Looking to buy a business? This is part 4/5 of the little things, the little mistakes that people make that they keep replicating and therefore can stop them from doing deals.

If you haven’t watched parts 1-3 yet, you can do so here:

• Part 1:
• Part 2:
• Part 3:

Part four is that you’ve got to close on the day. So what do I mean by this? Well, obviously we’ve got our process, which is initially you make contact. So that could be through the letter process. You have your telephone appointment, which is where you’re doing your inquiry questionnaire and building a load of rapport. You then have your face-to-face meeting, which is the first face-to-face meeting you have with them, where you rebuild the rapport, remember you have to do this all over again because the face-to-face rapport is slightly different to telephone rapport.

You’re going to have to remake friends, re-establish all of that rapport and maybe listen to the same stories again, because for some reason people seem to forget they’ve already told you all this stuff. But anyway, smile and grin and bear it and build a rapport through that part of the process.

The Most Important Thing

Is to frame out your deal. Now you’ve already seen the details of the business cause you’ve done the inquiry questionnaire. So you already have an idea of what you could offer them, whether it’s going to be a BIBO, whether it’s going to be a deal pie or one of the other 12 deal strategies taught on The Harbour Club.

What the structure, whether it’s just a handover the shares and we’ll catch the hot potato for you. We’ll make people redundant that need to be made redundant, etc. So whatever the deal structure is going to be, you kind of have an idea in your mind what that looks like. And so you want to pitch that deal to them there and then in that first meeting.

And you want to close, you want to actually say to them, I’m ready to go. You really want this message that the only thing holding them back at this point is them, but you’re ready to go. And this is really, really important. This is not just an aggressive tactic because we’re impatient. This is a genuine pattern interrupt. They will have gone through the motions of having loads of these kind of meetings in the past with different people who promised to have the panacea, the solution to all of their problems.

The Same For All Meetings

Basically all of these meetings go the same, which is everybody gets on very well and that it sounds amazing. And then after they leave, nothing happens. So you need to give this meeting a really big shake. So they realize this is different, that this is ready to go. The common feedback you’ll get at this point is, “but don’t you have to do any due diligence? Don’t you have to understand the business better?”

The best reply to that is always: ” Look, I don’t think we have time. I think I’m just going to have to look you in the eye. We’re gonna have to shake hands and we’re gonna have to just get on with this. Otherwise, in a couple of weeks, I don’t think there’s going to be a business left here for us to be negotiating about.”

Pivot The Conversation Around

So, really pivot the conversation around to, I’m ready to go. You just need to, shit or get off the pot basically. This is really, really powerful and really, really important. It’s so tempting at this point, when you’re in the meeting to bottle it and just go, okay, bye and leave. And then try and call them up relentlessly to try and do it. And it’s kind of like the desperate … you met someone in a nightclub and you call them relentlessly for a date afterwards. It doesn’t come across well. So you need to do this close there and then, and it most likely won’t close, but you just need to show them that you’re ready.