#12 | I Found a Business to Buy on BizBuySell

So far I have focused my search to acquire a business on unlisted businesses. My thought process has been that it is unlikely that I will find a good business to buy that is listed for sale simply because my criteria is narrow, and secondly I figured that I would end up overpaying for a business that is listed for sale where I am competing with other buyers, probably have to pay a brokerage fee, etc.

Well this week I finally decided to start looking on some business listing websites and guess what…

In the first 3 minutes I found a business I am interested in haha!

Here is the business if you are interested - Profit Frog Listing.

This business is basically a financial projection tool similar to what we originally built at ProjectionHub. Now, we ultimately decided to shut down our software tool and just focus on selling spreadsheet templates and consulting services, but we do have a good bit of experience in this space.

It was pretty ironic all of the hoops I have been going through to try to find good leads for businesses to buy, and within 3 minutes I might have found the most promising lead we have at this point. What makes it most promising is that the owner actually wants to sell; whereas, the timing just hasn’t been right for most of the leads I have connected with so far.

Finding Businesses to Buy from SBA Data

After telling you how fast and efficient BizBuySell was, I am going to share a tool with you that we created if you enjoy the thrill of the hunt haha!

I thought a unique place to find leads of businesses that met certain criteria might be the publicly available SBA PPP loan data. Since you can get a rough estimate of the revenue that a PPP loan borrower had along with their industry and location data, it is a nice data source to be able to sort and filter through to build a list of potential businesses to reach out to.

We built a free dashboard tool that you can use here - PPP Loan Data Dashboard.

I recorded a quick video to share how to use the tool here (warning, it’s a lot of data so filtering takes some time to load ):

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I still think this tool can be quite useful to help you build a list of prospect businesses to reach out to, but I guess I learned my lesson that I need to be looking on BizBuySell and other business brokerage sites as well!

I'll be sure to update you if anything comes from my interest in the Profit Frog listing, but I'll see you on the next one!