Ep 385: The Financing Trap That Kills Online Business Deals Before They Even Close with Ami Kassar

If you go to McDonald's for lunch, you can have indigestion for a few hours, but then you'll be over it. But if you go to drive-through financing or to close a big transaction, you could have indigestion for a few years or ruin your business.

I'm Jaryd Krause, host of the Buying Online Businesses podcast. And today I'm speaking with Ami Cassar. He's the founder and CEO of Multifunding and the author of The Growth Dilemma. Now, for over twenty-five years, Ami's helped entrepreneurs across the states unlock creative, cost-saving financial solutions from SBA loans to alternative debt strategies and structures to grow companies, improve cash flow, and acquire companies.

And he advises people like the White House, the Treasury Department, Congress, and the Federal Reserve Bank. He is frequently quoted in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and the New York Times. And he writes a weekly column for 21 Hats.

And in this podcast episode, Ami and I talk about where people make their biggest mistakes when it comes to an acquisition and using finance. What are the things they need to get set up, and how much time do they need to get themselves set up typically?

Before they go away and look at working out how much acquisition finance they can get. What are the mistakes that lenders could make when a deal is supposed to happen?

We talk about the pre-qualification for a lot of deals and why a lot of these SBA pre-qualification broker deals may not actually be qualified to close. And I've noticed this a lot in the time that I've been doing this and very recently in the last one to two years too, and how to combat that.

We also talk about building out a structured portfolio of multiple businesses. We talk about how much finance is too much finance, what happens if you rush through a deal or rush to finance, and what you pay more than just finance as well, like higher terms or worse terms in terms of percentage of interest and loan time. Now there's so much value in this podcast.

I'm sure you're gonna absolutely love it. Of course, we're talking about buying businesses. If you haven't got my due diligence framework and you're looking at acquiring a business, do yourself a massive favor and dramatically decrease your risk of buying a lemon.

There's a link to that in the show notes. This is what I use. It's what a lot of my clients use, and it saved people millions of dollars and made people millions of dollars. So there's a link to that in the description. And lastly, you guys have been asking for so long, and I've been building.

Our full stack due diligence service. It's finally live for deals from a hundred thousand dollars and up. And every package includes a personal MA strategy session with me. Which honestly, no other DD service is offering at the moment.

And because good due diligence without strategy is only half the job, make sure you get a professional to help you with due diligence. There'll be a link to our DD packages as well. Enjoy the podcast.

Welcome back to the pod.

Yeah, thanks so much for your time.

So financing for acquisitions. It's a big thing. Before you jumped on the call, we were talking about SBA and how they change things and why people can be defaulting on e-commerce brown brands.

And I want to get to that. But what would you say is the single biggest finance mistake a lot of people are making when it comes to acquiring an online business? And how does it s kill the deal halfway through or even before we get started, really?

Glad to be here.

I think maybe it's better to start like holistically with, you know, buying a business, whether it's online or any business. It's exciting, and it's people's dream. And we all want to do it, and it's easy to sort of get excited and want to go into it.

But I always caution a borrower when you're looking seriously at a business to ask yourself the hard question of what could bring this business to its knees.

Okay. And what's one question, and then really think hard about that risk and decide if it's something you're comfortable with. And there's something that could bring every business to its knees, something that could bring my business to its knees tomorrow.

Right.

And then the other thing I say is that imagine you were someone was coming to you to ask you to lend them money for this business.

Would you do it?

Right.

Good filtering, and if you wouldn't, then why are you asking somebody else to lend you the money for this business? So it's really important, I think, when you're going to take a loan, and we encourage people here in the US to do SBA loans because of the long terms and the better impact and the protections of them. But it's super important, and there's gonna be a lot of advisors around there with financial incentives to push you to get the deal closed. But does this deal make sense?

Do you really understand the risks, and how comfortable are you with them? And how do you plan to manage the risk of that business? So if you look at any business, Jared, I would argue some things could bring your business to its knees.

I know some things could bring my business to its knees. And it's not a fun it's not a fun thing to think about, right? No one wants to think about that. But especially when you're about to embark on a transaction potentially for several million dollars, and you're personally guaranteeing the debt and the loan.

That's a really good time to think about it and think about it.

I totally agree.

This is my whole job is to look at deals and, you know, exclude them and not present them to my buyers that are not within their acquisition criteria. And then secondly, if they are within the acquisition criteria, if they're going to have too much risk and they're not gonna stack up in finance. And we can I can see that before anybody else can. Even when you've got brokers, there are so many brokers that are presenting deals out there that are pre-considered.

Qualified for SBA. And I'll tell you what, there's that it's not realistic because I've taken so many businesses to acquire, and they've got in their listing that they're pre pre-approved for acquisition by SBA. And you present them to your financial, and we're like, well, hang on a second, this is not what they think it is, and here's why.

And typically I see that as well prior and just question it with the finance brokers that we're using to see, like, hang on, like what can can we can we even do this deal even though they think they can think we can?

Let's talk for a bit about that pre-qualification. We get asked to do them all the time, and we do them, okay, and we even get asked by buyers who want to be pre-qualified for S-mailens right now. But first thing you have to realize about pre-qualifications is that they really aren't largely worth the paper they're written on.

Okay. Because A, it takes a buyer and a seller to be prequalified to make a match. And often lenders, and we do it sometimes too, will do pre-qual without taking it through a proper underwrite. Some sales guy or woman will do the pre-qual. So I don't put much weight in pre-qualls at all.

And you could also have a bank do a pre-qual, and then six months later or a year later a buyer comes by, and the credit appetite for the bank has changed, or the business has fundamentally changed over the last few months.

So, my best advice is don't think of prequels as gospel because they're not, and it sounds like you're proving that to be true in your work.

Yeah, absolutely. It's just another filtering process that I need to go through. But I was just gonna come back to the original question. Do you see, I mean, and it might be this, but do you see there's like an overall,l like, one thing that's common that causes deals to fail, right?

Right. Go ahead, sorry.

You can talk about failure beforehand or after the transaction, right?

So we could split them up into two different angles.

You could split them up. But direction, let's talk about after. Okay. It seems to me that borrowers without really direct industry experience who haven't been through that rodeo before have a higher propensity to fail, right?

So if you've owned coffee shops and now you want to buy I'm making it up an Amazon retailer with, you know, three thousand SKUs and you've never dealt with Amazon algorithms before and stuff, right?

That any lender worth their salt will consider that to be risk. The other areas I do think, like the e-commerce industry and certain other industries, have been whacked around by tariffs quite a bit over the last two years, and that's taken some hits. There's definitely what causes a business to fail, and this can be tied up to what could bring a business to its knees: a product concentration.

Yeah, single risk, single source dependency on one product or supplier or something like that.

Right. We didn't. Again, when we broker loans, we don't fund them. But one of our lenders, two, three years ago, did a single-source e-commerce, single-product e-commerce business. Well.

Yeah.

From one, from one tr where was the s distribution? Was it just through one channel like FBA, or was it through a few different channels?

Don't know, but it was one product, and a few weeks after the transaction closed, that product got replaced in the market by something that was much better, and that business was dead. The other super important thing, in my opinion, for validating the health of an e-commerce business is how dependent it is on one channel.

And if that's highly dependent on one channel, it's pretty scary. And I do think buyers have to really recognize that the brokers are representing the seller, not representing them.

Right.

And so you have to take everything that they say or do from that perspective, right?

Now, I wish at some point the business brokerage world would turn more into the real estate business where every seller has a know I piss people off when I suggest this, but every seller and every buyer have representation, and they share,e and there's rules and regs about how to do it.

Right. Yeah.

Actually think that that would lead to healthier transactions. So all I'm saying is some of the things we see in e-commerce are, and this isn't true to e-commerce, it's true to any industry. If the buyer doesn't have some pretty direct experience in that industry, that could lead to trouble. And then sometimes it's product or channel concentration that could lead to trouble.

Yeah. The single source dependency on like one channel or one product is something that I just we don't even go near. And like, like, like it's not gonna get funded these days anyway. Right.

It's not.

If you are financing them. Yeah. But I want to come back to the what like the experience within work is I have a deal that we're looking at now and the the lender or the finance broker is like, well, we can finance the deal, but we'd have to have some sort of agreement that the seller would stay on for a certain period of time to help that new owner get the experience that the bank feels is or the lender feels is necessary to write the loan. have you seen those sorts we can see those, particularly in an area where the the the the bank doesn't feel comfortable that the the buyer has enough direct industry experience.

Sometimes they want to see the seller carry some note and/or an agreement that the seller's gonna stick around for at least a year. And so you have to remember that sometimes people, and I can understand why, get super frustrated with banks, but banks are actually there to protect you as a buyer, right?

And there's usually some logic to their madness, right? So if it's easy to get angry at a bank, it's also sometimes smart to really listen and think about what they're saying.

Yeah, I agree. I say that if something can get financed by a bank, it's a good sign for the deal being decent because they have very strict they want to make sure they get their money back.

And it's good for the buyer to understand, okay, if they're gonna lend to this, they're backing me to run the business as well and for the business to do good. So it builds so much more confidence in the deal for the buyer as well, for sure.

So when does it make sense to use an SBA loan to acquire a business versus, say, other financing structures?

I say about all this stuff is you should think about when you're structuring your business and/or running the business that you want to set it up for the maximum amount of flexibility, right? Like almost thinking about preparing a football team for a game where you want you need a good offense and a defense.

Okay.

And that means basically a good football team is flexible to adjust to every situation that's possible. And part of that equation is, in my opinion, the lowest monthly payment possible, even if that means a slightly higher interest rate and maybe a longer time to pay it back.

But if things go well, you can prepay and pay it back without any penalty. So one of the big benefits from our perspective, at least here in the US, and I think Jared, your listeners are around the world, is it's cool. I'm so sorry about that. But it's the tenure.

Mostly US but around the world too.

It's the tenure terms, right? And without any prepayment penalties. And there's gotta be some price you're willing to pay for flexibility. Now, there will be folks who love to I get routinely bombarded with offers. I get twenty, thirty, forty texts or phone calls a day, have to have spam filters everywhere offering me a hundred thousand to five million dollars in my bank account in twenty-four to forty-eight hours.

And there will be lenders out there that will try to sell you on their convenience and their speed. Okay. But that usually comes with a significant price. Okay. And don't do it. If it's too good to be true, don't do it.

Banks or SBA lenders can feel tedious and a pain in the ass. Okay. But they're actually there to protect you. Now, in transactions of more than five million dollars, sometimes if it's up to eight, we can do sort of what's called a paripassuu deal with SBA and some non-SB SBA financing with the same lender. Beyond eight, you're probably out of the SBA world at that point. But the b primary benefit of the SBA is the lower monthly payments, and that can be a big deal.

Yeah, okay, that's awesome. Yeah. So just to have freedom and flexibility, SBA helps a lot. And I would also just talk to doing something with speed, like trying to do a deal with speed. I think it's the psychology of it: the faster you go, the more you can miss through DD. The faster you go, the more expensive and costly the mistakes can ma can be. And this is just like in general terms.

I think that slowing it down and having a like 'cause if a seller's trying to sell a business and they want to close really, really fast, what like what is there something I go, what are they hiding, right?

Why do they need to close it really fast? Yeah, sure, I can understand and empathize with maybe they need some finances quickly for something or whatnot. But if they're trying to sell something really, really fast.

Typically, you can miss so many things, and it can end up in a pretty bad transaction versus somebody that doesn't need to sell it too fast, and co can go through the SBA loan process and is willing to do that; it shows that the business is pretty stable as well. And that's what I like to think about.

Like, what's so you're not just gonna be paying in more interest 'cause you can close faster and maybe worse terms, like in terms of duration of loan and payback period and all that sort of stuff. But you can make more mistakes. Would you agree, Ami?

I joke about it, but it's true. I say in some of my talks and speeches that if you go to McDonald's for lunch, you can have indigestion for a few hours, but then you'll be over it. But if you go to a drive-thru for financing or to close a big transaction, you can have indigestion for a few years or ruin your business.

I always tell people, and we take financing calls all the time, it's slowing down. Other women on the phone yesterday or two days before and she's a friend of mine and she's been building a PR business for eight years and she's exhausted and she's tired and somebody came to her with an offer that really felt like a fire sale to me and she had a close in like a week and I was like, Slow down girlfriend like or even when people are calling us and they feel like they're in a desperate situation we're always trying to encourage people to calm the temperature in the room and slow down. If there's a seller who feels like they've got to close in a week or two weeks, or be in the sense of like you're gonna lose the deal if you don't close quickly, you can almost be guaranteed that there's a rat there somewhere.

Yeah, for sure. Something something to question if it needs to happen fast.

Now, what about just approaching the idea of buying a business with finance and making sure fundability is, like is a decent amount of fundability for finance? What are some of the things that people can do to improve their fundability? Like their credit scores, financials.

Obviously the deal alone helps with fundability too. But what are some of the things they can do personally to move the needle? There are two sides of the equation. The one side of the equ equation is their personal side, and the other side of the equation is what they're buying, right? So on the personal side, there are almost two scenarios. Do they have an existing business or not?

Right. And if they have an existing business and this is an add-on or a diversification topic, be ready for the lender to look at your existing business and how it's performing and look at and review all those financials in addition to what you're buying, right? And all affiliates are gonna be looked at.

So if you're currently doing a lot of commingling of funds and pushing a lot of personal expenses through your business, I know people don't like to pay Uncle Sam, but that's gonna cause problems for you when you go through the loan process. So clean books and clean financials, both personally and business, or all your tax returns done and cleaned up. Are you current?

Or are there any personal or leans against you or your business, like you gotta get the remember that when you go to buy the business, they're gonna be looking at you and they're gonna be looking at what you're buying, right?

And taking the time to clean up your credit before you start the process is also super important. Like, I mean, I'm not in the market for buying a business, but it's June, and I haven't started mytwenty-fivee taxes. If you're out in the market now to buy a business, they want to see your twenty-five taxes, right?

Yeah. So the more you can get ahead of the curve, the better you are.

Yeah, that's great. That cancels out my next question I was gonna ask you around, well, what are some of the things that lenders do look for? And that's it, right? Is it what you've just mentioned with, you know, all of your personal stuff and your business stuff if you do have a business?

What about structuring the capital stack in the right way for acquiring your first business? What does somebody need to think about when they're doing this for their first acquisition?

Well, again, that's where maybe someone like the services we offer can be helpful to a potential buyer. But you, you're definitely going to want to be able to demonstrate some post-transaction liquidity to the lender. So they're gonna say, if this thing starts to go to hell, can this guy afford some relief?

If this guy can't get or woman can't get paid for six months or a year, can they afford it? So thinking about how much liquidity you're gonna have post-transaction. Do you have months for six months of living expenses or whatever it is? Do you understand what your monthly living expenses are?

These are all things that are important. And remember that there's going to be two sides to the puzzle. There's going to be what you're buying and who you are. Okay. So you you you don't know when you start this process what you're going to buy yet, because that will go through a few twists and turns before you find the right one.

But you do know who you are, and taking the time to clean up that story and make sure your personal financial statement is ready and organized. And if there are any glitches, check your credit report. Sometimes people have stuff in their credit report they don't even know about. And getting your personal house in order is also a pretty big deal.

Absolutely. It's so key. It's just the preparation. With your cause, when the deal comes, and you've got other buyers looking at that deal, things can happen and move quite fast. And yes, you don't want to miss out on that. You want to be so prepared to be able to put in an offer and go to LOI and have your personal side sorted before you even go into those.

And that's why I think it's worth people speaking to you, Ami, and your team to, you know, see, okay, what, you know, I want to acquire something. Like, can I have a rough range that can build my acquisition criteria? And what are some of the things I can do to build that rough range up of what I could get in capital to acquire based on my personal situation? Or do I need to, like, do something for three to six months to make my position better as well? And think about how much time you might need to prepare for this acquisition.

Even if you, you know, if somebody's got like seventy thousand dollars to $150,000, like what you know, what are some of the things you can do outside of just having cash in your bank account? Like in your business with your credit cards, with your liens, like anything like that. So get so prepared on your side for the busyness of the market, I guess.

Just keep in mind that I also advise people all the time: lending markets are pretty rational, and it's hard to fight gravity, right? So I always tell people on my calls with them, like I had a call today with an interesting business, and I always say, I only know what I know, and maybe I don't know everything, and you should go out and get a couple of opinions, right?

But I tell them where likely something fits in them in the market for what they're trying to do. And then they have to decide if that makes sense for them or not, right? And the other thing I always advise borrowers and ourselves, like at least in our business, we're not in the business of looking for what I call a needle in the haystack lender.

Right? And we can't afford it, and we can't afford the time to do that. So if and I always say it doesn't mean that there isn't a lender that will out there that will do this, okay.

But I don't know who they are, and I can't afford to go look for them. Okay. Like, and my s and if I knew who they were I would tell you, but I don't know who they are.

And they probably, you know, your client probably can't afford it either, with, like, the terms as well. Just to get a deal like that done. It comes back to, like, rushing into something to just try and get it done. Like I think you're gonna pay more in so many ways, other than just finance.

I don't remember the specifics of this transaction, but maybe a year or so ago there was a client I told them that I thought their chances of doing what they wanted to get done in the market were at best a coin flip.

Right? Yeah. And they said, I want to do it anyway, nd I said, Okay, well then my search fee is twenty thousand dollars, and then if I finance it, you can have a credit on that of buying closing. But I'm not doing this. And they said, why did I pay you twenty thousand dollars for telling me there's a fifty percent chance it won't work?

Exactly.

I'm like, don't do it, yeah. Just don't do it, mate.

Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. What point should a buyer think about? I guess maybe I'll move into like the portfolio and and and s and and structuring structuring a portfolio using finance for acquisition, but is there a point that a buyer should stop using their own cash and just start using leverage? And what's the mindset that shift that mindset shift that makes that transition easier?

I'm a believer that that's a personal decision. And and and risk tolerance and there's not a a formula that one formula that answers because everyone's different, right? So I joke about it, but here in the US we have the Inc. five thousand awards, right? Which is celebrating the five hundred or five thousand fastest-growing top-line companies in America.

Based on risk tolerance, right?

And I wanna start the Sleep Five Thousand Award. First is like celebrating the entrepreneurs who sleep the most.

That would be so cool.

Yeah, like tie it up with like a like one of those Uta rings or something in the park I just.

Yeah, yep, proved the tracking. I feel like I could probably I I would have a good chance of being in the top of sleep.

Well, that's cool, right? So, but that's what I say to people about risk, right? Some people, like I have a friend who's got so much debt and runs seven businesses, and I would literally throw up if I was him, right?

It's just not worth li like for you, it's not worth living that life, right? That constant amount of, yeah.

He's I worry about his health, but that's how he chooses to live his life. And then I can't relate to it. But then some people look at the amount of risk that I've taken in my business and what I took to build my business, and they thought I was functionally insane, right?

So everyone has to come up with that sort of decision for themselves. And I spoke to a guy today who's doing franchises, and he's done two of them, and he's ready to open up his third. He did the first two with equity and drew what's pure cash, and now he needs debt. I said fine. Right? So everyone's different, but I don't know what his personal financial situation is yet. Someone in my team might analyze it.

Yeah.

My goal for people is to not make money. That should be a byproduct of what they're trying to chase, which is a lifestyle. And the best lifestyles are the ones that you have freedom without too much stress. Like you have some finances without being too stressed.

I think it can get dangerous where you go from employee to buying a business being over-leveraged being stressed out and then pouring more of your hours into that business than what you were as an employee and it takes away from who you are as a parent and a partner and you can it it's it can be a slippery slope, right?

So I'm glad that you answered that because I don't think the goal should be personally for me anyway; everybody's got their own goals, and everybody's got their own risk tolerance. But I'm a big believer in sharing. As you can, you can make money and invest.

With mi with minimal stress. It doesn't have to be at the highest run rate possible.

And there's another side of the coin. I had dinner with a friend of mine maybe a few months ago, and he runs like a twenty million dollar manufacturing business. It's been a family business. He b built it up from nothing. And he'd been in the ER three times in the last six months.

Right.

And I'm trying to like drill down to what the problem is and what the problem is, and then finally I just asked him, like, what's keeping you up at night, buddy? 'Cause I thought first I thought it was medical, but he's like, cash flow. And I go, Okay, well, are you using your line of credit? It's like, No, I don't want to.

I don't want to take the debt, but I could I have a heart attack two days, almost have a heart attack a day before payroll every time. Right? And in a manufacturing business where it's heavy AR and it's heavy inventory, like a line of credit, like kinda like part of the furniture of the business.

Yeah. And I go, dude, like you gotta start using your line. Like, because do you want to, like, you I don't really want to talk to your wife if she calls me in three months and you had a heart attack. There's the other side of it too, that sometimes certain debt instruments and I know that's not necessarily tied to acquisitions or super healthy tied to that on acquisitions.

We really love to see, and we push for lenders to give all of our borrowers, wherever possible, some kind of working capital facility side-by-side,e absolutely with the transaction. And it's critical. And if you have a lender who doesn't want to do that, I would be careful.

Yeah, if a lender's not able to give you working capital but lend you to the deal, like it's like they're at their maximum capacity and maybe the business is at its maximum capacity. Yeah, I think if they can provide you with working capital online, it looks like a healthier deal.

And to come back to what you say, like, yeah, sure, your friend, he's not in an acquisition, and it's still so relevant to people because you can use finance to buy yourself out of stress. And it can be healthy in this way, depending on how you look at it. But I feel in this situation, it's a lifeline, really. It's a life raft. It's an insurance policy.

And that insurance policy proviwith des yourelief stress from worrying. That's what insurance does, I believe. And then it's good for the backup if something does happen. But it can prov it can pay for you, you know, to not have to stress too much. And why wouldn't you do it? Right? Money, that's what money should be for, is to buy yourself out of stress.

But you gotta be careful that especially more so when you have an existing business here in the States, there are so many people and it really pisses me off that Intu Intuit aggressively markets this on their platform, that when you're feeling a little stressed and you're in an emotional point on your journey, they will try to put you in super expensive predatory lending that put you on a a treadmill that can kill you and kill your business.

So if you are stressed and you got yourself in a stressful situation, I've been through many of them. I'm going through another stressful situation in my business now. It's just life, right? Don't fall for the predatory lending tricks, right? Do, wherever possible, set yourself up with liquidity and lines of credit.

I think in my book I tell a story of if a guy owns a pizza shop on the New Jersey shore, okay, and it's the heat of summer and his air conditioning blows on Friday and he needs fifty grand by Monday to replace it, and it's gotta be replaced by Monday.

Okay. And he calls my shop and says I need fifty K by Monday, okay, and his tax returns kinda suck, and he's been putting a lot of cash in his pocket and this and that and the other. What APR do you think that guy's gonna pay to get his fifty K Monday?

I don't know what the interest rate would be, but it would be like thirty-something percent or whatnot. Higher.

Yeah.

Wow.

Again, I don't do those loans, but I would bet closer to a hundred and fifty to two hundred percent if you needed, well, from Friday and Monday business. Now, if that guy had been filing his tax returns properly and had a line of credit checkbook in his drawer that was sitting there as his insurance policy.

Part of the line of credit is there for an emergency, and used it at the right time, he'd be okay,y and he'd be paying like eight or nine percent for his money until he could, you know,w refinance it properly.

So that comes back to the point I was trying to make earlier about whether, when you're buying your business or at whatever stage of your business, setting yourself up for the maximum flexibility.

Yeah, absolutely. Maximum flexibility, as you said, it doesn't need to be used, you know. You don't need to use it. It just sits there. Yeah.

Someone said to me again, tied to the line of credit story the other day, someone said, Yeah, I like to see the lines of credit, the greater ten percent of top line sales, es or eighty-five percent of AR, and fifty percent of inventory. Someone's like, I don't want a line of credit.

And I go, Do you, if in three years ase something bad happens- it's likely every couple of years something bad's gonna happen, right? And you need cash for the business, would you rather have the option of using the line or not? Or would you put in your own money, or would you shut it down?

Mostly you've got to put it into, like,e thinking about, like, you might have to shut it down, then it makes sense to have the line. So Ami, sorry, on. Go ahead. Lastly, I want to talk about structuring in terms of, like, a portfolio where do people how do people think about doing this in a way that they can go from one acquisition to another acquisition without using too much debt? Like, obviously using debt but not overloading themselves.

I think that comes less to a formula and more to personal choices. And what kind of lifestyle you want to live. Do you want to, I call it the diversity matrix? Okay. So do you want to build a portfolio of very different types of businesses? Or are you trying to build one big brand and do add-ons, right?

So really I think you've got to be clear in your strategy before you worry too much about the financing structure. Now the n nice thing in the SB world, at least, is if you buy a business in the same NACE code as your current business, you can actually do that with zero percent down.

Right.

Because that's considered an expansion loan. But it's that formula of building that portfolio and how fast you grow it comes down a little bit to risk tolerance and and and comfort in life. Like my friend who's got seven different businesses, like it's not maybe not worth it.

Yeah.

Well, it might be for him. Maybe that gives him energy, and that's how he likes to live his life, and all this- it would give me a heart attack. And it's not that his answer is right or my answer is right. It's a very personal choice. So sometimes we make not sometimes we generally always make decisions with the left side and the right side of our brain.

And there are feelings and our emotions and our egos and our historical experiences with money, and then there are the spreadsheets and the models and the forecasts and projections. And you kind of gotta mix that up in the mixer and make the decisions for yourself.

And that's what I that's what I encourage people to do and think long and hard personally about what it is you're trying to accomplish in life. And sometimes I also say to people, like one guy wanted to start an acquisition fund; often me they want to start a fund and raise a couple of million dollars, and they're gonna buy eight or ten businesses, right?

And they've got this whole bottle of this. I'm like, why buy your first one?

Yeah, just get out of the clear. I agree. Buy the first one, have it for a year or two. Take a breath.

And have a year or two, figure out how it works, how it operates. Do you like this? Are you good at it?

Can that business sustain itself, or something else?

And I didn't say now let's go buy the second, but sometimes if you try to go buy those ten all at once, in my mind that's a recipe for at least the way my brain works.

Totally agree. Yeah, I totally agree.

It's just taking on too much too soon, especially if you're just starting.

Yeah, if I was lending that guy money, I'd freak out. But again, I'm not;t I don't lend people money, so I try to advise people, but they don't listen to me all the time, which is okay. And sometimes loans work out that shock me, and sometimes loans don't that shock me too. So what do I know?

Yeah. Everybody has their own approach and yeah, it's I think it's still wise to listen to people that are in the space like yourself that have done so much work around this and all you wanna do is is make sure you meet their level of risk tolerance with safety and if it doesn't feel like it's it's gonna be the right thing, then they you know, they could they've always gotta get a second opinion and and that's cool as well.

Correct, but I always like to try and encourage people to pause and think and make sure that what they're doing is for the right reason. I think it's very easy to get caught up emotionally in a transaction when you're buying it or selling it, and that's often what leads to regret.

Yeah, I totally agree. Ami, thank you so much for coming on. I'm gonna send people to multifunding dot com. Multifunding LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram. Is there anywhere else that you feel would be valuable to send people?

Think so, and happy to chat with anyone at any time and see how we can help them.

Yeah, absolutely. Guys, if you guys think about an acquisition, you want to get prepped, speak to Ami, and see what you can get in terms of acquisition finance for your first or next deal. And again, Ami, thank you so much for listening. Everybody else for listening.