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We live in a time where starting an online business has never been easier. Thanks to the Internet and artificial intelligence, you can do more and reach more people than ever before. And yet, many aspiring founders fail or fail burnnever achieving their goals. Why? Perhaps that is because building a business is not for everyone.
Entrepreneurship through acquisitions may be a much faster route. The existing company already has customers, technology, staff, revenue, and product market fit. Monetizing these assets is easier than creating them, allowing you to skip the first months or years of experimentation and get began.
Yes, some may bristle at sacrificing knowledge for profits on day one, but taking over a company quite than building it opens the door for those that might otherwise burn out. Moreover, there is a business for every variety of entrepreneur and every budget. The barrier to entry is as high as your available capital.
Instead of years of grinding, take over a company that is already making a living and has the talent obligatory to succeed. Focus on growth, not survival. Turn your capital into time-to-market, your late-night hustle into immediate income, and learn as you go. Interested? Check below if entrepreneurship through acquisitions is for you.
Stairs or elevator?
Finding a market for a recent product or service costs time and money. Before you even consider scaling your business, you need to check if people want what you offer. Between building a product or service, marketing it, and gathering feedback, building momentum can take months or years.
Now imagine that you skip this early testing phase and you know that your product or service is in high demand and you can capture a share of the market when your organization launches. The time you save is time you can invest in growing your business, delivering more of what the market expects to multiply your income.
Acquiring a company with growing revenues and money flow shifts the focus from experimenting to scaling proven strategies. As a result, there is less financial risk, less budget wasted on failed marketing campaigns, and less pressure to find customers. Instead, you know exactly where to spend your money.
Such knowledge only comes from building a successful business or acquiring one where the hard lessons have already been learned. It’s the profession equivalent of using the stairs or elevator. Which one you prefer is up to you, but one is faster, easier and offers potentially greater rewards sooner.
Polished product
Many people don’t know how to code or don’t desire to learn. That’s okay. When you acquire a company, you acquire a ready-made or turnkey package of technology, infrastructure and processes, often managed by those that built them, and which may remain after the acquisition. You can then focus on what you do best.
This does not imply that acquiring a tech company means you’ll never need engineering knowledge. But before you hire developers, you can go a great distance with ready-made, working and bug-free technology. All prototypes were made, tested and subjected to further modifications. You simply select what you will develop next.
The company’s motion plan is a source of latest ideas for development. New features, especially people who customers consistently demand, help increase value perception and justify price increases. When you buy a company, you won’t need expensive experiments to test the market – your customers will tell you what they need.
Ready-made teams
When you build a company from nothing, you will often need to hire people more qualified than you to perform various business functions. Maybe less fun roles in human resources, engineering or sales, for example. Finding the right people for these positions is a long and complex process. Hiring mistakes are stressful expensive and require repeating the process (with the same risk of hiring the flawed people).
However, the acquisition of a company may involve its talented teams and leaders. You can then ignore the costs of talent acquisition and the time spent on interviews, skills testing and onboarding. As long as you know how to lead (or are open to learning or hiring someone who does), acquiring a high-performing team to complement your skills will maximize your return on investment in less time while reducing risk.
Follow your passions
There’s a reason startups fail at rates of 90% or more. Sometimes it’s being at the flawed time and place. Others fall behind the competition or throw money at problems as a substitute of solving them. But mental burden building a company from nothing also can weaken the founder’s resilience.
Building a company from nothing means wearing every hat – sales, marketing, operations, HR, finance and more. Does your passion for entrepreneurship extend into these areas? Does closing the books every month excite you as much as creating a viral marketing campaign? Pursuing things you are not passionate about can damage your entrepreneurial experience.
The joy of taking over a business is selecting the one you want to run and shaping your day by day life. Do you love marketing? Take over a company that has never run ads. Do you like leadership? Take over a company with a strong but rudderless team. There are hundreds of corporations to select from, so you don’t have to hand over your passions for the sake of revenue. Choose the right company and you will at all times love what you do.
It’s a journey back in time – for your profession
Taking over a company can shave years off your profession by forcing you to think greater. Why make countless mistakes before you come up with one concept that takes off? How long can the trial and error period last? Can you afford to devote years of your profession to learning how to build a profitable business from scratch?
A profitable company may be purchased for as little as $50,000. Will it’s a staggering revenue? Probably not, but it’s a reasonable start line. The growth potential is huge. The acquisition is just the starting of your journey. The next rung on the ladder is the exit. Do well and you’ll be rewarded for your exertions, potentially life-changing money, and the freedom to pursue your next acquisition.
Some might say that grind is a rite of passage where you learn more from failure than success. But not taking over a company guarantee success. This only increases your probabilities. If capital may be raised, the takeover of the company often ends higher because the mistakes have already been made. The founder figured out what worked, and now you can build on it by giving him an exit.
Is taking over a company for everyone?
Building a company is not for everyone, and neither is acquiring one. Some people are higher suited to doing things alone and in their very own way. There is at all times a risk that cultures will clash when you take over. That said, acquiring a business to develop into a full-time entrepreneur is the fastest route you can take, accelerating returns and allowing you to focus on growth quite than survival.
Our advice? Start small. Buy a company whose best weakness is your best strength and see how far you can go. Rinse and repeat until you learn how to consistently earn profits in your startup portfolio. Maybe then you will find a way to start something completely recent, where the only “grinding” will concern the morning coffee beans. Anything else will likely be meaningful work and a happier life.