Finding motivated sellers outside of traditional broker networks is a transformative approach in the world of dealmaking. Carl Allen shares his insights on how to uncover businesses that aren’t publicly listed but are mentally “for sale” in the minds of their owners. These strategies offer a powerful way to tap into opportunities that many overlook.

With only 20% of businesses being sold through brokers, there’s a significant pool of untapped opportunities for those who know where to look. Many business owners avoid brokers due to inefficiencies, overpricing, and a lack of personalized matchmaking. By focusing on off-market deals, you can find motivated sellers who are often more flexible and open to creative financing.

One effective strategy is the direct approach. Using tools like Data Axle, ReferenceUSA, InfoUSA, or Dun & Bradstreet, you can quickly generate a list of businesses that match your desired size, location, and industry. For example, if you’re looking for marketing firms within 50 miles of Chicago, these tools can provide details such as the owner’s name and address. Instead of sending generic letters, Carl emphasizes the importance of personalization. Hiring virtual assistants to research the unique aspects of a business and its owner allows you to craft tailored letters that build rapport. Highlighting shared interests or unique aspects of their business significantly increases the likelihood of a positive response.

Full Transcript:

Where do we find motivated sellers that are not busting with brokers? Dealmakers, what’s up?

My vision is to completely and utterly disrupt the market for buying and selling small businesses all over the world. Hey, Dealmakers. Hope all is well. Carl Allen with you.

Yes. I’m in the car. And, yes, I am going to Starbucks. But I wanna do a quick video for you because what’s amazing about my YouTube channel is I’m putting out all my videos, on all different topics, You guys are kind of asking me other questions inside of the comment section, and I really want you to do that.

So if you’re watching a video and you think, wow, that’s a really good video. I have a lot of value there, but I’ve got this other question for Carl. If you drop the question in the comments, my team capture those. And if we get several of those questions that are related, I’ll do videos for you just like this one.

So one of the questions that was asked a lot of times across all of my videos was was, Carl, where do we find motivated sellers that are not listing with brokers? And that’s a really good question, and let me tell you why. Only twenty percent of businesses that decide to sell actually go through business brokers. Business brokers, for the most part, are not very efficient.

They tend to overvalue and overhype the business.

They don’t do a lot of work really hunting down strategic buyers. They’ll just they’ll list a deal on a site, take an upfront fee, and it just sits there and it festers. And that’s why most businesses don’t sell, but go through brokers. So what I do or what my insider prodigy community do is we’re originating deals off market.

So we’re finding businesses that not for sale publicly, but they’re for sale in the mind of the seller. Right? Let me explain what that is. So we’re looking for highly motivated business owners.

Typically, approaching retirement age or they could be entrepreneurs that have started businesses, build them up to say a million dollars in revenue, and that they’ve got bored or frustrated or burnt out and they wanna move on to deal with the things. So there’s three key strategies that we use to find those sellers. And I’m gonna do videos on all of these to go through as a bit of a deep dive, but the three of this so the first thing we do is something called the direct approach. So you could use free services through online public library access like Theta Axle or ReferenceUSA, InfoUSA, Dunno Radstreet, all those guys.

You could go in there and literally within sixty seconds, you can find all of the businesses of a certain size range that are in the region that you’re looking for. So let’s say you live in Chicago and you wanna buy a marketing agency, it goes like data ranks and say, hey. Show me all the web design firms or the marketing firms within fifty miles of Chicago. And it’ll give you that list.

It’ll tell you the name of the owner, the address, all those different things that we write to them. So we write to those owners in a highly, highly confidential and rapport building way. We tell them why we like the business. So we don’t have to send out a random letter and say, hey.

I really like your business. Please call me. People do that. If you do that, be prepared to send out thousands of letters.

And as you know, it’s probably a dollar to send the letter now. So, it’s gonna cost you a thousand dollars to get one lead. What we do is we hire virtual assistants, pay them nine dollars an hour in places like Mexico or the Philippines. And we have them research these businesses for us.

And what they do is they’ll find out what’s unique about the business, what’s special about it. And what we know what’s special about it, we’d say that in the letter. We also tell them about ourselves. As you know, we wanna make the videos.

My high recommendation is stay in your lane, do deals in areas that you know, that you understand, that you’re passionate about, that you can add value to, so you talk about that. And then what we do is we find out some information about the business owner. So your VA will go find them on LinkedIn or on Facebook, and you find commonalities.

So they might vacation in a certain spot that you do. They might like the same sports team. They might have grandchildren. You might have grandchildren or, you know, somebody that does.

And what you can do is you can actually use that information to build rapport in the letter. So that’s a really good strategy that we use. The second one is we leverage Internet marketing. So places like LinkedIn, Facebook, we go to groups and we solicit information with those people.

And then the third is we build relationship networks. So, hey, I’m just gonna order my coffee and I’m gonna tell you about relationship networks. Just give me one sec. Hey, I’m ordering a coffee.

Hello. Good morning.

They’re not answering. This is cool. Hey, impromptu Starbucks break in the middle of the video. Hello?

No. No. It won’t be a second. Okay. He’s he’s gonna be a second. I don’t wanna tear into the, relationship piece whilst I’m waiting to order my Starbucks because it’s early in the morning and I need my Starbucks to get my brain to work.

But, yeah, relationship networks are really, really cool because business owners, before they sell the business, they tell people in their network. They tell their CPA, they’ll wire the wealth manager, and they’ll tell maybe some of their customers and suppliers. So if you’re networked with those types of individuals in a particular industry, then you can be contacting those people, building those networks, and then when they come across deals one second. Hey, can I get a tall skinny caramel macchiato, please?

Yeah. I’ll fire you. No. Thanks. Uh-huh.

Thanks, mate. Cheers.

That’s me ordering my Starbucks. So, yeah, what’s really interesting is wealth managers are absolutely the best people to go to when it comes to finding deals. And you can find wealth managers on LinkedIn. You connect to them.

You have a conversation with them and say, hey, you know, I’m looking for deals in whatever industry. Do you have any clients that are looking to sell their business? And they do. And what’s really good about it is if the if the deal sells, then the wealth manager is gonna get some business from that.

They’re typically gonna be investing that money. So that’s the, that’s the three ways that we find deals outside of business brokers. I’m just gonna go pay for my my style. But I’ll tell you found that useful.

Definitely hit me up in the comments with any other, questions that you have about anything related to deal making or life or entrepreneurship, and I will do those videos for you. Until then, bye for now.