In this relaxed and insightful video, Carl Allen breaks down the four main ways you can become a dealmaker: as an owner-investor, owner-operator, consulting-for-equity partner, or wholesaler. Whether you’re managing a business remotely with a strong operator, stepping in to run it yourself, trading expertise for equity, or simply flipping the deal to another buyer, there’s a path to suit your lifestyle and skill set. Carl emphasizes that you don’t need to be hands-on daily to build serious wealth through business acquisitions.

He also explains three powerful ways to earn money from deals: pulling surplus cash at closing, taking monthly distributions after debt service, and ultimately making big money on the exit. By reinvesting profits and scaling smartly, you can significantly increase a company’s exit value while collecting steady income along the way. Whether you’re just getting started or looking to expand your portfolio, Carl’s video offers a clear and motivating roadmap for how everyday people can build real wealth through business ownership.

Full Transcript:

Hey, guys. Carl Allen. Wanted to record a really quick video for you. I’m actually just driving to the pub.

So I’m at my Florida house right now. I’m not in the UK at the moment. I’m in Florida. Loads of stuff going on in America right now.

So, I’m spending some time over here. In fact, it’s so sunny. I’m gonna put my sunglasses on just to protect my eyes. And I’m going to the pub because it’s Star Wars trivia night.

Right? So if you know anything about me, if you’ve been following me for a while, you’ll know there’s two things I love very dearly. Number one is beer and number two is Star Wars. Right?

So Star Wars trivia night in a pub is the perfect evening for me after a really long day of negotiating some deals and coaching and checking in on some of my companies and board meetings and all that different stuff. So let me do a quick video for you. So one of the questions I get asked all the time is how do you make money doing deals? Right?

So there’s actually lots of different ways that you can make money, but there’s also lots of different ways that you can become a deal maker. So let me walk you through those right now, and then I’ll tell you how you can make money from doing it. So number one, what a lot of deal makers do is they wanna buy businesses and they wanna become an owner investor. Right?

So that means you can buy a business. You’re not working in it every day. You’re hiring a GM or an operating partner to kind of run the day to day for you keeping the the train on the track, so to speak. And, and that means you can buy businesses anywhere in the world.

You don’t have to live where you own that business. Right? I own businesses in America, Australia, in the UK. And, obviously, I can’t be in three places at once.

And so the businesses I bought, I’ve actually never been in them. Right? I have managers and partners that are running those deals for me. So, that’s that’s one number one.

Number two is there’s nothing wrong with you buying a business as an owner operator. Right? One of my protege students do that. They’re stuck in a w two.

They might be a high powered executive in a company and they wanna buy a company. They wanna go and they wanna operate it. Right? Nothing wrong with that.

But that means that you gotta buy a business in an area where you live or where you wanna live, and you’re in the business every day, you’re leading the tribe, you’re you’re driving that bus, you’re driving that train. Yeah. You can do bolt on acquisitions once you’re in, you can do roll ups once you’re in, you can eventually transition up to being an owner investor and having somebody do the day to day.

Transition up to being an owner investor and having somebody do the day to day, but that’s absolutely fine. The third way that you can do deals and you can make money is by becoming a consulting for equity partner. So what does that mean? So it means you build a portfolio of businesses you own between ten and forty five percent of those businesses, and you’re trading your skills, your time, and your knowledge that you’re injecting into those businesses.

Right? So let’s say you’re an absolute great CPA or you’re you’re a CFO and you know numbers. Right? You know how to help businesses and business owners, with financials.

So you could have a portfolio of five, ten, twenty businesses where all you do is fractionally provide those services. And you’re not doing it for fees, you’re doing it as an equity partner. Right? You’re becoming a consulting for equity partner and that means not only do you get money because you learn a chunk of the business, so you’ll get a check every month as a cash flow distribution.

But then if that business scales and then exits, if you earn thirty percent of it and the business sells for ten million bucks, you’re getting three million dollars. Thank you very much for that. The fourth way you can make money doing deals is by wholesaling. So oftentimes, you might find a deal, you might get it under contract.

Let’s say it’s an annuity deal where you’re gonna pay for the business over ten years. You’re not borrowing any money from anybody else. You get that deal under contract, but then you decide, you know what’s not for me. I don’t want to own that business.

I want to kind of wholesale that deal to somebody else. So you could give it to somebody else and then just share the cash flow with them. So you’re not having to spend any time whatsoever involved in that business, but you’re getting a check every month as part of the ownership. And then obviously, as that business sells, you’re, you’re getting a piece of the exit as well.

So the real three way ways you can make money by doing deals are number one, sometimes but not all. When you close a deal, there’s cash on the closing table. You might buy a business zero money down and it’s got two hundred thousand dollars in the bank that you inherit and you don’t need all of it to trade the business. Let’s say you only need a hundred, you could legitimately take that hundred thousand dollars out as a fee or as a distribution and then think about as your fee for doing the deal.

The next thing that you can do obviously is when you buy a business, there’s gonna be a carry cost every month, which is called debt service. Just go through the lights here. So let’s say you buy a business and it’s doing a hundred thousand dollars a month in cash flow and it’s costing you forty thousand dollars a month of that cash flow to pay the debt service on the deal. So you’re netting sixty, then you might say, well, okay.

I’m gonna leave twenty thousand dollars in the business every month to help it grow, and then I’m gonna take the extra forty thousand dollars out as my as my distribution. Right? So you can do that. But then the real way to make money is when you scale it and sell it.

And I’ll do a video for you, you, in a couple of days that shows you, the less you take out of the business every month, the more that you reinvest for growth, the more exit value you could generate.

Because if you buy a business for a million dollars, right, let’s say it’s doing four hundred thousand dollars in cash flow, period of time.

And then you scale it and within, say, business over a period of time. And then you scale it and within, say, five years, you still owe half a million dollars in debt service, but you’ve grown that business to the point where it’s worth three million. Right? So you sell it for three less the five hundred thousand dollars you still owe.

You just made two point five million dollars exiting that business before tax in addition to the income you’ve made from the previous example. So so those are the four ways that you can be a deal maker. You can, you could be an owner investor. You can be an owner operator.

You can, be a consulting property partner, and you can wholesale deals. And three ways that you can make money is number one, you can take money at the closing table if the surplus cash. Number two, you get a distribution every month as the owner of the business after the debts been paid down. And then number three, when you sell the business and you exit, you get the exit price less the debt that’s already in the business. So hope you found that useful and inspirational, and I will see you soon for another video. Until then, bye for now.