The Top Ways To Win Over A Business Broker & Get The Best Deals w/ Jordan Kelliher (A Business Broker)

**Brian Luebben** (0:00)
This podcast episode is going to be the difference between somebody having 10 deals to look at per week versus 50 versus 100 plus deals coming in from brokers.

**Jordan Kelliher** (0:09)
My inbox was 200 emails. Every single day, I'd open up 200 new people asking questions.

**Brian Luebben** (0:14)
You have a lot of these guys and girls that are frozen fingers when it comes to submitting an offer.

**Jordan Kelliher** (0:20)
Probably 99% of the responses are, name your price or for the right dollar, I'll sell.

**Brian Luebben** (0:24)
You don't have to be like Jeff Bezos on this freaking call. You don't have to be Elon Musk.

**Jordan Kelliher** (0:28)
I know this sounds dumb, but there's really no stupid question. Just ask the question.

**Brian Luebben** (0:31)
It comes from a select handful of influencers that are out there saying that you could buy businesses low money, no money down.

**Jordan Kelliher** (0:38)
They don't want to live in the same town that a private equity company acquired their business and destroyed it.

**Brian Luebben** (0:44)
All right. Jordan Kelliher, welcome to The Action Academy Podcast, sir. How are you doing?

**Jordan Kelliher** (0:51)
I'm good, man. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

**Brian Luebben** (0:53)
Dude, I'm super pumped to have you here. I think that this podcast episode that we're about to do today is going to be the make or break difference between somebody having 10 deals to look at per week versus 50 versus 100 plus deals coming in from brokers and from other people throughout a week, somebody that's looking to acquire their first small business. So as we get going today, who are you? What do you do?
What are we talking about on today's show?

**Jordan Kelliher** (1:20)
Yeah. So I'm on the sales side. I'm a business broker and so I help business owners, small business owners sell their business.
I'm in Austin, Texas where we both are, but I'll work pretty much nationwide. I like to say in that blue collar umbrella is typically the type of industries that I work in, but we help business owners sell their business and that's the primary focus of what we do.

**Brian Luebben** (1:46)
Sweet. So before we get into best practices of what to do, what not to do, and basically acquisition for somebody that's trying to buy their first small business, let's talk about the market at large to get started. So where do you see the market in general right now? Like are we kind of at this like sweet spot in the middle? Do you see this still being very much so at the beginning of business buying with a huge wave coming? Is there a lot more sophistication in the market than there used to be? Like what does the market look like today?

**Jordan Kelliher** (2:16)
Yeah, that's a very good question. I just had someone ask me that the other day is, you know, he's getting ready to sell his business and he kind of asked something similar. Is this a buyer's market, seller's market? What's going on? And to be honest, over the past several years now, it's been ramping up. Just the data on the amount of transactions that are happening just keeps increasing. And so my answer to that of kind of what's going on in the market is that it's both a buyer's market and a seller's market, obviously with some caveats here.
But if you own a business and it's in that blue collar umbrella, it doesn't have to be, but that seems to be the home run. And I'll explain kind of why. But you still have to check some pretty fundamental boxes, right? Just because you own a business, it doesn't mean that someone wants to buy the business. Just because you make a profit doesn't mean someone wants to buy the business. You still have to have...
You know, it can't be dependent on you. You can't make all your revenue from one large customer that you went to high school with, right? It still has to have the spread out revenue, the sticky revenue, not dependent on you. You still have to have a track record, so be in business for a period of time. Then obviously the industry helps. And so if you can have just a few of those things, that's when the business becomes desirable. And so if you own that business, then yes, you could say it's a seller's market, because that's what a lot of people are looking for.
And then in terms of kind of on the buy side, what I've been seeing, and I kind of always tell people, you always are going to have your financial investors, right? Your private equity, your micro private equity, they're always out there. You're going to always have your strategic buyers. And I say that just other businesses, right? If you own a landscaping company here in Austin, you want to start expanding out up into Dallas, you buy another landscaping company, we call that a strategic buyer. And so they've always been around. But now, and I'm sure you know this very well, but now we are starting to see over the past few years. Yes, we see a ton of entrepreneurs, these corporate professionals leading corporate and make good money. They've saved their money. They're single working nine to five or working for somebody and they're ready to go better themselves. And so these are smart, educated, they have money. They just don't really know the process or the flow of how to break into this. And now you're starting to see that with people like yourself teach that. There's programs in college, these ETA programs, which is entrepreneurship through acquisition. So you're getting a flood of these individuals coming in with the investment, the other strategic buyers, and they all seem to be going towards this, I'll just say blue collar umbrella. And the reason why I think that is my opinion, and I don't mean this in any disrespectful way, but I think it's easier to digest and understand the operations of a blue collar business more so than it would be like tech or SaaS. Now, that's not the case for everybody obviously, but you can understand the operations of a landscaping business or a pest control business better than jumping into a SaaS company. And so I think that's why a lot are flooding into these industries. So you have a ton of buyers coming in. You have a ton of businesses coming in. We could talk about that silver tsunami phrase all day long. So both sides are increasing year over year over year. But what is going to stand out on the sell side is having those fundamentals to your business. And so if you do, then it's a seller's market. And on the buy side, it's how do you get to the front of that line when there is a business like that? Because we list those businesses all the time.