Go Do Deals: The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Buying & Selling Businesses

By Jeremy Harbour

Go Do Deals provides entrepreneurs with a practical method to source and buy companies without having capital and without borrowing lots of money.

For those who are ready to take the next step on the entrepreneurial ladder and make the shift from customer to shareholder value creation, Go Do Deals shows them how to:

Bypass the brokers and find businesses that are NOT for sale

Find, approach, and have positive conversations with potential sellers

Structure deals so that they do not need to contribute cash upfront

Choose the right deals and avoid buying themselves a job

Know the best time to exit or sell their business

Buying a company can double one’s business in an afternoon, free them from the treadmill of staff and customers, and avoid the blood, sweat, and years of start-up pain. It’s time to Go Do Deals.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Morgan James Publishing
• Release date: Dec 8, 2020
• ISBN: 9781631952944

Jeremy Harbour

A globally-renowned expert in Mergers & Acquisitions in the field of small-to-medium-sized enterprises (SME), Jeremy Harbour speaks all over the world - even having been invited to Buckingham Palace and The British Houses of Parliament to advise on matters of business and enterprise. His commentary has been featured in the Sunday Times, Financial Times, and numerous other publications. As the author of Why You Should Never Buy A Company That's For Sale, Agglomerate: from idea to IPO in 12 months, and Go Do!: For People Who Have Always Wanted to Start a Business, Jeremy brings years of experience in “no money” Mergers and Acquisitions. Jeremy, his wife, and 2 daughters reside in Singapore.

Book preview

PREFACE

THE STORY OF THE HARBOUR CLUB

I have always been business-sector agnostic, and so my first deals were in a wide range of industries including telecom, IT, a health club and spa, and a music school. After I had done a dozen or so of my own deals, I started to get a bit of a reputation for doing deals without using any of my own money or borrowing from banks.

I had people chasing me to work for them in some capacity, either as a non-executive director or on some sort of consultancy basis, to help them acquire companies for no money down. I just couldn’t think of any good reason why on earth I would want to do that. When I find a company that I can buy for $1, I just buy it. Why would I want a salary to do that for someone else?

Then one day, I bought a business seminar company. It made me think that perhaps an educational program could be a way to work with these aspiring dealmakers to give them the tools and tactics needed to acquire companies themselves. This would create potential future partners who understood my methodology, and they would have no qualms about making deals on their own because they would have paid for the information.

So, as I was sitting in one of the seminars from my recently acquired business, the Harbour Club was born. Then, something fascinating happened. Before this time, I’d been like a butterfly going from flower to flower—or in my case, from deal to deal. I had never stopped to analyze the process I went through when considering a deal. The first thing did was to go through each of my previous deals and explored what worked, what didn’t work, and what could be effectively repeated. I found quite a few things I had done that had worked, but I had never done again!

So, by precisely analyzing what it was I had been doing, I created a framework of processes and systems. I did my first-ever Harbour Club course in 2009—an intensive, all-inclusive, three-day seminar. We’ve done a few courses every year since and every time, there are more real deals completed, more important lessons learned, and more valuable ideas shared.

The course has grown in both size and content over the years from the lessons and tactics I have honed while personally completing dozens of deals and from feedback on the hundreds of deals done by Harbour Club delegates. Attendees receive completely out-of-the-box approaches to doing no-money-down deals that simply are not available anywhere else. Through sheer volume, we are evolving and developing our tactics all the time, constantly improving, and adding new angles and structures that have been properly field-tested. There is no other mergers and acquisitions (M & A) course that comes close to being able to offer such a suite of tools and solutions to its participants. Also, belonging to a global network of members with a wide range of skills is invaluable in getting more deals done and extending learning. Our closed social network holds regular meetups, chat groups, and video conferences to share our experiences.

But I don’t make my money selling training. I make my money doing deals. I am a deal junkie first and foremost, and the Harbour Club is my network of dealmakers. As such, if you become involved with the Harbour Club, you will not be subjected to high-pressure sales of products or courses. We simply run our events at full price for the first visit and offer a massive discount for you to return to gain new information and meet new people the next time.

All the mastermind groups, chats, ongoing advice, and help within the delegate network are free. Our best dealmakers take natural leadership positions, sharing their stories and experiences, and helping people to get deals done. In every Harbour Club group course, there are now deep dive case studies into recent deals done by recent graduates. You hear not just about my experiences, but also about those who have completed the course and implemented the tactics. They share what they have learned by putting the tactics to use.

It is often thought that we just buy distressed bankrupt businesses that are about to close down. This could not be further from the truth. There are (at the time of writing) twelve no-money-down deal structures that we teach. Only two of these are for buying just about to die businesses, and both show you how to do it in a low-risk and high-reward way. The rest of these structures enable you to buy good, and even great, businesses. We have case studies of people buying profitable, debt-free businesses with seven figures of assets on the balance sheet, no cash up front, and no debt. We have had members buy long-established, well-known companies with businesses with revenues of up to $12 million. It is all about understanding people’s motivations and creating the right deal structure to meet their needs.

INTRODUCTION

In 2012, I wrote an Amazon bestselling book titled Go Do. It was a summary of my life in business to that date and a compassionate butt-kicking to everyone who talks about starting a business but never quite gets around to it. To this day, I am humbled by the stories and messages I receive from those who have read the book and been affected by it in some way.

There are loads of books on starting up a business, sales and marketing, systematization, management, leadership, and every variation of working harder or smarter, but there’s not much in the way of, and now what? books. You have a business. You have sales. You have a brand. Now what? I find it frustrating that, while there has been a boom in social science-type titles in the last decade or so, there simply hasn’t been anything new in the business strategy book space.

To understand the next steps, you have to understand what the key drivers are for being an entrepreneur in the first place. Most people would say freedom, whether that is the freedom to pursue a passion, freedom to develop a product, or freedom of your time or finances. What invariably happens for most entrepreneurs is that, in your pursuit of freedom, you unwittingly build a new prison. It’s one you can’t take a vacation from, occupies your every waking thought, challenges your relationships, steals your time, pillages your finances, and at various stages, teaches you all thirty-eight flavors of stress and heartache. Now don’t get me wrong: all these things are hugely valuable human experiences. I wouldn’t trade them for anything, but there has to be a point where the masochism stops, and you get some clear air. That’s when the next steps are the most valuable.

I believe the next step, that next rung of the ladder, is adding deal-making to your entrepreneurial repertoire. Buying and selling companies is a core component of taking the entrepreneurial experience to the next level.

If you look at any successful entrepreneur, you will see that they grew by acquisition or created wealth through an exit of some sort, whether a sale (like Elon Musk or Richard Branson) or an initial public offering (an IPO, like Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg). I believe that an acquisition is the only way a business can double its size in an afternoon and sometimes the only way it can grow or break through to the next level. Have you noticed that there seems to be a glass ceiling on company size in many industries, where you find thousands of similar-sized competitors and a few larger players? Well, a solid plan to become one of the larger players is to mop up a number of smaller companies to give you a quick scale.

You can break the scale paradox (this is how I describe the phenomenon that ‘you have to be big to get big’) by punching above your weight with suppliers and winning larger contracts to create even more revenue and profit so that the constraints that kept you small are quickly shrugged off.

The Entrepreneur’s Contribution

You are basically selling your future income Small business owners have to level up. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) represent 50% of gross domestic product (GDP) and 98% of private-sector employment in most major economies. This is an extraordinary contribution, yet the wealthy owners are few and far between. They are the exceptions, not the rule. I have dedicated myself to helping reconnect value creation to wealth, to make it not only cool to be an entrepreneur, but financially rewarding—in effect, to create a meritocratic way to democratize wealth (a way that entrepreneurs can be rewarded based on the merits of the value they’ve created).

I believe that, if entrepreneurs added a growth-by-acquisition engine to their existing organic growth strategy, they would quickly improve their businesses and create a good deal of shareholder value. It is only by creating more shareholder value that we can achieve the freedoms we foresaw when we started.

A common misconception is that vast amounts of capital are needed to grow by acquisition. This is simply not true. I have done dozens of deals with no capital, and my delegates in the Harbour Club have done hundreds more. Often it is more about meeting the seller’s needs and more about the deal structure than the price. For example, distressed deals can be a great way to add new customers and revenue with no cash up front.

My first-ever deal was with someone you might call a motivated seller. In a single transaction, I added a year’s worth of sales to my business. I call these tactical acquisitions—simple deals that grow your business quickly. Large companies, like Facebook, do dozens of these kinds of deals every month.

But the companies in question don’t have to be distressed; you can do deals with perfectly solvent, profitable, debt-free companies that are well run. How? By focusing on the needs of the owners and working out a structure that is a win-win but doesn’t involve lots of cash up front.

You also don’t need debt. Many people use working capital finance to do deals, and this can get toxic, fast, and giving that money to a key employee…to leave!

Would You Ask a Barber If You Needed a Haircut?

Unfortunately, solid information about how to buy and sell companies is limited. The available books tend to be written by Master of Business Administration (MBA) professors, advisers, lawyers, accountants, corporate finance people, or business brokers—enterprises that make money by helping people buy or sell companies.

The books written by advisers and brokers are inherently flawed. Advisers always say, Surround yourself with advisers. Of course they’re going to say that. You can spend a fortune on advisers. Most of the corporate finance companies and legal firms will require a down payment or monthly retainers to engage them, sometimes running to tens of thousands of dollars. People who are taking fees on an ongoing basis until you’ve done a deal are actually incentivized not to do the deal. At best, they’re incentivized to drag it out for as long as possible.

Business brokers can be on the buy-side or the sell-side of a transaction. They’re traditionally incentivized because they receive a percentage of what you pay for the business. There’s not much impetus for them to try and support a ‘no-money-down’ transaction—where’s the money in that deal for them? If there is no cash day one, there is nothing to pay them from. They might suggest the leveraged buy-out (LBO) model, which is, of course, one way to buy a business. There’s no shortage of information on how to do an LBO. On Amazon, there are currently over 280 books on the topic of how to buy a business with no money down by using lots of debt.

Deals are done by two people. Ultimately, it’s a face-to-face thing. It’s about trust and rapport, and the more people you involve in that discussion, the less likely it is that the deal will happen. The deal team that the brokers advise you to use creates a problem as they often interfere in the relationship that you’re trying to create.

You can’t build a marriage with a bunch of other people involved, continually giving you advice on what you should say and do, and how you should approach specific conversations. It doesn’t work like that.

Brokers and advisers subordinate the best advice by saying, Get the best lawyer, or the best accountant, or the best corporate finance company you can afford. Rather than standing by their advice, they just tell you to pay for more advisors. It is a lazy technique that does not reflect how the real world works (or can

Reviews for Go Do Deals

[Confidence · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Has several great details. No fluff. Contains lots of juice.

[thunderbirdceg · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Just an advertisement for Upsell of author's harbour club ..