My morning routine is looking at acquire.com for 30 min

I don’t really have much of a morning routine.

I just wake up, start working until I get a bit hungry and then I have breakfast.

I do this pretty much everyday.

Searching acquire every day is probably the one habit that I stick to daily.

It has by far given me the most returns out of anything I’ve done.

Unfortunately acquire has 10,000s of businesses and gets 100+ listings every week.

Despite spending close to 10 hours/ week on acquire I’m NEVER able to go through all the business listings. And that’s just one marketplace.

On top of this I feel that 90-95% of the listings on marketplaces like acquire are either stale, without updated stats, dead businesses, have a terrible asking price or just aren’t good businesses.

I find many sellers quite simply a little bit delusional when it comes to the negatives of their business and how much its worth.

At the end of the day, beauty (valuation) is in the eye of the beholder. Your business is only worth what you can convince others to pay. Not a standard multiple that you’ve fantasised about.

We’ve bought 6 businesses so far. For each deal closed we’ve gone through at least 100-200 businesses. Maybe even more. That’s almost a 1000 different micro startups.

I feel this has given me a great intuition when it comes to acquiring micro startups with an understanding of how to value them and how to interact with sellers.

Here are my 5 tips for finding the needle (your ideal micro startup) in the haystack (1000s of businesses for sale):

(for serious buyers only)

1. check marketplaces 3x week. acquire has over 500,000 registered buyers. the best deals are taken within weeks. if you check them once a month you’re likely to not see many great deals. unfortunately most listings are stale and will give you a bad impression of the businesses for sale. acquire is the best marketplace by far + microns.io also has some solid micro startups.

2. analysing listings is like a muscle. you have to ‘work it out’ very often in order to maintain your sense. there are different ways to analyse listings and find the right business to buy. for PE firms and startups they have certain debt constrains or multiples they are working with in order to understand the return they can get. with these micro startups the potential return depends a lot on the buyer and their capabilities. the risk is low when buying for <$5,000 and potential reward quite high if you can make it a viable business.

3. filters are your best friend. marketplaces have various filters around, revenue, industry, startup age, number of customers, etc. use them to filter through acquires 1000s of listings effectively. use them as much as you can to get an understanding of different types of businesses that are available.

4. you don’t need the perfect deal to enter negotiations. finding the right business is extremely important but just the first step. you need to know how to value the business, conduct due diligence, negotiate a good deal and then actually run the business. you need to enter negotiations multiple times before learning the ropes and crafting the perfect deal.

5. track things and go back to old deals. its important to track and measure your search. you get a lot of important and cool data this way. theres also a lot of alpha in going back to old deals that didnt work out but are still on the market. after being on the market for a couple of months many sellers are willing to give you a more favourable deal in order to sell the business. go back to old deals you found interesting to see if theres a way to make the deal work.

Here’s a look at our acquire CRM:

I hope this was helpful.

Best of luck to those seriously looking at acquiring a business. It takes time to get a good system going, but once its in place it really becomes easy to find deals with high alpha.

If you’re interested in me helping source deals for you then hit reply or fill out this form: