Property Hub - Investment Insights & Inspiration - Get Invested: Matt Raad on investing in digital property

Starting point is 00:00:00 We find property investors typically are really good or understand very quickly how the general business model works for buying and selling websites. It's actually easier than buying some bricks and mortar businesses. Do you know, you can make millions. I never thought this would be the case. We know people that are selling food blogs for millions of dollars. It's just mind blowing. Welcome to Get Invested on the Property Hub podcast channel, the leading weekly show to help you unlock your full self-health and wealth potential. I'm your host Bushy Martin and each week I go deep with the best investors, experts, leaders and founders to find out what it takes to break free from the grind, discover freedom and live by design. Subscribe now and

Starting point is 00:00:46 join me and get invested in the life you really want. Let's get started. Hi Freedom Fighters, Why are you looking to invest or to invest more? Is it to make money, replace your work income, to stop having to work in a job that you don't like, to get your time back to do things that are important to you, become financially free, or a combination of all of these? And if you're looking to invest, what's the best thing to invest in

Starting point is 00:01:13 that gives you the biggest buck for your bang while matching your time, your experience, and the money that you've got available, along with your sleep at night factor and your comfort level? Well, traditionally in Australia, the highest and safest reliable growth and cash flow vehicle that's tax incentivised has been property. However, with recent increases in both property values and interest rates, the accessibility barriers to purchasing property from both an equity and a buying capacity perspective are becoming challenging for many investors.

Starting point is 00:01:44 So what are the relatively safe affordable and easy alternatives? Now you're probably immediately thinking about the volatility of shares and equities, or maybe speculating in the quite scary world of digital currencies, crypto, blockchain and NFTs. But what if there's a much better and other alternative? A relatively unknown asset class with limited supply and demand requires little capital to invest. Now, have I got you intrigued? Well, you may be surprised to hear that I'm talking about investing in the buying, renovation and selling of websites, which in many ways could be considered as the digital equivalent of real estate or virtual property for want of a better description. You may be surprised to hear that investing in the

Starting point is 00:02:30 purchase, renovation and selling of websites can be an excellent and highly profitable investment opportunity if you know where to look and you know what you're doing. So what is digital asset and website investing and how and where can you do it and invest in it successfully? Well, that's exactly what we're going to unpack today with our very special guest, Matt Wright. As you're about to hear, Matt himself has used a very unconventional method to create financial freedom, starting with nothing and building a high cashflow portfolio through buying and selling businesses that has now shifted into the virtual online equivalent. Matt and his wife, Liz are now accomplished and successful website investors, which in simple terms means that they

Starting point is 00:03:12 utilise digital assets to generate cash flow and to build wealth. Together, they were some of the first in the world to pioneer the buying, building and renovation of websites. And they now teach others like you and me to achieve six or seven figure incomes using a similar strategy to buying and renovating traditional real estate. Now, I need to stress right from the outset that everything we talk about today is for general information only and in no way, shape or form does it constitute financial advice. So you'll need to talk to your professional advisors to see if it suits your situation, your needs and your risk profile. So today Matt is going to share his insights into his journey as a successful investor, where he started out

Starting point is 00:03:51 as a zoologist with his wife, how they bought their first businesses, they expanded into mergers and acquisitions and then transitioned into the very interesting virtual tech and digital world. Like yours truly, Matt and Liz share my vision to inspire and motivate you to invest in your future and replace your income with leveraged high cash flow assets and in Matt's case to extend this into the realm of location independent digital skills. Matt's going to reveal how you can buy, renovate and sell online website digital property and to achieve your version of financial independence and how you can replace your income in a relatively short time frame by leveraging websites as income generating digital assets so i'm really looking forward to

Starting point is 00:04:34 unpacking these exciting opportunities in the virtual world of digital real estate so welcome and let's get invested matt thanks so much bushy what an awesome intro love it no i said i really have been uh the more i've delved into what you're doing what you're doing i've got pretty excited myself matt it's uh as i've mentioned to you uh in the green green room off off air i wasn't even aware that an investment opportunity revolved around the website activity. So I'm really going to look forward to unpacking that. But of course, before we get into that, I'd love for you to just sort of elaborate a little bit on what you do differently. And more importantly, Matt, why do you do what you do? Well, I think what's so different about Liz and I is that, as you said,

Starting point is 00:05:20 and I know a lot of your listeners come from a real estate investing background as you do, And like you said, everyone here in Australia thinks that's, and it is a very, very powerful way to generate wealth in here in Australia. But what we do so differently is we buy and sell websites. And most people are like, what, what the heck does that mean? Like far out. And we take it for granted. So I need to be careful how sometimes I get a bit overexcited about it because it is such

Starting point is 00:05:49 a powerful strategy and it's a, it is very different. But like I was saying to you as well, and anyone listening, once you understand how it works, it's actually relatively simple as a business model or an investment model. And believe it or not, it's actually more like buying and selling or buying and renovating real estate than, say, running a standard business if you come at it from an investment point of view. And I think that's the other thing that Liz and I do very differently is we come at it with an investment view strategy. And that's thanks to Liz. She's really, she loved doing the real estate thing, which we can mention later on in the podcast, but she comes at it with a, like I said, an investment strategy rather than just treating it as a business as such.

Starting point is 00:06:38 So you'll notice we talk about ourselves as digital asset investors. And so, but basically we're buying and selling websites and not e-commerce sites. So everyone thinks, oh, you know, you're selling widgets online and things. No, no, no. We do none of that. And that's the other bit that I think people spin out a bit. And I'm happy to explain exactly the sort of sites that we buy in this podcast with you. Sounds awesome.

Starting point is 00:07:01 What about the why piece? What's the why of what you and Liz do? Well, the buying and selling, how do I, there's two parts to that. question because we we have two big areas of our life that we run one is the e-business institute where we teach beginners to do exactly what we've been doing for the last 20 odd years but the why we do that is because we're meant to be semi-retired and it's kind of started out as a passion and so many people ask us how the hell do you buy websites and now it's turned into this business of itself and we absolutely love it we were able to get people quitting their typically

Starting point is 00:07:39 high-paid corporate roles and or creating alternative investments. We have a lot of real estate investors in our community and they find this a really good alternative investment to have. And I guess it's just a buzz for us to do that and to teach them. And our why is we want to enable these people or open their eyes to an alternative strategy that's out there now. This is mainstream it's about to get even bigger over the next decade we believe and so we're just passionate about educating Aussies you know how to do what we've so successfully done we absolutely love it and why we buy websites is because it's a no-brainer wait till you hear anyone listening you'll see what I mean for us because our background is is business we've always bought

Starting point is 00:08:29 and sold businesses bricks and mortar businesses that's how we when we first met we bought a business straight away and um and it's really really tough it's way harder than what people realize and when we discovered the online space we suddenly realized not only is it heaps easier but we actually love doing this like it's so creative it's so much fun and as young entrepreneurs we didn't need as much money we're like in the past we used to you know forking out hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars into bricks and mortar business taking massive massive risks that's fine when you're young but we don't have that time and now we've got kids and everything and it was always stressful and you know it's easy to look at business owners and go i know a lot of

Starting point is 00:09:17 you said a lot of your or um listeners are like in high paid roles just like our our community and it's easy for people who work a job to look at entrepreneurs and go oh man you're so lucky and you make so much money, it's not that easy, I'm telling you. With bricks and mortar business, it's very challenging and it's something we're really passionate about because we made lots of mistakes in business in the early days and now what we're allowed we can do is throughout what we can teach people is how to do things like proper due diligence so you don't make mistakes,

Starting point is 00:09:50 the same stupid mistakes we made back in the early days. But also, like I said, our why is why buy websites? Because compared to bricks and mortars, it's a walk in the park. We're like kids in a candy shop, Liz and I, in this field. It's heaps easier. Yeah, I love it. Well, I know I touched on a little bit of your background in the intro, but I'd love to circle back to that now, if you don't mind, Matt,

Starting point is 00:10:18 and take us through where have you invested your time and energy and money over the years and why? and how has this now led you to what you're doing? And I guess the obvious place to start there is because, you know, when I first read that you're a zoologist, there's a big leap from that to what you're now doing. So take us through the highs and lows of the journey in that regard, if you don't mind.

Starting point is 00:10:42 Yeah, we get that quite a bit. And I think it's probably like you, Bushy, and possibly like a lot of your listeners, you've got to look at my why and it's handy for me to explain to your listeners, I come from a background where money was a real struggle and ever since I was a little kid, you know, growing up in the 70s and everything, it was tough and both Liz and I grew up on farms and I watched my mum and dad go through the 87, particularly relevant now,

Starting point is 00:11:11 when interest rates shot up to 18% and they nearly went bust and, you know, pretty scary time. and so for me ever since I was a kid like since I was five years old I had this drive to be wealthy and we didn't know any rich people even until I was 18 I didn't know any millionaires or anything like that you had no known way of doing that and but everyone in my family noticed Matt is very very driven by money it's just I don't know where that bit comes from but to understand my journey you know we come from nothing and it was really tough so I left left the farm in in southern New South Wales went into the big smoke and and you know had all sorts of adventures and learning but

Starting point is 00:11:58 when I first got there my main thing was I'm thinking well how am I going to go on this journey of wealth if I don't know enough I've got to meet people so I started meeting people and I realized business is the way to do it that's that I somehow but I knew nothing about business so if you're listening to this you gotta understand it's perfectly okay no matter where you're at in life you can start somewhere and I realized basically I just had to start learning stuff and learning about business and I had to hang out with entrepreneurs and get to know them and I think I went on a like a well I'm still doing it now you know multi-decade journey just hanging out with entrepreneurs like yourself and learning what i can off these amazing people and what that so

Starting point is 00:12:40 that's why we got into business i read lots of books back then like you do and i realized okay business is the leverage working a job is not ever going to give me the freedom that i want and so as soon as liz and i got the opportunity we met at uni studying zoology because i really didn't know what i was going to do and here we are at uni but i always had this thing in my mind and then luckily liz wasn't interestingly liz is totally opposite she wasn't driven by money even though she didn't grow up with much it wasn't her thing but her number one thing was freedom so and she realized as well matt's right business is what's going to give us that freedom because as a zoologist you can't you know we want to live in the country right well the joke is with

Starting point is 00:13:21 zoologists most of the jobs are in the city so that wasn't going to work for us anyway So we got into a little manufacturing business with the help of family and everything. And so we could outsource that. And we did really well in that. And, but when I say we did really well, we nearly went bankrupt when we first bought it because we knew nothing about buying business.

Starting point is 00:13:39 We got the wrong advice on due diligence from an alleged expert, an accountant. And once we got into the business, we very quickly realised this is going south. We've got to learn how to turn this around. So we're totally self-taught. I bought my we had so little money because everything was on the line and every last cent we had would go back in the business I bought my first business book from Vinnie's

Starting point is 00:14:02 for 60 cents I've still got it it's just over there in my in my cupboard and it's um what they don't teach you at Harvard Business School and that in that the main message I got that out of that is you got to learn how to sell and that's how we turned around the business so we've always been really strong in sales because we had a we were selling to wholesalers here in australia we're selling parts for um you know chainsaws and brush cutters and things like that and um we had a lot of fun in that and we make it look easy but honestly it took 10 years and it was we were this close to going bankrupt so many times it just wasn't funny but through that that was kind of a seasonal business and we discovered we loved business and we started buying and selling lots

Starting point is 00:14:47 of businesses because we were successful whilst it was a struggle we had a lumpy income and we could use that money and reinvest it and we interestingly we did invest in a bit of real estate as well luckily i will say as well golly gosh that helped us many a time with the banks and everything i've got us there's a lot more advantages of buying real estate than people realize but also we're able to invest into other businesses we just bought and sold and we still loved it so much that through buying and selling we became brokers and did it professionally and that's when i realized oh this is how i can start working with multi-millionaires not just millionaires but multi-millionaires and work for them buying and selling web businesses

Starting point is 00:15:33 and so I started working as a spotter and finding really good deals of much bigger businesses for private equity firms in Sydney and stuff and that was awesome. It was absolutely amazing. We were doing that leading up to the GFC and then what happened was we started a family and Liz started looking at the online space and she said to me, well, we can work from home and we can do what we've done for the last 10, 15 years

Starting point is 00:16:06 with bricks and mortar business, buying and selling them and rolling them up and combining them together. We can do exactly the same thing, Matt, with websites. And I'm going, what? How do you do that? He said, let's just do it. So we did. And it worked way easier and quicker than what we thought.

Starting point is 00:16:22 Like literally, compared to the bricks and mortar world that we'd been in, it was so much faster and leveraged And we didn't have to invest all this money into physical stock. And so to this day, that has been our passion is telling people, don't take these massive financial risks like we did. You don't need to put all your money into physical stock anymore. There's this thing called the internet. You can literally just sell advertising space or affiliate products.

Starting point is 00:16:52 And it worked phenomenally well for us. So obviously we have a lot of experience as well buying and selling businesses, and we're really passionate about entrepreneurialism, and we were very lucky that we'd had in Bricks and Mortar World some amazing personal mentors who were incredibly successful in business, but we literally just applied their strategies to buying and selling websites, and far out it was easy.

Starting point is 00:17:16 And, you know, the rest is history, as they say. Love it. I just want to drill into an exercise there because, you know, if you join the dots between the quite big transitions that you've made across the board, where has your and Liz's confidence to be able to take those leaps come from because it's quite rare. A lot of people paint themselves into their own box

Starting point is 00:17:42 and then they're nervous to step outside of that for fear of what might happen. Clearly you and Liz aren't. Where is that sort of persistence and resilience and courage come from that's enabled you to make those quite sizable jumps over that timeframe? That's a really insightful question, Bushy. Far out.

Starting point is 00:18:04 You're right. It's funny, when we look, I don't tend to look back in my past, but now we are because we teach people to do what we do and people say, well, how did you do it? And I look at our kids. So our kids are teenagers and they're, you know, they're ultra high achievers. And at first I'm thinking, where did I get that from?

Starting point is 00:18:26 Okay. And so that thing about resilience and courage, it's interesting. Liz says that to me as well. Look, we did take very what most people would consider very big risks. And to us at the time, though, we didn't hesitate. I think where it came from, you've really got me thinking here, where did it come from? I think it's from genuinely from our passion.

Starting point is 00:18:51 We're addicted to business. So I used to ride, like I've ridden motorbikes all my life because I grew up on a farm and stuff. And I can remember the first day I jumped on a powerful dirt bike and I was addicted. It was within about 10 seconds. If anyone of your listeners have ridden a motorbike, you know exactly what I'm talking about.

Starting point is 00:19:08 When you twist that wrist, all of a sudden you're addicted. It's like when you get on a really good horse or whatever. it's a very people who are listening know what i'm talking about well that's the feeling i got literally within 24 hours of owning our first business yeah exactly the same feeling i was addicted and i knew straight away so at that time here's how addicted was i i had no money right it all went into this business and everything i'd won this sizable scholarship from the university of new south wales to study um zoology and red kangaroos and everything and i literally rang them up and said i'm not coming back i'm going to give you all the money i gave all the money back

Starting point is 00:19:45 and said i'm not going to continue with my studies and it was really prestigious what i'd won but that's how much i loved business i think it was a something inside me that because remember like i said from when i was five onwards i wanted to be wealthy and and have that freedom as well like liz have that freedom and i realized business pretty much gives me everything that i possibly want in life I don't want to do anything else but business and so I guess feeding through to where do you get the courage when you know we went through a lot of challenges and particularly financial challenges I think young and stupid would be one answer but it's that you know well we did there was we had a lot of mentors so we read a lot of books like I a big influence in my

Starting point is 00:20:35 life back then was Arnold Schwarzenegger it's interesting I mentioned now because there's obviously a doco about him on on netflix at the moment and it's interesting i said to liz i think arnie influenced me a lot because he's a very brave person and he has a saying there's no plan b well we had no plan b we literally burnt all our bridges there was no going back and i guess i had those influences around me as well so it's not just the passion of you know i'm not going back to uni i'm not ever going to get a job i'm all i want to do is business i have to make this work and so each business and each step in our life that we've taken we always jokingly quote arnie and lots of things and literally there is no plan b i think we lived by that now i'm not

Starting point is 00:21:21 recommending that by the way that we were like i said we were young and stupid i realized when you get to this age you need to be a lot more conservative and a bit more careful and it's very smart these days and very easy now to have a plan b but honestly i think we're addicted to the journey of business and i think that's what gave us our courage plus got to admit we were getting wins along the way as well so whilst there's challenges in bricks and mortar world and everything that every phase of the like when liz and i were doing the big m and a's like in the 1 to 20 mil range that was really tough at times because there's a lot that goes on in that space but when you get the wins that's very addictive too so i guess it it's fear and what

Starting point is 00:22:04 Is it the carrot and the stick? I guess now when I'm thinking about it, it's a really good question. There are two things driving us, fear and addiction to the results we're getting as well. Yeah, I love it. I think just picking up on what you've shared with us there, what I love about what you and Liz have done, you've overcome fear through knowledge.

Starting point is 00:22:24 And, you know, it's like the thing you've jumped into. It's like learning a new language. Very clearly you've surrounded yourself with good people and good players in there. and you've read extensively so that you're you're breaking down that fear by increasing your knowledge which which includes and improves your comfort levels and your courage as a consequence of that so uh i really appreciate you sharing that because that's a really important lesson for people to take away is that the only difference between doing something and not

Starting point is 00:22:55 doing something is your knowledge of it and the only way you get the knowledge is to talk to others who are doing it and to read everything you can get your hands on associated with it so that all of a sudden you can see clarity through the clouds so and really offer there thank you i think i think you're spot on bushy you're right if i think of it i've forgotten this too liz and i were like sponges we we learned everything we went to every course every seminar including real estate seminars but we went to heaps of business seminars of course and um we read heaps of books because that was the cheapest way for us back then. And knowledge is king.

Starting point is 00:23:31 We learnt that off so many of our mentors. And that's why we were desperate to hang around. I shouldn't use the word desperate, that's wrong. But we loved hanging around these. That's part of the reason why I became a broker, just so I could hang around these very successful people and get to know them and learn off them. And I guess with knowledge did come a lot of deep-seated confidence

Starting point is 00:23:51 in what we're doing because we had role models where we knew If we keep pushing forward, we can still be successful at that. And you're right. It is so important to have those role models and that knowledge so you know what you're doing stands a reasonable chance of success. Love it. Love it. If you look back on your joint career with Liz up until this point,

Starting point is 00:24:15 share with us what challenging event has brought about your greatest learnings and best changes then. I think I've already mentioned it, nearly going bust, when we bought that first business and realising the due diligence was completely off. And that was a pretty scary moment because we're total beginners. And without a doubt, that would be our biggest challenge and biggest life changing moment in our not just business careers, but in our lives. because um and to this day it drives us that that's why we're so passionate about teaching people to make sure they don't get ripped off when through doing due diligence so with websites we're really really good at teaching people how to do due diligence because of that passion of of

Starting point is 00:25:03 and now it funnily enough it came from a bricks and mortar business but um yeah without a doubt that would be the number one changing thing for us and and in businesses and then also actually very closely related to that is the personal experience of watching other people get it wrong on their due diligence. And we've been called in to help fix up the mess or whatever. And it's like, oh man, if I could have helped you so easily, I can spot so quickly the mistakes that people make in their due diligence on any business, don't care what it is. And again, I'm an expert at it. I take it for granted, but it's purely because we're so passionate about it. So can I give a take-home lesson from that?

Starting point is 00:25:47 If you think you're getting into business, learn how to do due diligence. It's not that difficult. It's actually but make sure you do learn it and don't always trust, well, do I say this? I don't know. There's a lot of accountants that are really, really good accountants. That was another learning for us and I saw this repeated many times. There's a lot of accountants that are really good but they give their clients the wrong advice when it comes to due diligence on businesses, interestingly enough.

Starting point is 00:26:11 That's funny. So I've been called in to, you know, advise on certain due diligences and the accountants, understandably, they're not experts at buying and selling businesses, they're experts at figures. There's two very different things happening there. And so that's something to this day we are hugely passionate about because it's where you make your money. 100%.

Starting point is 00:26:33 It's like in real estate, wouldn't it, when you do a real estate deal? Absolutely. It's interesting you mentioned due diligence because one of the things that we spend a lot of time with people with is teaching them the core elements of due diligence on a property because you've got to validate and test and support with data everything that you're looking at, not just take someone's opinion. So there is very parallel in that regard.

Starting point is 00:26:55 I want to sort of drill down now into your own personal journey into the website investment opportunity and we'll drill into a lot more detail shortly. but just to share what was the attraction for you and Liz into that space initially? What was your initial investment strategy for like when you decided to go down that route? And then what have been some of the highs, lows and challenges

Starting point is 00:27:23 that have come out of that experience from your own perspective? Yeah, well, again, really good question. And when we first went online, we didn't actually buy websites. So Liz started learning about this space. And back then, it wasn't like it is now. It was very difficult to even build a website. You had to hand code them. She learned on a program.

Starting point is 00:27:48 If anyone's technical, you would know this. It's called Dreamweaver. It's not even around now. But literally, it was none of this click and drag like it is now. So this was back in, I think, 2008. And so Liz built her first website and she had to learn how to do all that. Now, she's quite technical. I have major technical challenges with computers.

Starting point is 00:28:13 I used to have some choice words at computers and I never grew up with computers, whereas Liz is quite confident with them. But interestingly enough, the whole reason it took us until 2008, we actually started looking at internet business or getting online years before that, but we were scared off because of the technical issues because it's so difficult technically and that's, again, why we're so passionate about teaching beginners because we regret to this day we actually saw the opportunity two years before we actually got online and we're still kicking ourselves now

Starting point is 00:28:46 because we would have made a lot more money a lot quicker if we'd gotten on two years early. So it was purely because of the technical issues that we delayed it. Liz figured it out though and she built this website and it worked but it was hard. It was really hard. It failed at first. It didn't generate any money and then luckily she had a mentor who said,

Starting point is 00:29:08 just stick at it. I think you're onto something there. This can work. And so she stuck at it and she got that thing up to making $5,000 a month, which is pretty cool. and that's seriously impressive now liz is is a real go-getter and she's quite impatient and she said i'm not going back through that because it took a year or something to get that up there but and i remember when we got our first affiliate check this was all just through selling

Starting point is 00:29:33 an e-book and you did no physical what we made a vow with each other we are not ever selling physical product ever again once we exited our final business and so when we got online she just sold an e-book and she built it herself so the turning point for us was she's impatient and she just looked at me one day and said what i said earlier in the interview what the hell am i doing building this thing why don't we do what we've always done matt i'm just going to buy websites and i'm going can you even do that she goes watch we'll figure it out and so she just started emailing people and because we used to do that with bricks and mortar business how we used to buy them we'd go door knocking or send out old physical letters remember those days and so that

Starting point is 00:30:16 was one of our secrets people don't realize that's how we used to do it we'd send out thousands of letters to businesses around australia seeing if they want to sell and so they just say well it's even easier now sit at home in my jimmy jams and send out an email and just see and back then you talk to people on skype and so we just started buying businesses before buying websites that's how we got into it before even the market there's now brokers and marketplaces for um buying and selling websites and we know all of them and they all started around the same time as uh the owners all have very similar backgrounds to liz and i in that that we all started buying and selling what's called ads um advertising websites and it was it was really good fun and very very quickly

Starting point is 00:31:00 we hit success because we just you could buy sites at a good price because no one was doing it one of the first site websites we ever bought believe it or not was off ebay because no one knew how to do it and we found this guy he we said to him why'd you put it on ebay he said where else do you sell a website i don't know how to do it and anyway he was in america we got talking to him on skype and we bought his site and um that was one of the first sites and i think that site was making a thousand dollars this is net this is all this is not sales it's all net profit. The profit margins on websites are like 90%. It's just through the roof. And I think from there, then we suddenly realized, okay, how do you do due diligence on a website? As everyone's

Starting point is 00:31:44 heard, that's something we're very passionate about. We better get this right because this is where we're going to get that wrong. So we realized it was virtually the same as bricks and mortar businesses, except we need to layer in the technical aspects of how websites work. So, again, we had to learn a lot in that first year or two that we got online and to this day we're still learning a lot but we became, we just loved it so much and we realised, oh, this is just the best. This is so, this is like the perfect business model

Starting point is 00:32:14 and it's really interesting, Bushy. We had some mentors from our bricks and mortar days who we actually would help. They were very high net worth individuals and they were, they just buy and sell bricks and mortar businesses. and so we'd go back to them and we'd hang out with them and we'd have coffee and stuff and we'd say, you're not going to believe what we're doing now because they'd say,

Starting point is 00:32:32 can you go and find us another business, Matt? I'd go, no, I'm buying websites. And they're going, you're doing what? I'm buying websites. And we'd sit there on the back of a napkin and draw it out, how it all works, and they're going, wow, okay, does this work? I'd go, yeah, look how much money we're making. And it's costing us nothing.

Starting point is 00:32:48 So compared to like these guys are spending millions on these businesses, so of course we got pretty excited and then we could start sharing with our mentors what we do. So, you know, we teach them a little bit too about how to buy these websites and it worked really well. So I guess that was our turning point and we realised, like I said, the only barrier for us was understanding the due diligence combined with the technical side of how websites work,

Starting point is 00:33:15 but that was pretty easy to figure out. And then we realised too we could start putting in this strategy that our favourite personal business mentors would do is what's called roll-ups. So they raise millions of dollars and they go out and buy bricks and mortar businesses in one industry, in one vertical. So they buy all the electrical wholesaling businesses here in Australia or they buy all the childcare centres or whatever.

Starting point is 00:33:37 So we just did exactly the same thing but at a way smaller scale. We didn't need millions of dollars. We could buy websites for five grand. So you imagine that. We could buy 10 websites over the course of a couple of months and all of a sudden we own that vertical online and, of course, we were getting really excited at that point. That's when we started to go, okay, this is amazing.

Starting point is 00:34:02 We're now like little mini business moguls for a fraction of the cost of what our friends are doing and we are working from home in our home office raising. Remember, we had two kids then so it's the perfect way to raise two of our kids. and okay we worked hard but it was a lot of fun and our kids got to grow up with mom and dad right next to them buying and selling websites it was awesome just absolutely perfect brian put some color around this for for those that are listening in and going okay we're talking

Starting point is 00:34:32 about verticals and the website space can you give us an example that sort of brings that to life for us yeah so we would go into like a crafting niche and so what i should explain is the the sites that we buy the bushy you and i take this for granted a bit but maybe someone listening doesn't realize you can buy websites remember we're not talking e-commerce sites if you're listening to to this now this these are websites say like bushy's asking me say it's a a website about knitting and when you come on there you're thinking well wouldn't i be buying knitting well no no no no or when you come on there there's ads for sewing machine companies if someone clicks on that ad we make money yeah so what's our job it's just basically we own an

Starting point is 00:35:16 online billboard or it's like the old magazines in the old days in the news agencies about sewing and knitting so my mum was a knitter that's why we picked that niche and so we but we know nothing about the niche other than that but remember the old days where there's magazines in that space well that's how it started to evolve online now it's way easier and better than that but that's basically we'd pick niches where there were magazines old print media magazines because then you know there's going to be advertisers there and we just put the content together we get all the content written by outsourcers like in the philippines and stuff they just write the content or we find knitting experts in america everything's done remote like it's just all on

Starting point is 00:35:56 skype and you just an email and it was easy really and literally we've been our jimmy jams making lots of money you don't have to you know get in a car and commute and go into the cities into the city or anything and you get to talk to really nice people because we found passion niches are the best so say like you're asking you pick a vertical like the crafting niche yeah the other classic one that we liked was gardening um or outdoor paraquim because i just know it like best chainsaws and stuff and you just what we're trying to do is solve problems online so when people google it your website comes up someone lands on it they either buy a product and you get an affiliate commission but ideally those click on an ad and you and you share in the revenue

Starting point is 00:36:38 everything's tracked everything's automated so this these things work 24 7 and that was a game changer for us actually bush that was another thing that kind of spun us out which we now take for granted it's actually interesting look back in my past isn't it i forgot that for us we're used to bricks and mortar businesses here in australia where we thought they were because we we we had wholesale distribution businesses or manufacturing business which we thought were awesomely leveraged because we could send stuff all around australia all around the world well websites go one level higher they're awesomely leveraged because they're automated but they work 24 7 while we sleep and we literally have a worldwide market and we have

Starting point is 00:37:20 free access unrestricted access to the world's best market which is america because we exported physical goods to america in our bricks and mortar days and i can tell you it's bloody hard sorry i shouldn't swear yeah but seriously it's really really hard um but with a website it was um suddenly there was no barriers absolutely no barriers whatsoever and we had these 24 these machines working 24-7 and we realized okay when we're sleeping there's people checking out our websites clicking on ads and we're making money so it worked really well and we could go in these really nice kind of i guess friendly you know passion niches where people are really friendly and and really open and and it was just you know we're raising a young family so we went

Starting point is 00:38:11 into you know um mum type niches where there's mummy bloggers and stuff and you get to meet really nice people it's all virtual but you know really good niches where they're nice people and you just dominate in those niches like because you buy three or four websites and next thing you're known for being the expert in knitting or whatever and you use pseudonym names so i was known as a female online because i had these knitting sites or whatever or crafting sites and so not many people realize that and you know yeah mattette or whatever no i used a different name but online you use pseudonym names and sometimes awkward people kind of go all right can we meet you to discuss like advertising on your website and i go all right well you probably should speak to my

Starting point is 00:38:54 actual wife liz and um i'm i'm a pseudonym and that's when you've got to explain to them so that's a lot of fun it was really it was a real that was all new to me as well yeah everyone uses pseudonyms but um it is as simple as finding what we also loved about getting online talking about these verticals people think to make mega bucks online and we're talking even to make millions of dollars you think i've got to have an amazon side or i've got to sell these products you would not believe the weird and wonderful niches we've been in where we make lots of money We own a website about pigeon racing. And here we are, zoologists.

Starting point is 00:39:36 I know nothing about pigeon racing. To this day, we make $1,000 a month off that website. Had it for a decade, over a decade. I don't even look at it. It's totally passive. And so you can go really micro niche, and I think that was an eye-opener. So anyone listening here, if you've even got a – if you've got some hobby, like you love golf, so we've been in the golfing niche,

Starting point is 00:39:58 own websites in golfing or any sports niches we love those do you know you can make millions i never thought this would be the case we know people that are selling food blogs for millions of dollars it's just mind-blowing this like admittedly they've been around for 10 years or so i remember 10 years ago looking and saying to liz we are never buying a food blog as if you could make money out of those things and now i've got to eat my own words they're selling for like five million dollars and stuff these these blogs are just about food recipes and stuff so you can make money in any kind of niche and what we learned was the more niche the better so for example pigeon racing awesome or anything to do with golf or anything to do with beginners learning

Starting point is 00:40:43 something like how to play guitar so if you've got a hobby niche that you like that's perfect place to start um but also you don't we also learned you don't have to be an expert on the topic because we've got all these amazing tools about researching these niches and we do what's called keyword research. And we teach people how to do that, of course. But basically, that's the other exciting thing I think that really opened our eyes. All of a sudden, we didn't have to be an expert in these topics at all. We hire expert writers and we do the keyword research. As long as we know the process and as long as we know how to do due diligence, we're fine. And so, yeah, that was, as you can hear, it was a pretty darn exciting time when we realised all these things

Starting point is 00:41:28 compared to bricks and mortar world. Absolutely. No, that's a great intro. And I really want to start drilling into this whole subject area in a second. But just to sort of set a framework around this before we dive into it, Matt. Thinking about life from an investment perspective, given where you've been and where you've come from and what you're doing now, what are some of the biggest mistakes that you you see investors make um with websites or investors as general because we work with lots of investors yeah just just general i think um oh that's actually easy it's really really i'd say what just popped straight in my head gut feel it's too much leverage and um lack of diversification so in my experience so i i think

Starting point is 00:42:16 is a little um so bushy like you know my background like i'm an advisor to high net worths and and buying and selling primarily through buying and selling businesses but obviously they're all full-time investors and they invest in real estate as well and yeah as i look over the years and one of the things we've learned and off personal mentors as well they've they know they've they're off typically a lot older than than me and liz and they and they've said to us you know just be careful don't over leverage like warren buffett says because you know when the tide goes out we're going to see who's standing naked and so we've had some um we've been really lucky to have some mentors who have always said to us cash flow is king and i think and that probably

Starting point is 00:42:55 makes the penny drop for anyone listening as to why i'm so passionate about business as an investment um and and i probably should mention that i am i guess i've been programmed by some of these mentors we've hung around that cash flow is king so whenever we've made investments Liz and I have always tended to go for high cash flow style investments. Even when we bought real estate, we typically bought in areas where the rental returns were, what do you call it in real estate? Cash flow positive. When we bought our properties, we couldn't afford to buy in Sydney and stuff.

Starting point is 00:43:31 So we used excess funds from our businesses, what little we had, to go into real estate. So we had to leverage. The way we got leverage there was having really high cash flow. So we bought in country areas or areas where the rent covered the interest payments and then the bank would let us do it. And so in terms of mistakes we've seen people make or is we've personally observed, yeah, because we see a wide,

Starting point is 00:44:00 wide range of people who are investors and I think it nearly always comes back to in our opinion, understand I'm very biased towards high cash flow, But in my opinion, the biggest mistakes are over-leverage and lack of diversification. And what I mean by that is people put too much money into one deal. And that's the thing that worries me about people buying, unless you're a hedge fund or a private equity group or very high net worth, who's very confident with buying businesses. If you're listening to this podcast and you're thinking of buying a business, my concern is that when i i won't say your average person but when you when a person well let's say like

Starting point is 00:44:42 your average person compared to a private equity firm or a or a high net worth when they go out to buy a business they put too much of their net worth into that business it'll typically be in hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars and i've personally helped people buy these but far out guys it's a big risk big big risk and that's why again these days i'm so so happy to teach people how to buy websites because you don't have to do that with websites. You don't have to spend hundreds of thousands. You can buy a really good website for under $10,000 easy.

Starting point is 00:45:13 You can buy a really good website for under five grand. We've got multi-millionaires. I just did an interview with one. You know, he's got unlimited funds. His main strategy, buying websites under $50,000. Now, compare that to bricks and mortar. That is way lower risk. So it's one of the biggest mistakes I see people making in investing.

Starting point is 00:45:33 that I think they put all their eggs into one basket. Yep. Not good when the economy changes. No, spot on. Or something happens in their personal life, like they either get, touch wood, like they might get really sick or a divorce or whatever to two main ones, and that can take them out of the game, sadly,

Starting point is 00:45:54 if you're not diversified. Spot on. So let's go to the other end of the spectrum, and you've touched on some of these already, but what do you believe are the keys to successful investment and why? Cash flow. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:46:07 Cash flow is king. No, you do need growth. I'll take that back. I'm changing a little bit now as I get older. I understand of some of my other mentors that, yes, growth is super, super-duper important and we need that and you need it to compound those, so it needs to be real. but in terms of what's the so ask the question again it did um yeah so what do you believe are

Starting point is 00:46:34 the keys to success on investment um you've covered cash flow you've talked about growth and good due diligence yeah nearly i'm going to come back to that i sound like a broken record but you said it as well same in real estate see and and we've got you know friends in in i think one of the reasons we were so successful in real estate was because we had a friend you know we did those real estate courses we we knew what we were doing when we bought real estate and man it worked well and it's the same with businesses exactly the same so i'm presuming bushy a lot of your listeners are i'm hoping for their sakes are into real estate and because you know real estate still is a massive wealth generator every mentor we've had says you know we've had mentors

Starting point is 00:47:15 warn liz and i because we invest so much in the business that a few of them say uh you should probably add some we know you're passionate you buy multiple businesses you should probably think about adding in some real estate and um you know diversification but even in real estate i think the number one thing you need to learn is is due diligence 100 so supporting that then what qualities and character traits separate great investors from the rest do you think mindset i think yeah well that's a good question i'm just thinking of the individuals i know who i really respect and who are very successful as investors whether it's in business or property i gotta say it's mindset i think i think it's success mindset like um and what does that

Starting point is 00:48:03 mindset look like they're driven they have a goal they have a vision and they're prepared to take some risks but they're they educate themselves and they and they do diversify but i think it's that they they're very they have a vision first and foremost and yeah what makes them successful oh i i'm gonna say mindset it's not necessarily even i mean i was nearly going to say experience but that comes with knowledge doesn't it and and and i guess the people i'm thinking of are a good 10 20 years older than me so of course they're going to have more experience i'm just thinking when they would have started what made them so successful because these are people that i look up to and that's a key question i'm always trying to find out often what happened at their tipping

Starting point is 00:48:54 point and i know for someone listening here you're probably thinking yeah what what can i do i want to quit my job or i want to i want to make that change to being a full-time investor or have these leverage investments i actually think it's training yourself to take on a bit of risk but in a very smart way so and having a vision i'm gonna it's one of the key things we teach i keep coming back to that because that's what's made the difference in liz and my life we've been very very clear on what we want over the years and we've had this you know liz is both of us are driven by freedom and so we've painted a picture of what that means and we talk about every single week and we're constantly tweaking that vision so if you're thinking of getting out

Starting point is 00:49:43 of your job i'm just thinking for your those people for their sakes it's all well and good to say you've got to have a vision but you've got to get your partner on board with it that's probably one of the big bits of advice i'll give actually in terms of all my personal mentors who who are really successful, a bit older, I've got to admit, whether or not their partners are involved with them, often they're not, which is interesting, but they're all on board with the vision without a doubt and so they're there to support.

Starting point is 00:50:10 So I think that's a big one. 100%. It's interesting you mention that because I talk about that a lot on the podcast because my good wife, Sonia, the first thing we did when we got together was we actually documented our vision for our life right off the bat. Perfect, yeah. And we were both on the same page.

Starting point is 00:50:31 We were both involved in that, and that has really set the scene for everything that we've done since. So I'm really glad you picked up on that, Matt. That's perfect. So now I want to get into the meat and potatoes of the conversation, which is the fun bit that you love to talk about. Exactly right, which is the wonderful and exciting world of digital assets and the website opportunities.

Starting point is 00:50:55 uh talk to us uh a bit about um how to start to because a lot of the listeners will have focused previously on the property piece and you've touched on this a bit as well but how does how does this investment that the digital asset class compared to traditional property from where you see it um in many ways we like i said at the beginning it's actually very similar to property. We find property investors typically are really good or understand very quickly how the general business model works for buying and selling websites. It's actually easier than buying and selling bricks and mortar businesses. And so let's focus on, like you said, let's focus on it compared to real estate because literally all we do is you think of it as you're buying virtual

Starting point is 00:51:45 real estate. So the domain name is kind of like the street address and the website that sits there is kind of the building that's on there and so of course all we're trying to do is we're not buying a run down you know complete rebuild type thing we're literally just buying a like a property or a website that we need to do a quick lick of paint a bit of a makeover fix it up and what and then it's ideally let's just say semi-passive so you come back once a month and you tweak it up and you do stuff so that's where it starts to differ a little bit from property so you do have to then it's not quite as passive as property but the concept is exactly the same you literally just buy renovate and sell and we tend to hold for the long term we're not website flippers just like

Starting point is 00:52:33 we weren't we were never property flippers as well and that's how you tend to make more money because it compounds and because the asset does go up in value just like property um the biggest differences in the strategy so the strategy what we do is literally that we just buy renovate and hold for the cash flows and then by increasing the cash flows which is like your rent return that increases the value of the asset that's pretty much how it works now the thing with websites is it's exponential it the numbers are 10x what they are on properties in terms of cash flow returns so we will buy for a three times multiple which means we're buying if we buy a website that makes um like a hundred thousand a year like that's net profit it's only cost us

Starting point is 00:53:22 three hundred thousand dollars so and then what of course what we do is the goal is to double that hundred thousand dollars a year which we can do with our skills to two hundred thousand and then the multiple goes up to 600,000 or can go exponential from there. So that's where websites then become obviously like an actual business, an online business where we start to get massive leverage. But I think real estate investors are just blown away by the cashflow return. So we have, let's flip it around the other way to get people really excited. We have clients that have bought you know websites for you can buy a website for uh i'll give a the most recent example annette one of our clients bought a website a travel blog you know for she's a great nomad

Starting point is 00:54:13 in a facebook group someone said i've been traveling around australia for years i got a 14 year old website we're going to close it down or whatever because we've stopped traveling does anyone want to buy it and annette said i'll buy it because no one else knew how to do it right? No one's ever heard of it. They're all gray nomads. And Annette said, I'll give you five grand for it. And the lady said, yep. And that was fair for the ladies. She's just going to close it down. So Annette now makes $5,000 a month off that website. So compare that to your rent returns. I don't know what it takes at the moment to earn $5,000 a month, but that's the sort of bargains you can get. So if you're looking for cashflow, so you use that strategy of buy,

Starting point is 00:54:53 renovate and hold for the cash flow except what we're doing is where it differs is we're getting massive cash flow returns so we get the same cash flow returns on just web assets that have cost us nothing that we've built out of our heads then i've got another site where i get uh five hundred dollars every week so it's like a rent return just goes in my bank account don't even look at it it's just a simple site it's got 10 pages on it and all it does is sell leads to a local business so you know built that anyone who's done our course could build a site like that and now there's this stuff you've got to learn how to do this stuff that that's the thing but that's where it differs and so when we we buy these sites um we're looking to add value just

Starting point is 00:55:39 like you do when you renovate a house and the way we add value in a website is we do a basic makeover look at make it look a little bit better not too pretty it's not so much about that but it's more about we just add in what's called content so that people find it in google and they come to the website and they click on it and then what we do then as well in terms of the renovation we add better monetization to it so that basically what it means is most sites passion sites people don't know how to make money off them so they don't actually make that much money they might make 50 bucks a month or 100 bucks a month and that's not bad just sitting there ticking along but at some point people get bored of it after a few years or like the lady selling

Starting point is 00:56:17 that 14 year old travel site it takes a little bit of work to keep these things alive so they just sell them really cheap so then we our community knows what to do with them they can fix them up and they can suddenly be making a thousand dollars a month which hey it might not sound like a lot of money to you a thousand dollars a month i'm telling you you own 10 of those that's for most people that's that's that's quit your job and working from home not doing much totally this is not like you gotta it's not like you gotta turn up nine to five on these things you gotta do a little bit on them but um really all we're doing is fixing up the content and then we find a better way to monetize them so typically the number one thing we do is we get better

Starting point is 00:56:59 affiliate payouts or better advertising rates on there um and everything compounds so the really exciting thing is bushy when you're online it's weird concept it's this thing that warren buffett talks about people don't realize the stuff you're doing today has a massive impact like i don't know in in bricks and mortar world it used to be 10 years down track but online it happens like in about two years down the track or 18 months down the track it has a massive impact so if you're if you can get the traffic which is the visitors to a website to increase quite a bit then what happens is the advertisers all of a sudden say oh your site's better i will now pay you double what you used to earn now that has an exponential effect over years and because if you

Starting point is 00:57:45 get even more traffic means it becomes this flywheel where as more people come in you get more money in your bank account so you can put more money into content which builds the traffic up the site even more so you always take part of your profits and just feed it back into the business which you should be doing in any business by the way um but on websites it it's way quicker and it gets exponential and it doesn't cost any extra capital. It's not like you're forking out constant money on stock or anything like that. And the money's instant.

Starting point is 00:58:15 You get paid every month. So beautiful. And that's basically how we renovate our sites. And then we just hold them and then we sell them down the track. Love it. I love the simplicity of it and the fact, as you say, it's not like you've got stock sitting in a warehouse or you've got staff that you have to pay.

Starting point is 00:58:31 This is a flywheel machine in terms of the cash flow, sorry, the equation. But we've talked about the benefits. What are some of the pitfalls and risks of a website investing and how can we limit and mitigate those? Yep. So that's a really good question. Now, that's something we're very passionate about teaching

Starting point is 00:58:47 because there is risks like anything. This is whilst I'm likening it to real estate, you are actually buying an online business. And so when the number one risk is in your due diligence is not picking up the red flags. And the red flags are there are spammy sites out there or sites that haven't been properly built. Now, if you're buying a long established site,

Starting point is 00:59:09 you can mitigate that risk quite a bit because if it's been established for a long time, what people don't realise online, everything, I'm telling you, everything is tracked, okay? Every single click. So when you know what you're looking for, it's pretty easy to figure out the due diligence.

Starting point is 00:59:25 So once you know what your risk is, your lack of knowledge, that's probably the number one risk there. Now, going forward from the due diligence bit, And there's lots of stuff I could teach in there, but the actual risk going forward is, I guess it's not even macro risk. You know how people are saying there's a recession?

Starting point is 00:59:43 Well, what we found during the GFC, website revenues actually went up because businesses need leads. So there's more advertisers. So advertising revenues, the dollar per click will come down, but you'll actually still make more money or just as much.

Starting point is 00:59:57 So we don't see a macro risk or an inflationary risk or a deflationary risk because these things are 90% profit margin. So the cash flows are so high, it's irrelevant what inflation or deflation is doing, unlike other assets. So we love that side of it. And also macro wise,

Starting point is 01:00:15 I'm of the belief that there will always be a need for these sites because it's just websites are not gonna disappear overnight. They're not going anywhere. They're only getting bigger, in fact, and there's more and more money being made online. So the macro risks are pretty minimal, but, hey, a recession, you know, could affect anything, but my personal opinion is a recession is not going

Starting point is 01:00:40 to affect website incomes as much as what traditional businesses are about to be affected by, that's for sure, because I've seen what happens with traditional businesses during a recession and it's not pretty. So the main risks are what happens in the Google search environment, so google updates and i'm sure if you're listening to this you've probably heard about lots of google updates people i think overly worry about what's happening with ai at the moment and how that's going to change that's way overblown so i i'm going around for the last six months i've been studying this intently because it's in my interest too i make money online so i need to understand

Starting point is 01:01:19 and there's a lot of naysaying um headlines like our internet businesses you know the search environment's going to change completely we're all going to stop earning money online it's total nonsense that's not the case at all and i'm probably more probably more an enabler potentially if you're using that's it it's actually the opposite it's about to get a lot easier for um our students i believe for those who have the right knowledge not only that it's opening up way better um for those who are actually serious about this it's actually going to give us the competitive edge because genuine written content is about to become incredibly valuable. It's like money in the bank, literally. And so everyone's rushing to this AI stuff. That is not what Google

Starting point is 01:02:08 wants. So the main risk in this, honestly, going forward is typical business risks. They're always there. Anything can happen. But the main risk, honestly, with internet businesses would be the google environment and you do need to learn how google ranks websites and what happens there that's probably the main risk and the other main risk as well in my opinion is probably this now this needs to be a fine balance but his lack of diversification yet again i wouldn't just want to own one website you know i want to own it's in the past we're in the hundreds i don't recommend that anymore that's what's also changed interestingly enough over the last 15 years and now you do need to focus but in in an ideal world any you want

Starting point is 01:02:54 between five to ten websites and then that just diversifies your risk so we've had websites where the we've lost them like the income for whatever reason like the affiliate offers can change they can get a penalty because there was something we didn't pick up in due diligence it just happens so the way that we've and we teach this we're very open about it we say look for every you know you want to own a portfolio of websites don't put all your eggs in the one basket for goodness sake don't bank all your money on just one website that's not smart what what we want you to do and there's no excuse to do that because you can buy websites for under a thousand dollars so and seriously if you can't afford to buy a couple of websites at that level you probably shouldn't

Starting point is 01:03:34 even be considering this so and you shouldn't be getting into business you you need to get a bank up um you've probably got bigger problems in life if you if you know if you're in that boat but um but lack of diversification would be a it would be that's how we mitigate the risks because that you can websites the other thing ah the other risk is um buying a website and then just totally leaving it you do have to do a bit of a renovation on it in this day and age so that's also what's changed interestingly enough 10 15 years ago you didn't really have to do that much it was literally the heyday of it there were definitely a lot more passive we have seen it become a bit more active now but it's still hugely leveraged it's like any marketplace things change and i

Starting point is 01:04:24 think there will be new risks coming up but every day for us the main risk is the google environment because because we rely on it so much um but if you know what you're doing especially when you know our strategy it's hard to explain this but content is like money in the bank these days you get good content it is literally so think of your your podcast bushy that's that's content in my view in my world that is exactly what we do it's like a website it's content that has a following behind it okay that is money in the bank that's your asset that's a that's literally a physical asset i don't care what anyone says out outside of mine in your world seriously that and when you think about it websites are exactly the same thing even though

Starting point is 01:05:13 they're virtual they are literally a physical asset the equivalent of money in the bank if they've got traffic coming into them and they've got a bit of a following and i have a saying that i say to our community members you know our back yeah i would love to own a website on on red kangaroos but it's never going to make me money because no one's passionate about it no one's looking it up i'd rather own a website on golf or something like that although i did eat my words when liz bought the pigeon racing site because i remember stirring saying no pigeon racing apparently it's a huge sport i had no idea but um even though i always jokingly say i would never make money it's going to be difficult to make money out of a website about red kangaroos

Starting point is 01:05:52 here's where the asset is if i had a website that was about goodness me red kangaroos and it had a million eyeballs a month like a million people visiting it a month then i'm making money so that's an asset so traffic is hugely hugely valuable in this day and age and it's becoming even more valuable so what you want to do is get smart and think about in terms of mitigating risk it's about owning websites that potentially has either really loyal traffic or large amounts of traffic and that's to me that's like um that's like security in the bank that's my ultimate asset in life going forward and that and you know that's something i can retire on literally that's what we're trying to build up and all my friends and business associates online are all exactly the

Starting point is 01:06:46 same all the business brokers that we know these are people that are doing seven eight and nine figure deals they're all exactly the same and and interestingly the big money players now private equity firms and and big high net worths they're all starting to invest in websites now as well in america and that'll come here to australia you watch you watch what happens over the next 10 years no doubt so you so someone who's thinking wow this sounds uh really exciting to me what are some of the prerequisites and minimum requirements that we need to invest in digital assets and i'm talking here about capital time uh experience levels and minimum investment that your horizon costs contingency risk what are we what are we talking about there well it's nothing like real

Starting point is 01:07:31 estate it basically you've got to learn you've got to you've got to invest in your knowledge because it would be really silly to get out there and just start buying websites there's lots of website platforms now where you can buy these things but you just won't know what you're doing so obviously I'm going to say that because we teach that's what we teach but seriously you do need to know what you're doing and as everyone heard that's what took Liz and I so long to learn in terms of capital i wouldn't recommend when we actually teach one of our golden rules is your first website under a thousand dollars that's all it takes to get started you can buy good websites for under five grand so some of our most successful students they're some of their

Starting point is 01:08:07 best buyers have been under five thousand dollars or under ten thousand dollars we've got lisa that bought this amazing site for two thousand bucks that thing now to give you an idea of time frame right it's been about four or five years she we interview her all the time that's now making she got it up to five thousand dollars a month net but now it's had thirty thousand dollar months and she had one of the world's top website brokers value that at over a million dollars and that's a two thousand dollar website buy so now that's a passion site that she'd learned already how to renovate same as our clients nathan alexa they bought a gardening site for 400 bucks that thing that's here in australia bought it off a guy that was just going to close it down

Starting point is 01:08:50 that they've got that now over the course of about i think two or three years that's taken that's making four thousand dollars a month so it's a difficult question to answer ideally you've got more money so if you can spend six figures on a website the world's your oyster like you've got unlimited range but the that's why i think it's perfect if you're looking to transition out of your career because it's a really smart question it's not like you have to go and borrow money and fork out you know 500 000 or a million dollars like you do on a bricks and mortar business or on real estate yeah um you can just start buying up small sites under 10 20 grand actually the sweet spot what we're teaching now is what we're finding in in in this current point in the

Starting point is 01:09:35 marketplace the sweet spot is buying really good websites under 50 000 so in the past we used to be over a hundred thousand then the six figures now it's interesting with knowledge you're actually better off buying these smaller sites why because there's way more upside so if i buy a website for half a million we just had this discussion this morning with a client of ours in front of everyone he buys he's raised millions of dollars to buy websites and he said yeah i don't want to take the risk of spending a million dollars on a website anymore and i don't want to spend 500 thousand he said you can they're really good but he said i'm with you matt i'm buying sites under 50 000 because i've got a team set up i've been doing this for years i know what i'm doing if i

Starting point is 01:10:15 can buy any website under 50 000 and i can just ramp it right up so there's no there's no downside so in terms of budget i'd honestly i'd recommend under 50k yeah i love it so brilliant so who is and who isn't suited to this type of investment then matt you've got to put some effort into it now it's not like it's not totally passive so because you're asking to how much time do you need to invest when you're learning you know studies have shown it takes seven times as long this is a pretty exciting space there's a bit to it to learn how to do it so the type of person that it wouldn't suit now we have people that are very time pressured but they really have this vision to you know get out of their jobs or change their careers in life as long as you're prepared

Starting point is 01:11:03 to to study a bit and work at it chip away at it once a week then you're fine if you want to just sit back and watch netflix every night then it's probably not the right thing because you've got a bit to learn so you've got to be a bit patient with this one it's not a get rich quick thing as nothing is nothing is by the way yeah it's very it's actually difficult to say that because i know full well if i know what i'm doing and i've got a you know some good funding behind me like say i've got 50k or a couple hundred grand i could literally go on to one of these website brokers now right now and we'd probably within half an hour find a really good website that would replace most people's incomes pretty exciting isn't it that's pretty cool but you know to get to that

Starting point is 01:11:46 level it it's it's so it's an ability is out there to go out and buy a website that can literally to replace your income overnight but i'm going to tell you it is not a get rich quick thing you need to work at this most of our clients would take 12 months plus 12 to 18 months that's where the magic happens why because it's just where they start to learn how to do this stuff of course it's like learning to ride a bike or ride a horse it takes you that long to get familiar with it then when then when you know what you're looking for it's easy from that point but you've got to get to that point so that's brilliant so talking about it in the context of now then what are the trends in the in this market and what are some of the best current and future website investment

Starting point is 01:12:31 opportunities you're you're seeing i think the best trend is one that i alluded to before is the big buyers are starting to come into this space and we've always been taught off our mentors you know follow the big money and i've saw that in bricks and mortar world in certain you know businesses that we saw when you start seeing what's called private equity firms coming in and this is a relatively new asset class it's quite alternative but now we're starting to see the private equity firms particularly in america come into this and they have unlimited funds like seriously some of them have got billions of dollars that's with a b many of them have hundreds of millions many of them have tens of millions and they are just buying up little like pretty

Starting point is 01:13:13 small websites. So that to me is, I think, a very exciting space. And so I think what we're starting to see, the new trend is something that Liz and I admittedly have been talking about for the last decade, but passion sites are becoming hugely valuable, which is really fascinating. So even I'm shocked at how valuable, like I said before, food blogs. So I am still spinning out of that. This has just started happening during COVID. I was talking to one of the world's most famous website brokers and i was saying you know food blogs you wouldn't buy one and he said i'm gonna actually correct you there matt and he said this in front of everyone we're at a lot at our one of our live events and he said uh you know matt i just sold i'm not allowed to tell you which one

Starting point is 01:13:56 it is i just sold a food blog i'm looking at it now on my computer screen for five million dollars literally last week and he goes all it does is just recipes on paleo diets for women that's it five million bucks and so to answer your question i think those passion sites like golfing music sites gardening sites knitting cycle these things that people think are just little hobbies all of a sudden they're incredibly valuable so and you think how many of them are out there at a micro level that are tiny little unsophisticated websites that no one's really done much with we need to go around start buying them up and renovating them and hold them in your portfolio don't sell them straight away you'd be crazy you let them compound and you sell them after five to

Starting point is 01:14:42 ten years that would that's where they're worth a fortune but you can flip them within a few years if you want but if you want to make the real money when i speak to all these brokers i always say to them what's what's the difference between a seven figure exit and an eight figure exit you think about that rolls off the tongue but that's a lot of money like you know sell a website for five million versus selling a website for 50 million what's the difference and nearly all of them say 10 years yeah yeah it's not interesting yeah there's a common theme in what you're saying and then it's that exponential growth again that always comes down to that i mean everything you've touched we could talk on this this three hours very exciting you know territory uh where do we

Starting point is 01:15:24 need to start and what are the first steps we need to take then awesome question what we if if you're interested if anyone's listening to this and they're interested in as you said we've just touched on it but learning our actual strategy you should seriously go and do our free masterclass on the e-business institute so it's e-business institute and that's a mouthful e-business institute.com.au forward slash masterclass or just go to our website you'll you'll find lots of links to it it's a really it's a 90-minute masterclass and we liz and i just literally go through with lots of examples from our students and ourselves the the sort of sites we're by because i think bushy a lot of people are probably also confused still most people don't quite

Starting point is 01:16:08 understand the sites we buy yeah go and listen and watch that master class and you can you'll visually see them and then it'll all come clear and you'll see how we literally our three-step strategy which is buy renovate sell just like real estate so i would recommend you start there and hey if you want to join us on our course we'd love love to if you want to take it further but also too while you're on the website you might want to go and check out some of our stories of our students who have been really successful because everyone everyone we teach is a beginner we don't teach advanced people that's our thing love it well i'm going to transition now into the old ambush series which i'm going to give you a blindfold cigarette on

Starting point is 01:16:48 that and i'm going to hit you up with a the podcast fast four uh first of those is what's your favorite quote and why favorite quote comes from Arnold Schwarzenegger because he's someone that's influenced me dramatically in my life and he's the one that put me onto this idea of and he said if I can see it in my mind then I can achieve it and I and that was a game changer for me I'd never had that concept that was 18 I think when I heard I read it in his book or something and I think from that point on then i went and read you know think and grow rich and magic of thinking big and all those classics that just reinforced that idea but i had this this perfect example of someone that literally did that he had a vision and he changed it and and i thought all right

Starting point is 01:17:38 that'll do it for me so that's what i did love it love it uh without knowing that i've followed a very similar approach to life matt so it makes a lot of sense you mentioned a couple of great books already in in what you just uh revealed to us then if you were to pick the top book that you recommend we read and why what would it be it depends who we're talking to for your listeners sake if they're interested in getting into this space yeah okay the top book would be i know it's a cliche but the top book would be tim ferris's four-hour workweek yeah without a doubt yeah if you want to change your life the top book for me after i read that arnie quote was how to win friends and influence people yeah it's just an ageless classic it's just ageless classic in

Starting point is 01:18:22 business in everything and i noticed it's warren buffett's top book that he recommends too so that's that's the other one but for your listeners who are interested in what you and i've talked about today i'd say the tim ferrers i think he nails it in there that's a pretty good he does yeah it wraps the whole lifestyle component into that whole exercise yeah i think sort of switching into the investment sphere for a minute what's what's both the worst and the best piece of investment advice that you've ever received then matt best piece of advice as i said his cash flow is king it's quite it was off a personal mentor i was very sick he said he actually actually what he said to liz and i was um i know you guys are going to all these courses and you're learning

Starting point is 01:19:01 about investing and and but he he's like us he comes from a background of buying and selling businesses and he said to us guys seriously get your cash flow sorted first and then you can go and invest in real estate and stuff like that. And so we just lived by that. And he was right. He said, get your cash flow up and then you can safely start investing in whatever you want.

Starting point is 01:19:20 You got a lot more safety. So it wasn't cash flow is king, sorry. It was get your cash flow up and in no uncertain terms, that's what he said to us. And it was right. On the flip side, what's the worst piece of investment advice then?

Starting point is 01:19:32 Oh, that due diligence. And it's been repeated too. And I've seen it a few times. So some of the worst investment advice is, yeah advice on certain investments where it was just really poor due diligence and yeah without a doubt um yeah yeah that's good i'm thinking on specific businesses and that's a good one that i think you've nailed it right there sort of coming back to the old self-help wealth sustainable success ingredients what's a what's a daily discipline that you employ that you think's

Starting point is 01:20:05 contributed most to your and liz's success today i think starting early we live in queensland so in summer it's 4 30 a.m which is probably not that smart as i get older but definitely 5 30 a.m and do a meditation and think about our vision so liz and i talk regularly together about our shared vision even though we have slightly different goals but we are constantly refining our vision and i think we learned that from arnie as well and all those books that we read and everything and i would say do we do it daily almost like and our kids know it and we talk about the kitchen table but also for me personally is starting my day early with a meditation and it's normally a bit of a visualization yeah what you think about what you bring about bring about

Starting point is 01:20:54 i've always said yeah that's yeah that's right that's an awesome quote yep absolutely agree so Well, Matt, it's been an awesome and inspiring and very motivational conversation, Matt. I'm really feeding off your energy and excited about the opportunity that you've revealed to us. But if you were to summarise that in terms of the key takeaways and the must-do actions for aspiring digital asset investors, what would they be? Yeah, if you want to get online, seriously, knowledge is king. There's a bit to learn here.

Starting point is 01:21:22 I'm not going to sugarcoat that, but it's fun. It is incredibly fun to learn this stuff. It's very creative. but if i had to give a bit of knowledge uh sorry a bit best bit of advice is is seriously get out there and play with this learn if you're interested if you think this is interesting take the time to learn it and start just looking around it can start on our website there's you know there's other options as well but seriously learn learn learn learn also even if you just want to get into business or investing you need to learn off people like and good on you for listening like off

Starting point is 01:21:55 like off bushy about real estate and actually bushy that that is my final bit of advice learn learn learn that was something else i was taught um you can never like even now i'm still learning but if you want to change your life and you want to do it through business or investing my number one bit of advice is just put invest in your knowledge for whatever it is that you want to investment vehicle you want to get into make sure you're learning and put aside time each week to do that that's the other bit of advice actually yeah stop watching the news for one night and learn something i'd stop watching the news forever i think matter of that for 25 years probably another sideline bit of advice especially at the moment you don't want to be watching the

Starting point is 01:22:36 news it just fills your head with the wrong ideas listen i don't watch the news actually so um we haven't done for many many years 25 years i stopped doing that mate yeah same so instead invest your time in learning because seriously that's what changes your life if you're in a situation that you're not happy with you need to learn you need role models you need you need people to learn off you'll learn off the wisdom of others there's heaps of it out there now and go on a path and particularly if you want to get online with online businesses i'm telling you it's a booming industry it's going it's only going to get better and you need the knowledge so start there and and perfect segue to what i was going to say

Starting point is 01:23:17 next and that is just reinforcing what you mentioned earlier for those that are excited about what you've heard today jump on the free 90-minute masterclass on how to buy and renovate websites for semi-passive income just to mention that website again it's e-businessinstitute.com.au forward slash masterclass really recommend that you do do that to open your eyes to the opportunity that's sitting there before you and matt this is the start of many more conversations to come i appreciate you coming aboard and let's make sure we keep the conversation going well thanks so much bushy you certainly got me thinking there's some really insightful questions that was awesome i really enjoyed that and thanks so much for inviting me onto your podcast and and getting

Starting point is 01:23:58 to share my knowledge you know with with your audience but that was awesome thank you so much thanks man we'll stay in touch bye for now thanks for tuning in to get invested on the property hub podcast channel your home for property investment insights and inspiration and don't leave yet until you've taken the next step towards living by design by getting my award-winning book get invested absolutely free when you sign up at knowhowproperty.com.au or bushymartin.com.au and finally make sure you subscribe to property hub to get your weekly dose of get invested and inspiration along with every episode of Realty Talk, Australia's leading property show

Starting point is 01:24:41 for red hot property investing news and insights direct from industry leaders and influencers. Remember to always get invested in your knowledge and I look forward to seeing you next time.

Property Hub - Investment Insights & Inspiration - Get Invested: Matt Raad on investing in digital property

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