Working From Home: Episode 22 – From plumber to business buying expert with Jaryd Krause
Nelson is joined by entrepreneur and founder of buyingonlinebusinesses.com, Jaryd Kraus. Jaryd shares with listeners an epiphany he had that empowered him to ditch his day job AND skip the grunt work of building a new, online business from scratch.
Topics Include:
– Ditching your day job
– Starting an online business
– Buying an online business
– The power of mentorship
Resources Mentioned:
www.youtube.com/channel/UCQ3g6G2USlnq7EgnUsajTBw
Timestamps
[0:53] – Nelson introduces today’s guest, entrepreneur and business guide Jaryd Krause.
[7:19] – Setting income goals. How money provides freedom, and the opportunity to support others.
[16:06] – The decision to ditch the job. How taking himself out of his regular environment led Jaryd to a life-changing epiphany.
[26:35] – Narrowing your focus when starting an online business, and why feedback is the breakfast of champions.
[33:50] – The epiphany that finally allowed Jaryd to break away from his day job and move fully into working online.
[35:12] – Assessing the value of an online business.
[44:48] – The value of building relationships with mentors.
[54:00] – Finding connection when working from home. Making friends, sharing knowledge.
[58:29] – The entrepreneurial mindset–forging your own path to accomplish your audacious goals.
[1:06:58] – Last words and closing thoughts from Nelson and Jaryd.
Transcript
Nelson: Hello, and welcome to the working from home podcast with your host Nelson Jordan. Today I’m so happy to be joined by Jaryd Krause, who has gone from a plumber to owning and buying multiple businesses to finally teaching other people how to buy businesses as well and follow in his own footsteps. This episode is going to be a must lesson for anybody who feels like they’re not doing exactly what they were put on this earth to accomplish right now. Anybody that has been told that they need to follow a specific route and then feels that they were lied to, or misguided. Anybody who wants to know a decent way to find and put their next foot forward in a digital first world.
Jaryd, thank you so much for joining us.
Jaryd: [00:01:35] Thanks so much for having me Nelson, I’ve been looking forward to this since we had our last shot. And yeah, this is going to be fun.
Nelson: [00:01:41] I think we’ve got so much to dive into and for those listening and watching Jaryd and I have had to stop ourselves in the intro because we went into our conversation before this, we were getting into so much that I was like we really need to actually record this.
Jaryd: [00:01:58] Let’s get some of it on here. Exactly.
Nelson: [00:02:00] Exactly. Hopefully we won’t have missed the juicy stuff, but the reason that I think we we’ve been talking so much is that we’ve got a ton in common.
I think that the first of which we kind of struggled to find our paths. And it took us both a while to do that and lots of adventures and misadventures. And I think you’ll your story is one that a lot of people will or resonate with. So, I mean, let’s start at the beginning, but not right at the beginning.
So what’s what was kind of the key period in your youth where you kind of found there’s this multitude of paths in front of you. And you’re realizing which one you should take.
Jaryd: [00:02:45] Yeah through high school I kind of felt like, and I look back and I’ll go to a different way that I explained about how I felt and how I saw things when I was in high school and my levels of actions.
I kind of felt that I had only two options when I was in high school, I could either go get a job as a trainee or go to university and study and then get a job. In terms of, if we’re talking about work that’s what I felt, that they were the options And I went down the track of I’m going to be… I knew somebody in my life that was an accountant, they had a pretty cool car and I had this ego at that age where I wanted a cool car and a good life and some money and all that sort of stuff. And I was like, that’s me. I’m going to be that person, identified myself or part of me within that person. I’m going to go away and do it. And he was an accountant and I started studying hard at math at school and I didn’t do so well. Well, so I got put into – we call it a dumb in math and we, and they called the English one dumb English. And so I was like, okay, cool. It looks like I’m going to be a tradie now.
And so I literally just.went what’s the trainee that earns the most money and the client is okay and that was a Sparky [electrician] or a plumber. And so I was like, okay, cool. I’ll nail this down to these two. And I’ll do work experience with two different people. And so I went and worked with a Sparky who was a guy who lived down the road. He was an older guy. He had a dual the same age as me and he owned his own electrical business. And I went around with him and he had a pretty cool life and all and stuff like that and made decent money. And then I try work experience with a plumber from was a bit younger, a lot more cool, just had a good attitude and I was like, I want to be this guy more than I wanted to be the other guy, not even referencing to job or money or anything like that. And I just went down the route of becoming a plumber because of that.
Nelson: [00:04:59] Sure. I think there’s going to be kind of a running theme throughout the episode, so apologies for any of our listeners that find it super annoying, but I think I’m just going to have to be jumping in and being like, yep. Me too. Yeah, me too. Yeah, me too. Like when I was when I was kind of 16, I really didn’t know what I was doing – 15/16 had no idea. At one point I was genuinely thinking of kind of upping sticks and just going to join the army. I think that kind of discipline and way that they map your life out of appealed to me at the time. But it was more like I was running away from something. It was more like, I didn’t really know what I should do, what I was supposed to do. Had no idea. I didn’t care about school. I’m reasonably bright, kind of you’re a bright person, like nothing that’s going to blow you away within my friendship group, I’d definitely be the dumb one. But I have ridiculous friends. I had lots of friends that ended up going to Cambridge and Oxford and stuff like this. So it was probably, it’s good to be the dumbest person in the room. I love it.
And then what you were saying about English. We had to do a GCSE is in other language and I did French and we were in a group of people that basically couldn’t do French just one table that was segregated from everybody else and we called ourselves the foundation because we were just Foundation level.
There was no growth though, whatsoever.
I wanted to ask about why firstly the accountancy and the level of income was so important to you at that age. Do you have kind of any insight there?
Jaryd: [00:06:59] Yeah, I knew that I didn’t want to be working forever. I knew that I wanted to have money. And I knew that I wanted to be able to have options and thought that money was that. And even I look at it now as is. But money’s options, not just to buy fancy things and luxurious things. It’s really, I’ll look at it as a tool and as a resource and to locate and have asset allocations in different ways it is such a great resource.
And when I was younger, I thought it was a great resource to have because it was gonna make my life awesome. Now I know it’s, it can be used to make other people’s lives awesome as well.
Nelson: [00:07:45] For me, money buys freedom. So I work for myself, I’m a freelance SAAS copywriter. I have the freedom to take on clients that I want to take, and I don’t have to work with people I don’t want to. I don’t have to work on particular days. I can kind of work in my own lifestyle and kind of I’m in charge of my own time. So for me, it was the freedom thing. I’ve never been somebody that wants material possessions in any way, shape or form. Not from a particularly moral standpoint, but literally it just didn’t appeal to me, in the same way that, sorry to everyone, all of like the UK listeners like football doesn’t really appeal to me. I’ll watch it with my mates if we’re down in the pub, but I’m never going out specifically on my own to watch it or anything. So it’s not, again, it’s not a moral standpoint. It’s not like, I think there’s something morally wrong with capitalism, I think I’d struggle to be in the marketing game if I did, I’d be in turmoil all the time.
But so talk me through the first steps then when you decided, okay, maybe a plumber as opposed to electrician might be the way to go.
Jaryd: The first steps of getting the job, or first steps of like working in that job?
Nelson: what appeals to you, or do you want to talk about within that?
Jaryd: [00:09:11] I guess the first… I’ve got a story for you guys then if you want to go down this route. I decided to be a plumber and I went through school, there’s this thing called Group Training Australia, where they would find you work and put you with different plumbers, right? So you get different levels of experience with different plumbers and the plumbers who hire through group training Australia to get workers or apprentices such as me at that time would pay group training Australia. Then group training Australia would pay myself as working as a plumber. Now I was so ready to go with them. I think I was gonna make like $6.50 an hour or something like that and I knew it wasn’t a great amount of money and I just bought into this belief system that everybody told me is like, if you’re you’re an apprentice, you’re gonna make like $200 a week. You’re going to make really the least money, $200-250 a week. That’s going to be it – apprentices make nothing. It’s just the belief system I was pushed into and just grabed a hold because I knew nothing else anyway.
So there was a party that I went to when I was 17. So I was at school still, at 17 I had my driver’s license and I went to a party with one of my friends and it was my friend’s older brother’s 30th birthday party. And we went there a little bit later and everybody was just very, very drunk. And we were in a group of like four or five guys. And there was just one big dude swaying around drinking and it was pretty in a sloppy state and he said, “What do you want to be when you’re older? Like, what do you want to do?” And my friend was saying what he wanted to do and I came to me and I said, I’m going to be a plumber. He said “I’m a plumber. Who are you going to work for?” And I said, “Oh, a group training Australia.” And he said, “ah, nah, you’re not, you’re going to have to come work with me.” And I’m bloody this 17-year-old, very shy guy. And he said, yeah, you come work with me. And how much are they going to pay you at group training? I was like $6.50, $200-250 bucks a week. He said, “no, you come work with me. I’ll give you 600 bucks a week.”
I’m like, this is too good to be true. So I went down that route and he gave me his number. He didn’t answer the phone on the first Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday, because they had RDOs, which are roster days off and then got him on the phone the next day and they said, yeah, come in for two days and do work experience called him up after the two days and said, “Hey, can I have a job?” And the big boss said yes. So I went off and that guy who was at the party who was in sloppy state, such an amazing guy. Like I started, he took me under his wing. He lived down the road from me and what I mean is like just around the corner and I used to drive to his house, we used to drive to work together and he was the site supervisor of this big plumbing firm.
So he took me under his wing and I started learning how to be a supervisor from a very young age, from 17 and by 18 I was sort of half running the job. And that was great that I learnt that, but it also took me it took me down a path that wasn’t ideal for me as well, because it just gave me more responsibility. He taught me how to take responsibility on and be a hard worker, but that was to my detriment as well. Cause that’s how it kind of started.
Nelson: [00:12:36] Yeah that’s fascinating. So what did the next couple of years look like? Did you stick with plumbing for a little while or did you find something else?
Jaryd: [00:12:47] Yeah, I did. I was with that firm for about two years. Well two and a half years and then that firm went bankrupt. And at that stage I was owed about $13,000 through pay that they hadn’t paid. So, my superannuation and stuff like that and redundancy package I didn’t really get, I think I’ve got like $3,000 back, but I got a job at this other firm plumbing firm and when I went to that plumbing firm, after three months of being there and I was thinking, I was a second-year plumber, three months of being there, somebody got kicked off the job. The site supervisor who supervised got kicked off the job and I must’ve been 19. And there was another kid there who was in his first-year apprenticeship. He was 19 as well. And there’s a trade assistant who is apply Brown, who is 40. One of the bosses came up from Melbourne which is like a two-hour flight from where I live and said, you’re going to run this job. This is your home. This is your baby. And it was like a renovation of this this big complex.
And that was the downfall. I thought it was great. Cause I was like, yeah, I’m going to be the boss now. But that was ultimately my downfall. I stayed doing that work on and off for about six or seven years. And just because I took responsibility, I just kept getting more and more and more work and more plumbers to work under me and stuff like that and that caused me to work overwork in terms of hours and then sort of treat my body and my mind quite bad by partying and drinking and trying to numb out because I was just so tired on the weekends. I went down a track that there was one year I can’t remember full weekends of that whole year because all the other weekends I was blackout drunk just due to me and this is my personality. When I try to do it, when I do something, I go loud. So, I went all out at work and I went all out in partying and that led me to want to quit work, travel, come back, quit, work, and travel.
Nelson: [00:14:52] So did you ever kind of hit a breaking point within that where you go right , this isn’t sustainable for the long run? I’m not happy. I’ve got to do something
Jaryd: [00:15:13] The crazy thing is I didn’t hit a breaking point. The revelation of what I was doing to myself came from taking myself out of that environment. So from me going, ah like I really wanted to travel. Like Aussies love to travel. So I just decided, I’m going to save a b bit of money, quit and travel.
And I saved up money, quit, traveled. And I went around the world. I went lived in like five or six different countries and spent over that eight-year timeframe I spent about four years overseas in total and on one of the last trips, what I look back at as one of the last big trips, I was like, do I want to go back to that lifestyle? Do I want to go back to plumbing. What I realized is there was the package which is two packages, plumbing, and the partying. And what I realized is that I wasn’t running away from my job. I was running away from my life and it wasn’t a breaking point. I would have kept doing it, but I was lucky enough to have that insight when I took myself out of that environment, which is something that I try and do now in my work still. And yeah, that’s where the big paradigm shift had happened.
Nelson: [00:16:37] Interesting. So I guess there’s two parts to that. There’s knowing something isn’t right. But then this kind of, okay, well, if it isn’t right, what do I do about it? Like that that’s a massive, massive question. It takes a lot of guts and insight, I say in terms of the courage to be honest with yourself and not just bury your head in the sand. You kind of feel like something isn’t right but you don’t know what else to do and the thought of you having to find a different direction can be incredibly scary.
Jaryd: [00:17:16] Oh yeah. All we have to do is type in online, all your listeners have probably done this, search how to work from home online. It’s just scary. As the internet grows, the number of options grow. So yeah, literally my first thing was I can’t, I don’t want to get back to this. I don’t want my life to be plumbing, or at least I was going to stop partying, even if I kept plumbing, but looking down the line, if I keep plumbing until I’m 50 or 60, I’m going to be that guy on the job site with white hair and pushing burrows of mud – we call it mud for concrete – around this job site with a cigarette hanging out my mouth and drinking red bulls and stuff just to be able to have the energy.
Nelson: [00:18:09] Knees gone, shoulders slumped, skin like leather.
Jaryd: [00:18:16] Yeah, it’s a toxic environment being on the job site, especially around so much testosterone and that.
So I was like, I can go back to plumbing whilst I earn a bit of income through whatever else I do, but I need to work out what am I going to do? And my thought process was what do I love? And at that time, I was living in Egypt. I’d been living in Egypt for about three months. I lived there for about six months, I got my dive license and teaching people to dive and stuff. And I was like, I love traveling, how do I keep traveling? So I thought I need to get online and make money online somehow. I didn’t want to go from place to place and get a job and have to go through the process of getting a job and then packing up and then getting another job and packing up.
So I kind of went through this thing of process of elimination of things that I didn’t want to do in my life, which we were talking about earlier. I didn’t want the plumbing. Didn’t want to have to find a new job every time I went somewhere. I didn’t want to have to go home at one point and start up my own plumbing business. I didn’t want to do that. Didn’t want to be tied to a location. So, I knew I needed to work online somehow, so I could travel. And that’s where I went online. And I literally typed into Google in 2012, how to travel the world and make money online. And that’s where, that’s where things changed.
Nelson: [00:19:37] So one of the things I noticed from your answer there Jaryd, is that the process of elimination is really, really useful.
Obviously, you knew what you didn’t want to do. You didn’t want to go back to plumbing. You didn’t want to go back to partying. For me it was something similar. I went to university only in part because I didn’t know what else to do and it just seemed like all of my friends, well, lots of my friends were doing it. I had quite distinct friend groups, all of the people from my school most of them were going to university. All of the people that I played rugby with almost none of them were going to university. They were tending to go into trades for the most part.
Jaryd: [00:20:14] But isn’t it funny that in Australia is the same thing. We’ve got two different, we’ve got the same options. I call it the funnel of society. I don’t mean to derail you from your answer, but yeah, you’re saying that you’re at university and you were going down the process of elimination yourself.
Nelson: [00:20:34] Yeah, exactly. It was this kind of why, I didn’t know what else to do. At the time I was under the misapprehension that I wasn’t academic, or I wasn’t capable of doing that. What I kind of look back at now and the educational system that I was a part of, which is very strange because I come from a family of teachers and I still didn’t feel like a part of the educational system. My mum was a deputy head teacher. My wife now, who I didn’t obviously know at the time when I was at university, she’s a primary school teacher. My sister is a primary school teacher. My dad, before he got into systems programming, he was a lecturer at a Polytechnic. So, education was in my blood, I suppose. And I still felt out of place, which is strange. So, I went to university actually to study sport with the intention of becoming a PE teacher. It was like two weeks into that university course. I already knew that I didn’t want to be a PE teacher. That’s all I knew at that point. I didn’t know what else I was going to do, but then I graduated years later and I didn’t know what to do. And I had this false kind of idea that in the UK to make a living, you have to move to London. It doesn’t matter, London is the only place where jobs are – obviously completely incorrect. So moved there became a recruitment consultant of all things. Terribly, terribly unforgiving job in terms of hours and incredibly monotonous – can be rewarding to some, if you’re particularly financially driven, but for me creativity and freedom and autonomy as well was really, really important.
I didn’t know this at the time, of course. I only know it kind of looking backwards. But I knew I didn’t want to do that because I was getting mouth ulcers of all things like so stressed for at least after the first couple of months. And I only stayed in that job six months and I should have actually quit after a week, but I had it in my head that you shouldn’t quit, you should stick things out, all of these kinds of things that you’re told over and over again you should quit because they useful in some situations, those stories, in others they’re really destructive.
But yeah, I had these – I don’t want to talk about it too much cause it’s disgusting. But for like three or four months continuously, I had several mouth ulcers rom the stress and I started putting on weight. I was drinking, but, there’s not too much to say, I was a young guy and in London at the time, so that probably would have come even if I was happy.
And then I didn’t know what to do, but at least I knew what I didn’t want. I saw the job, looking back on it after some downtime, not working for a month or two and thinking “What didn’t I like about that?” I didn’t like the strict, you have to make this many calls every day, you should be talking on this script, and the biggest thing for me, which is strange, but I just genuinely didn’t like interrupting people’s day. Like you’re ringing them up and you’re bothering them at work. I was always very, very meek. Didn’t want to go do this.
Jaryd: [00:24:08] Yeah, I’ve got this. I used to do a lot of sales calls and coaching as well. And I have a great reframe around that you’re almost doing people a disservice – If you’ve got a great product and a service, you’re doing them a disservice by not helping them.
Nelson: [00:24:24] Sure. I know. I think that’s more of my mindset now because I think that I do have something of value to give those people.
Jaryd: [00:24:34] Yes. You’ve got more confidence in your thing now.
Nelson: [00:24:36] I didn’t have anything of value to give people
Jaryd: [00:24:39] Yeah that’s the feedback that you got, your body and everything is giving you the feedback. Like I probably shouldn’t be selling this thing.
Nelson: [00:24:49] For sure. Yeah. And for me at that time, I was like, well, what else do I do?
But just kind of summing up my point in there that you get these signals that tell you, at least don’t do this, don’t do this, don’t do this. So even if you don’t necessarily understand what you should be doing unless you narrow down some of your options.
Jaryd: [00:25:14] Yeah I like that. What I like to do in business is get feedback – and this is not just a thing that I teach in business, but it’s also life – that if you get feedback and data points and they’re solid, I don’t like this, or I really liked that, then you start to get all of these dots. And it could be red dots are the ones that you don’t want and you don’t want to link them up to anything, but then you’ve got some solid green dots or black dots and all of these ones are the ones that you do like, right. But by dismissing these ones and making them red over time, when you’ve got so much feedback and so much data, or these black dots or green dots, when you link them up, it paints the picture of what you should be doing. And the direction you should be heading down.
And that’s why I’m big on people. Like you said, signals, right? You can call them so many different things like signs or data points or feedback, or realizations, or whatever it is universal downloads for those people that are in that space, but you get all these things and it helps you paint that picture and it helps make that muddy water clear and you’ll never stop having that until you’re not here anymore. And if you just listen to that and use that as a guide, it’s going to help you. It just takes so much stress away from “Oh, I need to make sure I do the right decision” because you’re never doing the wrong decision, because even if you’re going down a path of what you were doing in work it’s actually ended up being a good thing because you’ve worked out to color that in red and move on and then find another dot to color in. And then all you’re doing is just coloring these different dots. Everything that you do. It’s not a waste of time. It’s not in the way it’s on the way.
Nelson: [00:27:13] That’s a really good way of reframing I think.
So once you’d had these signals and you understood, okay well maybe the online space has something to offer and you Googled this, what was your first kind of activity or your first kind of venture?
Jaryd: [00:27:29] Yeah. It was a lot of things you can do to make money online. It’s quite overwhelming. It’s the same as people that are listening to this, like yeah, there’s this “the world really is your oyster”.
What I found was I did a process of elimination again from the Google search and I was like, all right, what do I like? And I actually got some signals or some signs from a person that I was living with at the time in Egypt and it linked up these two points of feedback, which is why I went down this route before I did this search on Google and trying to find what sort of work I was doing. Somebody said, “Hey I bought a really fancy camera.” I was doing a lot of travel blogging and stuff, oh not travel blogging sorry, I was taking photos. This is before travel blogging. I get to that. I was taking a bunch of photos and one of the guys were like “actually you’re doing okay. This is a pretty good, you should start a blog.” I’m like, nah, I don’t want to be on the internet. I don’t want my face on the internet. I don’t want to put any of me on the internet. Very different story now. But that was like, okay, cool I got a sign there from the universe. And then I saw that people were making money from travel blogging. I’m like, I want to travel, I’m taking photos, maybe if I learned to write, maybe I could do that.
So I just went all right, cool. I’m going all in. I’m going to become a travel blogger. And that’s what I did. I became a travel blogger and started traveling, blogging about all the places that I’ve been in, around 30 countries at this time. So I just went back and wrote up a bunch of stories that I already had and started this travel blogging route.
And that’s where the online world really opened up because then I could start to see what I liked about the online world and do I want to do this business or that business? Yes or no. And how do I want to market, organic SEO, paid product services. What do I want? And that’s that opened up the door.
That was the next step I went down, travel blogging.
Nelson: [00:29:27] So why not now travel blogger?
Jaryd: [00:29:28] Now that’s a good question. I’m not a travel blogger now because the market is so, so saturated and pretty soon into it, everybody with an iPhone was my competition. And so I had great photos and all that sort of stuff, but as soon as everybody in the rest of the world started traveling with an iPhone I’m gone and their stories are there. It’s just so saturated. And there wasn’t much money in the affiliate marketing space of either. So I quickly thought I need to start working out how I can make money either in a different business online.
Nelson: [00:30:02] Yeah. Did you try kind of a different a couple of things or was the one in particular that stood out to you?
Jaryd: [00:30:10] I wanted to make money online with a product, right? I wanted to sell products online. I thought cool products are making a decent way, you can sell some pretty decent products and make a decent profit margin from that. There was a caveat is that I didn’t want to have to be tied to a location, so I didn’t want to have to sell my own products. So drop shipping was a big thing at the time and I set up my own drop shipping business. Which was great, but I had no idea how to do paid ads or any marketing for that matter. I just knew how to write and do some SEO work, which I did, but I didn’t really make much money from that because I knew how to start the thing, I didn’t know how to really get it off the ground with paid ads, how to scale, that became a touchy point that I needed to go away and master
Nelson: [00:30:59] So did you master it? Did you decide to sit down and learn those skills? Or did you think, well, actually my energy is better spent somewhere else, maybe I’ll either avoid this for now or hire somebody else to do it?
Jaryd: [00:31:16] Yeah. I bypassed it and I avoided it. Okay later down the track I’ve made a decent amount of money through paid ads because that was a necessity of what I wanted to do and what I wanted to achieve. So what I did instead is I was making a little bit of money from my travel blog still, and I was making a little bit of money through my drop shipping store and at the time I was traveling and trying going back to my plumbing job and making a bit of money. And the more I traveled. And then also the more I came home, the more that fueled the fire of like, I’ve got to get out of this, I’ve got to get out of this work life routine in Australia.
And I came across a stat or a quote that 90% of startups fail. And that’s when I was like, hang on a second. If 90% of startups fail and I know how to run businesses online. Why don’t I go and buy a business that’s already past that 90% failure and has a proven track record, and it’s pretty making money, all I then do is buy it and manage it and that’s where I jumped on Google and I taught myself how to buy businesses and I bought one and then another, and that’s where the next part of the journey began.
Nelson: [00:32:26] Fantastic. So, within those businesses though, I bet that’s scary. I’ve bought a business, I’ve sold a business, and that was a drop shipping business within the fashion industry. I built my own business within the yoga industry with our own products, I kind of manufactured everything in China and then transported to the UK and sold through Amazon. So I’m pretty familiar with that sort of thing.
One of the things that I’d like to talk about is. If you make that decision to buy a business, that’s quite scary. Like you have to do your due diligence really. So, could you talk a little bit about that? The kind of framework that you’ve used or you’ve developed over the time, like the things that you consider most important.
Jaryd: [00:33:12] Yeah, it was quite scary. I had saved up money in another investment account and it was… I’d like to say at the time it was a calculated risk. It was as calculated as it could be for the first business and ended up being a decent business and I made some good money from it. The first business I bought, I didn’t have any help. I was actually too scared to put my hand out and ask for help and on top of that, I tried to find help myself online. There weren’t too many people teaching this stuff. Still isn’t. And so that’s when I bought one, it went really well. It was like, I need to work out how I can buy a better one and this one was a bit bigger. So I was like, I need to get better at due diligence.
So, I got my dad to have a look at my due diligence and then I started to work out that framework, which now I have, I have a framework like I have a bought multiple businesses and all of my clients go through this framework. In fact, I’ll give it away for free if people want to check it out. But in that framework, it goes through a few different things. It goes through checking out financial due diligence, checking out the organic traffic, things like SEO and all that sort of stuff. Checking out the marketing due diligence, SEO is underlying the traffic and all that sort of stuff. Making sure that’s good. And then checking out the competition, doing some competition research and then also asking the seller a certain set of questions. So seller due diligence as well. And they’re the main things within that framework and ask questions based off those main hubs and if you follow that process, it really takes the guesswork out of what questions do I need to ask again about a business and if it’s good.
Nelson: [00:34:54] Interesting. I think it’s also down to your personal skillset, the sort of businesses that you want to run. It’s about your knowledge, it’s about your experience base. So for me, one of the most important things when I purchased a business was that they had good organic traffic because organic traffic is really a better signal, I think – and I can say this having been in both SEO and paid ads for a long time before I found copywriting – like SEO for me is a strongest signal of a good business in terms of people are searching for what you’re selling. And you’re doing well within the competition, because if I’m just being real for a second you can buy traffic unprofitably, you can buy traffic and you can generate sales. and it’s quite easy to do it and breakeven if you’ve got semi-decent products that are average. You can breakeven, or maybe even make a slight profit by doing those and I think there’s a lot of businesses available, particularly in the e-commerce realm, that do that kind of skew their numbers very heavily with paid traffic. So I found SEO was a better indicator or a stronger indicator. Not always true, but that’s what I looked for. The fact that you could turn off paid traffic and still have people finding your services and buying your purchases. I found that kind of reassuring even if Facebook hikes their cost per clicks or something so that it just costs you more to get a customer, you’re still at least getting one channel of customers routinely.
Jaryd: [00:36:48] I totally agree. If you look at it, doesn’t have to just be SEO traffic, but the one that can be within SEO within YouTube SEO, within a podcast, algorithm, SEO within anything the way I look at it. And you’re just spot on is that when you’re building a business, you can do two routes or a combination of both.
You’ve got e-commerce businesses that will justify traffic and sell a bunch of products and that’s what they really want to do as a startup. Then you got other businesses that are like, I want to be in business forever. And I want to build a good relationship with those people that are having these struggles so I can ensure I can gain their trust and help them along the way, even if they don’t end up purchasing my products or services.
And so with SEO, you’re building a brand. You’re able to build a brand and you can do some real content marketing through that. Whereas with e-commerce you can have a great e-commerce business and not have any brand behind it or big trust levels, and you can just fuel ads into it and just push people in like cattle and take that dollars and sell average and mediocre products. And there’s a big difference between two businesses. That one that you’re just fielding traffic into is more risky business. And you went away and bought a more stable business that has organic traffic, that has a brand and a relationship with real people, that way you could have that trust. And the way I like to look at is, you can have a brand and a relationship, or you can just have a business that just makes a bunch of money that hasn’t got a reputation.
Nelson: [00:38:30] Sure. So there’s a couple of points there. Like it’s interesting to see the similarities and differences between the software world. So those two different types of businesses exist as well in software, in e-commerce. It’s not necessarily about the fact that the first people, people that need sales now, they’re not any less likely to want to build a lasting business, but they are more likely to want to generate a good level of users and growth because it impacts and runs on the board. Yeah, exactly so from a software perspective, they need people to use their product so they have those data points, so they can make a better product. They also need those people there from a growth perspective, because it impacts their valuations or impacts – And I’m talking about kind of VC funded here, like venture capital funded here – it impacts the valuations, the amount of money they’re going to be able to raise, it impacts a lot of things.
So the differences exist there, but it’s not because they just want to be like one and done, which is true of some e-commerce. I feel like on average the drop shipping model is more guilty of that, wanting to be kind of one and done attract a customer for a paid ad, make a little bit of profit. And then you don’t mind if you never hear from that customer again.
Jaryd: [00:40:02] Yeah, it is because you’re selling other people’s products and you can build a brand as a drop shipper still and sell other people’s products but you’re still at the mercy of building a brand around products where other people control those products. So there’s more risk involved.
Nelson: [00:40:24] They control quality. They control delivery a lot of the time.
Jaryd: [00:40:30] The two biggest things that our business should really have control over .
Nelson: [00:40:34] It’s really difficult. You could end up, as we did, being you start with one supplier and you build what you think is a really good relationship with them. And then you end up a few months later something happens and then you no longer can rely on the person to deliver the thing that they said and you basically don’t have a business at that point, you have a list of people that have bought from you in the past, which you think is great, but you have no way of actually producing those products anymore.
Jaryd: [00:41:11] Yeah. I just sold a drop shipping business this year. The relationship with the supplier, there was zero respect on his side. As much as I tried to make it great. The purchaser of the business wasn’t going to continue using the supplier and he’s okay with that. And it’s moved on with other suppliers and had that value add themselves. And it was a great win because I was like, I don’t need I didn’t sell the business to make money. I sold it to just get rid of that energy and close that chapter and door there and it ended up a win-win for everyone, except for obviously that person who’s the supplier, who to get a win needs to get his stuff gets sorted out.
Nelson: [00:41:53] No, that makes complete sense.
One of the things that I’ve kind of picked up for through our conversation is, and this is a little bit off that last topic, but something that’s been on my mind – so it’s my podcast, we’re going to go there..
When you first started plumbing, you used the words like this guy took me under his wing, and that was a vast acceleration in terms of your knowledge adoption, the amount you learn I think when you do have somebody who’s kind of a mentor or a father figure or whatever you end up calling this thing.
And then you mentioned it again, when you talked about the online business, the fact that the wasn’t really somebody in that role that could kind of facilitate your learning, could kind of steer you a little bit, say, okay, I don’t think you’re right here, or you need to prioritize this or have you considered that.
I kind of feel like that’s what’s led your path to what you’re doing now. So you’re actually becoming that person kind of going full circle, becoming that person to other people. Can you, can you say more about that?
Jaryd: [00:43:08] Yeah, for sure. I did get some snippets of help from people along the way, and I don’t want to discount them I’m truly grateful for those bits of knowledge and insight and to get along the way so thank you and I’m grateful for that to those people.
But yeah, you’re right I have started to fulfill that role, I guess. I’ve been doing it for a number of years, but it came about in, not me saying I want to teach people and I want to be the mentor and I want to take people under my wing. That’s why I want to do that now and I love it it’s very fulfilling for me, but it came through other people asking you for it. So not me going out and trying to find product market fit, but other people going, Hey! When you travel, if you’re not working and you don’t have to go home from work or you don’t have to have a job, but where you’re living on staying or whatever people are naturally curious as travellers, how the hell do you keep traveling and not at work type thing. And then a lot of people that travel don’t want to work as well and they want to make money online and that’s where that, that sort of came from. I ended up I got invited to a business retreat and there’s people talking there and they’re like sitting or gathering around we’re all talking about buying online businesses. And this is just after I bought my third business and everyone was like, we don’t want to start a business anymore, can you just teach us to buy one? And that’s how it evolved into that. And then I really got a lot of pleasure in ensuring people didn’t get ripped off as well buying a business, there’s a lot of risk in buying a business and I just want to make sure nobody gets taken advantage of and people can buy great businesses. Yeah, so that’s how it evolved in that aspect, but you’re right I definitely take people under their wing under my wing and not to put me on a pedestal or anything it’s just that I’ve gotten a bit of experience through that and I like to do that and it’s a win for us, both.
Nelson: [00:45:28] I mean, one of the great things about the internet – and there are a lot of negatives – one of the great things though is that it’s so much easier to connect with those people before we’d be limited to. It depends on how far you want to go back. Like the people that you knew when you all kind of direct face to face network through friends and family and if you didn’t have those contacts, like I didn’t have anybody growing up who was involved in business in that way in terms of… I might add, as I said my dad was a lecturer and then he became kind of a computer programmer My mom was a teacher. like I really didn’t think about business at all, I wasn’t the entrepreneurial kid who had his lemonade stand or sold people sweets at school or whatever, that wasn’t me. But I found now the acceleration that you can have in your career is incredible. Like the fact that you can go from, in some categories for sure, I’m not gonna say you can do it for everything and you can’t accelerate your track from not knowing anything to becoming a doctor or a lawyer or anything like that. But in terms of understanding the world that business, particularly online business, so many kind of resources out there now comparatively , you have these communities of people that, some of them free, some of them paid, where you can just rapidly grow your knowledge because you can literally just ask the question, anything you’re struggling with you, you just ask the question and somebody will help you or put you in the right direction at the very least. Whereas before you had to actually struggle through the thing yourself, and a lot of cases if you didn’t have those relationships…
Jaryd: [00:47:25] Yeah, you’re right. It really comes down to access. So forever and a day, you’ve either been able to go off and do something you’re on your own and learn from your own mistakes. Or even back in the day, you could hire a not hire a mentor, but you could have a mentor either in a job role or anything like that and you could learn from their mistakes and you could sow the seed. You’re learning through their theory of knowledge and their experience as well and we were only able to access those people within our circle of influence. But now that we’re online, our circle of influences is infinite and there’s so many people out there that are like, “I have learned this and I would love to help you” ever since it’s probably Russell Brunson, who’s a big contributing factor to this as like, “if you know something you’ve got a business and you can teach people that”. I definitely grabbed a hold of that and I know so many people have and that access to be able to learn from somebody else’s lessons and families and experiences has really opened up and it’s so great for people wanting to learn quickly and do great things and build the world. What I love about it most Nelson is that when you connect with these people that you may have them on a pedestal or whatever and you’re learning from their lessons and for the mayor experience the thing that’s more valuable that I find is not just learning from them, but it’s the relationship you can build with them. I find relationships far more valuable than any business transaction, even purchasing a business or anything like that is I feel like relationships are the real value and it doesn’t need to be just a monetary value – that can sound a bit sleazy, but the real value can come from what happens from that relationship you build with that person. It doesn’t need to be in the first year. It could be in 10 years down the track where you both do something together or you don’t. But that’s what I think is super exciting about the access to one another.
Nelson: [00:49:37] Yeah. I mean, for me this is a large part of why I started the podcast because I’ve got these disparate communities through the paths online and I kind of want to bring them together under one umbrella to help each other, from a selfish level, these podcasts give me like a great reason to talk to interesting people like yourself, but also working from home can be incredibly lonely.
You can think about things in other ways than financial. You are able to kind of pull in those relationships and make friends. I don’t want to sound like I’m playground or anything, but you can make friends, you can kind of get those people involved, you can learn from them. You can have successful business relationships with them as long as you’re not trying to go into this in a transactional kind of frame of mind, you’ll be fine. People will be willing to help you as long as you’re the sort of person that will help other people as well. Pass on that knowledge once they’ve taught you.
Jaryd: [00:50:49] Yeah it’s only, I find that being an entrepreneurial working from home is only as lonely as you’d wish it, as you let it be. Right. I’ve got business partners that I’m such good friends with that we just we love each other. We have so much fun right. We don’t meet up a lot, but we have so much fun. And then people that I speak to on my podcast, we’ve done great things like competitions and work together and stuff like that. And there’s so many ways to make friends even just by you talking to people about what you do. If you meet somebody at a party or something, like I meet people out in the surf all the time, like out the front of my house, where I go surfing
Nelson: [00:51:40] You couldn’t sound any more Australian if you try to, you’re just feeding into all of the wonderful stereotypes. So, sorry. No, I apologize. I’m only speaking from a very jealous point of view.
Jaryd: [00:51:56] Okay and it may not be, but the people that people that I have met from being in the water, like I’ve actually went and had breakfast and met somebody who creates apps and stuff like that, just by you sharing what you do you can make friends and yeah, what we want you to do with your podcast is you show what you do and you can make friends through it. Like it can be really, really fun and far from lonely if, if you don’t wish it to be.
Nelson: [00:52:26] I, I think it’s just fantastic. I think it’s more visible in certain communities than others. Like within copywriting, I’ve been surprised how compared to something like digital advertising which don’t get me wrong, there are great people that are prepared to share that knowledge and actually put in a lot of time within there as well, but on kind of a per capita basis per person, I think with copywriting there seems to be more people that are willing to go out of the way and share their knowledge and interact with people. Maybe this is just a bias with me in terms of the people that I’ve interacted with, but on the large that’s what I’m finding so far and like to give a shout out to those people it’s people like Jacob McMillon, it’s Tyler Koenig, it’s Dyanna Mayfield, it’s Lisa Dobson. It’s Michael Keenan, John Bonini. Eddie Shleyner.
All of these guys out there are prepared to… All of these people are kind of prepared to give up their time to build something, to give a lot of knowledge away for free. A lot of them also are selling something on the other side so it’s not just this, but with those people as well, that I mentioned you get the sense that they do it, even if they couldn’t make money from it, in terms of distilling that knowledge.
Jaryd: [00:53:50] Yeah, good on all those people you listed, they sound like amazing people and good on them, we need more people that are like that and it sounds like they really get it. They really understand that a relationship doesn’t need to be transactional. Like then by them giving and all the referring, all that sort of stuff you mentioned earlier off air, but they get that down the track it only makes you, Nelson, think I want to do good things for them, I want to help them, and it just fuels all the good use or energy or whatever comes to them. They get that it’s gonna come back to them and they’re probably not doing it for that reason. They’re probably okay with it not, but they get that the relationship is so much more valuable than the transaction.
This is what I find. Anyway, I’m looking at this at a glance. I don’t know these people obviously, but I think that they they’re at that level that they’re there, which is great.
Nelson: [00:54:51] Definitely. Running a little bit short on time, so I just want to talk about one last thing that I think is most important and I think it was the similarity between you and I think this mindset. So there’s this mindset there that’s quite visible when you talk in terms of the stories that just because you didn’t know something didn’t mean that you weren’t going to stay in that state, you found like you were able to question the status quo, you thought you had these two options in front of you and in the end although it was 10/15 years later, you ended up not taking either of them. You kind of forged your own path, you looked outside of what was in front of you. So that kind of mindset, it has a lot of different words and framing, but kind of growth mindset over the other term, solid state or unchanging or whatever it is. Is that something that you feel people can cultivate, that they can grow themselves? Can you switch from one person, one type of person to another?
Jaryd: [00:55:58] Short answer is yes, certainly. If you look at the end, let’s not give this any context at all. Not that I love Tony Robbins, he’s great he’s done awesome things, I’m not the biggest follower of him, but I know there’s one great thing that he does say and I forget who he said that too, but he says, this Tony Robbins guy, “I built this mofo. I built this person.” And I’m paraphrasing, sorry Tony I’ve probably butchered that, but just the lessons within what you’ve said is amazing. I truly believe in all the understanding that yes, you can learn to have a different mindset and have a different level of thinking and cultivate curiosity and questioning and never just buy into belief systems.
I have, as you can see, we talked about it before I bought in the belief system yeah, just $250 bucks a week that’s fine too cool. That’s just what I deserve 200 or 200 miles away. That’s very different now. Because I put up different levels of filters and lenses and different parameters of thinking and mental models around that and one of those is just questioning everything. Like I actually really enjoy sometimes, not that I want to say it’s pessimistic, but sometimes I like to just prove things wrong like old myths and wives tales and things. If somebody’s energy doesn’t feel good to me or things that they’ve said, I like to prove them wrong, not to prove them wrong for the sake of proofing them and say, ha ha right. But to prove them wrong in my own mind and my own thinking to say, is that right for me? Does that sit with me? Yes or no. And even to the point that I might hear a billionaire say something and it might be around working hard and lots of hours and things like that and I can question myself “Is that right? And is that true to me? And do I believe that is right for everybody?” And there’s a lot that you say, you’re very similar, right?
Nelson: [00:58:24] I mean, not that contrarian view is something I’ve tried to cultivate. It’s something that goes from at the beginning I’ve gotta be honest. It didn’t come from an intellectual level, it came from a gut level. Like, yeah, but is it though? And I’ve always had an element of that in me and I found it growing as I’ve gotten older, I always had something inside. Like a teacher would say something and I would be like, well, this is probably why I didn’t get on at school when we were there, it’s changed a lot these days but a lot of those days was kind of more like rote learning. We’re telling you this, you accept it. You learn how to put it into place. But sometimes I found that I couldn’t move past that because I would think that doesn’t seem right and I remember thinking the same at university when I was taught certain social theory. I think it was around how people use their bodies based on a class system. And it was something about how the upper class used their bodies in terms of leisure pursuits and things. There was just something about it that just didn’t gel to me. I ended up telling the lecturer and hopefully polite terms, but maybe not given that I was younger, but that they were wrong and they could see that they were wrong if they just went out into the world and looked at people, if they took their evidence not from this long-standing theory, which may or may not have been true when it was written, but certainly seemed to me, at least at the time, that it wasn’t true. If you just went out and looked at what was actually going on now.
I think that kind of ability to be okay not accepting what you’re told, not necessarily saying it, there’s a lot of things that people say now that I don’t come out and contradict, but I don’t internalize them either, I don’t say “yeah, that’s right, I believe that” I say. “Okay, that doesn’t feel right to me because of this, this and this.” I’m more intellectual about it now, I’m more considered about it now, for sure. .
Jaryd: [01:00:55] I have heard people and do this as somebody will say something and they’ll just be like, I don’t believe that. I think it’s better in that instance in my opinion, my own opinion, is to save face rather than create an argument and form some sort of this taste in the relationship. I think a lot of ideas came to me as you were talking about lessons that you may get taught from your teacher and you ought to accept it. I like to think about it yeah. I usually think about is that true for me? And would that work for me? And then, so I put myself in my pair of shoes, but then I also like to put myself in the giver’s pair of shoes of what they’ve said, how they said that and why they said that. And that could be, if I know that person, it could be based on their background or it could be based on their experiences, or maybe it is just based off their lack of education and knowledge around the thing. Then I also like to put it in other people’s shoes. Let’s say I’m sitting around the campfire, put it into other people’s shoes and what are their filters and how do they interpret that? And then get more of a consensus around that audiology or that teaching and think about it in multiple different ways. So if I look up at the fan, I’m looking at it spinning one way and then I go, well maybe if I go up above the fan, I look at it at spinning a different way, or seeing things from a different angle. So that helps us it helps as well I think the curiosity and the questioning and in questioning everything is healthy. So, I guess, healthy to a certain extent where you don’t get into a bit of a mind fart around it.
Nelson: [01:02:53] Well, I would love to leave a podcast with your last words being mind fart. I think that’s what I’m going to do because it makes me giggle. So, Jaryd, thank you so, so much for joining us.
I think I could talk to you for hours and probably will on several occasions, but where can people find out more about you and your story?
Jaryd: [01:03:18] Yeah, thanks so much for having me. It’s been an absolute pleasure. I love going down these tangents and express what’s in my head. Even though sometimes it may not make sense. Thanks everybody who did listen as well, really appreciate your time. And yeah, if you want to find out more about me, you can just go to my website. It’s buyingonlinebusinesses.com.
Nelson: [01:03:39] Fantastic. Well, that’s nice and simple and easy to remember. The links as well will be in the show notes and the transcripts.
Thank you everyone for joining us Jaryd, everyone that’s listening, everyone that’s watching along on YouTube as well. And we’ll speak to you soon.
Jaryd: [01:03:53] Thanks so much, Nelson.
Nelson: [01:03:56] And that’s it for today. You’ve been listening to the working from home podcast with me, Nelson Jordan. We’ve been talking about the good, the bad and the ugly side of remote work.