Ep 332: How Acquirers Get Swindled Into Dud Deals Without Understanding Proper Business Due Diligence with Elliot Holland

How much does it cost you if you stuff this up when you're buying a business? Hi, I'm Jaryd Krause. I'm the host of the Buying Online Businesses podcast, and today I'm speaking with Ilias Holland, who is a Harvard Business School alum, former business acquirer, and OG in small business acquisitions.

He runs the businessbuyingmasterclass.com and a seven-figure business that does mini audits on businesses before clients acquire them. To be sure, they're not swindled by sellers and brokers with nearly two decades of experience, Elliot empowers everyday investors to acquire million-dollar businesses because he's been in their shoes and offers insights and other things that people cannot.

Elliot simplifies complex small business buying concepts with humor so that everyday investors can understand. And with over a hundred podcasts under his belt as an appearing and speaking engagements at business schools and sharing his expertise on entrepreneurship and investing in business buying, Elliot is such a great person to chat to in this podcast.

And what we do discuss is some mistakes that he's seen people make when buying offline businesses, buying online businesses. We talk about due diligence with not just financial due diligence, but marketing due diligence for Amazon businesses, different types of e-commerce businesses, SEO, and talk about how important it is to have a great relationship with the seller.

Where sellers can swindle buyers and be forceful, or where they can lie, and where they can make mistakes and tell the whole truth and allude you, and sell you into buying their business in different ways when you, as a beginner, might not completely understand whether the deal is good or not.

We talk so much about due diligence. Of course, get my BD Framework. It's what I use, what my clients use to take the guesswork out of buying businesses. It saved people millions of dollars and made people millions of dollars.

So get that. There'll be a link in the description for that. It's such a valuable podcast episode. I've thoroughly enjoyed it. One of my favorites in a long time, and I'm sure you're gonna love it too. Let's go.

Elliot, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for your time.

Good to be here, thanks for having me.

Yeah, I'm excited. Look, you've been doing this for a long time now, helping people buy businesses. You got a master class, you help people with financial DD. What got you into &A? Like, what did you buy a business and go, I like this, and then say, helping people. What got you into this?

Be rich. Yeah, yes. When I was at Harvard Business School, I had an opportunity to sort of uplevel. And I figured since I was there, and they were gonna charge me a bunch of money for school, I might as well try to make as much money on the outside as I could.

One of my mentors sent me a link about what the private equity earnings were. I said, Hey, I like this. So I started applying for stuff didn't quite realize how difficult it was going to be to get in. But once I got in, I thought it was one of the most advanced uses of an advanced mind.

One of the most difficult things you have to do because there are sort of elements of any kind of business acumen thing you have to learn on your way to doing this. And it's quite exciting, makes a lot of money, but quite challenging.

Yeah, there are challenges. Love that straightforward answer. I just wanted to be rich. I was saying when I was young, I was like, look, let's get some money, you know, at least you went straight into the financial path. I was a plumber for a long time beforehand, but how about acquisitions or exits? Have you ever exited yourself or bought anything yourself? And if so, what? Sure.

So my buyout career started in a private equity firm. I was an independent private equity firm. They call them independent sponsors. Then I was like a dude in a dream. They call themselves self-funded searchers.

So, and private equity, we bought and sold a steel company. When I was an independent sponsor, I bought three companies and exited those: an automotive parts manufacturer, a tow truck company, and a clinical trials business. And then, as a self-funded searcher, I was way early and did not get a deal done.

And that's partially why I transitioned into being an advisor. So I have bought and exited in different capacities, but certainly understand the challenges as well.

Yeah. I mean, once you've done multiple deals, you've got so much more experience than somebody that's a first-time self-funded searcher that's out there, which is why we exist as buy-side advisors. Exactly. And off air, I was asking you about like what sort of amount of, you know, help you with due diligence and acquisitions for people, what amount of businesses are offline versus online that you work for my book of business, about two thirds are offline, brick and mortar, one third online, but that can change different years. Like, 2020 was a really heavy Amazon FBA year, so probably 80 % were online and 20 % were offline. So it just depends.

It's so true. It's different seasons, right? Yeah. I mean, we all know that 2020 was crazy with FBA arbitrage, arbitrages. How is DED different from a brick-and-mortar business to an online business? And I know there are so many different types of brick-and-mortar businesses.

You've got construction, HVAC, and all that sort of stuff. And then you've got maybe a hospital or something different, or hospitality. If you could lump offline businesses or brick-and-mortar businesses into one, how would they be different from DD for an online business?

The main difference is that with an online business, you get a lot more data if you're smart enough to ask for it and smart enough to get it. So what do I mean?

So, in a brick-and-mortar business, when you try to figure out sales and marketing, which is the most important thing is to understand revenue, and there's no EBITDA without revenue, you end up asking questions like, well, what is your marketing funnel like?

What is your sales funnel like? Who does the sales? Who closes the business? Who's the account manager? And all that kind of stuff. But a lot of times, you have to sort of ask.

Hope that you get a straightforward answer. Try to check it as much as you can, but there's no direct linkage. It's not like, oh, we have a $500,000 Google ad budget. We have a 250k Amazon ad budget.

And you can trace the person from the ad to the click, to the landing page, to the sales page, to the email, to the open, to the purchase, to the return to their fourth purchase and now I can do sort of customer acquisition costs, customer lifetime value and all these kinds of metrics that are incredible to have.

The other thing from a marketing perspective, you have sort of all the website visits, you have the keywords people are ranking for, you have the AdWords people are pushing on, what they've sort of stopped using from an adware perspective, and with they're currently using.

So you get a lot more data in online businesses, although most pure accountants, again, I'm a deal professional running a team of accountants, don't.

Dive in that deep, but you can if you're smart.

Yeah, mean, financial DD is different from like traffic and marketing DD. I have them completely separate. The financial DD looks into the monetary side of the transactions, of how much ad budget is, and all that sort of stuff, and maybe CPA and CLTV. So I agree.

Isn't it funny to think that the beauty about buying online businesses is like, what's your marketing funnel look like? It's already tracked. Like it's just baked into an online business. If you're not tracking it, then what are you doing? And it's the same with the offline business.

Sometimes that stuff isn't tracked if it's an older business, right? Like they just know it works. Is that hard to get that sort of information? Like do they have to go and write it down and, you know, try and work it out whilst doing DD or what does that you know, the reality man is I think a lot of people think they're better at DD than they are because they believe stuff that can't be proven or believe stuff that's at best direction correct or believe stuff before they checked it or believe stuff they're not an expert in.

So like if you're an expert in digital marketing funnels and ads and I try to question you as a medium dude that does some stuff, you're going to kick my butt. So if I ask the right questions, you're going to be able to go in circles around me. So in stuff that I'm not smart in as a buyer or an advisor, I need to go get help.

And I think what ends up happening is a lot of people were like, let me get the checklist, or let me ask ChatGPT. And those things only work if you know what questions to ask, you know how to check them, and you know if somebody's lying to you.

For instance, in a brick and mortar business, the owners's always going to tell you that Sam they just hired 18 months ago as the new salesperson, does all the sales. But it's quite possible that Sam's an account manager. He calls on behalf of the owner. He does the owner's bidding. He collects the owner's sales, and he was brought in so they can sell the business without the owner.

Well, you wouldn't know that if you don't know how to check it. And then in the online business, unfortunately, return on ad spend is a big dumpster fire. Attribution is a dumpster fire. ChatGPT and other AI agents are throwing a monkey wrench in SEO and Google. And so once again, there's a lot of stuff that people think they know that they.

Yeah, absolutely. And what's the point in getting the information from the seller or the business broker that's selling when you can't verify that it's true? Because if you do get this information, yeah, no, this is our close rate on sales, or this is our customer lifetime value, and this is our ROAS. Cool.

All right. But if you just believe that, then you're getting completely sold on it. You need to know how to check it, and that's why you need to be able to understand how to do due diligence, right?

That's exactly it. And there's a graveyard of people who didn't check. I mean, there's a famous due diligence business in my ecosystem that was bought without doing DD. And the person who spoke about it publicly.

And it's kind of crazy to think that someone would buy a DD business, a supply of diligence to other people who didn't do due diligence themselves, nor understand how to do it, and still really doesn't. But that's the kind of stuff that's happening right now. We're seeing a lot of business brokers and fake gurus starting Bizbox selling equivalent.

Deal the light sites that list deals, and what they're trying to do is sort of, oh, we're trustworthy business brokers. We're going to pre-QoE these. And I can't wait to see all the people they sent to the poor house. But again, when people want the easy, they get poor. People want to do the work, and they get rich. And that's no different in 2025 than it was a hundred years ago.

Yeah. Easy choices make a hard life. Hard choices make an easy life. Give me one or two DD stories for online businesses, businesses that you've avoided because of certain things, or DD stories that aren't yours that you've heard about, where people have made mistakes, so listeners can sort of pinpoint, like, we need to be aware of this.

Sure, so one of the big things for online businesses is inventory. So what a lot of people do is they kind of sort of barely do financials, and that's not a big deal. It only becomes a big deal when you're trying to sell at a multiple of EBITDA.

So you run your business, I run my business. I don't need perfect answers in my inventory. If I'm trying to sell it at four times EBITDA, I do. So what a lot of sellers have done, so can't pinpoint one, but I could tell you about 10 because of the weak inventory controls, their $400,000 of EBITDA or SDE is 80 % of their inventory.

And so, a 50 % swing in inventory that they have very poor control of could take away a substantial part of their EBITDA. And so when people are running around saying, look at my profits, they're $400,000, but having to count it for inventory, those could be break-even, negative margin businesses. And I've seen a lot of those.

I think with online businesses, people want to hear the narrative that they're easy to do diligence on and easy, simple businesses. You buy something from somewhere, you sell it online, and you send it to someone. It's easy.

And then you get in trouble where you have businesses where either the seller has competing businesses that you didn't know about, or the seller is telling you about these two or three marketing channels. But really,y most of the sales come from something different.

I can't tell you how many times people have said that their marketing funnel was sort of organic traffic to the website, and you go to the website and it looks like, know, 1999. What else? I see a lot of people have very poor control over their return on ad spend. So I brought that up earlier.

So people will say, okay, well, my ad company comes in and they have a 3X return on ad spend. But if you did all the ad spend across the whole business and the whole return, it would be less than one. Meaning you put more money out the door and you get back.

But if you don't understand how that metric works, you can get had. And so a lot of sellers will try to tell that story. And frankly, a lot of brokers don't know or don't really care to check it. So those are a couple of examples of online business war stories that

I've seen from Diligence stuff that I've been in, and there are so many things to dig into there. The one about the ROAS, maybe they've got two marketing channels. Maybe they get like 15 % organic traffic, right? And then they probably get 70-something percent or more from Facebook ads, but they're also running ads on Google.

And the Facebook ads have a ROAS of two and a half. And Google isn't really making much money, but they're trying to get into that market. And they've been doing that for a year.

Yep, they say, our return on ads, you know, two and a half. But they've also been doing SEO blogs and all that sort of stuff. And they're spending a thousand dollars a month on blogs and a thousand dollars a month on Google ads. It's two grand a month.

You know, Google. And then you've also got like, all right, well, what's the overall cost? You add spend on Facebook's five grand. So you've got seven grand per month. How many sales are you making, and how much are you making per sale? What's your revenue?

Divided by how many sales you're making in conjunction with your seven grand spend, not just the $5,000 from Facebook ads, which is where people just don't understand how to do DD properly within marketing. And it's all checkable. It's all Google ads.

Can check their account, SEO from Google Analytics. Can check that Facebook ads as well. And then you can also check the credit cards on how much they spend on SEO content. Google ads and Facebook ads, or check their bank account, and verify it. It's all very.

They're very checkable. The other thing people will do is they'll say in your analogy, okay, well, because Google wasn't working, no, we were investing in Google and hadn't done it long enough to figure out if we got a positive return.

We're gonna kill Google, take it out of them, fill in 12-month expense, put it as an ad back, and say that you wouldn't need to make that mistake. We made it on our dime when that mistake would have paid off another six months, but you killed a positive sort of revenue stream because you wanted the ad back, or you didn't want to admit that.

You had a portion of your marketing that wasn't getting that two-and-a-half ad spend. The other thing I've seen is people saying, hey, look, we have this Google account, this Facebook account. They go to this website, and here's how it goes.

And if you look on Google, it'll check out fine into two and a half ROAS, Facebook will as well. But you go to the website, and you're like, this doesn't have enough traffic at a reasonable conversion rate for there to be this much revenue.

So then there's likely sort of accounts that they haven't told you about, either social accounts or other Google or Facebook accounts. So, once again, sometimes the concept that the data is more checkable doesn't tell the full story.

Do you have enough Spidey sense to know when something isn't complete in terms of how you check that the information is correct? So one of the things we run into a lot, Jaryd and I won't put anybody to sleep, sometimes financial stacks aren't believable.

It's kind of like that friend who's lied 10 times in 2025. Like they tell you an 11th thing, and even if they have like the solid proof with the video with the person who they did it with right here, you're kind of like, I just can't believe you anymore.

Yeah, absolutely. And that's the thing is like, people are always looking in my space where people do my courses, and they're doing DD, they're always asking like, what's the biggest red flag? And they're looking for a reason to either walk away from the business.

And it's not typically one thing that you're like, that's a deal killer. Typically, it's mostly five things where trust has been broken in the data, or you can't, five things that you can't verify, or maybe 10 things that just don't feel right all up. It's not just one big one that's just going to be a red flag sign that says run away now, don't acquire this. It's multiple things, isn't it?

And I think it's a silly question from people who want things to be cheap and easy. Now I understand why they do. But a lot of people are rolling off of corporate jobs where they've never had to deal with counterparties that have no recourse if they lie. Here's the thing.

Business is worth my paying a million bucks for it. It implies that you're smart. So, Jaryd, because you're an online business dude, if I'm questioning you about online businesses, I have my head on a complete swivel because intelligence cuts both ways as such.

So you're smart enough to lie to me. You're not going to say, hey, Elliot, the lies over here and the lies over here. You're going to tell an elaborate story about your family, about your church, about your international travel, about why your business was the perfect augmentation to that.

And then you're going to forget to tell me about this thing over here that you hope I never look at. And so the concept of like, hey, we're the top red, you know, three red flags for online businesses.

Even the question shouts amateur to me because the last spouse that lied to you for four years, the last friend who was stealing from you, did they have a single red flag that's coincidental to all the people who have lied to you in your history?

No, they caught you on something that you didn't have your head on a swivel about because they were smart enough and slick enough with their mouth that they caught you with your pants down. This is that.

Yeah, yeah. That's a good analogy is like you, it's not just like one big warning sign. It's like, over the time of doing your DD, like how's the relationship feel? There are little things that you can sense is like they're being a bit cold about that. Why? Let me look into it. You just don't notice that they're being cold about that one thing, then you're going to miss it.

And these days, a lot of people don't like spending time. So one of the other things that gets lied about a lot is, Steve only spends five hours in his business a week. He's mastered everything.

Yeah, yeah, he's got all the system processes and the team and but on BA, and yeah, maybe a general manager that does nothing like it's yeah.

The only way to know that is to go sit with the guy for two to three days. And I don't know many people, if any, who understand it well enough to go do that. They want a shortcut. Well, how can I tell on a half day? How can Google tell me? How can I spend an hour in a meeting and get it? You can't. You freaking can't.

What I like to do is I like to get a task list from them. And this isn't a hundred percent accurate, but because I know how long tasks can take online on average, I've done everything from starting a business to buying, selling, all that sort of stuff.

I like to get a task list and have their set amount of time that they would spend per task. And then often the case is like, maybe double it or maybe just add a little bit of extra time to sort of see like, okay, this is what it's gonna look like if I maybe if I buy it, this is what it could look like versus like one alpha these five tasks per week, it could be 10 hours per week.

And then ask yourself, is this something that I'm willing to take on? Plus, when you're stuck, like we've got to realize when we first buy the business, whether it's the first time we're doing this task, and the first time you ever do any task is gonna take you longer than what it takes you to do in a year.

So you need to understand that it's going to take you longer at the start as well. So that's what I like to run people through when I'm helping them acquire a business. Like, let's get this task list and let's be realistic with it.

I like advising clients. The problem is they don't often execute this because they don't have the repertoire and the experience. Call a two-day strategy meeting from 9 to 5 in the local time zones because here's the thing, if you're really on your P's and Q's and I'm buying a company from you Jaryd, you can't tell me you're not available for a two-day strategy meeting if I'm paying you four times I don't want to hear about the cat ate your lunch.

I don't want to hear about that one dentist appointment your wife has, I don't want to hear about your hip replacement. You said you work five hours in the business, which means you can be out of the business for two full days. So let's have a strategy session.

And you and I know that we might not need a two-day strategy session, but I need to check to see if you're in the business more. And so, tuck down, bottom up, you have to check this stuff from like a logical brain of sorta, what would that look like? What would you need to believe if that were true?

I think your way and my way are great ways to kind of push closer to the truth. There are different time investments for each one. Like a business broker is going to try to not allow you to do it my way. I would tell them, unless they're pulling up the Brinks truck in 90 days, I don't think they're in a position to tell me what I can and can't do.

But a lot of people don't have the deal acumen and confidence to say it that emphatically. But a lot of people bought one business, and now they're back on a W-2 job because that failed. After all, they believe that five hours a week lie.

Yeah, absolutely. And you also, like you said, if you say, let's have a two-day strategy meeting, if I know the business is valuable and I know that I can explain how the business works and have you understand it within two to three hours, we don't need two days. We need two to three hours to get to a point where you're going to…

So I've had several of those conversations where a seller would say, I can explain in two to three hours. And at the end of the day, you have to reply with, well, I can't understand that you are only spending five hours a week in the business if we can't take the time for two days to dive deep into the strategy.

If you're telling me that you only have two to three hours to do it, I understand that. But then I need to discount the five hours a week quite a bit. If you want to believe that.

I wouldn't say I only need two to three hours because it depends on how fast you learn. You know, it would be like learning in two days that you're throwing millions of dollars around in two days. I would give two days. If you wanted two days, I would give two days.

100% because here's the thing, if it only takes two or three hours, it's going to be on me at hour four to look stupid.

Yeah, absolutely. Is. Absolutely. I will give you the two full days, and if it's like, all right, after our for meeting is understood. I'm like, as a seller, I'm like, I'm out. I'm not selling to this person.

Yep. And I think that's the thing. So in brick-and-mortar businesses, oftentimes we did the same thing. And what a lot of naive first-time buyers, well, the broker's not gonna, I'm like, the broker's not gonna go bankrupt, buddy, or lose a million dollars.

So if your first concern is the broker, you're crazy. The seller has been doing this for 10, 15 years. He understands the story he told about being in the business five hours a week. He's not dumb.

You wouldn't be talking to him if he were. So he knows what you're asking, too. Nobody's stupid. The only person who's going to either get what they want or not is the buyer who's willing to ask the question and push the agenda. Now, sometimes, I'm an engineer.

So my first language is efficiency. Right? So that's, I talk about in basketball terms a lot of times. Like, sometimes you've got to be Michael Jordan. You've got to drive to the hoop and dunk the basketball. Right? But sometimes you've got to be like Steph Curry. You've got to step back, dance around, and shoot a three.

Sometimes the most efficient way is the way you got to tackle problem Sometimes it's like one of those French or European people that speak all day or maybe a US person that speaks for three or four hours about nothing and they only start asking questions an hour or five or Like a filibuster in US courts.

It's like sometimes the strategy is to be slow and inefficient, and frankly, I think from a DD perspective, I've got eight projects I'm working on now for them. I couldn't kick in my clients in the butt saying the thing that you need to do is not, you cannot do it most efficiently.

You have to create some inefficiencies or encumber your time or it won't get done or it might just aggravate the seller to a point where you lose the deal which is always a risk of DD because on the client list, talking to the general manager, wanting a strong non-compete are all things that sellers push back on in the 11th hour to see if you're a weak buyer.

And to your point, they may upset the seller to the point where they walk away. They may, absent from them, push you to put a million dollars up, ruin your whole family's financial future because you wouldn't push the issue or wouldn't walk away. And then who's the person that won't do reasonable things en route to get a million-dollar check?

Well, that's right. Mean, if they are pulling out, like if their business is good and they legitimately have no other interests in that area, they're going to sign and not compete. They're going to do all these things.

And if it's not, this is the thing that a seller, a buyer needs to understand. If they try to push these things on or not do these things, you know, in the 11th hour, they're saving you a lot of money.

They're saving a lot of time, and you need to understand, like, okay, cool. They're not going to do it. Then I'm not getting into this versus you becoming a weak buyer because they're drawing you into that. And it is a dance, isn't it? That you need to be very aware of, which is why you need to be emotional in the deal, like us.

I mean, so, and I was gonna put a nice bow on it. I think Jaryd and I are speaking about the range of things to do on a deal. So Jaryd is right. Some things will piss the seller off. And if it's the greatest deal you've ever seen, get over some of that little stuff, go close it and go get rich, right?

On the other hand, maybe a little bit more pessimistic, and I'm gonna push a couple of things that may be inconvenient. Typically, people don't kick you out of a deal in 10 minutes.

It takes a week. So lot of times people say they're going to kick you out. You still have a couple of days, but I think in between the advice of these two great advisors, you can sort of see that there's not one great way to get a deal done, but there are a lot of things you have to take into consideration.

And it is a dance. A negotiation is a dance. A negotiation is a poker game, right? Over long periods of time, people get better at it. It's your first time you suck. I got a lot of 20 and 30-year-old clients going up against 60-year-old sellers and business brokers. Yeah. Like you shouldn't expect to win that on the first try as a first-time buyer.

Yeah, no way. Not if you've got somebody that's been in the industry for a decade or more. And it's just like, this is the way it is, buddy.

Would my butt in an online business sale and I do quite a bit of like brick and mortar stuff but like that's something you have to consider too is like when people are specialized in this stuff they are really good don't try to do something that requires really good knowledge on a DIY basis and go lose a million bucks because then I'm sure you get these calls too Jaryd I got three in the past month clients who chose me for the first DD then went and got a cheaper person the next time Now they're in a terrible deal now a man won't call you and tell you hey, man I screwed up.

Should have hired you the second time. What they'll do is they'll tell that hour-long Non-efficient story, Jaryd, that means, hey, man. I'm in a messed-up deal. I should have chose you I went cheaper did DIY and now I'm screwed There's nothing you can do about it, but I just wanted you to know that you were right a year ago three years.

Unfortunately, what I like to say is that when you pay cheap, you typically get what you pay for. Had somebody I was speaking to not long ago who I chatted to, and they wanted to work with me, wanted to buy a million-dollar deal, sent in my fee, and they wanted to negotiate.

Look, I'm open to some changes to a certain extent, but halving my fee is like you don't understand the value that I provide. Like you said, go away and find somebody that's half my price, you'll get half the value and probably double the risk, maybe if we're going to do it in averages. Which is, it's unfortunate.

Like, that's, I'm just going to repeat myself again, is like, you get what you pay for. Like you want somebody who's done these transactions. How many transactions has somebody done in that price range for that type of business specifically? That's the question you want to be asking.

And then if they're the person who's done the most and they got the best results, and then let's be honest and you may charge more than me. I'm not asking, but like on a million-dollar deal, 10,000 is 1%. 30,000 is 3%. So what you're expecting is that I can get you a better than a 3 or 5 % return to earn my fee.

What you're also betting if you don't go with me is that your first time don't know squat going up against 10 and 20 and 30 year veterans can get plus or minus the same result with no investment or to somebody that charges half because they know one third or one tenth or they're lying completely through their teeth.

We haven't even gone there. But if you're in business acquisition and you think all these people are telling the truth about what they've got, you know, I've got oceanfront property in Idaho to sell you.

Then you're in the poor house, and unfortunately, there's nothing that Jaryd and I can do to help that. The thing that's crazy to me is like the Warren Buffets and like these people that everybody points to as being the greatest investors, they hire the most expensive help.

Yes. With Johnny coming off of a digital marketing, you know, miniature manager position, he is going to go do it yourself with no DD, no advisors, just raw dog. It's like, well, I get it, dude, but like my fee is only a representation of the value I create for the people who understand.

That's right. And it's a good thing for you because you don't have to try and sell your service to somebody who's not going to understand it, who wants to do the search themselves, and do the DD themselves.

They're never going to get to that point psychologically until they've maybe made a mistake and go, I get it now. Like for example, I like investing in property. I've been in property for a while, a good couple of years. I've bought multiple properties, but I'm not going to call myself an expert just like Warren Buffett.

I'm not going to go away and buy it, learn and search the areas, and buy the property myself. I'm going to pay 15, 20 grand to the best buyer's agent out there to do it for me, just like Warren Buffett does. It's just crazy to…

I just told you about a DD guy who bought, he's not a DD guy, a novice who bought a DD firm without doing DD. And almost went back.

Yeah. There's only a novice who could buy that. Right. I think that only a novice could buy a DD firm that doesn't do DD properly, like or understeer. Do you know how much they do? Do you know how much they roughly spent on this?

Don't know, but I know it was an amount of money that could have taken them into bankruptcy. So we're talking well over a couple of million dollars.

Yeah, and was this a brick-and-mortar type DD service or?

Yeah. Don't want to refrain from saying too much. I tell stories in abstract. Don't want to share too much. Respect the person quite a bit, but they've said it publicly. Just don't necessarily want to tie it to it, but it's like you can go on a podcast. I was on a podcast last week with an M&A advisor who's like Elliot.

I wish I had hired you for my first deal because I didn't do DD, and I'm still digging out of it five years later. You know, so he's at least still in the game. A lot of people do their first deal, get hosed, now they're back on the job, and you'll never hear from them again.

Yeah, exactly. And that's why when you hit the seven-figure range, I believe you're just crazy not to use an advisor, a buy-side advisor. If you're buying something for 50 grand or 200 grand, depending on your life situation, your financial situation, it's not going to affect you as badly as a seven-figure deal.

And you can pretty much climb back within a couple of years. But when you're getting to the seven-figure, and you're using finance, like you want somebody that's like, this is going to hold its own.

If you get sick for six months or a year, this is going to hold its own if an environmental changes like Google or Facebook ads make a big change. Terrorists, tariffs, elections, like all these things, know.

AI. And then frankly, a lot of my clients are married with kids. So it's one thing where you're gunslinging your own money as a single man or woman with no family. But when you know your kids have to go to different schools, when you have to move houses, when bankruptcy affects your ability for a decade to purchase things, it might affect your ability to ever get your kids into college. Now, your bet is not just a financial one. It's a family responsibility. It's a leadership question. And so back to your point.

Earlier in my career, I would get frustrated, and people wanted to see the value. I kind of switched it now, Jaryd. If I get on a phone call and I think a person doesn't understand the value, I'll say, Hey, we're five minutes into a 30-minute call.

I respect you and I love you and I want you to be successful, but it sounds like you don't see the value. I do podcasts like this. Do content to convey the value in 200 ways since Sunday.

Yeah, I think it's best we cut the call early. I'm going to send you a list of links where you can get more information. I doubt you'll ever come back to me because it sounds like you want something more economical.

But if what I'm telling you resonates after you go do your work through this process, I want you to know that I'm here, but I'm also going to be as efficient with your advisory process as I will be with this half hour of your time. We don't need to spend 20 minutes arguing. You're brilliant. Yeah. And whatever choice you make is right for you.

And I always want my clients to be able to, or lead, to be able to call me halfway through the other doofus who screws it up and say, hey, Elliot, I hate to say it, man, but I'm probably going to pay them and pay you because what I'm getting from them sucks. And I don't want that call to be a tough one to make from a pride perspective, right?

No, that's right. Yeah. You want them to be able to come back to you, feel safe to come back to you with open arms, and be like, Hey, look, like I can see the value now because I see no value in this route that I have taken. If anything, it's caused, it can cause me damage.

So now I can see how much damage you can prevent by, by me working with you. And yes, my tail's between my legs. Yes, I stuffed up, but you're not going to judge them for making a mistake because you're a human as well, you know.

I'm human and I run a for-profit business, man, but as a former business buyer, and like I said, this, I was open enough to tell you in my self-funded process, I failed. I know what that's like. I know what kind of tailspin it can throw you into.

Know how self-doubting it can be because you may have done all the right things and just not gotten the same outcome because the luck truck didn't hit you. I almost as much want people to get good deals done, whether they use me or not, as I want to run my business, because more good deals getting done will benefit everyone.

And I don't want to be picky about who they use. Like, for instance, somebody called me about an online business, I'll probably send them your way, right? It's just not my greatest thing to do.

I can do it well, but know, God's like, they're gonna be better. Well, who's that guy gonna go to when they want a brick-and-mortar thing done? 100 of % people who told them the inconvenient truth.

Yeah. And then also I'm going to send them to you when they want to buy a brick-and-mortar business, because like, there's no way I'm going to do it. Exactly. And you've been sending me people, and like, it's a massive wind.

Like, it's a way to go. So, how can we get people to learn more about what you're up to? Yeah. Thanks so much for coming on. It's been amazing to chat. I'm sure we'll have many more in the future. Yeah. But I want to send some people your way to check out your course and all your stuff.

Where is my YouTube channel? So youtube slash at guardian due diligence, which is the of my business or just type in Elliot Holland and the subject line and then my websites are guardian due diligence.com or the business buying masterclass.com both are streamlined to make it very easy for you to get a hold of me and get on phone calls or ask questions. So I'd love to hear from you, and those are the places to find me.

Yeah, guys, get on the YouTube channel, check out his pod. It's so good.

So again, Elliot, thanks so much for coming on. Appreciate your time.

Thanks for having me.