From Plumber to Buying & Selling Online Businesses with Jaryd Krause

Summary

In this conversation, Jared Krause shares his journey from being a plumber to becoming a successful entrepreneur in the online business space. He discusses his experiences with various business acquisitions, the lessons learned from failures, and the importance of focusing on one business at a time. Jared also highlights the challenges he faced, including dealing with fraud and the complexities of e-commerce. Ultimately, he transitioned into coaching others on how to buy online businesses, leveraging his experiences to help others succeed. In this conversation, Jaryd Krause shares his journey from being a business owner to becoming a successful business coach. He discusses the evolution of his coaching model, the importance of client results, and how he adapts his strategies to meet the needs of his clients. Jaryd emphasizes the significance of building effective systems for business growth, leveraging affiliate partnerships, and avoiding distractions in business. He also highlights the value of experience versus attitude in hiring and the importance of maintaining a work-life balance while pursuing entrepreneurial goals.

Takeaways

Jared transitioned from plumbing to online business due to dissatisfaction with his job.
He learned valuable lessons from his first business acquisition, despite it not being a financial success.
The importance of due diligence when buying a business cannot be overstated.
Diversification in business can lead to neglecting individual ventures.
Jared faced challenges with suppliers and customer service in his e-commerce businesses.
He experienced a significant loss due to fraudulent transactions in one of his businesses.
Focusing on one business at a time is crucial for success.
Jared's coaching business helps others navigate the complexities of buying online businesses.
He emphasizes the importance of financial stability before quitting a job to pursue entrepreneurship.
Jared's journey illustrates the value of learning from failures and adapting strategies. There are great coaches who have never played the game.
Transitioning from free to paid coaching can lead to better results.
Adapting business models is crucial for growth and sustainability.
Client results are the main focus of effective coaching.
Tailoring coaching to individual client needs enhances success.
Focusing on business acquisition strategies can yield significant returns.
Building systems is essential for scaling a business effectively.
Leveraging affiliate partnerships can drive growth and revenue.
Avoiding shiny object syndrome is key to maintaining focus.
Creating effective training systems can empower employees and streamline processes.

 

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Transcript:

jon_stoddard (00:01.218)
Welcome to the top &A entrepreneurs today. My guest is Jared Krauss. Jared is in Australia. And he's got a business called Buying Online Businesses. He's been involved in four acquisitions. And now he has a course teaching other people how to do it, avoiding his mistakes, let's say. So welcome to the show, Jared. All right, so where in Australia are you?

jaryd_krause (00:15.719)
wrestling.

jaryd_krause (00:22.523)
Thanks John, thanks for having me on.

jaryd_krause (00:27.732)
I live in the state called Queensland and live in the town called the Gold Coast.

jon_stoddard (00:34.328)
Yeah, cold coast. And you, I noticed on your about bio, you do a lot of surfing.

jaryd_krause (00:40.101)
Yeah, that's my number one. It's one of the reasons I got into this. Yeah, surfing is huge for me. Yeah. Short board, predominantly. I do have a long board, but it only gets it maybe four times a year when it's very, very small.

jon_stoddard (00:43.138)
Yeah. Is that short board or long board? Short board.

jon_stoddard (00:55.054)
Yeah, my longboard hasn't been out since 10 years ago.

jaryd_krause (00:59.367)
We need to get you out there. Let's go for a surf.

jon_stoddard (01:02.424)
Yeah, it's been a while. So I want to talk to you about your journey here on in your bio. You were an employee at a plumbing construction company and how did that job come about and what were you doing there? And then I just want to talk about that like frustration. I don't want to do this anymore.

jaryd_krause (01:14.215)
Mm.

jaryd_krause (01:23.365)
Yeah, so that good question that job came about because at school I wasn't academically smart enough. And I really wanted to I really wanted to be wealthy when I was at school, I had an uncle that was quite wealthy as an accountant, or not an uncle is like a step uncle sort of thing that I saw he was quite wealthy. I was like, I want that. And I just did no good at math. I did no good at English. And the only other option was like maybe you just go get a trade.

jon_stoddard (01:30.915)
Yeah.

jaryd_krause (01:52.167)
which is a construction job. So I enrolled to get a job as a plumber and got one with a company that sort of like distributes out to distribute you that out as an apprentice to different plumbing companies. And then I got a better job before I even started that one with a large plumbing firm. And I did my plumbing apprenticeship. And I just worked my way up through the rank sort of thing to become a supervisor quite quickly. And yeah, I just

you didn't get much more money for being a supervisor and the stress of running the guys and getting the jobs done. I was a third year apprentice by the time I had to sign off jobs, which is kind of illegal because you need to be fully qualified and have your license to sign jobs off. But I was running jobs when I was, I think it was like 19 with guys, know, like 40 and trying to have to tell tradies to do their job correctly as a 19 year old is a bit, you know, it's a bit tough.

jon_stoddard (02:48.258)
Yeah, were you what was going on? Were you unsatisfied with your life at the moment or just too much stress or I'm trying to figure out when that first call to adventure came like you got this uncle that's making more money. How do you get into that?

jaryd_krause (02:55.175)
Yeah.

jaryd_krause (03:01.051)
Mmm.

jaryd_krause (03:06.405)
Yeah, so I didn't really know this, this like step uncle, it was like on the other side of the family and they had been like divorced for a long time. But I just saw like when I was younger, I was like, this guy had the life, you know, or what I presumed he did. And the frustration that I had in plumbing was I was working, I was driving an hour and a half to work every day in traffic and then two hours, two hours home. And then I'd be doing, so that's like 18 hours in the car, six days a week. And then I would be doing

you know, 60, 70 hours a week on top of that and having to deal with builders and I just hated it. So what most Australians do in our younger years is we go and travel and usually go and travel for three months or six months or longer. And that's what I did is I went and started doing snow seasons and I used to, I went to live in America, lived in Canada, lived in Japan and did a bunch of these trips. And eventually I got to the point where I was like, I don't want to go back to

I don't want go back to plumbing. I was, I was through the travel. I was running away from it because I was drinking a lot when I was working on the Fridays and Saturdays. This is an amount because I just had no life and I just needed some like

jon_stoddard (04:13.666)
Yeah, that's a drinking is an outlet to dull the pain. Yeah.

jaryd_krause (04:17.509)
Yeah, exactly. I had a really bad, really bad year one year that I four weekends that I remember consciously because I wasn't blackout drunk. So I really lent into drinking at that time. Yeah. So it is a massive outlet for people and some people may be listening or others that know people that are like, they're just hurting somewhere in their life that it needs to, you need to shine some light on it and talk about it and work on it.

jon_stoddard (04:32.428)
Yeah.

jon_stoddard (04:47.692)
Yeah. And then what, so where did this, did you try a whole bunch of different things first or did you just find this direction to go? That's whatever excites you.

jaryd_krause (04:48.582)
Yeah.

jaryd_krause (04:57.711)
Yeah. Yeah. So I was living in Egypt at the time and I got a job as a dive master. I had studied to a dive master and was just working doing that and thought, all right, I don't want to, this is in 20, end of 2012 to early 2013. I realized like, don't want to, I don't want to go home and be a plumber. So I need to work at how I can make money online. So I literally did the thing of like type into Google, how to travel the world and make money online. Cause that was my goal. And then

jon_stoddard (05:25.965)
Yeah.

jaryd_krause (05:26.939)
what popped up was start a travel blog. And so I did that and tried to start a travel blog and that didn't work so well. So then I thought, all right, I need a proper online business. And what I thought a proper online business was an e-commerce business. Little did I know, I set that up, little did I know much about paid marketing, Facebook ads and Google ads. So that didn't work so well, which led me to the stat of, well, 90 % of startups fail. And I thought if that's the case,

why don't I take some of the money I've saved from plumbing that I've had in the share market or the stock market and put that into buying a small online business that's past that 90 % failure rate. And I just tested that out and it went well.

jon_stoddard (06:08.864)
Yeah.

jon_stoddard (06:12.974)
What was that first business? It was e-commerce. What was it and what was the size?

jaryd_krause (06:16.665)
No, wasn't, wasn't the first one I started, the first one that I bought. The first one I bought was a membership business where people could subscribe to a monthly or quarterly or annual fee to get access to a database of wholesalers or suppliers, which people could use to tap into when they're starting their own dropshipping business or using a dropshipping business. Yeah, so it helped e-commerce businesses get started and scale basically. Yeah.

jon_stoddard (06:20.76)
first one you bought, yeah.

jon_stoddard (06:43.726)
Yeah. How'd that business go? mean, aside from learning a hell of a lot. Yeah.

jaryd_krause (06:47.205)
Yeah, was, yeah, man, it was, I didn't know. So I didn't know much about online business at the start. Like I learned through these failures of these two startups and then went into this and I didn't, didn't know how to buy a business. I had to teach myself how to do due diligence. And so it went well for about a year to a year and half, maybe two years. And I realized that when I purchased it, the database were

of all the wholesalers and suppliers were old and a lot were dropping off and no longer in business. And I didn't know to do due diligence on that at that time, right? Yeah, so.

jon_stoddard (07:23.914)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sounds like a good business. All you have to do is pay for access to a 20-year-old database.

jaryd_krause (07:30.713)
Yeah. Yeah. It was firing and humming at the start. And then quite quickly, people just like those, those, people in the database dropped off. So I just let that go extinct. Yeah. Yeah.

jon_stoddard (07:43.95)
Yeah, I'm curious. You're looking for advice from how to buy a business, how to grow a business. Were there any mentors online then that are still doing it today? Big ones?

jaryd_krause (07:51.911)
Mm.

jaryd_krause (07:58.503)
No, there was a guy, there's a guy named Jeff White that, that did do some stuff, but he wasn't very hands on. And so I tapped into him. I had one phone call with him. He's a guy in the States and yeah, I had one phone call with him after, after this purchase, this first one. And then I also, there was another guy named Ace Chapman also in the States that was doing a lot of work in this space.

jon_stoddard (07:59.8)
Now.

jaryd_krause (08:27.535)
and helping people sort of buy businesses, which he does, no longer does. So yeah, there was nobody really to heavily lean on or nobody like around at the moment these days, really other than myself that does it in the capacity that I do it. Yeah.

jon_stoddard (08:36.312)
Yeah.

jon_stoddard (08:45.794)
Well, yeah, you're luminary now. You're out in front of learning all these. So that first business you bought from savings from your plumbing, did it pay it back after a while, or did you lose money on that?

jaryd_krause (08:51.205)
Yeah. Yeah.

jaryd_krause (09:02.321)
Pretty sure that one paid most of it back. Maybe not 100%, to be honest. But most of it, yeah, yeah, close.

jon_stoddard (09:10.828)
But close, yeah. Yeah. And aside from that, you learned a lot about business. Yeah.

jaryd_krause (09:18.215)
Great, was a great, it was a bad investment on PayPal, great investment for me to learn from.

jon_stoddard (09:24.494)
Are you writing these lessons down or taking a mental note going, hey, don't buy a business with a product that's 10 years old or stuff? What was your next business?

jaryd_krause (09:31.655)
Yeah, Yeah, that's a really good question. the while ago, like I moved house and I was going through a bunch of boxes and I had an envelope and the envelope was to renew my plumber's license. And it had the plumber's union thing on it. And on the back of the envelope, I had my due diligence checklist.

written out in my own handwriting and I've got a photo of it somewhere it's probably on my phone and so that's what I was doing is I had on notes like googled notes and also paper notes that what I should buy what I shouldn't buy what to look out for yeah yeah

jon_stoddard (10:12.652)
Yeah, you should pull that out and find out are you close to what you should buy.

jaryd_krause (10:19.32)
Yeah, it's change, it changes, our investment criteria or strategy changes over time. And as I've learned and grown, a lot of that is like, there's some key core principles in that, but some of it's not as important. And it depends on the different type of business model you purchase as well. Yeah. Second business was an e-commerce business where we did tailor-made garments.

jon_stoddard (10:27.0)
Yeah.

jon_stoddard (10:38.926)
Yeah. What was the tech and business that you looked at and advised?

jaryd_krause (10:47.043)
I bought that and they had two people working for it and then the designer and the creator of the garments. yeah, that business went really, really well. I got back 100 % of my ROI, so the price of the business back within seven months, not expecting it at all. The reason it was a really tricky one to purchase was because the financials were in US dollars.

and also in, tie bar and then also I had to relate them back to Australian dollars because the person who started the business was Australian and I was Australian and they were selling it from Australia. They lived in Melbourne. so like suits, tailor made suits and shirts and stuff like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. yeah. I, so I bought that one in 2015 start me to start.

jon_stoddard (11:16.558)
jon_stoddard (11:30.606)
Yeah. Well, what kind of garments were they?

Teller Man suits. online. So this is pretty new. Yeah.

jon_stoddard (11:44.259)
Yeah.

jaryd_krause (11:45.017)
me to start 2015 and there wasn't really much around in that caliber. And yeah, they they just they started it because they were lawyers and accountants or one was lawyer one was an accountant and they used to go to Thailand for a holiday and they would get a bunch of their suits made and they're like, when they came home a lot of their family and friends like well that's an awesome suit like how much is it where do get it from? Yeah, yeah, exactly.

jon_stoddard (12:06.99)
That's nice material. Where'd you get that? Yeah.

jaryd_krause (12:10.489)
And so they started telling people, just go over here and have a holiday and use this guy. And then they thought, well, let's start a business. Let's help people that don't have time to go over there and measure them up, send the measurements over and get them made. And then they just turned into an online business. Yeah. The price point of that was

jon_stoddard (12:27.894)
Yeah, what was the price point of that? It's like a whole suit. was the jacket and pants and everything.

jaryd_krause (12:34.151)
Yeah, back then it might've been like $350, around $400 for a tailor-made suit. Yeah. Yeah.

jon_stoddard (12:41.122)
Wow, yeah. And did they actually fit? I mean, how many people have said, hey, this fits great, fantastic.

jaryd_krause (12:45.455)
Yeah, we had it. Yeah, yeah. If yeah, they definitely they he was really good. So what he liked to do the tailor is he liked to design or create the shirt and if the shirt fits, then he knew the measure most of the measurements for the rest of the body. So typically he would do a shirt, send it out if it fitted then he would make the make the full garment for the full suit shirt pants, maybe waistcoat if they wanted. And

He just got to a point that he got really good. And now he just designed them like he was just designing them straight for straight off the measurements that would get and the measurements we got better and refined. So over time, the ordering process got better. And there's also like a guarantee, a fit guarantee. So if they don't fit, either pay for alterations wherever you are locally, you just send us a receipt or send it back and we'll alter it to fit. Yeah.

jon_stoddard (13:40.792)
Wow. You were at the leading edge because there was a ton of VC money that flowed into those bias suit online with the measurements and with the camera and everything. Yeah.

jaryd_krause (13:47.014)
Yeah.

There was a lot. Yeah. And ads just got swallowed up by all that money. Like just raise the prices of, you know, of acquisition and stuff. Yeah.

jon_stoddard (13:56.109)
Yeah.

jon_stoddard (13:59.48)
So did you like that business? You said it did really well and it was profitable. What kind of margins did you have?

jaryd_krause (14:06.119)
So we were looking at like 30%, 20 to 30 % ish margins, which I thought was quite good. Yeah, after, you know, us handling everything as well and the price of the product, you know, the price of the materials and the tailoring and all that sort of stuff. Yeah, but to answer your question, I did like the business. Yeah, it was really, really good.

I just got to a point that I neglected it because I was focusing on other things in business.

jon_stoddard (14:31.15)
Yeah.

jon_stoddard (14:36.398)
So what were these other things you were focusing on?

jaryd_krause (14:40.389)
So I bought another e-commerce business. So this is my mistake.

As a plumber, as a simpleton, not having any actual education, university or college or anything like that, my ideology was that if I want, like I want to replace my income as a plumber so I could quit and travel the world, that was the goal. So I thought if I buy one business that's make, say my goal was to make like, you know, a couple of thousand dollars a month, $5,000 a month. If I buy like,

one business that's a third of that and then a second business that's a third of that and then the last business that makes up that whole, I would replace my income rather than thinking, all right, I'm going to buy one and just focus on and scale it. just want, I want a diversification and I don't think that's good, depending on what your goal is. But I think it's good to buy one business and really concentrate on it, learn from it. And then once you've had that education, then decide whether you want to keep it and

have it systemised it and then buy another one, or just sell it and then buy another one. So my mistake was that I...

jon_stoddard (15:47.342)
Sometimes we don't have the luxury of time to be able to figure that out. One business, even though it provides 100 % of your revenue at the time, diversification is good. It's a good strategy.

jaryd_krause (15:51.889)
Correct.

jaryd_krause (16:02.363)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There are so many strategies. Typically, most people will say, Jared, I'm gonna quit my job and I'm gonna come and get you guys to help me buy a business. I usually tell, do not, yeah, I'm like, do not quit your job. Because what happens when you quit your job is your goal, overall, before you even quit your job, your goal is to replace what income you did have or replace the income that you do have.

jon_stoddard (16:14.304)
And you say, no.

jon_stoddard (16:31.502)
Yeah.

jaryd_krause (16:32.103)
When you do that and you quit your job, you put all this financial pressure and stress on yourself, because you still have your life expenses, but you're not actually putting money in your account. And the more that your capital towards the acquisition goes away over time, the more stressed you get, which tries to force you emotionally into a purchase of a business. And that can be very, you know, put the blinders on.

jon_stoddard (16:55.256)
Yeah, absolutely. It's a bad deal flow. Creates bad sense of urgency for bad deal flow. Yeah.

jaryd_krause (17:00.847)
Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly.

jon_stoddard (17:03.032)
So what was that third business that you purchased? It was another e-commerce, right? Yeah.

jaryd_krause (17:07.139)
e-commerce yet that was we sold hanging chairs and egg like hanging egg chairs and hammocks and stuff like that. And that was just to the Australian market. Yeah. Yeah. That business went good. I learned a lot from that business as well. Eventually, it became a bit of a hassle when I was traveling dealing with the supplier that I had one of the main suppliers I had he was also selling

jon_stoddard (17:20.886)
Yeah, how did that business go?

jaryd_krause (17:36.421)
He saw the success of the business selling retail online. So he started his own online retail store and sort of made it hard for us to purchase the product when he would put himself first. And so it got a bit, he was a bit nasty towards the end and not answering phone calls or communicating when we needed stock and we had people already purchasing the product. So I just sort of exited that one because it was just too much.

to handle and deal with. I also...

jon_stoddard (18:07.586)
Yeah, don't you hate that call from customers? Where's my product? Like, don't you hate that call from customers when they call you up and go, hey, where's my product? And you don't know, you don't tell them, can't lie to them. Yeah.

jaryd_krause (18:11.355)
Sorry?

jaryd_krause (18:16.943)
and you don't even know and it's just like...

jaryd_krause (18:22.821)
Yeah, you can't, it's the worst thing you can do. yeah, then you end up, you just end up wasting your time because you either refund them or you feel very bad and they want a massive discount and you make no profit margin. It's just a tricky thing. Also with that business, I have another really good lesson that I learned. I had somebody call in and say, I wanna buy like, I think it was like 20 chairs. And these chairs are like, know,

jon_stoddard (18:39.81)
Yeah.

jaryd_krause (18:52.327)
like $800, $1000 bucks. And I was like, cool, like that's a really good order. They're hanging, those hanging chairs, the ones that look like eggs, but like a whole cut out of them. Yeah. You know, like hang from the ceiling or you can have them hang from a stand. And I was like, all right.

jon_stoddard (18:57.72)
Wait, what kind of chairs are these?

jon_stoddard (19:03.774)
yeah. Okay. Okay. Correct. Yeah. Yeah.

jon_stoddard (19:11.838)
These are the chairs you see in Ron Burgundy movies from...

jaryd_krause (19:15.175)
Yeah. Spot on. like pretty like fashionable and Instagram ish sort of like chairs. Yeah. So yeah, I had somebody call in and say, Hey, I want to purchase, you know, 20 of these. It's like, cool. That'd be great. And they're like, can you, we want, to send them over to America. I said, okay, great. and

jon_stoddard (19:24.653)
Yeah.

jaryd_krause (19:43.247)
I said, that's gonna cost a lot of money. It's gonna cost like 20 grand to get you over to America. So like, it was like 15 grand for the chairs and then like 20 grand for the, for the, yeah, for the, for the shipping. And so with that, I was like, all right, cool, you're have to pay for all of that prior to us, you know, going ahead and securing the chairs and the shipping. So they had a shipping company that we wanted to use and, or they wanted to use that was like,

jon_stoddard (19:52.128)
Import tags, yeah.

jaryd_krause (20:11.975)
probably the cheapest. And what happened is they, got their, I processed the order and they did on big, they did on multiple credit cards. They did on like three credit cards because they had limits and yeah. You can see the story unfolding. Yeah, yeah, yeah. At the time I was just like money. I was like, me the money. I was like, whatever. And I just went right, right over my head. Anyway, process of payments, the money went into my bank account. was like.

jon_stoddard (20:23.374)
Yeah, was that kind of a reason of red flag a little bit?

jon_stoddard (20:30.114)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

jaryd_krause (20:38.435)
All right, this is good. I actually waited for the money to get in my bank account. I was like, all right, cool. Good rock. I ordered the chairs and then I paid for the shipping. And then about three days before the chairs were to be shipped because it was an international shipping boat that it would take, it took a bit of time for it to get on the boat and it was gonna take a bit of time to get over there. So the logistics were quite slow of it. And so just like a couple of days before they were to go on the boats,

All these payments that had been made were bounced and had to be refunded and taken out of my account. And I was like, no. So like, there's like 35 grand gone there. like, just, there's not much I can do. I found out they were fraudulent cards. called the bank and like, look, it's fraudulent. There's nothing we can do. The money needs to be given back. I'm like, great. So luckily the shares, I had to cop the expense of the shipping and

but I got to keep the chairs. like that, I got that money back, but it was a very interesting thing to learn. And what I believe happened is that they, and I tried to research into the shipping company and get a U S lawyer and stuff like that. It was just going to be a waste of time and money to get like, you know, 15, 20 grand back. So I think how they were making money is that they set up like a fake shipping company.

jon_stoddard (21:58.574)
Yeah, yeah. Well, how are they making money with trying to buy a car?

jaryd_krause (22:08.419)
with no like actual LLC or anything like that and, or a separate LLC that had a lot of like information hidden. And they would just do this with a bunch of different, you know, furniture providers, and then just make money by getting people to like paying with fake credit cards or fraudulent credit cards, and then having the supply or the retailer pay for the shipping. And then they would take that money, which would not be fraudulent because it's come from a real business. Yeah.

jon_stoddard (22:16.194)
Yeah.

jon_stoddard (22:35.704)
Yeah. And you had to sell that business? Did you sell that?

jaryd_krause (22:40.037)
I didn't have to sell it because of that. But yeah, I sold it because it was just, I was just dealing with the supply that was a bit frustrating. And I just didn't want to manage that business anymore. I wanted to focus on what I actually do now. What my primary business now, which is Bob buying online businesses that that's gained a lot of traction and helping a lot of people buy great businesses and replace their income. So that just became my main focus and ate up my time, which I'm happy about because it's a fulfilling business.

jon_stoddard (23:06.766)
Yeah.

jon_stoddard (23:10.19)
Yeah, when did you start that? When did you say, you know what, I'm not going to do it myself anymore. I'm going to teach other people to do it. I mean, I see like in United States, we have coach like the coach of the Patriots. He's a great coach. He never played, but he's a fantastic coach, right? Some people want to be the quarterback. Some people want to be the coach. And with great coaches, you can go a lot farther.

jaryd_krause (23:14.823)
Hmm.

jaryd_krause (23:29.243)
Yeah.

jaryd_krause (23:37.893)
Yeah, I believe that definitely there's coaches out there that have never played the game that are just phenomenal coaches. They understand mindset, they have specific philosophies, but I think it's also good to have somebody in the boat that is a great coach and has done it before as well. You do see many coaches come from the game that they've been in, which is, as you can tell, myself, how this started and when it got started was in 2015.

jon_stoddard (23:53.379)
Yeah.

jaryd_krause (24:06.631)
Was it 2015? No, 2016, I got invited to a business event in Thailand. And it was basically for people starting businesses and starting from scratch and they were having a lot of trouble. And the hosts of this were trying to help people get through those pains and the startup pains. Anyway, we're going somewhere on excursion between this retreat and somebody asked me about my story. It's like, why are you here? You own two businesses or I think...

It was two businesses. was just about to acquire my third one. And they're like, why are you here? You've, you know, you've replaced your income and you don't, you know, you're not starting a business. Like how did you get into buying these businesses? So I told them my story and they're like, dude, like, can you just get on stage tomorrow and, teach us? Yeah, no, I didn't. Cause I was like, Hey guys, like, this is not my event. Like this is, I can't, it's not my thing. but then I've sort of saw the need that it wasn't just me that wanted

jon_stoddard (24:54.21)
Last minute, can you get on stage?

jaryd_krause (25:04.913)
to do this sort of, take this journey of replacing income by acquisition. And then I was traveling, that was the start of a trip, a year and a half long trip. was just after that, I went through Asia for three months and then I went basically a year and a half through, a year and a quarter through Central and South America, surfing my way down to Chile before I went home.

And on that trip, a lot of people like, hang on man, like how are you not working? You're just surfing and like, you're just working a couple of hours online. Can you teach me this stuff? So that was in 2016. So I decided to create a course when I was living in Mexico, just surfing. I would just go surfing in the morning, come back, write the course out and then go for a in the afternoon. And I built that over a month. And then I gathered all the people that on my travels and some friends that actually said, I wanna learn how to do this.

I gathered about 10 people and said, right, I'm gonna teach you this course for free. It was gonna be like a one to group sort of scenario. And I did that at the end of 2016 and nobody was held accountable. Nobody really got results. Nobody bought a business as much as me trying to push them. And I thought, all right, stuff it, like stuff you guys, like you guys told me that you really wanted it. I vetted you and you didn't want it as bad as I thought. And then I started charging for it. I got home in 2017. They didn't take action.

jon_stoddard (26:25.006)
And they didn't take action, right? They got it free, they didn't take action.

jaryd_krause (26:28.167)
They got it free. Yeah. Put a price point on it and it just went, it just went nuts. Like it went really well in 2017 when I launched it with the price tag. And that's basically when I started charging for it in mid 2017. Yeah.

jon_stoddard (26:43.884)
Yeah, how much did you charge for a dent?

jaryd_krause (26:46.413)
I was doing a one to one thing and it started off at four grand. Yeah, and then I moved it up to eight grand because I had my, the spaces just got filled really quick and I was like, wow, like I'm like, this is, this is too good. And I was learning so much more and contributing so much more and just making the course better with my knowledge and the experience I put throughout the course. So charge started charging more. And then I got to

jon_stoddard (26:51.682)
Yeah, wow.

jon_stoddard (26:55.842)
Yeah?

jaryd_krause (27:12.209)
too big and was working too much, too many clients. And then I had to change to the membership model where there was not my time involved in the coaching process. And I stopped coaching for like one-to-one coaching for two years, gave myself a bit of a reset. Like I was working too much. I got calendular fever, I got really sick and I had to change the business model as well as Facebook changing its algorithm on ads that I was running on Facebook.

jon_stoddard (27:39.233)
is that how you were getting traffic from Facebook ad? Yeah.

jaryd_krause (27:41.157)
That's how we were getting traffic. Yeah. I was just, I was just targeting just Australians at the start. And I was just targeting people that were me basically. That was my demographic. People that were tradists that wanted to get out of the, you know, the construction industry. And yeah, it just, it just went really, really well. And then I started to started, you know, a podcast and putting content out there and change it to the membership model because I just couldn't, I couldn't service everybody. didn't have enough time.

to service everybody that wanted to do the work. that's why we changed it. And I quit coaching for two years, gave myself a good reset. And now I only work with maximum 10 20 people at any one time, one-on-one coaching.

jon_stoddard (28:20.472)
That's great. What is any one time? that over a three month period, six month period or what?

jaryd_krause (28:25.477)
Yeah, so I run the model of pay as you go, which means I need to prove that I'm freaking great at what I do. so pay as you go is just per month. There's a minimum time commitment of three months, but then it's just pay as you go. And typically people will stay anywhere between, you know, a year to, I've had somebody working with me the whole time, you know, since I started it again, maybe three and a half years ago. Yeah.

jon_stoddard (28:38.818)
Yeah.

jon_stoddard (28:53.39)
Is this person bought and sold businesses? The reason I ask that, let me give you some context. So I know a lot of the other coaches that are in different categories and they're all telling me, I knew a guy who's charging $60,000 and you would think that they'd get really higher numbers with people buying business. And he goes, no, 97, 98 % of people go through this course don't buy a business. Don't know why.

jaryd_krause (28:57.297)
This person? Yeah.

jaryd_krause (29:21.147)
I do. Because that's my main, that's my main focus is like, how do I make sure people that join actually get results? And it's not just, you can't just give people a course and go, go away and do this. They need so much more support than is actually, than you actually think. But

jon_stoddard (29:23.032)
Well...

jon_stoddard (29:36.238)
Yeah.

jon_stoddard (29:39.69)
It's yeah, it becomes shelf wear. It's just like they buy it. They don't go back to it.

jaryd_krause (29:43.387)
Yeah. Yeah, I think it's disgusting. It really frustrates me that people create a course and they sell it to the industry and they're like, cool, go and get results and everything you need. It is everything that you theoretically need, but you're a human being with emotions and it's scary to freaking buy a business. Like you need emotional support. You need somebody on your side. You need to be able to send your business in to get reviewed and say like, this is bad. This is not bad.

this is what would happen if you bought the business and this is how you could grow it if you did buy it. So we facilitate so much of that within our business. We go above and beyond and people that join, they don't know how far we go until they join and they're blown away, which is why people stay longer and it's really good for retention and it's really good for results as well. But back to your question on that client that first joined, did they buy a business? They joined my...

program my membership to buy a business. They already had an Amazon FBA business and they did that for about a year and after that, at that time frame, I decided to offer one-to-one coaching to help people have more support buying a business or scale a business they already have. This guy already had an FBA business, he was doing seven figures and he's like, Jarek, can you help me scale the business? I was like, yeah, sure. So he joined within a year, we got him to seven and eight figures.

We got him to eight figures. For the first few calls, there was some really good value ads that he needed to put within his business to de-risk it with some of the suppliers and stuff that I'd learned from my previous smaller business. But so I work with a group of people that, a lot of them ascend through the membership and say, Jared, I need some more hand holding.

Can you help me with one-to-one coaching? And then we have people from externally that listen to my content like Jared, can you just help me scale the business? So there's a mixture of people. Typically the people that ascend will buy a business within usually a 90 day period. And then they stay in the coaching format so we can scale it to get results. Yeah.

jon_stoddard (31:56.398)
Yeah. So what kind of business is size do you just primarily focus on? Because I saw your website, you got smaller ones under $50,000 and then $50,200. Yeah.

jaryd_krause (32:03.396)
Mm.

jaryd_krause (32:08.271)
Yeah, so as we've grown, we've just started to focus on my time, like, as as my time becomes limited, like I asked for more money, because and because my not just because my time is more limited, but my knowledge is has grown and scaled infinitely since when I first started. So a lot of people that are buying businesses under the $50,000 price range, they still get help and support through the membership and they can join calls like

and all the things that they get, but it's not as much time with me. But I usually focus on helping people between the 50K to 500K range.

jon_stoddard (32:49.324)
Yeah, and what kind of dope or e-commerce?

jaryd_krause (32:49.927)
Usually it's around 100K to 500K or you bid over 500K, 700 or sometimes up to a mil, but it's not as often. Yeah.

jon_stoddard (33:00.878)
Yeah, well, what kind of businesses are those, the e-commerce or FBA or?

jaryd_krause (33:05.191)
It depends on the person. So the person, we need to understand what they do or don't know about the online business space. We sort of create a criteria that's best for their knowledge or lack of knowledge. If somebody comes in and they say, have PPC experience, so pay-per-click experience or paid ad experience.

jon_stoddard (33:14.54)
Yeah.

jaryd_krause (33:27.875)
and or have ran an e-commerce business or know a lot about it and they want to buy one, great, they've got leverage, right? They can buy a business and they can see the holes that need to be filled with their leverage and expertise. We get them to buy an e-commerce business. Somebody that's new, typically we go to get them to buy, because their goal isn't just money and owning a business. That's the vanity part of it. Hey, I own a business. The real goal is like, I want to have more time with my friends and my family and replace my income.

and that's the vehicle. And so we don't teach people to buy themselves another job. That's a major no-no. So typically content businesses are the most hands-off and typically the most passive. And the labor or the work to have the tasks done for those types of businesses, there's a lot more of it and it's a lot cheaper.

jon_stoddard (34:19.466)
It's in you can outsource all of it.

jaryd_krause (34:21.765)
Yeah, you yeah, we just help people build team and just build a process. We build a process in a system around what's working really well. And then just hire the hire the team. If the team doesn't get through the process in the system that ticks all of our boxes, then we just rehire. So we basically create this create the system, put them through their test a big batch of people, the ones that come out on top, they're the ones that stay with the business. So for I'll give you an example, somebody that bought we've got a

piece of content out there. I think it's on our YouTube channel. It is on our YouTube channel. Sorry, Kyle bought a business made 150 K in 12 months from flipping it. He bought the business with us. And then he was it was a membership business. And he had the ideology. Sorry. Yeah, No, no, it was selling content. It was like a like a it was selling like a new sort of ebook and new

jon_stoddard (35:08.386)
Not selling a database of products. Not selling a database of products,

jaryd_krause (35:21.819)
value every month. It wasn't a database. It was a really good lesson. Yeah, dude, you deal with it. If you're to buy a business with a database, dude, you do this on the database. Yeah. And so he bought this business and because he's started to consume a lot of our content and content within that space of buying a content business, he thought, all right, to grow this, I'm going to start a blog.

jon_stoddard (35:23.416)
Yeah. That's great learning lesson,

jaryd_krause (35:50.575)
and create a lot of content to get Google traffic. And I was like, all right, hang on. If you think about it, you're starting a blog, that's like a startup. There's a lot of time, effort and energy to put into it and you don't know what the results are gonna be. So you're invest something and you don't know what your ROI is. What I like to teach people is to listen to their business, is to tune into their business and when you can find out acutely what's working really well and what's not working so well, you put your resources into what's working really well.

And then you don't just put it into those into what's working well, but you make that system process so much better. So I asked him, what did the owner of the business do to grow the thing? The guy that you bought it off. And he said, he actually knew a lot of people in the industry that wanted to be an affiliate of the membership. So they could get affiliate commission, affiliate referrals. So I said, great. You don't know too many people in the industry. He had some.

He had some like knowledge in the space. He had a network. You don't, that's fine. Let's build a network. So what we did is we built a system on how you could go and find all of these different people in his niche that were either YouTubers or podcasters that got made money from affiliate commissions. And we just pitched them to say, Hey, you could make X amount of money if you'd like to join our affiliate program. Great. If not, is there any other way that we can help you? We built out that.

outreach system and he ran it for a little bit. He only wanted to work maximum five hours per week on the business because he had a young family and he wanted to just be a dad. And so I was like, cool, let's build this system. Let you do it, test it, see if it works. And then we'll get somebody else. We'll hire somebody else to run the system for you and they can do five hours on a week. And if it starts working, we saw that it was working really well. I said, why don't you double our hours? 10 hours. All right, it's working really well. Why don't you double our hours? 20 hours. Great.

So that, so we just built the system on what actually worked to grow the business, not what we thought would work. We didn't start a new department of the business to test it out and hopefully it works. We just did what was working. I built that out and it grew. And then he decided, Hey, I want to sell this business. Everybody in the, everybody now like coaching group was like, cause we do a bit of a mastermind call. like, dude, are you joking? Like you've just built this amazing thing over the last year and you want to sell it.

jaryd_krause (38:18.971)
Anyway, he sold it and he's doing good in another business. Yeah, so.

jon_stoddard (38:22.892)
Wow. that, was that, you called that kind of a joint venture influencer outreach to get people to sign up for your affiliate program? Yeah.

jaryd_krause (38:32.591)
Yeah, yeah, it's a partnership. It's basically an affiliate partnership where they're affiliated with you and the business and they're content creators, right? They're YouTubers and they're like, hey, if you, was a, the niche was within publishing, like publishing your own book. And they might be YouTubers that are out there teaching people to publish or self publish or write a book. And they're like, I'm doing a lot of the content. Don't get much money from Google ads or YouTube ads. How about I refer people to affiliate products?

and that's how they make their income.

jon_stoddard (39:03.97)
Yeah, how did he so the seller told him that or did he remember? mean, how did you guys figure that out? Yeah? that was you, okay.

jaryd_krause (39:09.519)
No, was, yeah, that was me. Remember? he was like, he was like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna say, how do you think we should grow this business? Now I just do this because it's a really good aha for them. He's like, I'm gonna start this blog and create a bunch of articles to rank on Google and to get in organic traffic. I was like, that's a great idea, but it's a startup. So you bought a business and you want to start another startup on the site and you don't know what your ROI is.

jon_stoddard (39:35.363)
Yeah, getting SEO position is going to take a year plus.

jaryd_krause (39:39.353)
It takes time and resources, yeah. And knowledge as well. So I said to him, hang on, stop. This is something that I've learned that I have a very honed in, tuned in skill, which is helping people to look at their business objectively, without emotions, and tune into their business, to listen to their business, because their business is screaming at them saying, help me Jared, do this particular part like,

do more in this part of the business because it's working really well. And if people can't see that, they can't feel it and tune into it, they don't know. And then they get swamped with all of this external content.

jon_stoddard (40:19.886)
Will they, yeah, then they just wanna, hey, let's do try that, try that, try that, but there's no, yeah.

jaryd_krause (40:24.327)
Correct. Well, this is the biggest problem, right? Shiny object syndrome. People will listen to a YouTube video, a podcast, read an article. this person made a hundred K in seven seconds and they did it through TikTok. I need to do TikTok in my business. No, you don't fricking need to do TikTok in your business. You're taking all of the good things that are working in your business, those resources, and putting in it to something that's brand new that you don't know is gonna work. Plus, is your audience even on TikTok?

jon_stoddard (40:33.068)
I'm guilty.

jaryd_krause (40:54.579)
Or, are they just people on TikTok for just a distraction? Typically they are, right? They don't understand the intent of the user on each of these different platforms. For example, people on Facebook, what are they there for? They're there to look at baby photos and wedding photos, right? And just kill some time really. But people that go on Google, they're typing in, do I fix this drainpipe? Or how do I, you know, create this t-shirt?

They're looking at how two things, means they actually, their intent is so high on the goal that they're trying to achieve. Typically, I find Google traffic the best because the intent is so high. But if we understand...

jon_stoddard (41:36.878)
Google just Google pay-per-click or YouTube kind of Google?

jaryd_krause (41:40.055)
just Google organic search. So people go on Google organic search to search for, to solve a problem, right? To find an answer. If you, your business has that answer and you provide it and it's a really valuable answer to them. Boom. You buy trust. What makes sales trust, right? So, but you grab those people when they're ready to learn more. They're in the discovery phase and they're hungry. They've got an appetite. That's why they went to Google.

People that are on Facebook, they don't go to Facebook to go, I wanna learn how to knit a sweater. No, I just need to burn time on Facebook, look at family photos, judge people, all that sort of stuff. Right? It's disgusting, I hate social media. So, to answer your question coming back to it, how did he find out what to do to grow that membership business? It was just me asking a certain set of questions.

jon_stoddard (42:20.686)
It's a rabbit hole.

jaryd_krause (42:35.089)
to lead him down the yellow brick road of going, that was working. I asked the seller of the business, told me that he was doing a bunch of affiliate stuff. Okay, cool, that worked. Let's do that. Let's just do more of what was working. And so we just found those affiliates that were already in the space. We knew what their problem was. They were making a lot of content, not earning a lot of money from just ads. So we said, how would you like to earn more money through affiliate revenue working with us?

Cool, they refer it. then to go meta, go even deeper, the people that were making more money as affiliates, what do we do? We lends into that more. And we said, how can we give you more support? How can we give you more money? How can we make this better for you? Because it makes it better for us. So we just kept leaning into on a meta version, what's working really well.

jon_stoddard (43:28.76)
Hold on.

jaryd_krause (43:33.895)
Can you still hear me?

jon_stoddard (43:35.714)
can hear you, but your video went away.

jaryd_krause (43:38.427)
All right, let me turn this back on.

jon_stoddard (43:41.998)
What do you think happened there?

jaryd_krause (43:43.461)
I think my, sometimes this overheats, it's a bit annoying. Hold on a sec.

jaryd_krause (43:57.533)
Let's see if this will turn back on. I might need to leave and come back.

me have a look camera.

jon_stoddard (44:08.428)
God.

jaryd_krause (44:12.669)
How about, if I leave and I come back, it should upload my other part. Well, it will, it will, yeah. Just leave it recording. Yeah, just leave it recording and I'll be back on in like two seconds.

jon_stoddard (44:22.754)
Yeah, go ahead and leave, come back. I mean, I'm not going to leave this one session. Yeah.

Sorry, I've got Camtasia and we're gonna handle that later.

jaryd_krause (44:34.087)
Perfect. Perfect. All right, see you in

jon_stoddard (45:23.502)
There you go.

jaryd_krause (45:24.797)
Sorry about that.

jon_stoddard (45:27.918)
We got a river side. Yeah. Yeah. So I've got to ask you this. is, you know, it's, I have this mentor that tell me that you've got to figure out what makes the bell ring with the business. And that's going to be different from every business. And for instance, we, I have a student that looked at an e-waste business in the South and

jaryd_krause (45:30.193)
We got real good.

jaryd_krause (45:43.965)
Mm. Mm.

jon_stoddard (45:55.276)
The guy's been running the business or in the industry for 30 years. He said the most important thing is when you get this old equipment from the hospital or the college or the businesses, like it's a computer or medical equipment, you got to be the sorting hat. What bucket do the printed circuit boards go in? Do they go into the trash or do they go into the bucket that we sell on eBay? And that's the sorting hat, what makes the bell ring.

jaryd_krause (46:21.885)
Mmm.

Hmm. Yeah. And that's, that's basically it where, know, I just teach people to find the sorting hat, and lean into it more, make that process even better. For example, if this business is like, how do you figure out what the, piece of trash is doing? Does it go to eBay or does it go to this, this recycled waste? Make it so damn hard for your employees that are sorting that to stuff it up.

in the sense that you could create a video training that they have to watch every week, once a week. Or you could create a, which was probably what I would do, which might be a bit fun. I would create a jingle or a poem or something funny, like a joke around this goes in this, this goes in this hole and this doesn't go in this hole. Yeah, yeah. Like this goes in this hole and this doesn't go in that hole and it could be a funny joke around it.

jon_stoddard (47:16.526)
Hiding, Tidy, Lefty, Lucy, right? Yeah.

jaryd_krause (47:24.397)
and it would make people remember. So it would be hard for them to stuff it up. So yeah, left is, left, loosey, goosey, right, tight, you know, like same thing. You would just make it, that's what I would do is I would make it so damn hard for people to stuff that up and then, yeah.

jon_stoddard (47:36.077)
Yeah.

I like the way you said that.

That's the way you decentralize and delegate to somebody else so you can step back. it doesn't be, you know, he's making it saying, you don't have experience in that. There's right. My student's only 30. He's been a W2. He's not in the industry, doesn't have experience. But how can we, you know, create that experience where he doesn't need it?

jaryd_krause (48:08.123)
Yeah, he does what you mean, he doesn't need experience.

jon_stoddard (48:08.524)
Yeah. Well, he doesn't need it. All you have to do is follow checklists. In the military, if you're to start up an F-16, you follow a checklist. It's a check.

jaryd_krause (48:17.991)
Yeah, the funny thing about experiences is, or having experiences, how do you initially get it? Everybody that is hiring is like, well, if you've got no experience, then we can't hire you. But they've got to get experience somewhere. So somebody's got to give them a go at least once. And hiring based on experience is good, but I think hiring based on like mentality and attitude is very valuable as well, because experiences can be taught. Look at yourself and myself, John. We probably didn't know anything about acquiring business.

before we dive into it. I know I didn't study anything. I was like, I'm just gonna try this.

jon_stoddard (48:48.461)
Yeah.

jon_stoddard (48:52.322)
Well, I read a lot of books, but I can tell you what, there's a lot of gaps that I missed.

jaryd_krause (48:56.475)
Yeah, but also the same thing with the theory, right? Is like, you read a book on how to do it, but you don't know how to do something until you actually do it. It's like riding a bike. You could read a, read like, this is how you ride a bike. You can read and watch a video about it all day, but you still don't know how to ride the bike.

jon_stoddard (49:10.956)
That's true. Yeah. Yeah. How many students do you have now going through this? What does that look like?

jaryd_krause (49:17.221)
We have over 200 students in the membership and yeah, I have like, I don't know, over 10, not up to 20 yet, but like around 10 that I just work with one-on-one. And then yeah, we have different parts of the business and stuff, but yeah.

jon_stoddard (49:31.245)
Yeah.

jon_stoddard (49:35.212)
Now is this much more fulfilling to you versus that a couple years ago your business model was one to one? Are you getting the time to do all the surfing and traveling that you wanted to do?

jaryd_krause (49:46.875)
Yeah, man, I was last year as we doing about 25 hours a week. This year I'm down to 20 hours a week and I love it. So most of my time goes towards like either interviews, one-to-one coaching and then just managing the team and I love it. I absolutely love it.

jon_stoddard (50:04.824)
Beautiful. Where in South America did you like to surf the bus?

jaryd_krause (50:09.603)
I love, or in South America, Ecuador. actually Nicaragua, sorry, Nicaragua, there's a really good place in Nicaragua. Dangerous country, but very good surf there. Yeah.

jon_stoddard (50:25.196)
Yeah, what about I've heard Costa Rica's got some really long waves long good longboard waves

jaryd_krause (50:30.813)
Yeah, Costa Rica is really good. On the other side of Costa Rica, I lived in Panama and actually ran a surf school for three months over there. They got really fun waves over there too. Yeah. Costa Rica is a really good place to go for friendly waves. Yeah.

jon_stoddard (50:52.536)
friendly ways. Well, Jared, man, I appreciate the time you spent with the top &A entrepreneurs. It's a great story. I love taking control of your life and putting the right things in the right order and helping other people while you're going along the way.

jaryd_krause (51:02.301)
Mm.

jaryd_krause (51:07.173)
Yeah, John, thanks so much. Really, really appreciate the questions. You just know which questions to ask and you're such a good interviewer. So yeah, thanks so much for having me on.

jon_stoddard (51:17.166)
Well, thanks, Jared. All right, Take care. Hold on. How do we stop this?

jaryd_krause (51:20.327)
See ya.