Marketing Secrets with Russell Brunson - (Q&A) Questions About Acquiring Dan Kennedy's Company...

Episode Date: December 30, 2022

Steve Miles asked about my acquisition of Dan Kennedy's company, how do I evaluate these companies?... and more! Hit me up on IG! @russellbrunson Text Me! 208-231-3797 Join my newsletter at marketingsecrets.com ClubHouseWithRussell.com Magnetic Marketing Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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What's up, everybody? Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are in the world. Hopefully, you are having a great day today. I want to welcome you back to the Marketing Secrets podcast. Today's episode, we're doing another Q&A. Great questions coming in, by the way. Please keep sending them. If you go to marketingsecrets.com, you can submit your question and I'm trying to answer as many of these as I can. And I think these episodes have been really valuable. So if you're liking these, please let me know. Take screenshots of these, post them in Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, wherever you are, tag me and let me know which ones you like and I'll keep doing more of these. And again, if you want me to answer your question, come on over to

marketingsecrets.com and submit your question. Okay. With that said, I'm going to jump into today's question from Steve. He had a question about my acquisition of Magnetic Marketing. This is Steve Miles. This was right after you announced you were buying Dan Kennedy's company. How do you evaluate these companies? Do you have some matrix? Because some of us entrepreneurs have no experience in buying these companies. And right now, I've got an opportunity where I could buy a kind of a defunct company that's really not making any money. It's just got a whole bunch of assets they've built over the last four or five years and aren't doing anything with it. And previous owners have moved on. I know that's kind of hard to answer, but for companies that are making money, how are you evaluating them? What's multiples or how are you doing it? Really appreciate an answer. Thank you, man. All right, Steve. So a couple things. Number one is I look at businesses probably differently than a traditional investor would, right? Traditional investors are looking for the multiples and this and that and that kind of stuff. I'm not looking for that. I'm looking for

deals, looking for things that make sense, right? The, the first thing that I'm a big, big, big believer in is the only real asset you have inside of a business is the customer list. Right. So that's the first question I ask is like, is there a list? Is the list good? Is it big? Is it small? Is it buyers? Is it just subscribers? Like that's the first criteria point I'm looking for is that a number two is like, now how active are they? Like when was the last email sent to them? How many opens, how many click-through rates? If I was buying a company, I might even have them promote something just so I can see the open and click-through rates. Ideally, they promote me as an affiliate so I can like make some money from the transaction, but also see if people respond

to what I'm selling. But just to get an idea of like the health of the list. Because if you have a big list, but they haven't been emailed in six months and you start emailing them, I mean, your open and click-through rate is going to be close to nothing, right? So it may or may not be worth it. But that's the first question I'm asking. Number two question is trying to see like how this fits into my business as a whole, right? Me, my, me buying magnetic marketing was not to buy magnetic marketing as its own entity just to have over here, right? It's part of my, my overall business structure. I get like people who buy Dan Kennedy's products and services will also need click funnels, right? Click funnels is my core business.

So the question is like, will, if I'm spending time and energy and effort over here promoting this product, the service, whatever, the people come from there, like will people come from there into my core product? Will they buy click funnels later? Right. That is the most important criteria point. In fact, you know, I, some of you guys know, I bought a green drink company and a bone broth company. And like, those are very disconnected because they're not related. Those are more like fun side things I'm doing just to stimulate my

mind and cause I'm enjoying it, but they're not good investments as far as like they're growing my core business. Right. So I would recommend for almost everybody to don't do that unless you have the ability to waste money and just throw it away, you know,'s it's it's a hobby for me not like a core business whereas you know click funnels is my core business magnetic marketing buying acquiring it from dan strategically is part of it because first off he had a customer list number two he had uh continuity so he had members who were paying monthly to be part of it and number three this entire customer would potentially buy click funnels like they are a direct market to message match, right? The, the, the match is there. So even if like the company was losing money, if I, if I promoted to that list, my own product ClickFunnels,

um, I would make money from that. Right. So that's kind of how I, how I look at this. Like that's the most important thing. So number one is the list alive. How big is the list was look like? Number two, will people on the list potentially buy my core product or service? Okay. If so, that's a, that's a big thing. Number three, then for me is I did a podcast episode called the Rembrandt and the addict, right? And if you haven't listened to that, I'll go back and listen to it. I'm looking for the Rembrandt and the addict, right? For me, Dan Kennedy, when I bought that company, he had 40 years of intellectual property. There's hard drives with courses and lectures and trainings and, and all sorts of stuff that he's done that nobody's seen forever, right? I'm trying to do a deal right now with the Napoleon Hill Foundation because Napoleon Hill

has so much stuff that never got published. It's just sitting there that I'm like, oh, these are Rembrandts in the attic. I can take these things. I can turn them into really good front-end offers. I can turn these things into good continuity upsells. I can turn these things into other stuff, right? So I'm looking for these assets that are undervalued that I know the value of, but nobody else might know it. Right. There's a couple of other influencers in our space who have retired, who they don't have a list anymore. They don't have customers, but I do know that their intellectual property that like the, I know that I could sell those products and acquire customers profitably and then introduce them to ClickFunnels later down the line. Right. And so with that, like for example Dan Kennedy's stuff, we went through it.

I found a whole bunch of cool things. And from cool things that he hadn't offered in a long time, we plugged those into the MIFKI offer. If you go to nobsletter.com, you can go and you see that. It's the offer that we give people to get them to become a subscriber of the No BS newsletter, right? But then also, one of the hard drive files I found when we bought the company was, there was like a seven year window of time where Dan Kennedy sent faxes to just his Diamond members, right?

So the 300 people who were Diamond during that window got a fax every single week and no one else has ever seen it. And I was reading the faxes and they were insanely good. So what did I do? I took that Rembrandt in the attic. We took it, we put it into a book format, we published it. And then, um, and then, uh, if you go to diamond upgrade.com, you can see it right now. We give away that book when somebody upgrades to the diamond level, which is going from $97 a month to $297 a month. Right. And right now we're getting huge amounts of people upgrading that to that. Right. So

that intellectual property I found, I knew how I could leverage that somewhere else. So it comes back to your skillset. Like what is your skillset, right? For me, I have a skillset of taking intellectual property that's got a really cool story behind it. I can tell that story in a way that gets people to buy it. I can turn it into a funnel. I can get people, I can acquire customers profitably, right? So those are the other things that are important to me. So again, it's not really a matrix like I think a VC company would have when they're trying to build out, you know, when they're trying to buy a company. But for me, those are the things.

Do they have a customer list? Is the customer list still alive? Right. Um, will these customers potentially buy my core product and service so I can make money even if the, the core business over there I'm buying doesn't actually ever make me any money. Right. And then from there it's looking at the other intangible, or not intangible, they are tangible.

Like the tangible assets, like the diamonds that are rough, the Rembrandts in the attic, the intellectual property. Like what is there that I know I could turn into money, right? Like with Dan Kennedy's stuff, I could go through in the hard drive tonight, I could go find something, I could put up a sales page, and by tomorrow I could make 100 grand just like pulling this,

dusting off this intellectual property and reintroducing it to his existing audience to make money. But then I could also turn to a front end funnel. I could buy Facebook ads and, and properly get new customers, which then I could push into the continuity or put them into click funnels or both and kind of moving on from there. So anyway, that's the, that's the thought, that's the goal. That's the game plan. So I hope that helps a little bit as you were looking at potentially acquiring. The one thing I would add on this is just understanding that the time we're living in right now, acquisitions are interesting, especially for someone like you talked about who their

email list is kind of dead. The company's kind of dead. There's no other buyer for that, right? They're not going to come back and like, I need a 3x multiple. Like based on what? You have no company. You have no business. Like there's no one else in the world that's going to buy that for you. Right? So you can write down, negotiate things for insanely cheap,

um, or have them finance it from the profits. Okay. With the Dan Kennedy deal, we got a really, really good deal on a company. We did the initial launch, which paid for the company. So within like three months of us buying the company, it was paid off. And then everything after that's pure profit, right? So a lot of deals like that we could have structured. I didn't, but we probably could have structured it saying, Hey, here's the thing. We're going to finance it. Um, my first payment is going to come in six months from now. And then I have that six months to go and make the money to then cover it later. Right. Um, when we acquired lady boss, it was kind of half and half. We, we paid a half money up front. Um, and then we're doing the launch and

then we're financing the rest over, I think over a year or something like that. Um, but those are some of the ways that we're looking at those things. So anyway, I hope that helps. It's really exciting. Um, a exciting way to grow is by looking at these acquisitions and, and, um, and also like, it's just, anyway, personally for me, I really enjoy it. I think I have more fun republishing Dan Kennedy stuff. I do my own, which is, which is fun. So anyway, I hope this helps. Um, and hopefully helps others, you guys who are listening and thinking about it as well. If it does, that's awesome. So also, if you guys have any other questions you want me to try to answer on the show,

again, go to marketingsecrets.com. Go submit your question and I'd love to try to answer it live. Thanks so much, guys, for being part of this. I hope you enjoyed this episode and I will talk to you soon.