The Growth Booth

A GIANT Passive Income Shortcut REVEALED! | The Growth Booth #103

Aidan Booth Season 1 Episode 103

Did you know there is a shortcut to having a profitable online business?

Welcome to the 103rd episode of The Growth Booth Podcast, a show focused on supporting budding entrepreneurs and established business owners alike, towards achieving lifestyle freedom through building successful online businesses.

In this episode, Aidan is joined by Sophie Howard to talk about buying existing businesses to fast-track your online business profits and growing your investment portfolio. Tune in as we talk about the types of businesses you can buy, the risks to consider, and how you can further grow existing income rates of potential businesses.

Whether you're looking for step-by-step strategies to start building an online business, simple game plans to grow your business, or proven lifestyle freedom frameworks, you’re in the right place.

Stay tuned and be sure to join the thousands of listeners already in growth mode!


Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

02:28 A Passive Income Stream Online

07:45 Scales of Businesses

12:50 Why Would Someone Sell A Profitable Business?

14:30 Episode Sponsor

15:00 Risks To Consider

20:57 Types of Businesses to Buy

26:24 Process of Buying

32:29 Sophie's Book "Freedom Navigator"

36:33 Outro


Links and Resources Mentioned:


About Our Host:

Aidan Booth is passionate about lifestyle freedom and has focused on building online businesses to achieve this since 2005. From affiliate marketing to eCommerce, small business marketing to SAAS (software as a service), online education to speaking at seminars, the journey has been a rollercoaster ride with plenty of thrills along the way. Aidan is proud to have helped thousands of entrepreneurs earn their first dollar online, and coached many people to build million-dollar businesses. Aidan and his business partner (Steven Clayton) are the #1 ranked vendors on Clickbank.com, and sell their products in over 100 countries globally, as well as in 20,000+ stores across the USA, to generate 8-figures annually.

Away from the online world, Aidan is a proud Dad of two young kids, an avid investor, a swimming enthusiast, and a nomadic traveler.

 

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Aidan 

Welcome to episode number 103 of The Growth Booth. Great to have you with us here today. I'm going to be talking about something which is fascinating to me, something that I've done a lot of in different ways, but definitely not as prolific as our special guest who we've got here today, who is none other than the one and only Sophie Howard.

 

Sophie, thank you so much for taking some time out of your day there.

 

Sophie Howard 

Thanks, Aidan. Thank you so much for having me on your podcast.

 

Aidan 

I've met Sophie in person multiple times. Sophie lives in New Zealand these days, and whenever I'm back in New Zealand, we always catch up and do lunch. We've done get togethers over like a full weekend and stuff where we've just been brainstorming all kinds of ideas for business, for investment. I think the topic that we've got here today combined all of those and finds this unique sort of intersection between having a business, having a passive income stream, being able to take a few shortcuts to actually get you there. Sophie combined a lot of her knowledge which has been built around building online businesses for herself helping thousands of students, having a passion about financial freedom, lifestyle freedom into everything that she's been doing with enormous effectivity, I could say so. And so we're talking about something today which is potentially a path to shortcutting having a passive income online. Maybe you could dive in and give people the 10,000 foot view point, and then we could get into the weeds a little bit.

 

Sophie Howard 

Thanks for the intro. So the idea is that rather than building a business from scratch, which I've done, and I've loved and had good results with, but a lot of hard work, a lot of trial and error, a lot of uncertainty, and even in the very best scenario, quite a long lag from day one to that thing running profitably and easily. One whole new idea that you might not have thought of is to go out and buy an existing online business. It's kind of at this intersection of being an entrepreneur, seeing an opportunity, growing it, being creative, running an online, very smart, profitable business, and also being an investor, so using your resources to earn an income stream.

 

The beautiful thing with this model, which I just love now I've started doing it, is that you do one transaction, and somebody else's income stream flows into your bank account. They've done all that hard work, the failed Facebook ad campaigns, the supplier that let them down, replaced, all the things that they've had to work through have been worked through. And so if you buy something two or three years old, it's ranked on Google, it's got the reviews, it's got the email database. You couldn't even recreate those email databases for the cost of buying the businesses sometimes. I just love buying something proven and already successful, and then still have some creative ideas about potential upside and savings you could make, make it more efficient, or add some products or play around with it to make it even better. It's such a fast track to owning a profitable online business.

 

Aidan 

The thing I love about this is the parallel that it has with a lot of the offline investing that I do. For example, I've bought a lot of property. I bought a farm in the past 12 months as well. And the farm is a good example, actually, because the farm has or had an existing tenant in place, someone who was paying thousands and thousands of dollars lease every single month. So I sort of swooped in, I bought the farm for enormous amount of money compared to playing an online business. But I had this built-in passive income stream from day one and the same.

 

Another example would be buying a property, an apartment that's already got a tenant renting it. The difference, though, is that instead of getting a 5% return on investment, I don't know, what can you get, must be like 50% return on investment like in one year. If a business costs you $50,000, you don't know how much can you make back. You'd probably make half of it back or more.

 

Sophie Howard 

Kind of standard formula. If you went to a broker and got them to list it on a marketplace, they would generally price it on the market at 3X the net annual profit. Sometimes the software ones get valued differently. I tend not to buy software businesses because they're a bit complicated. I want really simple, really straightforward business models, but generally the asking price is around 3X net profit. But then on top of that, you add in your nifty negotiations and very motivated sellers at the moment. There's a lot of people really needing some cash out of whatever they're doing or burned out or you know, whatever. Lots of personal reasons people want to sell in a pretty flexible price or to terms. They might finance it for you, which is very nice.

 

The other thing is, that's the asking price at its current performance. So if you back yourself to grow it or put a bit more effort in than an exhausted founder might be at that stage, or you think, "Oh, look, they've never put the prices up," or they could so add a $97 course onto the back of that, or they're on this rubbish ads platform, they should upgrade to a higher payout commission, or they've only got Amazon affiliate links, and there's a higher commission to be earned, working direct with other brands. So if you can spot some easy wins, some kind of low hanging fruit, that payback period might not be three years, it might be one. This is not the last business I bought, I did pay full price for that, because it was so good. I didn't want to miss it. But the one before that, the asking price was $110k and they got it for $55k and makes thousands of dollars every single month. Cash flows beautifully. It's actually a book subscription business, especially the only physical products business. It runs like clockwork, there's hundreds of subscribers locked in, credit cards loaded, so I just took over the passwords, basically, and the relationship with the fulfillment service, and off we go.

 

Aidan 

So to put this in perspective, and really sort of compare buying an online business with buying an offline investment. So if you buy an offline investment, an apartment, let's say it costs $100,000, you get a 5% return on that, it's going to take 20 years to recover the money that you've put in. With an online business, you might be able to buy something for $10,000 or $100,000, whatever the price is, and potentially could get that back in one year. So you put your investment money in, potentially get it back in one year, maybe a little bit longer. Every deal is different. But these investments, just not even in the same league. I think that's what makes it so exciting.

 

What about in terms of like the scale here? I know you've bought businesses online that have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. What about someone who's got a smaller amount of money to invest? What's been your experience there?

 

 

Sophie Howard 

Yeah, there's definitely kind of, I see them. There's three tiers of people that are interested in doing this. There's the people I would call the side hustler crowd. You may be prepared to be a bit more hands-on with running the site yourself, which is fine. If you've got time. That's a very rewarding thing to do to be hands-on: tracking the SEO results and coming up with new keywords for new articles, you might outsource some of the writing. But really, if you're on a tight budget, you can still buy something small, that sort of got an income stream, it'll still be valued around that 3X multiple as a general guide. But the trap with the smaller businesses is that they don't pay enough out for you to cover the operating of them, so you then have to do the work yourself rather than pay an agency to write two blog articles a week or whatever, manage the affiliate relationships or something. So I tend to find the sweet spots in this middle zone, which I call the acquisition entrepreneurs. I don't need to spend my time worrying about Google updates so much, there's a team and writers who do keywords and track what Google's up to and even upload the articles for me because I'm in that next band up where the business generates $5k or $6k profits and then say, a couple of K goes into all the operations being done for me, it might come with a team, like an assistant gets transferred over with the business. And so cash flows faster. Cash flows on day one at the bigger bracket often more easily than the pay $5k but then you've always got to top it up $2K every month to keep the thing growing and running fuel hitting your future goals.

 

Then there's another band above me, which terrifies me, it's so not me. I'm happy to take out financing mortgages on physical property because the banks understand it and the rates are reasonable. There's a very tricky world of finance for these online businesses, but the banks can't really secure their assets. The security is really challenging for a lender. And so the only finance part I have is, and this sort of caps me at the size of deals I get into, which is that the seller is happy to take the payment in installments. They basically do a seller finance package, which eases out the cash flow and lets me buy something bigger than I could afford with straight cash. But living in New Zealand, I can't access SBA loans. I certainly wouldn't want to mortgage my house against an online business. There's some high risk things and stable and then there's some lower risk ones like farms and family homes and investment property. So it's very like property investing. You've got the builders or the developers are like the side hustle people. They're really actively working, they've got to keep grinding to get an asset that's going to generate income in the future.

 

The mid band is kind of like being a residential or commercial property investor: you buy an existing building, you take over leases, you do a bit of maintenance. But basically, it's passive and you buy quality assets, and you choose which suburb and you choose if you'd rather buy a farm or an apartment. And then the next tier up, entire apartment buildings, city blocks, not my world. You need to really come out of a merger and acquisitions background or from Wall Street to be competent, able to do that well, because you've got the finance side and then there's a bit of the tech stuff to get your head around, which I keep very simple in my strategy. I just do very simple business models and very low headcount and very low overheads to keep things really as automated and passive as possible, because I'm more about lifestyle than buying and rolling up five companies and flipping them and dealing with private equity firms. So I keep mine really simple.

 

Aidan 

Going back to about 2006, we bought an online business. You can imagine what the websites look like back then. It was a website that was getting traffic, was making money through CPA affiliate marketing. I want to say we bought it for, I'm relying on my memory here, which is pretty tricky, but I want to say we bought it for about $46,000, and it went on to earn us hundreds of thousands of dollars like clockwork. At the time, that was very significant amount of money in the business and I think really sort of shortened our path to success online. So I see it as a massive shortcut for people who have got some funds available and want to just secure themselves with a passive income stream. Obviously, you need to know how to do it the right way. 

 

I'm going to share a story in a moment about how I've sold over 1000 websites, I've actually sold over 1000 websites. But first of all, before I tell that story, why would someone want to sell? In your opinion, in your experience, why would someone want to sell a website if it's making the money? What have you seen?

 

Sophie Howard 

Well, it's a good question. I sometimes think about this when I'm buying. I really try and get inside the vendors mind because it helps with negotiations, because you can sort of get them to think ahead about collecting that check and selling the business to you at a great price. But also, is their other intentions honorable? Is there something going on that they're trying to flick off? As part of my due diligence, I'm checking for any red flags and alarm bells about what's maybe not so great. Are they trying to get rid of something that's not quality? But again, I sat on the other side of the fence, I even sold businesses I built and sold a seven-figure Amazon business that's still running really well today. I built and sold a tea subscription business that did a million dollars on amazon last year, and the people who bought it got a great deal. It was what they were looking for a fast track to an online income stream without having to do all the education and upskilling, trial and error choosing products like to grow it. So they were looking to buy.

 

I actually had a big mortgage, had two children, and I had this very profitable Amazon brand. I asked a broker, "What do you think this will be worth?" I'd been trading for 15 months and he said, "Oh, I think I get a million dollars for that view," us sitting in New Zealand with a mortgage in a day job and running a business on the side and a baby and a toddler. So I said, "That sounds marvelous. I'll take it." By the next day, cash buyer. And so I walked into a plane coming home from a conference, the payment cleared, and I just cleared my mortgage in one transfer off my phone. Yeah, $700k or something was gone.

 

Aidan 

Those kind of cash injections can be life changing. I think that you never really know why someone is selling, but people have got all kinds of things going on in their lives. Sometimes their priorities change. If something looks really attractive, and it's not always the case that that's too good to be true. Sometimes it's just a case of that person wants to make a change or they need to do something different. Maybe they built the website, business, whatever it might be with the intention of selling it all along. We've sold ecommerce stores, we've sold a store that was selling pitching machines for over into the six figures. The websites that I sold, I sold over 1000 of them though, were niche websites, and the Halloween and Christmas niche where, probably going back 12, 13 years, they were exact match domain names. It was the likes of spidermancostume.com and they did really well. They threw off a large amount of passive income for me. They had great rankings in Google and everything, but I wanted to sell them because I was changing the direction of my business, so it was a strategic decision for me.

 

What are some of the risks that you think you could come up against? Because I know that when we've purchased businesses in the past, we always try to make a story in our mind that makes sense around all of the data and the information that's coming in until we'll say, "Okay, well, they said it's making $10,000 a month. How much traffic is it getting? What are they selling? Does this all kind of make sense?" But how do you sort of assess risks? And what might some of the risks be when you're buying a business?

 

 

 

 

Sophie Howard 

Very important part of this strategy, hugely important, and you'd never buy a building for a lot of money without getting a builder's report. There's an amount of tech stuff to be scanned and fully understood. I actually don't do that myself because while I've been in online business for 10 years or so, there's some tricky traffic things people can do. I want somebody who really knows that stuff to have a really good look at it, check that domains, not being redirected somewhere or not owned by the person selling it, sort of establishing that the assets for sale are actually owned by the seller, that the traffic's real. I really want all my portfolio of companies to be very similar to own and operate. So if something's not on WordPress, that really messes up what my team knows about. I keep WordPress, and then, with Google Analytics, there's not much once you've seen inside Google Analytics that you can sort of see firsthand for yourself, that history of the traffic, and they might make up some story about why the traffic dropped. But that's for you to then make a judgement on was there really a Google update at that time. But most importantly, is the quality of the writing on that blog site good. If so, take the long view. If it's clearly just been caught up by Google update, of course, you don't want it. So you're assessing quality of the assets, you're verifying that the income is real, things like a video screen share rather than a screenshot that could be doctored.

 

There's plenty of tricks for bad actors, but the good thing is that the platforms that sell these sites, there's a handful that are really good. So Flippa, Empire Flippers, Quiet Light, FE International, there's a whole bunch of them for that sort of tend to specialize in different sizes or business models. They've got a reputation to protect, protect, so although they're working for the vendor, they do a really thorough validation job. When I've been selling my online businesses, that's been very, very diligent on that on the broker side before even the buyers have had a look at it to check out that the Amazon account is real and the numbers are real and all the expenses, all the proof of income, all the agreements with suppliers or staff, they see everything before it goes live.

 

That doesn't happen, obviously, as much for the smaller deals, I almost feel like the bigger the deals, the easier and the more certain things are. Obviously, it's a scary amount of money to part with. But there's a profile with people who've been selling lots of sites if people are building to sell, and every few months pop out a $50k site to sell on Flippa. That sellers' reputation is strapped with feedback and the Flippa team really want to make sure this is a good experience that there's no scammers. The odd ones slips through on all of the sites occasionally, but that's why we do due diligence. So I go through that due diligence process very carefully, and I get some professional help every time. When I'm helping students do this, we do a thing called a deal review one on one where I go through, "Oh, if I was looking at the steel, here's what I like, this is a great opportunity. This is a really cool asset, it'd be really hard to copy, you could never build an email like this now," or "This is so underpriced, I could totally double my income stream in a week by changing the ad platform or adding a VIP version or something," but then I pay someone who really understands techie traffic things, "Can you check all the domain stuff and check all the traffic?" and then we'll do kind of the proof of earnings and things. So it's a bit of a team effort of data driven and tech, and then some judgment and more of an art and a science for a lot of it.

 

When I do those feedback sessions for students, we always learn something and I try, and most of the time the students are happy to share that whole deal review with the group. And so everybody sees all the pros or the cons: what looked a bit off, what did we ask more questions about that just was too good to be true or looked a bit weird or was just interesting, how can they get Pinterest working so well. You learn so much. It's a really privileged view inside someone's successful business, whether you buy it or not.

 

 

 

 

Aidan 

Yeah, I guess you always want to make sure that when you're buying a business, you are not going to all of a sudden lose that magical ingredient that's been making it tick. Sounds like you've got good due diligence processes in place for that.

 

What about the types of businesses that you buy? We've hinted towards a few here, but is there a certain type of business that you're particularly attracted to?

 

Sophie Howard 

Yes, well, there's businesses I like to build and sell, and then there's businesses I like to buy. They mostly overlap, but I tend not to buy software businesses, because I think they're really fun to grow and exit, especially the way that they get valued by the market and investors. I've not actually bought a software business yet, but I am growing one with the plan of selling that one. The ones I like to buy tend to be very simple and high quality. A really good blog site on a niche, so the last one I bought is called course reviewers.com. And it reviews online courses, and was pretty expensive. It was in the US$300k, which is a lot of New Zealand dollars in cash upfront, but it's such a nice business it reviews masterclass and Udemy courses and earns commission on that traffic. The traffic is rock steady through every Google update. The article quality is really, really high. With the number two or one affiliate for most of those platforms. It was just an absolute setup, all I did was take it over, and actually I know, review a bunch of courses, do a little video, we added YouTube, we've added some email list building things.

 

Aidan 

That's one that would definitely be able to add a lot of value to so I guess when you saw it, I mean, it was a model affiliate marketing, reviewing courses that you already knew inside and out. So I guess when you see one like that, and you think, "Wow, I could actually add something to this," or for example, let's say you're passionate about fishing, and you see a fishing blog come along, you might think, "I've been fishing for the last 20 years, I know a thing or two about fishing. I could add my own spice to this this website and probably take it to another level or something." So I guess that's one thing that you could look out for but what else do you sort of look? Is there a certain genre or style of business that you want other than that it's just really simple and quality?

 

Sophie Howard 

I love a newsletter business, they're pretty much the lowest tech, easiest to access your customers, high trust really hard to replicate from scratch with a quality brand built. I really, really like the newsletter business model. They're a bit of a bubble at the moment that everyone else has realized how good they are, too, sadly. I had them all to myself for a while. I bought quite a few of those which had been really good. Basically, WordPress content sites were the two kind of sources of income or affiliate relationships or advertising. So that course reviews, one didn't have any advertising on it, despite lots of traffic coming through. We put a little bit on not huge blocks all the way through just you know, one banner on the side, but it all adds up.

 

The things that I keep away from the where there's really big sort of staff or big overheads attached, I want to keep it really lean, I don't want to have a big team, I don't want to build an empire. I want10 businesses that produce $10k a month each rather than one enormous thing that's really complex, but simple and repetitive is good, the same team. I outsource the content writing, I use a really nice agency who I've found after a bit of trial and error. I have a really small team, basically two people here in New Zealand who are both mums, both part time. Between us we keep the show on the road and I keep looking for new and exciting deals. I find it really thrilling. I just love the research and the discussions and the daydreaming what you could do with it. It's really that intersect of investor and entrepreneur, like I'm looking for the return on investment and making a big decision to buy one, but then what can I do with it. So it's really fun, and you get to play with the fun bits really quickly. It's been great learning, you just see how other people have built things. It's so non intuitive how people have done something, but it's really clever, and that's brilliant, you just jump in where they left off and then grow it.

 

Aidan 

I can see also a lot of parallels here towards investing offline where one of the objectives that some people have is to ultimately build out a diversified portfolio. In my case, I've got a lot of index funds, I've got properties in three different continents around the world and in different types of property. That's sort of by design and you can do a lot of the same thing with your online businesses, you can diversify and you can have a small stream coming in here and a small stream coming in there and a small stream coming in there and they all add up to be what is quite a large river, if you like, so I absolutely love that and it's definitely a big shortcut.

 

We spend so much time building businesses and teaching people how to build businesses that it's quite refreshing sometimes to sit back and think, "If I've got some money that I wanted to invest, I could bypass all of that, and just buy something and start reaping the rewards straightaway." So I love it.

 

Is there a specific process that you sort of work through when you are looking to buy one of these businesses?

 

Sophie Howard 

Yeah, well, my own criteria are pretty clear. I tweaked them a little bit, I used to look at the numbers more and care about how interested I was in the subject less. Now I'm pretty hot on actually enjoying the subject. And if it looks boring, even if the numbers are great, I wouldn't buy one now, but that's a bit of a luxury having done a few of the deals. So I basically go in with lots of filters, and lots of searches set up on all the big brokerages, so I get some just landing in my inbox every day, get pretty good deal flow to pick through, and some really good deals like it's totally a buyer's market at the moment.

 

I have opened my morning with cool businesses for sale, and then I do a quick curl on business models. I've got a few preferences. And those are sort of some for personal reasons, if I was really techie or hadn't loved reading Facebook ads all day, I'd pick some different ones. I basically have a few little copy and paste sort of blurbs, sort of introducing myself to the seller. I don't write it from scratch each time, but there's a bit of a formula to how you introduce yourself to sound like a serious cash buyer who's done it before, who's going to be good to deal with. Swift, easy, fast, they often want to move fast, no got funds available, really interested in at all, then we have a call. Never do too much by email, I want to sort of get face to face, see the body language, bond a bit, hear the real story, not just the true story, because they'll have a story about why they're selling but a few layers deeper than that, it often all comes out, "Oh, I've got a bank loan being called in." I want them to sort of show me what they've done and really understand the business so I know exactly how it works. I really want to understand it myself properly, really get it, and then if I like it, I'll make an offer. It's usually pretty cheeky, and pretty low. I explain, buying from New Zealand, the exchange rates are pretty tough for me to, you know, buy in US dollars, it's always in US dollars.

 

Aidan 

Sophie, I could tell, I'm buying from Argentina and we've got 130% inflation. This is a peso market and we don't know if we're going to have a reserve bank next year and all these other things. I liked your strategy. Anyway, sorry to interrupt, but I couldn't stop myself there.

 

Sophie Howard 

Yeah, yeah. So anyway, I try and sort of really bond, I think that communication with the vendors, the biggest lever of being able to be effective and getting good deals and at good prices. I really put effort into those calls and prep them, you know, don't turn up and go, "So tell me about your business." Come up with good questions. When I'm coaching people how to do this, give them a template and a bunch of questions to start with. And then if they're serious, and I'm serious, then I try and move it along pretty quickly. There's ways to protect the funds, like using escrow to bounce money around and keep passwords for things get held in escrow till funds released. But there's always a due diligence stage, which is bigger or smaller, depending on the deal. Sometimes very quick and simple. If it's a newsletter business, you need to see proof of funds, the email list, see the open rates from the inside of their CRM and things like that. It could be just I wire some money to escrow, I have a good check over of everything, and then a couple of days release it.

 

I always lock in. This is what I do to keep myself working hard on a new deal is I write a 100-day plan before the money clears. That is what I would like to do to the business to grow it to make the most of it, some things to tidy up, some ugly data designs or do some SOPs and trainings for the staff and get my VA to do that thing, not their person, might be relationships and meetings, you've got to, you know, get to know people for an intro. So I do a 100-day plan just for the discipline of making sure I'm buying a good business I can do something with and I've really thought it all through that I can do what needs to be done to it. I run that past the seller and say, "What would you do differently? Can you think of anything else I've missed? Or have you tried any of these?" and that just somehow it just keeps me really focused for the day that thing comes through. I have an action plan and we hit it really hard to make sure we capitalize on that excitement of the new deal and the motivation is really high. Get the systems embedded in, get it feeding into the weekly reports, all of that stuff, we just smash it really fast. And then sit back and watch. We don't want to break Google. If it's a blog site, I don't suddenly redesign the whole site and delete 50 articles and throw 100 new ones on, like just let it settle in for a few months. Just chip away doing what the founder was doing, but working on the new content, working on new designs, working on new affiliate links and things.

 

I just think you need a bit of discipline. If I could sort of turn up here and say anyone could do this, you don't need to be techy, and you don't need a big budget, you do need a bit of budget, and you do need to take an interest in your business. I think it's 100% passive. You can outsource the grunt work, I don't need to do the SEO research. I don't need to write the articles, but I need to think through where do I want to take the site in the future. If I've just spent half a million New Zealand dollars, and the previous owner was doing a blog posts a month, and was earning that much money from 30 posts on the site, I'm like, "Well, I'm going to do one a week, if not two a week, I'm going to add a YouTube video and do a little short video with each article, see how that goes. I'm going to start collecting emails." Really motivated to make the best of that asset and maximize its returns and stabilize it.

 

Aidan 

That's awesome. Now, I know you've got a freebie that our audience can get their hands on. We've got a special link that they can go through to get there, which is the growth group.com forward slash Sophie. We will make sure that that link is below wherever you are streaming this, and of course, it will be at thegrowthbooth.com. It'll be episode number 103, where you can find that in show notes and everything else.

 

Tell us a little bit give us the high-level overview of this freebie that folks can get their hands on.

 

Sophie Howard 

 

Sorts of into two parts. There's a book called Freedom Navigator, because although I can talk about these deals, people who like numbers would like to probably see actual case studies and what you paid how it worked, what the overheads were. I've done a deal breakdown of three recent deals that I've done in this book, and also outline my own acquisition criteria, what I look for a few horror stories along the way. I've never actually been ripped off, I've not had one that's been bad so far, wnd everything I've bought, just want it showed. It's a portfolio. So some are better, some are worse, but they've all been good decisions and I'm really happy with the criteria and the processes. So I talked through in this book, the criteria, I have deals I do, what I look for some real case studies. Then also post-deals, you've got the migration, but also step you through how you would go about building a team, ways to get these sites up and operated once you take them over, so there's a lot in that little book.

 

And then there's also a free webinar, so a class taking you through over the shoulder with screen sharing of actual deals, walking through how I interact with the sellers, all that kind of thing. Because if you can get vendor finance, that's a huge game changer for what you can afford to buy and how the cash flow works and how scary it is, and so you want to sort of take the risk out of it, maximize the upside, and I think it's really interesting strategy. I mean, it's not obvious people don't talk about it a huge amount. I don't come to it with a finance M&A background because I've seen the very fun side of selling a business and growing businesses. It's sort of the third piece of the puzzle, which is just buy one that's already really good. It would really suit people who've got a bit of confidence, you need to be a bit decisive to actually make the decision because every deal, it's like looking at a house, it might be the perfect house in the perfect suburb, but the guttering needs replacing or something. There's always a bit of negotiation, a bit of maintenance, maybe some upgrades, maybe you're going to have to pay a premium because everyone's going to want this and your negotiation strategy is different. So it's really fun, engaged business, it's proper business. It's not sort of passive. There are ways to passively invest in online businesses, but this would be a lot less workload than building from scratch, but a lot higher return in the short term when you pick the right deal. I think it's very liberating. I think you'd need more than one deal to sort of balance out the risk and get some efficiencies across the different sites you would buy. It's been really fun.

 

Aidan 

Yeah, I can tell. It's just such an interesting approach to massively shortening the path to having a passive income stream that you can just use to be the vehicle that allows you to live the lifestyle business that could allow you to do anything you want, really. I love this. I'll make sure that we get the link published again, which is thegrowthbooth.com/sophie, that's where you can go and get your hands on all of this. And also over at thegrowthbooth.com, navigate to episode number 103, go through the show notes, the transcription and all that good stuff and links to the different websites that Sophie mentioned and everything else. So lots of value there.

 

Sophie, thank you so much for taking some time out and just being so candid about what you're doing here. I absolutely love it. I'm going to definitely be knocking on your shoulder to give you tips. I want to get some of these deals going for myself. So thanks so much.

 

Sophie Howard 

Thank you, Aidan. Yeah, thank you so much. As you can tell, I really love talking about this and anybody who's interested in getting started, would love to help you too. There's so many more deals out there than I can possibly do, so very happy to chip in and help you find the right one for you. Thank you very much.

 

Aidan 

All right, guys. So this is episode number 103 of The Growth Booth. Up next, next week, we're going to be talking about my AI toolkit and 10 transformative AI tools that could change your life. Make sure you tune in next week for the next episode of The Growth Booth. Bye for now.

 

 

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