If You Want to Buy Your Dream Business Fast, Be Less Specific

Why “Good Enough” is Almost Always a Faster Path to Wealth

Branden Schmidt
Digital Investor
6 min readNov 16, 2020

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Photo by Bench Accounting on Unsplash

Not everyone has the time to build an online business from scratch, so buying a business that is already generating income can be a great option.

If you want to build a lifestyle around working from your laptop at home or from anywhere you want in the world, you should start by keeping your business considerations open. If you are a perfectionist who is only willing to consider businesses in one specific niche or monetization, you’re missing out on tons of great investment opportunities. Finding your dream business fast requires some planning before you start your actual search, so we’ve put together a quick guide on how to make that happen.

Don’t Get Paralysis by Analysis

Once first-time buyers start looking to purchase an online business, they usually have an idea of the specific monetization or niche they are looking for. The downside of this tunnel vision mindset is that they often look past great opportunities that do not match their “perfect deal” mentality.

Common among many first-time buyers is the hurry-up-and-wait routine, which ultimately leads to zero deals getting done and time wasted. When buyers lock themselves into a tunnel vision search for the perfect business, they can miss out on dream opportunities. There is no such thing as the perfect business to acquire, and even if there was, what type of return on investment (ROI) could you expect to make if everything was already “perfect”?

No Such Thing as the “Perfect” Business to Acquire

Every business for sale online today has flaws. There are advantages and disadvantages to these flaws, but ultimately, how much the risk is worth comes down to you. Some buyers look at flaws as easy ROI wins because they have gained experience fixing similar issues in the past. Some might just be looking to start small and grow the business over time.

New buyers usually look for a business using very strict criteria based on their experience and often never end up finding “the one.” Many of these buyers have told us that when they first started looking for a business, it was in one monetization, but they changed to something completely different when the time came to close on a deal. If you want to find a business that you can one day grow to become the dream business you’ve always wanted, you need to focus less on “perfect” and more on “good enough.”

Why “Good Enough” is Better than “Perfect”

There is no such thing as a perfect business, at least for the people who are willing to sell theirs. “Good enough” will allow you to move fast on a business acquisition and actually start. Ditching the perfectionist mindset will allow you to pick up something quickly and help you move toward your business goals sooner.

A perfectionist will never actually buy a business, so you will be far ahead of them with your acquisitions in a shorter amount of time. While others will still be searching for the perfect business, you could be increasing the margins and enjoying the ROI of your business by improving one part of the business model or another. Nevertheless, while finding a business that is “good enough” sounds like a simple task, you will still need to define your criteria before starting your due diligence.

Create a Due Diligence System

Due diligence simply means doing your homework on a business you are interested in purchasing before making any offers. The process is unique for everyone and will oftentimes be based on your individual business and personal goals.

A few examples of the due diligence checks you might perform on a potential acquisition include reviewing the quality of the content on the site and checking the level of competition within the niche. Your main objective should be to create a system where you can disqualify businesses as fast as possible and move onto those that make more sense using a “good enough” approach. This system works best as a series of checklists that will move potential businesses further into your funnel while spending minimal time on those that don’t make the list.

Your first checklist during the due diligence process should be a quick five-minute check that disqualifies everything you would never consider purchasing. Monetization, niche, market locations, the use of private blog networks (PBN) — these are all examples of what you should filter out during your initial five-minute pre-qualifier. Once you have gathered your broad list of potential businesses that are “good enough,” you can move on to your second checklist, which will dig deeper into more specific metrics on the backend.

The second checklist should offer a deeper look into the intimate details of the business to gain a better understanding of what is making its gears turn. This second check should include things like combing through the site’s backlink profile, verifying that the traffic and revenue numbers are real, and any other checks you feel are necessary to get a clear picture of what you’re about to invest in.

The third and final checklist during your due diligence should comprise a series of questions that you would like to ask the seller based on your more in-depth understanding of the business they would like to exit.

Understand Your Criteria

The criteria you use to structure your due diligence checklists should be based on your goals and what you are looking to get out of the deal in terms of ROI. As described above, these should be separated into personal and business goals.

Personal Goals

Your personal goals should be related to how much time you want to exchange for money (or business revenue, in this case). Knowing how much time you are willing to spend each week on your new business will help you avoid investments that turn out to be full-time jobs. Another personal goal may be to find a business that already has a team in place and gives you a passive investment that is automated for success.

Knowing what your personal goals are will help you structure your checklists and allow only desired businesses to move deeper into your funnel. Having all these details clearly laid out from the outset will help you avoid potential conflicts with work and your personal time down the road.

Business Goals

As an entrepreneur looking to buy your dream business fast, you may consider your business goals to be more or less the same as your personal goals. Sure, we all want to be comfortably rich and not have to worry about money ever again, but you need to be more specific about what your business should look like. Spend a few hours this week building your criteria checklists (all three of them) to produce the due diligence system that will help you find that dream business you’ve been searching for.

List your buying criteria and create a due diligence system that takes your business goals into consideration. Not only will this get you to your goals much faster, but it will help end the terrible tyranny of paralysis by analysis that so many first-time buyers fall victim to. Building a system for your due diligence checks will help you locate real potential opportunities and create the structure needed to achieve your business and personal goals sooner.

Where to Get Due Diligence Practice?

After learning that you can still buy your dream business without being a perfectionist, you may be wondering where these businesses are.

When it comes to getting the most from this due diligence system you’ve just learned about, deal flow is everything. After you register with the largest curated marketplace for buying and selling digital properties, you will be sure to find a business that fits your goals. With new opportunities being released every week, the growing world of digital property investing is bound to reveal the foundation you need to mold your dream business into perfection. If you are brand new to the concept of buying digital assets, reach out to us. Our team can help you develop good buying criteria that works best for you.

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Branden Schmidt
Digital Investor

Providing insight and new discoveries to online business acquisitions. At Empire Flippers — we offer the largest curated marketplace for both Buyers and Sellers