How to Actually Find a Business Worth Buying (Without Searching Forever) - FULL KEYNOTE

Brian Luebben (0:00)

I'm going to be going over the Deal Flow Machine. How to 5X your Deal Flow and get more at bats if business is worth buying. So I'm going to be talking a lot more on like strategy. A lot of this applies to businesses, but of course, some of this can be applied to commercial real estate as well as general business. So for anybody that is a business operator as well, you currently own a business.

A lot of this is also going to be applicable to your business as well. In this presentation, I'm going to be mostly addressing business buying, like I just said, but there are macro elements that you can apply to all asset classes, which I'm glad I included because a lot of you guys are commercial, like storage, mobile home parks, multifamily. And so there's to be combinations of all of them involved. And hopefully by the end, you'll have three to five strategies that you can apply to get under contract by the end of this year. Sound good? So ultimately, you can close on and control over $300,000 to take home annual profit produced by assets, systems, and other people's labor, which if you're buying real estate, if you're buying SBA, it's all the same thing. You're just trying to control an asset that's producing income from systems, other people's labor, and leverage. So first, a story. That's me. I know, how do we get here, man?

That's me in my suit. Brooks Brothers, for those of you that are wondering. Skill that has served me well in business is the same skill that I learned years and years ago that allowed me to hit number eight out of 5,079 sales reps in Centos. So I was the youngest sales intern, actually, at Centos, back in 2018

From 2018 to 2022, I worked there. And I sold my VP into giving me the job because I was wildly underqualified. And I keep getting on stages and getting opportunities that I'm unqualified for. And then you kind of figure out how the hell to pull it off, which is I know how a lot of you guys feel right now in kind of your seasons and your areas of business. But there was a skill that I learned back then, and I cut my teeth in sales, especially outbound sales. So my job was, within the first 48 hours of that job, was to go out and start door knocking. And so I was door knocking factories. I was door knocking businesses in like Rock Mart, Marietta, Cedartown, Dalton, Calhoun, Cartersville, for anybody I know, a couple of Atlanta folks here. Like way out in the boonies, way out in the country, and I also got the wonderful world of Fulton Industrial Boulevard. So that's where you can get some great drugs, cheap prices down there, Fulton Industrial Boulevard. They got like 27 waffle houses, $37 generals, all within a one-mile radius. But it's not a waffle house, it's a waffle home. Back then, so I had to get really good, really fast, and the skill set that I learned that served me well was knowing the difference between lead measures and lag measures. Anybody here know the difference? Lead measures, lag measures? Okay, cool. So a good bit of you don't. That's awesome. Heck of a presentation. So lead measures, these are writer downers. I'll save you guys the hard work of knowing what to write down, what not to write down, these are the writer downers, I'll tell you. There's probably about five to 10 of them in the presentation. First one is lead measures.

Lead measures are the inputs and actions that we control today. The actions that you lead with. A lot of the times, when we're focused on goal setting, we focus on lag measures, which is going to be the next definition. And lag measures, a good example I like to use is weight loss. So when you're trying to lose weight, you focus on, you know, what's my weight? Am I, you know, 150, 170, 190? And then am I going down 10 pounds, 20 pounds? Like you look at the weight on the scale. But the lead measures, how many times did you go to the gym? How many times were you on track with your calories per day? How many sessions of cardio did you do? Those are the lead measures, the inputs, that lead to the result, which is a lagging result, which is a lag measure. Lag measure, I'll pause here for a second as you guys write, are the outcomes and the results that show up later. So what I've noticed is a six-figure kind of mindset, a five-figure to six-figure mindset is to focus on this, the lag measures. But a seven-to-eight-to-nine-figure mindset is to focus on, previously, the lead measures. And every single person I've seen that's operating a business at $30 million to $300 million to $3 billion is obsessive over their lead metrics and their lead measures.