A refund guarantee, but a guarantee that is, allows them to double the amount of time that they get with our coaches. Double the. The end result. And if they can't double that, then they get the. They get the double time of the coaches and we'll even give them a credit that's double the investment that they come in. And so we called it the triple double. And that. That really got some traction at the same time and we got feedback that that made a difference to people, even just the curiosity of it. We also.

What was the triple double guarantee?

As I recall, it was double the.

The.

It was double the. Well, actually, I'm going to read it because I'll get it wrong if I don't and I think I can find it relatively quickly.

Yeah, I feel like. So was this your brainchild or did you.

It was.

Were you inspired? Okay. You were inspired by basically cheeseburgers?

I was inspired by, holy crap, we're not selling anything.

That scares me. That is. And it's always disturbing when it starts off pretty good and then it just falls off a cliff. You're like, well, obviously something's broken. And you go and you dig into your technology and your shopping cart and you're like, no, it's fine. Just. I guess only three people wanted it.

I was like, so our, our triple double guarantee, you can't lose. Our program is so simple to follow and implement that we guarantee by the end of the program you will double your current monetization or have three new entry points, products, AI driven assets or strategies to grow your business. Or we'll double your access time to our expert support and coaching and double the value of your investment by giving you a full credit for membership into our $10,000 business buying accelerator. That's how confident that we are. So that was. That was the. The three doublings that you got. So. And that's. It was really funny because I was doing the double and then when I wrote two of them, I was like, oh, it's kind of like double double. Ooh, double double. That's because, you know. And then I was like, what if it could be triple double? So that was where that came from. That had a big impact. And then the other thing was we put on the page a widget that is. We tried to sign up for Service Bell, which is a company that puts video on. On page video where you can get onto a zoom call with somebody directly from your webpage. We couldn't get that done in time because we had to. I think it was because we had to do one of the stupid demos that they always make you do. It's like we just want to buy.

It, but desperately want to give you money.

But we had. But go high level, which is One of the CRMs that we use, had a widget like that. We put it on the web page and then we sent out personalized text. That was. The other thing is changing the texts that the text that started. I'll try to do this in. So the first thing we did was we added the guarantee. The guarantee bumped sales. Then we wanted to have more conversations with people because we know if we have conversations with people, they sell better than trying to sell a five or $10,000 thing on a webpage. So we put the widget on that increased the number of conversations because now people that were live on the webpage actually considering buying the thing could get their questions answered by a human. Could get reassured that this is a good thing to do. And that made a difference. And then the next thing was redoing the texts because we were doing a lot of texting in addition to emails. So I would recommend highly that you do that as well. And what.

Just so we're clear, texting out to people who are existing customers already on the list who had given permission, not just texting total strangers at random. Don't do that for a variety of reasons.

Oh, really? Why not? Yeah, exactly. So. So here's. Here's the. Like the first texts that were going out was Black Friday deadline. The name of the product expires at midnight. Offer details here. I was like, that's terrible. I saw. I don't even know who it's from because it comes from a number that's not in my phone.

Right.

So the next one, when I rewrote the text was Deanna here. Just spoke with Roland. You have a credit that's about. That's expiring tonight. Let's talk. Call me.

Right.

That shockingly, got a significantly higher response rate. So those conversations from the texts, we also had the link to the webpage that then took them back to a call through the widget. Plus, the guarantee was great. We did. I want to say that we ended up doing about three times this year what we did during this same offer last year. From that. In that. In that one business, I'm definitely rolling that guarantee into all our offer pages now. That will go evergreen. We're definitely going to suffer through the demo of service bell and add that to our page and we're definitely going to continue to do personalized texts. As a matter of fact, we're implementing a number so that everybody that has a conversation with our sales team will be getting it from a number that's in their phone so that it will not come from a number they don't know. And it will also be way more personalized than not mentioning any names or who we are. Just our Black Friday offer is expiring. Really? Seriously? That's terrible. How many texts and emails are going out with that same boring language that you become blind to? So those were things that I think made a big difference this year.

There was one other thing that we did that I was smart. Not my idea, but they ran in the days leading up to Black Friday, because really, if you think about it, like, Black Friday kind of lasts a week now.

Yep.

You know, and I mean, it gets started on the front end. So the Monday before Black Friday. So the Monday before. Before Thanksgiving holiday here in the States, they started sending out emails about a contest. Like, when some. It was like an iPad. It was like kind of the ultimate.

You guys did a MacBook Air.

I saw that. Yeah, that was.

Right.

Yeah. So it was. It was win this and. And. And you get the opportunity to win it when you enter the Black Friday sale. So it was kind of incentivizing people signing up for the sale, and in doing that, that's when they needed to.

Yeah, they're.

So we're getting a couple things. We're getting them to raise their hand. We're getting to find out, like, who's active, who's engaged. So you get some initial engagement. There's some commitment and consistency to that. You're also getting them to just verify their contact information again, you know, including mobile. So if you're saying, like, oh, that sounds good, I'd love to text people, but I don't have their contact information. Run a contest of some sort leading up to the sale next year where you get the engagement and you get the additional data that you need. And those were the people that we were really, you know, connecting to, you know, two, sometimes three times a day on Black Friday. And I know there are lots of folks out there. You're like, oh, my God, my inbox was filled. I hated everybody who was emailing me, you know, two and three times a day. Yeah. But if it was only the engaged people, like, that's. That's what we were doing. And, you know, one of might be related to this person won this contest because it wasn't just the one. Every day there was another way to win. It was like, you know, a new contest.

So I'm so happy you mentioned that because we, we borrowed that from you guys doing that last year and that was, that was very helpful. We did run the contest also, and we gave away, I think, AirPods and iPhone 15s and that was, that was good at getting people to register. So then we were able to, you know, to remind them multiple times that this was going on. And I think that that's a really good strategy to add to.

Yeah. Cool. So.

And how did they go? You were happy, right? Things of sales were up, you were very pleased.

Yeah, I think we, we hit the. We hit the better goal and have a shot at the best goal. Anytime we set goals, it's always kind of good. Better, best, good being like, what do we feel confident we can achieve based on what we know today? Better is always. We got 80% baked in, but it's going to take a little bit, a little bit more. And then best is like, if all the stars align, what do we believe is the outer edge of reasonable?

And you're still going. So both you and I, for those companies won't know until a couple days from now, but we're about 80% of best right now and I feel like we got a good shot at it.

Yeah, Yeah. I don't know, it depends on the brand. I don't think it's quite 80% at best, but like a digital marketer, most of the sales come in the last day. Yeah. So, you know, that's just, that's just how these things go. So if it's, if it's a strong close, then I feel really good about it. But if it stopped today, across the board, it'd be better than it was last year. So we'll deal with it.

So a couple of tools and tips and strategies for you guys for next year. A breakdown of things that worked for us this year. Was there anything that didn't work this.

Year for you that you tried?

No.

I mean, because all that, by and large, what we did was do what had always worked and add in, like, add in optimizers like that. That's the difference. Like with two of the brands, last year it was, let's try completely different things. And if you have something that works, remember it, document it, create the playbooks and then the tips that we're giving you, bolt those on. Don't use it to fundamentally change your strategy. Yeah. I mean, everything worked because it's what we've been doing for the past 13 years. What do you know?

And our I was just looking to see if I had any updates. But our new strategy that we tried is that we are, we did from the week before through Sunday, one offer that was the normal kind of offer that we do. Then today for Cyber Monday, we launched a different offer that's priced at a lower point so that we built up all of the wanting for the high priced offer. And then we have a different offer so we don't upset the people that bought the high, higher price thing, but a different offer that now provides an entry point for people that were priced out at the higher offer. So it's $1,000 offer as opposed to 5 and 10. And so it'll be interesting to see how that goes. And if the theory that now we've got a bunch of people that actually really wanted the other thing but just couldn't afford it and now we make it, make a version of it affordable, how does that work? So it'll be fun to see how that goes. No.

Can I give you maybe a point of optimization on that for next year? Something to test? And I would carry the sale like, so whatever the big promo is, I would carry that through Cyber Monday so that you get some, you know, and even if you're feeling froggy and want to extend an extra day because you're a really good person, you know, maybe do do that so that people come back and then fully close it out. And then when it's closed out now it's a, hey, you missed out. But here's this other thing because I think you can have both. I think you can have the big offer, especially since it was like crank. And that was the thing I was going to tell you. I'd forgotten that you were doing that. And when you're like, oh, yeah, we, you know, moved to a thousand dollars, like, oh, but the other one was cranking. Maybe, maybe save the thousand dollar one until after.

I really feel like we got, I mean, yeah, we should test it.

I feel like we got.

We hit it very, very, very hard.

I don't know how much juice was left in that squeeze. Yeah, fair enough. There is a certain point I'm all for being aggressive, especially during Black Friday. Again, I don't, you know, you heard me rant earlier about, you know, value signaling, virtue signaling, how you're not gonna do it, but there is a line and when you start to look at your own emails in your own inbox and you're like, all right, I'm kind of being an asshole.

Should I unsubscribe? Oh, wait, a minute. No, I can't.

Yeah, that's me. Yeah. Yeah, that, that, that's probably a good signal that maybe, maybe you went just, just a hair far.

I love it, but great idea and we will definitely try a version of that next year. Guys, thank you for tuning in today. Hopefully this was helpful for you. It's really fun when we get to share this and catch up because we hadn't had a chance to do it yet on the Black Friday stuff. So hopefully that was helpful. If you liked it, please share it and we'll see you next time on another episode of Business Lunch. Hey, Roland Frazier here. If you're looking for a way to grow your business exponentially to get more customers and ultimately increase your wealth, there's no faster way to do it than to acquire other businesses that already have the customers, products, services, teams and media that you want. If you want to double your sales, just acquire a company that has the same sales as yours. It sounds simple, but far too many people end up starting new businesses that fail and forget that they could skip all the hard stuff and just acquire one that already exists. There's a reason why private equity firms, family offices, big companies like Apple, Google, and some of the smartest entrepreneurs on the planet do not start new businesses from scratch. They acquire already successful businesses, and when they do it, they instantly increase their sales, their profits. If they want market share, they increase that, they can get new products and services to offer, all instantly. Hey, look, 90% of new businesses fail. 90%. Why not acquire an already successful business and increase your chances of success by 900%? What most people don't realize is you can acquire highly profitable businesses with no money out of your own pocket in pretty much any country in the world, regardless of your credit and without having to go find a bunch of investors or needing any experience. Look, I've been acquiring businesses for over 30 years now, and I cover the whole process in my EPIC Investing strategy training, and I want to give it to you 100% free. Just visit businesslunchpodcast.com epic to get your free access to my EPIC investing training right now, while it's available.

Ever wonder how some people build real wealth through acquisitions, while others just simply 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 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 going to 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, our closing and integration system 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 this 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 334-458-9034 and we'll get you in. So text I'm in to 334458. 9034 will 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.