Acquisitions Anonymous - #1 for business buying, selling and operating - The Amazon Agency With Dream Clients Falling From The Sky

Episode Date: July 21, 2026

In this episode the hosts analyze a high-margin Amazon agency for sale while a veteran business broker reveals how buyers can win—or lose—competitive acquisition deals and what "SBA pre-qualified" really means.Business Listing – https://quietlight.com/listings/18829076/Welcome to Acquisitions Anonymous – the #1 podcast for small business M&A. Every week, we break down businesses for sale and talk about buying, operating, and growing them.Looking to build a professional website in minutes? Try Wix: https://wix.pxf.io/c/6898629/3115214/25616?trafcat=templateHubSpot is the backbone for how businesses scale without chaos. Try them out here: https://go.try-hubspot.com/OeG9VrSubscribe for more episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@AcquisitionsAnonymousPodcast?sub_confirmation=1Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://www.acquanon.com/newsletter💰 Sponsored by:CapitalPad is a private equity co-investment group for lower middle market deals. Accredited investors invest in searcher and independent sponsor transactions on a deal-by-deal basis, with minimums starting at $25K. Acquisition entrepreneurs with a deal under LOI can raise equity through CapitalPad's single-SPV structure, closing with one partner and one wire. Raise capital or invest at https://capitalpad.comQuiet Light Brokerage specializes in helping entrepreneurs buy and sell businesses with experienced operators as brokers. They offer a free valuation clarity call to help owners understand what their business is worth and how to increase its value before selling. Learn more at https://quietlight.com/This week the hosts review an Amazon CPG agency generating $1.5 million in annual revenue and nearly $1.1 million in net income, listed for $3.7 million (3.4x earnings). The business boasts recurring monthly revenue, exceptional margins, remote operations, and virtually no working capital requirements, making it one of the most intriguing agency listings they've covered.Key Highlights:- Amazon agency producing $1.5M revenue, nearly $1.1M net income, listed at $3.7M.- Veteran broker explains what SBA pre-qualified listings actually mean—and what they don't.- Practical advice on how buyers can differentiate themselves in competitive acquisition processes.- Discussion around AI's potential impact on agency businesses and lender appetite.- Deep dive into customer acquisition, SOPs, recurring revenue, and agency scalability.Subscribe to  weekly our Newsletter and get curated deals in your inboxAdvertise with us by clicking hereDo you love Acquanon and want to see our smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel.Do you enjoy our content? Rate our show!Follow us on Twitter @acquanon Learnings about small business acquisitions and operations.For inquiries or suggestions, email us at [e-mail]

Hello, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome back to another episode of Acquisitions Anonymous. This is the internet's number one podcast on buying, selling, and operating small businesses. Today, we have a really cool episode. This is an Amazon agency for sale with 66% net margins. But the fun part about the episode is we actually have Brad Wayland with us today, who is a broker at Quietlike brokerage. And he gets into it with Heather about SBA pre-qualification. He also gets in into what he sees buyers do that really differentiate themselves in a competitive auction and what he sees buyers do to blow themselves out of a competitive auction and kind of convey that they're not serious. So if you are a buyer using an SBA loan, participated in a broker deal, this is a must

listen episode for you to hear Brad's perspective on how to distinguish yourself. We also talk about the dynamics of the agency business model and Brad drops a couple nuggets about what he's seeing in the evolving e-commerce space from the brokerage side. So a really fun episode today. I hope you enjoy this one from Acquisitions Anonymous. Hello, another episode, Acquisition Anonymous. We don't have 100% beers anymore. And thumbs downing on just the plus inventory line.

Hey, everyone, it's Bill, and I want to tell you about maybe the most exciting sponsor we've had in a long time on the pod. It's called CapitalPad, and it is the thing that I wish existed when I started my journey of operating and investing in small businesses. So CapitalPad is a marketplace for acquisition entrepreneurs. That is, people who want to buy a business and need capital, to list their deals and solicit capital from other people who want to invest in acquisition deals.

So if you want to back somebody buying a small business, CapitalPad is a place to do it. And if you want to buy a business and need capital, you can go on CapitalPad to be introduced to investors. So the really great thing, too, from the investor side is that CapitalPad takes care of all of the details that can get hairy with small business acquisitions. They handle standardized terms, standardized governance, standardized distributions all up front in black and white.

Basically, CapitalPad professionalizes investing in small businesses. And the returns can be really, really good. I'm so stoked they exist. It's founded by my friend Travis. who is a phenomenal entrepreneur in his own right. So if this sounds like something that's appealing to you, if you want to buy a small business and need capital, or if you want to invest in small businesses,

go check out Capitalpad.com and tell them that Acquisitions Anonymous sent you. Hey, Brad and Heather. How are you guys doing? Good. Enjoying summer. I know. It's so great. I'm going, Mills is not here, but I'm going camping next week on Mills's farm in South Carolina. pumped. No way. That's awesome. And Brad, you're going to, where are you based, Brad?

I'm north of Nashville, about 50 miles, Bowling Green, Kentucky. Okay, maybe a little far to drive to South Carolina to Mills's farm, but I know that you have the whole, the whole course on regenerative farming and everything. Mills is like down the rabbit hole, man. I love that stuff. That's so cool. Yeah, he's planning cover crops, like Millet and some other things. and then he's going to mull them all down and then they decomposed in the soil. He just bought a skid steers like Mills is way over the waterfall on this stuff. We only do animals, but he is down the rabbit hole for sure. He's been messaging me.

Okay. Awesome. Well, tune in the next episode of Acquisitions and I was with Mills where he will tell you a bunch about that kind of stuff. But this will be a fun episode because we have Brad Wayland here. Brad is from Quiet Light. So Brad is a former entrepreneur, having run his own businesses. but now probably among a few other things is a business broker at Quietlight. Quietlight, my personal go-to brokerage, especially in the e-commerce space.

So we asked if Brad would join us for a couple episodes and help us break down some e-com deals. So this is one of them. This is actually a Quietly deal, but not Brad's deal. So he promised that he would not hold back. Whoseever deal at Quietlight it is, we will get soon. It might not appreciate it. But I'm sure he will be fair and balanced. So you guys ready for this one?

This is Heather, your favorite. I want to hear later in the episode of what you think about this. An SBA pre-qualified Amazon CPG agency. It has $150,000 a month of monthly recurring revenue. It has 95% monthly dollar retention. It has untouched growth levers that you can pull. It has systematized operations and it's fully remote. The revenue is $1.5 million.

and the net income is nearly 1.1 million. So how's that for margins? And they are asking 3.4 times or $3.7 million for this Amazon CPG agency. It says, this fast-growing Amazon CPG agency is built on a solid foundation of over 150K of MRR. All the clients are under contract, no whale clients, while being systematically built, utilizing SOPs, proprietary tool sets, and a delivery team capable of running the business at 70% capacity, leaving a new owner to focus almost entirely on growth. The agency acts as a full-service growth partner exclusively focused on CPG consumer package

goods, brands in the better for-use space. This enables brands that are already performing well in retail or direct consumer to build Amazon into their highest margin, most scalable revenue channel. So it sounds like their ideal consumer archetype is a CPG brand that is selling in retail or on their own website and not yet on Amazon. I'm not sure how many of those are left in the world in 2026. But yes, I imagine it's quite easy if you take a brand that's crushing it in the hard channels and get a DTC and retail and pop it on Amazon. It's quite easy to crush.

So it says the current growth is entirely through referrals and organic content and almost no paid marketing spend. Dollar retention holds at about 95% month over month, and the delivery team has room for 20 or more additional brands before any meaningful headcount investment is required. That's impressive considering they've only got $500,000 of total OPEX on 1.5 of revenue. So how many people can they really have? It says with clients paying by the 7th of the month and payroll going out by the 15th, the business requires essentially no new working capital to operate.

Let's talk about that also later. The business has been deliberately built to run without the founder. A director of ops manages all account manager cadences, client escalations, and team training. An SOP library and a proprietary software suite give any new owner a fully documented, tech-enabled platform, or operation from day one. The growth levels available are concrete and largely untested. The agency has hardly invested in paid acquisition campaigns. It's never employed a dedicated salesperson. Multiple existing clients are actively requesting Walmart.com and TikTok shop management services that the agency doesn't offer.

A buyer who installs even a basic sales function acquires a business where organic demand has already proven the model and the only variable left to optimize is how much qualified pipeline gets generated and closed. This business is SBA pre-qualified, offered by our friend Ethan Alexander at Quietlight. So, Brad, tell me, what does this business really do kind of nuts and bolts day to day?

Well, it sounds to me like this business is taking non-technical people or non-marketing people and bringing them to the wonderful world of the web and putting them online. I think it on the surface sounds pretty brilliant. Expectations are probably quite low being that these people don't have access to those channels already or don't understand what they're doing.

And I imagine that almost every one of them came to this company. He says it didn't spend much on paid. So I imagine almost every one of them came to this company because they were searching for, can someone do this for me because I'm overwhelmed, would be my guess. Yes. So the idea is if you've got a successful brand, but you've somehow not ever heard of Amazon.com or don't know how to sell on Amazon, you've got a better for you CPG brand. These guys will set you up on Amazon, build out all your listings,

maybe take pictures of your products, write all the bullet points, set up some basic ad campaigns, who knows how far they go as far as generating S general traffic or a number of other things on the scale of white hat to gray hat to black hat, but in theory they will stand you up on Amazon and get you selling.

The thing that is just curious to me is, this basically describes like the holy grail client for an agency where you have to do almost nothing hard, you just create the listings, but the products are already so popular on D to C and in retail, that consumers are just beating down your door for them and so they just go on Amazon, search find buy,

and bada bing, you're done. My question is, Brad, how many businesses do you come across regularly if that describes? How many CPG brands are like crushing it but are also not on Amazon at all? Yeah, I mean, obviously fewer and fewer nowadays. I think that, you know, one thing that we do run into is we had the perception

that everything has gone online, but we do a lot of valuations. get about 5,000 leads a year for people selling their businesses. So each advisor at Quietlyde is doing several hundred valuations a year, or at least looking into those opportunities and maybe doing maybe officially 100 to 200 valuations a year. I will tell you that I'm sometimes kind of surprised whenever people come through, they have something that's brick and mortar or that they've built through other channels

and seeing the holes still in the marketplaces and things. like that that still exist. You kind of need to get down to the specific products to see it. You know, if I think like GoPro's, of course, I can get every model of GoPro that's ever been created on Amazon. You know, I can get, you know, any product, an iPhone case, all the like popular things that we think of. But when you get into, you know, some kind of, you know, plumbing part brand or something really popular among plumbers around the country, are those all on there? Well, what we find is that a lot of times they're not. we'll find other kind of knockoff brands,

brands that are kind of Amazon, you know, kind of homegrown, things like that. And so I have a feeling that this business is doing quite well because the people are finding them that need the help. I don't know how you would go find these people, unless you were just basically trying to get lists of products

and have an AI go out and just say like, what's on and what's not, and then trying to get to the higher-ups to say, hey, can we get this listing? So that's the thing that jumped out at me, because that's, I don't know how you target it. I mean, as a brand owner, I get inundated by agencies. I mean, multiple spam emails a day.

Like, hey, we would love to build out your Amazon listings. So what's curious to me is that they have self-proclaimed no outbound marketing, and yet they seem inundated with the ideal client profile for every Amazon brand. which makes me wonder how are they doing it? They say that it's entirely referral, which also makes me wonder, is the founder of this thing prominent in the industry somehow, or does he or she own a different agency

that is sharing leads with this one? Do they have a podcast? That to me feels like the only or the most likely story. Would you guys agree? Yes, and what good would it do if your clients aren't already online? What good would it do to do outbound, you know, online type marketing anyway, so they have to have some other sales channel to reach this ideal type of client. I think there's a little clue there, fast growing, because the price multiple

seems pretty fair based on the million dollars of net income that they're telling us about, you know, 3.43, but it says fast growing. So I have a question, how fast is it? You know, how long has this been around? Is this 2025's numbers and 2024s were a lot? smaller, you know, and how sticky long-term are these types of clients? Once you get them set up and running on their Amazon shop, do they need you anymore? Is it kind of like a one-year sort of churn or something, you know, somewhat long, but not super long-term with the customers? That's my guess is that it's grown pretty fast and they're selling on, you know, their best year, 2025. But it is curious, how are they finding these customers?

really interesting. I do think maybe in this space where they stay in a certain lane, I mean, one of the things we see out of a lot of agencies is they just try to go really broad. And I think that sometimes that might be a mistake. They might actually be able to make a little bit of a name for themselves on referral if they really are in the better for you space. You know, like there's a lot of things that are in the better for you space. But I think when you have brand recognition with some probably can get some

pretty quick credibility. If you say, hey, I'm doing XYZ brand. We've got these four or five, you know, different companies that work with us. And someone sees a name. They're like, oh, well, if that's good enough for so-and-so, then it's good enough for me. Oh, man, that is like the classic agency growth hack. It seems as though they all walk around wearing shirts all day with the logos like NASCAR drivers of the brands who are their clients. Or work with them. Yeah. And interestingly, also, let's just say there's some significant stretching of the truth or exaggeration. I mean, I have personally worked with an agency for two months, fired them, and then the next year, they're parading my logo all over the

internet as though I'm a client. Right. They never let them go. In fact, I was in the t-shirt business for a very long time. We have a very large screen printing business and an SEO firm that we worked with for a long time. And then my former business partner said, we fired them after our search traffic dropped by 90 something percent. I was actually visiting with them and saw the logo of our company, former company, on their website still. And I was like, okay. So they're still showcasing it, even though the end of that relationship was pretty angry.

Yep. Always call the logos. When you're hiring a new agency, always call the logos. Call the logos. Agencies generally, though, Heather, I want Heather. take and then I want Brad's take. So Heather, first your take as a lender. It says this is SBA pre-approved.

It seems like the margins are awesome. 66% net margin. It seems like they're, that uses no working capital because their clients pay by the seventh and they pay payroll on the 15th. This seems like a great business. Are you going to finance it for us?

Well, I love the working capital and the lenders will love the working capital. I think the, these margins, although very impressive, will tend to make lenders think this is a buy-a-job scenario, although the description makes it seem like it's really not. Like maybe they have an offshore team and they have this director of operations running it.

But those kind of margins usually tell a lender, this is a buy-a-job scenario. And lenders are really cautious about marketing agencies in general lately because they're concerned that what they do can be replaced by AI. This is kind of on their list. They've got, you know, every lender sort of got their list of small businesses to watch out for that are potentially more vulnerable to AI disruption. And whether right or wrong, agencies is on that list. And so they're going to be pretty cautious about whether this can really be sustained.

You know, so they're going to want to look back historically. Again, they're going to be worried if this was just recent growth. They're going to look back, how far, how long has this business been performing at this level? and they're going to look forward thinking how much of what this business does can be replaced by AI. So I think a lender might go for it with a little bit lower leverage than normal, and especially with a buyer that's got an agency background or some kind of marketing background. I don't think they'd feel comfortable in many cases with a buyer that just doesn't have a resume fit here. What's also interesting is it seems as though the strength of this,

agency is that they've really SOPed everything out. And I got to assume they're using almost entirely overseas labor here for this to have margins like this. I almost wonder if this agency can eat itself with AI and have the AI run, agents run the SOPs instead of humans over time. I don't think a bank will get excited about that, but I think an owner might get excited about that. Well, and that would be sort of stage one. Like stage one is they use their own AI and get even more cost efficient. But I think the concern is these are SBA loans or 10-year loans. And so when you think about how quickly small business owners might be able to have those tools in their own hands and do this DIY, I think that's where the banks are concerned.

How much are you going to outsource of this when you can just log into Claude or chat and get it done directly? So I think that's the long-term view. And I think that makes 10-year SBA loans trickier and trickier these days for business acquisitions, because there's a lot of businesses where you just can't, you can't quite imagine what it's going to be like in five years in that industry. Yeah, we had, so we've done a lot of deals in the last several years with First Internet Bank, and they've pulled the plug on all agencies. You know, what's interesting, though, is that, no, we don't have access to, you know, anyone important over there. So I don't know.

But they actually gave us a different reason than AI when they say that they weren't going to do them anymore. And it was key man risk. But they felt that in the agency models that the founder, when they were gone, was really difficult to replace with a new person. And I think that could be sort of anecdotal. Like, hey, we did a couple of deals that went south. Wouldn't surprise me if it was AI. It's just that they had kind of mentioned that particular issue. Interestingly enough, on the flip side of that,

agencies that are SBA eligible are very popular for our buyers. For one, like one of the big jokes at Quietlight, and like when I launch a listing and it's not SBA qualified, I get emails from my fellow brokers that says, hey, man, could you explain to me why this isn't SBA prequalified? and actually a couple of weeks ago, and it's a joke. They're sending it because I get that email like a hundred times.

You can scream. We're not going to be able to lend on this at all. Please don't ask. And people still say, hey, can you talk to me about why this is not SBA pre-qualified? So I actually did a joke a couple weeks ago, a guy on my team sent me things saying like, hey, this looks great.

Love to buy it with an SBA loan because he was kind of making the point that I had screamed too loudly that there wasn't going to be any SBA financing available. And so I just basically went into chat and said, hey, give me like a three-page response. And I want you to make it very thoughtful that includes these reasons. And so I sent it back to him. And it was like, you know, 4,000 words.

And he got about two paragraphs. And I was like, okay, you didn't have this. I get it. I get it. Yeah, but it is interesting. From a buyer standpoint, we have a lot of people that come in for SBA deals that don't understand the risk of web-based businesses. and they look at their savings and the SBA loan is sort of a lottery ticket.

It's like a debt lottery where they're like, hey, I've got 300,000. I talked to a guy this morning. I've got 300,000 saved. I want to go buy a $3 million business, and I want that business to be making a million a year, and I'll cover my debt service with $500,000, and I'll make $500,000, and everybody will be happy. And that's a very common profile for us to come through. People that are looking to escape, they're nine to five that has spent years kind of in the rat race and they won out. And seeking escape, they think that leverage is kind of the key.

And so all these influencers pushing that really get them excited about the idea of like, hey, I'll put down maybe 10%. And then maybe I'll get an SBA loan. And then I'll make twice as much as I make now and I'll own a business that's worth millions of dollars. And I spend a lot of time sort of crushing those dreams and telling people like, hey, just so you know, like, if you don't have any experience on the web, I would not use any leverage at all. You got $300,000. Go find a business that's for $300,000. That's for sale for $300,000. And then the good news is almost every business that we list, I see a path to great scale.

And so if you dig into it, you can generally find an opportunity for great scale. But don't convince yourself that this is some low risk play. Like if you go leverage this and you get a 30% correction after close, now you're paying an SBA loan and you have no free cash flow. And so you're going to be basically having sleepless nights worried about whether or not you can pay this bill. Yeah. The influencerization of the buy a business space over the last five, years has been dramatic, I would say. I mean, dramatic. And, you know, you can easily name

plenty of names who are all over Instagram pitching kind of the contrarian idea of buying a business and making money. That word shows on purpose. But, and yes, it is mathematically true, right? You can buy a business with 10% down and, you know, cash flow it and make a ton of money right away with the huge asterix of the business needs to be stable or up after you close, which is a huge asterisk because the transition is a non-zero risk, is a material risk, especially if you are not an experienced business owner, but even if you are, it's still a material risk. I have so much I could say, because I agree with both of you.

I think what happens to a lot of people is their experience, the closest experience they have to buying a business with debt is buying real estate, even investment real estate. And they come and they bring to this space a lot of assumptions that don't work here, that do work in real estate. And some of them are based on income. They look at the income that they're buying and they think that's the income every year. They don't understand that we have to project what kind of

kind of revenue visibility do we have? You know, what are all the things that can go wrong? Shouldn't we set the leverage to the worst case scenario rather than the base case or the best case scenario? And so our job at Vizzo anyway is to help our clients see all of those other aspects of a business and try to make decisions based on that and not some kind of mathematical formula that sort of pretends like the income you're looking at on a teaser is like a rent role on a property. It's not. And you have to be very careful with how you look at businesses and how you come to this space. I will say this. I've worked with a lot of people who didn't have the perfect resume for the deal that they bought, and they've been very successful. And I think those people,

it comes down to how quickly they learn, you know, that they take it all in, they absorb it all, and they do learn. Some do and some don't. But the ones that learn, they can, they can overre come to some degree their lack of experience. I'd like to hit briefly on a couple other things on this particular SBA situation. One is a problem that we've run into in the last couple of years is that many of the banks that we're working with do have a relevant experience requirement. That takes several people out of the game. Now, I don't know that it's impossible to work around.

Could someone go pick up a $15,000 site on Flippa and say, hey, I bought an Amazon store and I'm operating one now and then check that box? Maybe they could. But the relevant experience requirement is a requirement and we've had deals fall apart because that was not met. The other one is just want to unpack SBA prequalification for a second because, you know, I need to, I've kind of always wanted to say this on this show and I'm going to take the liberty now to do it. But SVA prequalification is not anything. There is no slip of paper we're getting from the SBA. So at Quiet Light as an example, and we've looked at bringing this in-house,

and we might do that in the next year or so. But at Quiet Light, we work with broker-lenders. So we have brokers that are kind of like us, and they interface with different banks. And we have, over time, matriculated towards people that have just built a reputation with us for getting deals done. And we're pretty strict about it. When we have someone who fails several times, people are like, hey, I don't want to work with you anymore. And we've had some names like that. But we generally work with people that are good at getting the deals done.

What the pre-qualification is, is it's us sending the CEM, the confidential information memorandum, and the tax returns to a broker lender and saying, hey, what do you think about this as a potential SBA deal. And then they look at it and they say, hey, these financials look pretty good. From what I can see here, this business looks like it has enough cash flow. It'll depend on the buyer. But hey, I want to write a pre-qualification letter for this and you can put it in your folder. And what they're basically saying is, if we find a candidate that has a relevant experience that has enough liquidity, then we think we would be able to get the deal done. And it would be under these terms. So maybe it says 10% down. Maybe it says 10% down plus a 10%

seller note. It can say different things. It can say 25% down. So that letter, I said it doesn't mean anything. It doesn't mean anything from the stance of the SBA knows nothing about it. But it does mean something that, hey, we are paid on success. So since we're paid on success, we really don't want to just say something is SBAable if it's not, because we're going to get caught up in a deal for 90 or 120 or 150 days, and then if it fails, we're going to be left with nothing. We're not going to generate any fees.

That means our seller is not going to get what they want. We're not going to get what we want. So when we put a pre-qualification and what it's telling you as a buyer is that, hey, we've taken this to a broker-lender. They've looked at it and they've said, hey, I've done a lot of deals. This looks like a deal that we could get through the SBA process.

And then they've provided a letter for us to furnish in the folder to allow people to see like, hey, This is what one broker lender that we work with says about it. Does it mean you have to work with that broker lender? Not necessarily. It's just how we do it at quiet light to kind of let people know, hey, this thing might be able. So my guess is Ethan Alexander, who's a very good advisor,

you know, Ethan probably has a letter in the folder from some broker lender that says, hey, this business is going to be financable. I don't think it's going to be financial by first internet bank because they've told us they're not doing agencies anymore. but it might be another bank. Brad, you know you're talking to like one of the largest SBA loan brokers. If I'm a broker than in the world. That's what we do.

I do. I do. But to be fair, one time on one of my listings, Heather said maybe Brad just slapped this SBA prequalification on. And so since she said that, I thought, hey, I would like to defend that sometime and just let people know, like, hey, I don't want to slap it on because I don't get paid anything if I don't close the deal. deal. So I really would like to make the point that I have no idea what they do at our competitors. Like, I have seen some situations where people have told me. They told us it was SBA able. And then I heard about how that process went. And it's like, ugh, that was nasty. Like, those people are not checking any boxes. I can't really speak for the other advisors at Quietlight.

But from what I see anecdotally is we're really not wanting to sign up for deals that are going to fail. So we try to do our homework a little bit on these SBA deals, try to get them done. I guess one question I have for you, Heather, is what we're seeing on our side is they're taking longer than ever to get closed with the folks that we're closing them with. And I mean crazy. Like my last three have been over 150 days. Yeah. Yeah. Let me say a couple things.

I would love it if all brokers would use lender vetted instead of SBA. pre-qualified because what you just described, that's what it is. We did some vetting with a lender, and you're vetting, you know, part of the deal, which is just the sell side. You know, we don't know who the buyer would be. We don't yet know what really the final structure or anything about the buyer's source of equity and all this other stuff. So I'd say lender vet is, that's why I, that's why I beat on this so much because people do misunderstand the SBA pre-qualified and think it means more than it does. I'd say lender vetted. But no, I don't think deals. take longer when they start out right. And this is something we do with our clients. We take

the deal right after a signed LOI and we do not approach the lenders. We don't even figure out which lenders to approach until we know enough about it. The buyer doesn't know enough about it right after an LOI. So if they go running straight to a lender at that point, it's a mistake usually because it just starts to unravel kind of from day one. Things get misunderstood. They don't know everything. So with us, we take about a week. If the seller is really prepared, it only takes about a week to get everything into a data room, ask a lot of questions, get all those questions answered, not just from the sell side, but from the buyer's perspective and their background. And then we go to the bank. And when we do it that way, we stay on track and we get closings in 90 days.

So absolutely, it's not taking longer if we do it right, but I think banks are sort of overwhelmed, the ones that are good in the space. And when buyers go on their own and kind of let it go piecemeal to the bank, it really does start to become very inefficient and kind of can spiral. So our job at my company is to keep that from happening. Hey, everyone, it's Bill. And I want to talk to you about Quiet Light brokerage. I was so psyched when Quiet Light agreed to sponsor the podcast because I am a customer.

I have used Quiet Light to sell three businesses. And if I were selling an e-commerce or a SaaS business, I really would not consider anyone else. Like I said, I went back to them three times. I worked with three different brokers at Quietlight. Had a great experience all three times. Even on one occasion, they found a buyer for a business that I just didn't know it was even going to be possible to sell. So they have pulled rabbits out of their hats several times for me.

They've been in the e-commerce and SaaS business brokering game a very, very long time. They really know what they're doing. They have great reach with both buyers and sellers. And the other thing I really love about Quietlight is all the brokers there are former operators. So you can't just show up and go, hey, I'm a lifetime business broker. I want to work at Quietlight. You have to be a former operator. So they all know what it's like to be in the operator chair.

So if you go to Quietlight.com, they have free business valuation calls, which they'll do with you. No obligation. Just tell you what they think about your business, what they think it would be worth. And then what you might need to do to kind of get it ready for market. Those guys over there are great, great SOPs, great systems. I just felt like I was in really good hands all three times with QuietLight. So if you're interested in selling your business, especially in e-commerce or SaaS, hop on over to QuietLight.com, fill out their onboarding form for a free valuation call,

and you can tell them Bill or Acquisitions Anonymous, sent you. I'm so glad Brad is on the podcast now because Brad, Brad was a friend of the pod before he was on, and periodically we would review some of Brad's deals, and I would get emails from Brad, like, frothing at the mouse, like you guys weren't fair to my deal. Like, I did vet it for the SBA load. Like, he's like super upset. So I love that you Harvard that grudge against Heather for like a year probably. No, it wasn't a grudge.

I'm here to help you. I'm here to help you. It wasn't a grudge. And let me tell you something. I, SVA, and we've got some data on it. In fact, last year we ran some data on certain deals. I don't remember what it was. was, but SBA deals traded a full one times multiple higher than our non-SPA deals.

Wow. That's a really interesting stat. That hurts to hear because we are desperate for more lending options. We would love to have other options available. And, you know, it's just really tough. And honestly, like Heather said, I mean, the 7A is such an interesting thing because I had some commercial real estate for a while when I was in the T-shirt business. And, you know, it was cheap, you know, these like ideal SBA deals, you're getting them cheaper than you can go buy a commercial building. Oh, yeah.

And I was buying, you know, about 110,000 square foot facility had to put 15% down. You know, and I have these people coming to me, you know, 10, 20 people a week. And hey, I'm looking for an SBA deal where I put 10% down. You know, which is more stable investment? This internet-based business, this agency, like Heather was saying, or a commercial building sitting in an industrial park in a city where there's no industrial space available with 10-year leases, with two five-year backup leases

that are triple net. Like, that's the picture of stability, and I have to put 15% gone on. Yeah, well, but that's why. Now, in all fairness, you will get a better rate on the real estate deal than you will on a business salary. It's fair. You will get a lot lower rate.

But you're right. there's an arbitrage, definitely, where the risk is maybe not fully priced in because it is a government guaranteed loan. However, I will say this. I have to defend the program. When you look at the SBA default rates and you compare existing businesses and startups to acquisitions, acquisitions actually have the lowest default rate in every period that we have data for. And I think that's because of deal selection. That's because a business that's going to sell with debt has to pass through an awful lot of filters before

that actually gets done. And so they tend to, it favors higher quality companies. And so it's, I know we hear some people online talking about doom and gloom with regard to this, but on the whole, the business acquisition loans actually perform pretty well. And I think that makes, I think that makes sense because if we go sell, this one was 3.43, I think you said, this one's at a 3.43 multiple, and we've got a 10-year payback. Yeah. So there's quite a bit of wiggle room there.

for that investment to take, you know, a little bit longer to recoup your capital on it. And I do think there's some built-in safety net with the SBA loans. I mean, we need the SBA loans. When that program gets shut down with these government shutdowns, it is a nightmare for us. Yeah, it is. And also, you know, that SBA program is, I think, the envy of the entire world. I mean, other countries do not have the 7A program, and it is much harder to transact in small businesses in other countries. We've done some of this BDC stuff in Canada, and it's like SBA, except it takes the rest of your life to get them.

I have closed some. Yeah, I have closed some. They're painful. Very much. So back to this agency. So it's selling for 3.4 times. It sounds like if you use a loan broker, like Heather or others, Heather will know to take it two banks that are interested in agencies and not terrified by agencies.

So, you know, because, you know, our friend Ethan here is a good broker, we're going to assume that he's got an SBA broker or an SBA direct lender who is game for agencies. So you're going to get an SBA loan here. It's a million bucks of income. Let's just say you hit the asking price. And, you know, I'm curious, like Brad, you've seen a lot of these. do you think this is going to hit the asking price? I mean, what's the market like?

Are things going for asking? Sometimes, if I ask you this, you'll go, everything's going above asking with four bids. Sometimes there's no bids and it's going below asking. What's the temperature these days? So our trends are pretty hot right now. It's a little bit inexplicable to me. I'll just be honest.

So we are basically, touching our 2025 revenue for the year right now. Wow. And it's, you know, middle of June. So, a little shocking because, you know, interest rates have not changed.

But I do think that what has happened in the market is the AI space, chips, these different sectors have brought more of a risk on appetite. And anytime we see risk on appetite, we start to see improvements

in our business sales because we are a risk on type of sale. So my guess would be, so when we have an SBA deal, assuming that this is sort of, we'll call it fully qualified, I know, again, that's not real terminology, but something like a 10 or 20% injection, either from the buyer or the seller or a combo of the two, if it is going to be that kind of deal, my guess would be that they will have multiple offers at asking price.

The reason I say at asking is that I don't see our buyers being very creative. If you're a buyer out there and you want to stand out, you have to do so little to stand out because there's a bunch of clones out there and they see the asking price and at the SVA side, they come in at the asking price almost every single time. Oh, Brad. Okay. I got a pull in this thread. What are some things that you have seen buyers do to stand out, both small things and big thing.

Like, how can you not be a clone as a buyer? Okay, so I tell people all the time, in my opinion, you should come to the table, if you've got more cash tunnels, you should come to the table from day one and say, hey, I'm injecting more. Okay, so let's just say that the letter says 10%, and the person says, hey, Brad, I've got way more than 370. I could put a million down. I will say, if you want to stand out, come from day one and say, I'm injecting a million. So I just want you to know, we don't have to worry about third-party valuation on this because the bank is going to know, hey, like, if it comes in a little low, it's not going to crater the whole deal. So that's one thing. Another thing is the speed at which people move.

It depends on who you talk to at Quietlight. We have advisors at Quietlight that think that 20 buyer-seller calls is a feather in their cap. Okay, I'm very critical of this. there are very good brokers that will tell their sellers, we need to talk to every single person because one time on that last person, we got the best offer. My view is 20 hours on the phone to sell your business

with these different buyers is cruel and unusual punishment. I think as an advisor, I need to be getting down to like, what are the seven calls that we can do? So what I'll tell people is, the speed at which you move, how much you're going to inject, and why don't you put a sweetener on there?

Because you're financing this over 10 years. So, like, if it's 3.7 and you know it's competitive, just coming in and saying I'm moving quickly and I'm paying 3.8, and I'm putting more cash in, you've all of a sudden gone from just looking like everybody else to being the number one king to. Now, there's always the issue. If there's a cash buyer, you're toast.

But there's nothing you can do about that. You're always toast. Nope, there's not. Yep, there's a cash buyer comes in. They want to buy it. You know, they're, they're going to win in most cases. Yeah, because if you're, if you're getting a 10-year SBA loan, the difference between 3-7 and 3-8 is irrelevant.

It's not going to change whether the deal pencils. It's not going to barely change your monthly. You know, if you're convicted at 3-7 with 90% 10-year financing, well, I mean, you're saying maybe take less than 90%, but even 60% 10-year financing. If you're convicted at 3-7, you should probably still be convicted at 3-8. So if you really love the deal,

I totally agree, add a little sweetener in there can really stand out. What about things, Brad, that buyers do to take themselves out of the running or to appear unsurious? Okay. So if we're going to talk about incompetence, I could talk for a long time.

Well, general patterns of things that people might accidentally do. One of the things that I feel like you kind of need when you're selling a business, sometimes we'll have sellers, and they feel like it's our job to manage those buyers and to sort of manufacture the desire for the deal.

What I really want to see out of buyers and something that is lacking a lot of times from people doing SBA, is they're not pursuing the deal. Like pursuing it like you were pursuing the woman you married or whatever. Like, you've got to want the business. And what I see in this SBA space,

someone's watched some influencer. They've started shopping listings. They've gotten serious about buying one. And then they sort of try to sign up to buy it. Hey, I'm here. Yeah, you're asking 3-7. So, do you have an LOI that you can fill out for me? You know, like, it's very like they're not owning the process.

And so when I see buyers that aren't trying to own it, that aren't following up with me every day. Like, I immediately am like, okay, this is a person that's going to get lulled to sleep during the SBA process. Whenever the lender says, hey, we need to look at this or that, can you check on this? And it's like, you go five days later and they're like, guys, we've made no progress here. Like, you didn't call that agency and get that dock from them the same day. Like, so I really feel like the desire for the deal is something I can't manufacture. for people, they've got to kind of pursue it. But general, there's just a general lack of competency sometimes in these deals

where people just sort of show their colors, just things that like, Bill, you're very experienced in operating. And there's certain things people might say that you would just be like, okay, I know this isn't going to work. Like if a buyer says, hey, I'm hiring Ernst & Young to do the diligence on the deal. Okay, I'll be like, okay, we're out. Yikes. Best of luck, right?

And you hear stuff like. Half a million dollar Q of E. Right. Like it, those, those kinds of things. Or if people say like, hey, we want to get in for a couple weeks and then we're going to fire up a Q of E and all this stuff. Q of E is a bad word for us in the wrong context. Explain more about that.

So there are people doing $300,000 deals that tell us they're going to do a Q of E. And those are people that I know don't understand what Q of E is. When I do a private equity deal, so we're looking at. looking at private equity generally on deals of about $8 million and up. A lot of times there's no SBA involved in those deals. You know, so let's just say I'm doing a $25 million deal. $25 million deal, 100% you're going to do a Q of E. So whenever I talk to those folks, they're like, hey, we need to do a Q of E. We're going to set that off in week two. It's going to take three weeks. It inevitably takes five weeks. And then they get done and, you know,

they come back and renegotiate some points of the deal. Like, that's fine. We're used to that with private equity, you know, firms, that's a, that's a common situation. What we've seen on the side of these smaller deals, stuff that's below that number, is people throw around Q of E trying to sound like they know what they're doing, but what they're actually doing is sort of making themselves not attracted to us. What we really want is like, if it's an Amazon business, our view is like, you don't really need a Q of E. You need somebody that understands that there's two components to an Amazon business to check it out.

One is you need the Amazon data. Jeff Bezos is not manipulating that data for people. It's come straight out. There's 24 months in the API. You can pull it out. But you can't get the cogs from that. So we need the bank statements for the operating account. Those two pieces of information should be able to complete the picture of what this business looks like.

Bank statements, Amazon data. So in an Amazon business, I'm looking for buyers that sort of understand those are the pieces of information. I'm in a deal right now with a publicly traded company in another country. And in that deal, they came to me and said, basically the equivalent of we hired Ernst & Young. And they said, hey, we don't know what the source of truth is. And I was like, oh, well, it's an Amazon business. They're like, right, but look this Q of E firm. Look what they gave us.

They said, we've got Amazon data. We've got the QuickBooks file. We've got seller board. And then we've got the bank accounts. we don't know who to trust. Oh, no, the tax returns. We've got the tax returns. We don't know who to trust.

None of these things line up. Well, that's a huge red flag for us. Because when we're looking at that, we're going, okay, so you hired a firm that doesn't even understand what Amazon does to understand that Amazon knows the revenue. Like, no one would question that Amazon knows the revenue that comes through an Amazon FBA store. Right.

Like, they know their fees. They know their revenue. Okay. Now, on that bank statement side, could someone fudge that? Could they have an operating account that they haven't told you about? Sure. Could they do something fraudulent?

For sure. But in a world where people are being honest, could we have an operating account and we have Amazon data? We have the picture that we need to verify an Amazon business. And so I think that we just see a lot of people not realizing the things that they're saying

that's actually making them unattractive for us to keep moving forward with. Just a general lack of sophistication or a lack of calibration as far as bringing an elephant gun to its much smaller deal. Yeah, for sure. Okay, Brad, I could go on with you for much longer than this, but we are 45 minutes, which is we try to keep our episodes too so people can fit it into their commute. So I imagine we have many listeners sitting in their driveways right now hanging on with us.

So thank you. So let's wrap this up. So this Amazon agency, Heather, thumbs up or down to finance this deal. Thumbs up to the right person and depending a little bit on how quick this company got to this size. Those are my two caveats. Right person. And what did 24 look like? I'm kind of curious.

But possible thumbs up here. Okay. Brad, what are your thoughts as a potential buyer here? Don't love that my friend Ethan did not put how old the business is. I am addicted to knowing how long the history is. I can't tell how long the history is here. So I'm going to say if we've got three plus years of history, I'm in. If this is like 18, 24 months, I'm out.

Assuming that since there's an SBA, I assume there's at least three tax returns. But I don't love that I don't know how old it is. And that would be a big factor for me. But I'm interested in it. And I feel like this might be an angle that could be exploited for more. Like they're doing something where people are not very technical. I have found those to be pretty sticky areas in my experience. Yep.

And I'll say something similar to you, which is that if they can scale the customer acquisition, I'm potentially very interested in this. That's also my biggest red flag here because they have basically described that they have mana from heaven. They have ideal client profiles just falling out of the sky and hitting them in the head that any agency owner would kill for. And I have major questions about how that is happening.

happening and whether you can scale that. And you might not be able to scale that. That might be coming from the founder's reputation. It might be coming, I don't know where that's coming from, but paid media on Facebook is certainly not going to create those types of leads overnight. So I would really want that, am I going to maintain this when the founder is gone, the lead flow? And can I actually scale it or is this a non-scalable lead source, which is in the end of the world, but it probably means you're not going to triple the business. The other thing that I'd want to do a lot of research on is they've got really this SOP library. Sounds like they've got really good SOP libraries. I'd want to read all of those. I'd also probably want to hire another Amazon agency

to audit the SOPs to make sure that they were high quality. And then the other challenge of this business is probably every six months, what's working on Amazon changes. The whole Amazon platform evolves very, very fast. And you need to stay kind of top, cutting everything. edge as far as what's working now. So if I buy this business and I don't become immediately immersed in the Amazon ecosystem and become the type of person that can write the SOPs for six months from now, this business is going to fall behind. You know,

not right away, but over time, it's just going to be less effective for its clients. So that's something I want to make sure I had a plan to stay ahead of also. But, you know, agencies, this one, uses no working capital to scale.

They're getting paid on the seventh and paying their people on the 15th every month. If you can jack up the lead flow, this business scales almost effortlessly. I mean, I'm hugely hand-waving. All the agency owners listening are like freaking out when I just said effortlessly scale. You know, it's a scale. It's a human capital problem. It's not a financial capital problem to scale this business. All right.

Brad, I love having you. You bring a level of spiciness to this thing and a deep level of experience, of course, across so many e-commerce businesses for your whole career. Thank you for being here. Appreciate the invite. Of course, I'm sure we'll have you back. So if you guys like this one, we have 500 plus more just like it, including a couple with Brad.

You can go on to ACQUanon.com, which is our website. You can search by industry. You can find all the agency deals, all the e-commerce deals, all the construction deals, you know, whatever it is you're into, you can find it and filter our feed by industry. You can also get on our email list where we will email. you when the episodes come out. If you don't like the sound of my voice, you don't have to hear it. You can just read it in your inbox. So please go check out our website or find us on X,

ACQ, U-N-N-on. You can also find all of the hosts on X as well as Brad. Brad. Brad, what's your X? Brad Whalen, W-A-Y-L-A-N-D. So go get after Brad on X if you want to sell your e-com business. You can go to Quietlite.com if you want a free valuation. for your ecom or SaaS business. And Brad, do you guys do more than ecom and SaaS? Just think of you as like the bread and butter ecoms SaaS.

But do you guys go outside of that? Yeah, we do. We do agencies like this. We do lead gen content. And content's expanding some. There's some new channels on content that are interesting. So we're getting more into the video side of that. And we're getting more into there's just a lot of new channels that are really lucrative,

like Facebook pages have become very lucrative again. And so we're seeing a lot of earnings there. And so content is kind of changing form right now, but I think the market's going to catch up to it pretty quickly and start seeing that it's actually creating a little bit more diversified space for content than we've seen really ever, where you've got people not just needing Google traffic alone to actually scale a content business.

So that's kind of an interesting category right now. Interesting. Man, well, Brad, I hope you'll come back because now I want to ask you more about that, but we are out of time. So thanks for listening to Acquisitions Anonymous. We will see you on the next episode.