If you’ve been in business for some time, then you know that one of the most critical areas to focus your efforts on is getting and keeping customers.
Assuming you’re not selling a product or service that tends to be a one-off purchase, then it makes sense to keep your existing customers happy. It’s generally going to cost you less in time and resources to look after your current customers than it is to win new ones.
But if your business is growing – and it should be – then you’ll want to be winning plenty of new customers too.
How do you do this? It depends on your business, but typically your team will be engaged in a range of sales and marketing activities to generate interest in what you do. Hopefully, you’ve got a number of different ways to pick up leads and turn them into customers, but no doubt there’s a fair bit of work involved.
What if there was a much simpler way to win new customers than the usual methods?
What if you could take a shortcut and double the size of your business overnight? Imagine having twice as many customers, as well as all of the staff and systems in place to handle those customers.
How would that change things for you? What impact would that have on your lifestyle?
The truth is you can double in size by buying one of your competitors.
You might have thought about this before, but perhaps you dismissed the idea out of hand?
Typically, people tend to come up with objections and questions such as:
• Surely my main competitor wouldn’t want to sell to me?
• What if their customers leave once we take over?
• How on earth will we get the finance for this?
Let’s deal with these one at a time.
Surely my main competitor wouldn’t want to sell to me?
The fact is, you never know what is going on in someone else’s business or life. If you’ve ever had those, “Why don’t I just jack this in and do something else?” thoughts that almost every business owner has at some point, then it’s quite likely that whoever’s running your competitor’s business has had those thoughts too. Life happens – people get ill, or they want to move overseas, or they’ve simply had enough. You can’t predict who would or wouldn’t want to sell to you.
What if their customers leave once we take over?
This is a risk and you’d need to do your due diligence and check the right contracts are in place with existing customers. If your business is based on geography and there’s rivalry or animosity between you and your nearest competitor, then you’ll need to carefully consider the risk that customers will jump ship. It may be that you decide it’s better to buy a competitor in another area, rather than a direct competitor.
How on earth will we get the finance for this?
When you’re buying a profitable company, there are ways of structuring the deal to ensure that you don’t need to use any of your own personal capital.
This is where it pays to learn from someone who knows what they’re doing and can put you in touch with trusted professionals who will help you put the right deal together.
If this post has piqued your interest and you’d like to learn more about how you can buy a business without using any of your own capital, start with this quick 5-minute video.