The Future of Online Business Investing With Mike Swigunski [Ep.216]

Yeah, man.

I mean, I don't want this to be super self-promotional of EF, but I've talked with other brokers now over the years, and I get how other people do things versus how we do it.

And I would say our vetting process, hands down, is one of the biggest, not the only one, but a big differentiator, especially on the buy side.

It's annoying for the seller to go through that, but from the buy side, it's so good.

Because I've seen some of these other brokers...

P&Ls are all messed up.

There's no tax returns.

Just like nothing going on.

It's just like they just let the seller upload anything and call it a day, put a multiple on it, right? So you can get some really fly-by-night brokers out here in this space, as I'm sure you are well aware of.

Before we get into more of your acquisition stuff, I mean, you've been in the game about the same length as me.

I mean, we got hired together, right? Our paths diverged a bit, but we're still pretty much in the same industry doing similar things.

How have you seen...

the buying opportunity changed over the last 10 years from say when we started back in 2016 to today.

Yeah.

I mean, a lot has definitely changed, especially the big milestones that I can think of is during COVID and during the aggregator space where everyone was focused on FBA, e-commerce.

And now it's kind of like a weird market where I don't really know where it's going to end up.

I kind of have my guesstimates or thesis on what's going to happen.

But I think AI is going to disrupt... every industry and every sort of business is going to have some impact.

And that's why like my sort of thought process is let's find a business that's under optimized and AI is another tool that we can use to grow and scale it, outsource some of the automations, outsource some of the like team functions or customer service and in general, just make it a better business.

And so a lot of times the businesses that I'm looking at, they're usually founder-led and usually a technical founder that doesn't have marketing and sales experience, meaning they got the product market fit great, they got those first 100, 200 customers, but they just don't really have the kind of concept to grow and scale a business to that next level.

They're really good at maintaining it, really understand the industry and the niche, But they're busy building features instead of marketing the business.

And so that's where you come in and where my sort of buy box is, is finding those types of businesses, coming in, implementing a sales team, a marketing team, and trying to get those really low-hanging fruits where what is the fastest, biggest impact we can make on a business to grow it.

And a lot of times it's with conversion rate optimization or CRO.

And so we find a business that's likely under-optimized.

The checkout flow is screwed up.