Topics:

Never Miss a Beat - Get Updates Direct to Your Inbox

Home » Podcast » Incredible Exits: Stacey Buys and Then Sells a Content Site 3 Years Later

FILTER:

Incredible Exits: Stacey Buys and Then Sells a Content Site 3 Years Later

Stacey Roberts is the Owner of New You Health and Wellness, a practice providing specialized advanced physical therapy and functional medicine to help people look and feel better. She is a physical therapist and holistic registered nurse with a demonstrated history of working in the hospital and healthcare industry.

Before New You Health and Wellness, Stacey was the Director of Rehabilitation at Aegis Therapies and an Assistant Professor of the DPT Program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She obtained an MBA in 2019 before earning a master’s in nursing and is completing a Nurse Practitioner Certification in 2024.

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

[03:45] Stacey Roberts shares her background in healthcare
[05:00] Stacey explains why she purchased an online content site
[09:06] The value of research before buying a business
[12:36] Challenges Stacey faced with the content site and how she overcame them
[20:03] Trends Stacey leveraged to grow her content site
[24:25] The process of selling and why she decided to sell her business
[29:56] How Stacey financed her business acquisition
[32:51] The importance of hiring an advisor to help you navigate the buying and selling journey
[38:19] How to manage the aftersale life

In this episode…

Do you have hopes of becoming an entrepreneur? Have you considered acquiring one? What can you learn from someone who has bought and successfully exited an online business?

Buying a business entails many moving parts, creating a great deal of complexity. Stacey Roberts realized this in her journey of buying, growing, and selling her content site for nearly double the purchase price. She now shares her process of due diligence, financing the acquisition, scaling the site, exiting, and managing aftersale life.

In this episode of the Quiet Light Podcast, Joe Valley and Pat Yates sit down with Stacey Roberts, Owner of New You Health and Wellness, to discuss how she successfully bought and sold an online business. Stacey explains her purchasing decision, the challenges she faced and overcame, the sales process, and why she decided to sell.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Sponsor for this episode

This episode 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. They provide trustworthy advice, effective strategies, and honest valuations. So, your Quiet Light advisors aren’t your everyday brokers — 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 its 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 offers 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 0:32

Hey folks, Joe Valley here. Thank you for joining us for another episode of the Quiet Light Podcast. And I say us because I’ve got my co-host here, Mr. Pat Yates. Pat, how are you? I’m doing great, Joe, how are you? Doing fantastic. I love interviews like this, where it’s an incredible exits, episode, somebody that, in this case, bought a business, doubled the revenue, double the value of it, and then sold it three years later, all while being in school full time. And no, she’s not 25. She’s an adult that decided to go to school and follow her passion. It’s just I love these types of stories.

Pat Yates 1:08

Yeah, it’s amazing. When you listen, or you look at a deal on paper, let’s just say I’ve watched it on paper, you don’t know anything about what the person has been through listening to Stacey talk about this so passionately about going back to school looking for retirement money and following a map, to be able to make a business successful and then resell it, she did everything the way you would want to do it and actually had some tough experiences along the line trying to sell it, which led her back Quite Light, which is amazing. The whole story is just fantastic. She’s an amazing entrepreneur.

Joe Valley 1:35

Yeah, I think the key message folks, as you listen to this is that she didn’t do this alone. First, she had help and learned about how to buy a business. From Jaryd Krause who was on the podcast, just a few episodes ago, he runs a call buyingonlinebusinesses.com. Check that out. So she got help from him first. And then she joined a mastermind group in the content space got lots of help from those folks and built a team. She didn’t do it alone at all, which was kind of the mature aspect of her being an entrepreneur. But too many of us as her and I were talking before we’ve all got kids that are late teens, 20s, you’ve got one that’s 30. And more often than not, they say, Mom, Dad, I got this. And when you’re a little bit more experienced a little more seasoned, you don’t say that as often and you get help, and you build a team around you. And that’s exactly what Stacey did, I think tons and tons of lessons to be learned here.

Pat Yates 2:39

I think the biggest lesson is one you pointed out for the people out there that were thinking about building a business, a lot of time there’s a vanity to reaching out to a broker or to someone that can help you acquire business. A lot of people either don’t want to spend the money or they feel like they know everything. The truth is the same line we always use you don’t know what you don’t know, Stacey was smart enough to reach out in the beginning, in the middle and at the end. And all those things lead to the perfect scenario. So people can’t overlook those things. No matter how smart you are, or what direct deal you think you have. There are always going to be hiccups. You need to lean on people, no matter what part of the business or in the exit. So she did a great job of putting the right people around her to make this scenario perfect.

Joe Valley 3:18

She did. Let’s jump in and see what she’s got to say. Here we go. Stacy, welcome to the Quiet Light Podcast. How are you?

Stacey Roberts 3:25

I’m good. Thank you guys for having me.

Joe Valley 3:27

Our pleasure, congratulations first on your successful exit. This is my favorite type of podcast to record, an incredible exit series where we talk about people that have either built and then sold the business or launched it and eventually sold it as well. So can you for the audience that doesn’t know who you are? Can you give a little bit of background on yourself?

Stacey Roberts 3:49

Sure. Actually my background is in healthcare. And I was wanting to increase my scope of practice. I’m a physical therapist, and I wanted to go into become a nurse practitioner to be able to do more things in my clinic. And so I was going back to school to do that. And I thought well, what can I do full-time in school that is going to pay for school for me. And then I started looking into websites to purchase when I was working as a director of a company because I knew I was going to be quitting that to go to school. So and then had the business for almost three years sold it successfully very happy with the sale and then yeah, and then I’m at now expanding my clinic as well.

Joe Valley 4:36

It’s pretty impressive that you as a professional decided to go back to school and you had to say how do I cover my expenses while I’m in school and buying an online business? Like you’re more in the brick-and-mortar space I could see you back on Euclid clients to come in and work with you now. What made you think online and what made you think content site?

Stacey Roberts 5:00

Sure I had a business in Australia that was online and offline. So we did services, but we sold products, as well online just to our clients or our patients. And so I had a little bit of understanding of online offline type thing. And we grew that part of our business substantially. So when I sold that business, I came back to the US, as we were talking about earlier that my son was going to school wanted to come back to school to go in the US. So he came back. And I took about a year off to kind of figure out what I was doing, but then saw that a lot of what I had earned from my sale kind of dwindle over time. And when I was thinking about going back to school, I thought, I don’t want that to dwindle. So I don’t want to utilize my savings in order to pay for this. So what can I do from a passive income point of view, I have a little bit of real estate. So I understand that concept. So I thought, okay, not that doing the website was passive, completely. But I thought, well, what can I do to do this? So I started looking at different sites that were for sale, more in the content range, which was a different area, I was more kind of an e-commerce, but only to my patients around Australia. So yeah, that’s what made me think, all right, I don’t want to kind of dwindle down my savings again, what can I utilize to help pay for this from a passive income point you, you know, the old Rich Dad, Poor Dad kind of concept. And yeah, that’s when I started researching and probably took me eight to 12 months to research just how to buy a site online. Because what I purchased previously was a brick-and-mortar that we grew the online part of it, and then took a few courses online to figure it all out. And then just started researching kind of like what I’ve done with rental properties, researching the websites and getting the background of them and that came up with the one that I ended up with in food and beverage.

Pat Yates 7:01

Stacey, I talk to a lot of people that have e-commerce businesses, and I’ve talked to them about buying content, and you might as well speak Japanese to them, because it’s like some people whether it’s weird, because there’s a lot of people that don’t feel they can get their hands around content, because the consumer is not buying it. They’re not certain that they can scale something like that. What made you when you’re deciding to go into this, move away from e-comm to content, specifically, some people say it’s financial because they don’t want to buy product. And others say that they just have more expertise. What was the reason that you decided that?

Stacey Roberts 7:31

Well, I had a small little Amazon store. And that got shut down by I don’t know if it was a competitor that said I had faulty product or something like that, but it was growing steadily. And then it kind of got shut down. And I’m like, oh my God, I don’t know if I want to deal with this thing, you know, over and over again. And it was my side hustle, right? So I didn’t have a lot of time to put into it. So then when I didn’t even know you got money for content sites. It wasn’t even like in my space. But then as I was researching different websites to buy, I saw these sites about display advertising. And I was like, wonder if you can make any money with that. And then yeah, just with a little bit more research, I was like now all right, so I don’t have a product there. So all I have to do is buy a site that’s already has these display ads on it. And then if I could apply the knowledge that I have to improving that site, improving the experience, then potentially I could make more money or at least pay for my schooling. Right? That was my main goal. To do that. And then yeah, so it was just kind of a, got knocked down with e-commerce from Amazon, that was a bit of a pain in the butt. And then I thought, okay, well, display advertising should be more straightforward. Content site, more straightforward. And it was but it still was, it still had its difficulties and stressors, for sure.

Joe Valley 8:51

I want to talk about the monetization and something that you just said there as well, which was the experience that you had, which doesn’t sound like you had a whole lot of experience in the content space. So that was the training that you got is that your experience was what you the courses you took online.

Stacey Roberts 9:06

The training that I had was really more about researching websites. And the training on the content site was after I purchased it, kind of digging into it and saying, okay, who knows what they’re doing in the space, and then finding out, becoming a member of their Facebook group and then listening and talking to them. The nice thing about the site that I chose to buy, it was already generating revenue from the content space with the display advertising. So from that point, I had a little bit of a cushion to learn more, right and dig in because income was already there. And then my idea was then to just grow that income based on SEO because the person that I bought it from, admittedly so was like yeah, didn’t really pay much attention to that she got most of her recognition from being on local shows, or she was out there more of a influencer media personality, and I wanted to do the opposite. I want to move away from that, and make it more of a general site so that when I did want to sell it, it wasn’t about pulling somebody’s face off of the site. It was more just about selling that that site that anybody could step in and do it.

Joe Valley 10:13

How much fear did you have when you bought it that the original founder was kind of the name and face of the site? Was that a big concern for you? And did you negotiate maybe leaving her name on there for a while or her image on for a while? What did you do?

Stacey Roberts 10:27

Yes, we did. So she was absolutely wonderful and is wonderful. We’re still in touch. And she and I talked about the fact she had this following. The nice thing about it is the probably the year or two prior to her exiting, she built up another following from her current following that she had started the site back in I think 2008. So she had another passion that she wanted to really move towards online. So she had built that part up. So what we decided to do was go, okay, let’s just do a handover that everybody, we did a video, she introduced me, we talked about our backgrounds, we talked about how we met, we made it so that the site wouldn’t change. This was just me, I was helping her out before the sale. And then I’m kind of managing it. Now, we actually didn’t mention sale, we just basically said I’d be managing the site now. And it’s not going to change and she’d still be around. And she was great with commenting on stuff as things were posted. So she was really supportive in that transition, probably for the first three to six months. And then occasionally here and there after that. So that was what we negotiated prior to so that it would be such a blatant, okay, she’s not here anymore. And we never hear from her again. And of course, we lost some subscribers as a result of that. I figured that out. But we gained more as well. As we I started to become more educational in the posts that we put up versus just a stories about her life, it was more educational about the topic that you know, the site was surrounded on.

Pat Yates 12:07

To expand on what Joe asked, I know that one thing that might intimidate some people about coming into content businesses is the fact that like an e-comm, you have channels that people buy a product, that’s pretty much how this works. But with you, you have advertising, you have sponsorship, you have all kinds of opportunities to bring products in, linking affiliate, there are so many options, which are great. How do you go through the process to decide what you wanted your site to be about? And did you eliminate some of those? Because you just don’t like that path? Or how did you decide on that?

Stacey Roberts 12:36

So I’m talking to some of the people that had the sites that were as big or bigger than the one that I purchased in regards to what do they do? So I kind of reverse-engineered some of the more successful sites that are out there. I went out there. Okay. Are they doing affiliate? Is there much into affiliate for the particular site that I had? What products are they doing affiliate for? Is there much in the way of sponsorship, so I kind of geared my plan was to build up the affiliate, that was the big part first, and then it was just kind of dribs and drabs there. So I was putting a lot of energy into not getting a lot of return. So we just kept the affiliates that we had. And then I looked more into sponsorship, and we got a few sponsorships where, a company approaches you or you approach that company, and they have a specific ingredient, or product that they want displayed, you create a post for them, you know, and they pay X amount of dollars. So we did some of that as well. But really where the most bang for my buck was to take the post that we’re currently not updated, and maybe eight years, five years, whatever, and start to update those for SEO. And that’s where I saw the traffic increasing significantly. And then optimizing my social media channels as well, too. I was in Facebook Jail for about a year so that hurts. What does that mean? What does that mean? Basically, Facebook said that, it was right when they kind of advertise that there had these bots to kind of monitor all the posts. So I put up, one of the things that I would do is a motivational quote every day in the morning. And one was a quote saying something like, if you’re at the end of your rope hang in there. It’ll get better or something like that. Well, rope and hang the Bots. Yeah. Which me I was like, what, like a human read this. They know this is like supportive, and I want to help you but they said I was posting something about suicide. And I was like, no. But anyway, and then, as you probably know, or listeners may know is that Facebook, there’s really nobody to talk to like, you can appeal and you can appeal and I can keep saying no and keep saying no. And usually within 30 to 60 days, they kind of lift those restrictions. And then what happened is that didn’t happen after 60 days. So I just kept on contacting them. One of my contractors helped as well because she has other clients where she was We’ll talk at least talk to human. So they lifted the monetization restrictions after about four months, but then they weren’t. My impressions were like went from 2 million to 10,000. Right? So, and then gradually over a year, it increased but almost exactly the day, potentially even the hour that they took that post down, then things started to increase again. So I had over 400,000 followers, and I was getting like 10,000 impressions a day. Ridiculous. So then it started to increase again. And then when I sold it, I was up to another 700,000 impressions a day.

Joe Valley 15:35

How much did that affect your income in that first year?

Stacey Roberts 15:38

Significantly, because it was right around COVID. And it would have affected it. The goal for Facebook that I saw others being successful at was creating a monetization of Facebook, through ads and things. And so you had to get so many views of your videos in order to qualify for that program. So I was just on the verge of getting that to be able to qualify for it. So I wasn’t really monetizing it at that point, but I was on the verge of monetizing it. And then that all kind of collapsed. So then what just before I sold, as laughing with the owner, or the new owners, I was like okay, sure, yeah, now, I’ve been working for three years. And now I get monetization for Facebook, and now I’m handing this to you. So you’re welcome. Their income should increase as a result of that monetization for Facebook videos, as well, too. And then we started getting to reels’ bonuses. And we’re getting a little bit of income from that. So prior to getting that monetization for the long-form videos, we had some additional income coming in from Facebook, to regarding the reels, bonuses and stuff that we’re doing on a consistent basis.

Joe Valley 16:46

So you were focused on SEO and increasing monetization and a combination of both. And you’ve said we several times is we, for you in the business? Or did you have writers as well, or a team that transferred with the sale?

Stacey Roberts 17:03

Yep, another goal of mine because I was in school full time. And then I was also working in starting my clinic because I’m a crazy person I hired out to for the social media, the same person did. Once you do Pinterest, and Instagram, I liked Facebook. So I kept doing that myself. So that was my own fun thing to do plus might edit my emailing. And then she also did Google Web stores. And then I had somebody who I trained in SEO would also do the we would update the posts. So I spent a lot of time more time updating existing posts, and then doing some new posts a little bit here and there probably about four new posts or so a month versus 23 do so we had over 2000 pages when I bought the site so it was a lot. I think by the time I sold it I had redone like 1000 of the of the pages and that generated significant traffic, organic traffic via Google. Because we were meeting their guidelines of what they expected for that type of site.

Joe Valley 18:08

And you learn how to do all of this sorry Pat you learn how to do all of this mostly from research or from the content mastermind, you joined?

Stacey Roberts 18:18

Content master. So there was the company that I joined to learn how to buy sites, right, so after that done with them then kind of didn’t really join a content mastermind, but just listened in and read and was on different Facebook groups of the same genre that I had. So I kind of learned all that and then asked for recommendations who to go to for SEO, and then I learned from them. And I learned there’s a lot of people that don’t know what they’re doing charging a lot of money and you’re not getting really any results. So then just went myself and then researched and then took that information. And I found a contractor that I really liked. And that took two or three people to go through found the one that I really liked. And then she and I had a great relationship. And then she learned from me and then she started learning herself. So then instead of me watching all the webinars, I paid her $20 an hour to do the SEO, then I would go Hey, watch this hour-long video on SEO. And you know, let’s talk about, you know, what, what it was about? And do you think and how it’s applicable to our site. So when I say our and we I really think of the contractors and myself as this family kind of running that site or team.

Joe Valley 19:33

Go ahead, Pat, I keep interrupting because it’s fascinating.

Pat Yates 19:36

I’m trying to figure out if we can finish early, I’m looking at the site and all these recipes got me hungry. I can’t imagine how you do this all day you probably have to eat but, going back to what you talked about is you choose those channels that you’re going to be able to do. Were there things that just do certain patterns emerge that in those that become better revenue for you and you start concentrating on those more whether it’s SEO or sponsorship or whatever. Did you find that trends sort of came out that could lead you in the right direction or what they pretty consistent across the board.

Stacey Roberts 20:03

I think the trend that I rode as best that I could was COVID at that time, with people staying at home, being online, looking at different recipes, things like that. So I wanted to ride that as best as possible and display ads to traffic, everything like that was really good. But the interesting thing when I bought it, it hadn’t increased in traffic significantly during COVID. So I purchased it, or my LOI was in March, March of 2020. Right before we knew it was COVID Was anything and then I had an SBA loan. So that took like, four ever, we went through one lender, and then that fell through and then went through another lender who only did SBA. And then we closed six months later, so we didn’t close until September. So it was right before the elections. So I knew that the traffic and everything was going to be improving just generally, but we didn’t. But what I was really interesting is I didn’t see her traffic improve in that six months, it was very steady, I had to check it every month just to make sure things weren’t going backwards. But it was very steady. And then when I took over and literally did a few things from an SEO point of view, I started really doing videos, videos was a big aspect of the SEO. It just really the traffic during that election time. And during the fourth quarter when it’s usually really good anyway just kind of ballooned, and we doubled what her fourth quarter typically was previously. So that was great. So I’m like, Wow, we got to ride this wave as long as we possibly can. And then that’s when I really focused on SEO and then tried to build the affiliates. But it just didn’t I don’t know it probably my inexperience at building affiliates as well that didn’t really grab on. So I just tried to ride the wave that was right in front of me instead of building new things out at that point in time. And then as we came kind of came out of a COVID I had the Facebook Jail thing where that was kind of affecting my traffic, I had to start thinking about other things. Okay, what else can we do besides the SEO. So I really did focus a lot more on Google as far as being very specific about our journey on SEO, and then looking at building up the other social channels. And checking out sponsorship opportunities, and then the reels bonuses came up from Instagram. So that was helpful and bringing in more income. So I really just tried to stay keep my finger on the pulse by listening to other people who had been doing a lot longer than me, and then focusing on those things and kind of jumping on board and do trial and error as I went along.

Joe Valley 20:25

It sounds like you were doing a lot of things, learning a lot of things and going to school full-time as well. How many hours a week were you putting in on average to the content business?

Stacey Roberts 22:04

Once I got the team together. So in the beginning, it was it wasn’t right in my clinic, probably for the first six months, it was just doing the website and going to school. But also school at that time was all online. So there’s a little bit more flexibility than having to go in somewhere. So it was really going school during the website. And then that took me a while to create my team. So that was probably I don’t know, 20 hours a week in the beginning, and then studying and stuff. And then once I got my team together, it was less than 10 hours a week to really kind of just make sure that everything was moving and then doing some research as well, too. And I think, for me, I love research. I love learning new things. So if a person doesn’t like to do that, this is not for them. Because it can be very frustrating. But for me, it was a challenge to okay, that didn’t work. So what can we do that will work? Because obviously people were doing well in the space. So why couldn’t I do as well as them.

Pat Yates 23:38

Stacey, one thing that I wanted to ask, you got a chance to work with Chris Guthrie, who was an amazing guy, just a great advisor. And obviously, were successful in your exit Quite Light we talked about the quality of conversations and the people we talked to and try to improve their business before they sell. Can you talk a little bit about because you had a lot going on you really taking on a sale, even if it was after you were in school is still a daunting process. Can you talk a little bit about how you qualify that what your decision came down to? And maybe how the whole process went for you from a optic standpoint, not necessarily financial, just the whole process?

Joe Valley 24:13

Yeah, I was gonna ask the same thing in a much simpler way. It’s like why sell you’ve got a great business generating great revenue, huge profits, because it’s a content site, and 10 hours a week.

Stacey Roberts 24:25

Yeah. To answer that question and then we’ll get back to the other one was why sales my goal in mind again, was to pay for school, right? That’s ultimately the goal. Now it’s probably nothing more than I thought that I was planning on doing although I obviously wanted it to do that. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have worked on it like I did. So in my mind, I thought okay, where’s my passion? Is this my passion? Is this what I want to do for long term? I liked it. I did love it. It was interesting. And I wanted to expand my clinic. So going back to my original goal of even going back to school, I just start to look and see, okay, what potentially couldn’t get for the site now the way it’s performing at first on the web, versus the way that I was it was performing when I purchased it. So I was kind of putting feelers out there. And what’s interesting is how I came along to Chris is one and Quiet Light was one of the people who had sold their site on the Facebook pages talked about Quiet Light. So I thought, okay, I’m gonna keep that in the back of my mind, kind of just get an evaluation and see what’s going on. And then really, weirdly, I get this message on LinkedIn, from somebody who’s like, hey, we’re a new company in the US. So we were looking at purchasing websites really like your site came up as one of the things to do. Let’s talk. So I talked to them. They were based in Germany had one representative here in the US, and put an LOI and then it was a good number. And I was like, okay, well, let’s explore this. So then we went on trying to sell it, and then all of a sudden, they had a shift in their business, and they were from overseas, and it was kind of crazy. And then everything fell apart, they came back with an offer that was significantly lower than the LOI for no apparent reason. And, yeah, I just got frustrated with them. And that was a six-month ordeal of dealing with that. And I’m like, I’m gonna call that Chris guy from Quiet Light, frustrated. And then I called him and he was fantastic. He’s like, okay, yeah, let’s talk about it. What’s going on, he’s like, give me these numbers. And of course, as I’m sure you guys know, I didn’t, I kind of dropped the ball on, I was like, okay, I’m just gonna focus on this. Now I kind of know what I’m doing what it might be worth. And then, as my business, my clinic here is growing, then I just went, you know what, it’s not fair to this business. If I’m even spending 10 hours away from it, or less on something else, then how is this business going to grow? Right? So and this is where I want to do through my retirement, and then at some point, build a little e-commerce thing for this business as well, too, and use some of the content knowledge that I have now regarding an around this business so that in 10 years time I have an exit potentially for retirement, right. So that’s where I was like, yeah, why don’t I keep it and just manage everybody else running it. But it just wouldn’t allow me to do then what I want to do with this business, which is really, again, what I love to do, and I think what I’m putting on this earth to do.

Joe Valley 24:25

I know that going through a six-month process and having to deal fall apart can be very taxing emotionally. Yeah, you’re almost there. And then they, they come in, and they offer you something an awful lot less. Just for the audience, I want to share some timelines, it looks like you sign an engagement letter on January 27 2023 with Chris, you put the package together fairly quickly, and launched the business for sale and went under letter of intent. That looks like 17 days later, maybe 18 on February 14 2023. Incredibly fast, right. So oftentimes, putting that client interview and all the details together takes a long time, because people are busy, the owners are busy, and it takes a while sounds like you really put your energy into it. So congratulations on that. And then you closed six weeks later, not six months, but six weeks after going under LOI. Right, what a different experience you had?

Stacey Roberts 27:26

Yeah, hugely different. And the advantage of working with the company like Quiet Light is the fact that we had an offer before it even went out to your meal email list. Like there were people who had deals that were going through and at this particular party, their deal fell through. So they were ready to buy I mean, that fell through and they were ready to buy right they’re ready to committed right? So they came across then my site so the other people didn’t have any sites they didn’t have any background they didn’t really have anybody else to offer it to right whereas you guys have that pool of people even besides the email list kind of I liken it again to real estate because I’ve been doing real estate for 20 some years is it’s before it gets on the MLS right. Chris and some of the brokers know other brokers before it gets on the MLS day, they talked to some people about it. And that’s kind of liken it to what you guys have that because you have so much experience in such a large pool of brokers, you guys talk to each other and say hey, you know what about this one and so that was extremely helpful and making it such a shorter process and still stressful, but much less stressful process.

Joe Valley 29:44

Six weeks of stress instead of six months with a positive outcome instead. Let’s try to estimate your return on investment and you bought this business with an SBA loan did you put 10% down?

Stacey Roberts 29:56

I put 10% down the deal with the owner was I thought was priced a little bit high for the income. So I said, okay, well, then I’m asking you to hold a note. So they held the note as well, after the sale, we decided to do it after the sale. Because really what I was going to use that note for was, I was going to purchase products to then resell on the site, which I never quite got to. But again, that was another thing for the new owner to pursue as well, if they wanted to ecommerce stuff. So, I was able to, and again, this, I don’t know if this is ever gonna happen in anybody else’s lifetime. But because of all the COVID stuff that was going on, the pipe first payment was deferred for I think it was four months or I think it was six months that the first payment was deferred for the SBA loan. And then I had the first three months deferred for the note that the buyer held. So essentially, I bought it for no money down, but I had utilized my money to put down on the SBA loan. And then when the owner and I worked out a deal for holding that note that I was going to use for fueling product essentially, it was a no-money-down deal.

Joe Valley 31:14

That’s pretty impressive. And you said you tripled the size of the business or tripled the value when you sold it

Stacey Roberts 31:19

Sold it for double what, almost very close to double what I purchased it for.

Joe Valley 31:26

Pretty good work three years and you doubled your money. You doubled, no money down. Pat with oh, gosh, I’m forgetting her name, oh, no, I’m, I’m going to be in big trouble. I’m not even going there. Because she’ll call me situation with somebody, bought a business for 10% down and sold it, a few years later, and just the ROI on that money down was just incredible.

Pat Yates 31:51

Stacey, it’s kind of amazing, because I’ve talked to a lot of even my friends that I have that are in jobs, corporate jobs, maybe lawyers been there 2025 years tied to an office to say I just have to change this. What’s interesting is you sort of follow the map of what I think they should do, which is to utilize SBA money, put a small amount of money at your at risk of your own, and then build an already existing profitable business, you did such a great job at that. And then obviously went through the situation to where like I always talk to people, it’s fine, we only care if people exit at maximum value, they do it on their own directly. That’s great. If you were successful, we’d be happy. But it’s interesting to me that you travel this entire path and then realize you needed an advisor to navigate some of that thing because that’s exactly what I think people should do is to sort of think deeply and then reach out and try to find actionable tips to be able to sell the business amazing, because this is exactly the map that I’ve talked to people about following.

Joe Valley 32:40

Great. Yeah. And you had a company teach you how to buy sites, you mentioned that earlier. Can you share the name of that company for others to look at it as well, if you recall.

Stacey Roberts 32:51

I can’t remember the name of that company. But the guy’s name he’s out of Australia is named Jaryd Krause.

Joe Valley 32:56

Yeah. We just had him on the podcast. Oh, really? And if you’re listening, what’s the name of it?

Stacey Roberts 33:03

Buying businesses online or something like that? buyonlinebusiness.com or something like that? Yes. Something like that. Yeah, he was great. He helped me put like all the little pieces together. Like what I really liked about his program is he said, okay, here are the brokers. Right. Here’s the brokerages. Here’s the parameters that you look for, when you’re wanting to buy a site. What else did I really get from him? Again, just a lot of those where do I go? Like the internet is so huge, and you don’t know what has any credibility. So I tried another one that just I didn’t feel had enough information that was helpful. But I felt Jaryd’s information was really spot on and helpful. After purchasing not as much, help from that. But that’s not what he’s doing. Right? He’s not helping you build the site afterwards, helping you find that site to purchase. So

Joe Valley 34:00

it’s buyingonlinebusinesses.com, they also have a podcast for folks to listen to as well, if they want to learn how to buy a business, I’d recommend it. Look, Pat and I and everybody else on the team, we’re going to help you as much as possible. But technically we represent the seller. So you want to just sort of demystify the whole process, we’re going to help you we’re going to tell you all about it. We’re going to follow as your buyer did, right, Chris Guthrie walked me through that whole process and made it successful for both parties. And we have to, because we’re not going to be able to help you or a client without helping the buyer because buyers never have representation in this business. But the more people can learn about that the better. I’m curious did you hire a company to help you with due diligence on the site when you bought it or what did you do there?

Stacey Roberts 34:47

Now with due diligence, but because I still terrible like the back end stuff of running a site from the tech point of view. I connected with a guy by the name of Dominic Wells, who has since moved on from doing this, but now buys sites and I think he just is trying to IPO his company in regards to buying sites, but he helped me with the transfer of the site. Because there’s big 2000 pages, and I’m like, I’ve never had a content site before, how do I know everything’s gonna be moving well, and he had some affiliate background as well, too. So he was going to take the partner, and he was going to take the affiliate program to kind of build that up. And then he would get a percentage of things going forward. So he was there, that was my kind of strength that I found him interviewing a lot of different people prior to buying the site, I did have the six months before it closed. So I did do a lot of my due diligence of figuring out like, who can I work with who’s going to help me with this transfer, landed with Dom and he was fantastic. But then when we closed and he kind of took over everything, he had a team that was helping run the site for a little while, I was still doing the Facebook and the email. And that’s when it just took off like crazy. So a lot of the revenue that we had agreed would be split was actually coming from my work and not the affiliate work. So we agreed after I think it was four or five months to go, he was kind of looking at taking his company in a different direction. And I was more like, well, I don’t want to pay you half of what the work that I’m doing. Right? So we talked about, okay, what’s a fair exit out of here. So then we parted in a good way. And then he’s doing it, he’s killing it in what he’s doing. And then I just kind of took over the after that four months, I felt, okay, I know what’s going on here. I can do it. And then what I did to help, again, with the maintenance is nerd press. I don’t know if you guys have heard worked with them at all. They’re like a maintenance site are they helped with maintenance of your site, so I didn’t have to worry about like, the Google Alerts are things that Google’s telling me that the site needs to be adjusted. I paid them a monthly fee. And there’s three different tiers that you can utilize, and then they would take care of kind of all that stuff, I would still monitor it. So they were part of this team that I assembled to put together, they would monitor everything’s on the back anything on the back end, as far as speed insights and all that I would do some research on that. And then I would say, Alright, how do we make this go faster? Since I have video what needs to be done technically, and they wouldn’t help me with that. And they then helped me hire somebody to change some of the things on the site. So our speed or insights, page in sites improved dramatically, our domain authority increased as a result of the SEO plus the increase in speed. So yeah, so this is definitely a village that helps this and being able to say, I don’t know something. So I have to find the experts that know more than me. And so I kind of became the CEO of my site and found the people that were more knowledgeable in different areas than me, and then put them together as a team.

Pat Yates 37:54

Stacey, I have one final question on my side, I find it amazing. I mean, you’re really humble about this, because I think our listeners have no idea how difficult it really is to acquire a company, double it and sell it within that period of time, which is just simply amazing. Can you tell us a little bit about once you did that, was there seller’s remorse. Were you happy? Were you moving on to your new thing? It was it everything you want it start to finish as you envisioned.

Stacey Roberts 38:19

So I think I have like little flashes of seller remorse, like, because I’m so busy doing what I’m doing now with my clinic that I don’t have time. Because I just kind of keep my eye on that ball. But I feel like everything that was kind of happening for the new buyers, I’m really very happy for them as connected with them. They’re very nice people. I think they’re gonna do extremely well with it. And then there’s always that little thing in the back of my mind, but dang it. What if I did it? But then I know I have to let that go. And then to again, focus on, okay, why did I even put it on the market in the first place? Well, this is why because I have this other thing that’s more closer to my heart, and really where I think I was put on this earth to do this. And I do love that as well, too. So I don’t have any regrets. But there’s a little bit of sometimes like, I mean, it wasn’t my baby, I didn’t start it. But it might have been my adopted teenager, that I just kind of prompted and helped through college and now, you know, it’s gonna go off and do some amazing things.

Joe Valley 39:28

It’s natural to feel that way. You should be proud of what you did, and focus on that instead of what we typically do as entrepreneurs, which is, what if I did this what, If I project this out, I could have waited and sold it for x. It’s just right focus. I love the fact that you’re focusing on the things that are closer to your heart and that you’re mature enough to say, I’m good at this, but it doesn’t fill my cup. I don’t really love it. I like it. It’s challenging. I love the research. But I want to do something that really fills my heart. So really, really impressive. Congratulations.

Stacey Roberts 40:05

Thank you.

Joe Valley 40:07

I wish we could all have great success stories like you are having now. So really exciting for you.

Stacey Roberts 40:12

I appreciate it. Thank you. And Quiet Light really was a big part of making the process more seamless. I tried it without a broker and wanted to choke the potential buyer at times. But Chris said was, Chris made a lot of sense when I first told him about that story. And he said, that’s when I, the broker would have been able to step in and say to the buyer, hey, you guys, this isn’t it, get your head out of here, you know what, and let’s get back on where this should be. And that’s what I was missing. So when you have a company like yours, and brokers, like you guys are, it’s just makes the process again, it’s not like, no stress. But in the process, you always have that person to go to if you’re not sure about something. And Chris was great and helping both sides, really. But I always felt that he had my best interests in mind for sure.

Joe Valley 40:20

I’m sure he did. Chris, a great guy, incredible experience. So if anybody out there has a content site, they’re thinking about selling and want to chat with Chris, he’s email is simply [email protected], very humble, very down to earth. And you’d be surprised when you dig into his background, how much experience and success as an entrepreneur he really has. Pretty incredible. Well, I know you’ve got a deadline here on in terms of jumping over to your next meeting. So thank you for joining us. Thank you for sharing your story. Big Congratulations from all of us at twilight.

Stacey Roberts 41:39

Appreciate that. Really. It’s been great to meet you guys.

Pat Yates 41:42

Yeah, congratulations, Stacey. That’s awesome.

Stacey Roberts 41:44

Thank you.

Outro 41:47

Today’s podcast was produced by Rise25 And the client 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.