4th Time's the Charm: 3 Broken Deals to Buy a Great Business

So it is a... weakness of this method of finding a business versus just looking for what's already for sale out there where you know the seller is for the right price, they're selling pretty much. I mean, of course, sellers can always back out, but there is kind of a bright red line there. If a business is listed for sale, they are very likely, if you meet their price, willing to sell.

So say more about the experience that you had. We heard you say four LOIs, three broken LOIs, and the fourth is the one you closed on. Was that why those three other ones broke?

And there are a number of things that bubbled up in my experience. One of the things that happened to me in one of the situations was we didn't realize this, but the seller already had another seller kind of in the wings. Even though he didn't have his business listed for sale, there was another seller over here.

And so he was able to use our presence and our LOI, if you will, as leverage just to get the deal that he wanted to get with the guy who he was intending to sell the business to in the first place. So that was the last one I went through, which was really frustrating for me because he kind of led us on. Yeah.

and and played us a little bit which he used you yeah to to an and you know you can you can protect yourself you can flush that out as best you can but at the end of the day some people are just going to do that and and there's not much you can do about that um but it is frustrating and to your earlier point

know if you're i was 10 months in at that point you know 10 times five quick math in your head you know carry the one it's you know fifty thousand dollars so that's a i don't know you know i don't care who you are listening to this uh 50 grand you know watching it just lighting that money on fire um that's not a great feeling and of course emotionally you're fatigued and and so i was in a

I was in a place where I was really reconsidering the process and whether this is, I believed in my heart still it was the right direction, but that was a lot of not yeses. And so I was really strongly reconsidering whether I should continue or not. And was this doubt that you were feeling, Brian?

Obviously, as you said, lighting 50 grand on fire will just create doubt. But was there some other doubt, like that maybe you were a bad buyer or that these sellers were never going to sell or that the quality of these leads were really not that good? Was there something else like structural you thought was flawed here or was you weren't going to be able to make happen?

The... The shift that I made mentally that caused me to continue to move forward, which is probably what you're looking for. The shift I made was if I looked for a common denominator throughout the deals that I had been involved in. I realized that I wasn't close enough to the seller, the owner, early in the process.

And we had a conversation and you have these Zoom meetings or in person or however it works out. But we'd have our meeting and then I kind of stepped back and then my broker would do his thing and there'd be a lot of stuff behind the scenes.

i realized that i needed to set it up so that i had more frequent touches with the seller and just to if nothing else to do an eyeball check um just to make sure that it's a human transaction hey this is us doing business this i'm real This is my time. These are my resources. That's your business.