Ep 288: First-Time Acquisition Entrepreneur Lessons with Zach Smith

Should you buy a business or should you maybe not buy a business? Who is this really for? Hi, I'm Joe Krause. I'm the host of the Buying Online Businesses podcast and today I'm speaking with Zach Smith. He is an experienced entrepreneur with a background in finance, startups and technology. And he started a career as a public accountant and then later moved to Uber in 2013. And in 2020, he set out on his own.

Doing some consulting for various startups before discovering an even more entrepreneurial path in owning his own small business and acquiring one. In 2023, he purchased American Dental Care, a 35-year-old dental discount plan-based business in Houston, Texas. And beyond his professional life, Zach is an avid golfer and a proud father of two amazing kids.

Now, in this podcast episode, Zach and I talk about why he went from tech startups and consulting to acquiring a business. We'll talk about his acquisition strategy, how he formulated it, what it actually looked like and why. We also talk about lifestyle, which is pretty important.

We then move on to how long it took him to actually acquire this business, find it and acquire it. We'll talk about what he learned throughout his due diligence and some key points that he shares with you if you're looking at acquiring a business. And then we get pretty philosophical, as always, about who should buy a business and who shouldn't buy a business.

And we also talk about fulfillment in your job versus fulfillment in a business and where you can actually make a more direct impact that actually may give you far more fulfillment. And it's not just about buying a business to make more money or to improve your lifestyle. There are so many other little things involved as well. Now there's so much value in this pod.

Obviously, if you're looking at acquiring a business and you haven't gotten my due date on the framework, make sure you go to buyingonlinebusinesses.com for just free resources and get my framework. It helps people buy businesses; it takes the guesswork out of it; it's made people millions of dollars and saved people millions of dollars. So if you haven't got it yet, get it?

Let's dive into the pot. Do you have a website you might want to sell, either now or in the future? We have a hungry list of cashed-up and trained-up buyers that want to buy your content website.

If you have a site making over $300 per month and want to sell it, head to buyingonlinebusinesses .co .us to sell your business, or email us at info at buyingonlinebusinesses .com because we will likely have a buyer. Details are in the description.

Zach, welcome to the Buying Online Businesses podcast.

Thanks for having me. I am very happy to be here.

There's lots to chat about. Congratulations on your career and congratulations on your acquisition. How did you come across the ideology that you want to become an acquisition entrepreneur?

I've had a little bit of an entrepreneurial streak for probably my entire life, dating back to starting a sports blog covering my university and college. But the idea of buying an existing business was a new idea.

I had a friend of mine from my seven years at Uber who told me he'd been exploring buying a business and recommended I read this book called Buy Then Build, which anyone who spends a little time in this space is going to be familiar with by Walker Dybul.

I was like, That's interesting. And I bought it, but I didn't read it right away. I was busy doing some kind of consulting work at the time. And when I got around to reading it, kind of at the beginning of 2023, I pretty quickly realized that this could be a really interesting path and so I did. And so here I am, you know, a year and a half later, having bought a business and it's been a great experience.

What sort of skills do you use? So let's talk a little bit about your career.

So you studied and you started as an accountant, and then you moved into a few different companies. You know, what did you do straight out of college? And then, how did you progress up until leaving? And because of you, I want to talk about your consultancy as well, you know, sure.

So yeah, I started out of school, I went into public accounting, I was an auditor with Ernst & Young, and you know, a very, probably pretty common business career path to kind of go that big firm type of path. And there were things that I liked about it. But I also realized pretty quickly that you weren't actually operating a business; you weren't really in a business itself; you were just auditing businesses. And even in that role, I had like three layers of review above me for anything I did to make any difference at all. And I just kind of felt like I was a cog in a wheel.

I felt for lack of a better way to describe it, like I was a little too insubordinate to survive in that kind of role in that kind of place for too long. And so I was only there a couple of years before I left and joined Uber in 2013 when it was still a relatively nascent company and product.

And I feel like I grew up professionally at Uber alongside that. There were only a couple hundred employees when I started and I was there for seven years all the way up through an IPO. There were a lot of ups and downs—more ups than downs—but definitely some interesting downs in that journey. was a great experience. And, at the beginning of the pandemic, I actually got laid off from Uber.

Which kind of set me down a new path at the time with two young kids, a pandemic and everything else going on. Freelance consulting for other early-stage startups was kind of a really easy way for me to maintain the home-front flexibility that I needed and do interesting work, which I really enjoyed doing for several years.

But I was starting to get that itch to feel like I was building something that was mine and that could grow and thrive without every hour of work that goes into it needing to be my hour of work. And so that's kind of how I started pivoting in this direction. Yeah. And working with, you know, a large accounting firm and then, basically, a startup. and then also moving into consulting on startups.

Why not go the startup route instead of choir? I'm very curious. Yeah, it's super wise to just acquire it, right? It's probably a good thing that I went and did the consulting work because, you know, my introduction to the startup tech world was to go to Uber, which was a rocket ship. It was pretty, and it was pretty clear pretty quickly that that was going to be a successful business.

And what's successful of on the other side of that is tha went and tried to help other startups do that, as I realized that it's not always smooth sailing or a perfect growth trajectory. Investors want to throw money at you.

The Uber unicorn term gets thrown around in lots of weird ways, but Uber really was a unicorn in that regard. It just worked from the beginning. Correct. Yes, absolutely. Yeah. That time, that place. Yeah. As I was consulting for companies post-pandemic, the fundraising environment was a lot harder. and then, particularly as it got into kind of late 22, early 23, the early 2010s sort of smartphones really taking off and there being a lot of what investors might call dry powder to invest.

It felt like any startup with any reasonable idea could raise several million, if not hundreds of millions of dollars, pretty easily. And that was a different environment. What I saw as I was consulting for startups was that it's not always an easy path. There are a lot of failures. There's a lot of people who pour years of their lives and a lot of their time and money and other people's money into businesses that ultimately don't go anywhere.

And so the idea of buying a business that was already profitable and could be confidently making money kind of from day one, that risk profile for where I was in life at that time was a lot more attractive to me than trying to go raise however many million dollars from other people and take a, I don't know what the odds are, one in 50 or worse shot at, starting something in tech. And I loved my time in tech, but I'm not a coder. I'm not an engineer.

I would need a lot of help with those kinds of things. I've had ideas for businesses, but I'm not sure I've ever had an idea that I felt so strongly about that was my own. I'm like, This is a thing that's going to change the world. And it's going to reimagine and disrupt and all that. I loved having that experience at Uber, but that wasn't my idea. I was an execution guy. I was an operations guy. I was like, Let's figure out how to make this idea work as effectively as possible and run experiments and solve problems.

And I loved doing all those things and I loved doing it in that environment, but I don't think that's the only environment where you can do that. And I'm enjoying bringing that to a kind of smaller, online business world. So cool. yeah, congrats on your career as well. Like this, this is not something to just gloss over.

You've done some really, really cool things. And then yeah, and that was in the right place at the right time. Yeah. Yeah. There's definitely one of those things. You know, I've had that in my life too: being in the right place at the right time and acquiring the right investment at the right time.

Now, how did you come to the decision? All right, startups 150 with tech are pretty brutal. Also, the accountability to provide ROI for investors and having that hanging over your head is pretty full on, I guess, an emotional toll or any sort of toll, I guess. So you went the acquisition route Yeah, you went the acquisition route. Why an online business? And what was your strategy? I guess, like, how did you build out your acquisition strategy once you made this decision? Yeah, as I started looking at businesses to buy from, I really did.

People who listen to this may very well be familiar with the buy, then build book and sort of the playbook that gets laid out in there. I really did follow that pretty closely. So I was developing a target statement for what type of business I might want to buy and what kind of skills I would bring to the table for that business. And I was looking at businesses that met those targets. And I didn't want to move geographically.

I'm in Houston, Texas and I wanted to stay in this area. So there was a little bit of a geographic limit to my search. And so I kept a pretty open mind in terms of the type of business that I might acquire. But at the same time, when I think about my experiences and my skills, I've never worked in home services or commercial services-type trades. I've not run a restaurant.

There are a lot of brick-and-mortar or on-the-ground service-type businesses that, I think, probably all of the right pieces have come together. I would have been willing to go try and do those things, but they weren't quite as much in my wheelhouse. The business that I bought, which I guess we haven't talked about, is American Dental Care. It's a dental discount plan, which in the U .S. context, it's an alternative to a dental insurance product.

So people pay me a small monthly membership fee for access to discounted cash payment rates at businesses. And what I saw in this is that it's actually kind of a marketplace business like Uber is. I need a supply of dentists who will accept customers and members of my plan.

And I need demand from customers who want the plan and want to go see those dentists and I need to bring them together. And when I thought about it that way, I felt like I'd realized that it's not exactly the same kind of marketplace as putting drivers and riders together at Uber.

But there are a lot of similar concepts there and I've got experience doing that and it works in an online world. so yeah, as I got into the process of looking for a business, while I kept an open mind, I think the businesses that I thought that I was most serious about getting further down the road with tended to have a more online component and less of an in-person physical delivery type component. And I think that just kind of fits my experience pretty well.

Yeah, it definitely makes sense that it fits your experience. Was there any part of that decision in terms of lifestyle? do you sort of think about it? All right, if, like, you know, we want to move in five or 10 years, did that come into play? Like going online for lifestyle as well?

Or was it not really like it might have been a small factor, but was it not really that significant? I think that lifestyle is important, so going the acquisition entrepreneurship route is, in many ways, a lifestyle play for me and for where I am in life. I have two young children and I value the time that I get to spend with them significantly. Every parent does, but I have appreciated the opportunity, particularly through the pandemic, to have a type of schedule where I spend a lot of time with my kids.

I get to drop them off and pick them up at school. I get to do sports practices and all those fun things with them. And I love those experiences. And I didn't really want to give those up. And so I think businesses that're maintaining retail hours in a physical location would find it more challenging to maintain that type of lifestyle. And a more online-driven business is definitely more conducive to that. It is the type of online, like, I still have a couple of employees, but we work remotely now.

There was an office when I acquired the business and once we got things stabilized, we were able to end that lease and now all three of us work remotely, which again fits because I don't want to have a 45-minute commute to that office every day. So yes, in a lot of ways, I'm making decisions around this business geared towards being able to maintain the lifestyle that I want to have at this point in my life and the flexibility of a more online business in that regard is a huge value add to me and my absolutely most people who listen to the podcast are more lifestyle-driven than just money, like, of course, most people want to earn more money so they can have some fun level of financial independence.

I'm most people in the world. Not everybody's born with health. And that was my goal: to have more money. Really, the ultimate goal above that was the lifestyle that it would provide me. And I acquired a business that had some in-person elements with people around Australia. And I just put it fully online and it was so much easier and less hassle. And I think you could just move so much faster digitally than you can physically. I don't know whether that's like a good mental model of philosophy or something I've just come up with now, but I think it's definitely helpful.

Yeah, I agree completely. And I think you know that owning a business, no matter how you own it, creates the opportunity for future potential windfall-type financial scenarios. But I think in the short term, with greater certainty, if I wanted to go get a mid-level management job at Amazon or, I don't know, some tech, you know, a large public tech company, I would have the resume to go get that job.

And I'd probably have a more stable salary and I'd have some better, you know, more impressive benefits or whatever. It might actually be a financially better decision than the route that I'm taking, but I enjoy the flexibility that I have, the lifestyle that I have, and there's something fun. There is a bit of a game almost to figuring out: can I make this thing work in a way that gets me to the goals that I have financially as well?

And I'm optimistic about those things that are not guaranteed, but I think that's part of the fun of it Why do I do this? Can I test myself and find out whether I can get that? I love that you mentioned that and brought that up, moving back into this sort of career that you had with your skills and your resume.

Why do people can, and I've thought about this before, like a long time ago when I was like, do I just keep plumbing and then, and just, you know, just suck it up and do it for a certain period of time? What I realized quickly is that in a career, I had like progressed in my career through different roles and just supervisory roles and stuff like that.

But at the same time, there was a ceiling there as well. And at the end of the day, yes, you know, a couple of years into your journey, depending on how fast things move for you and how much resources you put into it.

It can be wise to have something like, I've got this job and if I just, you know, I've got some stability here, but also if they fired me, I could go get another job somewhere else. So I've got some stability with my career in place, but it doesn't compound as well. I believe it doesn't compound as well as a business does or an asset that you own that doesn't really have a ceiling.

You know, I hear so many stories that happen to me as well, where people will go from like 60 grand a year to 600 grand a year, you know, in a year or more. And it's like, That's life. It's pretty life-changing, you know. When you go from maybe 80 to 100 grand a year to half a million, it's very different. And you just know that's not possible with a career; I've never heard somebody go from 100k to half a million in one year through promotions. Agreed.

And really, the only way it happens is if you sort of hit that kind of startup equity-type lottery where there's a windfall that comes out of that. And I guess I've been lucky enough to sort of be in that situation. But the odds are that it's not easy to get that to go from a $50,000 to $500k situation, but it's a lot more likely to happen with the right kind of effort and work than it is to turn it into a $5 million windfall out of a tech startup.

Those opportunities are great when they're there. there's obviously, you hear those stories and to some extent, I experienced a slightly smaller version of that myself and it's a wonderful thing, but I don't; it doesn't feel replicable. I feel like I was, yes, I worked hard and was successful, but I was as much as anything able to get into the right team at the right time to have that experience. feels way more replicable to get those next seven figures from building something myself in a more profit-driven, small business-type way than going that route. Yeah, absolutely. I agree.

This one thing in terms of career, money, and spending time on something that I don't think people really think about is fulfillment. The level of fulfillment—I believe that's the goal—that's why we're actually here: to enjoy the human experience and be fulfilled in healthy ways. I'm not talking about toxic ways. I believe that's a big part of our journey, our existence and why we're here.

And I think that sort of gets forgotten about, especially with societal conditioning. And if you think about your career, the level of fulfillment you can have in one company may mean that you are quite happy because you're in a company where you love their values, their ethos and stuff like that.

But, you know, if you're in a part of the company where you're not getting much fulfillment, even if you were getting a bunch of fill the film and you could get from your own business, it just brings you so much closer to the impact that the business makes when you own it yourself versus being in a larger business.

And that changes, I believe, your happiness levels in life. Have you noticed that yourself at all? Or this is getting pretty philosophical. love it. This is fun. This is a fun direction for this conversation to go. I'm enjoying it. Yeah, I am.

We were having dinner recently with some friends. We've gone out with another couple that we know and they both are in sort of the big consulting firm world, running big teams and offices and traveling all over the place.

Their travel schedule included a work trip, then coming back to meet their family for the vacation trip, then going on another work trip and they'd be back in like a month. And I had that brief moment of, like, being a little bit jealous of, like, big, sexy corporate travel, the family vacation and all the things.

And I was like, I don't; I don't want to be gone for two weeks on a work trip to some faraway place that doesn't actually serve my family. I want to be able to go on the three-week road trip that I just got back from with my family. And I want to go play golf with my dad later this week. And I can do all those things and run a compelling business that I'm excited for. That's profitable.

If I make the right moves with the right people at the right times, I can grow that thing and be really successful too. And so, yeah, I think society definitely trains us to get a good job in the corporate world, work your way up the ladder and get more responsibility and more money. But, like, you're still going to be grinding 60 hours a week. I love working hard, but I like doing it in a framework that works for me and my family. I didn't go into entrepreneurship to get rich quick or to make a lot of money and never work. It's not about that.

But it's about being able to decide when and how I do it and how I fit that into the rest of the things that are important to me in life. It sounds like you feel similarly. we're preaching to the choir here, I think. But I think the people who are listening to this are probably the types of people who feel somewhat similarly. Yeah, that's exactly right. That's what my main audience is like: we want to help people make money so they can spend time doing what they love with the people they love.

That's my whole ethos. yeah, now let's get pretty transactional here, I guess. What are some of the key things that you learned when you were looking for businesses? And then, what were some of the key things you learned when you started doing due diligence? And these might be things that have surprised you or that you found harder than you may have expected. Just the people like listing that they're going on this journey. What are some of the things that they should be thinking about looking out for?

Yeah, I felt like I got a little bit lucky. My search went pretty quickly. So I talked about reading with them in early 2023. It was really in the summer of 2023 that I kind of had a contract wrapping up in my little freelance consulting business that I was doing and decided to put that time rather than into another new consulting gig towards looking to buy a business.

And I first talked to the agent and then the seller of American Dental Care, my company, in late July or early August of 2023. So kind of right around now, a year ago. And we were under LOI within a week of that and then did kind of an eight-week sprint of due diligence and documents and things and closed at the end of September.

So my like, from actually saying, okay, I am now a searcher, let me develop a target statement and start looking at businesses to closing, was like a four- or five-month process for me, which is, I think, pretty quick; at least in the US, I would say that it is. And there are a few reasons for that. So luck is probably one of them. But the other thing is that the business that I bought was a smaller business, like half a million dollars in revenue and purchase price right around there.

And was a business that had been around for 35 years but had been shrinking for the last few years, as the previous owner had kind of been more focused on it; he was ready to be out of it but didn't sell it probably as soon as he should have. And hadn't really evolved with how he needed to acquire customers in a more digital, more online world. His customer acquisition had largely been TV and newspaper ads, among other things, 15 and 20 years ago.

Yeah.

And so, I think it was pretty small; it was shrinking and I didn't know whether it was an online business or an in-person business. I think there was probably a pretty narrow audience for this type of business. And so I feel like I was actually looking at a business at this size and this scale was kind of like fishing in a smaller pond where there was a little bit less competition to go buy a business like this.

And so I think that helped me move a little bit faster through that process, but that was worth it to me because what I knew that I wanted to do was operate a business. I'm not saying that I jumped at something; the first thing I saw was that without doing any due diligence, we can talk about the due diligence piece of it, but I knew.

I don't think you're ever going to find the very perfect business that checks every single box and has the perfect purchase price with none of the problems and all of the upside. And like, if that's what you're looking for, when you're looking to buy a business, I don't know that you'll ever buy a business. You've got to kind of find that.

You've got to find that. That's right. Yeah. You got it. You got to, I think you've got to accept that there's going to be some hair on the deal and that you got to find, find, I don't know, I'm to mix metaphors. We've got to find the warts that you can tolerate, work through and fix. And I know that if you can fix those, you're actually adding value to the business, which will pay off for you in the long run. Right.

If the business were perfect, you'd pay a huge multiple for it, and you might get some nice cash flow out of it, but you're not going to; you will have paid for that growth upfront. I'm rambling now, but yes, I think that figuring out what kind of problems you can tolerate and work through and maybe even having some skills that you can add value to to fix those problems, is a huge opportunity.

And as part of what I was doing, I went to buy this. Yeah, those risks are opportunities in disguise, really. and normally when I tell people, Okay, let's go through some risk mitigation strategy, that's typically a growth strategy at the same time. Totally. Really? Yeah. Yeah. And so that is quite fast—you know, four months—especially just looking for two months and then two months of DD. That's pretty fast. Just the search being two months. What are some of the things?

What are some of the big things that you learned through DD that you may not have expected? I think there's some things I learned really both in DD and then probably immediately after DD. The big one—I'll actually start with the latter—is that you're not going to learn everything in DD. You're going to get in there on day one and you're going to learn some new things. And I think that's always going to be the case, which kind of fits into that.

There'll be some hair on the deal things. I vividly remember a couple conversations with some key employees on the first couple of days saying, Okay, let's talk like, cool. This is going to be fun. It was fine. But but there was there was there were some things there. Yeah. I think, indeed, that my background in accounting was very valuable to me there.

This was a given the size of this deal, like I didn't want to go spend 10s of $1,000 in kind of due diligence type costs. And so I was doing a lot of that work myself and was comfortable doing that because I had a background in that kind of financial accounting where I basically took the financials that were given to me—you know, three plus years of financials—and I kind of rebuilt them myself, analyzed them and built out some future scenarios.

And I was able to get pretty comfortable with what the financial picture looked like and what, you know, a really good case—a kind of bull case—would look like. And also what a couple of not-so-good cases would look like and whether I'd still feel okay with where we were in the business. so that was comforting from a financial perspective. I think the operational perspective was probably the trickier piece of it.

One, because my business, despite being, you know, an online business, actually has some regulatory components working in this health space. And so some of the states in the U.S. that I operate in require, like, a license to operate the business. And that was probably the trickiest thing that came up in due diligence. We didn't have to figure out how to transfer that license; really, what we ultimately ended up doing was a stock sale instead of an asset sale of the business.

And I don't know how well these concepts translate worldwide, but basically, by doing a stock sale, the business entity itself stayed as it was. And so the licenses stayed where they were. And there was a little bit of post-closed paperwork to do with those to say that I was the new owner of the business and not the other guy, but we didn't have to reapply for any licenses, which was kind of an important deal, but a stock sale versus an asset sale brings in some additional risk and liability from previous things that may have happened in the business.

So making sure that the kind of indemnifications and the various risk pieces of the final closing paperwork covered me sufficiently was also an important part of that. There was some complexity in that, particularly relative to the size of the business, that I had to get comfortable with and there were a couple of moments where it felt like that might potentially derail the deal, but both the seller and myself were able to kind of get together on that and make it work.

And so that was kind of a big thing. I think the other thing I would say is that throughout both leading up to starting due diligence, kind of getting the LOI in place and then even in working through due diligence, I felt like through that whole process, I was still continuing to sell myself to the seller because I knew I was going to have to get him to kind of work with me on a few things.

Yeah, to get where we wanted to go. I needed him to believe that I wanted to get this deal done, but that I needed some help from him and that I was the right guy for him to sell it to and that we needed to kind of be a team to work collaboratively to get to a solution that would work.

And I think keeping that mindset, like he wasn't, yeah, he was an advert, like I was negotiating against him in some ways, but also we, neither of us were in an exclusive negotiating period isn't anyone else involved in this? We're actually also sort of a team to find out a way that we can get to a deal that works for both of us. and, kind of, working through that part of it was also really important and it was a good experience. I love that. I love that you brought that up: working together and sort of selling yourself, your skills and whatnot to him to be comfortable enough to sell it to you.

It's huge and I don't think a lot of people really talk about it. I have some training called How to Become an Attractive Buyer, and it buys you respect by becoming an attractive buyer and can actually allow you to get the business a little bit cheaper. Not that you forward. It's cheaper to rip them off.

You both have to come to a win-win scenario, but it buys you respect, and respect goes a long way when a seller goes; this person knows what they're talking about. They know what they're doing. They know this business, they know the market and they know what they're going to do. Continuwin-winoving forwards.

That's very attractive for somebody who wants to sell a business versus somebody who's like, I'm just going to lowball you and make it up as I go. So I know a bunch of things and guys, this is a little plug. Go check out my training on how to become an attractive buyer. But Zach, what are some of the things that you do, looking back now in hindsight or did you do that?

You believe it helped you become an attractive buyer in terms of, like, just relationship building. Yeah, I think that when I had my first meeting with the seller, I focused more on telling him why I thought he had a really cool business that I was interested in. You know, I focused less on some of the potential challenges I saw and more on the potential that I saw in the business to say I'm excited about this and I'm interested in this, particularly because this has been a shrinking business.

I didn't want him to feel like that. I think he probably felt some amount of, like, I kind of should have done some things differently or sold it sooner or whatever. Right. I wanted to soften that for him. I wanted to be like, Look, man, you've done a lot of amazing work over the last 30+ years and you've built a really cool business and I'd love to take it to the next chapter. Right.

But to kind of say, I'm in this in part to preserve your legacy; think so sort of complimenting him and the work he's done and his or her business, but in this case his business. and then explaining my background, my experience and what I want to do next. I have the right skills and the opportunity to take that business into the next chapter in a way that he would be proud and excited to see that business grow and succeed was also part of how I approached that. And so that first meeting in particular was very much about getting him comfortable and selling myself as the right person for that business.

And then, once we were under LOI, it was time to dig into more of those nitty-gritty aspects of it. And I think as we went through that process, particularly because we had to make that switch from the asset sale to the stock sale, which meant some of the deal terms were going to have to get renegotiated to get there, what I focused on was really understanding what was most important to this seller. You know, was he all about maximizing the purchase price?

I need to get this business closed as soon as possible. Was it? I need to preserve this for my employees, whatever the situation. And I realize? The reason was that as the business had shrunk over the last few years, running the business had put a lot of pressure on it. He'd felt a lot of pressure and stress from his lifestyle and his home life perspective with his family.

And he was really ready to be out of this business. And as long as he got out of it at a price threshold that he was comfortable with, he was really willing to work with me on almost anything else in terms of the terms to get what he wanted to get. And so I was able to negotiate a pretty attractive seller's note with him for a good chunk of the purchase price. I was able to get sort of the things that we needed in place to do that stock sale in a way that I was comfortable with in place while keeping in mind, like, okay, he needs, he really wants us to keep that closing date where it is.

And as long as our price stays above this level, we're going to be okay. He'll kind of give on some of the other things and we were able to get it done. And so I think that's both, like, just the brass tacks of what the business is; am I comfortable with it and is it worth what I'm paying for it? But then it's also, and what do I need to make sure to make sure that that seller is still there on closing day to sign all the paperwork and get the thing done? That's what it takes to buy a business.

Yeah, it does. I've got to both have parties and walk away happy. Otherwise, the deal doesn't get done. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. What's the parting advice? Would you tell somebody what's going on? I've got my career. Do I go and become an acquisition entrepreneur and get a bit of a lifestyle and some scalability in terms of money in compounding in the longer, longer route?

What advice would you give to them? My first piece of advice might be that if you really like your career, you might want to keep it because this is going to be a stressful and difficult path to go down and yeah, it is. It's not like I think there's incredible opportunity in owning your own business, buying a business, or growing a business that works for you.

And also, it requires a lot; you're taking a significant risk. are, all of the decisions ultimately come back to you. You've got to manage a team of people who are relying on you and your business, potentially, depending on the type of business, to feed their families as well. There are a lot of challenges that come with it. And so yes, there is the freedom, the flexibility and the lifestyle piece of it that's great, but you've got to make sure that you're willing to take on all of the things that are stressful and hard about it in order to get there.

And if you've got a job you like and you're making money that you're happy with and I'm not, I don't think it's for everybody. But if you're not happy and you're willing to take on all of those challenges, and the hope and the dream of that freedom, that flexibility and potentially, over a period of growth, the profit as well, are there, then yeah, I think it presents a pretty incredible opportunity. But just don't go into it blindly expecting it to be a get-rich-quick kind of thing.

And I don't think people listening to this are, but I do think people owe it to themselves to really evaluate whether it's for them before they take the leap and do it. Or even before they spend, I feel like I've seen people who, to your point, have spent a lot of time searching, looking for that unicorn business and never finding it because they're not really sure if they want to do it. And so every time they're looking at a business, they're looking for a reason not to do it. This isn't the perfect one.

I don't know how many of those people ultimately make the leap. I know for me, I know my process went really quickly, but as I sit here now a year later, I'm really glad I have almost a year of operating experience, not a year of searching experience. I'm glad that I got in the game and that I now have a year of experience owning and operating a business.

And it has been perfectly smooth and I haven't hit that top case that I was hoping to hit. but that's okay. I've learned a lot and I am going to do even better over the next year. And that's the attitude I think you've got to be able to bring to it. And I've already got your one under my belt.

And that's kind of the thing that I'm most excited about. Yeah, congrats on that. I mean, you're right, there are a lot of people that and it's a shame, but it sort of comes with us sharing the stories of things that are possible to inspire people to go away and acquire an online business and do great things and make money online, lots of stuff.

But the downside is that that can help people and aid in setting expectations for themselves. that those expectations can be, I think the worst expectations are time expectations because time is like the worst metric to ever track in your life. It's one of my philosophies and beliefs. It's just that time is not a great metric to track. Almost all facets.

And then you've also got business model or financing, the type of financing you want to do, and the type of business model you want to acquire. then I find that there were so many—you know, there were—throughout the start of 2024. It was pretty crazy with some changes that happened with organic search. And a lot of people were looking for this type of business and then realized, Maybe that's not the right type of business model.

And they just ran away—ran away from the industry completely—and have just wasted all of these months and maybe even years of time looking and learning how to buy a business that they could use towards buying a different business model that could be more valuable and more beneficial to them. Right. So for example, going from like a content site to like a newsletter business or, you know, into Ecom or something completely different.

And that's because they may be setting expectations. And I know that I've done this in my life so many times, like expectations on things and not being not happy and I ran away from things and not come back to them because the expectation ruined it. But if I had stayed in that lane, I would have gotten crazy into ROI over the long run. And yeah, I'm glad that you brought that up because the unicorn doesn't exist.

If a storm comes and you are like a very strong tree, your strategy is very strong, and you're not flexible to like the bamboo, and then with the wind, you're going to snap and you're going to leave the industry, and all that hard work that you've done, it's not going to compound again, right? And it's not if the storm comes; it's when the storm comes. The people who bought a business last year are now having to figure out how to deal with the changes that Google made in the first half of this year.

And whatever they did this year, they're going to do something different in the future. There is no steady state; this is how it always is and always will be. The storm will come and you've got to have a belief in what you're doing and the ability to adapt to whatever those changing circumstances are to succeed. And if you're not comfortable with the possibility of knowing that that storm is going to come, then again, maybe you are looking in the wrong spot for this.

I know that for me, like an online business, there are a lot of reasons why it makes sense, but I also had some thoughts in my mind in terms of when I was coming up with that.

Target statement that search statement and I didn't. I explicitly wanted to avoid businesses that I felt could be existentially impacted by Google, Apple or someone like that sort of just giving away my product for free suddenly by building it into their system or, as you know, if you're thinking over the next five to ten years, is AI going to make my business obsolete?

If it is, I'm not sure that's a business I would want to be buying right now. That's an existential threat to almost any business right now. And I think that's an important risk factor to be thinking about. I'm not claiming to be some expert on it and people are going to need to go get their teeth taken care of and are going to want to save money on it. And so I feel like I've got an opportunity to avoid those types of challenges.

But when things like I rely on search traffic and I have a different type of product, it's not as content-driven as it should be. I was less impacted by those types of changes than some of the more content-driven businesses, I think, but that doesn't mean that there was no impact. I had to figure out, okay, what do I need to change and how do I run my ads or my site to get the traffic that I want to have?

So the storm will come and you've got to be able to adapt when it does. Yeah. I've got a video coming out on who buying a business is for and who it's not for. And that's definitely a point like this; it's tough. And if you are not ready for tough,.

But maybe, or, you know, sometimes it's fine to be going through life and going artists don't have the capacity for that right now or ever. And you can keep doing what you're doing 100 percent.

There have been times about three years ago when I got into the consulting world because I could trade small chunks of my time for money efficiently in that stage with the skills that I had, but I had young kids, childcare was weird in the pandemic, family was going through some health things and like, it was not the right time in that season of my life to buy a business.

It would have been too much stress, too much chaos. I would not have been good at it. A couple of years later, I'm in a much more stable place and look, there may be a future season and hopefully I will have stabilized things in the business to write out that one too.

Again, the storm will come, but yeah, I think it's okay if now is not the right time. If it's a thing, you know you want to do it. I think this is it. I hear people my age in the States in particular say, "I've got to buy a house. I've got to buy a house. They're only getting more expensive. It's only getting harder to buy a house.

And to some extent, that's true. And also, if you overextend yourself to do something right now that you can't afford to do or that isn't right for your life right now, that's going to cause more problems than waiting a few more years and letting a few more of the pieces fall into place and all those things. I think Jared will be here to help when that time is right too. Absolutely.

Thank you so much for coming on, Zach. I really appreciate it.

If you're open to it, we can share a link for people to check you out. But yeah, guys, check out that in the show notes. But yeah, thank you so much for coming on, Zach.

I really appreciate it. I'm glad to be here. We got philosophical. I enjoyed it.

Me too. That's my jam.

Thanks. I appreciate it. Maybe we'll catch up in a year or two and see how you're doing with American Dental Care. I'd be happy to. Yeah. I will speak to you soon.

Thanks.