22 Feb 2024 - 🔥 Online Biz Acquisition Opps

Author

Corey Philip
February 23, 2024

Lot’s of interesting/appealing online business hit the market this week. Considering the volume I went more in depth on some, and then dropped to just a quick take, and then included just a few links.

Personally I’m still in Queenstown New Zealand and doing a ton of mountain biking. I continue to love the place more day-by-day. Here’s a pic on my Instagram at the top of a long pedal up for a run down a gnarly trail. Althought I do have a season pass to the lift served bike park I enforce a policy of getting solid uphill run or ride in before hitting the lifts. Getting lots of video but too short on time to edit much of it.

Business wise, working on the business development and retainage of pay-per-call clients. I had a good client uneepectedly cancel this week after we delivered strongly, which is hard knife to the heart after creating a service that is a genuine value add.

On that note, let’s jump into it!

💰 Asking Price: $204,383

💼 EBITDA: $62,892

📊 Revenue: $86,484

📅 Established: 2016

I love digital products for their scale. You can crank ad spend to them and sell as many as possible without worrying about order fulfillment and while returns may occur due, you don’t lose the cost of goods.

This business sells contract templates with the listing describing them as relative to a particular industry. It notes that the owner/founder since 2016 is a lawyer and has done some marketing of the product via conferences.

On the upside you have a potentially well created digital product by someone that may not be an internet marketing guru. On the downside you have their persona tied to it and possibly all sales tied to in person events. It’s a weird conundrum but one I think worth exploring. My gut is telling me an offer would be made based on the value of the product and endorsement from the creator. Worth the 204k asking… tbd.

AI SEO Tool SaaS: 179k Annual Profit

💰 Asking Price: $540,000

💼 EBITDA: $179,000

📊 Revenue: $230,000

📅 Established: 2020

Well that’s a buzzword headline! This is for a tool that helps people doing SEO optimize and improve content. The listing names the business as GrowthBarSEO which is a competitor to SurferSEO. Product priced competitively at $36/m means that’ve got 532 customers paying monthly.

There’s a lot to like here. SEO tools are very sticky and have a large ever green market. There’s lots of auxillary services/tools to expand into. They’ve proven concept and achieve profitability. Pure ARR. Valuation is only 3x.

Now I am not a SaaS expert, but it seems like an SEO tool may require consistent updates and modification (dev work) to stay relevant. But then again, SEMrush which I have paid for years remains pretty much unchanged. From a growth perspective, leverage up the 500+ current customer base for testimonials, case studies and success stories would be a banger move (I did not assess what they’re currently doing).

What’s your take on this biz model and my though their? Stable as-is or too much dev work need to up keep. Feel free to shoot me a reply.

Retail & Wholesale Lifestyle Accessories

💰 Asking Price: $859,000

💼 EBITDA: $244,731

📊 Revenue: $818,248

📅 Established: 2020

This business sells their own brand of lifestyle gadgets, which include tech accessories, office supplies, and home convenience… I’m picturing a ‘home office influencer’ as the customer here haha. They have wholesale and dropship relationships with such as Urban Outfitters, Altar’d State, and Ellenshop. They’ve also got a 3pl fulfilling all the orders and a margin of a high 43% on wholesale transactions. They’ve experienced 85% growth YOY while spend $0 on marketing and the owner claims to spend only 1 hour a week on the business while working an AI product.

Between the lines: with $0 marketing the wholesale channel is driving the growth as this is just a ‘pure placement play’. The owner is chasing his shiney object and neglected this business.

Opps: Increase (launch) d2c advertising. Aside from achieving profitability directly on ads, the brand recognition will carry it’s way over to increase in sales through the wholesale channels as well. 3pl set up and running successfully (its a bitch to set up 3pl btw) gives room for scale on any channel. Add more dropshippers; it seems like they are only working with a few dropshippers, yet their are many retailers that would dropship. Outreaching, filtering out the ‘too small’, and setting up would require a concerted effort but could yield big high value results.

Check: is the owner really working 1 hour a week? I’m always skeptical of these claims. If so, why not just leave the business on cruise control and if you ever feel like circling back to it later you have a solid foundation for expansion. That said, startup entrepreneurs do like to chase shiny objects. Also, how did they get into these wholesale channels… Did the owner have prior relationships with wholesalers?

198K Profit Healthcare Recruiting Run By Virtual Assistants

💰 Asking Price: $750,000

💼 EBITDA: $198,000

📊 Revenue: $263,000

📅 Established: 2019

And 500k Revenue in the pipeline. And 70% margins.

The healthcare industry is every growing and it’s hard to staff meaning a business that provides a staffing solution is highly valuable to it’s clients. And a business ran by virtual assistants is highly valuable to me to as a owner!

The listing mentions a high traffic website but also mentions sourcing candidates through job boards. To me it sounds like the clients find the business and pay for them to find a client and then they post ads on job sites like indeed and build/nurture a database of candidates for future opportunities.

There’s a lot to love here.

Worth a Look.

I’m not sure what to make of this one. With a 14 year old premium domain and high traffic, it looks robust at surfaces level, but profit is looooow. Possibly conversion optimization or product sourcing (for improved margins) could improve. But 77k asking price for 1k/m… eh

Could be a good opportunity for a seasoned advertiser to ramp up grab some quick cash.

It’s a 40 year old ecom business in a resilient industry, but a 5x+ multiple, owner operated, and holding inventory is hard to justify.

I’ve long said content sites are great to own, but shitty to buy as they are one Google update away from going to ZERO. But this one is SBA eligible… the SBA is generally not a fan of content sites for this risk, so Im surprised to see the eligibility here.

The headline reads well, but listing reveals the owner is in all the Youtube vids… so if you’re buying this you have to be knowledgable on real estate and good at presenting/engaging on camera (sounds easy but it is a skill).

Signing off; if you have an thoughts, feedback or insights I may have overlooked, shoot me reply.

— Corey

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