The Lifestyle Business Owner

How to Buy a Business, Grow Your Profits, and Make It Run Without You

Aaron Muller

• Publisher: Morgan James Publishing
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781683506492
• eBook ISBN: 9781683506508
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

A proven three-step guide to buying your own business, and adding more profit, free time & meaning to your life, by a #1 international-bestselling author.
 
The Lifestyle Business Owner reveals how ordinary people can buy a small business in their community, earn a six-figure income, and make the business run without them. Aaron Muller, founder of Lifestyle Business Owner Academy, reveals the 3-step formula he utilized to go from a kid who didn't attend college to the owner of eight companies that run without him. Now it's your turn to discover the secrets to owning a business that gives you the financial freedom, lifestyle, and contribution you desire.
 
Praise for The Lifestyle Business Owner
 
"Aaron Muller cuts right to the chase on what you need to do to own a profitable business that runs without you." —Marci Shimoff, #1 New York Times–bestselling author of Happy for No Reason and Chicken Soup for the Woman's Soul
 
"This practical book is full of proven strategies and techniques you can use immediately to increase your sales and profitability—from the first day." —Brian Tracy, author of Now, Build a Great Business
 
"A must-read for anyone who wants to be a business owner." —Gino Wickman, creator of EOS and author of the award-winning, bestselling book, Traction
 
"Aaron Muller opened my eyes to the world of buying and running a business (or two or more) as a way to express your values, have fun, be creative and make enough money to have everything you need…including a time for life's non-material pleasures." —Vicki Robin, co-author of Your Money or Your Life

PART I

It’s Time for a New Kind of Business Owner

CHAPTER 1

Meet the Lifestyle Business Owner

What comes to mind when you hear the word entrepreneur? Do you think of a couple of nerdy-looking kids starting a business in their garage, raising money from venture capitalists, and making it big in Silicon Valley? Do you think of someone who has had a long corporate career and finally decides to venture out and start his or her own business? Or do you think of someone who runs an Internet business, does not have an office, and easily passes you on the street without you ever knowing that he or she is an entrepreneur?

For many, the image of an entrepreneur brings up people such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, or Mark Zuckerberg. You know the stereotype: someone who is young and tech-savvy drops out of college and makes bazillions of dollars before he or she is thirty. Although this is one way to become an entrepreneur, it is certainly not the most common way.

Entrepreneurs come in all shapes and sizes. There is an entirely different class of entrepreneurs that live in the world of small business. Their goal is not to raise money from venture capitalists, take the company public, or sell the company for bazillions of dollars. Instead, they own a small business in the community, make, let’s say, $100,000 to $200,000 a year, and spend five to ten hours a week on the business, ensuring that the employees and customers are happy and that the business continues to run well.

These small-business entrepreneurs will probably never become billionaires, but how many of us need to become billionaires in order to feel successful? For many of us, an income of $100,000 to $200,000 a year is more than sufficient to support our families and live a respectable lifestyle, and a work schedule of five to ten hours a week provides for plenty of free time to pursue other interests.

As you may have guessed, the description in the preceding two paragraphs is what it is like to be a lifestyle business owner. The business is built around the lifestyle you want instead of the business being a machine that consumes your every waking moment. A secret that all lifestyle business owners come to understand is that it is important to know how much is enough. Let’s suppose you own a small business that generates $100,000 per year in income for you and that only requires you to work five hours a week. Is this enough income and free time to support the lifestyle you want? If you feel like you need more income, how about owning two small businesses, each making you $100,000 per year and each requiring five hours a week of your time to monitor, so you now have $200,000 a year in income and a work schedule of ten hours a week? How about owning three small businesses, so you have an income of $300,000 a year and a work schedule of fifteen hours a week?

If what I have described sounds too good to be true, know that these lifestyle business owners are all around you—you just never hear about them in the media. The media loves sensational and glamorous stories such as college dropouts becoming billionaires before they are thirty. It is great to become a billionaire or a multimillionaire within a few years, but how likely is it that that will be you? Thousands and thousands of new start-up companies fail every year, and in the news you hear only about the one company that succeeds. It is great that the founders of this one company became billionaires, but the founders of the rest of those start-ups are still broke.

In contrast, the kinds of businesses that lifestyle business owners own are rarely sensational or glamorous. Take my auto shop as an example. I have owned an automotive-repair facility in the community for more than fifteen years; it gives me over $200,000 a year while requiring me to spend about five hours a week monitoring it. Although the lifestyle sounds attractive and perhaps even sensational, people usually do not disclose their income or work schedule to the media. All the media sees is an auto-repair shop that fixes cars in the community, and there is nothing exciting to report.

I am trying to open your eyes to the world of lifestyle business owners. Chances are you do not hear much about them in the media because most lifestyle business owners do not own businesses that are glamorous or media worthy. These people are just small-business owners in your community. They never grow their businesses to have revenues in the hundreds of millions of dollars; instead, they own one or several small businesses with revenues in the $1 million to $5 million range. Instead of having hundreds or even thousands of employees, a lifestyle business owner might have fifteen employees or less. It is not that lifestyle business owners cannot grow their businesses but that they choose not to grow them.

You see, a small business is a lot simpler and easier to operate than a large company with hundreds of employees. A simpler operation means fewer chances for mistakes, lower financial risks, and the best chances for the owner to work very few hours and enjoy a wonderful lifestyle. Working only five hours a week running a big business is hard. Bill Gates founded Microsoft in 1975, worked long hours for many years, and finally became an absentee owner of the business in 2006 to dedicate his time to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In other words, it took him thirty-one years to become an absentee owner of a big business. In contrast, small-business owners can usually become absentee owners in as little as one to four years, depending on the current state of their business.

Let me be clear here. Not everyone wants or needs to be an absentee business owner. A lifestyle business owner is someone who builds a business around his or her desired lifestyle. Some people enjoy working in their business but just don’t want to work sixty hours a week. If working twenty hours a week is what you desire, you can build a lifestyle business that allows you to work only twenty hours a week. Rather than put profits and growth above all else, lifestyle business owners design businesses around their values and the lifestyle they desire.

Becoming a lifestyle business owner may seem complicated, but it actually takes only three steps. Step one: you’ve got to own a business. If you don’t currently own a business, the first step is to own one. Now, most people think that to own a business, you’ve got to start one from scratch. That’s the image of the entrepreneur popularized by the media—someone who starts a business from scratch, makes an innovation commercially successful, and becomes really wealthy in the process. The truth is that starting a business is only one way (and often the riskiest and most expensive way) to become a business owner. There is another way to become a business owner that most people don’t think about, which is to buy an existing business. In the chapters that follow, I will show you why buying a business is often cheaper, less risky, and more profitable than starting one. I will also show you exactly how to do it, but more on that later.

Once you own a business, step two of becoming a lifestyle business owner is to increase profits. Without enough profits, you will not be able to pay for the lifestyle you want. Without enough profits, you will not be able to afford to hire the right people, who will allow you to work fewer hours. Unless you buy a business that is perfect in every way to begin with (which almost never happens, by the way, as every business you buy will need some tweaking), you will need to implement some tweaks so that you can take your company’s profits to the next level.

Step three, the final step in becoming a lifestyle business owner, is to empower your employees so your business can mostly run without you. This is the point at which you switch your focus from growing the company’s revenues and profits to designing your business around your lifestyle and values. Many business owners choose to hire a general manager so they can gradually step back and work fewer hours. Many business owners also implement initiatives that leave a legacy. It’s one thing to own a profitable business, but it’s something else to own a business that really contributes to society. What’s the impact of your business on the environment? What’s the impact of your business on the local community? What’s the impact of your business on the well-being and happiness of your employees? Business owners who succeed at the third step do things not because they have to but because they care.

If becoming a lifestyle business owner sounds exciting to you, the good news is that a number of developments have taken place in the last ten years that make it easier than ever to become one. It used to be difficult to find a business for sale. But there are now websites that lists thousands and thousands of small businesses for sale. More business owners are starting to see selling their businesses as a way of transitioning into the next phase of their lives. In fact, more business owners are planning ahead and seeing the sale of their businesses as a part of their exit strategy. Business brokering is no longer an obscure profession. People seek out business brokers to help them buy a business, just as people seek out real-estate brokers to help them buy a house.

It is not only easier than ever to buy a business but also the right time for building a lifestyle business. More tools than ever have been developed to help businesses become more profitable. More business owners are coming to the realization that money and growth are not everything and that having quality of life, free time, happiness, and an enviable legacy are equally important goals to pursue. The days of building businesses that are cold, heartless cash machines are over. More and more consumers are choosing to spend money at businesses that have a heart.

We live in exciting times. It is estimated by BizEquity that 7.7 million US businesses will change hands over the next ten years. There will thus be 7.7 million chances to buy a business, grow it to the next level, and turn it into a lifestyle business. Unfortunately, many people will not succeed. As a business broker, I have seen people who choose not to heed my advice and end up buying a lemon. I have seen people who buy a great business and run it into the ground a few years later. I have also seen business owners who are considered highly successful by everyone around them, but in their hearts, they feel like a slave to their businesses.

The time has come for a learnable, step-by-step formula that shows people exactly how to buy a business successfully, how to run it well, and how to design it around their desired lifestyle and values. I will give you such a formula in this book. In learning this formula, you will also learn the following truths.

• •In the fast-changing world we live in today, the people who win are those who know when to buy a business and when to sell it. The ones who lose are those who cannot be flexible and who cling to the outdated notion that one must own the same business for life.
• •The people who win are those who know how to buy a good business. The ones who lose are those who think they must start a business from scratch.
• •The people who win are those with the knowledge and skills to take their company profits to the next level. The ones who lose are those who let their profits be at the mercy of the economy.
• •The people who win are those with the ability to make their businesses run without them. The ones who lose are those who do what they’ve always done and become slaves to their businesses.
• •The people who win are those who build businesses with heart. The ones who lose are those who see their businesses as nothing more than heartless cash machines.

Much of what I have learned comes from my experience owning more than twenty companies (of which I still own eight today) as well as observing the operations of thousands of companies as a business broker over the last fifteen years. As a business broker, I get to meet with hundreds of business owners every year in every industry imaginable, study their business operations, and give them a valuation of how much their business is worth. I’ve met business owners who work five hours a week, and I’ve met business owners who work one hundred hours a week. I’ve seen businesses that were insanely lucrative as well as ones with owners who were struggling to get by. I’ve encountered business owners who were full of vitality and purpose and business owners who looked worn-out and exhausted. After running my own companies and studying the operations of thousands of other companies as a business broker, I have found consistent lessons in what works and what doesn’t work in real life. It is my hope that I can share these lessons with you.

~ INVITATION TO ACT ~

What is your biggest takeaway from this chapter?

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CHAPTER 2

The School of Hard Knocks

Things have not come easy for me in my life. My parents got divorced when I was five years old. My mom was the office manager at a company that sold paper sorters for copy machines. As a single mom, she worked hard to put food on the table. She couldn’t afford to buy any snacks for my siblings and me. I remember that a treat for us was putting some butter and salt on a tortilla shell and baking it.

When I was in fifth grade, my mom remarried, and we moved to the San Juan Islands in Washington State. My stepdad was quite entrepreneurial and encouraged me to be the same. At eleven years old, I started my first business. I would go to the docks at 7:00 a....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Note to Readers
• Contents
• Introduction: It’s Not Easy Being a Business Owner
• Part I: It’s Time for a New Kind of Business Owner
• Part II: How to Buy a Good Business
• Part III: How to Increase Profits
• Part IV: How to Become a Lifestyle Business Owner
• Your Next Step: Join the Wave
• Take Your Business to the Next Level: FREE Bonus Videos
• About the Author