What if acquiring the finance to buy an online business was easier than expected? What if it turned out that you didn’t need as much upfront capital as you thought? In this episode, Jaryd Krause explores these questions with Ami Kassar.
Ami Kassar is the founder and CEO of MultiFunding, a Philadelphia-based consulting firm specializing in helping business owners across the U.S. find creative, cost-saving financing alternatives. With over 20 years of experience, Ami is a thought leader in the field, frequently advising major institutions like the Federal Reserve Bank, the White House, and Congress. He is also a sought-after speaker at national business events.
In this conversation, Jaryd and Ami cover a wide range of topics related to financing online business acquisitions. They discuss everything from the minimum deposits and credit score requirements to how to acquire multiple businesses and build a portfolio using SBA-backed loans. They also dive into how to scale a business portfolio and share key insights into the strategic steps involved in growing a successful online business empire.
For those looking to buy their first online business or expand their portfolio, this episode is packed with valuable information to help navigate the complexities of business finance.
Let’s get started!
Courses & Training
Courses & Training
Key Takeaways
➥ Online businesses often lack physical collateral, so lenders focus on cash flow when approving loans. This makes SBA loans a good fit for financing online businesses.
➥ SBA loans typically offer better terms than private lenders, who might offer quicker, riskier loans with shorter repayment periods. The SBA’s longer repayment terms (up to 10 years) are often more manageable.
➥ Business owners should be cautious about overleveraging themselves, particularly when buying smaller businesses as their first venture. It’s essential to ensure the business is stable enough to handle debt repayment.
About The Guest
Ami Kassar, author of The Growth Dilemma, speaks nationally to entrepreneurs and business owners who desire money to grow their companies, improve cash flow and/or restructure debt.
Ami is the founder and chief executive officer of Multifunding LLC, a Philadelphia based consulting firm that specializes in helping business owners across the United States develop creative, cost-saving alternatives for their business debt needs and structure.
For over twenty years as the “go-to” thought leader in business financing, Ami is frequently quoted in national media and is a sought-after speaker at business and industry events across the country. Including advisory for the White House, the Treasury Department, Congress, and the Federal Reserve Bank.
Connect with Ami Kassar
Transcription:
Hi, I'm Jaryd Krause, I'm the host of the Buying Online Businesses Podcast and today I'm speaking with Ami Kassar, who is the author of the Grow to Lemma. He speaks nationally to entrepreneurs and business owners who desire money to grow their companies and or acquire companies, improve cash flow and or restructured debt. Now Ami is the founder and CEO of multi-funding.
He is a Philadelphia based consulting firm for finance. They specialize in helping business owners across the states with creative, cost saving finance alternatives. Now for over 20 years, Ami has been the go to thought leader in business financing and he's frequently quoted in national media and sort after a speaker at business industries and events across the states, including advisory for the White House, the Treasury Department, Congress and the Federal Reserve Bank.
Now this podcast episode is an absolute delight if you want to acquire an online business with finance. I go through so many questions around what's the minimum amount you can get for financing? What's the minimum deposit? What's your credit rating score that you need? What's the maximum amount you can lend through SBA? How can you acquire more businesses or larger businesses that's not just with SBA? How can you acquire one business with funding?
And then a year or two later, acquire another business with funding. What does that actually look like and how do you build out basically a holding company? How do you build out a portfolio of businesses using finance to drive that? All the idiosyncrasies in between and just some warning signals as well on how to use finance, how to get finance, what things to look for.
Army is a world knowledge in this space and this is an absolute delight if you're looking to get finance to acquire an online business. Enjoy this episode before we dive in. If you're looking at buying a business and you don't know how to do it or you don't know anything about it, make sure you go away and get my judo's framework. It's what I've used, what my clients use, to save people, millions of dollars, it's made people, millions of dollars and it's something you need.
Get it at buyingonlinebusiness.com for just free resources.
Let's dive in.
Hello, Army and welcome to the Buying Online Businesses podcast.
Hey, Jared, thanks for having me.
So you've been in finance for many, many years now. I help people acquire online businesses and I want to talk about online businesses versus offline businesses and lending soon, but how does your average go? Say somebody that's got just a regular wage, go and get financing to acquire a business. What are some of the things they need?
So first of all, Jared, I'm really speaking more from a USB perspective. I'm not quite sure where I think your customers are all over the world or your listeners are all over the world. So I think it's important to understand that I don't have experience helping people buy businesses in other countries and so it might be a little bit different, although I think a lot of the principles apply.
But when you're going to go buy a business or ask someone to lend you money to buy a business, while they are some unique things about saying online business, generally the principles apply and what I owe is advice people to do is about if someone were coming to you to ask you to borrow money.
They're going to want to see the financials of the business that you're buying and the tax returns from the business that you're buying for the last couple of years and they're going to want to check on that when they want to go and to want to feel comfortable that based on the cash flow of that business, you can pay them back.
And while we do 99% of our financing is with the SBA, the Small Business Administration loans, while they can be a real pain in the butt, oftentimes actually the borrowers should realize that only annoying things is there to protect them and to protect the lender.
And so there are a lot of checks and balances in there to get the lender to feel real good that you will hopefully be able to pay the loan back. And really my advice to all kinds of people when you are looking to borrow money and or buy a business is it should take a little time, it's a little bit painful.
And if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. I love that. I love that you mentioned that to preface that if it sounds too good to be true, probably years. There's a lot of hurdles to jump through and a lot of things that lenders like the SBA and maybe other lenders want to ensure that it's a smart investment for them to lend money to you. So definitely takes time.
There's a lot of people that hear these things on podcasts and YouTube eos and whatnot that it's easy to get finance and you can get a business for no money down all these sorts of things when it comes to the reality of it is there's definitely challenges that you have to face to achieve those sorts of things. And sometimes you're saying out you're personally guaranteeing a loan and signing up for an obligation to pay it back.
And so you never borrow money without giving it a lot of thought and feeling really confident that you have a good plan and place that you're going to be able to pay it back.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Is there much of a difference between getting an SBA loan to buy traditional business versus an online business?
The real difference is that and this could be true for some other retail businesses or just regular online businesses is that typically in an online business, there's really no collateral. No, no collateral might be the inventory if the business has inventory. And so really it is a heavily cash flow, air ball type transaction, which means that the SBA is particularly a good outlet for it.
And for some people who don't really understand the SBA, it is as small business administration loans, the government does not make the loans directly, but they provide a guarantee to encourage some banks and non-bank lenders to participate in it to make riskier loans than they otherwise would.
So it is a program to fuel economic growth, but you're not borrowing money from the government. You are borrowing money from the back. And then generally or three big myths about SBA lending, I like to talk to people about the first is people sometimes think the SBA is the lender and that's not the case.
The only time the SBA is the lenders of this, like an economic injury, like the crisis or a kid or two they go, you're borrowing money from the bank for your lender and you're going through their credit policy and their criteria. The second place people get messed up in SBA is I think SBA's hands were small, so that's just for the smallest of lenders out there, of borrowers out there.
And while I've seen SBA loans as small as a thousand dollars, typically you can get up to five million dollars for working capital, partner distributions, buy a business, etc. So these loans can go quite large and if it's actually a owner occupied real estate project, say the business you're buying involves real estate, you can go up to 12.8 million on those.
But perhaps the biggest place people get pushed up on SBA loans is thinking that the SBA loan is if they go to their bank and their bank says no, they're out. And that's absolutely not the case. There are, although there's like 1400 lenders in the country who do SBA loans, the top hundred of them make up almost 80% of the volume and each of them has their unique attributes and credit policy and where they lend and how they lend and how what they like to lend.
So sometimes in SBA lending, you have to kiss a bunch of frogs to find a prince. I love those myths. I'll lay great. Let's dig into a couple of those. So is it typically max that you see somebody be able to require lending whilst using SBA and another lender for around the five million dollar range? Is that what you said? Five million?
Sometimes the lender will do what the technical dragon for is a parry patsule. So it might actually go as sometimes we've gone as high as eight, but on that capital stack, the lender will have five million of SBA and then a couple million dollars of traditional money on the same thing. And so that's generally how it works. Okay. And other other lenders that do finance online businesses that not through SBA, like you work with many lenders or any lenders that do finance, say maybe an e-commerce business or a media business, maybe even a SaaS software business without using SBA backing.
So the answer is yes, but or yes, and so if it's a very strong highly profitable business that is going to trade for 10, 15, 20 million dollars, there absolutely are bank lenders or niche lenders who will do those transactions. But if it's where I'm suspect a much smaller transaction, there are a lot of lenders out there that are more private lenders that will do these and they'll make the process seem really enticing and simple and fast and tell you then get you funded in a week or two or three.
ut I always caution everyone on those that while it might seem incredible also is it can be you really, whenever you take a loan, you really have to concentrate hard on what that monthly payment is going to be and you have to be really comfortable in your ability to meet it. And so if a private lender says they'll do the loan but they expect to be paid back in three years versus the SBA that's going to want to be paid back in 10 years, your monthly payment is going to be held a lot higher. And so while there are options, we really strongly encourage everyone to look at the SBA first, even though it's longer and more painful. And if you are going to explore one of those more private programs, be really, really clear on the terms and what your monthly payment is and what you can expect.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I can see why the, like you said before, the SBA allow like giving some backing towards lenders to provide better terms versus going directly from say I want to require business and I'm a US resident. And there's a lender that wants, that will give it to me outside of SBA. Those terms are going to be typically a lot not as good as SBA backing, right?
Correct. Typically, probably dramatically worse than S. What are we talking like dramatically worse? Are we looking at like you said three year loans and what's the, like what are the terms that we got in terms of interest?
Well, I don't know the exact terms of those lenders these days because I haven't looked at them in a long time. But what I say to people is if you were to go by a car and you chose between a one year term to pay off the car or a five year term to pay off the car, you might say, geez, I just want to get rid of this debt in the year. So I'm just going to pay it off in the year.
Well, that's all grand and dandy until at some point if the world changes on you and then suddenly you can't afford to to make those payments. Sometimes it's even a Congress issue that they'll entice you into a quick appeal back for a lower interest rate. So people will focus on the lower interest rate.
I always advise people to focus on the monthly payment and think long and hard about your ability to make that and realize that while the world might feel great and groovy today, it might not feel that way for more. It's a really good advice. When I'm helping somebody by business, I'm not looking at the opportunity and how much the business can grow alone.
First, we're looking at the level of risk in the business and the stability and that coupled with understanding what your loan terms are. But most importantly, what your monthly payment is, I think it's a really good piece of advice for people thinking about, is this business stable enough to maintain that without just the growth opportunities alone to be able to pay that monthly repayment for how the loan period is?
When I teach, I have an image of a two-football players in practicing ready to kill each other and one's offense and one's defense and I encourage people as you think about constructing your balance sheet to really think about that. So you want to set yourself out. The only sure thing in business is that there's going to be unexpected surprises and those come the terms of unexpected problems or unexpected opportunities that come up.
And you want to try structure yourself to give yourself the most flexibility as you can to help with different situations. And so sometimes that's a monthly payment. There's a Congress. You might be able to, the bank might say to you, for buying a brick and mortar business, I'll lend you the money over five years at 8% or if you want the SBA, it's over 10 years at 10%.
And so sometimes people will concentrate on that eight versus the 10 and they'll say, there's nowhere I'm going to pay 10 when I can pay eight. Well, if everything works out perfectly and the business goes and grows and that'll be fine. But oftentimes things happen in business that work in your control or you get to the plan works. And in cases like that, you need to have the most flexibility. I see, you know, what if you bought a business for a month before COVID started?
Yeah, yeah, with a lot of finance. Speaking about like a lot of finance, what's the typical deposit that people put in for financing? Is it like 10, 20, 30, obviously the more? Typically, I think in good thumbnail to plan is 10%. There are occasionally tricks that you can get a down to five percent.
If you're buying a second business, sometimes you can go to 0% down with what are we always tell people as a thumbnail is counting 10%. And if we can get it lower, lower, but you know, 10% and say we put in 20%, 15 or 20% is that going to help with terms? Probably not a whole lot that it'll help you with your debt and your debt service.
Again, there are a bunch of equations that profitable as a company, cash flow of the company, the strength of the personal guarantor. Is there any collateral involved? But if it's largely an airable business someone's going from 10% down to 20% down, that's probably not going to make a whole lot of debt.
Absolutely.
Cool.
Well, we talked about like typically SVA aren't going to back much more than the 5 mil range. They can do in some circumstances, depending on the business. What about the minimal? Like is there a minimum, like say somebody wants to buy a business for 100K and they've got 10K? Is that really an option?
There is, there's a lender now that we work with that's doing those smaller loans in a much less painful way for loans under half a million dollars that are acquisition finance. So the answer is yes. Yeah, cool, cool. I just want to put a word of caution out there for somebody if they're going to go and buy their first online business, so that never been in online businesses or online business or working one and they want to go buy 100K online business for 10 grand.
That's their first run. Be very careful. I wouldn't suggest it actually to be honest. I'd be suggesting going at a lower level that seems like you're kind of financing yourself to the hills with unless you've got some really good partners. The risks can be high with that. But as the businesses increase typically they're more stable, right? So I can see why the SVA have only just started to allow smaller and you said what? SVA has always done them. It's just the amount of, they've changed some of their roles to make smaller transactions a little simpler and more tech enabled.
So that makes it a few lenders are trying that. I think what's really important for people to understand about SVA lending in general is that it, I call it, it has a brand by association problem. And so you have a friend who went to get an SVA loan and had a really bad experience.
And now your impression of SVA lending is that it's awful and you don't want it to work. And your friend might have had a bad experience but that could have been driven by two scenarios. They either were a bad borrower with bad financials and a really messy situation or potentially they were going to an SVA lender who really wasn't qualified or didn't really know the program very well.
But then so people come into the SVA through many, many doors and maybe it'll be interesting for you to understand at least what we do at our company. We help people through the financing process. We financed last year with, I think we did like 96 or 93 transactions and we did them with 17 different lenders. And so not every lender fits every situation properly.
And sometimes lenders come and go, sometimes lenders are on the hot streak and then they pull out or vice versa. So these are the types of scenarios that where and how we try to bring value the other important thing I think for people to know is that in today's age there's no need for them to physically meet their lender any. The lender could be in a hole thinking about 90% of our transactions, our borrower and our lender actually never.
So I think some of that just might be interesting for folks. Yeah, it's lovely. When you think about like somebody else that's helping people get SVA back loans, they might have three lenders that they've got contact with versus larger amount and other people's experiences typically aren't going to be the same unless, I mean, it's just how somebody perceives their experience as well with that loan too. There's so many variables there now. So SVA looked at the business that they're providing finance for.
They also look at the person as well. What are some of the checks that SBA do or and or lender does on the person? Sure, they're going to look at your credit for your background. They're going to look at your personal financial statement to see how much liquidity you're going to have post transactions, sort of things don't go quite right.
You can be there to help and they're going to look for your prior income and cash flow and they're going to review your personal tax returns, your personal financial statement and all that. They just do that and that's an important part of the package as well. Yeah, so obviously the more sort of savings or capital you have after the loan settles and what your income is that typically it's going to be more favorable for you to get finance, right? 100 percent. Yeah. Now, say somebody wants to build out like a buy multiple businesses and they want to build out like a holding company.
Would you reckon?
I'm not a finance, I'm not a practicing financial advisor. I think the least amount of debt to start off with the better because I can help, I believe it can help you get more debt in the future to build out or acquire more companies. But say, for example, somebody does by a business, let's just say a $500,000 business they use you, it's a SBA backed loan and they've put percent down before that business and they've owned it for maybe three years or two years.
Is there the option to go and raise finance again to acquire another business or is that quite difficult? Absolutely. In fact, you have a stronger ability to get financing for that second business because you've got more background and you've proved your ability to do it. And if that second business is in the same industry, say e-commerce is the first one that could actually be considered an expansion loan and you could do that with zero percent down.
So I strongly couldn't recommend more, don't borrow more money than you need to do what you want to do at the time, but you can absolutely stack up SBA loans as you go. As long as your aggregate borrowing ability doesn't exceed $5 million with one exception to that. If you buy two businesses in entirely different industries with the new rules, you can actually get $5 million per industry.
So it used to be that the cap was just $5 million in total. Now it's $5 million in industry. Now if they were to Amazon companies selling a different type of widget, even though there was a different widget, I still think those would be considered the same industry. But if you want to buy a company that manufactures the products that would be considered a new industry. Cool. And so what's the difference between like say an expansion loan because it sounds like and I would love you to correct me if I'm wrong.
It sounds like to acquire the first business, you're kind of getting like an acquisition loan and they're looking at the business and then also your personal income. But for an expansion loan, they can look at three things, right? Or more, the business that you've already owned for a number of years, the results you've gotten from that business, your personal income, and then the business that you're looking to acquire again. Am I correct in saying that? And is that why help?
The expansion loan is a technical term that says if you are buying a business that essentially does exactly what your business today is doing, you can do that with your percent down. They take away that down payment requirement. So that's the only technical part of what an expansion loan is. Your application is certainly stronger if the underwriter can see that this guy has done this before. It's going well. He's owned this for a couple years. He's performed. He's growing it.
Now he wants to do it again. That certainly makes for a better story. Yeah. Now with structuring, say I have a business of order 500 came, I did 20% down, use SBA or SBA backed loan from a lender. And I want to do an expansion loan to say by a million dollar business. I need to purchase that business in the same entity that I purchased this the first business. Or can I get an expansion loan and acquire that business in another sort of LLC?
Or does it sort of need to be under the same roof? It's a good question. And if I'm never sure the answer, I say I'm not sure and I'm not a hundred percent sure. Okay. I'll find out for you and get back to you because you really get spucked, but I'm not a hundred percent sure. I do think that it has to. And a minimum have that same ownership. I imagine as long as it's the same ownership. Here's my best guess. As long as it's the same ownership.
And it moves to a different LLC, no problem. But if there's a different ownership group, it's not going to count as an expansion. Yeah. It makes total sense. And we're looking at building out a holding company here. Most of the businesses that are going to be acquired are going to be under the same roof anyway. So does it make sense though with the jump?
For example, of a 500k business, you know, purchase price 500k and then owning something for two years to go to get an expansion loan was zero down for a million dollar loan. Does that make logical sense with your knowledge of finance or not really? It really depends on what your risk tolerance is.
So for me, that would make me sleep better at night. And that would feel like a logical evolution of building a business. I always say sometimes the toward the swings that are the race. But other people might want to look at it very differently. The lender might give you more faster.
I don't know. It depends on what you're buying and the appraisal or what you're buying and the quality of what you're buying and your prior experience and all that. So it sounds like a nice solid, conservative way to go about building a business. But I'm not 100% sure that it's the only.
Yeah, cool. Well, through doing this podcast, I can almost guarantee you guys are going to get a bunch of people reaching out to you guys. They're looking to buy businesses. Now with that and somebody goes and buys a user that say they buy a 500k business or maybe a 250k business because that's that ability to purchase under the 500k range.
How soon is too soon to come to you and say, I've had this business for six months or I've had this business for a year. What are my options in terms of lending? How much could I raise or lend to acquire another business? Reason I ask this is because I build out my portfolio. Six months ago, but you also should keep in mind that you can, if you need it, sometimes people get SB loans for growth or expect a working capital growth capital to exist in business.
You might not just align a credit or working capital. You might not just come to the well just for the purpose of buying a business. You could come, you might say sometimes people say, geez, I really want to buy that building now or things like that. All of those scenarios. Yeah, absolutely. And I've talked about this in terms of acquiring not just your market share and competition when building out a whole code, but acquiring like your biggest expenses, say, for example, a e-commerce business, go and buy an e-commerce business for 500k and it's doing quite well and you realize, damn, it's doing well, but we're spending a lot on the manufacturing of this.
Maybe we can buy the manufacturer six months later and use it. Anything or you're going to buy the building or you're sometimes suddenly you need a lot more, you're going well and you need a lot more inventory or maybe it's a B2B business. You have AR and you need a database line. People's lending markets change and companies change. I always say it's really a good idea. Almost like going to the dentist twice a year to check in on your overall financial health.
Yeah, cool. Now with these expansion loans, say, for example, you are going to acquire a more lending. So the terms typically different than just. Typically, there'd be a real reason that terms will be different is if there's maybe incredible cash flow and you're buying the business that are really good price or there's like some hard to allow like real estate. Otherwise, the terms are going to typically be and you're using the SBA. The terms are going to be pretty close.
Cool. Cool. Now, I know there's people listening that they're going to have the question of like, what's the absolute minimum I can borrow? And then also with that as well, what's the absolute minimum wage that would allow me to get that borrowing capacity? And I'm just going to preface this for people listening. If you're looking to borrow something under the 100k range, I wouldn't be trying to do personally.
This is a personal and there's not financial advice at all. Like I said, I'm nothing in this podcast is from myself is legal practicing financial advice at all. Personally, I was going to buy something for 100k as an example. I would be wanting to put at least 50% down for myself and I for my personal risk tolerance.
Now, there's so there's two questions that is there a like a sort of minimum wage that SBA backed loans will work with and or what's the minimum amount like we're talking like 200k 100k. I've seen SBA loans. Why should I not be good at life? I said before I've seen SBA loans at small $1,000. You can go there are places in your neighbors called CDFI's which are community development funds where they'll go help a minority or a really small startup.
Really get their first loan and there are programs to do that. We in our shop aren't necessarily really good at the hook that but all those opportunities exist. But they are still as they should going to assess your ability to pay back the loan money. Barring money doesn't solve everything sometimes.
Barring money or if you borrow too much money, it makes things worse. So, I'd like to question you to have a really good plan to be really thoughtful and mindful about how much money you're borrowing and for what purpose. Yeah, it makes a little sense like I teach this thing called leaky buckets syndrome which is where people want to invest or want to achieve a certain thing but they need a certain amount of money first.
And if they say all of your income goes into a bucket and you have a leaky bucket because there's a bunch of expenses there that you've just forgotten about and you keep those expenses and you just are not good at paying off your car or whatever it is you have. That equates to like a credit score, right?
And if you've got a credit score that showcases you got leaks in your bucket, why would a lender go away and decide to put a bunch of money in your bucket? It's not going to make financial sense for them, right? So, it makes sense to have that leaky bucket healed and fixed and obviously be able to have a decent credit rating. So, is there like what's the credit rate?
Like, is there a credit rating that they will be like not touch or is there like a different? Some lenders will take risk of things but generally a minimum like a 660 or 670 FICO score is really what you want and I would caution people not to get too carried away with business credit. Sometimes that whole industry is a scam.
They'll tell you if you improve your business credit then you'll be able to borrow money. That's really the case. You've got to have a personal credit score and if you don't work to clean it up. Right. Now, like say paying down debt, like say somebody gets a SBA back loan from a lender and they want to pay down that debt, like say they do really well in business over three years, is the option to just pay it off faster? And is there a thing that you can, and that may or may not make sense for you, um, SBA loans that don't involve real estate, there are no prepayment penalties.
So you can pay it off as fast as you want to. You can decide depends of what else to do, what other opportunities they are to do with your money if you think you can make a higher you on them than you should pay it off.
Yeah. Cool. Cool. Now, we're going from like very like all the way down to like where can you start to get credit? You said the 660 credit rating and then minimum amount that you could possibly get or is achievable with SBA. You've also mentioned there's a possibility around the 5 mil range for each sort of business category, I guess. And then you've got sometimes you can increase it a little bit more up to the 8 mil you've seen.
Once somebody outside of SBA, when somebody wants to maybe they've got a $2 million business that they've purchased and they have done quite well with that, they've used financing for it and then they want to go on a quiet maybe a $15 million business. What are their options in terms of financing then? Like as people want to scale. Again, the options will be there.
There's always I joke that private lending industry might be older than prostitution. They're always be as lenders that will be kind of like the alternative lenders on the little end, but you're going to go to the banks and banks if they are feeling that you have are doing well and you have proven your ability, they'll keep lending you money, the pay back terms probably won't be the 10, they are unlikely going to be the 10 years that SBA gives you, but they'll be strong.
Pretty strong, yeah. Is there the option, I think there is, right? The option where you say you want to buy something for 15 mil and you go, OK, SBA will give me up to 8. And then SBA will give you SBA will give you 5 and then others will give you then you can go up to them out. But if you're doing a $7 or $8 million transaction, it probably makes nice sense to use 5 million on SBA and 2 or 3 million of something else, but much more than that, it's unlikely that including the SBA and your capital stack is going to make much sense.
You're just going to go to the bank and get conventional financing. Now, there's also a difference between term debt and lines of credit. So if the business has a lot of inventory at that size or potentially AR, then you certainly can consider using a line for that, but you might need that line to operate the business.
So always, again, just to go back to the court principle, always try air, play less attention to the rate and more attention to the monthly payment, realizing that whatever the equilibrium is today, at some point points in your journey, it's going to be better than some points that's going to be worse, most likely. And you want to make sure you're equipped for both scenarios. I love that. I love that.
Now, online business is typically harder to get financing for because of lack of collateral. Is there a type of online business? What's the easiest, I guess, the easier one for a lender to lend against and a harder one, like in terms of business model? I would assume that an incomeist business that has stock, like we mentioned before, is probably a bit easier than say, like a media business that just produces media, make money through ads and whatnot. What would be one of the harder ones or ones that may not get approved?
Well, I just think you'd like to see if there's a store that's 100% Amazon bad, right? That then someone might say, well, what happens if Amazon changes their algorithms one day or changes their rules and that business has nothing else? So I don't think it's a type of business versus more a diversification of different channels and how and what are the controls in place to help that lender through that?
That's the power through that. I always say a super good question, always asked, I think, and I think it's a great question to ask when you're even thinking about buying a business is what could bring this business to its knees and if there's something big that could bring this business to its knees, well, you should think about that risk for yourself and then also understand that the lender is going to think about that risk also in their share.
So that should, yeah, we call it single source dependency when we're evaluating business and doing due diligence, for example, I could see in a lender's eyes that an Amazon business that's fulfillment by Amazon, they might have a bunch of stock, right, which can be collateral and then might sell portion of it on Amazon and then a portion of that through Shopify versus an Amazon business that is KDP, which we call Kindle Direct Publishing, where they have books written and they publish them on Kindle and people purchase them on Amazon and people purchase them off Amazon.
You have single source dependency on Amazon, it's the only place that you're selling those books and if Amazon decides to de-list your book, you've got no business or if you've got multiple books then you might have a couple, but yeah, so that's what you've got right.
Yeah, love it. Thank you so much for coming on. I mean, it's been a pleasure. I appreciate your wealth of knowledge and I am sure that we'll be having people reaching out. Where should we send people?
Send people straight to the site. Multi-funding.com will be great. And if you want to, I have a daily blog, I'll write put armystates.com that people can go check that out.
Awesome. Awesome. We'll link to that. Again, thank you so much for coming on.
Appreciate your time. Everybody that is listening. Thank you for listening.
Connect with Sophie Brannon
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Host:
Jaryd Krause is a serial entrepreneur who helps people buy online businesses so they can spend more time doing what they love with who they love. He’s helped people buy and scale sites all the way up to 8 figures – from eCommerce to content websites. He spends his time surfing and traveling, and his biggest goals are around making a real tangible impact on people’s lives.
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