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Take Five #028: How one entrepreneur put in $50K, kept 85% ownership, and got a $5M loan for a $12M business

1. Do you have to sign a personal guarantee in order to get SBA 7(a) financing for your SMB?

2. Reflections after 1 year+ of searching and finally closing a deal

UK searcher Ayo Disu recently completed his first acquisition and published his top takeaways from the process:

A deal is a series of individual variables that must come together.

I’m sure this is common knowledge now, but the funny thing t advice, is the best advice usually gets repeated. The number of things that must come together to get a deal done is incredible (Sourcing, timing, diligence, geography, price, relationship management, financing, customer concentration, planning, and organization.)

A key trait for when you are in the thick of it is speed, adaptability, and flexibility. The amount of people who have lost deals because of analysis paralysis (aka fear) is significant. Trust your work and yourself.

I remember being in Sainsbury on Sunday and talking over some terms we had just received from the seller.., my business partner the legal team and I had an extensive chat to sort this. We got back to the seller on the same day.

My significant other was not best pleased when I didn’t come back with the groceries as I was completely side-tracked.

From “Reflections after 1 year+ of searching and finally closing a deal” on Searchfunder

3. You need a data room. Here’s how to build one:

4. Save time, make money, make operations safer: how one former searcher is transforming his new acquisition

Jordan Novgrod’s is still doing a great job documenting his first few months of business transition, post-acquisition. Here’s a moment of innovation which brought processing time down from 10 minutes per item to 30 seconds, showcasing how a fresh set of eyes can transform operations:

One of the things I had hoped to bring to the company I bought was innovation. That word gets thrown around a lot, and can mean different things to different folks. To me, it means applying new ways to get work done more efficiently.

For one of the products we make in quantity, we cut up a product call coco mat. It is coconut shell shreds that are glued together. While measuring the time and money it took to make this product, I realized that not only was the process of cutting and trimming the coco mat inefficient, it was somewhat dangerous.

I challenged the guys to think of another way, while I investigated several methods myself, and could not find a tool made that would do what I wanted. One of the guys decided to make a tool. It was essentially a large sharpened pipe. This tool was tested in a hydraulic press, and worked beautifully. It required 800 lbs of force to cut through the coco mat. While this worked, it was still really slow and required pre-cutting the coco mat to fit into the hydraulic press.

While discussing a better solution, we talked about using more leverage, thus getting fingers away from the cutting action. This led to the realization that we had an arbor press that had a four-foot handle. The guys further modified the tool to allow it to clamp to the arbor press. This enabled cutting of the coco mat without pre-cutting, pre-marking, etc. Further, because this method allowed for safely cutting really close to the other circles, it allows us to cut more circles out of each sheet.

This innovation took processing time from over 10 minutes per coco mat plug to less than 30 seconds. Since we make hundreds of these a year, it was a huge win. This win not only saves us time, thus making more money, but also makes the operation safer. Additionally, it helped me gain respect with my team, not for solving this problem, but for empowering them to solve it.

From “Innovation…” by Jordan Novgrod

5. How one entrepreneur put in $50K, kept 85% ownership, and got a $5M loan for a $12M purchase price business

Loved what you read? Subscribe to Take Five to get our top quick reads every week from the team at Kumo. Kumo aggregates thousands of sources into one easy-to-use platform so that you can spend less time sourcing, and more time closing deals.

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