Free course
The free course on buying a business
Six lessons in the order a purchase actually happens, from deciding whether to buy at all to the first ninety days after it is yours. They open in the course player when you sign up, and the ten-step guide arrives by email.
What does the free course on buying a business cover?
The free course is 6 lessons, 1 for each stage of buying a business: how to read a CIM, whether to buy at all, finding and screening, reading a deal, getting it funded, and the first 90 days. Each lesson teaches one mechanism completely and stops where the paid course's templates and worksheets begin. It costs nothing and needs only an email address.
Two emails arrive. One from us with your sign-in link and the ten steps, one from the course player asking you to set a password. Nobody calls you.
Where you are decides where you start
You get all six lessons. The one you are sent first depends on the answer you give above, because somebody deciding whether to buy at all and somebody holding a memorandum do not need the same first hour.
Deciding whether to buy at all
Should you buy a business, start one, or stay where you are. About 7 minutes.
Weighing buying against starting something, or against staying where you are.
Looking for something to buy
Where businesses for sale come from, and how to screen one quickly. About 7 minutes.
No specific business yet. Working out where listings come from and which are worth a second look.
Looking at a specific business
What a deal packet is actually telling you. About 7 minutes.
You have a listing or a memorandum in front of you and you need to know what it is really saying.
Trying to fund one
How a small acquisition actually gets paid for. About 7 minutes.
The deal is close enough that the question is how it gets paid for.
I already own one
The first ninety days after you own it. About 7 minutes.
Bought it, running it, and the problems are now operating problems.
What it does not include
The six lessons are also readable on this site without giving anybody an email address. The course adds the order, the course player, and the ten-step guide, and it holds them together in one place for thirty days.
It does not include the worksheets, the templates, the teardowns or the calculators at full depth. Those are the executable half and they sit inside the paid courses. Each lesson names the one it belongs to, so you can see the line rather than discover it.
After thirty days the course closes. The account, the calculators and the six lessons on this site stay open and stay free.
The six lessons are here: read them without signing up.
Who this is from
I bought a business with cash. I bought a second with an SBA loan, operated it, fixed what the last owner had let slide, and sold it early for more than double the equity I put in. Then I built another from nothing.
I teach this at a university and I host a show called Seeing The Gap.
Three people I have worked with have outcomes I can name. Zoe bought a beauty supply store after we read her listings together. Rashad and Tre each found a gap and built into it instead. That is three, and I say the number out loud because this category usually shows a wall of faces and no arithmetic.