All right, everyone. As I said, we’re gonna be talking about acquisition entrepreneurship and the different ways it’s evolving, what’s happening now. We’re gonna even touch in a little bit about the craziness of Florida, just because I love making fun of Florida. And then also just sort of where the space is kind of going and how to prepare yourself as you look into getting involved in it. As you know, I’ve been doing this for about two years. I’ve been kissing a bunch of toads and had yet another deal blow up during due diligence, which is always fun. So I’m licking my wounds a little bit right now. And I think our guest today could probably give me some good advice on how I could have prevented some of that. So before I keep rambling a little bit more, let’s welcome Richard Parker of Diomo onto the show. Richard, thank you so much for coming on.

Richard Parker:
Thank you, A.J. It’s great to be here. I appreciate you having me.

A.J. Lawrence:
As a Jets fan, I will grimace a bit as you have your Allen jersey in the back, but he’s actually a good quarterback who remains generally healthy unlike anyone the Jets can ever field. He can’t seem to field a quarterback who… I don’t even want to go here. It’s just pitiful. I mean, four plays. Oh my God.

Richard Parker:
Who makes it pass forward plays? But well, you’re a Jets fan, so my deepest sympathy. But it builds grit. We’re both cheering for teams that they’re character building, right? You gotta be resilient to stick with them.

A.J. Lawrence:
I mean, I did get the Yankees even though I grew up during the period of time where I was a teenager before they, yeah, I was a late teenager before they started winning world’s area. But it was like, I had the Yankees, but jets. That’s just painful.

Richard Parker:
Jets, yeah.

A.J. Lawrence:
I’ve been going through a lot of your material and the way you approach it is sort of a very non- and I want because there’s some people really kind of, especially as acquisition entrepreneurship and I’ll just kind of throw that as a broader one because I know there’s the traditional search fund model, there’s baby PE, there’s all sorts of things, but acquisition entrepreneurship I think kind of encapsulates it nowadays pretty well. But a lot of people are getting into some of the craziest. You were kind of mentioning the no money down and I’ve even had a few of those people on the show. It’s getting a little frothy. So in going through your material and going through your site and some of the videos, you have a very factual approach and a very structured, no nonsense. You do talk about the benefits and all this, but you’re not selling a fountain of gold or fountain of youth. Let me massacre my metaphors. You’re approaching this in a very systematic way. Can you tell us how you got into this? Because you’ve been doing it for 30 years now with Diomo. How did this come about and where are you now with this?

Richard Parker:
Okay, well great. So, you know, to your first point, yeah, the market has gotten, I don’t use the word frothy, I actually use the word really dirty because it’s gotten so. It’s beyond murky and it’s really unfortunate. And we could spend the whole show talking about these hucksters that are selling programs by business throwing off $250,000 of owners’ benefit and close the deal in 30 days with no money down. I had one text from someone the other day. I don’t know. I don’t even know I’ve got my number, but we can talk about someone who closed the deal in 19 hours. So I’m going to park those all in the BS category. And I deal in the real world and yeah, 19 hours. I deal in the real world. I have a practical approach to buying businesses. I bought 14 of my own companies and I know how this works. And so for me to go and profess to do these things or to tell people that they can do this in a way that’s unrealistic, I just think is out and out fraud. So I refuse to participate in that game no matter what. And I guess at the end of the day, truth wins. It just sometimes takes a little more time. We’ve sold over a hundred thousand copies of our material and have an unbelievable closing rate with our clients. So I would never veer from the truth, dispensing truth. And there’s some people that they wanna buy nonsense, well, go ahead, buy it from someone else.

So I got into this when I was 29 years old. I was always entrepreneurial. I grew up in Montreal, I relocated to Florida and I’ve been here 28 years. But I grew up in Montreal, lower middle class family. I had a terrific job. Yeah, it’s a great town. I had a great job and yeah, my mom’s still there. My 93 year old mother is still there. My sister still lives there, a lot of buddies, but too cold for me. So I’m happy where I am in Southeast Florida. And I was working for a company. I was doing really well.

A.J. Lawrence:
I love Montreal. I love it. Yeah, okay.

Richard Parker:
And then I made a horrible mistake in the stock market. And I had no idea what I was doing. I blew $60,000. I was 29 years old, I had about a hundred grand to my name. I was a good saver but I was getting paid $72,000. I was in a job way above my head, but the company was growing by leaps and bounds, so I found myself in this terrific position. And then I made a dumb mistake in the stock market, blew $60,000 and realized it’s, you know, I don’t know how I’m going to get out of this mess. I mean, I couldn’t really change jobs to get more. I was already overpicked.

And so thinking about it, and I didn’t think about it for long, it was, I’ve got to put myself in a position where there’s no limit to my upside. And so, I realized that the way to do that is either bet it on 35 Black in Vegas, which I wasn’t, I’m not a gambler. And so, I decided that I’ve got to be in my own business. So, I temporarily started a company in a similar product service that I was providing where the company I was working for was in consumer products, selling children’s products to mass retailers.

And so I started this company, I was able to make this transition. And shortly thereafter, really shortly thereafter, within a couple of months, I realized, if I’m gonna grow this thing, the easiest way is for me to go out and buy a company that’s doing the exact same thing that I’m doing on a small scale, because I had about 30,000 bucks, and acquire them and add their product mix to my products. The goal being, and it took me a couple of acquisitions, but I recognized that the easiest way to grow a business, organic is nice, but through acquisition, and not only through acquisition, but ancillary services, or in my case, I was selling consumer products, how can I get my hands on more products to sell to the same people? And that was my strategy. And so I started buying up company, smaller, and I was recovering financially, which was great. I had a nice little business, was profitable. And then in 19… was it 1992? A couple years after I started, I got the Eastern Canadian rights for Sega video. You remember? And that’s when it started to explode.

A.J. Lawrence:
Nice. Yeah. I remember that. Yep.

Richard Parker:
It was dumb luck. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time, and my business exploded. It went from two and a half million dollars a year to over 30. And it was insanely profitable and continued to buy companies. And then few years later, I knew what was going to happen when I signed my deal with Sega. It always happens in the distribution or age sales rep business. When you start making too much money, the company wants to either take over the accounts or buy you out. And I solved for that. I knew that was going to be inevitable.

I was making more money than the entire senior executives of Sega combined. And so they bought me out and I relocated to Florida. My three children at the time, have four now, and one grandson and decided it was the time to move. I was tired of the cold weather and I relocated to Southeast Florida and continued my journey looking at some businesses. And as a result of one deal that I backed out of, which was, it was really, I couldn’t figure out how I was ever going to figure it out. There was three different companies. One company was, whenever there was short of money in one, they would pay employees from another. It was money revenue coming one should be attributable to another. It was not fraudulent. And I’m not making that accusation, but it was just a big plate of spaghetti as they always describe it. And I decided to back out of the deal. I told the owner and I remember standing in Broward County. I was off Broward Boulevard, was in Fort Lauderdale. I remember thinking to myself, you know, the average person would have bought that business. And not because I’m so smart, but I’ve done it a bunch of times. And at that point by then I’d looked at, God, for myself, maybe 50 to 100 businesses. And it started, financial is in fine shape. So I took a year off and started researching the universe of entrepreneurship, which they now call, I guess, entrepreneurship through acquisition. I’m a pretty simple guy. I call it buying and selling businesses and recognize that this is a horrible broken universe.

A.J. Lawrence:
Yeah.

Richard Parker:
I spoke to hundreds of business buyers, business owners, accountants, attorneys, business brokers, people who try to buy a business and failed. And I recognized that there was no good resources for them to help take them through the process realistically from A to Z and hold their hand along the way. And so I decided I wanted to put my years of experience to memorialize them in a do it yourself guide with handholding that I would make myself available to people who ran into trouble. And I had no aspirations of turning into a business.

I mean, the night before we launched online and soon could coming it’s over 20 years, materials have been updated, constantly of course. My only goal, I told my wife, was to sell one guide that would either help one person buy the right business or avoid buying the wrong one. And lo and behold, here we are. All these years later, we sold over a hundred thousand and helped tens of thousands of people buy businesses. So it’s a great story and I’ve remained in M&A. I do some buy side and sell side representation and it’s a small investment firm. And that I’ve since exited. And so that’s where I am and my life’s journey is to help aspiring business owners.

A.J. Lawrence:
Let’s talk about that. Given your approach, you’re not talking to the wannabes because you’re actually being factual. You’re not doing the no money down in 19 hours. God, I’m just thinking of some of the due diligence I’ve started where there’s another layer, there’s another layer. Trying to do that in 19 hours, you just be like, here’s $2 million, can we just put a big bonfire out? Let’s go.

Richard Parker:
Yeah, exactly. Light it on fire. Exactly.

A.J. Lawrence:
Yeah, especially when you give a personal guarantee on some of the stuff, it’s just like, what? All right. A quick aside just on that, I’ve been amazed at just the arguments and it’s starting to finally turn, but like people talking about how expensive due diligence is and oh, you shouldn’t like 500 bucks. Yeah. Why would you spend $20,000, $30,000 on it? And it’s just like… uh. And I think it’s to the same type of audience that, you know. If you’re looking to close in 19 hours with no money, then yes, please don’t do due diligence. Just come on, buy your lottery ticket and go have fun. But if you’re being serious, play it. All right. So you’re talking to at least a more, what I would almost say a more educated aspirational individual who’s looking to grow. What do you normally see in the success? Not so much what they do, but what’s their background? Where are they coming from? Who’s having success with your program?

Richard Parker:
Okay. So it’s a great question because there are tons of people looking to acquire businesses and the failure rate is enormous. You know, in our industry, over 90% of the people who begin the search to buy a business never complete a transaction. And they spend 18 months looking with no results. And so we lump that whole group together of individuals. And the fundamental piece that separates those who succeed and those who fail there are, it’s sort of like a pyramid. At the top of the pyramid, it’s very easy to say, I want to buy a business, right? But the people that actually get to the finish line are those number one, who have a different attitude and approach, which is they need to buy a business. They’re looking at this as this is something I need to do.

A.J. Lawrence:
Mm-hmm.

Richard Parker:
Either to replace an income, to generate an income, or because they’re no longer willing to tolerate the professional life that they have now. And so they look at this and say, I need to buy a business because I need to change my life and put myself in a position where I’m in control of my destiny with no limit to my upside. And so that’s at the, philosophically speaking, those determine winners versus losers. The next piece is related to the education because this is unlike anything most people have ever done before.

Most buyers are full first time buyers. So, I mean, I’m not telling you about a revolutionary formula for success. The oldest formula to be successful in anything that you wanna do, any type of new project is find someone that’s already been successful at it and just copy them. But getting that point to make that decision to get informed first as opposed to jumping online, looking at all these business for sale listings that are never good. Most of them don’t even sell and spending your time chasing and chasing your one click away and you keep clicking to the next one, to the next one, next one, and getting involved in conversations with sellers who have horrible books and records, terrible businesses, concentration issues. There are some good ones within the package, but by and large, there’s not.

So you’ve got to educate yourself for the process and learn the various steps because there’s 23 distinctive steps in this process. You have to learn what they are. Now, I’m doing this 34 years, I still learn something in every deal. So you’re going to pivot and whatever. It’s not a straight line, but the knowledge piece is incredibly important. So if you don’t educate yourself, you’re just going to wind up as another dismal statistics of not buying or you’re going to make a terrible mistake and buy the wrong business. So the education piece is critical. The second piece is getting very well aligned with what type of business is right for you. And that you have to go through a process because what you think you’re good at necessarily may not be. And you have to marry your top skillset to the right business that needs that to drive the revenue and profits. And so using those online databases as a laboratory to go speak and meet with 30, 40, 50 sellers in different sectors so you can really get a start to crystallize of what was the business, what is the business type that I’m perfect to operate.

And so that’s the second piece and the third piece is understand there’s no such thing as a perfect business. You’re buying an existing business. You’re buying a going concern. And if you do it right, you should get the keys on Monday and take a paycheck on Friday. That’s the way you do this in a good way, but understanding every business is going to have blemishes and warts and what have you. So you’ve got to mitigate your risk, understand the downside. And, you know, afterwards, I’d like to talk about your point related to due diligence and those costs involved with it, because so much of this work has to be done beforehand. And when buyers don’t get educated and they don’t know how to go about the process, they just fall out of the game. Or they make a terrible costly mistake.

A.J. Lawrence:
And this is what is so interesting that I’m saying. There’s all this noise and I see people again and again and I’m seeing people shrill and the shrilling is getting pretty heavy. Yet recently, just last week, I think the SBA numbers were released for the past few years and we’re not seeing an increase in sales. The numbers are staying. It’s become this frothy space and look, I’m in it. I’m at two years with no acquisition. I’ve hit my failure point even if I’m continuing looking to acquire, but it is interesting to see all this increase in noise compared to like I came by it literally just grabbing buy than grow because I was taking a flight over six years ago. I can’t even remember. I think it was almost six, seven years, I was going to Thailand and I was like, oh, this would be great. Looks like a fun business book. Someone in a business group I was like, oh, it’s good. And I was like, wow. I had bolted on an Acqui-hired teams. I had my last company that grew my company significantly, but I never realized there was a strategy behind it. All the things you realize after are like, oh, if I had just done that more. And looking at it, it’s great that there’s now so much more information out there and more clarity around it. But in looking at it, maybe here, rather than kind of ruminating around the noise and the silliness in the space. How can someone look at your program and decide? How should they be looking if someone wants to get in? Let’s just give them, the two groups I see the most interesting are either repeat, and I know there’s tons of others, but the two I really think are interesting these days are the repeat entrepreneurs, like I said, like me rubbed sticks together a lot, figured out how to grow a business and sell it and then kind of like, yeah, maybe I should get back in but I don’t want to start all over again. And then two, the more senior corporate exile, like great operational experience, they’ve been in an environment, but as you learned early on, they realized the upside is capped. They get better. But after a while, even if you kind of grow up the ladder, the value you generate is not fully, you are not capturing much of the value you generate after a while in the corporate world. You can get paid pretty well, but you’re still capped. So looking at those two audiences, how should they be looking at first this type of an assistance and how to approach going to acquire a company?

Richard Parker:
So a lot touches upon what we alluded to earlier with the educational piece, certainly. How are you gonna go learn and making sure you put in the effort? Just saying I want to buy a business, you could spend all kinds of hours searching the internet and not make much progress so you have to dig in. And one thing, I believe this is doable for anybody. I guess with all the noise that’s around it’s one only positive. With all of that is it’s increased awareness that this is doable because it really is. This is not just for people with a lot of money and it’s not just for businesses acquiring business. This is for individuals. So anybody who has, I love to tell people, if you have any entrepreneurial blood running through your veins, you owe it to yourself to at least learn about it and then you could decide whether or not it makes sense for you. And one of the places where I see people make terrible mistakes or achieve terrific success is understanding that you have to get out there.

You have to meet with sellers, business owners, get the word out. You have to sit in front of sellers and learn about their business and what they do every day and what the positives are, what the negatives, what the challenges are about the business, what keeps them up about the business and going to various sectors. Cause most people have no clue what type of business they want to buy. They confuse experience with expertise, meaning well, I’m a C level executive and I’ve always been in healthcare, so I’ve got to buy something in healthcare.

Well, that’s experience. That’s not expertise. It’s what did you do specifically within that sector that separated you? What was your greatest skillset within that? That’s expertise. So don’t confuse experience and expertise. You got to focus on your expertise. And the only way you’re going to determine what type or types of businesses marry perfectly with your expertise is going and meeting with sellers and people that are selling the business or business owners and having a lot of face-to-face meetings.

This is a discovery process. And so, excuse me, I run these regular educational webinars and had a hundred and something people on one recently and they had their bios, which I had access to beforehand and was going through numbers and saying, the average person you’re trying, you have 12 sectors that you’ve identified and you can’t narrow your scope that way. I work on this model called 44411, which is should take you 4 months of looking, 4 categories, 4 offers, then you should be able to negotiate 1 month of negotiation, 1 month of due diligence and closing. Now the second, the last two number ones could extend to a couple of months, but 44 is unbreakable. So if you’re doing this and going out and meeting with tons of sellers, thank you. And it works. And then it forces you to get in front of people because you give yourself a time limit.

A.J. Lawrence:
This.

Richard Parker:
You’re not looking like some of these things, these searchers. I had a one or whatever webinars, it was a whole group of searchers. They call themselves searchers now, but it’s not traditional searchers, they’re business buyers. They said, ladies and gentlemen, we’re not calling you searchers anymore, we’re calling you finders. Because search to me has this connotation that you’re just looking for forever.

A.J. Lawrence:
You’re going off into the wilderness.

Richard Parker:
Yeah, you’re going off into the wilderness, right? So getting in front of sellers is critically important coupled with the fact that you owe it to yourself. I believe if you have any type of desire, burning or otherwise, or just a little bit like you say, the size of a mustard seed that you’d like to do this, you owe it to yourself to learn about it and learn about it in a good way. Not going down the road of spending a thousand, $5,000, $10,000 or $25,000 for nonsense bootcamps buying distressed businesses that don’t work is a deal in reality.

A.J. Lawrence:
No, I like that. And coming back, yeah, just that four, four, it’s interesting. Because I know having, you know, first it’s like a candy. It’s a land of candy. And it’s like, Ooh, this business, this business. But yes, coming up, and as you said, it’s not your experience. It’s your expertise. I look at it like, where can I have the impact? Yeah. Given my background. So I look at, I have an 80% focus, I then have a secondary 10, and then I have a 10% just, okay, I give myself. Those are cool, but I score everything. I have my scoring system and only if it’s seven or higher, well, six or higher for NDA and diving deeper, but I have to get it to seven or higher before I even think about an LOI. But I do like that approach because you can wander a bit into the wilderness into that.

Richard Parker:
Smart. Yes.

A.J. Lawrence:
Let’s maybe take a step back. What are some things? Because this four, and it’s stuck in my head, it’s four by four. And I know it’s not, but it’s stuck in my head. 4, 1, 1. 4, 1. Let’s kind of, yeah, I know. Oh, 1, 1.

Richard Parker:
44411. You’re close. 44411, which is four months looking, four categories, four offers, one month negotiation, one month due diligence.

A.J. Lawrence:
All right. One of the things I found, it was about eight months into my search which was very haphazard at first and then had a little more structures. I kind of found different things or joined communities and whatever. And now, in looking at sort of how you do, what are some things to kind of structure? Because this is in this 411 way of doing it. But what are some things that a finder can start doing to actually move? For me, the biggest thing I realized was I wanted to look at more deals but score them. I literally found I could start looking at deals pretty comfortably just by looking at the SIM and being like, okay, this is probably going to be around the edge. Let’s run it through or this is going to be horrible. Instead of the first 100 was everything I just scored. I realized, okay, there’s so much crap. Then I started getting a little bit cleaner on what I was looking at. What are things that you think help a finder move towards that acquisition or towards the opportunity there?

Richard Parker:
Well, one of the things, as you mentioned, if you look like this is a funnel, most of the stages in the process are a funnel from whether it’s the right business, what’s the right business for you. You start out with these. All these ideas at the top, there’s lots of them and you want to squeeze out a little bit at the bottom. And when you’re looking at businesses, you look at a whole ton of categories and you want to squeeze out something little at the bottom. It’s like going from a shotgun to a laser beam. And so at the beginning, people need to be open-minded. You need to understand that the search and the deviations and the setbacks and coming across businesses that are listed for sale and the numbers are completely wrong or something that’s in the ad is misrepresented. That’s just part of the process. It doesn’t represent everything, but it’s part of the process and you have to pivot. But clearly going out from the beginning and assuming that someone has the smarts to know that they need to first educate themselves, learn about this, the whole process, the various steps and what’s involved. And then as you start your search, it’s the ruling out process. The key is get out of the gate. You’ve gotta go sit in front of people and have these conversations and meet with businesses. And that’s the only way you’re gonna be able to determine the right business. But meeting with businesses and having a good layman’s ability to value a business, to be able to look at a business and be intellectually curious, to not just take the seller’s word for it. You listen to everything they say, you validate everything. You know, I go a little further, say, I listen to everything they say and I trust nothing. And so you wanna validate it. And this search, once you start learning about a particular business and having met with the seller, and then you can start investigating the industry, the market, the employees, the competition, questions, we get more questions, but your search becomes more horizontal, right? Because you’re looking at different components of the business and the fundamentals and you’re learning about each of these stages. And as you search, you may be, I always give the example, I was looking to buy a translation company and I liked that industry and started meeting with a bunch of sellers and talking with a bunch of sellers. And in one of the meetings, one of the individuals mentioned something that they had been in the past looking at the legal document preparation business for people that represent themselves in court.

And I just took it as a note during the meeting. They weren’t going down that road. And I started researching that business and said, you know, I really like this business. And I ended up buying a business in legal document preparation.

A.J. Lawrence:
Yeah.

Richard Parker:
And it was as a result of being, I’m not a bright guy, but I’m intellectually curious. And having that intellectual curiosity is important for everybody. You wanna have this insatiable desire to learn more. And as you’re looking at a business, you have to have that. So as you’re learning and researching the business and the industry and what have you, that’s gonna start all kinds of the wood burning between your brains of all kinds of activity. And that’s how it leads you inadvertently to a business because you’re ruling out a ton. And as you’re going down the road, what you think you want at the beginning in a business, you start to get more narrow. Like I have five golden rules for buying a business that any business I look at has to subscribe to. And this is people can formulate their own in time, which is why you have to be sales and marketing driven. I like a business where there’s demand in place. I don’t want to compete in price.

I like a business where there’s an element of exclusivity, the territory or geography, and I don’t want a business that, and I don’t want a business where there’s low margins. I love high margin businesses. And that ties the first thing, which is, yeah, I’m a sales and marketing guy. So if it’s high margins, I don’t really care about the revenues because as long I’m comfortable in my sales and marketing ability, you’re gonna be able to put a plan together. So if the margins are strong enough, the revenues will follow and it’ll be profitable. So, putting together your five golden rules is really, really important. And so this whole, it’s a universe. I think they often use the word is like ecosystem, but it’s a universe. And you’ve got to just look at these different things and get going. I mean, that’s the thing. You got to get going.

A.J. Lawrence:
I like the way you put it because one of the things in due diligence I’ve been taught, and I’ve done a lot of work with Elliott Holland of Guardian Due Diligence, one of the first things he’s always pushing me is what’s your no-goes? Before we even talk about what’s going to happen and all the greatness and how are you going to be able to, you know if this works, you’ll have a private jet and all that is like, take a step back and let’s talk about the next. And, you know, one, not just what’s going to happen there, but where are you going to start pulling. One, where are you going to start retrading or at least bringing up the, it isn’t quite what you said it was, but then two, when are you going to walk away?
I think that’s interesting because your line earlier about the plate of spaghetti, I walked into something that I believe they were using the confusion of it to kind of hide and move things around. Oh, it was spun out of a private equity. So of course it has a withholding thing. Oh, yeah, we pay money from this account that’s not part of the account. So no, you don’t need those bank accounts. You don’t need to verify that. And it’s like, okay, no plates of spaghetti. Earlier I was like, I’m going to keep that line because that’s going to be one of my reds. Yeah, I think that’s cool. But like, all right, so coming up with-

Richard Parker:
No problem, use it as often as you wish.

A.J. Lawrence:
knots, coming up with the structure and getting the touches, going through getting those areas, really getting an understanding of the business, what else do you suggest?

Richard Parker:
Well, one of the things that you brought up, which let me weigh in on, because if you and I were having this casual conversation saying you’ve been looking for x period of time and all these deals were falling out for one reason or another, one thing that’s, and the negatives that your accountant suggested, and astutely so, is you have to begin your due diligence earlier. For me, I go into due diligence to be confirmatory, not exploratory.

A.J. Lawrence:
Oh yes.

Richard Parker:
Now there are this odd times where I come across a business or client comes across a business that the initial fundamentals are terrific. There’s going to be a lot of activity and we want to tie the business up so put in an LOI, we tie up the business. There may be some modifications after, but in order to take the business off the market and get some element of exclusivity. Most of them don’t work that way in the lower market.

And so, you identify the business. You have a couple meetings with the seller, you go through all of the key questions. We outline 36 critical questions that you must ask every seller. And then your research begins. But your research really begins the second the business is of interest to you. You have to start your due diligence, not necessarily the form. It’s not the formalized due diligence where you have access to the company’s books and records, but your investigation has to start immediately. Because if not, if you’re not investigating the industry, the competition, the employees, the company itself, looking at the financials, detailing financials, what are growth potentials, am I the right person to run this business, all those type of things which are really the assets of the business, contracts, legal, certain things that you have access to in advance, some you’ll have later, but if you don’t start doing that early enough, what happens is there’s too many potential surprises.

And that’s why 50% of lower market businesses, like mainstreet USA and around that, fall apart in due diligence. Because you go into due diligence, you have all these unknowns. You want to start your due diligence immediately the second a business is of interest to you. And now the beauty of the internet, when you do it in a good way, you can get good information. So for example, if you’re going to look at a commercial cleaning company and you see that initial listing, no deck, no nothing. Well, you can immediately start to Google, you know, what are the challenges with a commercial cleaning business? What are the valuations of commercial cleaning businesses? What are the biggest opportunities in commercial cleaning business? Are business commercial cleaning businesses good opportunities to buy or bad? And you see. And having this desire for information, you’ll be able to extract tons of information that you’re sitting in front of a seller and you say to them, like you may have looked at your research and this example I just used in a webinar was to say, some of the challenges in that industry, which I knew beforehand before meeting the seller, was recruiting, training and retaining employees. That massive problem.

A.J. Lawrence:
Every space here.

Richard Parker:
Every article, every report, those are common with some other ones. And so you’re sitting in front of the seller and he’s to ask the seller. One of the beautiful questions I love to ask the sellers, what keeps you up at night about your business? Because something keeps up every seller and whatever their problem is going to be magnified in the eyes of a buyer. And so if they don’t bring up that, which you know is a pervasive problem through the industry, so you’re sitting in front of the seller and they don’t bring that up as a potential challenge or problem, either they operate differently than every other business on the planet, or are full of crap.

A.J. Lawrence:
Yeah. How honest are they?

Richard Parker:
And so you could say, well, what about training people? Ah, it’s not a problem. Well, if they dismiss it like that, the type of seller that you’re potentially dealing with versus someone who’s upfront and informative will probably have that right in their deck or sim. And so I know it’s a bit of a long-winded answer, but your due diligence has to start immediately, informing yourself, learning. And it’s amazing what you learn about one industry that could be applied to another when you look at business. No good learning is lost.

A.J. Lawrence:
I think since here on the podcast, we do focus a lot on what I call the first big transition of a business is that crossing over to seven figures into the millions as an entrepreneur who’s been starting from scratch, you have this expectation that–sorry, the Apple thing is popping up with all the little icons around my finger being up-

Richard Parker:
No problem.

A.J. Lawrence:
–but you have this expectation that once you have money, life is going to get so much better. And yes, you no longer lose sleep about making payroll or depending on once again, it depends on your model and the size of the company and all that, but you have different, bigger payroll, but it’s complexity.

Richard Parker:
Oh, you still do sleep. It just might be a bigger payroll. Yeah. Yes, correct.

A.J. Lawrence:
Complexity increases. And I think that’s the same way of looking at it because it’s like, I always joke, I can always tell an entrepreneur. I can tell someone from different areas, almost for more how they groan when you talk about something difficult. When someone’s just talking and they don’t know it, they just kind of go right past that like little piece in the middle. Um, yeah, I used to laugh the first time I noticed it was back in the early 90s. I was doing some software installation for a company that did software installations for other companies. And we went in somewhere and we were pitching it. It was me and one senior guy who knew nothing about systems.

Richard Parker:
Yes. That’s good observation.

A.J. Lawrence:
And yeah, the suit. And we went in and IBM had just walked out. IBM’s team and all eight people in perfect suits and all, I was like, all right, well, this is going to be a short meeting. Like within a second, the senior person of the client, it was a UK client, was like, yeah, whatever. And so he just like, yeah, just tell him. Yeah, he was checked out. It was just like I said, we’ll have this.

So the tech guy starts going over what they’re doing and I said, wait a second, you’re using blu- and I can’t remember, but it was something. I mean, wait, and you said you have this type of system that always blows up like everything. And he’s like, you know that? I’m like, yeah. I spent six months. And he was like–

Richard Parker:
Everybody knows it but you!

A.J. Lawrence:
-we were trying to, you know. I was like, oh yeah, it doesn’t work. You gotta use this instead. And we got into this whole geek out and that’s where I realized we ended up winning over the suits. So your whole thing of find those pain points, find that honesty of experience. Yeah, I like that.

Richard Parker:
Expertise. And you know, I’m a huge believer in buying good businesses. You’ve been in a lot of businesses, a lot of experience. So there’s, I call them the three G’s in the hill, which is the beginning of a business or start, it’s garbage, whether it’s a startup or whatever, it’s garbage. There’s nothing. You don’t know what it’s going to turn into, etc. And at the very top at the summit, it’s a great business. And in the middle, it’s a good business. So those to me are the three G’s of the hill. Garbage, good, great.

A.J. Lawrence:
A teenager.

Richard Parker:
Yeah, right. And I’m a big believer, hope and pray. And so yeah, you could actually do a lot more due diligence on a business than a teenager, trust me, about four of them, or four of them past that. But wow, I’ve often said it’s a hell of a lot. Business is easier, buying and running a business, than it is raising kids. And that’s certainly the truth. But, no, that’s good.

A.J. Lawrence:
Hopefully it’s going to turn out please don’t go to jail. I have teenagers. That’s for certain. Sorry, I took you off. I apologize.

Richard Parker:
My course is called How to Buy a Good Business at a Great Price. It’s not how to buy your dream business. It’s not how to buy the greatest business. How to buy a good business because you want it in that point in its history. Because all businesses follow that trajectory. Garbage, good, great, drop off the cliff. It’s just a matter of time. That’s the path of every single business. Some last much longer, but you don’t want one when it’s great. You’re going to overpay and there’s not much that you could influence. You want a good business. Rock solid. Business that you could take over, get the keys on Monday, grab a paycheck on Friday. It’s got employees, got customers, got systems. Now, some of these may have to be changed, but they are in place. The phone rings or the orders come in, or there’s a customer inquires, there’s bidding opportunities. Whatever the case may be, you’re buying the foundation and the platform of a good business. And if you’re the right person to run that business, the application of your expertise to that business can turn it into a great business.

If you’re the wrong person, that good business will go south fast. At the same time, there’s also lots of good businesses that are run by the wrong people. And so putting yourself in that, so, but to me and my clients and is never take your eyes off, don’t take your eyes off your fries as like the old McDonald commercial used to be, right?
A.J. Lawrence:
Yep, someone’s gonna steal them.

Richard Parker:
Don’t take your eyes off your fries or off your fries, off the prize, which is buy a rock solid good business. Cause that will allow you the time to acclimatize yourself, get in, learn the business, get the guts of the business in your belly, learn from the existing owner for the transition, then get them out because you’re the new sheriff in town, you’re the boss. You’ve got to put your stamp on it, but it allows you a meaningful transition. And then you could make magic happen, right? It’s sit back and let’s watch magic happen. I mean, it’s a thing of beauty. So, you know, I’m just so over focused on good business, not distressed businesses, not nonsense business. Rock solid good businesses.

A.J. Lawrence:
I think you’re right because just looking at the one where the plate of spaghetti and then sort of a little bit of talking outside of it, miscommunication, willful or not, let’s just leave it.

Richard Parker:
Yes.

A.J. Lawrence:
Business itself was stagnant. With everything else, I realized there was something great on the other side and the restructuring and all that. But that one year plus of cleaning up someone else’s mess or someone’s lack of visioning. Depending on your businesses and all that, we’re in the middle of a tech revolution that doesn’t feel like a revolution. I’ve been playing with tech since the 80s and shite is changing. It’s like, yeah, folks, things you need to adapt. There will be things. Unless our AI overlords come over and you know.

Richard Parker:
Yes, it sure is.

A.J. Lawrence:
Put us all in pods and start taking our body electricity. I think we’re okay. Yeah, we’re different. I think there could be a movie out of that. We should look into that. But it’s just, yeah, you got to be playing into the space. You got to be adapting and moving to it. But yeah, your thing, find a good business that is wherever. I mean, and look, even traditional,

Richard Parker:
But that’s a whole different podcast, right?

A.J. Lawrence:
Service businesses are the way they acquire. Clients is changing, so different. It’s moving faster. The technology, probably you’re not worrying about how do you code into a new pipe into something, but the ordering systems, the monitoring system, all these things are, how do you go about adapting and growing. So good business is something that is playing into space. Sorry, I’m just going through where I was learning now kind of taking what you said. I’m like, sorry, I’m stealing your thoughts and thinking of how I’m going to adapt it into my life.

Richard Parker:
No one steals my thoughts. No one steals them, use them.

A.J. Lawrence:
Yep. Well, I always call it, yeah, it’s that great thing, you know, Picasso’s still like an artist, you know, where Picasso was like, it’s everything.

Richard Parker:
No problem. I welcome anybody. Don’t plagiarize my material, but steal my thoughts, especially for business buyers. That’s the goal of what I do.

A.J. Lawrence:
Yeah. You steal everything and you make it your own. But no, really good. I do think I’m going to probably adapt my scoring a little bit more to lack of spaghetti into it.

Richard Parker:
Make it your own. Yeah.

A.J. Lawrence:
You’ve been doing this now for a while, where do you hope to go with this especially now that the space has gotten murky? Your frame, my frame is frothy. But where do you hope Diomo goes?

Richard Parker:
So there’s beauty and a challenge with being in business and not needing the money. And I look at this now and this is this stage of my life. I’m 62. This is a stage of my life. This last stage, however long it lasts, is really I’ve always been a teacher and a helper. And really, as a result of the proliferation of all this garbage on the internet, I really feel it’s my obligation to help people separate the wheat from the chaff, the garbage from everything else, and educate them and I love that.

We’ve had an unbelievably successful business because we’ve never gotten away from the mission of helping people. It didn’t start out, and I don’t want to sound like too altruistic or someone that says, oh, this guy’s full of crap. It’s not. I mean, my agenda for 20 something years has been to help people. I’ve never thought about the money. And when I say never thought about the money, obviously didn’t want to lose money, but it was strictly to help people. And so that I am not going to get deterred from that mission. It’s strictly to help individuals, help them accomplish. I come from a very lower middle class background. I didn’t go to college. They go to university. There was two years of prep college in Montreal, but I didn’t go to university. I’m the poster boy. I’m not a rags to riches story and/or sob story, but I guess somewhat of a rags to riches. And to me, it’s like, if I was able to do this, anybody could do this.

I’m not the smartest guy in the room. And I strongly believe if I’m the smartest guy in the room, I’m in the wrong room. I wanna be where I’m gonna learn. I’m where I wanna learn. And so what comes for Diomo is just, keep educating people. We’ve had incredible success. It’s very gratifying. It’s the most wonderful work that I’ve done and gonna continue to do so and not get influenced by some of these hucksters selling these nonsense program. I have a core group of people–

A.J. Lawrence:
I agree.

Richard Parker:
who continue to seek out information from me, attend our webinars. Even our webinars, they’re not infomercials to sell products, they’re educational platform. And I really believe it’s sounding a little bit, maybe a little bit harsh, but the bright people, the serious people, the bright people, really–

A.J. Lawrence:
Yeah, their engagement.

Richard Parker:
listen to what I have to say. They know I’m accomplished. My heart’s in the right place, and they’ll ultimately buy our materials. And for those that don’t, that’s fine too. I’m happy to answer their questions too. But I think the people that are serious about buying a business and have the intellect that this is nothing they’ve ever done before, regardless of any successes they had, this is a new project. So they got to educate themselves and learn. Those are our clients and that’s what I hope to keep accomplishing, just keep helping people. It’s been phenomenal. I mean, I have so much fun doing this. I spend hours every day answering emails from clients or getting on the phone with them. I don’t charge them and helping them get to where they want to go. It’s just a phenomenally gratifying business. Now, if I had to do this in my early 20s, well, I wouldn’t be able to do it because they didn’t have the experience. But assuming somehow they did, if I had to turn this into a business or that was my agenda going in, I got to make money at this thing, it probably would have never grown to where it’s grown. And interestingly enough, I’ve worked with people who’ve had massive success, right up to billionaires. And I’ve spent a number of years in partnership with the Dalio family office. And it’s unbelievable to me that the most successful people, and I’m talking from smaller entrepreneurs up to billionaires, and certainly people have had massive success, is they never focus on the money. They just focus on building a great business. And so that’s what I’ve always tried to do. And it’s just the, you know, the success as far as how many people we’ve helped, that’s my KPI.

A.J. Lawrence:
Successful personal touches. Touches may be the wrong word because then we get into some trouble there. But no, I like good touches.

Richard Parker:
Good point. Okay, we’ll stay away from that. I’m glad we’re on Zoom and not in person. Okay, so that’s good.

A.J. Lawrence:
There’s a lot to take out of this and I’m going to be unpacking for a bit on this. What’s the best way for someone in the audience to learn more about what you’re doing, to learn about the way you talk, the way you help people, where should they go? What should they go check out?

Richard Parker:
The easiest thing is go to richardparker.com. We have hundreds of free articles, free reports. Yes, the course is available there as well, but you can get yourself lost and immersed in all kinds of free resources. I do all the social media stuff now, which I never used to do, but I only started doing that to combat all the nonsense that’s out there and try to get good snippets of information. But go to richardparker.com and you’ll get lost in knowledge, very, very helpful. You’ve seen a bunch of them.

A.J. Lawrence:
Yep. A bunch of great videos. I was late to the call because I was actually going through one.

Richard Parker:
Yeah, we actually, by the way, all our webinars, we post online to the YouTube so people could watch all them after the fact. And they’re very educational. And I’m sure listeners, whatever position they are, individuals or business owners that have exit looking to make an acquisition or whatever, they’ll find the information helpful. That I’ll bet on.

A.J.Lawrence:
Great. We’ll put it into the show notes, we’ll put it in the email and our socials when this episode comes out. Now, I think there’s a lot to be found and see if you are thinking about a quiet company or you’re kind of early in your search.

Richard Parker:
Thank you.

A.J. Lawrence:
Check out Richard’s material because I do think, like I was saying, it’s a very no-nonsense. As much as I’m a very strong believer in the benefit of this, I have been kind of disappointed in the past year. I think a lot of people don’t pay attention to what’s happened, but over the past year, a lot of the people who used to be pretty straightforward and sensible, they’ve become bells of the balls and therefore are chasing attention.

Richard Parker:
Yes.

A.J. Lawrence:
So what I really did appreciate in going through your material was the sensible approach and sort of you’re not, you know, the no money down folks. I hear when they get the DNA cloning stuff going and we’ll have a couple more circles of hell out of modern society. And the no money down people get their own.

Richard Parker:
They get their own. And I’ll tell you, I don’t pay attention to them. The thing we know that there’s beauty in simplicity and our stuff works. It’s pretty simple, you know? So yeah, I don’t pay attention to all those other folks, only when I get texts or emails, I just sort of shake my head and say, wow, unbelievable. I feel bad that people get sucked into buying it, but good information ultimately prevails, I believe. And truth always prevails. Sometimes it just takes a little longer, but I really appreciate your kind sentiments about the materials.

A.J. Lawrence:
Well, Richard, thank you so much for coming on. And look, I really do want to continue this conversation. Maybe we’ll have you back on and we can get into some specifics or just follow up with you on some things because this is what you’re doing is really fascinating. I think your approach to it can help a lot of people. So thank you so much for coming on the show.

Richard Parker:
Thank you, A.J. I really appreciate you having me. I love the questions and I welcome coming back again.

A.J. Lawrence:
Wonderful, great. Hey, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. Like I said, go check out Richard’s material. The videos are really great. He dives into a very practical approach. Look for good businesses with the idea that you buy on Monday, payroll on Friday.

I hear a lot of things out there and we’ve talked with some of the people talking on some crazy, other things, I won’t say craziness, but those two alone, I think are really great North stars to kind of put into your search. So look, go check out his material. And if you liked today’s episode and you know someone who is thinking about buying a company, share this episode with them.

Richard Parker:
You take your packet. Yes.

A.J. Lawrence:
Tell them they should go subscribe to Richard’s material and then also subscribe to our podcast in whatever listening platform of choice. But I would appreciate it a lot. So thank you everyone. Have a wonderful day and I’ll talk with you soon. Bye bye.