38 Content Ecommerce Acquisitions & Going IPO on NASDAQ

 Summary:

In this conversation, Jon Stoddard interviews Dominic Wells, who shares his journey from the UK to Taiwan and his evolution into the world of e-commerce and business acquisitions. Dominic discusses his experiences with Onfolio, the strategies he employs for acquiring businesses, and the importance of leveraging content and social media. He also delves into investment strategies, the structure of dividends for investors, and plans for going public. The conversation highlights the challenges and opportunities in the current market, emphasizing the need for credibility and audience building in the acquisition process.

Takeaways:

Dominic moved to Taiwan for personal reasons and found a career in e-commerce.
He transitioned from teaching to internet marketing and business acquisitions.
Onfolio started as a service for investors and evolved into a holding company.
Leveraging Facebook groups can enhance traffic and business growth.
Investment strategies can include seller financing and equity sharing.
Dividends can attract different types of investors looking for cash flow.
Going public can provide liquidity and enhance credibility with sellers.
Market multiples for businesses can vary significantly based on demand and risk.
Building an audience is crucial for credibility in business acquisitions.
Deals can come from unexpected sources, emphasizing the importance of networking.

Watch the episode:

 Transcript:

Jon Stoddard (00:01.858)
Hey, so welcome. It's John Stoddard with the top &A Entrepreneurs podcast. I have a guest this time is Dominic Wells. I don't know if you've seen him on Mighty Networks or Facebook, but Dominic resides in Taiwan. How you doing, Dominic? Hey, yeah, good. Thanks. Yeah. Yeah. So, Dominic Wells, are you, what's your background? I mean, you're, are you from, you asked her where are you from?

I'm from the UK. from the UK. Just outside of London. very cool. How did you get how did you pick Taiwan? Short answer is my brother's wife is Taiwanese. We came here for their wedding in 2007 and I had just graduated from uni and I wanted to go live abroad and maybe teach English or something.

My three weeks in Taiwan told me that it was a good country. The salary was OK compared to teaching English in Europe. there was kind of the safety net of having her family here. So I just went, yeah, I'll do that. I'll go for a year or two. And then 2008, the last recession started. And I thought, well, maybe I'll stay a bit longer. I've got job. I've got a girlfriend, blah, blah, blah.

I basically never left. Very cool. How did you get into acquiring e-commerce businesses or any business? E-commerce is a specialty, right? More like content businesses. We do have some. That's a long journey, I guess. But in 2012, I started learning how to build affiliate websites.

I basically was done teaching. didn't, I didn't want to teach anymore, but I wanted to stay in Taiwan. Couldn't speak Mandarin. So I thought, okay, let's try and figure out internet marketing. so I started building websites and then started selling some of them. And then I realized as I got more money, suddenly I realized, wait, if you buy businesses, they're pretty cheap. because I think when I first discovered website flipping, was like,

Jon Stoddard (02:22.966)
Okay. If I buy this business for 30 K, it might make me a grand and I w wouldn't really be excited about a grand a month, but I would miss 30 K from my bank account because I didn't really have much. Yeah. So I didn't really get it. And then when I was a bit, I was, I was a bit older. had a bit more money and I had like a hundred K to invest. And I was like, I buy stocks or whatever? Suddenly I went, well, hold on. You can get like 30%, 40 % by investing.

in websites and I know how to run them. So I should just spend money there instead of the stock market. Capital allocation, man. Put your money where it's best loved. Yeah. And so, so that's what I did. I just started spending my own money and then I had, I already had an audience because I had a previous business where we, did some services for internet marketers. And so I had some audience members who were like,

Hey, yeah, I've got money, but I don't know how to run these businesses. So can I, can I buy a business and hire you to run it? And I was like, yeah, you can. And so that's how it starts. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. I was like, sure. Yeah. I'll just, I'll take like a percentage of the growth and a fixed management fee. And, and, and basically that led me to start on folio in 2000. Now that is a fund, right? That's a.

That acquires business. It's more of a holding company now. Holding company. Yeah. So originally we just started out doing these services for investors. So like high net worth people that just have some money to deploy. But then we realized it's a lot better if you can spread the money around multiple businesses. instead of like, we might have 40 clients, all of them own their own business. And then if

one of those businesses dies, it's a pretty good track record, but it sucks for that one guy. Whereas if all 40 people owned a 40th or 40 sites and one site dies, no one even notices because one of the other sites will have taken off. So we were considering a fund, but we realized we wanted more of a kind of permanent capital structure. We wanted to be able to just buy businesses and grow them and hold them forever and not worry.

Jon Stoddard (04:46.082)
the cycle of a fund. so we just said, okay, we'll be a holding company and people can invest in that instead. Yeah. So let me, let me go back to the, the Epic part. Now, which Epic group were you in? Two. So yeah, that's a lot. Yeah. Why did you join this? I mean, if you were already doing acquisitions pretty regularly and why did you join?

two reasons really, one at the time I was thinking of making a course about buying websites because some of my audience members wanted a course. So when I saw Roland was doing one, I was like, it's probably going to be really good. So I'll check it out. And about a week in, was like, there's no way I can do it of course, because I couldn't make it anywhere near this good. And I mean, I was just curious as well, because I thought to myself, yeah, I already know all of this stuff.

I don't know how to do it out of like with no money out of pocket. But if this is what is my passion and I think the Epic challenge was like $47 or something. So I was just like, you know, if I learn one thing, it's worth it. And it's worth it. Yeah. I'm not, it's not just a hobby for me. So, you know, it made sense to try and learn as much as I could. then I signed up for the Epic, the next thing, the accelerator, because again, I was like, I'm sure I can get

I was two grand or I'm sure I two grand value out of it. Yeah. And did you? Yeah, I think I probably got two grand out of the challenge to be honest. I bought a couple of businesses and I rather than just paying all cash, I negotiated. It wasn't no money out of pocket, but I negotiated like 30 % of it as seller financing.

And so that was worth about 200 grand or something. easy. Yeah. Yeah. Was there anything in the course you didn't expect? Like, that you learned that you didn't expect? yeah, I think, I think it changed how I looked at websites rather than the standalone businesses. looked at them as just traffic assets. and I realized that I can buy content businesses and then

Jon Stoddard (07:13.047)
pair them up with e-commerce businesses or service businesses so that they're all like one business. And also,

I think Adam had a lot of training around Facebook groups and so did Roland and so that made me realize I could also just purchase Facebook groups and leverage them to bring in more traffic and stuff. So there was quite a lot I didn't expect really. I think it's one of those things as well where probably three years from now I'll be doing something or I'll be...

doing something a certain way and I'll realize that probably that came from like just having my thinking shifted. Yeah. So can you give me an example of the, how you bought these agency type acquisitions or this app ecosystem? Did you start with a, did you start with a website first, the product, or did you sometimes say, well, let's, let's get the, well, not the, not like the content.

and let's get the Facebook group later or did sometimes you start with the Facebook group and then go by the content to market to? It's kind of a mix. Like we had a website that was a large, it was a content website about party planning. And I realized there's just a ton of Facebook groups about party planning out there. And so we didn't manage to acquire one, but it made me realize, okay, if I can go out there.

find these Facebook groups, some of them have like a hundred thousand people in. And then I had another business that had a Facebook group with 75,000 people in it and I just hadn't really been doing anything with it because I was just like, yeah, it's got a big Facebook group or whatever. And so it made me sort of look at it like, hold on, the Facebook group with that many people in probably has value. I could try and sell advertising or I could bring traffic back to my website in a different way.

Jon Stoddard (09:10.667)
And then there were other examples, like I saw Terry Wilkinson's talk about, was just like the first one he did, but he mentioned in it, you could pair up, if you have a content site, you could pair it up with like a physical products business. And if you have physical products, you could pair it up with content. And so I reached out to him to talk about, you have a content website, can you launch an FBA business off it or can you pair up with FBA business?

Yeah. He had a lot of good ideas and we're trying some stuff together there. So, yeah, it kind of just depends. We looked at what we had and was like, well, could anything, like we had another content site about pet fish and we suddenly thought, rather than trying to find good products to affiliate with, we can just buy an e-commerce business. Yeah, that is a completely new way of looking at it, isn't it?

I mean, just that whole agency in a core and all the other areas around it, the wheel. Yeah, exactly. So that was really, it's really interesting. And we haven't, I can't point to like 15 things we've done as a result, but it's just changed how we've approached, how we approach things. And I'm sure we'll end up landing one deal or doing something in the next six months to 12 months where we realized like, yeah, that was like something we directly learned from Epic. Yeah.

Now, you have, if you go to your website, invest on folio, do you have a lot of partners? How many partners do you have?

Well, it depends if you mean team members or investors or... Yeah, just team members. You guys, partners as far as like, he owns 50 % of the business, I own 50, like that. so the way we worked was we raised equity. And so originally I earned 100 % and then we raised just shy of a million dollars from a group of investors. I think it was about 40. So some people put in like...

Jon Stoddard (11:13.353)
20K, so just a small amount. And then the Invest on Folio website is actually offering preferred shares in our holding company so people can just get a fixed dividend. And again, that's got about 20 or 30 people who invested in that. They're just investors. So in terms of like partners, they don't have any say in running the business.

What I'm referring to is a lot of people in Epic and now there's over a thousand people. kind of, you know, a lot of people are collaborating together and teaming up to say, Hey, let's work on this deal. I'll give you, you know, you get this percentage, I get that percentage and let's go do it.

Yeah, we haven't done a ton of that because we haven't really needed to. We already had our investor base and stuff, but we have, we have done some business with people in Epic. Like I mentioned, we were working on something with Terry and someone else brought deals to us. So I think for us, it would be more operations. Like if someone has a business and we have a business, we could work together. Do you, do you.

follow Roland's rule about the businesses you buy stays away from broker dealers or do you buy from Empire Flippers and then just take it to the next level? Yeah, I mean, we're pretty agnostic. So we have a reasonable amount of private deal flow people coming to us because I go on podcasts and people know I'm buyer. So they'll just reach out to me and then.

I do buy from brokers if they have the business I want to buy. So a lot of the businesses on Empire Flippers don't really fit my criteria anymore. So I haven't bought one of them for a while, but it's not because I'm trying to get away from them. It's just, you know, we look at Empire Flippers, look at FA International, Quiet Light, all the other sites like Ibiz cell. And if we see something good, then we'll move.

Jon Stoddard (13:28.397)
because we're not strictly following the zero money out of pocket rule. We don't have to avoid brokers. Right. How many businesses do you have in your portfolio now? Right now we're running 38. 38. That's amazing. And have you sold any? Yeah. We sold a few off, just ones that were low six figures or five figures, like 80k, that kind of thing.

We haven't had a flip because we're, really we want to hold stuff forever. More like a kind of Berkshire Hathaway style model. Now who manages all that? Are you got it to a lot of these parts where it's just automatic and you watch that or do you have somebody managing each one of those? Yeah. mean, I've got 27 people on my team. So generally I'll have a general manager who's like pretty high level.

a good salary and he'll run like four or five businesses if they're if they're bigger or maybe 10 if they're smaller. It's kind of finding the sweet spot where you can get as many businesses out of them as you can without the business's performance suffering. Some of them are pretty simple and you can just like be pretty hands off with them and others like take up a few hours a day. Yeah, that's cool. Do you have I see in your portfolio you have some Udemy courses?

Not yet. We're trying to buy that one as soon as we've got the money raised. We'll buy that one. I'll tell you a story. Four years ago, I was negotiating, I think it's Ismael Rickson with FEI International to purchase Rob Percival's portfolio, which was a million coding courses. And he's doing $2 million a year and it had about 97 % margins. It was just a cashflow cow.

Yeah, I mean, this one we're this one we're purchasing is smaller. I think it makes like 200k a year, but it's pretty much hands off. So we're just seeing it as not free money because we have to pay for it. But it's not like I have to buy the business and then hire a manager or anything. So it's it's just like instantly adding like 200k a year. Yeah, I gotta tell you the the

Jon Stoddard (15:52.555)
The strategy with the Rob Percival's courses was just to start acquiring other courses and put under it. You'd have these developers to write a course, and if they put it up themselves, they wouldn't make any money. They'd probably sell five courses a month. But if they sold it under Rob's umbrella, they could sell 5,000 courses a month because he was getting the bulk of the traffic.

Yeah, I mean, that's one thing, this business that we're buying, it's about five or six courses. And I think three of the courses were created by a subject matter expert, and then they just share the profit. so we'll just do the same thing. Like if we want to, let's say we want to create another course relevant to the core business. So the audience is the same, but you know, we'll just find someone who's graded it and say, create it, stick it under our umbrella and we can market it to our list.

Because Udemy is kind of fussy, like you can't really take your customers or your students off Udemy and then just like spam them, but you can absolutely email them and say, hey, we've got a new course out. And so I think there's about, think there's half a million or a million students that have gone through. So we can just like bring out a new course every couple of months and scale that way. And so it should become a bit of a flywheel.

Yeah, inside Rob's courses, you go through the course and he offers a free hosting for, you know, like three to six months. That's how he gets to sell other products to them. Yeah, that's a good idea. Yeah. So where are you? I got a question about the Onfolio portfolio. Why did you offer a dividend? Is that what your investors like? I mean, I'm a fan of Warren Buffett and some other investors and they eschew

dividends. They just like to keep the money and then allocate it to new businesses. Well, that's the thing because when we did our first raise, it was just equity. It was common shares. And the common shares don't come with a dividend. And so we were like, we're just going to raise money, we're going to use that money to buy businesses, those businesses are going to pay us profit, we're going to use that profit to buy more businesses, build tea and blah, blah, blah. And then

Jon Stoddard (18:14.869)
A bunch of investors were like, that's awesome. But some of us have said, well, I like this space because of the cashflow. I cashflow. And we said, okay, so when we do a future raise, instead of issuing more equity and more common shares, why don't we issue preferred shares that come with a dividend?

So the, and it's a fixed dividend of 12%. So it's not actually related to the profit of the business. mean, obviously we have to be profitable to pay it, but you need 40 businesses. You need 38 businesses. long as businesses can pay us more than 12%, which they do. Yeah. And so now, of course, now we went back to our investors and we're like, yeah, this one has a dividend. then the investors are like, well, that one doesn't have upside. I want upside. And so it's like, well, you want everything. But

Basically the idea is that people want upside like Warren Buffett style, they should buy the common shares, which currently aren't on offer, but will be again in the future. But if they want cashflow, 12 % is actually a pretty good return. So a lot of the people who are buying preferred shares are just people looking for retirement income or, so they're not really entrepreneurs who are like, I can run businesses myself. more like.

people who are like, hey, I've got a million dollars sitting in the bank making negative interest. I'll invest in your portfolio. The downside is protected and 12 % is nothing to sniff about. No, it's not, not at all. Because if it's in the bank, it says 0%. Yeah. And then that means that our common shares can appreciate more because we're not issuing more common shares and diluting them. So it's great for the common shareholders and it's great for people that want cashflow.

Yeah. And who knows, maybe in a couple of years we'll say, well, let's issue some more common shares because it makes more sense. So we're just going with preferred shares right now and we'll see how that goes. Yeah. So let's say you had 38 businesses and I'm just going to guess like each one of them doing a million a year. I don't know, but you know, 38 million. Do you have any plans to go public or? Yeah, we actually, so the common shares, the plan is that we'll go

Jon Stoddard (20:33.463)
public later this year, maybe Q3 will file so like quite soon. So rather than trying to get really big like Thrasio doing a big IPO, we're going to do a direct listing on the OTC markets and then the common shares will still be thinly traded and they'll be like low in value but because we'll be a public company, it'll make it lot easier to raise money and then. It's liquidity, investors want liquidity.

And also sellers, because we can go to a seller and say, hey, we can give you like, you want to sell this business for $5 million? We can give you 5 million or we can give you 1 million cash and 4 million shares. And then they can Google us and see like, you're actually an SEC reporting entity. Like you are public. And then when we want to recruit team members, we can give them stock options. there's a lot of, a lot of upside benefits that go in public. Yeah.

And then once our profit gets higher, we'll probably, I don't know, 5 million in profit or 10 million. Then we'll say, actually, let's switch up and go onto NASDAQ. Yeah, you get to your $4 a share and, you know, your assets is at a certain level. Yeah. And your trading volume. Absolutely. Exactly. Yeah. So a lot of people said, why don't you stay private and then go public later? And we, we could do it that way, but we think we'll grow faster if we go public sooner.

So yeah, I'm a big believer you should go public sooner because there's so many things in the market happening right now. I mean, you have access to eyeballs, millions and millions of eyeballs, very simple to get in front of. And then there's so much capital right now available. So if I looked at your business, I go, man, I got, I got a content business, Ecom business with big email list and the people that may buy your stock. Let's say you did a reggae and raise money. You can go right.

to the reggae and write to your customers, 38 different businesses and say, I know you love our product. Would you be interested in buying the common stock at X amount of shares? And I think you got a great story there. Yeah, I can't do a reggae based outside the US. So at some point when the pandemic is, I'll probably relocate to the US as well because I think reggae is amazing, especially if a lot of our audience aren't accredited.

Jon Stoddard (23:01.777)
And if reggae, if the shares are going to be listed, then there's no limits on what people can invest as well in reggae. Yeah. Up to $75 million total. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's a year, I think. mean, a year, a year would put us in a pretty good position. So yeah, it's a, the more I learn about reggae, the more amazing.

Yeah, we should talk later. We've done a number of reggae and I have a private equity investor that will invest in reggae. That's cool. Yeah. Yeah. That's cool. and the course you recommend the course to other people in your spot or was it just kind of an accidental type? found this course I need to say I'm referring to the Epic course because I love it. Yeah. No, I haven't recommended it.

At one point I was going to be an affiliate for it and email it out, I just, those affiliate emails sneak up on me. They're like, Hey, hey, mail now we're launching.

they've already launched a website I didn't prepare. But yeah, I definitely recommend the course. Yeah, I signed up as an affiliate. I signed up as an affiliate and I put one post in LinkedIn talking about it and some other stuff content just about what I love. I think I've sent three, two or three people over there. Yeah. Yeah. I was in the trends Facebook group and someone asked about it and I was like, I think I just told the story about like

Yeah, I made my two grand back in a week or something. And I think a bunch of people signed up based on that. So didn't use an affiliate link, but I'm sure, I'm sure there's some people in Epic who were there because of me. So, yeah. So let me go back to this, how you purchase a company now, because, you know, I'll look at the conversations on the Facebook group or the Epic challenge and the Epic accelerator and the Epic completes. And it's different because

Jon Stoddard (25:04.077)
A lot of people in the accelerator challenge think, you know, no money down. It's not no money down. It's no money out of pocket. How do you look at when you see a business, how you structure that with, let's take an example, a million dollar, million business and it's content business. How would you structure that? I know that everyone's different, but. Yeah. So for us, I mean, it really depends where it is. Cause if we're working with a broker, then it's really hard to, you know,

structure something. A lot of sellers are expecting all cash or like 70 % cash. And the thing about Roland's rule or Roland's teaching is if you can do no money out of pocket, then that's amazing. And it's great for people that don't have access to capital, but you don't necessarily need to do that. So for us, because we have access to capital.

If we want that business and the seller's like, I want cash, then we'll just be like, okay, we'll pay cash. so, especially as once we're public, there'll be a multiple arbitrage as well, because we'll be buying businesses for 3X, 4X, but we might be trading at 10X, 20X. it's- yeah, it goes up to 24X. Yeah. I mean, when we're on the OTC markets, think 24 would be a stretch, but on NASDAQ, like absolutely- Yeah, you're right on that one. But either way.

So we kind of don't have to use no money out of pocket. So a lot of the time we'll just do what we need to do to get the business. So what we might do is just some of the standard stuff that Roland teaches like I could defer down payment or we'll just use, let's say 30 % seller financing. I did one deal actually before we changed to a holding company and decided to go public. The first deal I did sort of post epic was we bought the business for

600k and it was 400k, it was 200k up front and 400k over two years and so I had some investors who wanted to come with me so basically the investors put in the 200k and we said we'll just do the 600k as a seller note, the 400k as a seller note so we got 60 % of the business and the investors got 40 % but they paid for like

Jon Stoddard (27:29.363)
all of the initial capital and we're just paying monthly out of the cash flow. So we're also carrying a risk. Like if the business goes down, we have to pay the sellers forever. But we got that with zero money out of pocket. And I think if we were going to do it again, we would even offer something Roland talked about a lot that I think is very doable is you get someone

Like, let's say you find a seller who agrees to 60 % cash and 40 % over time, which you could probably find in a business that's over a million. Because obviously if it's a 500K business, they're like, there's so many buyers, the seller can be fussy. And I'm not really dealing with distressed buyers. So that's another difference for me.

Yeah, if you could get someone who says, okay, I'll take 60 % cash and 40 % over time, whatever you negotiate, you could get investors to pay that 60 % cash in exchange for like 49 % equity so that you basically get 51%, you get control and stake and you're paying nothing out of pocket. I think if an investor said, that's not fair, I'm 60 % and only getting 49, you're just like, well, I'm going to work for free or, you know, so.

I'm going to manage the business in exchange for and I'm going to connect the business with what I know. yeah, so it's come along for the ride. Yeah. So I mean, as long as you can find the investors and I was fortunate because I spent two years building an audience. So I've, I've got, I've got like thousands of people on my email list. So I have the demand that I could do that. But I think that's probably the easiest deal for people in Epic to do is get

someone else to pay for the down payment or whatever the seller wants upfront and then, but for not $1 for one equity, you know, like not one for one for the dollar for the equity. then yeah, that's a good way of increasing your stake.

Jon Stoddard (29:41.549)
And I thought about some other things as well. I, so I have a relationship with Ezoic, which is a display ad company. And they, they said to me, if I migrate any businesses from another display company, like Mediavine or AdThrive, they'll, and I switched to Ezoic, they'll guarantee the revenue will be the same. because they're like, we can beat their revenue. So we guarantee it be the same and then we'll work hard to beat it.

And one thing I was thinking is I wonder if I could go to Ezoic and say, Hey, if you put up some of the money, I'll buy this business and migrate it across to you guys and you can get paid back first. I think it's a great idea. Have you tried it? No, because I am, we raised a bunch of money and didn't need to, I think it's good idea. I think there's probably other companies that would be interested in doing stuff like that as well. So it was, was funny because I was going through Epic when

I think I had a three or four month old daughter and being in Taiwan, I couldn't make any of the live calls just because of the time zone. So I was listening to the recordings the next day and I was typically like walking around my bedroom rocking my daughter to sleep with just like light bulbs and ideas firing off in my brain like for an hour and listening to Roland on 2X speed and

So I'd have to try and hold all this stuff in my brain. And then when she went to sleep and I put her down in the crib, I had to quickly go and write everything down. yeah. That's great. Nice story. Yeah. So yeah, there's, there's a lot of things that I tried and then we just kind of went, we're doing something different now. So we'll, we'll put a pin in that. But I think if anyone's going through the course, wondering if, if all the things Rodan talks about are doable, I think they are.

I do think the key is you need a motivated seller though, because we had one, we actually bought one e-commerce business in December and it was an epic deal. didn't even realize it, but he, I hired away this guy, this employee to come and work for me. And he told his boss, I'm going to leave, but I'll stay and train my, my replacement. And the boss said, you know what? I'm just going to retire. Do you guys just want to buy the business?

Jon Stoddard (32:08.941)
It was making 120K a year. And so he said, you can buy it for 120K and you just pay me 10K a month for a year. my God, that's perfect. There's a ton of Epic people that would have loved to see that come in their lab. Yeah. And for me, was like, I was like, I don't know if I want this business. So then I looked at the numbers and was like, wait, that's a no brainer. That's a free business. Yeah. And so we said, sure. And then, and of course we've grown the business now. So now

At the time the business was making 10K a month, so was paying for itself. Now it's making, I think 15K or 20K a month. So it's just free revenue. And it makes enough money that we got a strike, a working capital loan to buy more inventory so it can grow. And so the other day I was thinking about it and I was like, that's exactly what like Roland teaches, except I didn't seek it out. It came to me.

But I think it's a good story because people in Epic can know these deals are out there and I found one without even looking. So if you look, I'm sure you can find some. Yeah. What's the hardest part of this whole process of putting, you know, deals in your pipeline at the start, having the conversation and moving down the pipeline where you have two to three deals. What's the whole, what's the for you? I think in the beginning it's

you don't even know where to start. So you think, should I contact brokers? Should I try and build some credibility? Should I just start randomly like cold calling businesses? And what I did was I started building an audience. So I just was buying some businesses and I started blogging about it and sharing in Facebook groups and trying to get on like by business podcasts and stuff.

And once you build an audience, it grows your credibility. also if people start bringing businesses to you. So not everyone wants to do that. It takes time. Not everyone needs to do that. That's just kind of what I did. So got a little bit of survivorship bias. It's a great tip. It really is. mean, yeah. Yeah. I mean, for me, I would do that every time because it's what I'm good at, but I, I'm not going to go and say to every

Jon Stoddard (34:33.229)
1,000 people in Epic, you need to start a blog. But actually, I think there's a lot of material in there already about how to get started. there's a lot of, there was that service that started out, I think, in the middle of Epic too. Was it Peter that did the service where you can? Yeah, Peter Lang. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, exactly. the &A done for you. Yeah. So.

That's one of those things where it's like, okay, yeah, you have to spend a fair amount of cash to get it started, but one deal will, will make up for the three to six months. Yes. Yeah, exactly. I mean, and then some, it's like, what six months is, I don't even know what the price is anymore. Cause I think it don't know. Yeah. But yeah, I'm pretty sure you do one good deal that then the first month of that deal will pay for the

the course. Yeah, 100 % makes sense. So it's a $5 million business. Of course. Yeah. Yeah. I actually maybe I should check it out again. Actually. I got a question about I got a question about multiples, you know, rolling prints out of EBITDA multiples by industry. And I and the reason I bring this up because I was looking at it goes like online services, internet, ecommerce marketplace is 19.63 for EBITDA and I

I go, you know, that's, I had an e-commerce business. I sold hearing aids and I sold it through Empire Flippers. And it definitely wasn't 19.3. It was like more like 2.4 to four, something like that. Yeah. I mean, I know. I think a lot of that research came from TechCrunch or Crunchbase. And probably the internet service businesses that are on Crunchbase probably are.

the 19X but the ones on Empire Flippers, the average is a lot lower. In fact, Empire Flippers have this tool. yeah, yeah, no, I used it today and it was, I was spot on. said, can't. Yeah, it's like the average is, well it's not loading but anyway, the average is, the average actually has accelerated since start of the pandemic which is annoying but

Jon Stoddard (36:54.157)
Yeah, it's probably three to four X. You will see some listed at five, but I don't think anyone's paying five. No, that's, that's gotta be, you know, a one hour per month or one hour per year consistently revenues in management place. Everything's automatic. Yeah. And I wouldn't buy a business that just runs on Google traffic for five X. Like if it was a service business or it was something that had.

a large amount of email subscribers and a Facebook group or something, then yeah, you pay five X or even higher. But a lot of these businesses, they're one Google update away from getting wiped out. so the risk, I think the risk has actually increased because Google's updating a lot more aggressively. And so if the risk is increased, the expectation of return has decreased.

that doesn't make sense. the multiples are going up, so the returns are going down, but the risk isn't going down. In fact, the risk is going up. So if anything, the multiples should stay the same or go down, but there's so much demand that of course multiples are going to go up. And so for me, it's frustrating, but...

You just manage through the up and down cycles. I it's just there. It's like dollar cost averaging at some point. I average over 20 years for Forex. Yeah. Yeah. And also for us, the multiples are kind of a relative as well. I'll overpay for something that's amazing.

Like when I first started working with investors, I had someone who said to me, I'm not going to pay anything more than two X for a business. And I said, so you're just going to get a garbage business. unless you get lucky, but really the multiple is not something people should fixate on as long as, you know, if the numbers can work. for us, if we saw an amazing business that we know we can grow and it's super stable and we need to pay over the average to get it.

Jon Stoddard (39:04.567)
that's what we'll do. you know, I think every single podcast I've been on, I've referenced this Warren Buffett quote about it being better to buy a good business for a fair price than a fair business for a good price. And so we have that in our veins. so, yeah, it does suck when multiples go up, but as long as the quality of businesses goes up with them, then it kind of nets up. That's great.

right, Dom, I I really appreciate the time you spent on this. mean, I talked to Epic members all week and I love helping them because I love this part of it. And your experience really helps because it's just you can come from anywhere to do this. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, I've probably had a different entry from the traditional route, but yeah, that just validates that you don't have to follow Roto's Blueprint.

to a T, you can use it to inspire you to figure out what's going to work for you. And customize it a bit. Yeah. Yeah. It's perfect. Man, I wish you the best of success with your business on Folio. at some point offline, we should talk about that Reg A because that's what we do. And I've got a private equity firm that will come in on there. All right. Awesome. That sounds good. Yeah, that's good. Thanks for having me. Thank you very much, Tom. Cheers. Bye.