How 5 Real Buyers Overcame Obstacles and Grew Their Businesses
By: Sarah Nuttycombe
Tags: Overcoming Obstacles, Entrepreneurship, Ecommerce, Online Business, Podcast

How 5 Real Buyers Overcame Obstacles and Grew Their Businesses

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

Sometimes the best advice, or a solution to a problem, is hiding in plain sight.

It’s a frustrating situation to be in — knowing that someone out there has been through what you are experiencing, but you can’t find them easily.

This is exactly why we kicked off The Opportunity Podcast.

After talking with buyers and sellers over time, we realized that buyers hold a wealth of untapped knowledge and are full of insights that others shouldn’t miss. In particular, we focused on finding real buyers and discovering their stories, as there wasn’t a platform for them to broadly share their experience.

We know buying can be intimidating, and that’s why we are bringing you five real buyer stories to make your buying experience just a little easier. They share how they have passed one million in sales and how they have overcome obstacles caused by the pandemic.

Let’s dig into some of the key lessons they learned.

Seasonality Isn’t Scary When You Build Your Portfolio Right

Seasonal dips and spikes are a dreaded reality for many online business owners. Depending on the niche, seasonality can be unavoidable.

Barry Deen shows us a different side to seasonality and dispels any seasonal anxiety in Episode 2 of The Opportunity Podcast.

Barry owns a large portfolio of Amazon Associates businesses, and he knew that each site would have its ups and downs during the course of the year. He shared with us about how he balanced the highs and lows by acquiring sites that would peak at different times of the year, thus ensuring that at least one of his businesses would be having its best quarter no matter the season.

This would allow Barry to reap consistently good income and not have to worry about one specific site. He flipped seasonal dread on its head by making seasonality work to his benefit.

Beyond creating a season-proof portfolio strategy, Barry noticed that small improvements could lead to big wins for his businesses.

When he added 15–20 additional articles, his monthly income grew from $2,500 a month to $8,200 a month. Furthermore, he found that “sometimes an extra $1–2K a month is just one Google ranking away.” Barry attributes his growth to his writing team and suggests hiring a native English speaker to make content really pop.

He is a strong advocate for building a portfolio of businesses, noting that buying three or four websites can help withstand external forces, such as algorithm updates or commission changes. Barry explained that his preferred portfolio setup is to hold four or five sites in the short term alongside one flagship website.

All of these tactics have helped Barry create momentum in his portfolio. When asked for insight for new buyers, he advised that when considering buying a business, look at its competitors and ask yourself whether you can do better than them. Assess whether you can be a top-three player in the niche before committing to an acquisition.

If this seems daunting, then Barry has a great perspective on why everyone should consider buying:

“For me, I’m not really too interested in being the next guy with six Lamborghinis in his garage. But if I can never have to commute, only work on things that I like and that I enjoy, make my own schedule, and have a comfortable living, all of those things really sound perfect. And they’re very achievable, in my opinion. I’m actually surprised that more people don’t do this. I understand it seems risky, but once you are actually in the weeds of running the websites, building content, and hiring writers, it’s not that hard of a job to do.”

Access Your Future Audience During Due Diligence — If You Can’t, It’s a Red Flag

Caleb Page’s entrepreneurial journey is rich in experience. In Episode 4, he connects his real estate investments and brick-and-mortar business ownership with his entry into the world of SaaS.

Caleb’s career in SaaS acquisition wasn’t perfect. He realized that after he bought a business that he had missed a red flag in his due diligence — the seller did not provide him access to the user base. The inability to talk directly to users resulted in difficult payment portal issues down the line.

Caleb found out the hard way what issues can cause a subscriber base to ask for refunds. Not knowing that they were signed up for a service and missing the charges led to high refund requests and a decreased trust rate, thus finding a payment portal to work with was difficult.

To overcome this problem, Caleb had to comb through his subscribers one by one to find who wanted to be fully signed up for the service, and he lost half his base in the process. While fixing the issues with his base, Caleb went through three different payment providers until finally finding one that would accept him.

Ultimately, the changes led Caleb to restructure his business and he regrew his subscriber base. Despite the challenges, he was committed to his acquisition, saying:

“There’s a term I use about standing up in the business. If you’re not willing to stand up in the business you’ve bought, if you’re not willing to say ‘Hey, I own this. This what I do,’ then there’s something that’s incongruent; we’re missing a step there. You have to get real with yourself and ask ‘Do I want to stand up in this business?’ And it’s going to be that way for the next three to five years after you make that offer.”

Caleb’s challenges with payment portals, access to his audience, and issues in due diligence are key lessons for SaaS buyers.

Decline Teaches as Much as Growth in Entrepreneurship

Bill Szabrak describes himself as the “quintessential corporate cog,” yet in his interview he was full of enthusiasm and encouragement for new buyers. He describes his journey into first-time online entrepreneurship in Episode 6.

Bill made two content-based business acquisitions, which allowed him to experiment with online income and plot his escape from the corporate world.

Both his websites have seen ups and downs. He had to spend his first month of ownership just spending time learning about one of his newly acquired sites. By studying his business, he saw that its content was outdated, and the site had too many plug-ins. From there, he developed a strategy to add content and improve his ads.

In this episode, Bill shares one very helpful tactic for ad improvement. He says it’s best to get on the phone with your advertising provider to determine how to improve the existing ads on the site. With this trick, Bill saw sizable improvements in his ad performance.

Still, there are some things no one can prepare for. While one of his businesses has suffered during the pandemic, Bill’s other acquisition has soared.

He wasn’t deterred by the shift, saying:

“Growth and decline go hand in hand. People will say you learn more from your failures than your successes, and I do believe that’s true. But also, when you’re having growth, and when you have good times, be smart about it. The more you can figure out why something is growing, the better you can grow it.”

Despite any challenges and big changes, Bill advocates for getting into the online space and believes that taking the leap to buy changed his life for the better.

A Deal’s Greatest Asset May Be the Seller

Not everyone can be as lucky as Rick Baxter was with his buyer–seller relationship. At first glance, it certainly didn’t seem like the relationship would be successful.

In Episode 8, Rick tells us about how he was new to online businesses and wanted to buy from a seller who was willing to guide him, and really hold his hand, during the turning over the business. He found an Amazon FBA acquisition he liked, but its seller couldn’t speak English.

He became concerned, but the seller found a work-around; he was better at texting in English than speaking, and so agreed to coach Rick on FBA ownership via text. The seller even went as far as helping Rick launch a product, which became one of his best sellers.

Rick’s business grew rapidly, and he went from being excited about making $500 in sales a day to making $4–5K in sales a day. He reaped a full ROI ($60K FBA, home niche) in six months and was dumbfounded about it, saying he was “completely beside himself.”

Rick believes that failure is integral to business: when you give up after failing, that’s not a business, that’s a passion project. He is also passionate about just trying things out; quick iteration during product launch is key to his success.

He summed up by saying:

“Launch is the first rule. Don’t talk about it, don’t think about it, or analyze it to death. Launch.”

As he surpasses $1 million in sales this year, his interview gives plenty of insight into how even newbies can replicate his success.

If You Understand Amazon Algorithms, You’re Prepared to Launch Other Amazon Businesses

In Episode 10, Henry Marcacci makes the case that inventory management can be fun…kind of like a video game.

While not everyone loves managing inventory as much as Henry does, the way he combines his passion for writing indie KDP novels with his genuine enjoyment of stock management to become a successful FBA buyer should pique everyone’s interest. He says his experience as a KDP novelist gave him a base for understanding Amazon’s algorithms for FBA, and his success proves that his hunch was well-founded.

Henry managed to 5–6x his acquisition by looking for “blessings in disguise”.

For Henry, that meant primarily looking for a business with inventory problems. During the episode, he shares:

“If you’re looking at inventory and inventory is running out, that means people want your product, and you’ve just got to get it to them — and that’s a great problem to have.”

He also looked for high margins on inventory to allow room for error and the highest potential for growth.

Henry did what smart buyers do and leveraged his best skill sets on the business’ weaknesses to bring the business up to the level where it should have been performing, and then some.

His success has changed his future goals: “Now that I’ve seen explosive growth, I want to see if I can replicate it.”

How You, Too, Can Grow as a Buyer

Hopefully you’ve gained some nuggets of wisdom from this The Opportunity Podcast highlight reel. Every business and situation is different, so (of course) we recommend tuning into the full current and future episodes to pick up advice that relates specifically to you and your business.

If you don’t have a business yet and are hungry to get started, head over to our marketplace to browse the businesses available for sale right now.