Ep 316: Buying 7+ Businesses Using The Growth By Acquisition Strategy with Link Moser

How do you build a portfolio of businesses using the growth by acquisition method? Hi, I'm Jaryd Krause. I'm the host of the Buying Online Business podcast and today I'm speaking with Link Moser who is an accomplished marketing executive with over 25 years of success in driving world-class B2B digital marketing strategies for enterprise organizations and setups and he's known for delivering.

Impactful SEO, SEM and PPC campaigns that enhance online visibility, fuel revenue growth and boost performance expertise. And these sort of things include leading UX driven website development from design to content with a mobile first approach to reach target audiences and maximize ROI. Now, Link is broadly recognized for his strong interpersonal and communicational skills, which you can see throughout the podcast.

We'll talk about his entrepreneurial spirit and the ability to quickly adopt and implement new technologies and strategies in processes to give value to his clients, specifically his hosting clients. So in this podcast episode, we talk about how Link had his primary business in hosting and a great recurring revenue business, and how he came across the opportunity to acquire another business.

And then how he decided to make this his strategy to grow businesses, and why he wanted to grow businesses in this way, because it was a lot easier for him to grow that way, versus specific marketing strategies. We talk about the types of business he bought, how much he bought them for, the deal structures, how he financed the businesses.

We also talk about the things and the lessons he learned, the things that he didn't do so well and the things that he did very well. And we talk about his advice to other people that wanna grow their portfolio of online businesses using the growth by acquisition model.

Now this is such a fascinating episode, I'm sure you're gonna get so much value from it. And enjoy it.

Link, hey, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for coming on.

Thanks for having me.

Absolutely.

So congratulations. You've bought a bunch of businesses. Before we dive into that journey, I want to ask, what were you doing before you decided to acquire businesses? During the development of these businesses, and what moved you to want to acquire online businesses, was the question?

You know, it was sort of out of necessity. So I started a web design company when I was 20 years old. It was about 1996. So I was pretty much right out of high school in the early days of the internet. It was a lot, well, number one, my cost of living was lower then, and it was easier to get business organically, but as time went on and more and more people were entering in this space, for whatever reason, felt like I stunk at new business development acquisitions became a lever that I sort of stumbled into when I learned about a local competitor just rolling their book of business into some other shop.

And no one ever came and said, Hey, Link, you have an interest in this? So that's what got me to be more purposeful about reaching out to other people like myself and saying, Hey, if you ever think of selling, let's have a chat. And so it was born from that desire and that need to grow and struggling organically.

Okay. Hey, here's another way that I can look at growing.

So you just started buying out your competitors or people that were in your space, right?

Correct. I started locally and then, as I kind of exhausted that outreach, I started casting a wider net and went more regionally and nationally.

Cool. And is this just based on web development? Like business? My sweet spot is with website hosting and then with web hosting comes web development and web maintenance. Thee hosting is a high profit, a high margin, recurring revenue that has been steady through recessions and boom times. So many people need their website to be hosted. And then the byproduct of that is the project-based revenue that comes from, Hey, I need a new website, or help me add this page kind of thing.

Yeah. It's a great lead.

Like a membership business, a recurring revenue business with the upsell opportunity to increase customer lifetime value through one-time purchases, a landing page, or site development, or a theme, or whatever it is.

Correct. You've got that relationship with one service, assuming you're doing well with that. You have a much warmer sell to eight. You guys need help with print design.

What about CEO or are you doing anything on social media? Right. Those conversations are not cold. If you've already got a relationship with a customer. Absolutely. And they're in the space.

They typically need that stuff. Way around entering this, like acquiring businesses is similar to me, but also a little bit dissimilar where I tried to start for me. And then I thought, why don't I buy something that's already.

Built and established, and, then grow that you've done that differently, in what we call growth by acquisition, acquiring your market, basically acquiring the market cap. And I've heard from some pretty awesome advisors over the years that every business problem can be solved with an acquisition, typically, not all the time, but typically it can.

And so do you go and out like for the first acquisition, did you go and find that through your network or did it come to you? And what did that look like? What was that? What was the first acquisition? Do you talk prices? The very first one was probably, so I started sending letters out. I realized these people were not going to come to me if I did not put myself out there and say, Hey, I'm interested.

Some of these people on the smaller end probably didn't even realize they had something that somebody else would be interested in. So hopefully they don't just shut the door and tell their customers, Hey, I'm all done. You've got to find someone new. So I sent out letters and I started locally.

And the first one that came in was a sad story, a widow whose husband had been the technical component of the business, and he passed away. So she didn't know to keep running the business. These guys actually, I think kept servers on their property. So she'd had my letter. I'm sure she'd had it for a good year or so.

And people hang onto these letters and reach out and say, hey, here's my situation. I need to find a good place for customers to go. So it was a hundred percent earn out. Said, I'll, I'll give you half of whatever comes in the door from this customer base for the next 12 months. And she was happy to have a place for the customers to go. made that simple. I transitioned them over and she didn't have to worry.

And then she got something. Mean, not a life changing amount of money, but it was enough to close that chapter. And I think seller motivation is a big part of the timing. Yeah, absolutely. It's good for their customers as well to not be trying to make things work with their business and have those sort of like hosting solutions with somebody that's not technical that can't serve them. So it's better really for everybody, isn't it? So it's all across the board.

And even though we can work with someone anywhere in the world, there's still a comfort for small businesses with somebody local. So I think it was easier in this case for the person to say, Hey, I found this guy. He's right here in the same state. He's not, not a location matters, but I think people still value that buying local. So it helps that narrative.

And I've certainly acquired some that are further out, but you do see a little more challenge and retention sometime with that. So, right. Because these are so much about personal relationships at this size. Talk to me about that. Like people with local, so you're mostly serving businesses like local businesses with websites. That right?

Correct. Correct. Yeah. Yeah. I can see how, cause I've got a friend who's a web developer, a website developer, and a brand developer. And he works with just local based businesses. And I can see that they're very interested in just working with people in the local area. Like he normally refers people to me to help them grow their businesses.

And I refer them to other people. Yeah. It seems like some people like me in my space and online business, making money online, a lot of people are just fine with like working with anybody, virtual assistants and all that sort of stuff. But when it's somebody that is slowly moving away from like the traditional brick and mortar business or lifestyle, or they're in that they just typically stay because it's a comfort zone, right?

So I can see why that would be an important people and so good for retention because local based businesses, they don't want to have to worry about any downtime on the web. Right. I just want to pay money to somebody that can solve that. So do you, do you have local servers and all that sort of stuff? Or how does it, how does it work in terms of like, servers are here stateside, necessarily local to me. And I don't know that the customer is technically savvy enough to know about that or care.

Think they just want their point of contact to be low. Not everyone, certainly some don't care, but enough of these small business customers do value that more so than maybe the bigger customers that are more geographically agnostic. Think we're generalizing there, but I think that's kind of been the experience with most of my customers, who are what I would call Main Street mom and pop businesses.

So, I'm not so large that I don't know all of them when they call and they know who I am. So I think that is helpful for retention, but it also is trickier when you are acquiring because that relationship is changing, just as if your doctor were to retire and say, here's the new doctor.

Well, you don't know that new doctor. You don't have a relationship with them. So you might try them, but you're starting over. So you've got to build that trust back up. Right. There are the pros and cons in that.

So that was the first one you acquired. Did a 50-50 earn out. So how long was the earn out? How long did that take? That one was 12 months. And I think it was maybe 30 customers or so. There weren't a ton of them.

Yeah. At that time. So did you say 50-50 as in like you paid 50 % in cash and then 50 % was an earn out over 12 months? No. So there was no cash upfront. So it was 50 % of the gross revenue received the month before.

If a hundred dollars comes in this month, the beginning of next month, I'd write them a check for $50 and I would do that for 12 months. Cool. Cool. Have you shared or are you open to sharing, like acquisition prices or anything like that, as we move through? Yeah, I don't mind at all sharing any of those numbers.

Now that one, I don't remember the details. Mean, there was no upfront price and I've never gone with a fixed price because of the earn out, which changes it. We could project what it might be if the revenue of the previous 2 months was the same, it never happened.

Right. And that's a tricky conversation with a seller because sometimes some of them I'm not getting it all up front. You know, you're not guaranteeing me a price. Well, can you guarantee me all these customers will stay here for the next 12 months? No. Well, all right. You know, we've got to share that, that risk.

But yeah, I'm certainly happy to share numbers on any of them. There's just some of them I don't remember that was probably 11 years ago. Okay. Yeah. Right. And yeah, congrats on that acquisition. Then so how far out was your next acquisition? I had taken my foot off the gas for a few years between 2014 and 20, say seven.

I have had an interest in residential real estate sales. So I was focusing more on that business and this one kind of got neglected. By the time I circled back to it, Trishon had taken it down to an embarrassingly low place of, I don't know, like $20,000 a year. I mean, it was really low. And so I like, all right, I've got to boost this back up. So I got real serious about sending letters out, which caused that to work before. In 2017, I connected with a person who was another local customer. This was an older gentleman.

It had been a sort of a second career for him. He'd retired from the corporate world. He had about 30, 35 customers. He was a Joomla guy, which I knew nothing about Joomla. It was more of a WordPress guy, but I'm like, Hey, it's cPanel hosting. You've got revenue there. I'm interested.

Yeah. I think he was making about 32,000 a year. So not a huge amount, but it was a good little deal where I put down $4,000 and then same terms, 50 % on the recurring, the gross recurring, and then 35 % on everything else, which I called one time or project-based revenue. And that was for 18 months. Cool. Cool. Great. So four grand down, had 35 customers.

Yeah. Okay. Do you have an estimation on what that price would have been? I think it would have fallen that one, that one held pretty good. So I think that would have shown up to around 32,000-ish for him. I did keep track at that point, going forward, of what my payments were and what they ended up getting and sort of compare how that went with what we projected. Cool.

And so that was like August of 2017. And by September of 17, I had picked up another one. This was an out-of-state guy who was spinning out. So he wasn't selling his whole book, he was spinning out so that he could focus on a particular vertical in his industry. So he says, everybody that doesn't fit that vertical, I'm looking to sell.

And there were about a hundred customers in that batch. Cool. And he had had a custom content management system, which came with no documentation and no one knew how this thing worked. But he sold it with the server so we didn't have to migrate it. And again, I was looking at the cashflow and I was getting a little overconfident.

So in that one, I think I put down $30,000 because there was a fair amount of project-based revenue as well. Was about, it's usually somewhere 50-50. So half of that's project, half of that's recurring. And I will value the recurring at a higher amount because it is stickier. And that one went pretty well.

What I learned from that one was that the project-based revenue was not sticky. The 12, I think we did the same terms, 50 % of the recurring, maybe this case, 30 % of the project-based, and that was for, it might've been 12 months. I don't know if it was a full 18 months, maybe 15 months, somewhere in there.

But I found that the bulk of project-based revenue had been booked in the previous 12 months before I came and took it over. So that stuff did not materialize. Those people did not need another website a month, a year later. Yeah. So it took a little longer for me to recoup the revenue on that one, but the recurring did stick was a lesson learned, is okay.

That product-based is less predictable than I thought. So that was less predictable. If you don't have a, well, of course it's less predictable because you already got people signed up paying recurring, right? But if you think about it from like a, just a one-time product business, digital or physical products.

Can be a bit more predictable when you do have a good sales channel, sales distribution, that spending X amount of money on marketing or X amount of inputs on marketing, such as content marketing or paid ads, and see what the result is. Typically that is somewhat predictable until ads and algorithms or content algorithms change, right?

Yeah. For a young business like that. I wouldn't say it's young. I mean, in terms of like not a whole lot of clients that are just project-based, that can be difficult to predict. It was, but it still worked out okay. I don't know that I would have put down as much. And the custom CMS was, I wouldn't say a nightmare, but it was more of a struggle to be able to support that because we, luckily, he wasn't going out of business, so we could still contract with him and pay his developers hourly for this. So that was helpful. Uniquely enough, just last year, that same gentleman, we'd stayed in touch.

He was retiring completely, so he had half a dozen or so clients left at that point that he just rolled over and he moved them all over and there was no compensation whatsoever.

Congrats. That's great. It was a big tick up, but it was still great. Hey, happy to do that. He knew how to move them over and get them set up and how great that's an amazing thing to have happen. Just want to like the audience to really sort of see behind the scenes on why that would have possibly happened as for you as a buyer.

And my assumption, and I'm hoping I'm correct here, is that why would he not do it when you've helped his previous clients, you've bought the business, and you've built a great relationship. More so being that the relationship is great. And you sustain that relationship, the value of relationships.

And I'd say this again and again and again, typically the value of the relationship in the deal can end up being more valuable than the deal you acquire itself. It can, it can. You say that's probably the biggest component of why he just gave them, gave you those 12 clients? Yeah, he, we stayed in touch. I continued to contract with them and have support questions. I, I, I've never missed an earn out payment.

I've never had to be chased for it. The first of the month, if I've got one due, it says on a Sunday, I'm writing the check. I'm getting it in the mail. Cool. I think I was going to say? Yeah, I a hundred percent agree with you that the value is in that relationship. Now I did not expect that to happen, but I think if you do what you say with people and it was funny, I gave some customers back because sometimes personality is just not a fit. And he had some difficult customers.

And I'm like, look here, I don't want to deal with this guy. You can have them back. No problem. And so when he retired, some of those people came back to me and they were, guess what? We're going to do this differently now. You know? So it was a little, little funny that they thought they had gotten rid of me, but guess what? Well, here you are. That's hilarious.

I think that's a good thing for people to understand in business as well is that like business can become less fun when you don't enjoy who you're working with. And so at the start, sometimes you need to work with everybody to get money in the door and get out of the survival phase.

But once you have a bit more stability, it's worth not taking on certain people or discontinuing projects and work with people because then you can, I think the aim of the game in the business, in business is to stay in the game. And the longer you can stay in the game and enjoy it, the better it is for everybody. So why are you working with people that you don't particularly like to work with?

And also it's better for the clients too. Like if you're frustrated with that, if you're frustrated working with them, of course they're probably more, even more frustrated working with you. Right? Yes. And I think some of that comes with age too, right? As we get older, we become more mature, we're maybe more confident. We're also, you know what? I don't need this. It's not a fit. We aren't getting along.

That's okay. Life's too short. So here, let me show you the door. There are many graceful ways to, as they say, fire a client. And it doesn't happen often, but you realize that once every couple of years, there's somebody that's just, they have a bad attitude. They aren't respectful. Mean, you realize as you get older, how you let people treat you. And as you said in the beginning, you need all the revenue you can get, but hopefully you get to a sustainable point where you can be selective.

And I will say, I love helping and working with nice people, along with their kind and polite. Professional, I'll do anything I can to help them. But once that goes, then we're all set. Yeah, exactly. And so did you end up buying a couple more? How many did you end up buying in total? I think at this point we're probably at seven or eight.

Now, some of these are super small. I had a good run there for a while on 17 and 18, and I thought this is like shooting fish in a barrel. But then what happened leading up to the pandemic is my perspective was two things. One, I became a little wiser to where the red flags are in some of these scenarios.

So I started becoming a little more selective. The market was still ramping up leading into the pandemic. So it felt like valuations were going up. And as you move upstream in deal size, you typically have more sophisticated sellers and owners that recognize that they have a more valuable asset.

And so you, you've got to pay a little more, but the risk is still there. And so it was hard for me between 18 and 23 to find a good-sized deal. There were little ones that were some spin outs and things that I, I'm sure I've forgotten about in there, but boy, I was not getting the growth that I was hoping. And I was getting frustrated.

Because I'm like, I'm doing the same thing. I'm running out of places to send letters. I look at broker deals as well, but I've not had good luck with broker deals because it's kind of an auction, and a price, and many brokers are not open to an earn out or advising that. And I guess if the seller doesn't have to do it, that, know, not good. Their money is faster, right? They want to sell for mostly cash. And if they can get that for the seller, that's what I would want. If I were a seller.

So 23 was the most recent one I did and it was the largest I did. Happened to have a broker as well, which was a very good broker. It was the best fit yet. It was probably about 60 customers. They were larger customers, so they had higher value per customer. They also came with a good chunk.

So it probably had about $80,000 gross of recurring revenue. So, hosting and maintenance plans, which you like to see, because that will be a value add on, on straight hosting. I would have been happy if it was just that, but there was probably about another 80 or so of print design work, which is again, one-time project-based work, something I had not done a lot of, but I was certainly comfortable with it. And, they were, a retiring age, traditional retiring age, husband and wife team. And they did not have the technical knowledge. They'd been outsourcing that.

Happy to have someone be interested in it that had that knowledge. And then you kind of had to take the print work as well, which I was happy to do. Now this was, this was a six hour drive from me. So it was not local upstate New York, but it's worked out well. They stayed on board for a while, in a freelance role doing some of the design work while I transitioned that to, a freelancer here at Stateside.

And it was a very gradual handoff where the others had been, okay, you got it. You ultimately didn't answer questions, but this worked out well to help transition those relationships. I've driven out a few times, met some of the clients in person, which certainly helps with the goodwill and the value. And all, was a great experience. And that one was about $60,000 down. And the rest of it was an earn out over 24 months.

Okay. Cool. Congratulations.

I'm still making payments on that as of this time that will wrap up the end of this year, but it's been a great fit. Hope that they would say the same. Some of the lessons I learned in that one were that we did not perhaps discuss the best terms for how we would work together.

We did a good job getting the closing and we knew that I would be paying them a contractor rate, but I don't know that we thought about how that was going to transition out. They were still meeting with clients in person. I couldn't duplicate that, said, we've got to, we've got to wean the clients off of that.

What does that timeline look like? So thereweres some assumptions there made on both sides that we recovered from, but I think for hindsight, we should have talked some of that more throughThatat would have been a, that's a note in my head for the next time, is to talk about the post-closing relationship with that seller in a little more detail, just so everyone, you can't foresee all the challenges, but the more you can.

No, you can't. And things do change as well. Agreements can change into post-sale training as well. If both parties are happy with that, that's fine. Sometimes I like to have more training in the asset purchase agreement or the contract of sale and then not use it. And if you don't need it, that's great. And the sellers are happy.

They don't need to do more training as well. Then there's some goodwill left in that relationship that you can just keep the relationship alive. And that's the most important part because then you can have more agreements moving forwards. Now, I just want to like state here that everybody listening, you have bought these businesses mostly with large chunks of being an earn out.

And it sounds like most of these have been businesses you've acquired off market. So it can be done, but also, being private deals, it's very different to buying a business from, I mean, you bought this last one from a broker, which is a portion earn out and portion cash.

Typically, those earnouts aren't as popular or aren't as normal to do with acquisitions. I don't like it sometimes when you mention things in podcasts, and you do videos and content, people take it as gospel, and that every business they can buy for no money down and a massive earn out and like no deposit and stuff. It's like, come on, like let's, you gotta be realistic with like where the market's at and you're buying in a different market than maybe other people are buying. So I just wanted to highlight that.

I also want to ask you through your process of acquiring these businesses, they're strategic acquisitions, right? Very strategic acquisitions that lend to your primary business, and you're growing by acquisition. So that's your strategy. What lessons have you learned that have been great? What one or two lessons have you learned that have been very, very powerful, and what one or two lessons have you learned that you would continue to avoid?

That's a great question. It reminds me of one transaction that I did forget about that was in 2020. You'll understand why I forgot about it here in a second, because it's, it was probably one of the biggest lessons. This was a company that did not fit my model. Was a company that was in Denver, Colorado. So quite a distance from me. And the focus was social media content creation.

So if you think of a company that needed somebody to create content and post it on social, it was an outsourced business model, and it was a high retainer, certainly compared to web. So you had retainers between 1200 and $3,000. It had an established, it had its own, and had two W2 employees with it. It was a hundred percent recurring revenue though.

And it had monthly recurring revenue. Uh, the MMR was probably around $20,000. It was decent sized by my standards and the owner was taking a different tact. We were not retiring, but they were focusing on a different business venture. And we'd been in touch for a while. Some of these conversations take years.

I had tried to rehome this for someone else. It didn't work out. I had just reached out as a follow-up and, and I caught wind of this and I said, I'm interested. Let's talk. Then that's a great place to be when someone has already tried. It's not the first time that happened to me where I caught somebody who was already trying to rehome this business.

So what were your terms with that person? Because that's kind of, you have a benchmark for what they were willing to accept. So it was a no money down, 100 % earn out model. I'm like, boy, Christmas is coming early here. To acquire $20,000 of recurring revenue for zero down was like, all right, it's not a service line I know about, but it comes, with staff. The numbers are looking good.

Why wouldn't I try this? I like where this is going as a great lesson. Can preempt this before maybe everybody else. Do you think you know where it's going? Yeah. Sometimes things are too good to be true. That's true. And I didn't do a lot of due diligence because I've got nothing to risk. That was December of 2020, I think, or 2019. So we finalized the deal on January 1st, whatever year that was, as I had never met anybody.

Didn't fly out. This was during the pandemic. So 21, I think, because it was during the pandemic. So that's why I didn't get on a plane and go out there. Well, this thing was shedding clients leading into this and it continued to do so. So long story short, by about May, so five months in, it was still shedding clients. It didn't help that the Russian-Ukrainian conflict fired up.

Gas prices were going up. There were some geopolitical tensions at that point, that caused these clients to look at this like, is this a need? And it was not a service that was moving the needle. And so some of them brought it in house. Some of them had strong relationships with the owner, who was still very visible, and then doing their part.

Didn't do anything wrong here, but we couldn't write that ship and I had two employees that were on salary instead of hourly To move them over to a variable rate would have been a take back. I said, I'm making my earn out payments here, but I'm not taking anything. And that was fine, but we were heading into the red. So I said, Hey, you could take it back or we'll just let clients find new homes.

And that's what happened. So that's a long winded way of sharing that story is that if you don't get the deal terms right, what would have happened if a broker had packaged that all up and sold it for say even two times? Yeah. And some poor fella mightn't have gotten an SB loan, but maybe you could have cashed out your retirement account, and would they have had the same fate I had?

Maybe it would have been different, but what would have happened with these? Typically, with those, typically as a buyer-start advisor, we have certain contingency plans within an asset purchase agreement with an earn out and amortization and balloon periods and stuff like that. If you're using SBA to ensure some risk is not all risk is taken on by the buyer.

And also this is a tricky one too, because as the, it's an anomaly that period in time isn't anonymized for businesses. After all, that business went backwards. Millions of others did, went out of business completely as well. So it's a very, like it's something that can't be predicted. It's sort of like saying, I'm going to invest in this stock and it's been, you know, it's got, it's poised for goodness. And then apparently that if you're investing in a mining stock and the mine gets shut down, nobody can preempt that.

Right. So it's a, it is a tricky period. So it's a good lesson that you've learned and that's a great lesson for all investors to learn, but also I wouldn't be too harsh on yourself at the same time as well. No, I was proud that I structured it in a way that I mitigated that risk. Definitely. I would have done that deal all day long with those terms because it had no financial risk. And there was a lot of time that went into it and I invested a lot of time getting to know the employees and you know, which is fine, but those are all part of it.

I'm just glad that, you know, the other takeaway there was to look at the value of the service because a company that is spending thousands of dollars a month is going to look closely at that or closer than they would $30 a month for web hosting. So if you're, I think this rule applies to things like SEO as well. And PPC, if you're not showing an ROI on that spend, you've got 30 days to earn the next 30 days.

And whereas hosting is more of a, like equated to a utility, right? It's like keeping the lights on, you know, my website's up, it's working good. So knowing the services you're providing. Yeah. And even web design and project-based work has a tangible asset to a, here's my new website. Yes, I see it. I paid X price for it. Yeah. It's much more tangible. So those are the big takeaways for me.

Yeah, cool. Cool. Congratulations. I love those takeaways. And so what's next? Are you going to continue to grow by acquisition over the years as the years go on? It's still a hard lever to pull as much as I would love to keep doing these ideals.

I don't always know where to find them. Many, many letters, thousands of letters have gone out over the years and a fraction have responded. Do you then send back out to everyone, was it as on target as it was?

The last mailing I did last summer was to about 3000 ad agencies. I got the idea from a company that was locally here for sale. That was a broker deal. I liked it, and turns out that the seller changed their mind about selling. So I thought, where else are there companies like this one?

The numbers were good. I liked it and it was more heavily in the print side of things. And so that's what got me going down the ad agency, and also my thought there was a traditional ad agency might have an older owner because in the digital world, there's a lot of younger owners. After all, it's a younger industry.

But if somebody had already been in the pre-internet phase, I've learned also the second takeaway is that the seller's motivation. Why, why are they having that conversation with me now? It has to be something other than strictly financial. I don't have the resources or the desire to overpay. So they are better off keeping what they're doing if their only reason is, give me a lot of crazy money and I'll sell. So I'm looking for an age-related reason, a health-related reason, a burnout, an opportunity to do something else.

Exactly. There needs to be a non-monetary reason. Otherwise, you're going to pay a premium to try to move that person's timeline in a direction that had naturally been going, if that makes sense. Right. Right. Yeah. Those businesses where people are just ready to move on for, like you said, it could be health, could be a period in their life. It's typically the best acquisitions versus somebody that's built something to sell and they've cut corners and they just want to quit cash.

Yeah, absolutely. I learned to ask those questions on the first call in an indirect way, to sort of feel that out, because I want, I will talk them out of it if they don't have a good answer. And we'll just, we'll put a pin in that and Hey, down the road. Nice meeting you. Hang on to my info. And that happens too.

People will, it's not now, but then for some people, a health scare or something unpredictable changes that timeline. So, yeah. And I think that, I think what you were saying before is like, do you send out more letters? Do you follow up? Like if you look at a marketing strategy to achieve a result and your marketing strategy is sending out letters to acquire businesses, which is a result, it's been very fruitful for you.

So the ROI on that is quite good. If it were me personally, I would send out, I would send out follow-ups and I would send out more because it's a great marketing strategy that has worked for you for years now and yes, there can be limited supply, but it could be just there is supply gets opened up as people start to remember like, yeah, I got a letter from this guy two years ago and he's still interested.

Like him, know, make a point, and it should be an obvious one, because another lesson here is sometimes I have reached out to people by email and it's been too long. Wow. Yeah. We sold that last year.

Yeah. All right. So clearly I wasn't being a bother enough. So you're right. You make a very good point that is an obvious one that I have a database here. Some of these are letters that go back, gosh, seven or eight years. So no way are they sitting there thinking of me. So they could be long since gone at this point. So it would be worth going back to that and reaching out again.

It's funny because sometimes the most obvious ones we don't see because they're right under our noses or right under us. And we're always like, how do we get ahead? And we're looking for answers. And when we're going out and looking for answers, we're not going within and typically within the business, which is the rawest data that you have and the best data that you have to use. It's a philosophy that I like to teach people to use inside out growth versus outside in.

Like taking other methods that people have used when you know what already works for you. Like it's just do more of it. That's been, I think, a blind spot for me that has fallen into even things like running an ad campaign as you know, I think, and I'm sure I'm not the only one you could do one shot at it.

And you think, well, all right, I got some response or it didn't work, but you know that, that, and I know the saying, right? Takes seven or eight reps for something to stick in the mind. So yeah, of course, like sales calls or anything else, one shot is not going to get you the full value. And I just don't follow that. You know, I know it to be true. Just because there's a cost to it and you get, talk yourself out of it sometimes.

Yeah. Well, that's what any marketing strategy at the start is the best mindset I would say to have is not to be expecting a result, but expect data because what you're buying is at the start, you're not buying a result. Typically just buying data to see what works and what doesn't work.

And you need to keep buying data until you work out, until you get to a point where you're like, I haven't got any results here, or I worked out this is what the result is. And this is what it costs me. Can I do more of that? Can I scale it?

Right. Yeah. Yeah. I'm excited for you, Link. I think you've got a good thing going. And I would say keep going if it's worked for you and you've enjoyed it and you know what the right businesses are and you've learned so much. Like it's a perfect growth by acquisition strategy.

And I would love others that are listening to employ that as well with their businesses, buy an add-on business and continue to grow that way because you don't have to grow super fast, right?

You've been doing this for years now and it works and you don't seem stressed. It seems like you've got a great life and what an awesome way to go. So I'm thrilled for you and thank you so much for coming on.

My pleasure. Thanks for having me. It's always fun to share the story and I hope that folks listening here get value from it and are almost happy to be a resource. So somebody certainly can reach out with questions. This journey is not only for me, so that others could do the same thing, and I'm happy to shorten that path if I can.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And guys, if you know anybody that has a business that is in hosting that they may want to sell, reach out to Link as well. And Lin, would I just link to you?

linkmosa.com, your website where people can find you and chat to.

Yeah, they can find me there. LinkedIn as well. I'm more than happy to connect on LinkedIn with anyone there as well. Yeah, certainly encourage folks to do so. I'm more than happy to chat and be a resource for anyone else's future growth endeavors.

Absolutely. Thanks so much for sharing, Link.

Everybody who's listening, thank you as well, and I'll see you on the next one.