I think one of the most interesting things I've learned from you in your content is just that you don't actually have to have $100,000 to buy $100,000 business, which is just like kind of, I think it's probably the big unlock that no one knew. Can you talk a little bit about or maybe give some examples of why that is true?

Because it certainly doesn't seem it. Yeah, it's two magic words when you don't have money. And that's seller financing, which used to be a thing in real estate. You used to be able to sometimes buy a house and from the future profits you got off a rental unit, you could buy that house for $0 down and pay them over time.

So the seller would finance your purchase. Now it's not so normal, but in buying businesses, it's very normal. 60% of all businesses are bought using essentially the seller's future profits. And the reason why is because you've run a business or seven before. So how miserable is running a business sometimes?

It's tough, right? And so for a lot of these sellers, they've been doing this for 10, 20, 30 years, that at some point they're ready for the next thing, even if it's a profitable business, but they're stuck in it because unlike a job, not everybody knows how to exit a business.

Everybody knows how to leave a company. Not a lot of people know how to sell their company. Not a lot of people know you can't even sell your company. And so there are a ton of sellers out there who are trapped in their business. Most of these sellers do not have enough cash for retirement.

More than 70% of them do not have a transition plan for the next generation to take over or somebody else to take over. And so you come in as a little bit of a solution for that. And how that works really quickly, for instance, like I always use this one deal because it was one of my smaller deals in the beginning.

I bought a laundromat for like $100K a year that did $67,000 in profit. And that bit, so that's a one and a half, roughly X and one and a half X, the profits of the business is how you value these for everybody listening. And so I buy this laundromat, but I don't use my own cash to do it.

I tell the seller over a three-year period, I'm going to pay you back from the profits of the business to take over your business. And at the end of three years, great, you have your full 100K. And at the end of the three years, I own the business outright.

And this is very common. And I would say it's not always common. You get 100%, but it's more common than people think. So a business costs $100,000, the business is making enough profit to pay for that. Why is this a good deal for the seller just to get out?

It seems like a great deal for you because the business pays him back with the profits, you don't spend anything. Yeah, it goes back to the old supply and demand curve. When you have a lot of supply and not a lot of demand, then you're in charge. And so there's somewhere around the range of 10 to 12 billion small businesses for sale.

There's a great article actually, we did a video on it about Japan, and they have a crisis in business owners starting to give away their business for $0. I'm not talking $0 seller financing, I'm talking $0 because the next generation doesn't want to run a goat herding business, or they don't want to run a plumbing business.

And so the founders of the companies just shut them down, or they try to give them away. So this is a real thing that happens every day. In fact, a lot of people don't think that they have a business, they think that they have a job. So think about your neighborhood wedding photographer, right?

Who also happens to have some contracts for high school photos that they do every year. They do $100,000 in revenue a year. It's a great little business for them, right? That's their business. They do $100,000 a year. And when you take out their salary, which at this point, they pay themselves the full amount, but let's say you take out their salary of like $60,000, $70,000, that leaves $30,000 to $40,000 profit.

That person, when they're done being a wedding photographer and a high school photo photographer, they probably just stop and go do something else. But those contracts with the high schools are worth something, that residual revenue is worth something, their gear is worth something, their website, the SEO that's built up, all of these jobs have inherent value to them.

And it's just that a lot of people, there's a big mismatch. And it's one thing we're working on trying to build right now, so I should talk to you about, but I'm trying to build right now a better mousetrap because there's something called BizBuySell, which is like the Zillow or Redfin of small businesses to buy, except it's awful.

It's like bad UI/UX, a bunch of garbage on there. The financials aren't clean. They have business brokers that never respond to you. It's not a great site, but it's the best of all of the bad, right? And so we're trying to figure out how to build a marketplace where sellers can come and trust that there's going to be non-looky-loo buyers on it.

And we can sort of normalize the information and pair the two. But there's not a lot of that right now. So that wedding photographer can't find you, the young new photographer that would love to buy that business because you, the young photographer, are just thinking, "Oh, I'm just going to go start my own." As opposed to, "What if I could buy it?

What if I could instead, when I graduate dental school, what if I could buy somebody's practice and I could give them an annuity in retirement, but I get to start that?" Instead, people just retire. I think buying small businesses is the next real estate. And in 10 to 20 years, it will be completely commoditized and normalized in a way that it is not today.

But until then, there's a lot of opportunity. If there's not a platform to do it, is it knocking on doors? Is that how you find these businesses in your local community? We started one company... Well, actually, we bought a company. I bought a company called BizScout. BizScout.io. And that company sources off-market deals.

And so basically, if you want to buy a car wash in your geographic area, it pulls together all the data from Yelp and Google and business listings and pulls them into one location. Also cross-references that with PPP loans. So you can try to get to who the owner is in your location.

And maybe needed some help. And so it might be more likely to sell now. And then also pulls this list of proprietary deals we have from having this big audience. So BizScout.io is the one that we want to build off of. It's what I use right now. And then, yeah, I think the best way to buy a business is different than buying a house.

It's almost like buying a house back in the day. Before Realtors, you would be like, "Oh, my friend Sally is selling. You want to get into the neighborhood? You should talk to Sally." That's like foreign to my generation. We can't even imagine you just buy houses on word of mouth.

What's wrong with you people? But that is actually the best way to buy a small business is to build up your network or do what I call personal P&L review, where you look at all of your expenses and you see which CEOs of those companies you could actually get to.

And you start nurturing relationships and saying, "Oh man, you guys produced my podcast at all the hacks. How's that business going? Is it profitable? How long have you been doing it? A while. Cool. Is this something you want to do forever? You want to keep running this business? No, you don't.

You're kind of ready for the next thing. Interesting. I actually buy small businesses. If you had an offer at the right price and the right terms, would you be open to a conversation on potentially getting acquired or an investment that comes with distributing equity, cash flow, something like that?

Oh, you might be interested So that great, now we're in the game.