When you’re looking to acquire, you don’t always have to buy a whole business. Sometimes you can just buy the part of the business you actually need. In today’s episode, host Roland Frasier walks us through some unconventional mergers and acquisitions, different ways to buy parts of companies instead of the whole thing. Maybe you just want to buy someone’s media, their list of consumers. Maybe you buy a podcast or Facebook group. Maybe you buy a company’s sales team or a certain product they sell that you’d like to add to your offerings. The possibilities are virtually endless. Listen in as Roland shares a whole list of great acquisition ideas based on his own extensive experience.  Buy Media to Instantly Get More Ideal Customers If you’re looking for more leads, there’s no better way to get them than to acquire media from a business that has already aggregated the attention and eyeballs of your ideal customer. To identify this business, ask: Who’s already got the customers I want? Who’s already gone through the trouble and effort to get a bunch of them together?  This could be a whole business, but it’s more likely to be something like a podcast. Maybe it’s an ecommerce podcast, and your ideal customer is an ecommerce customer. If you acquire it, you’ve got media access to a pool of customers you’d like to send to your other business. Roland buys a lot of Facebook groups. For his dog business, he buys specific types of breed owner groups, like a dachshund owner group or a German Shepherd owner group. For his real estate business, he’ll buy a Facebook group that already has a whole bunch of real estate agents in it. He’s looking for the exact aggregated lists of our ideal customers.  In addition to podcasts and Facebook groups, you could acquire a YouTube channel, an existing business, a trade show, or websites that already rank in the Google search you’re interested in. It’s really easy to find media, and it’s really cool once you get it.  Because now, especially with the death of the 3rd party cookie, the iOS 14 updates, and privacy rules and changes, it’s harder to get your word out to the exact targeted audience you want. If you already own the media (aka, the first party data or your list), you’re expanding your list by acquiring groups of your ideal customer that you can now market your message to. That’s a big benefit. Acquire a Team So You Don’t Have to Hire OneDid you know you can buy a company’s marketing team or sales team or whatever kind of team you need for your own business? It’s hard to start something from scratch. Let’s say you want to start an inside sales team, but you don’t have a salesforce. You’ve never been a salesperson, and you know nothing about how to find them, recruit them, vet them, qualify them, compensate them, but someone else has already done it. You can just acquire their team. When Roland was looking to launch software development, none of his people had ever done software development management. They hadn’t found employees or qualified them. They didn’t know how to monitor their work, speed, or effectiveness. Rather than start a software dev team from scratch, Roland found a company he was already paying for their software product and acquired their software dev team.  This is often called an acqui-hire. Whatever you need, that team has already been formed somewhere and you might be able to go out, identify, and hire them. Does someone already in your network—that you’re already working with—have a team you could acquire? This is really a great strategy. You might also want to be thinking about resources. Roland’s business runs big events, and they’ve got thousands...