Ep 353: He Acquired 15+ Digital Business Acquisitions + Mistakes To Avoid with Yury Byalik

Hi, I'm Jaryd Krause. I'm the host of the Buying Online Businesses podcast. And today I'm speaking with Yury Bailik. And he's a seasoned growth marketer, acquisition strategist, and digital business investor with over 15 years of experience in buying, building, and scaling profitable online businesses.

Currently, he's served as head of strategy and acquisitions at Onfolio Holdings, which we talk about in the podcast. It's a public company that acquires and operates a diversified portfolio of digital assets, and prior to that, Yury worked across digital marketing, SEO, and business law, giving him a unique blend of operational, legal, and deal sourcing expertise.

So he's a recognized speaker and contributor on topics such as deal sourcing, acquisition, elevation, and value creation in online businesses. And in this pod, we talk about all the acquisitions, not all the acquisitions, but a big portion of the acquisitions Yury has been a part of, what types of businesses he was buying, and how he sourced the deals.

What he did to grow some of the businesses. We talk about some of the red flags that you should avoid when buying a business, specifically some of the things that went wrong in some of the deals he had, and how you can avoid those.

Then we talk about AI affecting multiple businesses and what type of business models have been affected by AI, and why and how much so. And then we talk about growing businesses as well.

Like, can you merge a business, or should you just grow it alongside another business if you're building a portfolio, and how long should you wait before you start working on the growth phase of the business that you do acquire? Now we talk a lot about buying businesses.

If you haven't got my due diligence framework, make sure you get that. It's made people millions of dollars and saved people millions of dollars. It's free. There'll be a link to that in the description of the podcast, and go away, enjoy the pod.

Yury, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for having me.

Absolutely. So you've been buying businesses for how many years? When did you buy your first business?

Probably about 15 years ago, I bought some small sites for myself. But I've been involved in digital marketing for over 20 years. And then I started doing it professionally when I was with Unfolio and was helping them with their acquisitions.

Yeah, cool. Were you buying before on Folio? Were you buying your own businesses and then growing them, and what sort of businesses were they?

Yeah, I mean, at the time, I was doing more flipping, so I was buying like smaller e-commerce and content businesses, and then you know like increasing the traffic revenue and then flipping them on Flipa.

Yeah. Yeah. And did you buy more Econ? Why content and why e-commerce brands?

I've always liked Ecom. Something I've been in since I was like 13 or 14 years old, like running and starting my own Ecom businesses in the sunglass and watch space.

Content was just, know, back then you could run content sites without a lot of oversight and management. It was kind of a cash cow. Those were the golden ages. Can't really get away with that anymore. But at the time, they were just very easy to manage.

Yeah. And what sort of gross strategies, what size businesses were you buying in e-comm, and what sort of gross strategies were you implementing before flipping, and how long, like what was the…

Yeah. So I'd say they were like in the mid five-figure range, or I would also just start them from scratch as well. As far as growth strategy, I guess, cause my background is in SEO.

That's where my focus has always been, sort of more recently, you know, programmatic SEO, but back then it was a lot harder to do at scale. So it was more just, you know, creating bottom-of-the-funnel content blog posting. And then obviously, like, you know, guest blogging, niche edits, sort of the old SEO tactics that some of which still work today.

Yeah, yeah, I mean it's definitely changing over time. Do you, do you, I'm not sure which direction to take. There are so many questions to ask. When you joined Onfolio, what was your role?

So I actually started there as a part-time consultant. I actually moved to Bali, and I was kind of like, you're not working for a while. I just wanted to take some time off. Then, Foley CEO, Don Wells, is a part of an entrepreneur group that I'm also a member of called the Dynamite Circle.

And so we connected through there, and he was just looking for somebody to help do the SEO and manage his content portfolio. So I just jumped in there. I think it was just like a part-time consulting gig at the time, and just because I had so much background in doing SEO for agencies and for myself, and a lot of experience across all different industries, it ended up where I started, kind of advising them on, because back then, I totally had a different business model.

They would acquire online businesses for investors and manage them. And, you know, I kind of came on board, and I said, well, that's not a great business model because your investors are the ones making the money. After all, they own the businesses.

So eventually I convinced them that they should be the ones buying the businesses. So I kind of like slowly migrated from a marketing role into an acquisition role where I would go and find businesses to buy, you know, deal with the brokers and marketplaces, do the due diligence.

And eventually that's the direction they moved into. You know, now they've pivoted, and where that's exclusively what they do is make acquisitions. And now they're, you know, a publicly traded company on NASDAQ.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I had Dom on not long ago, but we were talking about GEO, not SEO, for one of the brands that I have acquired, and then like, like, starting that other thing that's on the side there.

So, how many acquisitions do you think you've been a part of, and what are maybe the two biggest things that you've learned through acquisitions and due diligence?

Oh boy, probably part of, I'd say maybe 10 to 15 acquisitions. One of them was like a mid-seven-figure business in the core space. Oh man, one thing I learned is that sellers definitely do your due diligence, right? Whether knowingly or unknowingly, sellers exclude a lot of information from their prospectuses and just…

Again, we had actually some examples of outright, they were committing fraud, right? And there was an opportunity then for lawsuits and litigation, which thankfully were avoided.

Just definitely have a strong team. Whether you're doing buy side or sell side, right? Just always have a strong team on your side to help you with due diligence and financials. Have a good lawyer, paperwork, everything, because you don't need one until you need one.

Absolutely.

Yeah, so definitely just have the right professionals on your side is what I recommend.

So I agree. I work as a buyer-side advisor for deals over the one million range, and then under, we have business analysts that help advise on structures and negotiations, and looking at deals, and having somebody that has looked at many deals, like I don't even know, I've been a part of hundreds of transactions, maybe more, maybe thousands.

Maybe, maybe, maybe 500 or something like that. But we've been a part of a lot of transactions, and having somebody who has seen this, seen acquisitions that many times, can see things very clearly before anybody else can. And they're the ones that save you from the biggest mistakes.

And then you have the lawyers who wrap that up into legal protection. And then your due diligence team, if you're not doing due diligence yourself, I'm sure you're like me at the start of this, where you're doing due diligence yourself.

Maybe you did due diligence on all of the businesses that you helped acquire, either for yourself or for Onfolio. I want to ask about the fraud example, because you said it could have gone to legal action, and it never did. What is one of the examples of where a business you're, is it was a business that you acquired was committing fraud with their numbers? And how did that, how did you resolve that?

Yeah. So we had, so it was acquired on behalf of an investor. The fraud that they were committing was that they had one of their clients they were giving illegal kickbacks. So it was a client who worked for another company and who used this other agency. It was an agency, and this client was getting kickbacks from the agency.

And none of this was being reported obviously by the client and the company he works for, cause they would have fired him, and the seller didn't disclose it.

And then additionally, the seller knew that the seller was getting kickbacks from a company, so the seller was receiving money or the seller was sending money.

The reason that the seller was getting this client in the first place was because of the kickbacks that they were giving to the person who was bringing the business.

I see. Yeah. So their client was sending them money. Yeah. Got you.

And then on top of that, they knew that their biggest client was leaving, and they didn't disclose that, which was the client that was giving them kickbacks.

I think it was actually a different client because what like, during the due diligence, one of the questions was like, you know, whether you know if any of the clients are leaving or potentially leaving, and they lied on that when they knew that one of their bigger clients was leaving.

So that obviously dropped the EBITDA much lower than it would have been. But no litigation was pursued. I think the investor didn't really want the hassle and the headache because you know, it was also from, it was an international company. So it would have been much harder to collect anyway.

Yeah. So they just took the, they just took the loss. The investor took the loss.

I wouldn't say they took the laws because, like, they're in a way yes, but obviously they have an operator. They're working on growing the business. So it's not like it's necessarily a loss, but it's they definitely overpaid for the business.

Yeah, got you. Yeah. Yeah. It's this is why you need legal protection, and like with contracts and if you're hiring a legal deed lawyer to do contractual due diligence on the contracts and make sure they're up to date, and like either big clients or whatnot. Yeah.

It's definitely an important one to know, especially in an e-commerce brand where you might have supplier relationships and contracts for specific terms, length of, and price-wise quotes and stuff like that.

And then also, if you've got clients and their star clients, how long are their contracts? They have contracts, and then what do they look like? That's a, 's a critical thing to check through your due diligence, isn't it?

Yeah. Mean, like you, I've looked at like, you know, thousands and thousands of prospectuses and spoken to these, so I can like catch a lot of them, but there's just some where it's almost impossible to verify because if someone is just lying about something, it's hard to verify until like after the transaction closes.

So yeah, and if they don't even have a contract in place, you know, then you just don't know as well, yeah. What is another example, maybe one of the worst examples of an acquisition that you've ever seen being a part of that went wrong, and why? I wouldn't say necessarily when we're on, but we made, uh, and fully made an acquisition at that time. And it happened like a month before ChatGPT came out, and it had a very big impact just based on the business it was.

And so, yeah, you know, definitely took a long time to recover revenue from after it dropped because it just, you know, for example, like I've seen content businesses that were selling for three to $4 million and then within six months.

They were losing money, couldn't break even, and had to close shop because that's kind of what, you know, the impact that ChaiGPT had on a lot of light content agencies, for example.

Yeah, massive on content agencies and like guys that are out there looking at all of these businesses that are being listed for sale, all of these marketing agencies. I looked at one of the other days for a client looking at around a $7 million deal, and I think it's like 60 % of their revenue comes through SEO services.

And I'm like, wow, okay. Like, does anybody who doesn't have experience buying a business or understand digital marketing, they can be like, this is cool. All right. We've got some diversified revenue sources, but they just don't know where the markets are, and you and I can perceive, well, 60% of revenue coming from SEO. Like, and how relevant is that? And how many of your clients are actually getting results from that type of work? Right.

Yeah. I mean, this goes back to the due diligence. If you're buying a business and you're not familiar with that industry, then you should have somebody on your team who is, because one of the things I've noticed is that I think I know something about the business.

After all, it's an online business, and that's where my experience is. But I might not have that, like very specific industry experience that is necessary to identify all these little nooks and crannies that come up. So you really want a subject matter expert to kind of help you with the acquisitions.

Absolutely. And this is, this is a business that I was looking at for them. I found it, and I didn't even make it through my list. So it didn't make it to them. So they've got no idea. Looked at it, and that's exactly why you want somebody who knows what your acquisition criteria are.

Knowing your risk tolerance can just save you a lot of effort and pain without you even realizing it. So it's the hidden things that they don't see that you can add an insane amount of value.

Now you've been a part of, think you said 15 acquisitions, right? Yep. And after what percentage of those did you, did you decide to just grow them? And were there any that you purchased as like a roll-up or merge, or integrated them?

Think so for myself, I'm actually advising right now a client who purchased three in the same space. And he's actually who I had a call with this morning, and she purchased them with an SBA loan, and they're just, first he bought a, think, either, I think he bought a bigger one.

And then a few months later, he bought two smaller ones. And now we're actually debating whether to roll up either all three into one or leave the big one and then roll up the smaller two into one, which is what I was advising.

I think that one makes sense right now because there's always the risk-reward. Whether you want to run them all separately, you obviously need the resources to grow them independently. But on the plus side is you can take up way more real estate. So you have that benefit there.

Whereas not everybody has the patient's ability and budget to be able to grow, you know, whether it's three or five separate businesses independently, because usually people struggle with focus and growing, you know, more than one. And so there's kind of that balance.

I totally agree. I'm with you on focusing on one. I struggled. I bought three businesses in three years, my first three businesses, and two of them just struggled because I didn't I struggled to run and grow, and manage them because my eyes were focused on the price of the one that was making more money.

And the other ones got neglected, and that had been a theme for a couple of years after that until I realized, like, wow, I could actually just put everything into this one asset and help people at a far better level and don't have to worry about like investments that are not underperforming, you know.

Yeah. I think it depends on the personality type, right? Because, depending on their size, you could have put an operator and had them grow and manage each one separately. Because I'm a huge fan of creating a flywheel. So if you think of the agency space, say you buy, for example, you have a PPC agency. And say most of your clients are e-commerce.

Well, what else do they need? Conversion rate. So now I think it makes sense to go find a CRO agency, whereas I see too many like roll-ups or acquisition companies just buy completely random businesses. And then, you know, this is why we saw all these e-commerce roll-ups go out of business.

Like, look at Thrasio, right? Their entire model was, it's on Shopify, where, you know, it's on Shopify. And there was another, the last one that just opened that store, if you're familiar with them. So, it was a huge one. They've raised a bunch of money.

The CEO was like on Twitter always like boasting about how they were the left one, last one standing. And I think they're just closing most of them, except for like their top three now. And they were buying the worst dropshipping businesses on Flippa. It was like all they that was their business model. And that just never works out well.

Yeah. This is the funny thing, when capital, like so much capital, is raised and you just think, cause I've got capital, I'm invincible, and I can raise capital out of this. But once investors see that capital is not getting a return, they're like, this is like, why would we give any more capital for something that's a sinking ship?

And yeah, it's it's it's risky business when they're just buying one business model. And I know with Razio, through buying a bunch of Amazon businesses, the level of competition was ridiculous, and they just weren't really doing due diligence.

Know, say if one of those, one of the, one of these teams either had you or me to be a gatekeeper and slowed them down by slowing them down, we would be able to make them so much more money by building out something that's like a building on a platform versus just spreading too thin. But yeah, everybody knows, there's no.

Yeah, forgot that Drasje was the Amazon one. So I had, I spoke to some people who worked there. So one of the things was they decided to hire a bunch of MBAs out of grad school rather than anybody who knew Amazon.

So these guys came in with like their degrees, but they had no idea how to do like hands-on work at Amazon. They were also making one, an average of one acquisition per week, which is not sustainable. And on top of that, they borrowed a lot of money, and then the interest rates went up, and they got screwed.

Yeah. So yeah, the interest rates alone are a tough one, let alone having the wrong person buying, you know, and the volume is so many things have gone wrong there. Right. Yeah.

So I wanted to ask you about these acquisitions after a close. How fast do you prioritize marketing operations and team for scale? Like, do you normally have a period or a window of learning?

What is that? And then how fast you move into growth, and how aggressive were you going into growth?

Yeah, mean the acquisitions on Folio make it so ideal that they want to keep the previous team on board, right? So in some cases, the CEO is going to want to, you know, they're going to want to leave because they got a nice payout.

But then you try to hire it, like internally have somebody else step up as the operator CEO of the business. If that's the case, they're already very familiar with the business. So you can kind of put your foot on the gas and make it go.

But if you're bringing in your own team, right, it can take, you know, one to three months to figure out the operations, the management, the marketing, before you really want to scale. And I mean, with some businesses, sometimes the best thing is to do nothing for a time being just to see how it performs.

Think everybody wants to start making like quick changes without fully understanding what they're operating. There may be instances where that doesn't always work out well.

Yeah, I pretty much describe everybody that's going to buy a business to wait at least a month to understand, learn the business, and see what's working quite well. And mainly that's because the philosophy that I have is inside-out growth is not just bringing things into the business, looking at the business and seeing what's working really well, and leaning into that and using that as the superpower and growing from the outside, sorry, from the inside out.

But you know, sometimes there's, you know, there's the strategies as well as people that are digital marketers, and maybe they're buying a Shopify business and they're a gun on Amazon, and they understand Amazon PPC, and they haven't got the products listed on Amazon. Of course, adding that channel in is going to typically be significant growth. Right?

Yeah. Or if you're buying an e-commerce business and Black Friday is coming up, right? You definitely have to go there. But like, yeah, as you said, I mean, the best thing is probably to like learn the people in the business, right?

Because, you know, there's all there's, there might be a lot of turnover if you don't handle things properly with an acquisition. I remember we at Unfolio, we bought a Facebook group to as a just like as an asset to go with one of our content websites.

This was the biggest disaster I've ever seen. We ended up returning it to the owners after a month and getting our money back. Cause it was it was it was in a niche that is a very tight community.

And when they found out that it was sold, the members were absolutely livid and it just, and it just spiraled out of control, and we had to just undo the deal.

Wow. I mean, that's quite cool that you got your money back as well, though. But the community has dictated what they actually want, which is cool in itself, really, when you think about it.

It is. Like these, you know, these small communities, they don't want an investor to come in and buy it because generally investors tend to ruin these kinds of things. Right. We've seen this with public companies. So yeah.

Yeah, it's an important thing. I was looking at a pet business maybe two months ago that was looking at acquiring a seven-figure deal, and they weren't going to sell it to anybody, and they shouldn't have because the community wants the same type of content and the same type of love. And they wanted somebody who could, who had the heart, the same type of love for that space.

And they're out there, there are business owners or investors out there that are into that, and they want to pour their heart and soul into a deal.

Is that the one that's the four-character domain?

Yep. We didn't buy. Yep. For a reason. Yeah, you know it.

Yeah, I know.

Yes, familiar with this business. Mean, I've seen that guy from like, I mean, he's been in the content space for a long time. So you've kind of seen his growth of like, and eventually like, you know, buying this domain and rebranding and everything. So it's been nice to see. There's also a very big pet content site owner who lives in Chiang Mai who runs several large sites in the space.

Yeah. Cool. Yeah. Talking about that deal sourcing some, somebody came up to me the other day, and I was just out at dinner, and they're like, they recognize me from YouTube, and that's one way, right?

Is, is building a brand and building a, building a network. But what, like when you first started and threw out on folio and all that sort of stuff, deal sourcing, how you know, were you a part of deal sourcing? Was that one of your roles, and what did it look like? Because a lot of buyers struggle with like deal sourcing.

Yeah. So that was my role. I basically went on all the different brokerage websites every single day, you know, flip a empire flippers, quiet light. And I would just look for opportunities.

Obviously, we had a relationship with the brokers, so they would email us as well. But at the time, we weren't really doing any kind of cold outreach for deals, which is actually one of the benefits that happened as the company went public, more people learned about it, and we started getting more inbound deal flow.

So that's, that's the one benefit there, but you know, like for example, I don't know if most people know, but like some of these brokerages have their own, they have like a separate department where they have a fund and acquire the businesses themselves.

So what happens is if you see publicly listed, that means their own fund passed on the business. So you're not necessarily getting the best deal flow if you are already seeing it publicly listed.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. It's you've got to like, you've got to read between the lines at some stages. So yeah, okay. You're just finding them on broker sites, and then eventually your network grows, and, and deals, deals come to you.

While we're speaking about these guys, if you do have a business that you're looking at selling and it is profitable, reach out. I have a lot of buyers who are interested in your business a lot. Now, what mistakes have you learned from in acquisitions?

You know, some of the tougher mistakes that you've learned that first time that you'd recommend first-time buyers to sort of just be aware of, one I'd say is just be patient, right? You might have to look at a lot of businesses before you make any offers or even find the one that you like.

So I think that's kind of key. If you look at like the, you know, the ETA space, right? Some people search for two years before they ever find a business to buy. So that's one thing.

Stay patient. I, yeah, I'd say if you're buying a business, ideally, do you want to buy a business that you're, especially if you're going to be running it that you're passionate about and you could see yourself running for the next 10 years.

It just makes it easier to grow a business that you are actually passionate about. Kind of like we're talking about the one in the pet space, which is funny because the one I mentioned, the Facebook group, was also in the pet space.

Yeah, I could imagine.

So very passionate group of people.

But it is, and that's why it's such a good industry, and niche is because they're so passionate and they love their pets and they're going to spend money on that. Which is, which is great.

Like those, those sorts of niches and industries like sports and fishing, where people just love, love, love, love it. Any, they have money to spend on that because it's a hobby that they're obsessed with. They're great. Right.

Absolutely. The crafting niche is one of the best niches I've ever seen. It has so many different sub-niches. And I mean, you literally, if you join a Facebook group for like Thrive, which one, the like media vine or those similar Facebook groups, you see all these women with their crafting sites making 50, a hundred grand a month.

This was before some of the Google updates, just from like, from Google ads and from, you know, AdSense, all that stuff. So it's insane, how much of a community they have.

Yeah, definitely, if you're passionate about that, crafting is a great niche, and I actually think it's gonna be exploding even more over the next few years.

Yeah, yeah, I agree. Talking about Mediavine, I'm pretty sure it was Mediavine, either Mediavine or AdThrive. The good news for people listening in content sites, media businesses, is that they've decreased the amount of views you need per, for your site to be accepted as an ad partner from 100,000 to 25,000 a month, which is really cool.

And that's due to this whole AI LLM thing that's been happening since 2023. It's been two years now. It's time for recording. I'm aging this pod a little bit; it's good news. It's necessary.

Talking about, you mentioned before, the pod, we're going to talk about AI. I'm typically more about like, AI, it's like, look, it's changing things, but I don't like to be fear-mongering about AI. I think it's a massive tool, and people think it's the answer, but it's just a tool.

And you were talking about how it's changed the multiples for some business models. Tell us more about that.

Yeah, I mean, so traditionally SaaS businesses would trade on a 10x multiple of revenue, especially like for like fast growing SaaS, maybe six to seven for not as fast. But now, with a like vibe, coding has dramatically decreased.

Mean, I see SaaS for sale for the same multiples as e-commerce now, because e-commerce is actually a bit more different, you know, a bit more resistant to AI. Like, I'm not a developer, and I'm coding full-blown SaaS applications right now for myself.

Right. Zero coding experience. And all the investment money is really going into a lot of the AI apps. So I've seen multiple SaaS businesses go down significantly, especially ones that don't have any kind of native AI integration built in, which is both an opportunity, right?

So you can buy something cheaper and integrate it yourself if you have like the technical know-how or a team to help you with that content businesses as well. Like you've seen those. I mean, I see them at like one to two X now.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There was one that was trying to be sold for three X, and then just as the time we're looking at acquiring it, like something had happened with the algorithm, and not, you know, traffic down.

Um, it's, it was a great business. I'm not sure if it's been bought, but multiples are changing due to how this landscape is evolving, and why would a SaaS business not have a decreased multiple when one of the criteria of buying a business should be how easily replicable is this business?

How easy can I build this business and replace it? We've had somebody who's come out and mimic ChatGPT within a very short time, like a week or something like that, by basically rebuilding it. And if that can be done for a business of that size, why can't it be done for something a lot smaller? So the risk is there, but the reward can be there as well.

Right.

It's true. Like, so you were asking before, like the biggest mistakes you can make, right? And one of them is if you buy something that doesn't have any diversification of traffic and revenue, you're potentially setting yourself up because like I personally, I am not, I don't like Amazon FBA businesses because I know all your eggs in one basket and one report by a, you know, a competitor in China and you might be out of business for two months or even longer.

So I've heard too many horror stories because again, you basically have one traffic channel, and that is why I don't like Amazon businesses, right? Same thing with, like, if you're, you know, all your revenue was made from like Google AdSense, and that gets shut down or one algorithm update, and you lose all your traffic.

So this is where I really like, like the diversification of traffic and revenue. It's one of the reasons I like e-commerce businesses, the right ones, because, you know, you might be getting traffic from Pinterest from Facebook ads, organically, you know, there's just more diversification opportunities there than you might see with some other businesses.

Absolutely. Saw, obviously, I would say the absolute like, I'm careful about saying this because people think this might exist, but likely not because it's a unicorn. But if you could buy the best business, it would be like a membership business in e-learning that has, it runs no ads and all the traffic is organic because you've got a recurring revenue business model that isn't relying on ads, you've got a long customer lifetime value or a large customer lifetime value.

And then down from that would be an e-commerce business that only makes money through organic traffic as well. Like that's wild, right?

I'll tell you about a business I really like. Have you heard of publishing.com?

So it was started by these brothers, and basically it was like a high-ticket course that's what people had to make money with, like Amazon Kindle or something like that. And what most people don't know is that one, it grew like really, really quickly, like I think eight figures, but then Alex Hormozi made a huge investment in the company.

So he's a big investor now, and then they built the SaaS component. So they not only have this like high ticket course, they now have like recurring revenue, and I love that kind of business model.

I think it's doing potentially nine figures now in revenue. Yeah, it's insane.

Yeah, it's great, meaning that what an amazing business model. And for people who are thinking about buying their first business, they like to buy something that's out of the dance, is you'd need money, and you might need to start with something smaller that does have a little bit of like, maybe it's got a single source.

I mean, I know all the businesses that I first started out had single source dependency on either Facebook ads or SEO, uh, until you can learn to, or get yourself to a place where you can buy a larger business that has multiple streams of revenue, multiple traffic sources.

I'm not advocating buying something that has a single source dependency. That's the one thing that I talk about in my courses, and my education is that single-source dependency is a massive risk, like you just mentioned, Yury.

Thinking about smaller businesses with diversification, but like to buy the perfect business that most people think or most people hear about, like us, talk is like, they're very, very hard to find, and when you do find them, you've got a long list of sophisticated buyers with deep pockets ready to pay a premium for it.

Yeah. I saw a business listed. This was a while ago on quiet light. I emailed them within 10 minutes of it being listed. Cause I knew I was interested, and they responded later that same day, like hours later, and they already had like four offers over the Askew price. It was a B2B drop shipping business.

Yeah. I mean, B2B and drop shipping, like there's no risk to the business because it's drop shipping and it's B2B, which is better than direct to consumer. Yeah, yeah. And then you, when those sorts of businesses are SBA eligible, and you can buy them with finance, it then increases the multiple even further.

Yeah, I've actually, I've seen some issues now where I have like friends who are trying to sell businesses, but their business is incorporated in like random countries like Estonia for tax reasons. Yeah.

That makes it harder. Cause one, you'd be surprised about how many banks or investment institutions don't even want to touch the business. Cause they don't even know where Estonia is, and they think it's like some illegal tax scheme, and they can't be born with an SBA loan.

Yeah, absolutely. So Yury, what sort of work are you mostly doing now?

So, mostly doing agency work. I actually just launched a new agency called levelfield.io. It's basically sort of reputation management. Cause I've seen basically how it started was my friend is an attorney in New Jersey, and somebody had left her a fake review. It wasn't actually a customer negative review.

So she asked me if I could help get it removed. And then I did. And then I realized a lot more people are having this issue. So, I created the service. Not only that, one of the things I've noticed is a lot of these dropshippers that you see that kind of the fly by the night, where they might be open and closed within a month.

They make these crazy, crazy claims, and they steal a lot of traffic and revenue from legitimate brands. So, you know, I feel like we can help take them down. And so that's part of what the service is. So basically, that's why it's called level field, right?

Level the playing field, for businesses to fight back against, you know, whether it's like brands violating DMCA and copyright infringement, fake claims on their other Facebook ads, leaving negative reviews on sites like Google or Amazon.

At the same time, I'm also looking for an acquisition myself right now. You said if you have anything in the B2B drop shipping space, I'd be happy to take a look at that.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, we'll put levelthefield.io in the show notes for people to check out. But Yury, thank you so much for coming on. Really appreciate your time. It's so good to have the experience of somebody who's been a part of 15 transactions and looked at thousands of deals as well.

I feel like I'm talking to like another me, which is really fun. Yeah. Anywhere else that we should send people to check out more about what you're up to, or contact you at levelfield.io.

They can contact me there. Also, have a bridge the gap that AI, which is a sort of an AI agency offering SEO and development services, if somebody is looking to launch, because not everybody has, you know, six figures lying around, and maybe they want to test the waters first.

So it's like it's an AI agency where we use AI to, you know, to create MVPs for people who want to start their own business or use it to grow their business with marketing. So bridge the gap that AI can.

Cool, I'll chuck a link to that in the show notes as well. Everybody who's listening, thank you for listening. Again, Yury, thanks for coming on, and I'll speak to you guys soon.

Thanks for having me.