Jeremy Harbour
Him my name is Jeremy Harbor. I run an experiential training course called The Harbour Club where I teach people how to buy, fix and sell businesses, often distressed companies or companies that are motivated to exit in some way. A lot of people ask me, “Why would you buy a business in the first place?” Well, I’ll tell you what, when I first started out in business I thought basically you had to start something and work really, really hard. For years, that paradigm was reinforced by all the books that I read, the people that I met, the conversations that I had.
Jeremy Harbour
Then one time, I was running my telecoms company and telecoms is quite acquisitive. So I was always having people come to meetings who were trying to buy me. The one thing they all seem to have in common is that they weren’t going to put any money on the table up front in order to complete the transaction. That kinda got me thinking, “Well, I haven’t got any money. Maybe I could buy a business.”
Jeremy Harbour
I started looking for motivated sellers, people that might want to sell their business. After a while, I managed to find a 13 year old telecoms company where they put in all the blood, sweat and years to build it up to where it was. But they had some very specific motivations, and I was able to complete a deal where we bought that business with no money up front. We didn’t borrow any money from the bank or from the vendor in order to do it, or from outside investors.
Jeremy Harbour
I had this huge paradigm shift as soon as this happened. You see, for years and years, I’d been running the marathon whereas really all I needed to do was run the last 10 yards and I’d still get the medal. It completely changed the way I started to think about business. You see, when you grow by acquisition, literally it’s like a light switch is switched on. That morning, you have so many customers, that afternoon, you literally grow by a year or mores revenue in an afternoon and you haven’t had any of the risky sales and marketing tactics which invariably don’t work properly. You haven’t had any of he stress or managing of additional staff in order to get there. Just by doing one simple deal, you can make a huge difference to your business.
Jeremy Harbour
Now in The Harbour Club, we teach people how you can find opportunities using our sourcing techniques to find a consistent flow of these distressed or motivated sellers. We teach you how to hold a meeting with them so that you can get the best out of the meeting and get a deal, whether it’s no money down. Remember, these aren’t businesses for sale, these are businesses that are off the market so to speak. We teach you a whole load of tactics. They’re like cookie cutter systems for how you can put these no money down deals together.
Jeremy Harbour
We really focus on not using upfront capital and not using any kind of borrowing, whether it be from the bank or from outside investors. These really are true no money down transactions. We then run through a whole range of tactics for fixing businesses if they have some sort of financial problem. That covers everything from insolvency tactics and the insolvency law right the way through to some really clever, street fighter style tactics for fixing cashflow and fixing profitability.
Jeremy Harbour
After we’ve done that, we talk about exiting. How do you sell one of these companies shortly after buying it. We’re now able to buy a business for nothing, and very shortly afterward, sell it for six or even seven figures. So we teach you how to do all of these things throughout the course of The Harbour Club. But even if you’re not looking to get into buying and selling businesses, and you just have an existing business, I still think growing by acquisition is the best way to ensure rapid growth. I hope to see you soon. Thank you.
Jeremy Harbour
Hi, my name is Jeremy Harbour. I’m going to talk today about growing your business by acquisition. I had an epiphany a few years ago when effectively I grew my business by a year’s worth of sales in an afternoon, and it didn’t cost me any money, and I didn’t have to take any risks with sales and marketing type techniques. But, before I get into that, if we go back to the start. Growing up I was always quite entrepreneurial. In fact, I started a business when I was 14 years old. I left school when I was 15 to go and pursue that business. In fact, I went spectacularly bust when I was 19, which is a great lesson in humility. I think everyone needs a good kick in the nuts when they’re a bit young and cocky.
Jeremy Harbour
It was a really useful experience. Actually, it’s really helped me in later life to be able to empathize with businesses that are in trouble. Because I know exactly what it feels like to be in their shoes. Basically, I was running businesses like this. I was always a firm believer that if you wanted to be successful, you had to start a business and you had to work really hard. I did sacrifice everything. I put in the blood, the sweat and the years into growing my businesses at the expense of almost everything else in my life. It was great fun. It’s a right of passage. I think everyone should start a business and have that experience.
Jeremy Harbour
But one of the things I realized, I was growing a telecoms company at the time. We’d grown very quickly organically. I think in our first year we did a few hundred thousand. The next year we doubled that. The year after that, we doubled it again. An interesting thing happened. We obviously appeared on the radar of quite a few of our competitors. Now, our competitors were looking at buying us out because, obviously, they could add our revenue to their business but they didn’t have to take all of our costs. So they could get rid of our office and our staff and everything else and just add the profitable revenue, which meant that they would get a much, much bigger upside from buying our business than we would get from our own business.
Jeremy Harbour
I basically spent every week having meetings with these various different telecoms company bosses who were trying to pitch me. That’s the only way to describe it really, pitch me on why I should sell to them and how I should do a deal. The reason it was a pitch was because there wasn’t going to be any money up front. All of these deal structures were quite creative. They were all targeting things that I needed and wanted and that would help fulfill other needs. But ultimately, all the jam was tomorrow. So there wasn’t going to be anything up front.
Jeremy Harbour
Now fortunately, I had quite a few of these meetings. I think too many people are negative on the phone when people ring up and don’t have meetings. But I think I always took the view that it’s part of my business education to meet as many people as possible and talk about what it is they’re looking to do. And sure enough, after a while, what happened was instead of me having two or three opportunities to choose from, I ended up with sort of 15 opportunities. Then it made me start to think about everything a little bit differently.
Jeremy Harbour
The thought process I had was pretty much, well, at the time I didn’t have any money at all. So maybe I could buy a business. Maybe I could use the same type of strategy they were doing in order to grow my telecoms company. I decided to just go out there and start talking about wanting to find a business. Now a really interesting thing happens. When you go out and start telling people what you want, lots of little sign posts pop up that weren’t there before. In fact, all the same conversations you used to have, suddenly with this new pair of spectacles on, there’s new opportunities.
Jeremy Harbour
It didn’t take long before I started to get opportunities to talk to other telecoms companies about the possibility of buying them. I got a few slaps around the face from not being able to come up with any cash. But sooner or later, I found a 13 year old telecoms company that was based in the UK. It had some great customers. Nintendo was one of it’s customers. I was able to structure a deal with him because he had particular motivations that I was able to satisfy. I was able to structure a deal with him where I bought the business for no cash up front whatsoever.
Jeremy Harbour
Also, I didn’t have any borrowing. I didn’t borrow money from the bank. I didn’t borrow money from the guy that was selling me the business. I didn’t have to take on investors, capital to complete this deal. Like I say, I effectively grew the business by a years worth of revenue in an afternoon. And I had an epiphany. I don’t need to start a business and work really hard. I don’t need to put all the blood, sweat and years in that I’d been putting in before. I don’t have to run the marathon. I can just do the last 10 yards and I still get the trophy.
Jeremy Harbour
That was a really important epiphany for me. It suddenly made me realize that maybe I’d been doing it wrong all these years. Or not wrong, just not the right way. The funny thing was now when I started looking back at all the books and all the things that I’d read before with this new idea that you can just run the last 10 yards of the marathon and still get the trophy, I realized that everybody that I thought was telling me to start a business and work really hard, they’d all made their money doing deals.
Jeremy Harbour
In fact, all of the dragons on Dragons Den, bought or sold businesses as the way that they accelerated their success and their wealth. It was a complete paradigm shift. I completely changed the way that I looked at business. It was around about this time, basically having had that epiphany, I went on a little bit of a rampage. I ended up buying lots and lots of businesses. In the space of 18 months, I built up a mini empire of businesses turning over about 13 and a half million pounds a year on a monthly run rate. We had about 135 staff, all based around the Hertfordshire area in the UK.
Jeremy Harbour
I became extremely business doing all of that. I bought a seminar company. It was one of the business I bought. This seminar company taught people various business skills and business techniques. Out of the back of that, I thought, “Well, how would I teach people what I do?” It was actually at one of their seminars I started to write a little script down of how I would do a training course. One of the first things I realized is actually to learn how to buy a business, you really need to buy a business because it’s an experiential thing.
Jeremy Harbour
I titled this course The Harbour Club. I wrote down all the things that would make it interesting for the participant. How would they source deals? How would they effectively, continuously source deals? Because they’re not where you think they are. They’re not with accountants or insolvency practitioners or people like that. How would they get to have a meeting with these people? Because if you ask the average entrepreneur, “How’s business?” Generally, it’s their best month ever. Isn’t it?
Jeremy Harbour
You need to be able to have an honest conversation with the entreprenuer about how things are going and what it is. They then needed to understand the no money down deal structures that you can use, because there’s lots of different ones. In fact, on The Harbour Club course, we have six core no money down strategies. There’s actually seven or eight all together. But there’s six core no money down strategies that we work through, which shows things like how I was able to buy an air conditioning company for a pound where we met them at nine o’clock in the morning and at 5 p.m. the same day we’re being introduced to the staff as the new owner. Then go on and sell that later for six figures. How we bought a furniture manufacturer for a pound, 100%. Again, we were able to turn that around and sell that on in a very short space of time, and a whole load of other stuff, a call center business.
Jeremy Harbour
We bought a gym and spa. It was a health club, 15,000 square foot health club that cost 3.2 million to fit out just a few years before that we were able to buy lock stock and barrel. Actually, the way the deal was structured, we ended up 25,000 pounds in front after the deal was completed. There’s some really, really interesting techniques that we’ve stuck in there. Everything is backed up with real case studies. Not only do we use the real case studies with the real company names, but we also give you the documents that we used when we completed those deals, all of the contracts and spreadsheets and questionnaires and things like that we’ve had to do.
Jeremy Harbour
Now people often ask, “How do you buy a business with no money?” My facetious answer is, “You need to start with no money and try and buy a business,” a bit like I did with that first telecoms company. Because necessity is the mother of invention. So I bundled all of that into this course called The Harbour Club to give people the complete package on how to do things. The Harbour Club has been running very successfully since 2009. The references and things that people give us for it are always incredibly flattering and very, very positive.
Jeremy Harbour
But actually, quite a few people just want to come along to learn how to grow their business by acquisition. They’re so interested in all the turn around techniques and the insolvency tactics and the exit side of it. Really in the beginning, what they’re looking to do is what I did in the first place, which is to grow that company by a years worth of revenue in an afternoon.
Jeremy Harbour
Now in order to grow by an acquisition, actually, one of the most important things is how you find motivated sellers. Because these people aren’t always in distress, but they are motivated. You need a consistent tactic that will get you those people. Now they’re not with insolvency practitioners. They’re not with accountants. They’re not with business brokers. So where do you find businesses that actually aren’t really for sale that you can then put these deals together with?
Jeremy Harbour
The next thing is then how you have the meeting with them so that you can have a proper conversation about getting a deal done. Then we go into the legal protection, how you protect yourself from not getting yourself into trouble. You wouldn’t like to buy a company that’s potentially insolvent and then it destroy the business that you have already. Now it’s very simple not to get into trouble like that, but as long as you know how.
Jeremy Harbour
The next thing is the deal structuring. How do you actually put a deal together where you’re not borrowing money and you’re not paying anything up front for the business? We go through all the systems you need to do that. Then how do you reduce all your up front costs in doing the deal? We show you how you do it without any legal fees, without any accounting fees, without any cost of due diligence. We have a really smart system for taking all the due diligence costs out of doing the deal. We tell you exactly how I bought businesses, how I found them, how we go the deal done, the whole thing.
Jeremy Harbour
Then if you feel that you want to take everything a step further, you can come on one of my Harbour Club courses where we’d fill in all the gaps in terms of how you do the financial engineering, the seven steps to fixing a company’s cash flow. For example, we bought an air conditioning company that hadn’t paid it’s payroll for two months. It was 10,000 pounds overdrawn. We were able to fix that within about six weeks so all the payroll was caught up, and it constantly had cash in the bank.
Jeremy Harbour
We bought another business that was 85,000 pounds overdrawn. It’s payroll was due in a week and the overdraft was personally guaranteed by the owners. So the deal we did there was if we could get you off the personal guarantee and we can pay the payroll, could we have the company? To which they said yes. Then we used a really clever tactic which meant we didn’t have to put any money in ourselves, but we managed to get the overdraft back to zero, get the bank guarantee canceled. We were also able to get the payroll met on time and ended up with the company, which we were later able to sell for six figures.
Jeremy Harbour
That’s one of the case studies that we use in the course. So if you’d like to find out more, have a look at it. See how that works. Then maybe I’ll see you in a Harbour Club one day in the future. Thank you for listening.
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