Generated $2.5B With Performance Marketing - Cem Atik

**Charles Schwartz** (0:00)
Welcome to the Proven Podcast, where we don't care what you think, only what you can prove.
On this episode Cem Atik, the German operator who's generated $2 billion in revenue buying, scaling, and selling SaaS and e-commerce companies, breaks down how to spot undervalued businesses, fix what's broken, and scale them into massive exits. The show starts now. All right, everybody, welcome back. Cem, I'm excited to have you on the show.

**Cem Atik** (0:25)
Have you to be in here?

**Charles Schwartz** (0:27)
So there's a couple of people out here who know about sales, and they know about scaling, and they know about SaaS, but they might not know about you.
So give everybody a little bit of an idea of what you've done, the revenue that you've generated. Give everybody a little bit of detail of who you are and what you've done.

**Cem Atik** (0:41)
Sure. Yeah. I'm Cem from Germany, basically a small marketing nerd, I would say.
And I make my passion to my job and also, like my roadmap that I just want to share with people, I would say. So what I do is really simple. We buy businesses, we scale them and then we sell them. Really simple. Mainly, we are just talking about e-commerce and SaaS businesses.
Yeah. To just keep it quick. Yeah. That's pretty much it.

**Charles Schwartz** (1:16)
So when you talk about doing that, you've generated a certain number of revenue and sales and scaling. Can you talk a little bit about that to get the audience to go, what the heck? Because Sam, it's a huge thing that you've done.

**Cem Atik** (1:29)
Yeah. When we were just talking about how much revenue we generate for businesses we are actively was working on, we reached last year $2 billion.

**Charles Schwartz** (1:43)
So little numbers, nothing big, little numbers there. So you've done two billion revs for the companies that didn't even start, you just acquired them, you scale them, you systematize them, you go from there. So a lot of people have a lot of questions going, okay, I have a SaaS company, I want to own a SaaS company, I want to buy companies. Let's go through this whole process. Let's go through when you're looking for businesses to buy, and then we'll get to what we're doing if you're scaling one. When you're looking for businesses to buy, that are these SaaS companies, where are you looking and what are you looking for?

**Cem Atik** (2:14)
So, the first thing is a couple of years before, when we were starting with this idea, I was thinking like, okay, how we can do that? And I just trade since I'm 19 a lot, and I was thinking about Warren Buffett. What he does is pretty much the same only in another industry. He just tried to figure out really undervalued businesses, get involved and growth together with them. And that's basically a pretty similar process. We do it a bit differently, because we're specially looking also for businesses that are going close to being bankrupt sometimes. So buying a business out from the insolvency, it's a huge leverage for us. Just imagine a business that makes 30 million revenue last year, can be maybe sold this year for 1 million, which is insanely cheap for sure. That's one thing.
And the second thing is we usually, I mean, this is more a network thing. So it's not like you can do a lot of ads for it, or you just can talk about it. We already do ads for that in Europe. But mainly these contacts or these leads or businesses that could be interesting for us coming over our M&A network. Over the last years and also because we are investor backed, happy to be able to say that, we have a huge M&A network, over 200, 300 M&A consultants that are interested to just give us the best possible deals because they know that the percentages that we share are much higher than the competition.
So you win with money basically. So that means if an M&A consultant usually get 5%, we pay him maybe 7%, that he gives us the good leads. Sounds bad, but the world, it is.

**Charles Schwartz** (4:03)
It's just how the world is. Absolutely. I do this with real estate for years, where your real estate agents are going to get 1% or 2% of whatever they sell. I'm like, well, I'll give you 6%. All of a sudden, all the deals come to me first. I was like, it's not complicated.
It's just how the world works. Now, when I'm doing it in real estate, there's very specific things we're looking for. You're looking for very specific things in businesses and SaaS models. What are the things that you're looking for when you're looking for a business and they come to you and they're like, hey, I used to make 30, I'm now worth one. How do you know that that one that has now one-thirtieth of the valuation, how do you know that it's actually going to be valuable and that you can monetize it?