How Old-School Outreach Netted 3 Deals in 2 Months

This Week in ETA:

• Searchers: I shared the story of a searcher who got 3 off-market opportunities in his target industry and city… in under two months. How did he do it? He 1) had a clearly-defined buy box, 2) created a target list based on his criteria, and 3) put in the work to cold call and send snail mail to his potential prospects. You’ll hear me talking more about this methodology in the coming months. In the meantime, if you’ve had success with “old school” outreach methods, please reach out to me!

• Investors: Declining interest rates makes debt service easier… but can also drive up valuations…but can also convince more business owners that now is the time to sell. Axial shares insightful data on the relationship between interest rates and valuations and the trends they’ve seen over time; their article was a very thoughtful exploration of those nuances and well worth a read.

Featured Off-Market Deals

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Plus:

• Chicagoans: We are co-hosting an SMB Investor/ETA Meetup with Rejigg in River North on Wednesday, October 22. We would love to meet you & connect you to other searchers in the area! If you’re able to join us, please RSVP at this link. 

• A reminder not to get lenient with due diligence because you’re feeling burned out in your search. It’s always safer to walk away from a bad deal than to try to make it work!

Question:

Hit reply and tell us - Have you tried cold calling/ writing to seller prospects? If so, what has worked well/ what did you learn?

P.S.

A business called Wedding Hashers (they create punny hashtags for people’s weddings) is looking for a buyer. It’s a small world; I almost bought the business just before COVID but the deal fell through. The buyers ended up having another venture be very successful, so they’ve given it almost no attention over the past year, and it’s now at breakeven (down from ~$300k SDE at the peak). The sellers have extremely reasonable valuation expectations, they just want it to live on with someone else. LMK if you’d like us to connect you to them.