How to Plan a Profitable Takeover

There are an increasing number of businesses, owned by “Boomer” owners, that are coming on the market as the owners age and find that they do not necessarily have family members who want to take the business over. There are 2 reasons why taking over one of these businesses might appeal to you.

1. As an alternative to starting your own business, which offers far more certainty than starting a business from nothing.

2. A way to grow your existing business, by “bolting on” an associated business, that broadens your product range and/or increases your productive capacity.

This article outlines some issues for a Profitable Takeover. It is at Yellow Belt 

Buy Rather Than Start

In the article on Profitable Startups (see PSU article) we pointed out the considerable stress and uncertainty associated with starting your own business.

We also described how you can reduce this stress and improve your odds of success by buying an existing business.

Often, it might be easier to raise money from, for example, a bank if you buy a going concern with a track record. The bank finds this more reassuring than trying to fund a startup business with no income, assets or surety that it will survive.

For more on this opportunity, see the Profitable Startups article (link to article here).

Buy to Grow

If you are successful at growing your business, you will be spinning off money that you could use to buy other, less well run, businesses.

By the time you get to this stage, you may have done the Optimise100 which indicates how to Double Your Profit in 100 Days (see list of articles here).

That means, if you are buying a business that is a little “tired”, as many of the Boomer generation owners will be after running a business for a long time, you might be able to turn it around into a far more profitable activity quite quickly.

You can then apply the Grow365 techniques (see list of articles here) to grow both the new business and your original business.

Acquiring a business in this way lets you increase your productive capacity and/or diversify your product range or location to improve the coverage of your clientele.

Because you already have experience at spinning up and improving businesses, it is a far less risky activity.

Resources

Walker Deibel: Buy Then Build
A very useful reference book.

Video’s relating to Lean Startups:

Eric Ries: The Lean Startup / Talks at Google (video link)

Alistair Croll: Growth Tribe: Lean Analytics
Workshop on Lean Analytics & Growth Hacking – Part 1 (video link)

Benjamin Yoskovitz: Lean Analytics (video link)
Co-author, Lean Analytics and VP Product, VarageSale talks about the One Key Metric that matters and how to use data to build a better startup faster.