I love my life as an entrepreneur.
I own several successful businesses but still have time to do what I love with the people I love.
I started Dealmaker Wealth Society to give as many people as possible around the world the opportunity to live that same lifestyle.
But here’s the thing…
Lots of you will fall back on the limiting belief that this stuff isn’t for you — that you don’t have the chops to be a business owner.
I’ve seen it happen time and again… and it’s TOTAL B.S!
John Evans is a perfect example. He’s a student of ours who last year bought a very successful, primarily B2B online pharmacy… without a cent of his own money.
He works in that business a few hours a day, but otherwise has a general manager deal with the day-to-day operations. That gives John plenty of time to focus on building his empire by bolting on more businesses.
But John wasn’t always an entrepreneur. Let me explain…
He grew up in Liverpool in the ’80s when it was quite tough due to high levels of unemployment and started his career as a mechanic. He transitioned from working ON cars to financing and leasing them, and eventually lead his own sales team.
He remained in the automotive sector for several more years — until a year after being headhunted by the big automotive rental company Avis Europe his role was eliminated thanks to a massive reorganization.
He took his redundancy (severance) money and, with no real experience in the sector, started a construction subcontracting business adapting homes for the disabled. (An opportunity, as he explains it, that ‘just fell on my lap.’)
That was 2007.
Unfortunately, like 90% of start-ups within the first 10 years, he made the decision shut it down just four years later.
He went back to sales, this time in software.
Then about a year or so ago, John came across Dealmaker Wealth Society.
As John puts it, joining our flagship Dealmaker CEO training system “gave me the confidence, really, [to put] all the bits and pieces together on how I could structure a deal [while] using OTHER people’s money.”
So he posted an advertisement: Looking to buy companies. A guy who owned an online pharmacy business got in touch.
The owner wanted £1 million for his business, but John knew — thanks to the small business valuation skills he’d gained from CEO — that the business wasn’t worth a million.
At most, John was willing to pay £500K… but some of that would have to be deferred over the next two to three years.
The seller wasn’t interested. He wanted the million.
John walked away, but he maintained a relationship with the guy.
And he must have made a pretty good impression because three months later the seller came back and asked if John was still interested in buying an online pharmacy.
As it turned out, the seller’s broker had CHEAPER online pharmacy for sale just a few minutes down the road.
John was put in touch with THAT business’s seller (one of four shareholders) and told him straight-up he was not going to put any cash into a deal.
Instead, John told the owner the deal would be a leveraged buyout, structured with an asset-based loan and deferred consideration. (Totally BALLER, though I generally don’t recommend this approach out of the gate — you first need to develop some serious rapport.)
Interestingly, these sellers weren’t your typical baby boomers looking to retire. Instead, they were a bunch of investors in their 30s and 40s who had run the business for seven years, made some money, were bored and wanted to move on to other ventures.
Albeit younger, John had stumbled upon highly motivated sellers of a profitable business with no sales or marketing and lots of opportunity to grow.
BINGO! Except…
The sellers wanted £160K for the business, all cash. When John started talking to them about deferred consideration, they weren’t interested.
But John leaned on his training, walked them through the numbers, and ultimately paid £180K (£20K OVER their asking price), with most of it deferred.
Like the construction business he’d started, John didn’t have any practical experience in the online pharmacy space… but this time he’d done plenty of due diligence. (He even had a pharmacist friends of his do a quick survey of the place.)
John was there in the business probably for the first hundred days, stewarding the strategic visions while bonding with the staff. What was a pretty small company at the time when John took it on has now grown significantly, and John has been able to forge a close bond with his employees.
John insists, “I don’t think I would’ve achieved it without Dealmaker Wealth Society.”
Though its only his first year buying businesses and he continues to educate himself on financial statements and company accounts, having done that first deal with the help of Dealmaker CEO and the Academy group left John with TONS of confidence.
When asked what he would say to people who are thinking about becoming Dealmaker students, John said:
I’d say that you’ve got to do this. If you’re really interested in creating wealth for yourself, you can’t do it on your own. You need to have people within the Dealmaker Academy [group mentoring program] and within Dealmaker Wealth Society to help you along, because it is a real collaborative process. I would never have been able to structure the deal as I did if it wasn’t for [Dealmaker Wealth Society]. So I would say anybody who is of that mindset that they would like to [be an entrepreneur], go out and actively buy a business… [and] get involved with you guys at Dealmaker because it has given me a lot of confidence.
I would say to anybody considering getting involved with Dealmaker Wealth Society, just do it because the value you will get from being part of a group, a network… is 10 times more than trying to do it on your own. And you will get that value back 10-fold.
What an amazing journey! I want you to take these THREE critical lessons from it:
The opportunity is right in front of you… right here, right now. You’re MORE than capable of grabbing it…
And Dealmaker Wealth Society will help you every step of the way. Click here to learn more about Dealmaker CEO.
Until next time, bye for now.
