Two Hidden Places to Buy the Best Online Business for You
With a little creativity, you can find great deals in unexpected places.
For those looking to purchase an online business, sourcing deals is often the number one objective when looking to acquire a digital property.
Gaining access to those hard-to-find deals offers a buyer a competitive advantage over every other buyer looking to do the same. Often, what most online businesses in the market are lacking is the knowledge of where to source these hidden gems while beating their competition to the negotiation stage with a seller.
There are a few places most buyers will look when first scouring the web for digital assets for sale, but these venues are often lacking in one area or another in terms of providing any real potential.
In this guide, we aim to show you two hidden places most buyers frequently overlook when sourcing potential acquisitions. Before we reveal these hidden gold mines that you could source deals from yourself, we should first cover what happens more often than not for those looking to purchase their first digital asset.
No Suitable Business Out There
The biggest issue that most first-time buyers face is trying to find the “perfect” deal.
This will often keep them from moving forward with a potential acquisition in the hope of maybe finding “the one.”
This should not be your approach when it comes to finding a potential business to acquire. To improve key aspects of the business, you should look for “good enough” and work toward improving or outsourcing the workload to those who are more knowledgeable in any area in which you happen to be lacking.
After you have moved past the mentality of finding the “perfect” business, you will find that there is a plethora of business-for-sale aggregators.
This will come in a wide range of public marketplaces, like Craigslist, Facebook groups, and brokerage marketplaces, with some offering high-quality assets and others not so much.
The problem you will have with these types of business aggregators is that you will often exhaust yourself in looking at a multitude of businesses for sale that just do not meet your standards. Even if you were to take the “good enough” approach, you will still find it difficult to find something that matches your exact criteria.
This is where you need to start expanding your horizons and considering other ways to source high-quality deal flow. Outside of researching multiple marketplaces, the two places that entrepreneurs will often look past when sourcing potential acquisitions include examining competitors and businesses within a parallel industry.
Competitors
Buyers will often disregard competitors if they have a combative attitude toward them.
Even if this is not your first acquisition, you may look at the competition as a threat rather than offering potential to expand your current project to new heights.
Although you are competitors within your industry, it may still be possible to maintain a good relationship with them should you push your ego aside and think of the old saying:
“the bridges you burn today may be the bridges you need tomorrow.”
Maintaining a healthy relationship with your competition will also help you in the end should you be in a position to acquire their business if they are looking to make an exit.
A few upsides that a competitor might consider over selling to someone outside of their industry include the fact that you understand the true value of their business. As you come from the same industry, you already have insight into the potential their market provides. This is even more evident when they receive below-average offers from those outside of their industry.
Another reason a competitor might consider your offer over someone else’s is the fact that you are already equipped with the skills needed to run the business.
For many sellers who have spent years of sweat equity in building their business to the level it has achieved, they do not want to see all this effort flushed down the drain once they exit.
When you express your desire to scale the business using the skills you already have within their industry, you are giving them peace of mind in the fact that you want to see the business succeed even after the deal is done. With the fact that your intentions with the acquisition are clear, the seller will be at ease knowing there will be no need for a prolonged search for a suitable buyer should you approach them early on with a great offer.
Establishing early contact with them may also offer the potential to partner with them to combine brand power should they not be ready to exit their business just yet.
On the subject of combining brand power, another hidden gem of potential business deals to source during your search are those businesses within a similar niche or industry.
Businesses in a Parallel Industry
Looking outside of your general criteria for a potential business acquisition, you may be able to find an asset that solves your customers’ problems in a different way. Searching for business acquisitions in a parallel niche or industry doesn’t necessarily mean looking to acquire a competitor’s brand. In a different approach, you could offer a complimentary service that a similar brand may offer, which your target audience could also benefit from.
An example of how you could use parallel industry research to improve your deal flow includes an ecommerce brand you own that sells dog food to pet owners whose dogs have sensitive teeth. Rather than looking to acquire a dog food brand that is in direct competition with your own, look for a business that offers its customers dog food toys with snacks built inside. Not only do you have a new product to offer your existing customers but you are also providing a sub-niche item that your customers might have higher interest in when deciding between two separate brands of dog food.
With this example, you could easily cross-promote the products you have within each separate list while maintaining a strategic purchase, solving more than one problem a customer may have simultaneously. This is just one example of how you can locate potential deals within a parallel industry. However, the question still remains: where do you actually locate these great opportunities in the first place?
Finding Deals in Hidden Places
If you have been in the online business space for some time, no matter which industry or niche you have been targeting, you will most likely already have an idea of who your competition is.
Your competitors will be easy to locate; however, not all of these brands or business owners will be open to your offer. Not only may they not be open to a potential offer you bring to the table but many of these owners may not be ready to exit at the time you are looking to make a new acquisition. What is even harder than locating these potential businesses for acquisition through your list of competitors is locating businesses that are for sale in parallel industries.
The best way to surmount this challenge in locating potential business acquisitions, whether through competitors or parallel industries, is to use a broker’s help to facilitate your needs and to perform the hard work for you.
Signing up on a broker’s marketplace that already receives a large deal flow of different types of businesses can help you find the exact type of business you desire, covering all the bases mentioned in this post.
Not only will you be able to filter businesses that are within your exact niche or industry but using a broker will also give you the best opportunity to find a business that meets your criteria based on the sheer amount of deal flow they receive.
All of this is also made possible without having to do the leg work on your own.
Saving you time on research and reaching out to potential sellers is also a huge advantage of using a broker to help facilitate deal flow in your favor. No matter which route you select when locating that hidden opportunity for your own, we hope that you will now have a better understanding of the hidden places in which you can locate business acquisitions.
