🧐 What I Learned Last Week
Week ending Friday, October 15, 2021
What I Learned Last Week curates the most interesting content relating to business acquisitions, operations, entrepreneurship, finance, and more. WILLW is a publication of The Business Inquirer.
Hello Friends!
We’ve got 28 deal search criteria posted on Deal Flow Scout. Check it out if you’re actively searching or have deal flow to share. Free. Open. Transparent.
What I Learned Last Week is brought to you by DueDilio. DueDilio is the first M&A due diligence marketplace connecting business buyers and investors with quality, verified due diligence experts.
📰 Articles
Great post from XOXO Capital sharing their experience of selling a micro-SaaS company. Talks about optimizing the listing, diligence, and transfer. Great tips in here. Check out the Deal Flow Sourcing Guide if you’re looking for a comprehensive list of where to buy/sell a business.
How To Sell A Micro SaaS Company
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The SMB MBA had a great recap of the Re-Convene conference. In case you’re not aware, it’s like Woodstock for hippies, Movement for techno heads but this is for real estate investors and operators. It’s a really great article talking about today’s free-money environment and how to capitalize. Doesn’t just apply to real estate.
Those Deals Don’t Exist Anymore
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Empire Flippers writes about the proposed new tax plan and how it creates urgency for business owners to sell their business today rather than wait.
The Biden Administration recently announced its plan to do a massive tax overhaul that primarily focuses on taxing the wealthy and high-net worth individuals. For most Americans, the tax policy is much to do about nothing in the sense that they won’t be affected, at least not in direct ways.
But, the person most directly affected by this new tax plan could be you.
If you’re an entrepreneur who is running a successful and profitable online business valued at over $1 million dollars, then you’re in dangerous territory. You could lose close to half of your business value to taxes when you go to sell the business.
A New Tax Plan Creates Urgency for Entrepreneurs to Sell Their Business Today
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Big Deal Small Business took a quick tour around the US to meet with some of the top folks in Twitter SMB and job shadow them for a few days. Where do I sign up? (there’s a biz idea in here somewhere). He did this job shadow thing, wrote about each business and the main takeaways. Pretty pretty pretty good.
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Always great to learn about the dynamics of different industries. Check out this post on Searchfunder where a member shares their experience with the truckload carrier industry. TLDR; not a good business.
Brief thoughts on acquisition of truckload carriers
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If you’re in the content/affiliate/display website space and not a member of The Website Flip yet, run don’t walk to sign up. In a recent members-only post, Mushfiq recorded a fascinating video review of a very high-ranking content website built entirely with AI-generated content. Thousands of articles are all generated by AI. It’s a relatively new phenomenon and I’m sure Google will update its algorithms at some point to mitigate this. For now, it works. This is for members only but I was able to get a direct link to the case study for y’all.
AI-Driven Content Site With 3.1 Million Traffic: My Video Review
🧵 Twitter
I love a good rant from someone who knows what they’re doing…
Another good case for buy vs. build…
Don’t bring a butter knife to a gunfight…
Oldie but goodie on the importance of making long-term plans…
Love this case study…
As Jordan says “Just do it”…
I’m all in on the LCNC movement. Great thread highlighting some popular no-code tools…
On innovation…
This was a good one for me to read as it’s very relevant for DueDilio…
If you’re not signed up or following @SMB_Attorney - now’s a good time to start as he rolls out his free Legal M&A Masterclass. Who knows, you may even see a few words written by yours truly…
🤔 Thoughts & Commentary
Less Deal Flow
I’m seeing less interesting deal flow. Not deal flow in general but just actionable deal flow. If you’re looking for 3-month old startups asking for 60x multiple, plenty of those are available.
For the last issue, I found just a single interesting SaaS listing to highlight. Obviously, the definition of “interesting” is subjective but I cast a fairly wide net. I’m looking for tech-enabled, 2+ years of operating history, profitable, and listed for a somewhat reasonable multiple. Just an observation. Anyone else noticing something similar?
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Get on Twitter
I know I’ve mentioned this a couple of times but there are tons of benefits of getting on Twitter. For me, it’s facilitated networking, building relationships, growing my audience, business, and more. For DueDilio, a good amount of projects come from Twitter and I don’t even have that many followers. So if you’re not on there, sign up.
Here’s a list of SMB/ETA folks to follow on Twitter.
🛠 Tools & Resources
These are tools & resources that I personally use or have used. They may contain affiliate links so I’ll get a few pesos if you sign-up.
ProjectionHub - Access to 50+ CPA-developed financial projection templates. 25% discount.
PrivSource - Deal aggregator for lower and middle-market listings.
Logology - Best automated logo & brand identity tool I’ve come across.
DeepBench - Access a cutting-edge expert network. $200 discount.
OpenPhone - The best business phone solution that I have found. $20 credit.
Eloquens - Knowledge marketplace. I’ve bought a few guides and templates here.
Deal Flow Scout - peer-to-peer deal flow exchange. Free, open, transparent.
That’s all for this issue of What I Learned Last Week!
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Important Disclaimer: This newsletter is provided for informational & educational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. This newsletter may link to other websites and certain information contained herein has been obtained from third-party sources. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, it has not been independently verified. The Business Inquirer makes no representations about the enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation. References to any companies, securities, listings, investments, or digital assets are for illustrative purposes only and do not constitute an investment recommendation or offer to provide investment advisory services. Charts and graphs provided within are for informational purposes solely and should not be relied upon when making any business, tax, or investment decisions. Content in this newsletter speaks only as of the date indicated. Any projections, estimates, forecasts, targets, prospects and/or opinions expressed in these materials are subject to change without notice and may differ or be contrary to opinions expressed by others.