The EASIEST Path to Building a Business

Most people are stuck in a system designed to work harder and not smarter. We're here to expose the strategies, the loopholes and the Life hacks for 1% use. This is universal basic knowledge. Everyone wants to start a business. But what if I told you that's the hardest path to actually building wealth? The 1% aren't starting from scratch. Well, some are, but that's definitely the hardest path. They're skipping straight to buying businesses. That's money that's already making money. And let me show you why. Starting a business means that you have to go from zero with no customers, no system, no proven model, no income, and you have no time to really think about these things and build. That's why most startups fail. But when you buy a small business, or any business for that matter, like an ATM route, a vending machine operation, or even a cash flowing Instagram account, you can skip the hardest part, the build. And so the tremendous amount of business failures that are out there from zero to one is enormous. And there are certain entrepreneurs that are very, very good from zero to one. But right now, we are facing one of the biggest wealth transfers in history. All across the last 40 years, baby boomers have been building some of the most amazing businesses, small businesses in America, car washes, laundromats, accounting firms, you know, you name it. And a lot of these baby boomers do not have people to take over their next businesses. And this is a massive, massive opportunity for this next generation. So millennials, Gen Z, Gen X, you can buy these businesses in many cases with no money down. And so this is a great opportunity and we're going to talk a lot more about it. So just to be clear, I've started a lot of businesses from scratch. A lot of people, a lot of amazing entrepreneurs have started from scratch. You have amazing stories like Facebook and so on and so forth. But it's really hard. And it's really, really hard. And what I found over the years is that if actually buying a business actually can be a much better path, if I were to do it again, I would probably go to that path, especially now. Which is why we felt that it was intelligent and interesting to make it for this audience to learn about what that may look like. It's things that even we're looking like in our business. Because if you look at larger companies, people that aren't having to start from scratch, the wealthy, many of them are buying businesses right now. They're buying assets to grow their company. Because sometimes it's easier to grow through acquisition than Actually building it yourself, right? And this is actually very famously has made the private equity model of buying up companies, rolling them up and creating much bigger amounts of wealth through that mechanism, so, so profitable over the last 10 to 20 years. So I wanted to be clear that starting a business is great, definitely do it if you really, really feel compelled to. But it's not the easiest way to get started. And, and this is why. So here's the truth. You can buy cash flow, and right now there are tons of small businesses, many of which are under $50,000 or even with no money down that you can buy. And people just want to exit, they're retiring, they're over it, they've hit a ceiling. There's tons of examples here. And the businesses can be very, very simple. They could be boring businesses like ATM routes, vending machines, content accounts, laundromats, car washes. There's just a ton of them out there. And there are a ton of websites for you to check out. And we're going to give you a ton of resources, books, et cetera, for you to do this and look into it. Most of these businesses are valued at two to three times profits, and sometimes you can get them for, even for less. That means that a $20,000 business earning $10,000 a year could pay for itself in 24 months or less. And you don't need a million bucks just to get started here. This could be something as small as a $10,000 a year operation or even larger. And there's a ton of different resources for you to see how you can create the right deal and the smart structure to get this started, whether it's a side income for now while you're at your current job or something that you want to take on full time. So we're not just talking theory here. In future videos, I plan to actually take you through a process of us buying a small business or a small asset. We are doing this here at Mode. We're buying a lot of apps, small ones, to kind of build into our ecosystem. So that'll be a bigger walkthrough how we think about due diligence, the deal structure, and I'll just give you the play by play on the terms exactly as it stood, and you can see for yourself. But in many cases, you may not be specialized on apps. That is something that I felt that we knew very, very well for our business. So we really understand that market. So one thing I really want to make sure that you understand is, is you should focus on something that either you're super passionate about is super, super profitable. And that makes a ton of sense for you. So we're gonna give you the process of how to look for these businesses, what content you should really focus in on, how you should dive in, because this is something that you don't wanna just jump into. I do believe it's much easier to buy these businesses and right now is an incredible opportunity, again because of this massive wealth transfer happening. But this is a serious thing. I mean, you are, in some cases, depending on how big this acquisition is, you are putting up your capital, you're putting up your credit across this, and there's money out there that the SBA wants to give entrepreneurs. Let's get started. But this is a big deal and so it's really important to do your research. We spent a lot of time, I spent a lot of time internally before I made a decision to go and acquire an asset and you should too. So we're going to start talking about what that process looks like and some of the websites that you could look like. We're going to have all of these also in the show, notes and examples for you to check out many of these resources. I personally also read and, and spend time on or they are on my read list or I recommend them for others based on information of what I found. So let's start from the top here. I have to delete all this. You want to start with first learning the basics of this. Right. So what I would recommend is the first book you should listen to is called Buy, then Build. Right. This is. I personally listen to this via audiobook. I would probably buy the audiobook and the physical copy because I believe there's some graphics and stuff around that. But I listened to it initially. It was super helpful. It's just to give you context, context of the why behind this, much more than what we're able to do here in this five to seven minute video. The second one that you should check out is HBR Guide to Buying a Business. So the concept of this. Buying a business, my amazing handwriting. So the guide, these two books are probably like what I call the holy grail of people that are looking to buy businesses. This is something that became very popular in MBA courses. So the concept of MBAs, they're coming out of consultancy, they're coming out of investment banking and many of them decided to go out and they're like, hey, I'm going to go buy a business. And you're going to see this in some of the podcasts that we're Going to give you, if you start listening to them, the people that are coming out of there, they typically learn about this concept of buying business in mba, right? And so the HBR is Harvard Business Review. It's a harvest business school concept. And so these two books will teach you a lot about buying businesses and learning about this space. And so I would start there first and foremost, right? Other books that I would recommend, a new one that came out especially with the small business is Main Street Millionaire. Very good book. Again, have no affiliation to Cody Sanchez, but do like her content and think it's very, very valuable for you to check out. But once you have that baseline, once you have that baseline of information, now what you're going to see is like, okay, there are tons of businesses out there and there's tons of things, tons of opportunities for you to find. There's typically two ways for you to find a business. One, you can go to websites that have businesses for sale, right? So one of the biggest ones is biz buy sell.com. this is one of the largest websites for small businesses in the world. You can put anything like, hey, I'm looking for businesses in Indiana. I'm looking for businesses in, in Canada. I mean, it's very, very flexible on what you want to do. And they have all different industries and niches what you'll find on this website. And in many cases, there are these things called brokers, business brokers. So business brokers are exactly what they sound like. Like you have a real estate agent, you have a real estate broker. These are people that they. All they do is sell businesses. They may basically have a deal repertoire. They take on a client and then essentially they're going to send you the deck of the business, what the financials look like and how it looks like. Now, some business, some businesses, they sell without brokers. Sometimes you can get great deals that way. So you just have to be flexible because it doesn't. And you don't want to rush into this. You want to kind of find the right opportunity for you. You want to study an industry that you like. You want to do something that is relevant to you and what you are good at or passionate about or your local area. Right. And so, you know, biz by sell is good for small, small businesses. If you're more in digital businesses, you want to be a content entrepreneur, you want to be a website entrepreneur, an app entrepreneur. What I would recommend to check out is flippa.com lot of digital businesses here. That's a very good platform. A lot of different stuff there, newsletters, etc. And then there are other platforms for like social media. Flippa has social media accounts that you can buy and then there's swap.com which is also a platform that, or Swap Co, I believe that allows you to buy social media accounts and in some cases you can actually monetize these social media accounts. Swapped is a very informal platform. It's not going to be as formalized in terms of being able to buy these accounts and understanding the business model behind them. And so I would still recommend you focus on these two if you are interested in those services. But I think that at the end of the day you're going to go to these websites, you're going to work with brokers, and I would just check out these sites right now. You can see these types of businesses are out in your area. In many cases people have an asking price, but just like anything, life is a negotiation. And in many cases you can go to these businesses because you know, especially this older generation, they don't have people that want to take over their businesses. Maybe they don't have heirs, maybe their, their kids are not interested in running that business and now they have no one. So the biggest issue that's happening right now is there's a tremendous amount of amazing businesses out there that are literally about to shut down for no reason. And they're profitable. Right? And so if you can take that business, amplify it, revitalize it, use technology to improve their processes, it could be very, very profitable. And some of the biggest industries in the world have been able to be super successful about this, of buying and growing these businesses. And that's where the entire private equity model has come out of. So would highly recommend you guys checking that out. And that just gives you a little bit of an intro into the concept of buying versus starting a business and why you should consider it. While most people are chasing the next big idea, the 1% are stacking businesses that they didn't have to build. That's a sure thing. This isn't about working harder, it's about skipping the hardest part entirely. If you want to go deeper, I've linked the links of books, podcasts and resources for you to check out. There's a ton of step by step guides in those and, and I would highly, highly recommend you start there. And those books in general are going to give you advantages of acquisitions over startups, how to get immediate cash flow, how to structure deals, how to basically get existing customer bases, and finding proven business models. This is going to lower your risk compared to starting a startup from square one. So some of these include buy and then build Buying a business that makes you rich, HBR Guide to buying a Business, Main Street Millionaire. And we're also going to include some podcasts like Acquiring Minds, Acquisitions, Anonymous, which is really interesting. They're actually taking live deals from some of the websites that we referenced today, and they say why they would or would not buy the business. So it gives you an idea and a breakdown of how other people are thinking about it. What are the red flags to watch out for, and how to learn? If this sounds interesting to you, join our free community. You don't need to be rich to live like the 1%. You just need to learn what they do. This is universal basic knowledge.