Ep 299: 21 Businesses Bought: How To Acquire A SaaS Business with Dirk Sahlmer

What can you learn from somebody who's bought 21 businesses? Hi, I'm Jaryd Krause. I'm the host of the Buying Online Businesses podcast and today I'm speaking with Dirk Sahlmer, who was a mechanical engineer. Now he's turned SaaS Deal Hunter and Acquirer, or serial acquirer, I should say, and he shares his insights on SaaS mergers and acquisitions, starting with scaling existing software businesses.

Now in this podcast episode, Dirk and I dive into how he moved from mechanical engineer into the tech space and the SaaS space. And then how he moved from that to mergers and acquisitions and acquiring small businesses for the small startup that he was in. And we talk about his story of how they went and acquired one business over each year, and then it moved into a couple of businesses and it moved into five businesses, acquiring six businesses per year.

We talk about how to raise funds for existing business owners and/or for people that are looking to acquire their first business. We also chat about just how to merge or what you can do if you want to acquire businesses and merge them together and why maybe it's not always the best route to take to merge businesses into your previous business that you acquire.

Kind of a discussion around how to build out a conglomerate of businesses under one company or build a holding co. And then we talk about growth as well as retention and so many awesome things about software businesses and acquiring businesses. Now, before we dive into this podcast episode, we do talk about buying online businesses and that's what I do, right? So if you haven't got my due diligence framework, you can get it for free.

It's helped people save millions of dollars and make millions of dollars and it takes the guesswork out of acquiring online business. Go to buyingonlinebusinesses.com for forward slash free resources. You can get that due diligence framework there and a bunch of other cool stuff too.

Let's dive into the pod.

Dirk, welcome to the pod. Thanks so much for coming on.

Yeah, thanks for inviting me to be here.

You're welcome.

I'm looking forward to this chat.

So mechanical engineer, and then you moved into SaaS. How and why?

I would say the short answer is lucky coincidence. My last role as an engineer was at Alpina BMW. They are not calling themselves so, but it's a BMW tuning company. So they took the BMW basis and then tuned it and increased performance and it was a cool job, but I always wanted to do a master's.

And so I quit my job and started a master's with a focus on electric vehicles and electrical engineering in the automotive industry. And during the time I met some student colleagues who were keen to start their own business. And there was a seminar at our university about, like, startups and how to build your own business, where we participated. And that's how I got into that whole tech startup bubble.

Yeah, we worked for a while on our own business but ultimately failed. But this was in the software space. So we wanted to build a parking management solution for retailers. And when we decided, OK, we part ways and we do something different, I ran into the SaaS founder at the time.

And the business was still at a very early stage. And he was looking for an analyst to help with deal sourcing. And that's how I got into that whole SaaS acquisition topic as a mechanic engineer.

Yeah, cool.

And so I've got two questions here. What do you do in short now? And then I want to come back to the acquisitions part that you did for that first tech startup.

What is it that you do in short now? Just if you could explain for the listeners.

So me personally, you mean?

Yeah.

OK.

So my role is head of origination. I think you could compare it with a sales role at a typical SaaS company. I go out, I speak to founders of potential &A targets for SaaS group, and I try to see if there's an opportunity. So yeah, you could also say head of deal sourcing. So I'm constantly trying to engage with founders and see if they are interested in exit and in potentially working together with us.

Cool.

So head of deal sourcing. so this first sort of tech startup, you jumped straight into basically deal sourcing as well, right?

So what sort of deals were you looking at and why does it make sense, I guess? For a tech startup to acquire other businesses, what were those, why and how did that look for you at the time?

Yeah, so I mean, back in the days when I was running my own startup, when we were working on that software company ourselves, we were in the early stages. So I think at this point, it wouldn't make much sense to look for strategic acquisitions already. But I think for more established businesses, it definitely makes sense to look left and right. I mean, you know it yourself, right?

Thousands or millions of small businesses you could benefit from because it provides a feature for your existing business because it just provides access to specific clients to your business, etc. Even if it's just a blog or a newsletter or whatever, an affiliate website, it could still have a positive impact and you can maybe get it for a reasonable price.

I now also encourage like small SaaS founders running businesses of, let's say, a few hundred K AOR to consider small acquisitions. Even more so now that the barrier is quite low given all the platforms like acquire, flip website closers and so on. Yeah, absolutely. And so what sort of businesses were you acquiring?

Was it those, you know, newsletters, SaaS small SaaS businesses that could be a feature of the startup you're working in? Was it affiliate sites? What were the ones you were looking at, particularly when you first started?

And did you raise funds for those? No, I joined the SaaS group; I think now it's almost five years ago. And the goal was really to focus on small bootstraps, which also means capital-efficient SaaS companies in the range of, let's say, 5k to 1.5 million ARR. Because the founders are all tech entrepreneurs themselves, and they sold their previous businesses. So in the beginning, it was purely self-financed from their pocket money.

In the meantime, we also have existing credit facilities for larger deals and a larger volume of deals. But this was the beginning of very small businesses where you could say, okay, they have product market fits, but they are struggling to get to the next level. And also from a founder profile, very often it was like an indie hacker type of person. So they were not even interested in making this a big organization, a big business.

So it was intentional that they kept it small, very product tech focused. And very often it started out of a hobby project or side gig because they were trying to solve their own problems somehow. Yeah, right. I didn't really raise funds. They already had that as a part of the startup in cash themselves from selling previous businesses.

Is that right?

Yeah, that's right. So I think it was a good situation for us to not raise funds and not make this a VC case. mean, maybe you've seen it in the Amazon FBA space. They were highly debt- and VC financed and so you have pressure to deploy capital, pressure to do acquisitions.

And I think for us in the beginning, it was more like building a proof of concept, finding out if that whole thing works and if it can really work on improving these businesses and then going from there. A lot of people want to acquire and build out a big holding company, right? And to do so that I have much capital, they're obviously raising debt. And then it becomes tricky because you raise debt, you need to pay your investors back, which means you need to acquire and the ones that you need to acquire, you need to make sure you merge them well into the whole company or the other business, the platform business.

And then you also need to make sure that they grow in unison. And then you have your operation expenses and building, putting different people in different departments for the holding company or each individual business. And there's so much pressure on that. just, I'm a big advocate for acquiring one primary platform business with cash if you can.

And then from that, growing slower by building that business out, having that one single sole focus and then acquiring one business and merging it in. And then eventually, once you have the facilities in terms of the team, the system and everybody involved in that one or two businesses that has the capacity to scale. And I think it's a good idea to raise finance and then acquire something where there's less pressure on it to work.

Like you said, through the Amazon aggregator time, through COVID when money was abundant, that's where it just blew up in people's faces because they had to deploy this capital like you said, and then there was all this pressure on it all working, and it seemed like they bought so many businesses that they couldn't handle how much was going on with the type of team that they had, right?

It just seemed like they were buying these businesses for such crazy multiples that people didn't have the right people already there to take on board these businesses. Have you seen some of that play out in?

What you've done at all or is this the stuff that you've seen from afar with where you're at? Yeah, no, I would confirm what you're saying. I mean, you know it firsthand, so I don't need to tell you, but many people I talk to say, Yeah, that sounds smart. Maybe I could also build a small SaaS group by just acquiring lots of small businesses and running them in parallel. You know the game, right? But it's not that easy.

You have to be very picky, especially if you're starting with smaller businesses. you can't really make sure that there's a good product market fit just because it generates, let's say, 1K, 2K revenue a month or so. And it's really hard to scale it because, like, even if you just hire a freelancer or someone to help you, then this is already like a loss-making business.

So you have to make sure you can run it yourself and you are really confident that you can make something out of it because just buying and hoping that nothing breaks probably won't work. now, mean, we also learned kind of a lesson. As I said, the acquisitions we made in the beginning were right on the smaller side. Now we move a bit higher in terms of the ARR range we prefer. The smaller businesses are causing the most issues.

We have an organization that's supporting the operations, but we give high responsibility to the respective company we acquired and not try to centralize it because I think that also wouldn't, wouldn't. Yeah. When just for the listeners, think what you mean is when you acquire a business and then you just bring in, plug your team straight into the business, you can lose out a lot of what's already working in that business and not work with the previous owner and their team to make sure that we don't wreck anything that is magic that's happening that is not detectable by the eye or the data. Right?

Yeah. And also now we are leaning more towards companies and businesses and operations that just work. Like, of course, we have in-house experts in certain areas, like marketing products and so on.

But if we're now looking at businesses, we wouldn't favor a business where something is broken and we think we can fix it, but rather focus on businesses that have been growing sustainably over the last couple of years where we are confident that they can sustain that growth over the next couple of years with our support, but not something where it's like a turnaround case or where we think we are much smarter than the founder or the management team to fix this.

Right.

I think that's investing principle number one really is like not looking for something that just has massive opportunity. Looking for something that has minimal risk and opportunity is just massive icing on the cake. Right? Yeah. And also, I mean, like you probably got started if you start with a small business, then it's even more important to not think you're smarter than others. I think, okay, they've never done marketing. So I just start investing in marketing and all of a sudden the business is going to skyrocket.

This is usually not how it works. Yeah. And I'd just like to explain why as well. Right? So say you've got a business that says it's an e-commerce business, just to be simple and it's selling products on Amazon. And then somebody comes in and says, Look, they're spending a bunch of money on Amazon with Amazon PPC; there's a massive opportunity to start running Google ads and they're not doing it.

And so what happens is that when you add another channel in like that, it's like adding another startup to the business because you need to spend money on ad spend to get data to then work out who your target acquisition client is on Google and then what words they like in terms of copy and what products sell best. And so it's like another whole startup you're starting completely from scratch without any guarantee of return. So it's a big risk, right?

It's worth it if you can see other people are doing it well and that sort of stuff, but don't invest for that alone because if you're just trying to acquire opportunity, opportunity really isn't there until it already exists, right? It's already being done. Yeah. And what would you say from your own experience, mainly focusing also on smaller businesses, what's your checklist where you say, Okay, if this is the status quo, then it represents a good opportunity for me? Well, it depends on the client, right? We got to build out acquisition criteria and it depends on what skills they do have or don't have.

And then what sort of work, what sort of team they want to manage or no team? then then it becomes, All right, let's look at this. Let's look at that type of business and go and find that. It's very different for each investor and what they want. It's a difficult one to answer.

I do tell people to start with the E; they're starting out from scratch and they don't have much online business experience. try to tell them to go for something different, like a media business that doesn't have too much involved with SAS.

Normally the entry to get into a SAS business, I wouldn't recommend people spending any less than $200K on a SAS business for their first business because you've got typically there'll be ads involved. Typically, tech, if it's under that price range, typically needs a lot of work. They probably don't have a very good customer base yet. The retention probably stinks.

And there's a lot of things, like you're not just doing SEO, but you're doing marketing and then you're working on retention, all that sort of stuff. So there's a lot of moving parts and then you could go to Ecom. But I would only suggest Ecom for people that are willing to scale fast but also deal with many things in terms of pressure and stress because, I mean, you can scale really fast, but you've also got the risk of other people in the market as well.

Whereas media businesses typically think it's a lot easier to run content websites, not so much now due to what's good, what's happened with Google previously from a year from now. But media businesses like YouTube channels, Instagram accounts, and those that run on their own and make good revenue yet. Newsletter businesses are amazing businesses to own. It's a great beginner business.

Yeah, so I wanted to ask you, you went from just acquiring businesses with cash and now you've got some runs on the board. You've got a business that can sustain acquiring businesses with teams and get some scalability out of that. Yeah. Do you raise funds for these SaaS businesses and how do you raise funds? What does that look like? Yeah. So we basically went from, let's say, a self-financed acquisition machine, but on a smaller scale, to now a whale-oiled machine that can also handle larger volumes and larger deal sizes. We signed a credit line with a German foundation that has a debt facility, I think three years ago.

So we got a pretty decent credit line where we're paying a provision fee, but then also when we're drawing from it, of course some interest rates on it. And that allowed us to really scale in the last two to three years. So when I joined, there were only three small businesses. think together, they were making around 1.5 million AR. Now we are at 21. So we added quite a few in the meantime, and yeah, we might need to go for a debt fund raise next year again. I think for this year we are still good.

Yeah, cool.

Just like to explain that to listeners as well that want to acquire businesses with finance. Typically, when you're buying your first business, there's not really the most amount of financing options available for Americans; you got the small business administration line in Australia and the rest of the world, not really like BUPOs, were offering some financing options.

And these are options for people that are first-time investors, but the terms are quite big, like the interest rates were quite high and they didn't do so well for a portion of time, so they shut that down. I hope they're coming back. Once somebody starts or once somebody buys something small, like we said, why not start with something with cash smaller?

And once you build that up, then you can sort of present that business to different people, like lenders and banks and show like we're producing this income with this asset. Can we use that a little bit as collateral and prove that we know what we're doing? Can we raise a bit of funds to acquire another business to merge into it, right?

I know that Stripe does this. Lots of companies, the company that we're looking at purchasing now, have used Stripe to pull cash out of the business and acquire another business and then also acquire property as well. And there's a lot of merchants that will do it as well.

Is that how you've gone—sort of used merchants—or did you just go to a bank and do it that way? Yeah, I think like last time we did it, we just ran the process ourselves and we got some recommendations from our network. I recently also talked to someone from Bupas just two weeks ago.

Yeah, I think they are drawing back from that segment and focusing on other areas now. So I don't know if you can still rely on them. And I also know from experience that you will have a hard time explaining your bank, what an online business is and how it can generate money and that it's potentially recurring, et cetera.

So it's better to not tell them a story but actually show them numbers. if you spend some of your own money on it and you were able to grow it and it produces some cash, then go you through your bank, show your numbers and then try to explain it. think then you have a better chance of getting something at all and at a decent rate. totally agree with you.

When people go to a bank or a lender to buy a business and it's an online business, just say it's a business. Because then you know that you don't have to tell them it's an online business. It's up to them to do their due diligence, which they totally should in terms of like collateral and stuff like that.

And maybe just one comment on the financing part. So now, I mean 21 companies, we also have a decent amount of cash flow we could potentially use for acquisitions. But of course, if you're just getting started, it may be harder for you. What I would also suggest is to try to get some seller financing.

I always tell sellers to not accept the high proportion of seller financing because it's a high risk for you to sell your business for cheap if something happens. think like 20, 30%. I mean, of course it's a negotiation part, but I think that's totally doable and you can save some money in the upfront cash part and then just pay it over time to the seller. And if it's a good business, the seller is going to do it, right? And that helps. It really gives you so much confirmation if a seller is willing to do seller financing and longer.

And the better term for you that you'd, the better the business typically is. And that seller knows that. So it's really good confirmation of the acquisition for sure. So you said you've acquired 21. You got 21 businesses in the SaaS group now. Yes. Yeah. Cool. Congratulations. How long ago was the first business built or acquired? Yeah. So I think we started in, but then just acquired one per year. And then we slowly ramped up the volume. So last year we did six.

I hope this year we will again do five to six and yeah, we will gradually move upwards. So we're currently hiring people for our &A team. So next year we will aim for, let's say eight and yeah, then just see how it goes. But it's not that we want to blow up the team and just go for volume because there's also a process that follows the acquisition.

So you also need to integrate them, integration projects. comes with adding new people to the family, properly onboarding them, et cetera. So we also need to make sure that we're not messing it up once we close the deal. So yeah, that's why more gradually ramping up the volume. Yeah, I think it's good. Since 2017, so what's that? That's nine years.

Starting slower as you get better and better at it, things just compound, right? I think it's more about time in the space than timing the right purchase; it's just that the compounding effect is insane. And maybe who knows what it looks like in two years? Maybe it's like, Let's not do five or six. Maybe you have a different criteria for the size of acquisitions and you just simplify it a bit and do two at the have an ARR of four mills each or something like that. Five mills each. Yeah. Can change the time. And I think that you can beat the workload but move faster with different types of acquisitions.

Yeah, agreed. mean, when I started five years ago, we hadn't had an &A team. So I was responsible for deal sourcing. The founders, they were discussing evaluation, et cetera, but they are tech entrepreneurs. They are also not &A professionals. And we were still able to close deals, but now the whole organization became much more professional.

So we added professional &A people that have previous PE experience or come from other software aggregators like Constellation Software. And also, we've built an in-house team, the so-called central team, with different functions. We have an in-house finance team, in-house HR and some other teams and they are supporting that whole portfolio on a brand level, but also us in the due diligence, for example.

So I think this is required to do a larger volume of transactions because otherwise we could simply not handle it. Yeah. Bringing it in-house as well is a lot cheaper too. Right? Yes. Yes. And you have more control.

What does the deal flow look like in terms of sourcing? Like you used to source, do you still source sometimes? I'm guessing you probably have a network. And what does it look like in terms of sourcing deals?

Yeah.

The good thing is my work has improved in a sense that when I started, we had no real brand exposure. Nobody knew what we were doing and we had to do a lot of education, tell people what we have in mind, what we've planned, why we are doing this, and why we think we can help them.

founders and their companies get to the next level. So it was a lot of storytelling, education, and also connecting with a lot of brokers to send us stuff. And in the meantime, because I talked to many, many founders, brokers, investors, and stakeholders, I think people—more people—know now what we're doing, how we're doing it, and what our value proposition is.

And therefore we're getting an increasing amount of inbound deal flow. Yeah. So I would say numbers wise, it was like 95 % active sourcing approaching founders, approaching brokers. And now it's around, let's say, 60-40 or 50-50. So 50 % inbound and 50 % proprietary deal flow where we are actively approaching founders. I love it. Congrats on that. That's really cool.

So people are listening that they may own a business and they may want to be raising some funds through Stripe or their merchant or somewhere that they know they can. If they want to start building out some deal flow. How did it start for you? Like, what did the outreach look like when you first started? I would say it was, in retrospect, quite embarrassing because we just send out like spray-and-pray email campaigns with very generic templates.

So, hey, dear founder, we want to acquire your business. We are a group of three serial tech entrepreneurs. Yeah. Exited our previous businesses, now looking to build a platform to independently run SaaS.

And at the time it was not very competitive. So the response rate was still okay. I booked enough calls to generate enough deal flows. So everything was fine, but now more and more players are popping up. DE players are also aiming for smaller targets. So they're also fishing in our market now.

So if I now talk to founders, they basically tell me, Hey, I'm getting five of these emails every week. The good thing is they still respond to me, right? But I needed to adapt and improve our outreach and also work with some other tactics.

I mean, I've started to post a lot of stuff on LinkedIn, which helps build credibility and a lot of people. mean, you're getting an email, you check me out on LinkedIn, you see, okay, the guy's legit and you may respond, at least out of curiosity, not because you're necessarily interested in an exit, but at least get people on the phone, which is already important.

And then it can take months, years, until they become more serious about an exit and then get back to me. So I think it's important to get a foot in the door, but then even more important is to build a relationship and trust over time. Yeah. Stay on top of founders minds.

Absolutely. I like to tell people that it's better to not, you know, quality over quantity. And what that means is that instead of having a lot of non-quality relationships with a lot of different business owners that may sell at one time,.

It's better to have really good relationships with a handful of great business owners that know how to build a business, know what their exit figure is and know they want to sell. So when they come to you, they're sophisticated; they're ready to go. You're sophisticated, ready to go.

And it's easier; it's far easier to manage fewer relationships, quality relationships and your ROI. If you're going to look at it in terms of relationships, it's far better that way, right? Agreed. So I think from my experience, you have like two bigger camps. You have that one camp of founders. They know they are going to exit. They have, like, more or less, a clear plan. So I'm doing this for five to 10 years.

This is what I'm aiming for financially. So I'm trying to max it out and find the right buyer. And at each point in time, they roughly know where they are in terms of valuation. They also have reasonable expectations. And then there's the other camp. They are basically saying, I take this with me to my grave. I'm not planning to sell anytime soon, or if I would sell, it's like, it needs to be a hundred million.

And usually this camp moves towards the other camp, but it's a matter of time when that happens. So I agree. mean, the more you know about your preferences, like, do you want to stick around for a while with the buyer or do you want to leave? How long do you want to stick around? Do you go for?

Big cash component or do you rather opt for maybe an earn-out and some upsides, equity swap, whatever? I think that's really important. And also if you have at least a ballpark figure in your mind, what your business could be worth or what you want to have for it. And if it's reasonable. And I mean, we are more of a generalist buyer, right? So we have acquired SaaS businesses in the HR space, productivity space, and marketing tech space.

So we acquired opportunistic and understood ourselves as generalists, but many, many founders I talked to are aiming for the big strategic exit to Microsoft Salesforce or another big scale up highly VC funded that acquires them for a steep multiple.

But what they don't get is that it's super hard to land on that corporate dev team priority list as a missing piece of their puzzle to approach you and be interested in exactly your business because of your client base or because of your strong mode in a certain space, because you're strong IP, especially in our space, because we are more looking for horizontal products. It's so rare that companies are getting acquired by strategic. So that's a really good thing to mention.

Two things are one, you've got people that are in the camp of, like, we're not going to sell until we get this big figure and this exit over a long enough period, most people are going to shift camps and to go, okay, let's get to this price point. Let's exit because most people get to a point in business where, like, I'm done, I'm over it or it's, you know, I need cash or I want to do something differently with my life.

Even if the business is great, it's worth them moving on. And then secondly, those people that are looking to sell their business to Google, Microsoft, and all these large firms. When you think about it, say you've got Warren Buffett; he buys the best businesses in the world and people literally create businesses, build them to sell them to Warren Buffett and Warren Buffett declines like 99.9% of them, right?

So he gets the best deal flow to him because he's such a good investor. And it's the same with Google and it's the same with Microsoft. So the chance of getting to that level is very, very hard. So most people are going to shift into that camp of let's sell it.

Maybe earlier than we expected or for less, you know, maybe we were not going to get to a hundred million dollar exit. Maybe we get to a million-dollar exit and chalk it up as a win and then do something we're more passionate about now because over the 10 years of what I was passionate about, it's changed a little bit, right?

Yeah. That's also what I recommend to founders. I mean, I'm not saying SaaS group is the only buyer out there and there are no better offers you can get. Of course you should compare and also ultimately pick what's best for the business. What's providing the best outcome for you?

I'm just saying if you want to increase your chances of selling to one of these bigger players, you better start building relationships with the core deaf team today and stay in touch. And even then, in 99.9% of the chances, you will not close a deal. So yeah, it's a bit like gambling, right? You shouldn't go all in, but of course maybe you can chip a few dollars into that bucket to see if it works out.

Now I want to ask the question for those who are looking at acquiring their first business or have their first business and they want to acquire another one and merge it in. What are some of the most successful things that you've done in terms of an acquisition merging it into the primary business that have seen you the best results that could be general and could work for most people?

That's a very good question because we know it's so hard, especially when we're talking about the technical integration of two businesses you acquired. we tend to just keep them independently, run them as an independent business, and try to grow them. That doesn't mean that we're not looking for synergies, but we don't price it in and it's not a must for us when we look at a certain opportunity. So our approach is more to run a SaaS family of independent businesses with their own brand, their own name, and their own team without a technical integration.

However, we also started this year to look for potential add-on acquisitions for existing businesses, but then, yeah, we really need to be careful about tech stack and other topics and really analyze, okay, is it really the same ICP or is it a different geography? Is it different, like ARPU range and all that stuff? So it might look good on paper or if you look at the two businesses and compare them high level, but if you dig deeper, you may find out, okay, there's not a lot in common.

And it might be quite difficult to merge them. If you're considering it, I would really be careful and do your homework; do a proper analysis if it's really worth the effort or whether you can just build it yourself with fewer issues. that's like what you've done is you've sort of realized that, okay, this demographic to the primary business is not 100 % aligned.

It's maybe 70 to 60 % aligned with the primary business. This one that you're acquiring lets us run alongside this other business and there can be some synergies that evolve over time. Is that what you're working on? So to give you a few concrete examples, we acquired a scraping business that offers a scraping API. It's called Scrape API. And for example, our SEO tools in the portfolio require a lot of web scraping, so they are using Scrape API now under their hood and replaced other technical solutions they used before because now it's much cheaper, of course, to use our own stuff.

So that's what we are evaluating constantly, whether we can dogfood our own solutions to other brands, but it's not that we're acquiring for example, two SEO businesses and we're evaluating, okay, do we use this as a feature for the other one or we just merge them and keep one of the brands.

That's not what we're usually doing. We might experiment with some upselling cross-selling opportunities in the future, but yeah, as I said, it always looks good on paper in practice. It's much harder to reach out to your existing client base and say, Hey, there's this other tool, maybe worth trying out. That's why we leave it for now.

Absolutely. agree. And another good way to do it though is like, say for example, you've got somebody in your email list for this one business that hasn't yet used this tool. Maybe they're not.

Looking for all the features and everything that's in that tool, you can market the other business through your email list to that email list and say, Hey, look, if you haven't thought this out, we've got, there's a competitor that might be just as good, or there's this other product out here that has these things.

If you're interested, we've worked out a deal where you get a good deal for it. And you could run those campaigns from one business to the other, other businesses to the other, and vice versa sort of thing, just through an email list for people that haven't yet made the move but have thought about it and realize it's not the right tool.

Let's move across.

Yeah. Yeah. So good to have you on. Thanks.

Yeah. Thanks for having me.

I just wanted to give you another example. We acquired time-tracking software quite recently. So two, three months ago, we were exploring the whole space. So they are very active in the dark space and we were just approaching other time tracking solutions in the dark space to find out, is there an opportunity?

And it can be a good opportunity if there's, for example, a distressed business and they are looking for a fire sale and you can maybe just acquire their client list for cheap. So you save yourself some acquisition costs and you just let them reach out to the clients and say, Hey, we're sunsetting the product, but you can now switch to the other one and get an annual discount or something, but you have to actively source them.

Mean, they are usually not coming to you, but this can also be like a good way to quickly integrate or acquire clients without much technical integration headache. Absolutely. I like that. That's awesome. Thank you so much for coming on Dirk. Is there anything that you would share with people like you've been in the &A space now and acquiring finance and businesses? is there anything you would leave for somebody listening who is looking at buying their first business, building out a conglomerate or a hold-go?

Yeah, so make sure you build enough confidence that you really want to spend that money and make that transaction and make sure the business is not distressed if it's your first one and it's working; it's not broken. So you don't need to fix things but rather build on top of a good-looking business. And yeah, just get informed, get advisors like you on board if you're not an expert in the field to not mess things up and hopefully do more acquisitions after that first one. I love it. Wise words and very linear too.

Dirk again; thank you so much for coming on. Where can we send people to reach out to you if they wish or check out?

So feel free to check out my LinkedIn profile. I'm posting a lot of content about &A topics, as well as SaaS KPIs, benchmarks and so on. yeah, if you want to talk Q&A, if I can help you acquire your first business or if you want to sell yours, then feel free to reach out to my email, dirk at SaaS.group. And yeah, I would love to talk.

Awesome. Thanks again, Dirk.

Everybody who's listening, thank you for listening and I'll speak to you on the next one.

Thank you for having me.