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How to Find The Right Business and Make Sure It’s a Good Investment

Chris Yates is the Co-owner and COO of Centurica, a due diligence services firm that helps e-commerce entrepreneurs avoid scams, fraud, and unreliable information when purchasing an online business, website, or Amazon FBA account. He is also the Co-owner and CEO of Rhodium Weekend and the Co-founder and Managing Member of Vision Group Management, LLC.

Throughout his career, Chris has built hundreds of websites, generated millions of dollars in sales, and successfully created, scaled, and sold multiple businesses. He has also been an advisor on more than $50 million in online business acquisitions and exits.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

[2:05] Chris Yates talks about his work at Centurica
[4:36] Chris’ top strategies for mitigating and diversifying risk when buying a content site
[9:17] Are there still substantial algorithm updates for online businesses?
[14:04] Common risks associated with Amazon FBA businesses — and some tools to help you avoid them
[20:50] How Chris and his team are revolutionizing online business listings with Centurica’s MarketWatch
[27:17] Joe Valley and Chris share their insights into the current growth of the e-commerce industry

In this episode…

Do you want to know exactly what you’re getting yourself into when purchasing an online business? Are you looking for advice and tools to help you identify — and avoid — risky deals?

It’s difficult to evade unnecessary risks when buying a business, especially as a new entrepreneur. You want to acquire a solid, profitable business — but how can you do so without hard-won experience under your belt to instruct you every step of the way? That’s why Chris Yates is here today: to share his own accumulated wisdom about online businesses and help you identify common red flags to prevent a disastrous sale.

In this episode of the Quiet Light Podcast, Joe Valley sits down with Chris Yates, the Co-owner and COO of Centurica, to discuss the best-kept secrets for buying an online business. Listen in as Chris talks about his tips and tricks for diversifying risk, what to avoid when buying an Amazon FBA business, and how Centurica’s MarketWatch tool is changing the game for buyers and sellers across the globe. Stay tuned!

Resources Mentioned in this episode

Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is brought to you by Quiet Light, a brokerage firm that wants to help you successfully sell your online business.

There is no wrong reason for selling your business. However, there is a right time and a right way. The team of leading entrepreneurs at Quiet Light wants to help you discover the right time and strategy for selling your business. By providing trustworthy advice, effective strategies, and honest valuations, your Quiet Light advisor isn’t your every-day broker—they’re your partner and friend through every phase of the exit planning process.

If you’re new to the prospect of buying and selling, Quiet Light is here to support you. Their plethora of top-notch resources will provide everything you need to know about when and how to buy or sell an online business. Quiet Light offers high-quality videos, articles, podcasts, and guides to help you make the best decision for your online business.

Not sure what your business is really worth? No worries. Quiet Light offers a free valuation and marketplace-ready assessment on their website. That’s right—this quick, easy, and free valuation has no strings attached. Knowing the true value of your business has never been easier!

What are you waiting for? Quiet Light is offering the best experience, strategies, and advice to make your exit successful. To learn more, go to quietlight.com, email [email protected], or call 800.746.5034 today.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:07

Hi, folks, it’s the Quiet Light Podcast where we share relentlessly honest insights, actionable tips, and entrepreneurial stories that will help founders identify and reach their goals.

Joe Valley 0:29

Hey folks, Joe Valley here. Welcome to another episode of the Quiet Light Podcast. Today’s guest is a very special one. He’s actually the original guest. He’s the Oh gee, I guess that is Oh, gee, right, original guest. And I was reminiscing about when it was like to fall of 2017 or 18. I can’t remember. It’s it’s an indication of too much going on in my life. I bet you can’t remember either, can you Chris, not atop my head. All right, so he’s got too much going on too good problems to have folks. It’s Chris Yates from Centurica Centurica is a due diligence firm that helps buyers not make epic mistakes, and also helps buyers find the right business. And we’re going to talk about both of their services there. But more importantly, Chris is just going to educate you on what you can do on your own. If you’re buying a business and are going to go that due diligence route on your own or if you’re buying the business on if you’re on the hunt for for buying a business and what MarketWatch can do. Chris, welcome again to the Quiet Light Podcast. Yeah, Joe, thanks for having me back on appreciate it. I think your services are probably one of the top two or three services that I refer people out to it’s usually you know, an e commerce bookkeeper, a contract attorney, and Centurica for buyers doing due diligence. And we’ve always been an advocate of strong due diligence on the back end, even though we’re on the sell side. So I think what you’re doing over there, fantastic. But I’m sure I didn’t get the intro Exactly. Right. Can you give an overview of what you guys do over there at Centurica and MarketWatch more specifically?

Chris Yates 2:04

Yeah, sure. So Centurica, is a due diligence firm as you as you mentioned, and what that means, the way that I’ve kind of been describing a little bit lately is, if you think of a Venn diagram, with one circle being you know, the accountant, right, who goes in and checks all the numbers and make sure that they’re good to go. And then on the other side of the Venn diagram, you have this, like a marketing agency who you might hire to look at how well is this business performing? What are risks to the traffic or the sales channels and things like that, you know, we sort of fill both of those Venn diagrams, and we’re really good at the middle of those two. We also layer on sort of what I think of as a third circle, which is the owners mindset. So both myself and my business partner, Brian, have many, many years of experience with e commerce businesses with acquired acquisitions ourselves through our own portfolios and investments that we do. So we’re always looking at every deal like hey, what would I want to know what risk would I want to know about this deal, if it was me buying it. And so that’s kind of the mindset we go in with with all of these, but ensure we verify the income, the expenses, and we look for any issues with that, you know, poor performing KPIs, poor performing trends. And then we look at the the traffic and the sales and channels to see if there’s any performance issues, policy violations, anything like that, basically, we were real heavy, making sure that you go in with your eyes open on it on the deal that you’re considering acquiring.

Joe Valley 3:34

Let’s talk about one of my epic failures for a moment, I sold my business requite light back in the fall of 2010. It was a brilliant site, lots of really great whitehat organic traffic. And then I went around a turn around and bought one in the spring of 2012. And I think it had maybe six keywords on page one, and then nothing else. And I had it for 42 days, and then the Penguin update hit and it got crushed, and everything fell off page one, I lost about $280,000 in the period of six months. If we were having a beer sitting across the table, and I was not hiring you for your services, what would you tell me to do? Other than smack me upside the head? Did you tell me to do until look at in this particular case, Chris, it was a content site. Are there any things that anybody that’s buying a content site must look at to make, you know, educated decision?

Chris Yates 4:33

Yeah, so content sites are really interesting one to start with. So I’m kind of glad you started there. And for a few reasons, and the way I think about risk with the with a content site specifically is you have to look at the macro risk. So what’s happening with the the type of industry that this site is talking about? First off, so is this a trendy industry? Is it something that is growing and increasing in terms of awareness or whatever? Or is this a fad that’s kind of coming and going, you know, things like that. So you have to start sort of with the macro environment, are people looking for this online? How is that changing over time? You know, is this something that will be here today and won’t be here in five years or something like that. And then we look at the business model risk. So content sites in general, if you look at them, and generally, for buyers, I would say, make sure that you’re really comfortable with whatever the business model risk is, before you start even thinking about what are the risks of this specific business. And so by business model risk, I mean, with a content site, the nature of these things is that you typically can’t pay for traffic to content sites, because you make your money through advertising. And there are ways to do arbitrage, with paid traffic and things like that. But that’s very, very advanced, and not always very sustainable. But most of these sites, you know, they’re generally driven by some sort of free traffic. And we all know, the biggest sources of free traffic are going to be Google SEO, maybe some social media, like Pinterest, or Facebook or something like that. So due to the nature of this business model, you can, you have to go get free traffic. And the other nature of this business model is that typically, what you’re doing with that traffic, when it comes to your website, is you’re sending them right off of your website to go somewhere else. And that’s either through display advertising, or through affiliates, right. So the whole business model is built around getting free traffic and then sending them off your website. So what happens when the free traffic goes away? Now you have really nothing left, essentially, because as soon as the new visitors stopped coming, you’re no longer making revenue, it’s all driven by that new visitor. So your job is to really understand that that’s just the nature of content sites, and you have to be able to sleep well at night knowing that that is a reality. And so for a buyer like yourself, you know, if let’s say that you had 250 grand to put into a content site, right. And you were going to go buy a single content site that was fully driven by Google SEO, my recommendation generally, would be not to do that. Because I would say you should have at least maybe five sites, because if there is an algorithm update, like you experienced, if you do it, right, some of your sites will go down, some will actually benefit from those updates, and some will stay the same. So you get a little bit of that portfolio effect. Now we can get into specifics after the business model piece. But I want to see a joke. You have any follow ups on that?

Joe Valley 7:29

Yeah, well, how do you how do you get to five without buying one first, right, you can’t get a portfolio five without making that first purchase, how you get there.

Chris Yates 7:38

So what I think what I’m the point I’m trying to make here is that you have to understand that one site is not, is not. It’s like having a one legged stool, right? And, and so you have to start somewhere agreed, you can start by, if you had 250, grand, you could split that up and across four or five deals and do it over, you know, say, six to 12 months. So you’re gonna have that period of time, when you hit where you are on a one legged stool as a result of that. Now, could you go find a portfolio of sites that maybe have a few in it that are a little bit diversified that does exist, it does come up on the market every once in a while. But the more specific you get about your criteria, the longer it’s going to take for you to find a deal. So it is a bit of a trade off from that perspective. But yeah, you got to start somewhere. And that’s where we get into like the very specific due diligence that you can do on that first deal that you do, and layering on somebody who really knows SEO, who knows these types of sites well as either an advisor or a partner in the deal with you. So that you go in with, you know, again, with your eyes open.

Joe Valley 8:42

Yet, what we’re talking about really is channel risk when it comes to having five content sites versus one. So when we talk about channel risk on the podcast, audience listeners, we’re not just talking about Amazon or Ebay or your Shopify store, we’re talking about maybe one SAS customer that’s generating, you know, 500 subscribers a month, you know, cooperation with all their employees, or in this case, you know, one content site. So diversifying channel risk would be going from one to five, from one to 10, so on and so forth. It’s, you know, the lower the risk, the higher the value of that business is generally how it works. You mentioned algo, algo, updates or algorithm updates. I guess I did, because I mentioned the Penguin update. It feels like Google is smart enough now and has been around long enough that it’s much much harder to cheat. Are there still substantial algorithm updates, like the penguin and panda updates back in the day that were really crushing people that cheated? Or is it just simply harder to rank? or neither? Yeah, there

Chris Yates 9:43

was a recent one, actually. So the short answer is yes, they still get rolled out regularly. And again, I think it’s just the nature of the beast, I think over a long enough time frame those who are, you know, just focusing as Google would want them to do on on Really good content and good user experience, things like that will ultimately win out over time. But that there is a huge incentive for people who can game the system to be able to make that short term money flip those sites to somebody who’s unsuspecting. And you know, they buy them, then they they sort of suffer suffer the results of the future updates and things like that. So that is kind of I think the just the nature of the beast of these types of sites is that there’s a whole really savvy group of people who know how to, you know, kind of manipulate things. But I mean, just as an example, there was a relatively recent Google algorithm algorithm update, that crushed a bunch of review sites that kind of did like the best of x, you know, the best, the best mops for 2021, or something like that, right? Those types of sites where it was just kind of an aggregation of a bunch of lists of the best products, those sites got crushed, basically, and there, and you’ll see those types of sites popping up on, especially on some of the marketplaces and sellside representatives who focus more on content sites, you’ll see a lot of those types of sites popping up. And those are some of the ones that really, really got crushed recently, so still happens. And I think there’s one I’m not sure where it’s at right now. But the latest one is relating to site speed and user experience, we’re expecting, you know, something pretty substantial coming out there. So yeah, this stuff’s this stuff’s it’s a constantly evolving space. And you have to, like my opinion, is you just you have to understand this is the business model. And like, you have to learn to love that you have to learn to, you know, kind of take your own spin on this and either like realize that, hey, I’m always gonna be gaming the system, or Hey, eventually, I’m gonna win out over time, or somewhere in the middle, right? Like everybody kind of finds the way that they that they, they’re, they’re willing to sleep at night with these type of content sites that are risky.

Joe Valley 11:45

Yeah. And it’s, it’s the niche, there’s no utopian niche, right? It’s not content sites are so easy to operate and run, or FBA businesses or straight up ecommerce businesses, or SAS businesses, they all have their own challenges. And you have to become an expertise, an expert in that particular niche. You just have to, you know, pick your poison, and then really become that expert to make sure that you’re offsetting, you know, the risk of your investment and making sure that you’re protecting it and growing it as much as possible. So it’s not like, I’ll only buy content sites, because there’s so much easier and the overhead is so much lower. The competition is just as hard and it’s algorithm updates when you’re selling physical products, especially when it comes to Amazon FBA businesses, which these days, Chris is all the rage. Are you getting swamped with you know, due diligence requests for, you know, some of these aggregators and larger companies buying FBA businesses?

Chris Yates 12:42

Yeah, we are we work with probably, I’d say, either currently work or have helped establish at least half of the aggregators who’ve raised let’s say, nine figures plus in funding, or, you know, substantial amounts of money. So yeah, this is this is very much in demand over the last year, are you

Joe Valley 12:59

are you doing the due diligence for them or training up their people to do it themselves, because I would think that they’d be wanting to do it themselves over the long run,

Chris Yates 13:09

you know, somewhat both, but more of our focus is actually on just doing the work, you know, augmenting their team, there’s value to having a third party who doesn’t have skin in the game or isn’t getting incentivized for a deal to complete and to help their investors or lenders, you know, sort of feel like, Hey, there is a neutral third party who’s looking at this and letting

Joe Valley 13:30

letting us know what the risks are, I can see the logic in that for sure. So with content sites, the risk is, you know, just buying one and of course, you got to get to that point and and own one with with FBA businesses, what do you see from you know, your, your view of the world of, you know, of the risks associated with that. And, and I, the obvious ones that we always talk about, by the way, are single skew businesses and businesses that are young and things of that nature, but what are you seeing that comes up that somebody that’s not going to use your services should focus on? Yeah, so

Chris Yates 14:04

first off, I start with this, which is, if the product sucks, you’re going to be swimming upstream for the rest of your experience with this with this product, so don’t buy something where the product sucks and buy sucks. I mean, like, you know, it is a shady area, like for instance, a certain supplement that makes health claims that are a little you know, questionable or a product that is really commonly broken by Amazon is a process the warehouse stuff and or through shipping, you know, things that have weird technology, things that that like won’t work for people or have really, you know, like, just anything where it’s like users can have a bad experience with that with a product. You know, you’re starting you’re starting from swimming upstream, right right off the bat there so so that’s one thing to I would say to start with is just that product and where you can get some indications of that is actually buy. If you can get access to their Amazon account, you can download all their, you know, kind of review history. You can look at their To use online, you can use some, some tools like review meta, and some of those that will give you a sense of like, was there any kind of review manipulation and those kinds of things. But at the end of the day, you know, if you start seeing in the, the messaging with the buyer and the seller, you start seeing in case slogs, where Amazon’s complaining about, you know, user experience, you’re seeing performance notifications in the Amazon account, where listings have been taken down for periods of time, because of a user complaining and they got burnt, or their skin got red, because they put this thing on them, or whatever it was, or their house started leaking, when they install this thing under their toilet, or what you know, whatever it is, you know, that kind of stuff is just going to indicate that this is going to be just a swimming upstream kind of scenario. And you’re going to be dealing with with listings getting taken down and thus revenue, going along with it.

Joe Valley 15:51

So asking a seller to provide view only access to the seller account for reports pre Letter of Intent might be a challenge these days, because there’s such a frenzy. Is there a third party service and outside service that enables you to look at some of these ratings and reviews and complaints and whatnot, where the seller does not have to provide that access?

Chris Yates 16:16

Yeah, I mean, you can just look at the Amazon listing. That’s actually Oh,

Joe Valley 16:20

yeah, that’s that’s that yeah, that’s, that’s, that’s obvious. But it’s almost, I want to I, I want to be kind here. In my words. That’s work, Chris, you actually have to go through them one by one and look at what people are saying. That’s me being wise as folks. Sorry about that. I guess that’s the most obvious one. But there’s no third party app that will give you a complete rundown not just of the reviews, I’m talking about any suspensions and and warnings and things of that nature, or is that just simply all inside the seller account?

Chris Yates 16:53

Yeah, I mean, there are tools you can look at that give you some history on the Amazon account, things like, like review, Matt, I mentioned can kind of, and there’s others like that out there, where it’ll it’ll tell you if there was likely, you know, kind of a scammy Review reviewer who reviewed the product or some of those kinds of things. And it will give you some history that’s getting harder, though. And Amazon’s changing the way that they’re doing their reviews and stuff like that. So I don’t know how long that’s going to be possible. But at least let’s, let’s say, as I’m recording today, and in the past, you should be able to get a pretty good sense of, you know, how likely is it that they have, you know, sort of manipulated reviews in there. And just to give you an audience an idea how that works? Like, they actually these these companies will actually aggregate the reviews over time. And they’ll look at the reviewer was this, did they only review one product one time, and were they a new Amazon account? Right? That would be an indication that maybe that was, you know, sort of a manipulative type review or something along those lines. So that would be one you can look at, you know, just other Amazon tools that are out there that have historic sales data and pricing data for the products to see, did they start out the launch at you know, $5, and then raise it up to $20 on the product or something like that. So that’ll give you an indication that maybe they were doing, you know, some price testing, or maybe they were lowering the price at launch in order to do things like that? You know, but the reality is when you get into the M like, so, you mentioned lol, so pre LSI. To me, the way that I usually say this to people is ask the questions that you need to know, and only the questions that you need to know in order to value this business and understand if it’s the right fit. So if I were to ask the seller, pre yelloweye, have you had any account suspensions? Have you had any policy violations? And they said no. And then when I got in the account after LSI. And and you know, to verify that that was actually true, and saw that it wasn’t true, then we have a conversation out right. So my general recommendation is take the seller at the word pre yelloweye. ask the questions you have to know. And after Li that’s when you get the opportunity to verify that right?

Joe Valley 19:03

Yeah, see if the trust is eroded or not. I want to shift gears on to one of the other services that you provide to anybody that goes to your website at no cost. And that’s MarketWatch. But before we go there, I want to put you on the spot. This is almost like a 32nd commercial break for our friend in common shock Mullins. You’ve known shock and the audience knows whose Chuck is at this point. And I just love busting his balls. So Chris, if you have to describe Chuck Mullins in 30 seconds or less, please complete the sentence Chuck molins is

Chris Yates 19:39

he’s i mean he’s just a sharp guy like he he of all the people that I’ve met, he is the one who can find an angle in almost any situation and he is just extremely, extremely good at doing that. And having somebody like that around you is actually very, very valuable like I could see you know for brokering as an example. He’s going to tell you before that thing goes on the market. Get what buyers are going to complain about on your business and really prepare you properly for and things like that because he sees the angles right he’s very very good at that.

Joe Valley 20:08

I agree with everything he said look if if Mark and I are having discussion about the business and what to do, and we want to put an email out there we jokingly say why don’t we just send it to chuck because he’s the one that’s going to respond with the most detail and the most advice Chuck is also the person that I think we get the most feedback from like just got an email the other day a transaction closed and just rave reviews about what a difference Chuck made in their lives. It’s just the I don’t know what he does. He it’s it’s um, duplicatable. Anyway, that’s our little infomercial on Chuck Chucky, the third Chuck Mullins folks, reach out to him, tell him how much you love them. Okay, let’s go on to MarketWatch. Right? This is for the buyers in the audience. Anytime somebody sets up a call with myself, Mark and a member of the team. And they want to talk about buying a business. And we walk them through the process of subscribing to our new listing updates and whatnot. Usually what I say is, you can do this, and you should do this. But what you really want to definitely do on top of that is subscribed to marketwatch go to the site, and I talk them through it and tell them what to do. Can you give a an overview of what MarketWatch is I remember when you when you launched it thought it was a brilliant idea. But it’s so much bigger and better than it was back then.

Chris Yates 21:25

Yeah, so vert for context, Centurica, we don’t do buyer brokering of any kind, you know, when it comes to buyers who

Joe Valley 21:37

want? I don’t know, anyone who does work, or that does it? Well, just for the record

Chris Yates 21:42

started, right? Yeah, we’re finding deals for people or whatever. So, but we always had people asking us, you know, and so we needed a solution that would be helpful to those buyers who are still looking because really, people can’t get the most value from us until they’ve identified a potential deal, right that they’re going to do and preferably once they’ve got an ally sign. So we needed to, you know, kind of figure out some way to support those people. And so the actually the original founder of marketwatch, prior to me acquiring it had started this thing called the marketwatch. And what it is, it’s, it’s like an aggregator of a lot of the brokered and marketplace listings that are out there, put into one place and kind of standardize a little bit in terms of what is being viewed. So you can see quite late listings, you can see other brokerage listings and things like that all kind of in one place. You can set up email alerts, if you’re looking for just Amazon FBA, you can filter just those and get emails just for Amazon, FBA, etc. So the simplest way I could think about it, for those who aren’t as savvy with the industry would be it’s like the it’s like realtor.com, when you’re looking for, you know, properties, right, you go there and you see all the properties. So we’re kind of trying to do that for online business listings.

Joe Valley 22:55

Somebody referred to it as MLS for online listings. Yes,

Chris Yates 22:57

exactly. Right. And not everybody knows what MLS so I just use.

Joe Valley 23:02

Yeah, but yeah. Zillow, multiple listing service. Yeah. And I think it’s brilliant. You know, biz buy sell was, you know, doing it, right. A lot of people used to list stuff on biz buy sell back in 2011, and 12. But it’s not specific to online businesses, and you can’t narrow the search down as simply and easily as you can here. And I’m looking at it on my screen, folks. Chris, why don’t you charge for this service? I’m

Chris Yates 23:30

not yet, you know, why don’t you? Yeah, I don’t know, I, I’ve thought about it. Let’s just put it this way, we could either do a $20,000 engagement for one client on due diligence, or we could try to charge five bucks to a bunch of buyers, you know, way before they ever worked with us, which was, you know, we did the calculus and it just didn’t make sense. And I think it’s good for the industry to have a resource like this available. And and one thing I didn’t mention, we don’t list we don’t it’s not like a classified site where we list people’s businesses as of now. We’ve thought about that. But you know, the end of the day, we just wanted to create a an easier way because we still recommend people go sign up with the email lists of every brokerage and meet the brokers like personal relationships can go a long way. Yeah, there’s a lot of value in just sort of going to each individual place. But if you want to get just a quick feel what’s going on with FBA or or businesses that are over a million dollars, what are their asking prices, currently, you can look on our site and just kind of get a really good feel. And then, you know, you can get a kind of a roll up of all these instead of having to go you know, contact 10 different brokers to get to get, you know, all the listings in your email and that kind of thing. So, yes, I hope that makes sense. I don’t know if I really answered your question directly, but just financially didn’t make sense. But you know, we spend a couple $1,000 a month just maintaining it. And so I feel like to some degree, it does keep us top of mind. So there is some benefits, a little bit of selfishness there. If you will, it keeps us top of mind for when somebody does get a deal,

Joe Valley 25:03

but I think it’s brilliant. I really do. I think you’re serving a lot of buyers in a way that just makes their life a whole lot easier. How many different brokerage firms do you pull in data from?

Chris Yates 25:16

Actually, you can look on the website by going to its, I can guide, there’s a section on there that says exclude brokers and you can actually just get a list of all the brokers that we currently are aggregating, I will say that we, we aggregate ones that we felt had a decent signal to noise ratio. And what I mean by that is, we we don’t often see them having obvious scams as a good proportion of their listings or, you know, really unreasonable buyer experiences and things like that. So you may there, there are other brokerages out there, and other marketplaces out there that we don’t aggregate. Typically, that’s because either we don’t have a relationship with them, or we we’ve chosen not to aggregate them for a specific reason. So you will see a few brokers on that are not on here. But you know, I’m guessing there’s probably a dozen or two that we have aggregated right now.

Joe Valley 26:13

There’s probably more out there that you don’t know of then those that you don’t want to work with. Right. Have you ever had to remove anybody from your broker list? Um, I have Yeah, I’m not gonna ask you. No, I said, Chris. No. Yeah. Has anyone ever told you you look like Tom Brady.

Chris Yates 26:33

I’ve got a little bit of Tom Brady. there’s a there’s a couple doppelgangers I have out there that are, you know, sort of celebrities now. I don’t even think they’re married now. But my wife tells me that LeAnn Rimes ex husband looks just like me. And then the guy from the trainer from the biggest loser. I don’t even know his name. But he’s, he’s the other one that I get a lot. So I’ve heard Tom Brady. I’m going Tom Brady,

Joe Valley 26:55

I’m actually going to I’m going to go back to when I asked you about shock and the smile, you had the funny, awkward smile on your face. And I’m going to screenshot it. And then I’m going to put you by Brady. And maybe I’ll just maybe I’ll put Brady as the picture of the guest on the podcast, but put your name there. Maybe nobody will notice. We’ll say, Alright, let’s see what happens. All right. All right, Chris. I want to wrap up with just saying that, you know, I’ve been at this for a decade now and grown up in the industry back in, you know, 11 and 12. It’s just looking at the numbers, the average transaction size was size was you know, for us at quiet I was in the 100,000 $200,000 range. And now it’s in the gap we have we have 34 listings under under Letter of Intent right now with an average transaction value about $4 million. Our overall for the year will be lower than that probably in the in the two to two and a half. But it’s just crazy how this industry has grown up. And you’ve been one of those people, one of those firms that’s been out there just defending and fighting for accuracy and the truth being one of the good guys the good humans there’s, there’s probably a I’ll give two handfuls of people that I would point to that are just good, good humans trying to do the right thing and, and working with the help first mentality. And that’s that’s you and Brian over at Centurica. And I think what you’re doing with MarketWatch is spot on. So anybody that’s out there looking to buy a business, you should definitely subscribe to MarketWatch. And when you buy one, hire Centurica, but plan on some delays, because things are crazy busy right now just like quiet like we have. I don’t didn’t tell you this, Chris. Yes, tell business was I think we’ve had an average of four and a half offers on every listing so far year to date. And that means that you guys are incredibly busy as well. So I’m sure there’s a backlog there of being able to work with clients. Yes.

Chris Yates 28:49

Yeah, to some degree, you know, we we kind of take it, I guess, week by week, to some degree and and where our company is moving right now is we’re working with more repeat buyers, because it allows us to better plan and service them really, really well. That’s not to say that we you know, we want to be helpful to anybody buying a business because you know why we exist is so that people don’t totally, as you mentioned early on to totally make a huge mistake and get a panda pay. Not that we can predict it. But Penguin update, like you mentioned, we don’t I hate seeing that in our industry, I want people who are especially first time buyers to have a great experience. And even if it means I hop on the phone with them for 15 to 30 minutes just to kind of give them my experience for the type of deal that they’re looking at. Sometimes that can be enough to to get them set up to do their own due diligence or to potentially work with us. So, you know, I don’t want to tell people that you know, we aren’t, we aren’t taking on clients, but we are prioritizing our existing clients who are coming back to us regularly.

Joe Valley 29:51

Excellent, excellent. Well, we’ll we’ll put Centurica in the MarketWatch in the show links. I’m also going to go ahead and link folks apart Guess that Chuck did on due diligence and a whole list of due diligence tools that he uses in the event? You want to go out and do this on your own? Chris, you’ve been fantastic. Again, you and Brian are a couple of the good guys in the industry. The other one is Chuck, of course, is there anything you’d like to say about our friend shot one last time before we close out the podcast for the day?

Chris Yates 30:22

Well, we didn’t we didn’t talk about it. But I also run an industry conference and Chuck came to the conference in 2012, the first event we ever did, so he’s actually you mentioned, oh, gee, check is o d, o g, and this industries, he’s a wealth of knowledge. And he is one of those people you mentioned, who were kind of always leading with value, like he used to go speak about buying websites for years and never got anything out of it. And, you know, it sort of evolved into where he’s at now with quiet light and his experience with other acquisitions and doing deals and things like that. So I just would, would actually encourage people, if you get an opportunity to sit down and have a meal with chalk or hop on the phone with them to do it. I don’t want to make him more busy. That’s why I’m almost hesitant to do it. Because I know he’s like, slammed right now. And he’s doing is he one of your top brokers right now?

Joe Valley 31:09

Oh, hell yeah. He’s slammed in a good happy way, though.

Chris Yates 31:12

Yeah. So I mean, I, I think Chuck’s Great. So I, you know, I leave the busting of balls to Jason, who’s my emcee for my conference, he he those who are always busting each other’s balls at the event. So I’ll leave that to Jason. But

Joe Valley 31:27

I’ve been to your events. And that is actually what happens from one has a microphone and the other doesn’t. Jason does and Chuck doesn’t, but Chuck gets in then just as much. That’s right. All right, Chris. Thanks for coming back on. Appreciate it. We will talk to you soon. Thanks, Joe. Folks, that’s a wrap for this episode of the Quiet Light Podcast. Please do subscribe on Spotify, iTunes, wherever it is that you listen to your podcast. It helps us reach a larger audience and helps us rank better. It’s not necessarily downloads anymore. It’s subscribers, so please subscribe. And if you have not picked up a copy of The EXITpreneur’s Playbook. Whether you’re a buyer or a seller of online businesses, pick it up. It’s going to help you reverse engineer a path to a great exit or a great purchase by getting your own ignorance discount if you’re buying directly from a seller. Thanks again. We’ll see you next week.

Outro 32:25

Today’s podcast was produced by Rise25 and the Quiet Light content team. If you have a suggestion for a future podcast subject or guest, email us at [email protected]. Be sure to follow us on YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram and subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next week.