dom wells thank you for joining me this early morning on acquiring minds yeah thanks happy to be here excited you are actually in taipei so it's uh bedtime where you are not early morning so i think we found the uh one hour in the day where our two schedules overlap enough to to make this happen so uh thank you for that uh really looking forward to this conversation dom i'm i'm in general wanting to have more guests on to talk about digital business acquisition so you are a perfect candidate i've actually known about you for a while uh i've seen you on other podcasts i've um seen you on in some of the entrepreneur groups that i'm involved in so really excited to now have you on my own podcast what we're going to do in this conversation dom is hear your story uh in brief just to set the context and then really just get into the topic of digital business acquisition digital asset acquisition which is really a core part of what you do today so um speaking of which uh why don't we start there and work back what is it that you do dom what is on folio yeah um so i'm the ceo of onefolio and we basically buy and grow online businesses um quite a wide range of business types which i'm sure we'll go into later on but um yeah we're an acquisition company we occasionally start businesses the rest of the time we uh we're looking to acquire great uh and so okay so and how many businesses do you have in your portfolio today would you say good question uh it's probably about a thousand we we recently trimmed trim to the flat so um some of some of our portfolio was clients some of them owned by ourselves so in terms of things that we actually own ourselves it's about a dozen okay and can you give the audience like a sense of size or scale of these businesses what using maybe annual revenue is the metric yeah i mean we're we're pretty small i mean um 2021 our total revenue was about two and a half million so um the the businesses range from 300k a year to you know somehow obviously a lot smaller than that i think i think the largest is about 300k okay great and so let's have more of your story and background um how you got into this to this world of digital digital business asset um uh acquisition take us back to wherever the most relevant starting point is and and work forward for me uh sure so 2012 i um uh read the four hour work week book um wanted to so many stories have started so many entrepreneurs stories have started with that very line i love it go ahead yeah do i do i need to continue to say i read the photo um so for me i guess what's relevant as i was living in taiwan and still i am but um i i wanted to find a different way of earning money without having to leave taiwan um so a friend recommended for our work week i read it i'd already read the rich dad poor dad books um and so for me it was just like oh i'll just read this book and just kind of see and a lot of people would say the word work week is was a blueprint for them for me it wasn't really a blueprint it was just like okay i read this and i realized oh i can figure this out because the book kind of said you can figure it out like i didn't need to have got an mba i didn't need to have done this all i need to do is just keep learning um so i followed my nose and discovered affiliate marketing uh which um long story short you build a website maybe a blog um you review products you get paid a commission if people buy those products and so i i really i thought this is going to be easy i'm going to make loads of money so i sort of jumped in started a lot of websites i think i started four or five um not at the same time like i started one it was later okay this one's not gonna work started another one and you know shiny object syndrome like everyone has at the beginning and after a year i think i was making 500 a month so it wasn't what i expected at all i thought i'd be making like 10k after six months or something but i had seen enough by that point to realize okay i can try and scale this um and then okay fast forward a couple of years i actually started acquiring online businesses because i realized it's a much faster wealth creation um and by that time i actually had some cash so i actually could start buying them so i went to flipper.com which i don't know how familiar your audience are but essentially it's like ebay for online businesses um they would probably flipper would probably take offense to that but that's what it felt like back in 2012 and um yeah you know sold a business for like a thousand dollars and started buying businesses and started building a business called human proof designs which we sold done for you websites for beginners um that was in 2014 and i spent the next sort of three or four years building that up getting a name and a reputation um scaled that to a million dollars a year revenue and then in 2019 i sold the business because i wanted to focus on monthly i went on folio did at the time was there was a lot of other people out there like me who wanted to buy online businesses but they didn't know how to buy them maybe they didn't have the capital that sorry they had the capital what they didn't have was the skill set or they just weren't interested you know they didn't want to buy themselves a job because investing in online business is actually not passive a lot of a lot of these businesses earn money passively but owning the business isn't a passive income so it's kind of this weird misconception and so we said okay you pay for the business we'll run it and we'll charge you a fee and some some profit share and very very quickly it it kicked off um i think within six months i was able to pay myself a higher salary than in my previous job or um uh the profit was higher than at the previous the police business so i was like okay this is a good traction i'm going to pour even more on this and we got lots of demand lots of people out there who like the idea of owning digital real estate so a lot of people came to to us and hired us to buy them businesses and run them and um then in 20 the pandemic blurred everything what year is it now in 2020 in 2020 i realized it's way more lucrative and i don't have to deal with clients and investors if we pivot everything into a holding company rather than being like kind of basically we were just a service provider like a glorified seo agency or something so i said okay people can invest in the holding company and we're just gonna buy 40 businesses instead of like have you know 40 individuals or 20 businesses instead of 20 individuals and there's a few reasons for that but the main one was whenever there was a google algorithm update or something that happens in online business which can basically screw a business we might say okay we're running 30 businesses only one of them got hit in the last google update you know that's fantastic track record but it sucks if you're that one investor who's just put like 100k into a business and then google decides to take its revenue away so i thought but if you know if all of our clients owned all of the businesses together then risk yeah diversification basically you know so pretty you know i didn't invent diversification but i realized it was very pertinent to the space and so um i also realized i wanted to build something big and substantial um so i thought okay this is what i want to do it makes more sense for investors and so that's what i'm going to do and so we pivoted think it was around april 2020 that i started talking to people about doing a different a different route and we raised the first money in september um just just shy of a million we raised about 800k bought a few more businesses spent 2021 basically raising uh more money and raised 2 million in september and about a million throughout 2021 and then the idea is that we're gonna scale it larger and uh working towards an ipo and raise some money in the ipo and use that money to make more acquisitions and do it as a public company um so it kind of escalated quickly there from from from a to b to where i am now but yeah that's it's kind of the abridged version yeah and and that that escalation that yeah that thank you for that the the escalation is that because you feel like this latest model of on folio that you've uh kind of backed into is just so much more powerful than all the things that came before um yeah but also because i was in a place in my life where i was ready to build something you know for the next decade um or two decades or three decades or whatever but like i'd had an exit before it wasn't seven figures but it was enough that i'd scratched the uh the edge of having an exit and i thought the potential for unfolio is there's no ceiling basically so you know i also realized and this is a quote from stephen schwartzman from um um he said it a lot but it was in his book um the founder of blackstone he basically said it takes just as much effort to build something big as it does something small so you might as well swing for the fences and i was reading that book while i was mulling over all the different options i also considered starting a fund which is what a lot of people do in the space um and i just thought you know what this is the this is the ultimate big swing but also it was something i believed could be done so it wasn't behind the sky and i just thought you know okay i've just had a kid ready to um just buckle down and focus on something for the next for the rest of my life i guess um so yeah let's do it um spoke to my team as well and they you know they were just as um excited about the idea so it just made a made a lot of sense you going back now to 2012 and in those first few years of you in the business it's primarily focused on affiliate content websites and we're going to we're going to define those a little bit in a little bit more detail in a second but um has that the the types of properties that you acquire has it evolved beyond affiliate are you still mostly focused on affiliate style content websites as what you buy yeah i mean we're actually probably the least type of business we're likely to buy now um yeah it's evolved we've we we started out almost entirely seo based affiliate businesses again seo for those not savvy is the the art of ranking in google so not paying for your traffic but getting your website to be like the number one number two result in google so all your traffic is free um an seo is basically what you do to get that um now we really avoid businesses that are heavily reliant on seo which basically means those affiliate content websites are basically not they don't match our criteria anymore now we wouldn't rule them out entirely because you occasionally will find one that is a solid business uh it's diversified you don't fear the seo etc etc but essentially no we we don't buy those types of businesses anymore we we similarly we had a similar experience with e-commerce where we thought maybe e-commerce was the better solution but uh e-commerce is so cash flow intensive it's kind of like what's the point in owning this business sometimes it's it's like um the the purpose of owning a business is to give you free cash flow and con ecommerce business is just a massive cash sinks so we we again we're not ruling them out because there's occasionally ones that make sense and they do give cash flow so we never rule anything out but we don't buy a lot of e-commerce anymore either um so yeah actually dom let me let me jump in here i i think this this is a perfect time to let's kind of bucket the different types of digital businesses because we're getting into it anyway um you've just touched on two affiliate and e-commerce but let's let's just define those in a little just a little bit more detail obviously people know what e-commerce is but um and while doing that um so so let's do the the main types of digital businesses obviously there's a very long tail i mean anything that's online can be considered considered a digital business but you know we hear about e-commerce affiliate sas lead gen so whichever you think are the the biggest buckets that you think about and look at define those for us and then let's go through the pros and cons of each which you which you do and don't like about them let's start again with affiliate you've already you've already said that um affiliate businesses are extremely vulnerable to seo a change in the google algorithm your business can implode overnight what else do you like or not like yes an affiliate business is essentially they've gone through an evolution of their own like maybe a few years ago you might so let's say you wanted to buy a water filter so you would google you know best water filter or something like that and uh in google the first few results would be a website like bestwaterfilters.com or you know something like that and they've just written an article and they're like this is the best one on this is the best bang for buck this is the best if you live in arizona yeah like this is the best for that and you click on it it goes to the manufacturer's website or it goes to amazon if you buy a product the the owner of that website gets a commission um and they're typically low quality so while they had their their heyday and they were great because it's very easy to write the content you can outsource it the seo used to be a lot easier these days google just doesn't really like to rank those types of websites anymore and i think google uses machine learning and so what happens is well of course they do but i mean what used to happen was if you ranked at the top of google and you didn't do anything like bad in their eyes like you didn't game the system you didn't um do anything spammy then google was kind of happy with you there even if maybe another website was better they'd be like well you're fine whereas now every few months they roll out an update and even some of the best websites on the planet their traffic just tanks maybe six months later it comes back up again because google tweaks the dials again and that's a very bad acquisition strategy when you're like i'm gonna buy this business for a million dollars and it could lose all this traffic tomorrow you know it's a very asymmetrical risk so um that that basically is it like all the reasons it's good are cash flow very well like the revenue and the profit line on the p l are usually very very similar they can have very small expenses content is nice to create it's it's easy um but it's all trumped by the fact that it's not reliable you just don't know what's going to happen tomorrow so it's it's a fine business to own but not a good business to buy could i jump in with another observation just because i remember this so much of course also you're you're really reliant on the suppliers the the the manufacturers paying you the commissions they can also just on a whim change the commission rate that they pay you so there was an infamous moment a few years ago where amazon was paying call it eight percent commissions on certain categories of products and overnight that went down to what four two percent and so those businesses were those affiliate websites that were generating commissions in this these product categories saw their revenues quarter or or worse than have overnight because of some bureaucratic decision within amazon do i have that right yeah it wasn't even bureaucratic like they just did it they did it two weeks into the pandemic like it's it was crazy they went from eight percent down to three percent and as far as i'm aware they didn't discuss it with some of that the other departments within amazon um they just announced it to so for example amazon us just told amazon eu they were doing it um devastating but um yeah it cost me a lot of money i had some businesses i was about to sell oh suddenly though you know it's like this business was worth 150k now it's only worth 50k um you know so it devastated bloggers as well because okay for me i have diversification i just bought different businesses instead but there were a lot of mummy bloggers out there or people with one website which some some of the income categories went from eight percent to three percent commission and so that's like imagine you're making 7k a month you have five care month and expenses so you're okay and then suddenly you're only making two counts uh you know it was brutal um and um it was the second time i was in stoneman so they you know it's it's not the first time they've done it so it's like for me once shame on me for me twice don't buy amazon sites again um and you know amazon are one of the better people to work with as well so there are other if you work with an individual business you don't even know if they're going to necessarily pay you up um so yeah it it's very you're very much it's essentially not a business because you're not there's so many things you aren't in control of control of and you're relying on uh so many other things and so when hours and changes it it's like well okay they're a business they did it for their business reasons like it sucks for you but you build a business that relies on amazon so you know kind of get what you deserve to some extent um so that's why we try not to uh we try not to uh to do that great let's um let's hear about e-commerce people know what e-commerce is um but you were talking about how how cash-hungry e-commerce businesses are um to talk to me more about pros and cons please yeah as a generalization i'm sure there's other people who are e-commerce businesses who might disagree with me um e-commerce is essentially physical products so you're the manufacturer you might even have affiliates who are promoting your products so you're basically the other way around but you maybe you're selling supplements maybe you're selling um sunglasses you know anything but people come to your website they see your products they send you money you send them the products um that's that's e-commerce so the pros and cons are paid traffic works you can you know you can buy traffic or facebook or google with affiliate businesses usually the margins are too thin like you might spend ten dollars to get someone to buy something off amazon and amazon pays you three dollars so it doesn't work whereas with e-commerce you can do that you can everything's in your control like it's completely the opposite of what sucks about affiliate stuff so we went oh let's check out e-commerce instead and then we discovered with e-commerce you kind of never actually get to enjoy any of the cash flow because you're always buying more more inventory you're always um just like you have products stuck on containers from china waiting for them to arrive it's just other headaches and if you have one e-commerce business and it's your sole thing that you do and you can make it very profitable then fair enough but for a company like us who were trying to scale it didn't we we were just like let's just buy something else like why should we why are we doing this to ourselves so uh and a lot of e-commerce businesses are hurting after the ios 14 update where uh essentially apple stops track allowing facebook cookies to track iphones and so on so suddenly you might be paying three dollars to acquire a customer and now you're paying six dollars to acquire a customer because the facebook algorithm can't find that customer and you might be break even at six dollars so it was before you had fifty percent margin now your break even so a lot of businesses got screwed by that and luckily we only owned one or two at the time so once again diversification saved us um um so we have decided and one and once again like like if like the affiliate websites there is a lot of platform risk so where affiliate websites are really vulnerable to google you know tweaking the dials turns out ecommerce businesses that rely on paid traffic from facebook or instagram are really vulnerable to some change related to that in this case it was apple making a change that affected facebook but it's like one big tech company making a policy change and all of a sudden your business is turned upside down or implodes just you're just a lot of yeah a lot of platform risk in e-commerce it turns out yeah exactly um just internet marketing general there's always something that you're relying on um you know but but e-commerce also you are you typically own everything like yes you might use shopify but typically you own everything the customers are yours you can move your business to another location and still reach out to people um unless you're just like getting your customers from twitter or something which donald trump experience what happens what happens there but um yeah like there's a lot of pros that ecommerce has um the other thing is i discovered that paid traffic people in seo people are wired differently so my bread and butter was always seo and content uh and so e-commerce was was fun but it just wasn't it didn't come naturally to me although people in my team it does come naturally too but that was an interesting observation um so it's about figuring out what you're good at and sort of doubling down on that take me to whatever you think the third category of digital business um people should be yeah so for us there's also what's called digital products businesses which is where instead of selling physical products you're selling digital products like a course or um a membership or um you know there's a lot of paid newsletters right now you know thanks to things like substance so these are these are kind of marrying the two where you've got the cash flow ability and the uh less less like sort of cash intensive sides of content businesses but you can also make paid traffic work you're not necessarily relying on the whims of a vendor because you are the vendor if you're selling like your own course or something like that um so right now we're very interested in courses and we have a couple and uh we we will probably go out and buy more um as we you know as we scale um but um yeah that's a third type and then a fourth biggest bucket which is really the last bucket wait donkey john could i hear some pros could i hear some pros and cons on uh on on courses what well the pros you've already mentioned just the economics are great what are some of the the cons about um digital products that's a good question i haven't discovered them yet um people can rip off your courses like you get people who download your courses and sell them cheaper for free and you can you know you can sorry they sell them like they pirate your stuff so you have to chase them down and use like c synthesis and stuff yeah um also there's typically courses are sometimes a dime a dozen so it's hard to stand out uh it does take effort to create a course and if you're buying a course as the acquirer you often have to make sure that um the marketing isn't too reliant on the founder teaching the course because they they're usually going to step out um yeah those are really the hardest parts about courses like you just have to be good at marketing really for a course it's harder to sell them but um if you have a good course and a good funnel and all of those things then they can be very good acquisition targets great okay next category uh sas so uh sas being software as a service uh sas is basically you know software you used to pay for it once you've got a cd you installed it now pretty much every software you sign up and you pay a monthly fee or a yearly fee or something so that's that's sas um so this is great we just aren't very good at coding we don't have a good development team so we we haven't merged moved into sas yet will we in the future if it makes sense to um but right now we don't have any um a ton of sas the the the pros and cons so that the pros are subscription based which is typically the best revenue because it's reliable you can you can scale quite easily and typically you get good cash flow as well although you do off you have large development costs as well and circus and so on the cons are again a lot of software is not that defensible you know there's 50 of everything like just just choosing riverside fm to record this podcast you probably had 10 other options um but the the real challenge we have with acquiring sas is a lot of sas founders do everything themselves so you look at this business and they're like yeah it makes 20k a month or it makes 5k a month or whatever and you think okay cool um so let me see your spreadsheets you know and then you see their expenses and they've got like just server costs only and you're like where's the developer where's the development costs and they're like oh i do that myself so we're like okay when we buy this business we're gonna have to hire someone to do all that so it's actually going to lose money so we you know we we can't do that now we could do that and buy a 10 million business and maybe it has all of the team and everything built in the p l but um we don't know enough about sas to be confident dropping that kind of cash so for us that's that's the limiting factor so is is is that to say dom that the people should be wary of sas businesses at the low low end of the market because if they don't clear the 200 000 or maybe 300 000 arr uh which is which is sas for annual revenue annual recurring revenue that there probably isn't just enough enough meat on the bone because i mean you need to you need to have at least one developer and as we all know developers are really expensive yeah and also arr i think mris are much better metric that's another problem with sas they they get like three clients and then they they extrapolate that to their arr and it doesn't necessarily work that way um a lot of this assets just cost more so a lot of sas founders are expecting silicon valley start-up valuations and um they're not going to get them so there's there's it's actually quite hard to buy a sass from a solo founder because there's a kind of uh and i'm not trying to like um the little sass founders too much it's just the reality is a lot of satisfaction there's like a cognitive dissonance between what they think their business is worth and what it's actually worth whereas other founders typically for whatever reason they just they know what the market rates are for their business um but that's more about buying a business from a sas founder and less about problems with the model so that's you know sas is is one of the best business models out there for online business it's just one of the hardest so from this menu of options if i wanted to get into some sort of online something to some digital business where are you seeing the opportunity so you've already touched on it a little bit you don't like e-commerce uh affiliate had its a day or the certain types of affiliate sites that you described had its heyday that is now on the downswing in a big way so what are we looking at for the next three five years or maybe digital moves too fast for that so the next two years also predictions are always wrong um i i do think where are you guys putting money courses and content but the content not um you know content like a youtube video or a podcast for example or a newsletter or a blog but where it's not trying to make money from affiliate so now's a good time actually to talk about another type of content which is advertising or sponsorships so we have some content websites that just make money from adverts on the website and they still google doesn't hate them as much as it hates the kind of low quality crappy affiliate sites so the seo risk is lower but still still very real um and it's very very passive like you just people come visit your website there's address on it you make money it's it's it's great um so that there is a a a side of content that's very much alive i think the distinction is that you just need to really have higher quality content and i think you need to have content that people find educational and entertaining so like a podcast like this for example is an excellent um uh example and i think did we meet in trends in the trends group is that where we went um where do we meet yeah so at least i've seen you in trends i don't know if i first reached out to you there yeah well anyway so trends or the hustle or things like that are a great um you know i would love to yeah i've been being hubspot and bought you know trends um or the hustle um i do think uh there's a little bit of a gold rush with newsletters right now and that everybody and his dog is starting a newsletter and they will probably i don't like you but i signed up to way too many newsletters and now my inbox i don't read half of them so i think newsletters will go out of favor to some extent but um good content that's not just surface level will always have an audience so so courses and things like that will always be interesting and if i'm interested in sourcing deals or at least um maybe dabbling and just seeing what's out there uh what what are the primary ways i mean when you when you're gonna go out and look for for a business to acquire where do you go uh yeah i mean there's a few marketplaces i typically the best ones are empireflippers.com fe international.com quietlite.com uh and all three of those are also well maybe fe not so much but all three of those are really good at um educating buyers and sellers as well so they're actually really good like unbaglet has two actually maybe even three uh podcasts they've got a couple of youtube channels um they have a blog quiet like i have a really good podcast um i i don't know if they have a blog anymore but there's definitely like oodles of content you can go and read and effie the founders actually put out some of the best content out there but they do it on other people's podcasts they don't really host any of their own content um so it's a good place to go and learn and also a good place to actually like look at deals and not pull the trigger on one until you've learned a ton more but yeah it's that's where i would tell people to start just trying to okay and and really i mean we're just talking about three websites and i correct me if i'm wrong here but i would guess there's probably only 20 to 100 listings on each website uh are listed by each of these brokerages at any given moment so we're not talking about biz by cell which is the american website for main street businesses which is has many many thousands of websites at any given moment or a flippa which has many many listings many many thousands of listings it's pretty manageable to basically keep your eye on all three of these websites the volume isn't too too much yeah that's one of my biggest one of the biggest problems with the space is there just isn't enough deal flow because there's only so many good online businesses out there that you can buy um but um yeah but they definitely have the best deal flow out there uh the best content out there about the space that we're in so yeah well worth checking them out and now let's let's talk a little bit about the the platform we've already touched on flippa but let's talk about it more directly and then it's it's uh the the up-and-comer micro acquire which is sort of a flip a competitor although it's it's quite differentiated so tell us about these two well-known platforms flippa and microacquire uh well flipper used to be a lot worse so even though i didn't really recommend them they've come a long way and they're still improving and they just raised some money so they i'm sure they're going to improve even more the issue with flipper is because anyone can list a business on there there's just a lot of stuff on there which is just not good um so i just find it very hard to find something good on flipper so that's it really no issues with the platform i just never see anything good what micro acquires differently is it's they don't charge any commissions whereas all the other brokers charge commissions to the seller um and it can be percent it could be five percent depends on the the valuation on the platform whereas microacquire charges buyers uh a subscription fee to get access to the listings and then sellers is free so um andrew's built a pretty cool platform andrew um kesdeki and he basically just his his kind of shtick is brokers are a bunch of thieves and they steal money you can sell your business for more if you don't have to pay a broken fee and that we can debate all day long about whether or not that's true i actually think the brokers fees are often priced in just like with with everything else but um founders like it so you know a lot of a lot of people um sell their businesses there microacquire has a lot of sass because andrew is big in the startup scene he's kind of like you're building a startup you could raise venture money or you could have a like a micro micro exit um and he so he's done a lot for the space in a lot of sas farmers didn't know they could sell their business they kind of thought i either have to get venture funding or kind of that's it you know and so he's done a lot for the space however i was talking earlier about cognitive dissonance between um sellers not knowing what their business is worth and what it's really worth and microacquire is the prime culprit of that we see businesses listed there like um we kind of have a deal flow joker for the week in our slack channel and it's always a while for required business uh there might be something there like um like trailing 12 months profit trading 12 months revenue a million dollars trading 12 months profit 100k um last month's profit 10k asking price seven million and you're like one oh okay i can build a business that doesn't make any money and sell it for seven million sure i'll do that um and it's just and the problem another problem is brokers go on microacquire and pitch the sellers like oh take your business off microacquire i can sell it i can get you a way better price and so we come to sellers and we're like look you've got a good business but it's not worth this it's actually worth like a fraction of what you think it's worth and they're like oh but somebody else is telling me they can sell it for the double what i've listed it for and it's like okay we just have to end these conversations like there's too too big a gap so microacquire has good businesses and i think micro requires a good platform but good luck trying to buy anything off there that's my uh that's yeah that's my my unfortunate honest uh truth and that being said there are businesses bought and sold on there all the time so maybe we just don't want to pay the prices maybe other people out there see value in the businesses um but we we just think the businesses there are way overvalued so we don't we don't buy off there and um in in the world of digital business acquisition is cold outreach or what they call the searcher world calls proprietary outreach is this uh done and is that can this be effective particularly when you talk about the uh kind of this inflation effect of micro acquire where it sets sellers expectations inordinate inordinately high um so is it a practice and is an effective practice have you used it at on folio uh it is a practice what a lot of people do is they just sort of spam the internet like hey you're interested in selling your business and i know that because i receive a lot of those emails um is it effective probably that you have to kiss a lot of frogs which is probably true for the rest of the searcher community um again you're gonna get cognitive dissonance so we we did it in the past where uh we emailed a lot of people we had very specific criteria we had a sas company who scraped google looking for certain websites that met certain criteria and then emailed them like hey i like i'm a buyer are you interested in selling and there were just people who are like making me an offer so high i can't refuse and i'm like well well no i'll make you a fair offer but you need to tell me about your business and never hear from them again um people you know someone called outreaches you and say hey i want to buy your business you know you're going to go on the defensive or you're not going to believe them so um that being said we actually had a few conversations that i was like yeah actually i i would be interested in your business but i don't have that much money right now or something like that so um it's worth exploring yeah it's worth trying um i think the problem with proprietary outreach or how however you phrased it is well we just call it outbound deal playing but um a lot of people do it thinking that they can save money that way like if you can get off market deals you can pay like half price because you get on you get an unsophisticated seller and i think really the reason to do proprietary outreach is to get the better websites and just pay whatever they're worth um and so yeah basically i think i think people just do it for the wrong reasons and they get crappy results so um in the world of search again to compare digital to non-digital uh it's actually common that a searcher will acquire a type of business that they are uh not they're they're an industry outsider and they acquire into an industry so let's say uh hvac um although they are expected to learn and learn quickly and there can be licensing issues um so it's i don't mean to under uh state the importance of learning the industry in into which you acquire um but even lenders recognize that in the world of search this is this is a this is a thing and so essentially they look for quick learners uh but um talk to me about an outsider or non-technical person or somebody new to digital breaking into this world um would you and also just feeding into something you said at the top about how uh some of your early investors or the clients that you serviced in the in the previous iteration of monfolio were these types of people who kind of sounds like they just didn't want to learn or they wanted to outsource um the the placement of of these investments to somebody who's so digital savvy like on folio so say i'm not digitally native these are new business models to me what do i need to what would you advise me to stay out altogether or can i learn or what i would probably invest in a fund that um takes care of running the businesses for you and it's diversified um so for example empire flippers has ef capital where you can see say six operators who are raising funds and you can give them 10k each or like 50k or whatever you need to be accredited of course but um uh fe international have a sas fund there's a bunch of other funds out there those don't give you a ton of insight into exactly how to run these businesses but they give you exposure to the space and they give you diversification um if you did it say the other way so how we used to do it uh that people would just find a company like on folio and hire them the challenge is you need to you should still buy multiple businesses because we were good but we couldn't completely prevent someone's we couldn't completely prevent the risk and so um it's going to cost a lot of money because if you want to buy multiple businesses if you buy small businesses then the team running them are going to be spread too thin and not able to do them justice and so yeah the only real way to do it is to buy big businesses and then the team can you know have the the budget they need and you've got the diversification but that might cost you millions so you know the best way to do it is to just really just to invest in a fund or something like a group buy or something like that um alternatively right at the other end of the spectrum if you're going to want to play you could buy a couple businesses for 5k each and just learn through you know spin the game like you know buy your way into the space and just learn learn by doing um i wouldn't go out there and buy one business for 100k and hope for the best um which is the opposite of what exactly what i used to do for people so i've learned through experience that's probably not the best way to go that's great now dom just in in closing here why don't we um you've been in this world for 10 years which is is not a lifetime in many industries but in the digital world it kind of is a lifetime or two uh talk to me about just looking at the span of your career in digital talk to me about a few of the takeaways or the learnings that you've had from these years yeah i was trying to think before the call about things that would be useful for people who are maybe not that used to the space but are not like yeah kind of noobs to business you know so basically someone who's inexperienced in this space but sophisticated in online in business in general perfect and i think i i think the three pieces of advice i came up with actually would have been applicable even if you need to have tenacity is the first one because the feedback loop in online business is really long like you can be doing the right thing and you just need to do it longer or you could be doing completely the wrong thing and you have no idea yet so i actually i imagine that applies to all business but definitely online so you just need to keep going because eventually you'll figure it out um the the other is that you should test stuff for yourself so there's a lot of people out there talking about what works a lot of survivorship bias where someone does something once and then goes and blogs about it and when you run multiple businesses like i do you see that actually what works for a minor work for b and what doesn't work for a it might definitely work for c so you just have to read what other people are saying and be like okay i'm going to try that but it might not work and then the third thing is just network networking has been by far though one of the most powerful things i've done over the last decades so people should always be networking just in full walks of life and um it's kind of an obvious you had mentioned something about going right at the very yeah i wanted to make sure we we uh i picked that back up so can you elaborate on that at all or what yeah i mean obviously there's things i can say and things i can't but basically the idea is we're going to go public and by the time this podcast is aired we hope to have filed uh rs1 with the sec which is basically the document you file when you're like hey sec we want to go public um and so then the idea would be to ipo shortly after the sec declares that effective so i can't really talk about the timeline uh but the the plan is to to um to go public soon and use the money we raise to um acquire businesses and grow our revenue significantly so that's just something people can follow along with i guess and so pouring over the the on folio s1 would be another great next step for people to learn about digital business acquisition is that fair uh if people are into s ones uh 140 pages of bedtime reading um yeah definitely um that is that is something people can do or they can you know they can i i also recommend checking out the content from empire flippers fe international um quiet light um and you know people can go to onfolio.com and see all the other podcasts i've done the blog posts i've written and so on um and follow me on twitter as well so yeah it's it's a fun space so if you will approach it from an educational perspective i think that's a really good way to to learn more what is your twitter handle donna is that the best way if people wanted to reach out to you personally is twitter the best i think using the on folio just emailing me domadonfolio.com is the best but thank you for the questions digital business acquisition we could have talked for another hour um but you have a hard stop and and so i um so maybe i'll have to have you come on for round two but in the meantime thanks very much for the time and staying up late for to make this happen yeah definitely i'd love to come on again and thanks a lot for having me this first time