The best tools to buy and grow a business in 2023

Today in 10 minutes or less, you’ll learn:

✔️ A terrifying truth

✔️ Stuff your toolkit

✔️ Get past your blindsides

✔️ Buy a business

✔️ Build, operate, optimize

Cutting down a tree can take a lifetime with a nail file or a few moments with a chainsaw. Thankfully, you get to choose your tools.

I’ve built 9 companies, invested in 100+, bought and sold dozens of others, and had some luck hitting the 7-, 8- and even 9-figure club with our investments.

However, it’s taken me slowing down, writing more and creating nomenclature around our frameworks to realize that it doesn’t always have to be so hard.

Today, I’ll share with you the tools and tactics that I wish I had 15 years ago when I started.

A terrifying truth

If you’ve never gotten so lost in work you don’t want to be found, you won’t understand this.

It may surprise you, but I don’t feel bad for those who work long days and burn the night hours. I don’t feel bad for those who have never heard the words “work-life balance.”

I feel deep, crippling sorrow for those who never know what it is to love every moment of the work you choose to spend your life lost in. I feel a gripping terror at the idea that my whole life could have been spent “looking forward to the weekend.”

Someone asked me why I write. The truth is, I don’t write for you. I write for me. Some people get massages, others have affairs, I write.

I write because it takes the lunacy out of my head and traps it on paper. It wraps that constant voice in pen-drawn chains. I write because it’s a thing I cannot stop.

If you are a writer, you understand me, although maybe very few understand you. Your blood isn’t red, it’s black.

Coders you probably follow along, although your blood flows with 0s and 1s. Hardware engineers, you speak my language but in wires and currents. Painters, you hear me…on canvas. Builders, you hear me in dollars and cents and P&L’s lined up.

For the rest of you...

If you haven’t found the thing that you get so lost in that you pray to every God you’ll never be found, then keep searching.

I don’t know about religion. I don’t know about heaven or hell. But I know that bliss isn’t found in drugs or excess, in sex, in escaping…it’s found in creating.

Once you’ve tasted that drug, nothing else will satisfy you. You’ll be a hunter in search of your prey. Everything else is a shiny distraction.

Work-life balance? A funny joke among the children who don’t yet know what they’ll grow to be capable of one day. Or a tragic jest to those who let others build their lives.

I can’t promise you much, but I can promise you the point of life is not passive income to sip tequilas on the beach. It is to let out that thing inside of you and leave it stamped on the world.

If you don’t understand this now, one day you will. Or you’ll die uncompleted.

Stuff your toolkit

The world is noisy. The tools for financial freedom are aplenty. The tools for ownership, just as many.

If I could go back in time, the tools listed below are what I’d tell young me to use to start “my thing,” to buy my first business, to begin to leave my mark on the world.

Each grouping has the steps you should take to buy, build and then run your business.

Here’s the framework:

• Blindsides – what don’t you know but should ponder
• Buy – how to buy the dream you want
• Build – how to take the dream you now own and build your empire

Get past your blindsides

Step 1: What you're doing right now is probably wrong

If you’re reading this, there is one framework I want you to know above all others: the sunk cost fallacy. What is it and why?

Well, for starters, only 29% of Americans are happy with their work.

So the truth is you’re probably part of the 71% of humans in the unhappy category. It’s ok, your secret is safe with me.

But it’ll never be safe with you. There is no hiding from the mirror. So I want you to realize one thing. Just because you’ve spent time getting an overpriced MBA, a Ph.D., 10 years in sales, 30 years at a job…doesn’t mean you should keep going.

The sunk cost fallacy means humans continue on a path even though they know it’s wrong, because they have “sunk” a lot of time, effort or money into it.

Remember this line:

There is no past, only future. So if the future is not one you like, forget the past.

Step 2: Why > What

Why you are doing this is just as important as what you are doing or how you are going about it.

Are you trying to generate steady cash flow for a lifestyle change? Or to stop renting your time for causes you don’t believe in?

Maybe you want to pass along a cash-flowing asset to your family?

Here are the tools I use to get honest about my why:

• My daily journal: The Best Self Journal
• ​Man’s Search for Himself – Rollo May​
• If you don’t know what to buy or build
  • ​130 boring businesses I love
  • ​Trends where ideas come to roost
  • Explore your curiosity, and then choose something. It's ok if it's not where you end up, you just need to start. Then iterate.

Now, this is the part where you get to choose your own business buying adventure. Here are your two options:

1. You want to buy a business. Continue to the next section.
2. You want to build from the ground up or add to the business you just bought. Skip the next section and go straight to “Build, operate, optimize.”

Buy a business

So you want to buy a business? Alright, fam.

Step 3: The 10-step business buying journey

• The foundation: This is an opportunity. Holy sh*t, I should do this.
• Deal clarity: What is a good deal to me? What would make me happy?
• Origination: How do I find a deal?
• Selling you: How do I position myself as a serious buyer?
• Negotiation: How do I communicate with sellers to get info and then move to close?
• Due diligence and valuation: What is a business worth? How do I value it?
• Financing: I’m not a multimillionaire, how do I buy this thing?
• Structuring: Price and terms. Learn to speak the language of acquisition.
• Closing: Legal, accountants, paperwork, CYA…get the thing locked down.
• First 90 Days: Holy hell, I own a business…now what?

This is the buying a business journey we teach in our How to Buy a Small Business course. If you are serious about buying a business, I think you should take the course.

Why do you think KKR, Blackstone and Sun Capital don’t write books or sell courses? Because everyone wants to get rich quietly. Meh—that’s not fun to me.

I’m a journalist at heart. They should have never let me into the club.

Step 4: Find your business

If you’re looking for a physical brick-and-mortar business, take section 3 of the course (origination) seriously, or try these tools:

• ​Bizscout – My favorite tool to buy businesses. In fact, I liked it so much I bought the company. Using a few keywords, Bizscout will pull for you a customized list you can go call to your heart's desire.

• ​BizBuySell for buying brick and mortar.
• ​Loopnet for real-estate heavy businesses.
• We’ve got playbooks for other brick-and-mortars – like ice vending, car washes, RVs and RV parks and tiny homes – which you can get your hands on with a Contrarian Cashflow membership.

Maybe you want to start smaller with fractions of businesses rather than an entire biz:

• ​FundRise buy fractional real estate
• ​FranShares is a platform for purchasing fractionalized shares of franchises

Brick-and-mortar not your bag? Searching for online businesses or online cash-flowing ideas?

• ​Flippa to buy an online business outright. We partner with them constantly and I love their UI/UX and analysis.
• If you’re looking to sell digital products for cash flow, check out Appsumo or Gumroad. Thinkific is another great partner if you have online course offerings.

Step 5: Incorporate as an LLC or become a sole proprietor.

Build a digital home base for your new corporation.

​
​Step 6: Set up your finances

Now we’re getting closer to what most folks think of when they hear, “start a business.”

Choose your bank (different needs = different personal and business banks, in all likelihood) and put funds in there. If you need funding, look to compare loans with Fundera.

Step 7: Buy your business

You’re newly incorporated, with a business bank selected and funded, valuation and due diligence conducted. Now, make your offer and buy your business.

Congratulations, you’re an owner!

Don’t let it go to your head…this is where the real work begins.

Build, operate, optimize

Step 8: Operational efficiency

Increasing operational efficiency is all about tracking worker productivity, keeping maintenance and upkeep costs low, and otherwise managing your PP&E.

Whichever flavor of biz you bought (brick-and-mortar or digital), you’re going to need:

• CRM – Moral of the story is you need one. Odoo is a pretty solid choice, Jobber is another. Consider using out-of-the-box software to get started. Use these to communicate with your customers, invoice, follow-up and document.
• Pay your people – If your business is located in the US, use Gusto. If you have international contractors, we like deel.
• ​Notion – We use it for content management, but many of our SMBs use it for processes and systems.
• ​Slack – The best tool for managing communications overall.
• ​Stripe or another payment processing service – Don’t use cash, ever.
• ​Google Drive – The best, easiest and cheapest way to go paperless. Don’t keep anything in binders or on desks, just buy a scanner and printer and upload everything.
• Task management – Right now we use Notion for task management, but I actually prefer Trello, Monday.com or Asana.

Step 9: Hiring

If you’re running a business, you know the unique pain that is the hiring process these days. While we can’t take that pain away, we can help shorten its duration.

• ​Trainual – For training and onboarding new team members to your business.
• ​Upwork – We have multiple business leaders who spend 6-7 figures hiring here.

Step 10: Marketing

Now you need a website and a hosting service. Here’s our tech stack.

• If you can only do one form of marketing for your small business, make it reviews. We wrote an article on how one cleaning company used NiceJob with their CRM. Their customers got an automated text immediately after the job was finished, leading them to Facebook/Google to leave a review. If that went unanswered, the text was followed by two well-timed follow-up emails, each asking for a review. It led to 300+ reviews.
• ​WordPress is where our website is hosted.
• ​Memberpress allows us to take digital recurring subscriptions.
• ​99designs for our logos, branding and marketing materials.
• ​Fiverr graphic design and misc tasks.

Step 11: Media

If you used my business buying resources above, you found and bought or are building a ‘boring’ business.

Usually, that means your current business has little search engine optimization, web presence, social media marketing, and may still be using a fax machine to communicate with its customer base….you get the idea.

Now’s the time to change that business’s outdated, antiquated media presence into a kick-ass, 21st-century media star.

If you want to learn how to 10x your email list and cashflow, we built a course on that.

• Build your email list with ConvertKit.
• Expand your Twitter reach with Hypefury. There’s a whole #SMB twitter group.
• Create lead magnets that lead to emails with Beacon.

When I first started out, I took cash payments, wrote notes on pieces of paper, sent individual emails, had no CRM, paid people via PayPal.

What I mean to say is – I was a nightmare operationally. You, hopefully, are infinitely better than I am.

With these tools, I don’t think there is any way you won’t be.

​

We don’t have to… we get to.

- Codie

🍸 Ryan's investing again: "I know about as much about fintech as I did about gin"

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🦇 This lady lived for 500 days alone in a cave in Spain... on purpose

🤓 What's the Reverse Flynn Effect? (Aka, are we getting dumber???)

🚭 Juul to pay $465M (~1% of its valuation) for telling kids vaping is cool

🐿️ Bonus internet palette-cleanser: chipmunk tries almonds for the 1st time.

Ready to become part of the Contrarian Crew?

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✔️ Small Business Acquisitions Course: A step-by-step framework on how to build freedom and passive income through SMB acquisitions.

It's like a mini-MBA, but one you'll actually use (and at 1/100th of the cost!)

✔️ Work closely with us in the Unconventional Acquisitions Mastermind to buy your first, or next, business if you have a minimum of $50k to invest!

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