Businesses for sale

I remember from my surfing days an Australian who was in town to do construction management for an executive’s new luxury home. During the weekends, he would surf. (He flew in his surfboards with him from Sydney.)

One of his philosophies was really simple: “You don’t ask, you don’t get.” I like that. It’s simple. And it works.

Apply this to gathering intelligence. If you’re thinking about buying a business, it’s good to go into the situation with as much understanding you can get. Even the simplest business has some tricks of the trade that, if used, make your life a lot easier.

Where do you get this intelligence? You ask. You can always find people who will gladly give you info about their business. During slow periods, they will usually be glad to talk about what they’re doing. If you ask questions out of curiosity, you’ll get open and honest answers as long as they are not being asked to reveal deeply confidential business info. Ask enough over time and you can learn a lot: the nature of the customer base and who the prime customers are, how the business goes about selling itself, what their current challenges are (usually this has to do with finding more customers, but sometimes it’s about competition, employees, or the landlord not fixing a leak), and what the owner’s dreams are in owning the business.

Gather more intelligence over time from various sources, separate the wheat from the chaff, and you’ll start to have good ideas coming from a number of businesses which you can use to evaluate candidate businesses for sale. You’ll be able to see rather quickly what the current owners have and haven’t been doing well or not at all, where you can make adjustments once you buy the business, and go ahead with buying a business, knowing you have wonderful, fresh ideas to bring to it.

That will give you the confidence to succeed mightily. And that attitude of confidence is the important intelligence you can bring to your new business. But you got to ask.